It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, November 28, 2024
Chemical replacement of TNT explosive more harmful to plants, study shows
University of York
The increased use of a chemical compound to replace TNT in explosive devices has a damaging and long lasting effect on plants, new research has shown.
In recent years, TNT has started to be replaced with DNAN, but until now very little was known about how this substance impacts the environment and how long it can remain in the soil.
Researchers at the University of York have been studying the environmental impact of the explosive, TNT, for more than a decade. They have shown that the chemical compound, which is used by the military around the world, remains in the roots of plants where it inhibits growth and development.
Now a new study, led by Professor Neil Bruce at the University of York’s Department of Biology and Director of the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP), however, has shown that DNAN has similar effects to TNT, but accumulates throughout the plant and lingers for longer.
Professor Neil Bruce said: “Similarly to TNT, DNAN reacts with a key plant enzyme, generating reactive superoxide, which is highly damaging to cells. Over the course of our research we have genetically engineered plants to successfully detoxify land contaminated with munitions.
“Unfortunately DNAN is a very different story to TNT, as it accumulates in the above ground parts of the plant. While plants can use natural processes to reduce the toxicity of TNT, our studies found that plants appear to have no natural way of fighting off the toxic effects of DNAN, meaning that it persists in the plant and is toxic at much lower concentrations.”
Researchers warn that as DNAN is present throughout the plant and not just the root system, as is the case with TNT, there is a greater risk of animals eating the infected plant, introducing the toxin into the food chain.
In previous studies by the York team, genetically modified grass was grown on land contaminated with military explosives, which successfully degraded contaminants to non-detectable levels in their plant tissues, but as yet there is currently no such method to remove or reduce DNAN.
The US is estimated to have over 10 million hectares of military land contaminated with constituents of explosives and the US government estimates that remediation of unexploded ordinances on US military training ranges alone will cost $16-165 billion.
Dr Liz Rylott, co-author of the study from the University of York’s Department of Biology, said: “Recent years have seen an escalation in military explosives due to global conflicts, and so we are potentially looking at vast scales of pollution, which means there is an urgent need, and interest in, developing sustainable plant-based remediation strategies.
“We also don’t know what the limits of DNAN toxicity are in humans, so our hope is that our latest research will highlight that more work is urgently needed to understand its effects.”
This research, published in the journal Nature Plants, was funded by the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) of the U.S. Department of Defense and was in collaboration with researchers at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Journal
Nature Plants
Improved catalyst turns harmful greenhouse gases into cleaner fuels, chemical feedstocks
DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
image:
With an improved catalyst, ORNL chemists converted two greenhouse gases, methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), to syngas, a valuable mix of hydrogen (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO).
A chemical reaction can convert two polluting greenhouse gases into valuable building blocks for cleaner fuels and feedstocks, but the high temperature required for the reaction also deactivates the catalyst. A team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has found a way to thwart deactivation. The strategy may apply broadly to other catalysts.
The team improved a reaction called dry reforming of methane that converts methane and carbon dioxide into syngas, a valued mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide used by oil and chemical companies worldwide. The team has applied for a patent for their invention as a way to minimize catalytic deactivation.
“Syngas is important because it's a platform for the production of a lot of chemicals of mass consumption,” said ORNL’s Felipe Polo-Garzon, who, with ORNL’s Junyan Zhang, led the study published in Nature Communications.
Improving the catalyst that speeds syngas production could have enormous impact on global energy security, cleaner fuels and chemical feedstocks. In countries lacking oil reserves, syngas derived from coal or natural gas is critical for making diesel and gasoline fuels. Moreover, syngas components can be used to make other commodity chemicals. Hydrogen, for example, can be used as a clean fuel or as a feedstock for ammonia to create fertilizer. Methanol, an alcohol that can be made from syngas, is a source of ingredients for producing plastics, synthetic fabrics and pharmaceuticals. Methanol is also a good carrier of hydrogen, which is hard to pressurize and dangerous to transport. As the simplest alcohol, methanol contains the highest ratio of hydrogen to carbon; it can be safely transported and converted to hydrogen at the destination.
“This [dry reforming of methane] reaction sounds attractive because you are converting two greenhouse gases into a valuable mixture,” Polo-Garzon said. “However, the issue for decades has been that the catalysts required to carry out this reaction deactivate quickly under reaction conditions, making this reaction nonviable on an industrial scale.”
To attain significant conversion of reactants, the reaction must be conducted at temperatures greater than 650 degrees Celsius, or 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. “At this high temperature, the catalysts undergo two deactivation processes,” Polo-Garzon said. “One is sintering, in which you lose surface sites that undertake the reaction. The other is the formation of coke — basically solid carbon that blocks the catalyst from contacting the reactants.”
Catalysts work by providing a large surface area for reactions. Metal atoms such as nickel have electronic properties that allow them to temporarily bind reactants, making chemical bonds easier to break and create. Sintering causes nickel particles to clump, reducing the surface area available for chemical reactions.
Likewise, coking chokes a catalyst. “During the reaction on the catalyst surface, methane will lose its hydrogen atoms one by one until only its one carbon atom is left,” Zhang said. “If no oxygen bonds to it, leftover carbon will aggregate on the catalyst’s nickel surface, covering its active face. This coking deposition causes deactivation. It is extremely common in thermal catalysis for hydrocarbon conversion.”
Today, most commercial syngas is made by steam reforming of methane, a process that requires large amounts of water and heat and that also produces carbon dioxide. By contrast, dry reforming of methane requires no water and actually consumes carbon dioxide and methane.
By tuning interactions between the metal active sites and the support during catalyst synthesis, the scientists suppressed coke formation and metal sintering. The new catalyst provides outstanding performance for dry reforming of methane with extremely slow deactivation.
The novel catalyst consists of a crystalline material called a zeolite that contains silicon, aluminum, oxygen and nickel. The zeolite’s supportive framework stabilizes the metal active sites.
“Zeolite is like sand in composition,” Zhang said. “But unlike sand, it has a sponge-like structure filled with tiny pores, each around 0.6 nanometers in diameter. If you could completely open a zeolite to expose the surface area, 1 gram of sample would contain an area around 500 square meters, which is a tremendous amount of exposed surface.”
To synthesize the zeolite catalyst, the researchers remove some atoms of aluminum and replace them with nickel. “We're effectively creating a strong bond between the nickel and the zeolite host,” Polo-Garzon said. “This strong bond makes our catalyst resistant to degradation at high temperatures.”
The high-performance catalyst was synthesized at ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. Zili Wu, leader of ORNL’s Surface Chemistry and Catalysis group, served as a strategy advisor for the project.
Zhang performed infrared spectroscopy, revealing that nickel was typically isolated and bound by two silicon atoms in the zeolite framework.
At DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, ORNL’s Yuanyuan Li led X-ray absorption spectroscopy studies detailing the electronic and bonding structures of nickel in the catalyst. At ORNL,Polo-Garzon and Zhang used a technique called steady-state isotopic transient kinetic analysis to measure catalyst efficiency — the number of times a single active site converts a reactant into a product.
X-ray diffraction and scanning transmission electron microscopy characterized the structure and composition of materials at the nanoscale.
“In the synthesis method, we found that the reason the method works is because we're able to get rid of water, which is a byproduct of the catalyst synthesis,” Polo-Garzon said. “We asked colleagues to use density functional theory to look into why water matters when it comes to the stability of nickel.”
At Vanderbilt University, Haohong Song and De-en Jiang performed computational calculations showing that removing water from the zeolite strengthens its interactions with nickel.
Next, the researchers will develop other catalyst formulations for the dry reforming of methane reaction that are stable under a broad range of conditions. “We're looking for alternative ways to excite the reactant molecules to break thermodynamic constraints,” Polo-Garzon said.
“We relied on rational design, not trial and error, to make the catalyst better,” Polo-Garzon added. “We're not just developing one catalyst. We are developing design principles to stabilize catalysts for a broad range of industrial processes. It requires a fundamental understanding of the implications of synthesis protocols. For industry, that's important because rather than presenting a dead-end road in which you try something, see how it performs, and then decide where to go from there, we're providing an avenue to move forward.”
The DOE Office of Science funded the research. The work relied on several DOE Office of Science user facilities: the CNMS at ORNL; the Center for Functional Nanomaterials and the National Synchrotron Light Source II, both at Brookhaven; the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource at SLAC and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science. The single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, the Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Dawn Levy
Water molecules in vapor are drawn to a water-loving polymer in a copolymer solution. The presence of the less hydrophilic polymer causes an exchange that helps release the water under near ambient conditions.
Harvesting water from the air and decreasing humidity are crucial to realizing a more comfortable life for humanity. Water-adsorption polymers have been playing a key part in atmospheric water harvesting and desiccant air conditioning, but desorption so that the polymers can be efficiently reused has been an issue. Now, Osaka Metropolitan University researchers have found a way to make desorption of these polymers more efficient.
Usually, heat of around 100°C is required to desorb these polymers, but Graduate School of Engineering student Daisuke Ikegawa, Assistant Professor Arisa Fukatsu, Associate Professor Kenji Okada, and Professor Masahide Takahashi developed a liquid moisture adsorbent that requires only a temperature of around 35°C to do so.
This became possible through the use of random copolymers of polyethylene glycol, which adsorbs water well, and polypropylene glycol, which adsorbs water slightly less well. The difference in their water-loving properties created a transfer mechanism that broke down the water clusters, freeing the water more easily.
“This technology has the potential to be applied not only to water supply in arid regions and places with limited energy resources, but also to ensuring access to water in times of disaster and emergency,” Dr. Fukatsu proclaimed.
“Improvements to this technology are also expected to lead to reductions in greenhouse gases and more efficient use of water resources,” Professor Takahashi added. “From now on, we will aim to improve the liquid moisture adsorbent and increase the efficiency of the entire system in order to make it practical.”
The findings are published in ACS ES&T Water.
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About OMU
Established in Osaka as one of the largest public universities in Japan, Osaka Metropolitan University is committed to shaping the future of society through “Convergence of Knowledge” and the promotion of world-class research. For more research news, visit https://www.omu.ac.jp/en/ and follow us on social media: X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.
Credit: Illustration by Alex Bosoy, Design & Illustration, LLC
An international team of scientists recently published a study highlighting the potential role of iron sulfides in the formation of life in early Earth’s terrestrial hot springs. According to the researchers, the sulfides may have catalyzed the reduction of gaseous carbon dioxide into prebiotic organic molecules via nonenzymatic pathways.
This work, which appeared in Nature Communications, offers new insights into Earth’s early carbon cycles and prebiotic chemical reactions, underscoring the significance of iron sulfides in supporting the terrestrial hot springs origin of life hypothesis.
The study was conducted by Dr. NAN Jingbo from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dr. LUO Shunqin from Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science, Dr. Quoc Phuong Tran from the University of New South Wales, Australia, and other researchers.
Iron sulfides, abundant in early Earth’s hydrothermal systems, may have facilitated essential prebiotic chemical reactions, similar to the function of cofactors in modern metabolic systems. Previous studies on iron sulfides and the origin of life have focused primarily on deep-sea alkaline hydrothermal vents, which provide favorable conditions like high temperature, pressure, pH gradients, and hydrogen (H₂) from serpentinization—factors thought to support prebiotic carbon fixation.
However, some scientists have proposed terrestrial hot springs as another plausible setting for life’s origins, due to their rich mineral content, diverse chemicals, and abundant sunlight (Figure 1).
To explore the role of iron sulfides in terrestrial prebiotic carbon fixation, the research team synthesized a series of nanoscale iron sulfides from mackinawite (Figure 2), including pure iron sulfide and iron sulfides doped with common hot spring elements such as manganese, nickel, titanium, and cobalt.
Their experiments showed that these iron sulfides could catalyze the H₂-driven reduction of CO₂ at specific temperatures (80–120 °C) and atmospheric pressure. Gas chromatography was used to quantify the methanol production (Figure 3).
The study found that manganese-doped iron sulfides exhibited notably high catalytic activity at 120 °C. This activity was further enhanced by UV-visible (300–720 nm) and UV-enhanced (200–600 nm) light, suggesting that sunlight might play a role in driving this reaction by facilitating chemical processes. Additionally, the introduction of water vapor boosted catalytic activity, further supporting that vapor-laden terrestrial hot springs may have served as key sites for nonenzymatic organic synthesis on early Earth.
To further investigate the mechanism behind the H₂-driven CO₂ reduction, the team conducted in-situ analyses using diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFTS).
Results indicated that the reaction likely proceeds via the reverse water-gas shift (RWGS) pathway, in which CO₂ is first reduced to carbon monoxide (CO), which is subsequently hydrogenated to form methanol. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations provided additional insights, revealing that manganese doping not only lowered the reaction’s activation energy but also introduced highly efficient electron transfer sites, thereby enhancing reaction efficiency (Figure 4). The redox characteristics of iron sulfides make them functionally analogous to modern metabolic enzymes, providing a chemical foundation for prebiotic carbon fixation.
This research underscores the potential of iron sulfides to catalyze prebiotic carbon fixation in early Earth’s terrestrial hot springs, opening new directions for exploring life’s origins and supporting efforts to search for extraterrestrial life.
Figure 2: Scanning transmission electron microscopy reveals characteristics of the iron sulfide (mackinawite) catalyst.
Figure 3: Simulated reaction of metal-doped iron sulfides catalyzing the H₂-driven reduction of CO₂ under various terrestrial hot spring conditions.
Figure 4: Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations of CO₂ hydrogenation on the surfaces of pure iron sulfide and manganese-doped iron sulfide.
Iron sulfide-catalyzed gaseous CO2 reduction and prebiotic carbon fixation in terrestrial hot springs
Article Publication Date
28-Nov-2024
Unexplained heat-wave ‘hotspots’ are popping up across the globe
So extreme, they cannot be explained by global warming models
Columbia Climate School
image:
Regions where observed heat waves exceed trends from climate models. Boxed areas with the darkest red colors are the most extreme; lesser reds and oranges exceed models, but not by as much. Yellows roughly match models, while greens and blues are below what models would project.
Earth's hottest recorded year was 2023, at 2.12 degrees F above the 20th-century average. This surpassed the previous record set in 2016. So far, the 10 hottest yearly average temperatures have occurred in the past decade. And, with the hottest summer and hottest single day, 2024 is on track to set yet another record.
All this may not be breaking news to everyone, but amid this upward march in average temperatures, a striking new phenomenon is emerging: distinct regions are seeing repeated heat waves that are so extreme, they fall far beyond what any model of global warming can predict or explain. A new study provides the first worldwide map of such regions, which show up on every continent except Antarctica like giant, angry skin blotches. In recent years these heat waves have killed tens of thousands of people, withered crops and forests, and sparked devastating wildfires.
"The large and unexpected margins by which recent regional-scale extremes have broken earlier records have raised questions about the degree to which climate models can provide adequate estimates of relations between global mean temperature changes and regional climate risks," says the study.
"This is about extreme trends that are the outcome of physical interactions we might not completely understand," said lead author Kai Kornhuber, an adjunct scientist at the Columbia Climate School's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "These regions become temporary hothouses." Kornhuber is also a senior research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
The study was just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study looks at heat waves over the past 65 years, identifying areas where extreme heat is accelerating considerably faster than more moderate temperatures. This often results in maximum temperatures that have been repeatedly broken by outsize, sometimes astonishing, amounts. For instance, a nine-day wave that hammered the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada in June 2021 broke daily records in some locales by 30 degrees C, or 54 F. This included the highest ever temperature recorded in Canada, 121.3 F, in Lytton, British Columbia. The town burned to the ground the next day in a wildfire driven in large part by the drying of vegetation in the extraordinary heat. In Oregon and Washington state, hundreds of people died from heat stroke and other health conditions.
These extreme heat waves have been hitting predominantly in the last five years or so, though some occurred in the early 2000s or before. The most hard-hit regions include populous central China, Japan, Korea, the Arabian peninsula, eastern Australia and scattered parts of Africa. Others include Canada's Northwest Territories and its High Arctic islands, northern Greenland, the southern end of South America and scattered patches of Siberia. Areas of Texas and New Mexico appear on the map, though they are not at the most extreme end.
According to the report, the most intense and consistent signal comes from northwestern Europe, where sequences of heat waves contributed to some 60,000 deaths in 2022 and 47,000 deaths in 2023. These occurred across Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and other countries. Here, in recent years, the hottest days of the year are warming twice as fast the summer mean temperatures. The region is especially vulnerable in part because, unlike places like the United States, few people have air conditioning, because traditionally it was almost never needed. The outbreaks have continued; as recently as this September, new maximum temperature records were set in Austria, France, Hungary, Slovenia, Norway and Sweden.
The researchers call the statistical trends "tail-widening"―that is, the anomalous occurrence of temperatures at the far upper end, or beyond, anything that would be expected with simple upward shifts in mean summer temperatures. But the phenomenon is not happening everywhere; the study shows that maximum temperatures across many other regions are actually lower than what models would predict. These include wide areas of the north-central United States and south-central Canada, interior parts of South America, much of Siberia, northern Africa and northern Australia. Heat is increasing in these regions as well, but the extremes are increasing at similar or lower speed than what changes in average would suggest.
Climbing overall temperatures make heat waves more likely in many cases, but the causes of the extreme heat outbreaks are not entirely clear. In Europe and Russia, an earlier study led by Kornhuber blamed heat waves and droughts on wobbles in the jet stream, a fast-moving river of air that continuously circles the northern hemisphere. Hemmed in by historically frigid temperatures in the far north and much warmer ones further south, the jet stream generally confines itself to a narrow band. But the Arctic is warming on average far more quickly than most other parts of the Earth, and this appears to be destabilizing the jet stream, causing it to develop so-called Rossby waves, which suck hot air from the south and park it in temperate regions that normally do not see extreme heat for days or weeks at a time.
This is only one hypothesis, and it does not seem to explain all the extremes. A study of the fatal 2021 Pacific Northwest/southwestern Canada heat wave led by Lamont-Doherty graduate student Samuel Bartusek (also a coauthor on the latest paper) identified a confluence of factors. Some seemed connected to long-term climate change, others to chance. The study identified a disruption in the jet stream similar to the Rossby waves thought to affect Europe and Russia. It also found that decades of slowly rising temperatures had been drying out regional vegetation, so that when a spell of hot weather came along, plants had fewer reserves of water to evaporate into the air, a process that helps moderate heat. A third factor: a series of smaller-scale atmospheric waves that gathered heat from the Pacific Ocean surface and transported it eastward onto land. Like Europe, few people in this region have air conditioning, because it is generally not needed, and this probably upped the death toll.
The heat wave "was so extreme, it's tempting to apply the label of a 'black swan' event, one that can't be predicted," said Bartusek. "But there's a boundary between the totally unpredictable, the plausible and the totally expected that's hard to categorize. I would call this more of a grey swan."
While the wealthy United States is better prepared than many other places, excessive heat nevertheless kills more people than all other weather-related causes combined, including hurricanes, tornadoes and floods. According to a study out this past August, the yearly death rate has more than doubled since 1999, with 2,325 heat-related deaths in 2023. This has recently led to calls for heat waves to be named, similar to hurricanes, in order to heighten public awareness and motivate governments to prepare.
"Due to their unprecedented nature, these heat waves are usually linked to verysevere health impacts, and can be disastrous for agriculture,vegetation and infrastructure,” said Kornhuber. “We’re not built for them, and we mightnot be able to adapt fast enough."
The study was also coauthored by Richard Seager and Mingfang Ting of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and H.J. Schellnhuber of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
More information: Kevin Krajick, Senior editor, science news, Columbia Climate School/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory kkrajick@climate.columbia.edu 917-361-7766
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Method of Research
Data/statistical analysis
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Global emergence of regional heatwave hotspots outpaces climate model simulations
Article Publication Date
26-Nov-2024
Ban medical research with links to the fossil fuel industry, say experts
Investigation reveals a case for stronger action against the influence of these health-harming companies on academic research. Of the top five medical journals, only The BMJ bans fossil fuel-tied research
BMJ Group
An investigation published by The BMJ today reveals the extent of fossil fuel industry involvement in medical research, leading to fresh calls for academics and publishing companies to cut ties with companies.
An analysis by journalists Hristio Boytchev, Natalie Widmann and Simon Wörpel found that over the past six years, more than 180 medical articles have acknowledged fossil fuel industry funding, and an additional 1000 articles feature authors who worked for a fossil fuel company or related organisation.
While many studies don’t have an obvious link with fossil fuel industry interests, experts told The BMJ that publishing research benefits the companies by enhancing their reputation and buying influence with researchers and health practitioners.
The BMJ analysis found that Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, was involved in around 600 articles, mostly through Johns Hopkins Aramco Healthcare (JHAH), a joint project between the oil giant and Johns Hopkins Medicine. Many of these papers concerned infectious diseases such as covid-19 and Mpox.
ExxonMobil was linked to the second largest group of articles. The ExxonMobil Foundation has funded the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network, which supports malaria research. Until recently, the company spent almost three decades drilling for oil in Equatorial Guinea, a country with a high risk of malaria.
Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and ExxonMobil did not respond to The BMJ’s requests to comment. Saudi Aramco declined to comment.
More than 1,000 articles were co-authored by employees of the companies. Often this was due to the involvement of hospitals or research institutes that are directly related to the companies, such as Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s (KPC) Ahmadi Hospital.
The BMJ also found around 75 articles written by co-authors affiliated with fossil fuel companies without academic partners. These included Shell, ExxonMobil and the KPC (involved through Ahmadi Hospital). “Shell has a strong record of supporting important academic research and our involvement is always made clear,” a company spokesperson said.
Today’s findings come as some experts demand that the fossil fuel industry be treated similarly to tobacco companies. “Fossil fuel companies and the tobacco industry are similar in both the vast scale of harm they cause to health and their tactics of deliberately distorting science”, said Anna Gilmore, director of the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath. “Research journals and academic institutions must rethink their collaborations with the fossil fuel industry.”
Of the world’s five leading medical journals, only The BMJ has a policy banning fossil fuel-tied research. In 2020, The BMJ committed to ban advertising and research funded by companies that produce fossil fuels and this is now being extended to cover more BMJ journals. “We are extending this policy to BMJ Open and BMJ Medicine, and will begin a process of rolling out this policy to other BMJ Group journals,” says editor in chief Kamran Abbasi.
The BMJ has also strengthened its advertising policy by banning advertising from banks that fund fossil fuel companies. “Medical journals have an important role in not only advocating for climate action but also taking action,” adds Abbasi.
A spokesperson for the Lancet Group, publisher of the Lancet, said editors would “strongly scrutinise any fossil fuel industry funded research” and the “Lancet journals are very unlikely to publish such research unless it provided a clear benefit to public and human health.”
A spokesperson for Nature Reviews Disease Primers said competing interests are made available to referees and “there is a high degree of editorial oversight for reviews published in the journal.” The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Journal of the American Medical Association did not comment.
There have also been calls for medical organisations to divest from the fossil fuel industry. John Middleton, president of the Faculty of Public Health, said that in addition to divesting, organisations should consider restricting researching and publishing together with the industry.
One common theme of 2024 election postmortems is that Vice President Kamala Harris lost to President-elect Donald Trump because her campaign was too far-left. Zeteo News editor-in-chief and CEO Mehdi Hasan took issue with that argument.
In a video posted to X, Hasan tore into Democratic establishment figures like James Carville and Adam Jentleson who said the "far left" was holding the Democratic Party "hostage." He blasted headlines in major media outlets like the Washington Post that read: Harris defeat is a stinging verdict for the left," and a New York Times op-ed titled: "When will Democrats learn to say no?"
"Are you f—ing kidding me? This is gaslighting of Trumpian proportions," Hasan said.
"There was nothing 'left wing' about Harris. I mean, the centrists literally got the presidential candidate they wanted: A tough-on-crime prosecutor who bragged about owning a gun and spoke about her love for a 'lethal' military," he continued. "A candidate who famously told migrants: 'Don't come to this country.'" And, during the one and only presidential debate, attacked Trump for not backing a bipartisan and very draconian border security bill."
Hasan went on to bash arguments that the vice president's campaign was too left-wing "ridiculous," "detached from reality" and "demonstrably and obviously false." He noted that she didn't once use the phrase "Latinx" or "defund the police" on the campaign stump, and "barely said anything about transgender rights." And he noted that in 2020, when "defund the police" was a more common saying, Democrats won the White House.
"It's as clear as day. Harris did not run a left-wing campaign. She didn't run on Medicare for All. She didn't run on student debt relief. She didn't run on a Green New Deal. And she didn't break with Joe Biden on Gaza," he said. "So when you say she ran 'left,' what on earth are you talking about?"
"This is a presidential candidate who campaigned way more with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban than with AOC and Shawn Fain. Who listened to her brother-in-law, the chief legal officer of Uber, than to Bernie Sanders," Hasan added. "The truth is, in 2016 and again in 2020, the Democratic establishment united to block Bernie Sanders, an actual leftist, from becoming their nominee. And in 2024, due to Joe Biden's stubbornness, they didn't even have a contest, just a coronation."
"So look, the centrists, the moderates, got their candidate in every single election in which the Republicans nominated Donald Trump: 2016, Hillary Clinton. 2020, Joe Biden. 2024, Kamala Harris. And they lost to Trump two out of three times," he concluded. "And now they're going to blame the left for that? No f—ing way."
