Alberta solar projects raise tensions over agricultural land use



EMMA GRANEY

ENERGY REPORTER
TABER, ALBERTA
 AUGUST 2, 2021

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Solar panels face toward the direction of the sun at the Prairie Sunlight II Solar Project (Hull Project) solar facility on July 30, 2021, near Vauxhall, Alberta.
IAN MARTENS/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Rumbling along the gravel of a southern Alberta range road, there are plenty of cows, pump jacks and fields that are typical in this part of the world. Then, next to a field of sugar beets, emerges a sight that is rapidly changing the landscape of the province’s energy industry: acres and acres of solar panels.

Welcome to Alberta’s sun belt, where long days of sunshine, relatively little snow and a power market unique in Canada have stoked a surge in solar investment as the province’s energy industry evolves rapidly.

A decade ago, Alberta’s list of major private and public projects valued at $5-million or more included no solar projects. Now, there are 23. Of the 87 major energy projects listed in the most recent data, 27 were oil and gas, but more than 40 were either solar, wind or biofuels.

Developers credit three main factors for the explosion of solar farms: An abundance of sun, a rapid and dramatic drop in the cost of solar technology, and Alberta’s power market structure, which makes it easy for companies to sign renewable power purchase agreements, thus helping them with their corporate emissions-reduction goals.

Construction begins on new Alberta solar farm, Amazon to purchase power

But as municipalities eye the tax revenue solar farms will generate, the projects – which can span hundreds or thousands of acres – have councils walking a delicate line between welcoming a lucrative new industry and preserving valuable agricultural land.

Stung by oil companies that have failed to pay the millions they owe in property taxes or clean up inactive wells, municipalities want the provincial government to ensure landowners don’t end up on the hook for cleaning up renewable power projects in future.

Many advocate for some kind of system of reclamation bonds. Come Sept. 1, the Alberta Utilities Commission will require companies to ensure sufficient funds are available at the end of a project’s life to cover the cost of cleanup, though the government was unable to provide The Globe with details of how that system will work.

Most forecasts say fossil fuels won’t disappear any time soon, but energy diversification shows no signs of slowing down. Wind turbines have been scattered across the province for years, now government data shows just how quickly large solar farms are taking root.

The first detailed solar proposal on the province’s major projects list popped up in 2015: the Brooks 1 project, a 17-megawatt facility slated for 74 acres of southeastern Alberta’s Newell County.

With 50,000 panels rising from the prairie by the Trans-Canada Highway, it was the first utility-scale solar project in Western Canada when it came online in 2017. Last year, Vancouver-based developer Elemental Energy Inc. got the okay to add another 28 MW of capacity.

Even with that expansion, Brooks will soon be dwarfed by a colossal new project under construction near the hamlet of Travers, about 80 kilometres southwest.

Spanning 3,330 acres in Vulcan County, the 465 MW facility will be the biggest solar photovoltaic project in Canada and one of the largest in the world, according to developer Greengate Power Corp. Amazon.com has already signed a deal to buy up to 400 MW of electricity from the site to help offset the online giant’s carbon footprint.

When the Travers project is complete, 1.3 million solar panels will generate enough electricity to power more than 100,000 homes.

It’s located on what Vulcan Reeve Jason Schneider describes as marginal, lower-producing land. But the municipality, like others, wrestles with how to preserve higher-class agricultural acres while also increasing tax revenue with new renewables projects.

West in the Municipal District of Willow Creek, Reeve Maryanne Sandberg calls the quandary a “double-edged sword.” On one hand, she says, is protecting land and farming culture. On the other is protecting the rights of property owners to use their land as they wish.

“Especially right now, when you look at what we’re going through as agricultural producers in a really rough year, it looks even more appealing to some people,” she says.

For now, the Travers site is an unremarkable stretch of farmland.

But it’s coming along. A handful of rectangular trailers squat behind a chain-link fence. PCL Construction pickup trucks drive along a gravel road that is now closed to traffic and lined with orange warning signs.

In the distance, the 166 wind turbines of the 300 MW Blackspring Ridge project are lifeless on this hot, still day.

One of the largest operating wind farms in Canada, it has already changed Vulcan’s fiscal picture, and Mr. Schneider thinks it’s a sign of things to come. He remembers when Blackspring Ridge came online in 2014. Back then, oil and gas was still going strong, so the additional tax revenue from the wind project “was just gravy.”

But as fossil fuel companies walked away, renewable energy developers started showing up – and the county has been receptive.

“Without these projects coming in, I’d hate to guess what our taxes would be. I’m pretty sure there would be pitchforks on our front step,” he says. “These renewable projects are really what’s going to keep us afloat.”

Blackspring Ridge constitutes around 20 per cent of the county’s tax base, and Mr. Schneider suspects the Travers solar project will rake in a similar amount. That means about 40 per cent of Vulcan’s taxes will flow from a wind farm and a solar farm.

“It’s not unrealistic to think that in the next five years, over half of our tax base will be renewable energy, and could almost dwarf what we made from oil and gas in our peak,” he says.

Two solar projects are currently under construction in the district, two are seeking provincial approval, and council is in discussions about three more.

It’s a similar story to the southeast, in the Municipal District of Taber, where two projects are in operation, and four are either approved, under construction or about to start building. There are rumours of more developers in the wings, too.

The municipality has also approved more than a dozen smaller projects for agricultural purposes such as powering irrigation pumps or buildings, and just okayed two applications for the RenuWell pilot project, which will transform old oil and gas well sites into 1 MW solar installations.

One of those is on the corner of Molnar’s Farm, which grows vegetables and holds an annual pumpkin festival. Purple-flowered alfalfa carpets an empty section of land, but it belies the fact the soil was never properly cleaned of hydrocarbons from an oil well that ceased operations decades ago.

Power lines that run alongside the field once brought electricity to a pump jack on the site. Under the RenuWell pilot, they will carry solar power back to the grid.

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A decade ago, Alberta’s list of major private and public projects valued at $5-million or more included no solar projects. Now, there are 23.
IAN MARTENS/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Rural Municipalities of Alberta president Paul McLauchlin says solar development has many councils writing bylaws to govern the projects. Taber is no different. It has also instituted a reclamation bond system for projects on municipality-owned land, so it doesn’t get stuck holding the bill for eventual cleanup.

But there’s no requirement for bonds on private land, which is why municipalities are pushing the province to learn its lesson from the growing problem of orphaned oil and gas wells, and institute rules now to avoid a similar problem with renewable power facilities.

Strolling through his company’s 20 MW Burdett Solar Project, about 45 km east of Taber, BluEarth Renewables Inc. president and CEO Grant Arnold says his company and others take reclamation seriously, writing it into contracts with landowners.

The eventual cleanup of renewable sites is also nothing like oil and gas, he says. Unlike fossil fuel wells that eventually deplete, eliminating any incentive to stick around, the solar resource isn’t going anywhere. Parts will be replaced and technology upgraded, but, in theory, a solar farm can remain in operation forever.

“I think we’re pretty blessed in Alberta to have another couple of resources,” he says. “There’s jobs, there’s construction and there’s support for local communities while oil and gas is going through a transition.”

GREENWASHING

Mining industry’s ‘green metals’ are a fallacy, experts say
AS IS SUSTAINABLE MINING


NIALL MCGEE

MINING REPORTER

UPDATED AUGUST 1, 2021
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The green theme is being driven by the rage for environmentally and socially responsible investments, which experts say has put pressure on miners to improve their environmental footprints.

CAROLINE THIRION/GETTY IMAGES

The mining industry is promoting a growing number of metals as green. The label is popping up everywhere: on the landing pages of company websites, in speeches from mining executives at conferences, and in pitch meetings with investors.

“Every nickel project is now green, every copper project is green,” said Doug Pollitt, analyst with Pollitt & Co. “The resource sector is making the most out of this.”

The green moniker, which implies the metals and mining methods are environmentally friendly, is generating fierce debate. Some call it appropriate, given the growing end use of minerals such as lithium, cobalt and graphite in alternative energy. Others, factoring in the full life cycle of metals from the ground to the customer, deem the framing deceptive and misleading.

“A lot of marketing fluff,” is what Mr. Pollitt calls it.

The green theme is being driven by the rage for environmentally and socially responsible investments, which experts say has put pressure on miners to improve their environmental footprints.

“Like every other industry, mining has to paint itself in an ESG cloth right now,” said Rick Rule, former CEO of Sprott U.S. Holdings, and a natural-resources investor. “ESG is part of the cost of capital.”

One of the earliest mentions of green metals came from mining executive Robert Friedland, founder of copper miner Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. In 2004, he referred to platinum, copper and nickel as green because of their growing use in hybrid cars.

He currently uses the term to promote his latest big-ticket venture, Ivanhoe’s newly constructed Kamoa-Kakula copper mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which he has said is one of the greenest in the industry, in part because Kamoa-Kakula’s electricity is sourced from clean hydro power.

Ivanhoe has also pledged to use an electric or hydrogen-powered mining fleet to further cut on-site emissions. Mr. Friedland declined to be interviewed for this story.

Teck Resources Ltd. , which gets the biggest percentage of its revenue from mining metallurgical coal, is also marketing itself more and more as a green miner. That’s partly because of Teck’s growing exposure to copper, which is increasingly used in alterative energy.


“This strategy is anchored by our QB2 copper project in Chile, which is expected to double our consolidated copper production by 2023,” Teck spokesperson Chris Stannell wrote in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail.

But once the copper industry’s emissions from mining, refining and transporting the metal are factored in, the green label becomes more tenuous.

Samuel Julio Friedmann, senior research scholar at the centre on global energy policy at Columbia University, who wrote energy briefs for former U.S. president Barack Obama, said that referring to an industrial metal such as copper as green is problematic. That’s not only because of the damaging environmental effects of mining, but also because only a small part of demand for copper ends up in alternative-energy uses.

According to a 2020 World Bank report, a mere 7 per cent of the overall demand for copper will go into renewable energy technologies and energy storage by 2050.

“Calling copper green, if it doesn’t have a net-zero carbon footprint, or a really reduced carbon footprint, it’s very hard to make the case,” Dr. Friedmann said.

In fact, many metals that are being characterized as green, such as nickel, could as easily be called “dirty,” he said.


The World Bank study said that many of the growing green-power technologies, such as wind, solar and battery-storage plants, require significantly more minerals than fossil-fuel-powered plants during their construction phases. That means much more CO2 is emitted at the beginning of a green-power plant’s life cycle. The good news is that once alternative-energy power plants are actually in operation, their drastically lower carbon emissions, compared with coal or gas, quickly turn the tide.

“Even if low-carbon technologies are more mineral intensive, they only account for a fraction (6 per cent) of emissions generated by fossil-fuel technologies,” the World Bank report said.

Electric cars, too, are not nearly as green as one might assume. For instance, according to a recent report from the investment bank Jefferies Group, the average electric car must be driven for 200,000 kilometres to deliver total “whole-of-life” emissions that are lower than internal-combustion-powered cars. That’s because EVs are typically heavier than gas-powered cars, requiring greater amounts of steel, aluminum and copper, and also vast amounts of lithium for their batteries.

Metals that have the most widespread green-energy applications include cobalt, lithium and graphite, with demand projected to rise by more than 460 per cent, 490 per cent and 495 per cent, respectively, by 2050. However, the countries that dominate the production of metals used in low-carbon energy also have some of the worst environmental records.

China produces nearly 70 per cent of the world’s natural graphite, while the DRC produces more than 60 per cent of the world’s cobalt. It wasn’t that long ago that parts of the DRC had no environmental standards on dust and diesel emissions at all, said Mr. Rule. The West African country also has hundreds of thousands of artisanal miners, many operating illegally with no environmental oversight.

While standards have improved considerably in recent years in the DRC – and Mr. Rule points in particular to Ivanhoe Mines, whose new copper mine in the country was built to Western standards – a lot more needs to be done.

“You will still have mining operations in frontier emerging and totalitarian countries which don’t meet anywhere close to acceptable standards,” he said.

Globally the mining industry is making considerable strides to improve its environmental footprint, often because investors are demanding it. Thermal-coal companies have for some people become no-go investments, and companies are worried that more minerals may join the black list.

“The pressure’s on them, and the pressure’s coming from the investment community,” Mr. Pollitt said.

Largely by dint of abundant hydroelectricity, Canada is ahead of many countries when it comes to a greener mining infrastructure. “The nickel and cobalt that we export to the world is in the top decile when it comes to lowest greenhouse-gas intensity,” said Pierre Gratton, CEO of the Mining Association of Canada.

“If you buy our nickel, it’s greener than 90 per cent of the rest of the world’s nickel from a carbon standpoint because it’s processed in facilities that are powered by non-greenhouse-gas-emitting power stations in Ontario and Quebec largely.” The same is true for Quebec’s aluminum industry and some of British Columbia’s copper mines.

Still, Canada has its black spots. A number of the country’s biggest base-metals mines, including Voisey’s Bay in Labrador and Raglan in northern Quebec, are largely dependent on diesel generators for power. Mr. Gratton is hopeful that industry and government can work together to build new hydro infrastructure that may eventually connect such mines to the grid.

Meantime, on mine sites, electric hauling trucks are expected to become more prevalent in the future, especially underground, said Mr. Gratton, which will further cut emissions.

No matter what progress is made, a degree of negative environmental impact is inevitable in mining. But for those who protest the loudest at the damage inflicted by the industry, Dr. Friedmann said they would do well to take a look in the mirror.

“It’s silly for companies to try to rebrand themselves as green when most of their products and operations are hard to classify that way,” he said.

“But I think it’s equally silly for some environmental groups to paint these people as demons, when [environmentalists] are driving in these electrical vehicles that are built on their products. There’s no shortage of hypocrisy and silliness in this discussion.”

Jihadists flood pro-Trump social network with propaganda

GETTR, the new platform started by members of the former president’s inner circle, is awash with beheading videos and extremist content.


The proliferation of terrorist propaganda on GETTR underscores the challenges facing former President Donald Trump and his followers in the wake of his ban from the mainstream social media platforms. | Jenny Kane/AP Photo


By MARK SCOTT and TINA NGUYEN

08/02/2021 04:30 AM EDT

Updated: 08/02/2021 04:42 PM EDT

Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a POLITICO review of online activity on the fledgling platform.

The social network — started a month ago by members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle — features reams of jihadi-related material, including graphic videos of beheadings, viral memes that promote violence against the West and even memes of a militant executing Trump in an orange jumpsuit similar to those used in Guantanamo Bay.


The rapid proliferation of such material is placing GETTR in the awkward position of providing a safe haven for jihadi extremists online as it attempts to establish itself as a free speech MAGA-alternative to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

It underscores the challenges facing Trump and his followers in the wake of his ban from the mainstream social media platforms following the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots.

Islamic State “has been very quick to exploit GETTR,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism, who first discovered the jihadi accounts and shared his findings with POLITICO.

“On Facebook, there was on one of these accounts that I follow that is known to be Islamic State, which said ‘Oh, Trump announced his new platform. Inshallah, all the mujahideen will exploit that platform,’” he added. “The next day, there were at least 15 accounts on GETTR that were Islamic State.”

While GETTR does not provide access to its data to track the spread, or virality, of such extremist material on its platform, POLITICO found at least 250 accounts that had posted regularly on the platform since early July. Many followed each other, and used hashtags to promote the jihadi material to this burgeoning online community.

In the months since he was kicked off Twitter and suspended from Facebook, Trump has sought alternative ways to engage with his base online. While his supporters decamped to other online venues — including the social network Parler, where they could express themselves without facing increased scrutiny — Trump’s own effort to create an internet bullhorn has stalled.

In May, he launched a blog — titled “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump” — but it was taken down just weeks later amid widespread ridicule and poor readership.

So far, GETTR has been the highest-profile pro-Trump platform launch, given the names behind it: Jason Miller, former Trump spokesperson, is its chief executive, and the site is partially funded by Miles Guo, the business partner of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Trump, himself, is not directly involved in the operation, nor has he officially signed up to the platform. The social network has touted a “free speech” policy that, purportedly, would allow users to fully express themselves without the censorship of tech giants.

The newest MAGA app is tied to a Bannon-allied Chinese billionaire
BY TINA NGUYEN

Yet this MAGA exodus to fringe social networks that champion unfettered speech has also caught the attention of supporters of Islamic State and other jihadist groups, according to extremism experts.

In response to questions about jihadi material being shared on GETTR, Miller told POLITICO that ISIS was attacking the MAGA movement because Trump had destroyed the group militarily. “The only ISIS members still alive are keyboard warriors hiding in caves and eating dirt cookies,” he said in a text message.

These terrorist communities have similarly faced widespread removals from the largest social networks, which have often promoted their clampdown on Islamic extremists as an example of how the tech companies are policing their global platforms for harmful content.

In response, Islamic State supporters have quickly shifted gears, looking for new spaces online where they can spread their hateful material, as well as piggybacking on tactics and platforms first used in the United States.

“Is Daesh here?” asked an account whose profile photo was of the Islamic State flag account, using the Arabic acronym for jihadi movement. The replies were in the affirmative, with some praising the social network for its willingness to host such content.

Days after GETTR was launched on July 1, Islamic State supporters began urging their followers on other social networks to sign up to the pro-Trump network, in part to take the jihadi fight directly to MAGA nation.

“If this app reaches the expected success, which is mostly probable, it should be adopted by followers and occupied in order to regain the glory of Twitter, may God prevail,” one Islamic State account on Facebook wrote on July 6.

Some of the jihadi posts on GETTR from early July were eventually taken down, highlighting that the pro-Trump platform had taken at least some steps to remove the harmful material.

Larger platforms like Facebook and Twitter now work via the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, an industry-funded nonprofit which shares terrorist content between companies — via a database of extremist material accessible to its members — so that the material can be taken down as quickly as possible.

GETTR has yet to sign up.

In the platform’s terms of service, it outlines how offensive or illegal content, including that related to terrorism, may be removed from GETTR. “This may include content identified as personal bullying, sexual abuse of a child, attacking any religion or race, or content containing video or depictions of beheading,” a clause reads.

Though the site has had notoriously spotty luck in moderating users on the platform — in its early days, it was flooded with a wide spectrum of pornography — Miller has drawn the line at doxxing, or sharing other people’s addresses, or advocating physical harm.

In interviews, GETTR’s chief executive has touted the site’s content moderation policy, primarily based on a combination of human monitoring and algorithms.

Four days after POLITICO submitted several requests for comment to GETTR, many of these accounts and videos are still up.

The overall amount of terrorist propaganda that POLITICO found on GETTR represented a mere fraction of the mostly right-wing content — which also includes the promotion of the Proud Boys white supremacist movement. More mainstream conservative influencers and policymakers like Sean Hannity and Mike Pompeo also regularly post on the platform.

Still, the fact that such jihadi material was readily available on the social network, and GETTR’s failure to clamp down on such extremism, underlined the difficulties that the company faces in balancing its free speech ethos with growing demands to stop terrorist-related material from finding an audience online.

“The content we’re coming across on small platforms is basically similar to the content that is being automatically removed from Facebook and Twitter,” said Adam Hadley, director of Tech Against Terrorism, a nonprofit organization that works with smaller social networks, but not GETTR, in combating the rise of extremist content online.

“Many of the smaller platforms do not have the resources to automatically remove this type of content,” he added. His organization’s membership includes Tumblr and Wordpress, the blogging platform.

Extremism analysts who reviewed POLITICO’s findings said that Islamic State supporters’ use of GETTR appeared to be an initial test to see if their content would escape detection or be subject to content moderation.

In their ongoing cat-and-mouse fight with Western national security agencies and Silicon Valley platforms, jihadi groups are quickly evolving their tactics to stay one step ahead of online removals.

“The terrorist organizations are always experimenting, because they're fighting a real battle to continue to have access to public spaces to spread their propaganda,” said Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab and the author of “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.”

So far, Islamic State supporters are enjoying their incursion into GETTR and the possible new audience they could reach. “We will come at you with slaying and explosions you worshippers of the cross,” wrote an account whose name referenced the extremist group, adding: “How great is freedom of expression.”

Rym Momtaz contributed to this report from Paris.

 

Decline in CO2 cooled Earth's climate more than 30 million years ago

by University of Bristol

Tree stomp in lignite deposits. Credit: Vittoria Lauretano

New research led by the University of Bristol demonstrates that a decline in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 played a major role in driving Earth's climate from a warm greenhouse into a cold icehouse world around 34 million years ago. This transition could be partly reversed in the next centuries due to the anthropogenic rise in CO2.

Between 40 and 34 million years ago, Earth's climate underwent a major climatic transition. Before 40 million years ago, during the Eocene, Antarctica was covered by lush forests, but by 34 million years ago, in the Oligocene, these forests had been replaced by thick continental ice sheets, as we know Antarctica today. The main driver of this greenhouse to icehouse transition is widely debated, and little information is available about how climate changed on land. An international team led by Dr. Vittoria Lauretano and Dr. David Naafs at the University of Bristol used molecular fossils preserved in ancient coals to reconstruct land temperature across this transition.

The team used a new approach based on the distribution of bacterial lipids preserved in ancient wetland deposits. It was developed as part of the ERC-funded project, The Greenhouse Earth System (TGRES), which also funded this study. The TGRES PI and paper co-author Rich Pancost, from the University's School of Chemistry, explained: 'These compounds originally comprised the cell membranes of bacteria living in ancient wetlands, with their structures changing slightly to help the bacteria adapt to changing temperature and acidity. Those compounds can then be preserved for tens of millions of years, allowing us to reconstruct those ancient environmental conditions.'

Lignite mine in South East Australia. Credit: Vittoria Lauretano

To reconstruct temperature change across the greenhouse to icehouse transition, the team applied their new approach to coal deposits from the southeast Australian Gippsland Basin. These remarkable deposits span over 10 million years of Earth history and have been extensively characterized by collaborators on the study from the University of Melbourne, Dr. Vera Korasidis and Prof. Malcolm Wallace.

The new data show that land temperatures cooled alongside the ocean's and by a similar magnitude of about 3C. To explore causes of that temperature decline, the team conducted climate model simulations, Crucially, only simulations that included a decline in atmospheric CO2 could reproduce a cooling consistent with the temperature data reconstructed from the coals.

These results provide further evidence that atmospheric CO2 plays a crucial role in driving Earth's climate, including the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet.

"Eocene to Oligocene terrestrial Southern Hemisphere cooling caused by declining pCO2" is published in Nature Geoscience.

Throwing a warm sheet over our understanding of ice and climate

---

More information: Eocene to Oligocene terrestrial Southern Hemisphere cooling caused by declining pCO2, Nature Geoscience (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00788-z , www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00788-z

Journal information: Nature Geoscience 

Provided by University of Bristol 

FIDE CHESS WORLD CUP

Alexandra Kosteniuk triumphs in Women’s World Cup

by Carlos Alberto Colodro

8/2/2021 – A draw with white was enough for Alexandra Kosteniuk to claim victory at the first edition of the Women’s World Cup in Sochi. Aleksandra Goryachkina could not create imbalances in her must-win game and ended up agreeing to a draw in a lost position. In the match for third place, Tan Zhongyi and Anna Muzychuk drew again and will decide their match in tiebreaks. Meanwhile, in the open section, Sergey Karjakin moved on to the final, where he will face either Magnus Carlsen or Jan-Krzysztof Duda, who will return to the playing hall on Tuesday to face off in rapid and blitz tiebreakers. | Photo: Anastasiia Korolkova



A fantastic performance

Alexandra Kosteniuk’s showing at the first edition of the Women’s World Cup was nothing short of dazzling. A fixture in the elite women’s circuit for over 20 years, the Russian won the knockout event without ever needing to play a single rapid tiebreaker. In fact, she scored 10/12 points on her way to a memorable triumph — knocking out Deysi Cori, Pia Cramling, Mariya Muzychuk, Valentina Gunina and Tan Zhongyi before defeating top seed Aleksandra Goryachkina in the final.

After 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 g6! leads to the so-called "Accelerated Dragon Defense". On this DVD the Russian grandmaster and top women player Nadezhda Kosintseva reveals the secrets of her favourite opening.

Twenty years ago, a 17-year-old Kosteniuk reached the final of the 2001 Women’s World Chess Championship — a 64-player knockout event — where she lost to Zhu Chen in a drawless 8-game match. Seven years later, in 2008, she defeated Chinese prodigy Hou Yifan in the final of a similar event to become the women’s world champion, a title she kept until 2010. Now, at 37, she defeated the latest challenger to the world crown to get a spot in the Candidates Tournament, where she will fight against 7 highly motivated opponents to get the right to challenge Ju Wenjun in a match for the Women’s World Championship.

Kosteniuk’s stellar performance gained her a stunning 42.8 rating points, which prompted her to climb 10 spots in the women’s world ranking. Simply an extraordinary achievement!



The woman of the hour — Alexandra Kosteniuk | Photo: Eric Rosen

Twice was the tournament’s champion in real danger of losing throughout the event — in her game with white against Gunina, and in Sunday’s first encounter of the final against Goryachkina. Remarkably, she came back from behind to score full points on both occasions!

Only needing a draw with white on Monday, the experienced grandmaster kept things under control against her younger compatriot. In desperate need of a win, Goryachkina tried to keep the game going in an opposite-coloured bishop endgame, only to soon find herself in a lost position:

Kosteniuk vs. Goryachkina - Game 2

As endgame specialist Karsten Müller points out in his annotations below, entering a race with 42...Bc7 is too risky for Black, while 42...Bxh2 would have led to a draw. Of course, Goryachkina had no option and looked for a last chance to provoke a mistake by her opponent.

Not long after, White had a completely winning position, but the compatriots nonetheless sensibly agreed to a draw, which meant Kosteniuk had won the demanding event that started exactly three weeks ago.

Alexandra Kosteniuk triumphs in Women’s World Cup | ChessBase

Braid: Poll shows UCP faces long climb out of persistent unpopularity

Author of the article: Don Braid • Calgary Herald
Publishing date:Jul 31, 2021 • 

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney at a press conference in Calgary. PHOTO BY POSTMEDIA FILE
Article content

Premier Jason Kenney’s United Conservative government remains far behind the NDP in both popularity and cold hard cash.

A new poll for Postmedia from Leger Research shows 39 per cent of Albertans would vote for the New Democrats, and only 29 per cent for the UCP.

Current contribution numbers filed with Elections Alberta are even more startling.

In the first six months of this year, the NDP collected $2.7 million. The UCP brought in $1.2 million

If this trend continues, the NDP will have a stupendous war chest for the election coming in about 20 months.

Leader Rachel Notley’s party raked in nearly as much in the past three months ($1.5 million) as they spent to win the 2015 election ($1.6 million).

The NDP not only has more donations but about twice as many individual donors as the UCP.

Money trouble always makes parties nervous, even when they face virtually no opposition. The late Progressive Conservative premier Don Getty was gently encouraged to step aside in 1992 after fundraising fell off. He did.

The more visible problem for Kenney is weak approval numbers. This has shown up for months in results from several pollsters.

The latest findings from Leger remain bleak for the government.

First, there is widespread general discontent. Fifty-four per cent of Albertans say the province is going in the wrong direction.

The UCP scores behind the NDP in Calgary, Edmonton and the rest of Alberta.

Only in the age group over 65 is the UCP more popular than the NDP (47 per cent to 39 per cent).

The NDP appears to have a lock on most younger Albertans.

For those between 35 and 44, the NDP has 45 per cent approval and the UCP only 18 per cent.

The NDP leads among men, with 38 per cent to 33 per cent. Female voters favour the NDP by 40 per cent to 26 per cent.

Leger executive vice-president Ian Large says “the numbers are bad for the UCP.”

“But I think you’ve seen the low point in UCP support. There are small changes, incremental, but this could essentially be the darkness before the dawn.”

For instance, when only decided and leaning voters are considered, UCP support rises to 34 per cent. This is still well behind the NDP but appears to be trending upward.

Also, 51 per cent of voters say they could change their minds about whom they will support. Some younger voters, although leaning hard toward the NDP right now, are quite open to switching.

Large says, “there is lots of potentially good news on the horizon for the UCP. Oil prices are up, there’s the Trans Mountain pipeline — all that perfect storm for recovery is there.

“There is the potential for the numbers to keep rising. They’re only two years into the mandate, so they have another two years to pull it together.”

But some serious UCP challenges are starting to look entrenched.

“The NDP shouldn’t be leading in Calgary,” Large adds. “It just shouldn’t be happening. The (UCP) problem runs very deep, far beyond just a few people on the right.”

More troubles seem inevitable. Leaks from the Allan commission report on foreign funding of anti-oil campaigns show there has been no wrongdoing — an expensive finding sharply at odds with the premier’s rhetoric on oilpatch opponents.

Also, Leger’s polling was completed before this week’s abrupt shift in pandemic policy. By mid-August, the province will sharply cut testing and even allow people infected with COVID-19 to circulate with others.

“The announcement has created a great deal of confusion and concern,” says Large. “With the new rules, kids don’t have to wear masks, so you have a very big contingent of worried parents who are sending their kids to school.”

If the UCP is to get out of this jam, they have to start soon. The months do fly by.

Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Calgary Herald.

Twitter: @DonBraid

Facebook: Don Braid Politics

Alberta NDP fundraises double the donations of the UCP in first six months of 2021

NDP raises $2.7 million, UCP raises $1.3 million


Janet French · CBC News · Posted: Jul 30, 2021

So far this year, the Alberta NDP, led by Rachel Notley, right, are out-fundraising the governing United Conservative Party, led by Premier Jason Kenney, left. (Mike Symington/CBC)


The Alberta NDP has out-fundraised the governing United Conservative Party for the third consecutive quarter, new figures show.

It's a pattern one political scientist calls "remarkable" for a governing Canadian conservative party.

"These 2021 numbers are staggering," said Mount Royal University Prof. Duane Bratt.

For the first six months of this year, the NDP has pulled in about $2.7 million — more than double the UCP's fundraising of $1.3 million during the same time.

He said it's a noteworthy reversal from 2018, when the NDP was in government and UCP donations were twice as high as their political foes.

Conservative, governing parties tend to lead in fundraising, since many of their supporters are business people, who can afford to donate the maximum amounts allowed, Bratt said.

The governing party's challenges are numerous, Bratt said.

"They've got a problem in caucus," he said. "They're already removed two people. There remains some discontent. They've got a problem with the public, in public opinion polls, and they've got a problem with their donors."

Alberta NDP would likely form majority if election held today, new poll suggests

Alberta MLAs Todd Loewen, Drew Barnes booted from UCP caucus

No one with the UCP responded to phone calls or emails on Thursday afternoon.

Bratt says while some financial support may have migrated to the NDP, many disenchanted voters may just keep their wallets closed, he said.
Unpopular government policies prompt NDP donations

Last year, fundraising by the two parties was on par, with NDP donations surging near the end of 2020. Both parties brought in slightly more than $5 million each.

Although the NDP has had more lucrative quarters during the last four years, the party claimed the latest figures from Elections Alberta as a victory.

"I think that they show that Rachel Notley and the Alberta NDP have momentum and have sustained momentum," provincial secretary Brandon Stevens said. "And I think Albertans are seeing Rachel as a leader who's ready to be premier and who has a positive vision of where this province needs to go coming out of the pandemic."

Patio dinner fallout shows new fractures in UCP caucus, pollster says

Donations are growing on multiple fronts, he said. An unpopular policy or decision by the government will often prompt a rash of one-time, small donations from frustrated members of the public, he said.

Since being booted from government in 2019, the Alberta NDP has more than doubled the amount of money it brings in from monthly donations, he said. They also toned down fundraising efforts during the heights of the pandemic.

Stevens said the party is using the money to hire more staff, conduct research, invest in technological campaign tools, and save for the next provincial election campaign, expected in 2023.

In a distant third place for fundraising during the second quarter of this year is the Pro-Life Alberta Political Association, according to Elections Alberta.

With more than $124,000 in donations so far, the anti-abortion group has out-fundraised the Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta, the Alberta Party and the Alberta Liberals. The pro-life party declared no donations between 2018 and 2020.

Bratt said they are a likely beneficiary of people who feel disenchanted with the UCP.

He said the UCP can catch up on fundraising in the second half of this year, which is likely the goal of provincial tours this summer by the premier and cabinet ministers.

The governing party is aiming to win back support by re-opening the economy and dropping pandemic restrictions faster than any other Canadian jurisdiction, he said.

Bratt says what the public won't know until next year is how much money is flowing to political action committees — third-party political advertisers who can accept corporate and union donations, unlike individual politicians.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Janet French
Janet French is a provincial affairs reporter with CBC Edmonton. She has also worked at the Edmonton Journal and Saskatoon StarPhoenix. You can reach her at janet.french@cbc.ca

Alberta NDP leading in support from voters with 39 per cent compared to 29 per cent for UCP: poll

Author of the article: Ashley Joannou
Publishing date: Jul 31, 2021 • 

Alberta NDP Opposition Leader Rachel Notley met with approximately 100 nurses and supporters who staged a protest rally outside the Sturgeon Community Hospital in St. Albert, Alberta on Monday July 26, 2021. They were protesting staff shortages and bed closures at the hospital.

PHOTO BY LARRY WONG /Postmedia

Lifting COVID-19 restrictions was not enough to give the UCP government much of a bump in voter support as the NDP has kept a significant lead across Alberta, a new poll suggests.

An online Leger poll of 1,377 Albertans conducted July 22-26 for Postmedia found 39 per cent threw their support behind Rachel Notley’s NDP while 29 per cent support Jason Kenney and the UCP if an election were held today. One in seven Albertans said they were undecided.

More than half (54 per cent) of Albertans said they feel the province is headed in the wrong direction, the poll indicates, with only 25 per cent responding that the province is heading in the right direction.

The NDP is leading with voters across the province. The widest gap, unsurprisingly, is the party stronghold of Edmonton at 45 per cent support versus 28 per cent for the UCP.

One of the things that’s different this time around is that Notley is a former premier sitting as leader of the Opposition, said Ian Large, Leger’s executive vice-president. Unlike in almost all previous cases where a party will replace its leader after losing an election, Notley is a known entity to Albertans, he said.

“The devil-you-don’t-know persona can’t be applied to her because we know who she is,” he said in an interview.

The numbers represent a recent trend in the province with the two largest political parties sitting at an unchanged level of support for the last six to nine months, Large said. A March 2021 Leger poll found 40 per cent support for the NDP compared to 20 per cent for the UCP.

The latest poll was done after Alberta became the first Canadian province to drop almost all major pandemic restrictions at the beginning of July.

“(The polling results are) not unexpected. What I had expected was maybe a little more lift for the UCP with the faster reopening and Calgary Stampede and things getting back to normal,” Large said.

It is common for political parties to see low voter support in the middle of their term, Large said, adding that heavy criticism of the government’s COVID-19 response has not helped.

Despite the trend in the polls, the minds of Albertans are far from made up. About half (51 per cent) of the Albertans who are considered decided voters said they may change their mind.

According to the poll, 57 per cent of decided NDP voters said that their choice is final while only 46 per cent of decided UCP voters said they won’t change their minds.

Large said those numbers suggest that while both parties have room to increase support, the NDP has more space to grow since it has more of a base locked in.

He said the openness of voters to change their minds is a change for Alberta, where conservative loyalty is historically strong.

“I think if I asked this question 10 years ago, at exactly this point, I would probably have gotten very few people saying that they’re likely to change their mind,” Large said. “This is an indication that there are two strongly viable parties that could form government.”

Online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population. If the data were collected through a random sample, the margin of error would be plus or minus three per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Hog heaven: China builds pig hotels for better biosecurity

Chinese companies are building high-rise ‘hog hotels’ to prevent outbreaks of swine fever.

An automatic temperature and humidity controller is seen at a pig farm on April 26, 2021 in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, China

 [File: Wang Gang/China News Service/Getty Images]

Bloomberg
2 Aug 2021

China is taking hog biosecurity to new levels — 13 stories in fact.

That’s the height of a building in southern China where more than 10,000 pigs are kept in a condominium-style complex, complete with restricted access, security cameras, in-house veterinary services and carefully prepared meals.
KEEP READINGChina’s ‘No 1 document’: Beijing steps up focus on food securityWorld food prices continue to soar, hitting nearly 7-year highChina court jails billionaire pig farmer for ‘provoking trouble’

The seemingly luxurious conditions represent a state-of-the-art approach to biosecurity in which pigs — the main source of meat in China — are shielded from viruses, including the devastating African swine fever that wiped out half the nation’s hogs in the two years before the coronavirus pandemic emerged.

Nicknamed “hog hotels,” these gigantic vertical farms are being built by companies, including Muyuan Foods and New Hope Group, emulating the strict controls major suppliers in other countries have used to prevent outbreaks of the devastating disease.

China is copying best-practices from Europe and the U.S. to close its biosecurity gap, said Rupert Claxton, the U.K.-based meat director at consultant Gira, who has been providing advice to farmers and businesses for two decades. “In 20 years, it’s done what the Americans took probably 100 years to do,” he said.

Lethal African swine fever, which sickens pigs much like Ebola kills humans, caused a dramatic outbreak in China in 2018. Within a year, roughly half the nation’s herd of more than 400 million pigs had been wiped out — more than the entire annual output of the U.S. and Brazil combined — leading to rocketing prices and unprecedented imports.
Top Priority

Food security became a top priority, and as inflation surged to the highest in eight years, the government had to turn to emergency sources of frozen meat to cool prices. New agriculture policies were instituted to accelerate a shift to large-scale, industrial operations over backyard farms that have traditionally fattened pigs on raw kitchen scraps and swill — the main sources of African swine fever.

Now, domestic hog numbers recovered more swiftly than anticipated because mega farms have expanded capacity so aggressively. Wholesale pork prices have tumbled so much that it tripped the government’s new alert system, prompting authorities to begin buying pork for state reserves and to shore up the market.

Still, the virus threat persists, with 11 incidents reported so far in 2021, prompting the culling of more than 2,000 pigs, China’s farm ministry said in July. The emergence of new strains that appear to cause milder symptoms and have a longer incubation period are complicating efforts to detect and respond to outbreaks, the ministry said.

In developed countries, pig production is dominated by bigger farms in fewer hands. This has been seen for decades in the U.S., Denmark and Netherlands, which have among the best biosecurity standards globally and never reported a single African swine fever outbreak in recent years.


Mega Complexes

These days, mega pig complexes that don’t rely on other farms for sows, fodder and labor — which risk introducing pathogens — are a pillar of China’s food security. As of 2020, 57% of the country’s pig production is from farms supplying more than 500 hogs a year. Before the outbreak, only about 1% came from larger suppliers.

New Hope Group recently completed three five-story buildings across an area the size of 20 football fields, or 140,000 square meters (1.5 million square feet), in Beijing’s eastern Pinggu district. The facility, which can be smelled from about a kilometer away, will eventually produce 120,000 pigs annually, making it the largest in the Beijing area.


It’s equipped with robots that monitor animals for fever, air filtration, and automatic feeding and disinfection systems, according to Gong Jingli, the supervisor in charge. A request to visit was declined on biosecurity grounds.

That’s in part because the scale of these farms means more is at stake. With thousands of pigs housed in close proximity, an infectious disease could spread rapidly.

Strict protocols are enforced to minimize risks. Staff are required to shower and change their clothes on entering and exiting the facility — much like scientists working in biosafety laboratories. Wristwatches must be left outside.

Tom Gillespie, a U.S.-based swine veterinarian with 40 years of experience and who visits farms in Asia annually, said he was asked to remove his wedding band before entering a facility in China, but was allowed to keep his spectacles on. The requirement was a reaction to African swine fever, he said, and may be relaxed once operators are more familiar with managing biosecurity risks.

Some mega farms have built staff dormitories to try to limit workers’ contact with the “outside” — a strategy Gillespie said would be difficult to implement in other countries.


So far, large-scale farms in China have also avoided many of the restrictions applied to their overseas counterparts because of animal welfare and environmental concerns.

“In Europe and U.S., there are restrictions on how big we can make a pig farm because people just object — they don’t want to live next to these huge sites,” said Gira’s Claxton. “In China, that doesn’t seem to be the case. If it’s decided that a pig farm is needed, then the space is available.”
Popular Option

Expanding vertically is a popular option in a country lacking vast tracks of empty space. Rapid urbanization has diminished land available for agriculture, and environmental regulations have made intensive animal production increasingly difficult in metropolitan areas.

High-rise blocks can cut farmland use by a third compared with traditional farms with the same number of pigs, and there’s flexibility in terms of location as some can be built on mountains, said New Hope’s Gong. Wastewater from the Pinggu plant is treated and used to irrigate orchards nearby, while the solid waste is turned into fertilizer, Gong said.

Muyuan Foods, China’s largest hog breeder, said it has land available to support 100 million hogs. Jiangxi Zhengbang Technology, the second-biggest, has said its herd may eventually reach a similar size.

The rise of large hog farms also reflects shifting diets in China. Whereas Beijing focused on fighting hunger and eliminating poverty in past decades, rapid economic development and expanding incomes mean China’s 1.4 billion people are eating more meat, eggs and other animal proteins. That’s driving more-intensive animal production.


“China is the world’s largest pork-consuming nation, and I don’t see that changing very easily or any time soon,” said David Ortega, associate professor of Food and Agricultural Economics at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “Rebuilding the pork sector is a national priority for the government.”

Swiss Epidemiologist Says No Evidence of COVID-19 Laboratory Leak
By Sputnik

Published: Aug 01, 2021 


Photo: AP
There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, could be a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, and such accusations against Beijing are political in nature, Didier Pittet, lead infectious diseases expert at Geneva University Hospitals and inventor of the hand sanitizer, told Sputnik in an interview.

"We really have no evidence that this or any other virus were created in a laboratory. The topic has been discussed a lot. Especially since it happened in China. But people often forget that the first destructive bacteria to escape from a laboratory did so in the US," he said, noting that though it is theoretically possible even in high-security facilities, there is no reason to assume it happened with COVID-19.

According to the expert, the question of whether there could be a leak of a dangerous virus from the laboratory in Wuhan due to incompetence or insufficient level of security "is more political in nature."

In March, the WHO issued the first report of its fact-finding mission to China, which came to the conclusion that the possibility of the virus having leaked from a state laboratory in Wuhan was very low. The experts said that there was a high possibility that the virus was transmitted to humans from bats through another animal.

However, in May, US President Joe Biden ordered the US intelligence community to reexamine the origins of the coronavirus and determine whether the disease leaked from a lab or spread from an infected animal to a human.

China has denied claims of a lab leak and urged the US and its allies to stop politicizing the issue. Beijing has also affirmed its commitment to finding the truth behind the origins of the virus with global partners based on a scientific approach.