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)
NB Atlantic puffin returns to open water after 'miracle' rescue
Wed, March 8, 2023 This young Atlantic puffin was released into the water off the New Brunswick coast just days after it was found in the middle of a busy road in Riverview. (Atlantic Wildlife Institute/Facebook - image credit)
The tiny Atlantic puffin rescued from a busy four-lane road in southeastern New Brunswick last Thursday has already been released into open water after a short recovery at the Atlantic Wildlife Institute.
Pam Novak of the Atlantic Wildlife Institute said that when the email came in about a tiny bird in Riverview that had clearly lost its way, she thought it was a typo, and the sender meant pigeon — not puffin.
"Luckily, it was found as quickly as it was," she said. "For the gentleman who found him to find him so quickly before it actually got hit by a car is what the miracle of this is — that that bird didn't get injured."
Weighing in at just 400 grams, Novak and her team did some research and concluded the Atlantic puffin was likely a juvenile, going into its second year. It's plumage is dull, and the bill itself didn't have the iconic orange and yellow colours yet. Submitted by Pam Novak
After an exam, a few days of rest, and a bathtub swimming test, Novak knew the puffin was ready to be released into open water.
"We have a little pool set up to make sure that we can see that activity happening and he passed that test," she said. "Then it was a matter of getting him back out."
When it came time for the release, the bird "was very happy to go," she said as she laughed. "No looking back."
The wildlife care team determined the bird was most likely on its way to Grand Manan or nearby Machias Seal Island, and drove the Atlantic puffin down the Bay of Fundy coast to find open water and a direct route to the breeding grounds.
"The consensus was that it's probably trying to get down to Machias Seal Island, so that's where we put it … and shortened his or her trek to get right to the island."
LISTEN | Pam Novak tells Information Morning Moncton about how a rescued puffin has been returned to the wild:
Novak suspects the lonely puffin may had become disoriented by fog that moved in that morning. It was also a "pretty breezy, snowy kind of day."
While there is no way to know whether the bird will survive, Novak is hopeful.
Atlantic Wildlife Institute/Facebook
"A lot of times you're not going to know what's going to happen. All we can do is put a bird out that we felt was in good healthy condition, didn't show any kind of ailments, just got itself put off track for whatever reason and just give them that second chance."
The last time Novak saw the bird, it was in deep open water — a quiet place she describes as the best spot it could be.
"Last we saw it was diving underwater and it took off and that was that," she said. "So that's all we can ask for."
Sunday, February 19, 2023
Although Giant Penguin Fossil Is Nice, Wyoming’s Dinosaurs Were So Big They Pooped 3,000-Pound Boulders
By Jake Nichols, Cowboy State Daily Jake@CowobyStateDaily.com
A recent paper published in the Cambridge University Press touted the largest-known fossil of a penguin discovered by paleontologist Alan Tennyson.
This portly puffin waddled the coastline of New Zealand some 60 million years ago, weighing as much as a refrigerator. The ancient auk was identified as a new species, Kumimanu fordycei, and is thought to be the largest penguin to have ever lived.
By the way, the now-submerged fragmental continent of Zealandia is considered the center of extant penguin diversity, with accumulating fossil evidence supporting hypotheses that penguins as we know them today originated in this part of the world.
A left, a life-sized rendering of how large the prehistoric penguin found in New Zealand would be. At right, the brachiosaur, which was so large its poops are esteemed to weight 3,000 pounds.
Wyoming’s Big Brachiosaur
What’s noteworthy about this discovery halfway across the globe is that in Wyoming, we’re crazy about dinosaurs. Who isn’t?
And frankly, and with all due respect to the scientific community digging up dead birds from the beaches of Otaga, New Zealand, the Cowboy State has dinosaurs that poop bigger than that monster penguin. Literally.
The impressively sized brachiosaur is thought to have supersized scat that weighs in at an estimated 3,000 pounds.
And not only is Wyoming home to the brachiosaur, it’s the biggest one ever found. Well, some of him anyway.
Dubbed “Bigfoot” for obvious reasons, a foot belonging to a close relative of the long-necked, long-tailed brachiosaurus was uncovered in 1998 in the Black Hills region of Wyoming by a team from the University of Kansas.
The brachiosaurus is a genus of herbivorous sauropod dinosaur that lived in North America during the Middle Jurassic, about 150-180 million years ago. It is featured as a gentle lumbering behemoth munching on treetops in the Jurassic Park movie franchise.
“This beast was clearly one of the biggest that ever walked in North America,” said Emanuel Tschopp, a Theodore Roosevelt Richard Gilder Graduate School postdoctoral fellow in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Paleontology, in a 2018 press release when the finding was officially recognized.
Discovery Almost Didn’t Happen
Think the Mesozoic Era was long? It took forever to get this foot fossil to a research facility for cleanup and 3D scanning.
In fact, the discovery is 77 years in the making and came close to never happening at all.
Field crews first began exploring Mesozoic formations in the U.S. in the 1870s, starting in southern Utah. University of Kansas alum Elmer Riggs excavated the first brachiosaurus specimen in 1901 in Colorado.
At that time, Wyoming was considered far too north for dinosaurs like the brachiosaurus to have roamed – until a 1941 expedition led by a team from the University of Nebraska found fossils on a remote hilltop in the Black Hills region of northeast Wyoming.
The dig uncovered an extremely large femora belonging to a sauropod, but with summer coming to a close, the site was secured for the winter with every intention of returning.
Then the U.S. entered World War II.
Most field activities were curtailed during wartime. By the time follow-up excavations were organized in the early 1950s, no students or professors could remember exactly where the quarry was located. Records were incorrect (two miles off, it would turn out) and the dig site was nearly lost forever.
Professor Larry Martin at the University of Kansas was a student at U. Nebraska at the time of the original dig in 1941. He organized a new expedition in the 1990s and was able to zero in on the exact location of the famed fossilized femur with the help of a few old-time ranchers in the area.
While it is not the largest brachiosaurus ever found, it is the largest intact foot from the species ever dug up and positively identified.
Wyoming’s Snakey Croc-Faced Sea Monster
Not to be outdone by Bigfoot, College of Charleston geology professor Scott Persons announced the discovery of a bizarre new prehistoric sea monster in September 2022.
Persons labeled his find Serpentisuchops, a biological name translating to “snakey crocodile-face.” It was unearthed from a sulfuric patch of scrubland near Lusk, Wyoming, in 1995.
It took 27 years for the bones to be carefully excavated, cleaned up by a volunteer group of elderly women known as the “Glenrock Bone Biddies,” and finally verified.
This member of the plesiosaur species swam the seas of Wyoming when it was under water some 70 million years ago. Its discovery is significant, Persons says, because this sea creature has both a long neck and a big head.
“It’s an unusual one. It looks like a sea turtle with the shell removed,” Persons commented during a podcast interview with the College of Charleston late last year. “When I was a student, I was taught plesiosaurs come in two basic flavors — one with a really long neck and a tiny head, or the other way around with a short neck and enormous head and crocodile jaws.”
This extraordinarily preserved specimen sports a total of 32 neck vertebrae as well as really long jaws.
“It is unusual to find a plesiosaur with this mix of traits. Very weird,” Persons added. “It might represent a lineage of plesiosaurs that evolved to do something different.”
After studying the fossilized remains, Persons speculates this creature was especially adept at striking out to the side to gulp down a school of prehistoric fish as they passed by.
Today, you can see the unique serpentisuchops sea monster, or the 35% of it unearthed, at the Glenrock Paleon Museum.
Scott Persons with an artist rendering of his novel “sea creature.” (Courtesy College of Charleston)
T. Rex Tracks In Glenrock
Persons is credited with another fossil first in the Cowboy State. It happened almost by accident when the budding dinosaur hunter was a mere 13 years old. Not even that, truthfully.
His parents fudged the 12-year-old’s application form so he could participate in his first expedition in Wyoming.
During that visit to Glenrock and its Paleon Museum, Persons befriended then-director Sean Smith, who himself made a groundbreaking discovery of a skull of a triceratops in 1994 when he was just 19 years old.
It was a rare find that put Glenrock on the paleontological map and launched the museum.
Smith took notice of Persons’ enthusiasm and asked the kid if he wanted to see something really cool.
Persons remembered, “Sean led me out to a sandstone slope and started brushing away at an indented spot. At first, it looked like a prehistoric pothole. But soon I could see the imprints of three big toes, each with sharp claw tips. It was so cool my jaw dropped.”
It was the footprint of a large carnivorous dinosaur, most likely a Tyrannosaurus rex. And not just one print, but two more, making a left-right-left trackway.
Persons never forgot that experience. Years later, while finishing up his graduate-level study at the University of Alberta, Persons reached out to Smith, pleading with him to pursue formal scientific recognition of the find. That effort was realized in 2016 with the publication of their research in “Cretaceous Research” (V.61, June 2016).
The trackway found in the Lance Formation behind the Paleon Museum is now regarded as the longest sequential set of prints from a tyrannosaurid in the world.
By measuring the distance between the prints and estimating the relative size of the dinosaur—likely an adolescent T. rex, Persons guesses—the research also helped establish that these tyrannosaurs walked faster than previously assumed, according to their stride.
Since the discovery, Sean’s father, Don Smith, confirmed to Cowboy State Daily that the trackway continues on even further. A total of 10 footprints have now been discovered, but private property rights have hampered further exploration.
“We’ll probably never know how far they go,” Smith said.
Persons has come full circle with his love for paleontology. The professor brought a dozen Charleston students to Glenrock last summer for a field trip and plans to do the same this summer with 10 more grad students. He now hopes to unearth the full skull of a triceratops, Wyoming’s official state dinosaur.
“We got super close last year,” Persons said. “An enormous lower jaw, the biggest I have ever seen. We’re hoping to find the rest of him in coming summers.”
Wyoming’s Jurassic Mile
All this dino stuff and we haven’t even mentioned a 1-square-mile stretch of rugged terrain in the Big Horn Basin near Cody.
This 640-acre patch of land in the heart of the Morrison Formation is so exceptionally rich in fossil records it’s been dubbed the “Jurassic Mile.”
In 2019, a 20-year lease was signed by The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, in partnership with University of Manchester, to allow scientists exclusive access to the dig site that has been victim to private and commercial pillage in decades past.
The massive, $27 million dino dig is expected to eventually uncover hundreds of prehistoric specimens including some never before cataloged. Already, almost 1,000 bones have been discovered.
The exact location of the dig site is kept highly confidential for fear of fossil looters. Reporters headed to the area to cover a news story must agree to switch off geotagging on their phones and avoid taking photographs that feature the horizon.
Pure Bliss: Dig Your Own Dinosaur
Tucked away in the northeast part of Wyoming on the border with Montana is the Bliss Dinosaur Ranch. The 3,000 deeded acres are owned by Frank Bliss, a former Jackson Hole resident and co-founder of Geologists of Jackson Hole. He has a master’s in Geology and a BS in GeoBiology. He’s been a field paleontologist since 1980.
Bliss offers a dinosaur dig, bed & breakfast experience where guests can keep some items they find. “As long as it is not collector, museum-type pieces,” Bliss said.
Bliss is sitting on Hell Creek and Fox Hills sediment—formations marking the latter part of the Cretaceous some 65 million years ago as dinosaurs were slowly dying out. Still, this time period supported around 300 different creatures, 28 species of dinosaurs.
Bliss has amassed an impressive collection of over 10,000 pieces—mostly heavier stuff like teeth and horns that were not easily carried away in the big river flows occurring as ancient oceans drained away westward.
“I get a lot of individual isolated bones because the river was tough on things and broke them up,” Bliss said. “We find teeth and claws and horns, many from triceratops. We do about five digs a year for guests.”
THUMBNAIL: Crew from University of Kansas discovered large fossilized brachiosaur foot in the Black Hills region of Wyoming.
When oil prices plummeted during the pandemic, fossil fuel companies made vague efforts to invest in clean energy. Now pulling in bumper profits, Big Oil is discarding those initiatives to maintain their business model: capital over climate.
In the midst of the pandemic, climate-conscious financiers became excited by a relatively obscure piece of market news. NextEra Energy — the largest renewable energy company in the United States — surpassed ExxonMobil in market capitalization.
In other words, NextEra briefly became the most valuable energy company in the United States. This reversal was all the more shocking given that ExxonMobil was generating vastly more revenue than NextEra, raking in $265 billion in 2019 next to NextEra’s $19.2.
Exxon eventually overtook NextEra once again, but the shift was seen as a harbinger of future market movements by many investors.
While it may be difficult to imagine today, oil prices briefly fell to near zero in the midst of the pandemic. The collapse in prices was down to a combination of a dramatic slowdown in demand for fossil fuels and a quirk in commodities markets that encouraged investors to offload their oil futures all at once.
The big fossil fuel companies took a big hit from collapsing energy prices. The shock was particularly deep for Exxon, which is notorious for its refusal to countenance a shift away from fossil fuels.
The company’s former CEO, Rex Tillerson, who went on to serve as Donald Trump’s secretary of state, was adamant that climate change was simply a new trend to which the world would have to adapt. In 2016, he stated outright that “[t]he world is going to have to continue using fossil fuels, whether they like it or not.”
Exxon is also currently on trial for concealing information about the impact of burning fossil fuels on the climate. As far back as the 1970s, scientists working for ExxonMobil found strong evidence of the greenhouse effect. The company’s response was to slash funding for its science department and divert the cash into promoting climate denialism.
Exxon’s utter failure to signal its willingness to shift away from fossil fuels is a big part of why investors punished the company so heavily during the pandemic. In the first few months of 2020, ExxonMobil lost nearly half its market value.
When the company was overtaken by NextEra, market watchers took it as a clear signal that investors had had enough of fossil fuels.
There was a significant amount of triumphalism at this moment among the world’s capitalist class. The market had finally provided a solution to climate breakdown.
Whether due to demand for green investment products among retail investors, regulatory innovations like ESG scoring and carbon pricing, or simply the realization that green energy was the future, investing in fossil fuels no longer seemed like a sensible strategy for your average investor.
This transition, many argued, would put a great deal of pressure on companies like Exxon to shift investment away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. And sure enough, the fossil fuel companies were quick to respond.
Total rebranded itself as “TotalEnergies” in a bid to become a “world-class player in the energy transition.” Shell announced it would increase the amount it was investing in renewable energy. BP bought a significant stake in a renewable energy company. Even Exxon finally caved to market pressure and said it would invest billions in “lower greenhouse gas emissions initiatives.”
The upshot of the “success” of these market-based solutions to climate breakdown was, of course, that the world no longer needed to toy with “socialistic” solutions to climate breakdown like the Green New Deal.
But under the surface, the situation was a lot murkier.
Most of the pledges made by the big oil companies were vague and slow to be implemented. In some cases, the announcements amounted to nothing more than greenwashing. The oil companies were betting that the age of oil was far from over.
A number of savvier investors agreed. Several hedge funds quietly started to make big bets that the price of oil would recover quickly as the world transitioned back to fossil fuels once the pandemic was over.
And they were right. After the worst of the pandemic was over, it wasn’t long before the price of oil recovered to pre-pandemic highs. Then it started to skyrocket. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the price of natural gas also soared, which proved a significant boon for the US fracking industry.
The fossil fuel companies, and the investors quietly channeling money into them, had made the right bet. Without a coordinated shift away from fossil fuels, led by the public sector, the world was going to continue to rely on dirty energy.
The market, in other words, was never going to provide a solution to climate breakdown.
ExxonMobil recently announced that it made record profits of $56 billion in 2022. This isn’t only a chart-topping profit for Exxon, it represents an “historic high for the Western oil industry.”
Five percent of these profits will be directed into Exxon’s climate pledges, many of which center on expensive and relatively untested work-arounds like carbon capture and storage. Meanwhile, it continues to ramp up its investments in oil and gas.
BP, which also made record profits of £22 billion last year, has been even more brazen. Alongside a massive share buyback to enrich its investors, BP announced that it would be slowing the shift away from oil and gas. As the think tank Common Wealth points out, the company is spending ten times as much on share buybacks as it is on “low carbon” initiatives.
During the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world missed out on an historic opportunity. With the value of fossil fuel companies tanking, governments could have bought up large chunks of these companies and pressured them to shift toward renewable energies.
And when both demand and inflation were relatively low, they could have announced stimulus packages that promoted decarbonization.
Instead, the oil companies were left to their own devices, Joe Biden’s climate plan was torpedoed by a senator in the pocket of ExxonMobil, and the EU announced a pretty pathetic attempt at their own “Green Deal.”
The result has not only been higher greenhouse gas emissions, it has also been a massive transfer of wealth from households to some of the largest energy companies in the world.
“The market” was never going to solve climate breakdown — and it was either naïve or, more likely, deeply cynical to pretend otherwise.
This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.
The Jackson Water Crisis Is a Disaster Created by Austerity
Jackson, Mississippi’s water crisis is an omen of climate disasters to come. But August floods were only the straw that broke the Jackson water system’s back. More fundamentally, the crisis is the result of decades of disinvestment and austerity.
The Salvation Army of Jackson and Walmart distribute bottled water in
Jackson, Mississippi on August 31, 2022. (Brad Vest / Getty Images)
After a crisis which left 150,000 residents without drinking water for weeks, water pressure in Jackson, Mississippi is back as of Monday. But safe, clean drinking water remains elusive, and it’s unclear when that will change.
The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says it’s still too soon to declare the crisis over, and the city warned of “additional challenges” on the horizon. Jackson residents are still under the same boil-water advisory implemented in late July. For over a month, faucets have gushed a cloudy, discolored liquid that’s unsafe for drinking and cooking. Health officials told residents they could take a shower with the tainted water — albeit with mouths shut so as not to swallow it accidentally.
“It’s like we’re living in a nightmare right now,” a local high school sophomore told CNN.
The crisis was kicked off when heavy rain flooded the Pearl River and knocked out the pumps at Jackson, Mississippi’s water treatment facility for a week. Many commentators have rightly focused on climate change, identifying Jackson as a sign of disasters to come when increasingly extreme weather inevitably damages core infrastructure. But Jackson’s water problems can’t be blamed on the climate crisis alone. They’re also the result of decades of disinvestment, dysfunction, and systemic racism at every level of government.
“Deliberate Indifference”
Jackson’s mayors and city council have called for repairs on roughly fifteen hundred miles of century-old water mains off and on since the 1940s, according to Jackson’s Clarion Ledger. Back in 1978, the Environmental Protection Agency ((EPA) warned city leaders that significant improvements to the water infrastructure were needed. Yet decades of white flight and capital disinvestment from Mississippi’s capital city — now 82 percent black with a poverty rate of 25 percent — reduced the revenue officials say the water system needed to maintain full operations. An estimated $1 billion worth of necessary upgrade requests went unfulfilled.
Consequently many Jacksonians have lacked clean drinking water for years. The EPA first reported high lead levels in the city’s tap water in 2015. Since then, local officials have advised pregnant women and children under five not to drink from the tap. The lead issue has not yet been properly addressed, nor have many of the two dozen violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act that the EPA has issued over the past eight years.
Last year, two lawsuits were filed in federal court over Jackson’s lead level, with one suit alleging that the city of Jackson and the state’s Health Department made “conscience-shocking decisions and have shown deliberate indifference that has led to Plaintiffs’ exposure to toxic lead in Jackson’s drinking water.”
The lines were said to be as fragile as “peanut brittle” a year and a half ago, a time when most residents lost access to running water during back-to-back wintery storms. While the nation was panicking over the arrival of COVID-19 in February of 2020, roughly forty-three thousand Jacksonians also had to deal with losing water access for more than two weeks.
“We’ve been going it alone for the better part of two years when it comes to the Jackson water crisis,” Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said. “I have said on multiple occasions that it’s not a matter of if our system would fail, but a matter of when our system would fail.”
Build Back Never?
Residents were placed under a boil-water notice in late July. August floods only exacerbated the preexisting problems, acting as the straw that broke the camel’s back.
State and federal officials have declared a state of emergency, but aren’t taking any responsibility for years of inaction as the crisis unfolded in plain sight. Last year, two bills designed to raise money for water system repairs died in the legislature. In 2020, Mississippi governor Tate Reeves, a Republican, vetoed legislation meant to assist residents struggling to pay overdue water bills, which would have in turn delivered the city much-needed revenue. Reeves instead passed the state’s largest-ever tax cut in the nation’s poorest state.
“We’re facing an environmental injustice, and we have been ignored,” said Maisie Brown, a community activist and organizer in Jackson. “Jacksonians and people around the area have been ignored by state leadership, and now they want to swoop in — all hands on deck, fixing the problem — but we’ve been asking for help for years, not even just from this administration,”
Help is coming but it’s not enough. The state is receiving $429 million from Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill for water system repairs. But that money that will be spread throughout the state and won’t begin to cover the $1 billion estimated to fix Jackson’s ailing water systems. The federal government even bungled the effort to pass out water bottles: residents were seen waiting in mile-long lines at Hawkins Field Airport for hours last Tuesday to get just one case of bottled water. When the seven hundred cases of water ran out, many Jacksonians were eventually turned away.
It’s true that Jackson’s crisis is a sign of things to come if we don’t halt climate change and ward off extreme weather. But pinning Jackson’s problems on the August floods is the equivalent of pinning the Titanic disaster on the iceberg. Jackson’s water woes aren’t an act of God. They’re a manmade disaster happening in slow motion.
This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.
Ryan Zickgraf is an Alabama-based journalist and is the editor of Third Rail Mag.
Wednesday, August 03, 2022
Canadian government sued by environmental groups over 20 oil and gas “sleeper” permits
Two environmental groups are suing the Canadian federal government over 20 oil and gas “sleeper” exploration permits originally granted off the coast of British Columbia in the late 1960s and 1970s.
The application for judicial review, filed in a federal court on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund Canada and David Suzuki Foundation, claims the federal government has unlawfully extended the permits in violation of the Canada Petroleum Resources Act.
“The central argument that we’re advancing is that those permits are expired and the federal government has unlawfully kept them alive and on the books for more than 40 years,” said Ecojustice staff attorney Ian Miron, who is repressing the two plaintiffs.
“We certainly think that the threat of oil and gas exploration… is not an abstract one.”
Miron pointed to the Bay du Nord offshore oil project approved this year off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador as an example of how the government is still approving major extraction projects despite its climate commitments.
Chevron and ExxonMobil’s oil and gas exploration permits cover 5,840 square kilometres of the Hecate Strait Glass Sponge Reefs Marine Protected Area and the Scott Islands Marine National Wildlife Area – WWF Canada
The Scott Islands attract five to 10 million migrating birds every year.
The coastal sanctuary has the highest concentration of breeding seabirds on Canada’s Pacific coast, and the islands provide habitat for 40% of all B.C.’s seabirds.
That includes several species listed as “at risk” by the federal government, including marbled murrelets, short-tailed albatross and the sooty shearwater.
Four of the Hecate Strait glass sponge reefs, meanwhile, are thought to be 9,000 years old. Before they were discovered, they were thought to be extinct worldwide, only surviving in the fossil record dating back to the late Jurassic period.
Described as “exceptionally fragile” and vulnerable to human activity, the glass sponges “play an important role in marine carbon and nitrogen processing,” according to the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.
“In a nutshell, these two ecosystems support a thriving biodiversity but also contribute to thriving culture and livelihoods for the communities along the coast,” said Miron.
Miron said the environmental groups are taking the matter the court as a last resort after questions to the federal government and the two companies that hold the permits — Chevron Canada and ExxonMobil Canada — “fell on deaf ears.”
“We do think there is some urgency to taking these permits off the books,” said the attorney. “Our clients believe that the mere existence of these permits in these protected areas is actually hampering efforts to fully protect and manage the areas.”
Glacier Media reached out to the Ministry of Natural Resources and ExxonMobil Canada, but neither responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.
A spokesperson for Chevron Canada declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
If the defendants choose to fight the application for judicial review, a case could reach a federal court within a year, says Miron.
Decline in North Sea puffins causes concern nIn both places, a census is taking place to determine the extent of the decline, which has been blamed on rising sea temperatures and other environmental factors (AFP/Andy Buchanan) Stuart GRAHAM Sat, May 28, 2022
The Isle of May, off Scotland's east coast, is home to one of the UK's biggest colonies of seabirds. Some 200,000 birds, from kittiwakes to guillemots can flock to the rocky outcrop at the height of the breeding season.
But conservationists are concerned about dwindling numbers of one of the island's most distinctive visitors -- the Atlantic puffin.
"The population was really booming in the 80s and 90s and then suddenly, a crash," David Steel, a manager at the nature reserve, told AFP.
"We lost nearly 30 percent of all puffins in the mid-2000s and since then the population has slowly increased but nothing compared to what it used to be."
Just over 50 miles (80 kilometres) down the coast on the Farne Islands, off Northumberland in northeast England, there are similar concerns.
In both places, global warming, high winds, rains, coastal erosion, pollution and overfishing of its favoured food -- sand eels -- is being blamed for dwindling numbers.
"Climate change is having a big effect with prey items in the sea," affecting sand eels which feed on plankton in the North Sea, said Steel.
"The plankton is moving north as the sea temperature increases. So if there are less sand eels the puffins are going to struggle." - Census -
On a meadow on one of the Farne Islands, rangers slowly slide their arms into narrow sandy burrows, searching for signs of nesting pairs of puffins, which are known locally as "tommy noddies".
"Quite often you will get a bit of a nip, which is a good sign because it means then that the burrow is occupied," said one of the rangers, Rosie Parsons.
In 2015, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature gave puffins "vulnerable" status, after large declines over much of their European range.
Rising sea temperatures have caused sand eels to move north to cooler waters, forcing the birds to follow but where more extreme weather can be fatal for them.
The traditional enemies of puffins, which grow to just under 30 centimetres (one foot) tall and weigh around 450 grams (around a pound), are seagulls and seals.
Puffins mate for life and lay a single egg in April or May.
Due to their low reproductive rate, populations can take decades to recover from a sudden knock.
A full puffin census is being carried out on the Farne Islands and the Isle of May this year.
Concerns were raised last year when a limited count recorded 36,211 breeding pairs across four of the Farne Islands compared to 42,474 pairs in 2018.
Puffin numbers on the islands peaked at 55,674 pairs in 2003 before a sudden crash to 36,835 in 2008 a due to an extremely low number of sand eels.
Zoologist Richard Bevan, from Newcastle University, hopes the resumed annual count will provide a more accurate estimate of puffins on the islands.
"Up until 2018 surveys were done on the Farnes every five years, which means you don't know what's happening in the four years in between," he told AFP.
Before 2018, teams of researchers would check every burrow they came across on an island and form an estimate from that.
The university then found a way to subsample to form an accurate estimate of the population. This has sped up the count and made the task far less arduous. - Concern -
Measuring puffin numbers is difficult, said Bevan.
Sometimes it will be easy to spot one of the birds, returning to nests with a sand eel clamped in its beak, but puffins are often underground.
"Often the only way to do it is to stick your arm into a burrow and check," he said.
The 2022 census will give scientists a picture of how the puffin population is being affected by factors such as climate change and local changes in sand eel availability, Bevan says.
"Looking at the data, it is worrying to see that over the last four years we have seen a downward trend," he says.
"However, these are data for a short time period and compared to the population counts in the early 1990s they are still reasonable numbers."
Although there is not an immediate danger of the puffins becoming extinct, the fact that their numbers are falling "triggers concern".
"With a declining population you have to keep your eye on it to make sure that doesn't continue," he said.
"If it does continue we have to be aware of the factors that contribute to it and how we can ameliorate those."
srg/phz/cjo/ach
Sunday, December 26, 2021
Carbon Capture Must Be Part of the Climate Solution
Fossil fuel companies tout carbon capture as a way to shore up their own profits. But the technology holds the potential for good — helping us to save the planet, and ourselves, from ecological catastrophe.
Orca, the world’s first, ONLY and largest climate-positive direct air capture and storage plant, in Hellisheidi, Iceland. (Climeworks)
Imagine a group of campers carelessly polluting the forest, leaving beer cans, plastic wrappers, and propane tanks strewn about the understory. An ecologist comes upon their campsite and explains how they are harming the forest ecosystem. The campers decide to stop polluting, but never clean up the mess. This is analogous to a climate strategy without carbon removal.
At its root, the climate crisis is a chemical imbalance. Global heating is just one of its side effects. To restore the ecological conditions in which we evolved, we must restore the balance of carbon flows between our atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. This means not only halting carbon emissions, but returning carbon to where it came from.
Where to Put All This Carbon
Since 1750, an estimated 26 to 46 percent of cumulative historical emissions have been released from the biosphere through deforestation and other forms of habitat destruction. Fortunately, ecosystems have myriad ways to reverse this process. Even on the mouth of a smokestack, the most advanced technology scrubbing the densest coal plume pales in comparison to a tropical forest, which itself pales in comparison to a mangrove. It’s true that nothing sequesters carbon more quickly than nature.
But the world’s ecosystems have a carbon ceiling, or carrying capacity. Even if we somehow returned all converted land to its preindustrial state, models estimate we could only sequester around 41 percent of cumulative historical emissions — in other words, roughly as much carbon as the biosphere originally contained.
This is because at least half of the carbon we’ve released into the atmosphere has come from the lithosphere, through burning fossil fuel from the Earth’s crust. There is no natural process to reverse this at the necessary scale and speed.
Despite this reality, many leading climate advocates argue that carbon capture is unnecessary. They point out — correctly — that if we rapidly decarbonize, the planet could make it halfway back to preindustrial carbon dioxide levels by the end of the century.
But again, the changing climate is only one consequence of the global chemistry experiment we’ve been running. If we leave all this carbon in the atmosphere, levels will eventually decrease once we stop emitting. That’s because most of it will dissolve into the ocean, triggering a chain reaction with carbonic compounds that acidifies seawater. Removing carbon from the atmosphere reverses this process. Even if we should reach preindustrial temperatures in the 2100s by emissions cuts alone, we will have done nothing to address ocean acidification. Is it a victory to achieve a planet where there are vast areas of ocean with no oysters to filter water, no corals to shelter fish, no pteropods to support food webs?
Worse yet, without burying carbon, the effects of temperature change will be catastrophic on both sea and land. We will almost certainly cross the two degree threshold, virtually dooming corals to extinction, liquidating the Arctic sea ice, sinking hundreds of cities from Bangkok to Miami, and killing millions of people in heatwaves. To survive, we must stabilize our climate — and quickly. Ungreenwashing Carbon Capture
While leadingbiogeochemists have long made the case for carbon capture technology, its most visible proponent is the fossil fuel industry. Its lobbyists use it to sell carbon credits to big polluters and empty promises to world leaders. Its interest in the technology isn’t motivated by an obligation to humanity or the planet, but rather a strategy to silence critics and stay in business — whether that means emitting less or more. Today, most of the small amount of carbon the industry captures isn’t stored, but rather used in enhanced oil recovery to lubricate geological fissures and accelerate carbon extraction. Needless to say, this exacerbates the problem.
There are only a few forms of carbon capture technology that yield net-negative emissions. First, some catalyze natural processes, such as enhanced rock weathering and ocean iron fertilization. However, the sequestration potential of these approaches is generally thought to be modest — and with a high risk of negative ecological side effects.
Then there’s bioenergy carbon capture and storage, or BECCS. BECCS augments the theoretically net-neutral process of growing and burning biofuel with capturing carbon at the smokestack, storing it underground to push emissions into the red. This method could potentially sequester a lot of carbon, but at a high cost in land. While we wouldn’t have to expand cropland if we drastically reduced agricultural land use by farming fewer animals, using land to grow biofuels would sacrifice its higher potential for carbon sequestration through rewilding.
This leaves direct air capture (DAC), perhaps the most technologically challenging of all. DAC generally involves a system of enormous fans sucking air through a chemical sponge that filters roughly a thousand air molecules for every four of carbon dioxide. These are then liquefied in solvents and pumped back underground.
The drawbacks associated with direct air capture are low compared to other forms of geoengineering and related to the risks we already take during fossil fuel extraction, including seismic destabilization and injection well leaks. However, DAC is water-intensive, and although we might develop passive systems that use wind, absorbent solvents, or electrodialysis, today’s direct air capture technology demands high quantities of energy and is only emissions-negative if powered by renewables.
Therein lies the most significant caveat: carbon capture is no excuse for aggressively cutting emissions. It will only help if we also rapidly phase out the fossil fuel industry.
Unfortunately, that’s who’s getting all the funding. Fossil fuel corporations are raking in public investments and tax exemptions to research and develop carbon capture, yet posting pathetic results. Despite decades of R&D, billions in carbon capture subsidies, and proposals for $100 billion more, ExxonMobil reported capturing less than 1 percent of its emissions in 2019.
The charitable interpretation is that carbon capture engineering is uniquely challenging. A less credulous explanation is that fossil fuel corporations simply have no incentive to develop carbon capture technology. Funding isn’t contingent on progress, and scaling isn’t worth the capital of thousands of engineers and millions of construction workers. Either way, the research and development of carbon capture technology can only be successful if we decouple it from the fossil fuel industry and build it within the public sector, far from the tyranny of the profit margin.
Despite such misinvestment, net-negative carbon capture technology does exist. In August 2021, a prototype called Orca went online, making it the biggest direct air capture facility in the world. While its developer, Climeworks, is at best a net-neutral corporation — it sells carbon offsets to make a profit — Orca is net-negative, running on geothermal and drawing down a relatively impressive four thousand tons of CO2 per year. At that rate, we’d need more than eight million of them running for fifty years to capture all the fossil carbon we’ve burned (and it would take longer for the atmosphere to level out).
The good news is that the facilities are not that big — about the size of a shipping container, of which we have around 43 million — and like solar and wind, we can expect this technology to gain efficiency over time. Plus, if considering where to install them, we do already have millions of drill pads complete with tubes connected to oil deposits or porous shale strata. Lastly, it’s not all or nothing. Every atom counts.
The Real Net Zero
Carbon capture is not the easy road to net zero that oil lobbyists want to sell us. The real net zero is somewhere around 280ppm CO2. We should think of carbon capture more like putting an imperceptibly diffuse toothpaste back into countless millions of leaky tubes — essentially reverse-engineering fossil fuel, our most disastrous geoengineering experiment ever. It’s a moonshot, yet it’s not rocket science. And while there is a complex engineering case for carbon capture, the ecological case is simple: we need to rebury carbon to reverse ocean acidification.
Carbon capture is a challenge we cannot afford to turn away from, regardless of the venal purposes for which the technology has so far been developed. Today, it is used as a justification for prolonging our dependence on fossil fuel and enriching those who have profited from its extraction. Tomorrow, it may be the only way to remedy the crime against nature that precedes and precipitates climate change — the distortion of planetary chemistry.
This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Spencer Roberts is a science writer, musician, ecologist, and rooftop solar engineer from Colorado.
Friday, October 15, 2021
Nothing funny about bad year for Maine’s clownish puffins By PATRICK WHITTLE
FILE - In this July 1, 2013, file photo, a puffin prepares to land with a bill full of fish on Eastern Egg Rock off the Maine coast. This year's warm summer was bad for Maine's beloved puffins. Far fewer chicks fledged than need to to stabilize the population.
(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s beloved puffins suffered one of their worst years for reproduction in decades this summer due to a lack of the small fish they eat.
Puffins are seabirds with colorful beaks that nest on four small islands off the coast of Maine. There are about 1,500 breeding pairs in the state and they are dependent on fish such as herring and sand lance to be able to feed their young.
Only about a quarter of the birds were able to raise chicks this summer, said Don Lyons, director of conservation science for the National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute in Bremen, Maine. About two-thirds of the birds succeed in a normal year, he said.
The puffin colonies have suffered only one or two less productive years in the four decades since their populations were restored in Maine, Lyons said. The birds had a poor year because of warm ocean temperatures this summer that reduced the availability of the fish the chicks need to survive, he said.
“There were fewer fish for puffins to catch, and the ones they were able to were not ideal for chicks,” Lyons said. “It’s a severe warning this year.”'
In this July 19, 2019, file photo, research assistant Andreinna Alvarez, of Ecuador, holds a puffin chick before weighing and banding the bird on Eastern Egg Rock, a small island off the coast of Maine. This year's warm summer was bad for Maine's beloved puffins. Far fewer chicks fledged than need to to stabilize the population.
(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
The islands where puffins nest are located in the Gulf of Maine, a body of water that is warming faster than the vast majority of the world’s oceans. Researchers have not seen much mortality of adult puffins, but the population will suffer if the birds continue to have difficulty raising chicks, Lyons said.
The birds had one of their most productive seasons for mating pairs in years in 2019. Scientists including Stephen Kress, who has studied the birds for decades, said at the time that birds seemed to be doing well because the Gulf of Maine had a cool year that led to an abundance of food.
The puffins are Atlantic puffins that also live in Canada and the other side of the ocean. Internationally, they’re listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Every winter, thousands of emaciated seabird carcasses are found on North American and European shores. In an article published on the 13 September in Current Biology, an international team of scientists including the CNRS1 has shown how cyclones are causing the deaths of these birds. The latter are frequently exposed to high-intensity cyclones, which can last several days, when they migrate from their Arctic nesting sites to the North Atlantic further south in order to winter in more favourable conditions. After equipping more than 1,500 birds of the five main species concerned (Atlantic puffins, little auks, black-legged kittiwakes, and two species of guillemots) with small loggers2 and by comparing their movements with the trajectories of cyclones, the scientists were able to determine the degree of exposure of the birds to these weather events. By modeling the energy expenditure of birds under such conditions, the study suggests, surprisingly, that the birds do not die from increased energy expenditure, but as a result of their inability to feed during a cyclone. The species studied are particularly unsuited to fly in high winds and some cannot dive into a stormy sea, preventing them from feeding. Trapped during a cyclone, these birds will starve if the unfavourable conditions persist beyond the few days that their body reserves allow them to survive without food. As the frequency of severe cyclones in the North Atlantic increases with climate change, seabirds wintering in this area will be even more vulnerable to such events.
CAPTION
Flight of a little auk equipped with a GLS system (eastern Greenland).
The following major international structures took part (among others): the University of Wisconsin, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.
2 - GLS (Global Location Sensor) tags are tiny tracking devices weighing around 1g, capable of recording light levels in the vicinity of the bird, allowing the position of the equipped individual to be calculated. Though less accurate (range of about 200 kilometres) than a GPS device, these loggers require little energy and have a long life span. They are placed on the metal rings that scientists put on the birds’ leg.
Trump’s National Labor Relations Board Is Sabotaging Its Own Mission The federal agency that’s supposed to protect union rights is instead championing the interests of bosses.
SEPTEMBER 21/28, 2020, ISSUE SCABBY THE RAT Photo illustration by Cindy Lee.
On a June afternoon in 2019, in front of a statue of George Washington at Federal Hall in New York City’s financial district, more than 100 construction workers and activists gathered for a First Amendment rally. Amid chants of “Free speech, free speech!” an approximately 15-foot-tall gray inflatable rat with glaring red eyes bobbed in the sun. The workers, mostly members of Laborers Local 79, weren’t defending speech, exactly. Rather, they were demanding their right to display Scabby the Rat, the mascot deployed at job sites to shame anti-union bosses.
This article was reported in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Puffin Foundation.
The challenge to these workers came from a seemingly unlikely quarter: the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing labor law. The NLRB’s general counsel, Peter Robb, had launched a legal assault to ban Scabby from a nonunion construction site at a Staten Island supermarket. Arguing that its menacing presence amounted to illegal protest activity against a “neutral” business under the National Labor Relations Act, Robb, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2017, sought a federal court injunction that could effectively outlaw Scabby across the country.
On the steps outside the hall where the Bill of Rights was ratified, Chaz Rynkiewicz, Local 79’s director of organizing, took the microphone and denounced Robb as “an anti-union lawyer that, before he was head of the NLRB, worked for corporations to break unions…. If you know any Trumpsters out there, let them know, educate them. They need to know that they can’t love [their] union and love Trump.”
So far, Scabby has survived the legal attacks. In July 2019, a federal district court judge denied Robb’s request for a preliminary injunction in the Staten Island case. But the giant rat remains under threat: An earlier case against Scabby in Philadelphia is still pending before the NLRB.
The zeal with which Robb has pursued the cherished totem of union solidarity reflects how far the NLRB’s agenda has shifted under Trump. A report by The Nation and Type Investigations—based on interviews with more than 25 labor advocates, attorneys, and current and former NLRB staff members—reveals that the federal agency that’s supposed to protect union rights is instead championing the interests of management.
The NLRB is tasked with administering union elections and processing unfair-labor-practice cases under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which protects “concerted activity,” the collective action that workers take to try to improve conditions on the job. Over the years, the NLRB’s rulings have tended to oscillate between pro-worker and pro-management decisions, depending on which party holds the White House.
But with management-side lawyers dominating the agency, which is run by a five-seat board and a general counsel, labor advocates say the NLRB is more stridently anti-labor than ever before and is sabotaging its own mission. Not only has Trump’s board consistently sided with bosses, but career civil servants at the NLRB’s regional branches say they are being deprived of funding and staff. CURRENT ISSUE View our current issue
Even before Trump’s appointees began to undermine the agency, labor organizers were frustrated with the NLRB. Cases often require years of litigation, and remedies typically entail only back pay or reinstatement after a worker is unlawfully fired—not penalties stiff enough to deter employers from abuse.
After the rally in New York, Rynkiewicz told me, “As an organizer for 20-plus years, I’ve never viewed the NLRB as an ally of labor. It’s a shame to say.”
Just before Scabby was deflated, Rynkiewicz added, “The right-wing anti-union people want to portray the NLRB as a friend of labor. It’s not—even on a good day…. When you have the board’s majority put in place by the Democrats, you get nothing. When you have the board’s majority put in by the Republicans, you get an attack.” RADICAL ROLLBACKS
The shortcomings of the NLRB are to some degree baked into its structure. During the labor uprisings of the 1930s, police and the National Guard members frequently killed striking workers. Established by the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, the NLRB was designed to maintain labor peace by absorbing the often violent conflicts into the legal arena. The act, a compromise between labor and management, forced companies to bargain with unions, but it also excluded whole categories of workers, such as farm laborers, and effectively limited collective bargaining to individual companies, not whole industries or sectors.
After World War II, conservative majorities in Congress gutted the National Labor Relations Act with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which expanded employers’ power to suppress workplace organizing, allowed the government to break up strikes deemed “national health or safety” threats, and required anti–Communist Party pledges from union officers, which led organized labor to purge many of its most militant union members. Dangerous web: A 1947 cartoon shows unions trapped in a web labeled “Taft-Hartley compliance.” A spider marked “NLRB” sits at the top. (Phil Drew / The Dispatcher)
Over the next several decades, organized labor withered in numbers and political clout. With private sector union membership now down to about 6 percent, workers and unions are often left seeking justice through this byzantine, Depression-era judicial apparatus. Ready to blow: A 1948 cartoon from a union newspaper warns of the explosive effects of the Taft-Hartley Act. (Phil Drew / The Dispatcher)
The NLRB’s board is currently dominated by three conservative Trump appointees, two with ties to law firms that have represented some of the country’s largest employers. Board chairman John Ring and board member William Emanuel are lawyers who defended companies such as Marriott International and Uber, respectively. A third member, Marvin Kaplan, previously worked on labor policy as a counsel for House Republicans. The board’s lone Democrat, Lauren McFerran, left when her term expired in late 2019 but was reappointed in August. Neither the Trump administration nor the Senate has moved to fill the board’s fifth seat, which has been vacant since August 2018.
Robb, the NLRB’s general counsel, operates independently of the board and is a veteran management-side lawyer who worked with the Reagan administration to bust the air traffic controllers’ union. While the NLRB’s regional branches process most of the unfair-labor-practice charges—handling investigations, adjudications, and settlements—Robb shapes the agenda for the board, which rules on complaints appealed from the regional level, setting precedents for how the National Labor Relations Act is applied and enforced.
Shortly after being sworn into office in November 2017, Robb set about reversing the legacy of the previous board, which had incrementally expanded workers’ rights. In a series of sweeping decisions, the board scrapped rules instituted under Barack Obama barring workplace policies that impinge on the right to organize, axed a prohibition against employers making unilateral changes to collective bargaining agreements, and overturned a ruling allowing workers to form smaller bargaining units within a larger workforce.
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One of the board’s most influential decisions dealt a severe blow to efforts to extend collective bargaining rights for contracted workers. Under Obama, the NLRB loosened the joint employer standard, which determines whether a company can be considered an additional employer of workers hired through a contractor, such as a franchise operator or subcontracted cleaning agency. In 2015, the board ruled that a company could be considered a joint employer if it exercised “indirect control” over workers or had the ability to exercise control.
The Trump board restored a more restrictive joint employer standard—first through a 2017 decision, which the board vacated because of a conflict-of-interest issue, then in 2020 through the administrative rulemaking process. The move upended a multiyear legal challenge brought by McDonald’s workers, who claimed that the company had enough influence over its franchisees to be considered a joint employer and was therefore liable for retaliation against workers involved with the Fight for $15, the campaign for a $15 hourly minimum wage and a union.
The board’s initial moves to nullify Obama-era provisions have been followed by rulings that limit workers’ rights far beyond those under previous Republican administrations. In August 2019 it reduced workers’ rights to protest on private property, determining that management could block musicians with the San Antonio Symphony from leafleting at a performance venue because it was not owned by their employer. It also excluded faculty at religious colleges and universities from its jurisdiction and allowed bosses to bar workers from organizing on company technology and equipment, including the use of e-mail.
In recent months, the board has also used its rulemaking process to roll back pro-worker regulations, especially in regard to union elections; make it easier for employers to interfere with voting; weaken rules that protect unionizing construction workers; and shorten the time that employers must wait before petitioning to oust a union.
“It’s breathtaking how many areas of the law, how many precedents they’ve managed to overturn,” said Wilma Liebman, a chair of the NLRB under Obama. “And they just kind of snap their fingers and do it, in my view, with little regard for the quality of the legal thinking or reasoning, reaching out to decide issues that aren’t before it.”
Some NLRB staffers fear that Robb is making it more difficult for them to scrutinize employers. In June he directed staffers to dramatically alter their investigative procedures. In some cases, bosses can now preview recordings that could be used as evidence and be present when former supervisors testify against them. NLRB spokesperson Edwin Egee told The Nation and Type Investigations that the “dissemination of information during the investigation” enables the agency to “more fairly enforce the [National Labor Relations Act]” and “aid settlement efforts.” But labor advocates say the measures discourage whistleblowers and compromise the integrity of cases.
The NLRB’s rightward shift under Trump has deterred some unions from taking cases to the agency. A current NLRB staff member, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, said she has observed unions opting to settle to avoid triggering an unfavorable ruling. Unions, she said, “are just less likely to turn to us because they…don’t want to create bad law.”
Several graduate student employee unions, including at Boston College, withdrew their cases in 2018 to prevent the board from overturning the Obama-era precedent that supported the collective bargaining rights of graduate workers at private institutions. “We pulled our petition to protect the rights of graduate student workers at private universities nationwide,” said Sam Levinson, a Boston College graduate student worker, in an e-mail. “The current NLRB has consistently chipped away at the collective bargaining rights for which the labor movement has fought for decades. We decided to organize and build power, instead of allowing Boston College to put the fate of our rights into the hands of Trump and his appointees.”
Even though the petition was dropped, the board initiated a rulemaking process last September to strip collective bargaining rights from graduate student employees—another attempt to change policy through an administrative rule change rather than case law.
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For career staffers who joined the NLRB to help enforce the rights of workers, the Trump board has been demoralizing. “There’s a host of decisions that have come out that are destructive of workers’ rights, and it’s an extremely sad time to be at this agency and work here,” said a second NLRB staff member, who also requested anonymity. “The only hope is that [the administration] will turn before too much damage is done.”
In early 2018, according to Bloomberg Law, Robb floated a proposal to centralize case-handling authority under officials who report directly to him. The NLRB’s 26 regional directors protested, calling the move a unilateral concentration of authority by a Trump appointee. And Senator Patty Murray (D-Wa.) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) sent a letter expressing concern. At the time, an NLRB spokesperson told Bloomberg Law that “no plan involving the restructuring of our Regional Offices system has been developed.” Facing congressional scrutiny and a backlash from staff, Robb seemingly shelved the idea.
But in August he appeared to have revived his consolidation efforts with a plan to combine case handling across several branches in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland, Denver, and Phoenix. Democrats in Congress criticized the proposal as a backdoor attempt to undercut the regional directors. Egee said the plan did not constitute a reorganization of the local offices and was merely a “resource sharing” initiative intended to “address chronic workload imbalances” between regions.
In 2018, Robb antagonized staffers with a memo recommending dozens of ways to speed up investigations. Although Egee said the guidance was drawn “directly from NLRB employees,” the NLRB Union, which represents workers in the regional offices, responded by arguing that it will “result in a reduction in quality, not an improvement.”
Staffers say they are under pressure to process cases quickly, prioritizing efficiency above all else. Meanwhile, the workforce has shrunk. While the number of field staffers has been decreasing since 2011, Robb exacerbated that trend by offering buyouts and early retirement incentives to eligible employees, according to the NLRB Union. The result, it said, has been a more than 20 percent reduction in staffing since fiscal year 2017—from more than 900 to about 717 full-time equivalents as of June 30. (Egee cited different statistics, stating that the total number of employees has declined less than 4 percent since fiscal year 2018.)
During fiscal year 2019, according to the NLRB’s annual performance report, the processing time from initial filing to judgment for unfair-labor-practice cases fell from 90 to 74 days. Yet the agency’s funding has shrunk by an inflation-adjusted 15 percent since fiscal year 2011, according to the NLRB Union.
A third NLRB field staffer said being asked to work faster with fewer resources feels like an attack on the agency. “If you are trying to [end] the administrative state and you want to get rid of the agencies you like the least—ours is probably one of them—then this is what you do. You really starve the staff, and you decrease morale.”
Some NLRB employees have left the agency on principle, according to another current staff member. “It is really tough when you believe in Section 7 rights and you have to write [a legal rationale] that you believe is eroding them,” the person said, noting that the NLRB was losing both experienced senior staffers and talented younger lawyers. “We’ve had some incredibly bright attorneys hired in the last five or so years who are jumping ship…. They’re still in labor law. They’re still in the fight. But they’re not going to fight from within the board.”
The agency’s two staff unions—the NLRB Union and the NLRB Professional Association, which represents employees at the headquarters—have been waging a modest resistance. They have accused the board of understaffing the agency, refusing to bargain in good faith over the Professional Association’s contract, and letting millions of dollars in the agency’s budget go unspent. (The board has disputed the allegations and attributed the underspending to contracts that were not completed or came in under budget.)
Last November, the unions held a rally at the NLRB’s Washington, D.C., headquarters and passed out leaflets reading, “NLRB Leadership is destroying the agency from within by refusing to spend funds to hire staff.” They even brought Scabby the Rat to stand guard. Industrial unrest: Anti-union vigilantes attack striking workers in Ambridge, Pa. The NLRB was designed to reduce the number of labor actions. (Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
A RANK-AND-FILE STRUGGLE
As Trump’s board whittles away labor rights, unions and workers increasingly see the legal bureaucracy of the NLRB as irrelevant or even antithetical to their efforts.
“A lot of people—the layman, the regular worker [or] union worker…they think that the board is there to protect them,” said Rob Atkinson, a former UPS driver. But under the current administration, “it’s obvious with their decisions that they’re no longer a friend of the working man and woman. They’re now a watchdog for the national Chamber of Commerce and Trump’s buddies.”
UPS fired Atkinson, a longtime Teamsters shop steward in western Pennsylvania, in 2014 for allegedly violating package delivery procedures. He filed two grievances, saying he was fired for his activism in a rank-and-file Teamsters movement, but he got no relief from what he said was a biased internal grievance panel.
Atkinson sought justice with the NLRB, and shortly before Trump took office, a lower-level judge found that his dismissal had been retaliatory, invoking an Obama-era ruling that said the board can override a grievance panel when considering certain violations of the National Labor Relations Act. But last December, the Trump-appointed majority on the board reversed that precedent, deciding that the grievance panel should have had the last word.
“My panel was made up of political enemies and people who wanted me gone,” Atkinson said. But his struggle with his former employer “really opened my eyes and showed me how cold and callous big businesses are and how we really need huge, strong unions and a strong National Labor Relations Board…to hold these companies accountable.”
In a statement, UPS said the board “recognized that an internal dispute resolution process can be relied upon to make fair and regular decisions on claims that might take years to resolve in other forums.”
Atkinson is appealing his case in federal court. His experience turned him into something of an NLRB watchdog; he now runs a Facebook group that tracks cases and educates other workers about what Trump is doing to labor law. “Look what the NLRB is doing to our rights and how they’ve turned into an antagonistic organization to the average working man or woman instead of an organization that’s there to uphold us,” he told me. LABOR BIDEN NEEDS TO TALK ABOUT JOBS ON LABOR DAY. AND EVERY DAY.
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to fresh labor clashes: Meatpacking workers have walked off the job, nurses have protested nationwide demanding more protective gear, and Whole Foods workers have filed suit after being disciplined and fired for wearing Black Lives Matter masks and apparel. Yet the NLRB continues to make it harder for workers to organize.
In July the NLRB Union and other labor groups denounced the board’s safety guidelines for resuming in-person union elections as inadequate and advocated a move to online or mail-in voting instead. At the same time, the NLRB’s advice division, which provides legal guidance to regional offices, has issued memorandums that seem to give employers the green light to act unilaterally in response to the pandemic. One advisory suggests that an employer can refuse to bargain with a union over requests for pandemic-related “paid sick leave and hazard pay.” The NLRB also indicated that a person can be fired after speaking out against a company’s Covid-19 safety protocols.
Sharon Block, the director of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and an NLRB member under Obama, said that during the pandemic, it was “incumbent on worker protection agencies like the [NLRB]…to be exceptionally vigilant on behalf of workers and attuned to violations of their rights, because it is so hard to feel secure enough to speak out. [But] this is a board that we watched operate for three years in a way that would not give that kind of security to workers.”
Nonetheless, she added, the systemic problems with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act go beyond the Trump administration. “Even with board members…and a general counsel with the best of intentions who really believe in the spirit and the purpose of the act, it’s just a tool that doesn’t work anymore.”
The Labor and Worklife Program wants to overhaul labor law and extend protections to domestic and undocumented workers. It also advocates for sectoral bargaining, which would enable workers in an industry to negotiate en masse.
In the more immediate term, Democratic lawmakers are pushing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would expand the rights of workers to strike and organize at work, institute meaningful penalties for bosses who violate labor law, and allow workers to sue employers in civil courts rather than be forced to rely solely on lengthy litigation at the NLRB.
Despite its limitations, workers continue to use Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, often to ward off campaigns to suppress organizing. Since April, Amazon workers belonging to the grassroots group Amazonians United in Chicago filed several unfair-labor-practice charges with the NLRB, alleging that they were unfairly disciplined by the company after staging walkouts and slowdowns to demand better health protections. Amazonians United member Ted Miin said he and his coworkers were reprimanded for allegedly violating social distancing guidelines at work, which he sees as retaliatory selective enforcement. (Amazon did not return a request for comment.)
Concerned that it might not be worth the effort, Miin was wary of filing a charge. But when the official probe began, the atmosphere at work changed. “Management has basically loosened up on us a lot at our warehouse since we’ve had active NLRB cases open,” he said.
Miin knows his charges may lead to nothing. He acknowledged that “the Trump administration has been rewriting the NLRB rules to favor bosses over workers.” But whatever form their resistance takes, he added, “as workers, we have to protect ourselves. No one’s coming to save us…not the NLRB, not politicians, not reporters. As workers, we have to get organized ourselves.”
