A Century of Tragedy: How the Car and Gas Industry Knew About the Health Risks of Leaded Fuel But Sold it for 100 Years Anyway

BY BILL KOVARIK

 DECEMBER 10, 2021
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

On the frosty morning of Dec. 9, 1921, in Dayton, Ohio, researchers at a General Motors lab poured a new fuel blend into one of their test engines. Immediately, the engine began running more quietly and putting out more power.

The new fuel was tetraethyl lead. With vast profits in sight – and very few public health regulations at the time – General Motors Co. rushed gasoline diluted with tetraethyl lead to market despite the known health risks of lead. They named it “Ethyl” gas.

It has been 100 years since that pivotal day in the development of leaded gasoline. As a historian of media and the environment, I see this anniversary as a time to reflect on the role of public health advocates and environmental journalists in preventing profit-driven tragedy.

Scientists working for General Motors discovered that tetraethyl lead could greatly improve the efficiency and longevity of engines in the 1920s. Courtesy of General Motors Institute.

Lead and death

By the early 1920s, the hazards of lead were well known – even Charles Dickens and Benjamin Franklin had written about the dangers of lead poisoning.

When GM began selling leaded gasoline, public health experts questioned its decision. One called lead a serious menace to public health, and another called concentrated tetraethyl lead a “malicious and creeping” poison.

General Motors and Standard Oil waved the warnings aside until disaster struck in October 1924. Two dozen workers at a refinery in Bayway, New Jersey, came down with severe lead poisoning from a poorly designed GM process. At first they became disoriented, then burst into insane fury and collapsed into hysterical laughter. Many had to be wrestled into straitjackets. Six died, and the rest were hospitalized. Around the same time, 11 more workers died and several dozen more were disabled at similar GM and DuPont plants across the U.S.

The news media began to criticize Standard Oil and raise concerns over Ethyl gas with articles and cartoons. New York Evening Journal via The Library of Congress.

Fighting the media

The auto and gas industries’ attitude toward the media was hostile from the beginning. At Standard Oil’s first press conference about the 1924 Ethyl disaster, a spokesman claimed he had no idea what had happened while advising the media that “Nothing ought to be said about this matter in the public interest.”

More facts emerged in the months after the event, and by the spring of 1925, in-depth newspaper coverage started to appear, framing the issue as public health versus industrial progress. A New York World article asked Yale University gas warfare expert Yandell Henderson and GM’s tetraethyl lead researcher Thomas Midgley whether leaded gasoline would poison people. Midgley joked about public health concerns and falsely insisted that leaded gasoline was the only way to raise fuel power. To demonstrate the negative impacts of leaded fuel, Henderson estimated that 30 tons of lead would fall in a dusty rain on New York’s Fifth Avenue every year.

Industry officials were outraged over the coverage. A GM public relations history from 1948 called the New York World’s coverage “a campaign of publicity against the public sale of gasoline containing the company’s antiknock compound.” GM also claimed that the media labeled leaded gas “loony gas” when, in fact, it was the workers themselves who named it as such.

Leaded gas was marketed as Ethyl, a joint brand of Standard Oil and General Motors. John Margolies/Library of Congress.

Attempts at regulation

In May 1925, the U.S. Public Health Service asked GM, Standard Oil and public health scientists to attend an open hearing on leaded gasoline in Washington. The issue, according to GM and Standard, involved refinery safety, not public health. Frank Howard of Standard Oil argued that tetraethyl lead was diluted at over 1,000 to 1 in gasoline and therefore posed no risk to the average person.

Public health scientists challenged the need for leaded gasoline. Alice Hamilton, a physician at Harvard, said, “There are thousands of things better than lead to put in gasoline.” And she was right. There were plenty of well-known alternatives at the time, and some were even patented by GM. But no one in the press knew how to find that information, and the Public Health Service, under pressure from the auto and oil industries, canceled a second day of public hearings that would have discussed safer gasoline additives like ethanol, iron carbonyl and catalytic reforming.

By 1926, the Public Health Service announced that they had “no good reason” to prohibit leaded gasoline, even though internal memos complained that their research was “half baked.”

As leaded gasoline fell out of use, lead levels in people’s blood fell as well. U.S. EPA.

The rise and fall of leaded gasoline

Leaded gasoline went on to dominate fuel markets worldwide. Researchers have estimated that decades of burning leaded gasoline caused millions of premature deaths, enormous declines in IQ levels and many other associated social problems.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the public health case against leaded gasoline reemerged. A California Institute of Technology geochemist, Clair Cameron Patterson, was finding it difficult to measure lead isotopes in his laboratory because lead from gasoline was everywhere and his samples were constantly being contaminated. Patterson created the first “clean room” to carry on his isotope work, but he also published a 1965 paper, “Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man,” and said that “the average resident of the U.S. is being subjected to severe chronic lead insult.”

In parallel, by the 1970s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decided that leaded gasoline had to be phased out eventually because it clogged catalytic converters on cars and led to more air pollution. Leaded gasoline manufacturers objected, but the objections were overruled by an appeals court.

The public health concerns continued to build in the 1970s and 1980s when University of Pittsburgh pediatrician Herbert Needleman ran studies linking high levels of lead in children with low IQ and other developmental problems. Both Patterson and Needleman faced strong partisan attacks from the lead industry, which claimed that their research was fraudulent.

Both were eventually vindicated when, in 1996, the U.S. officially banned the sale of leaded gasoline for public health reasons. Europe was next in the 2000s, followed by developing nations after that. In August 2021, the last country in the world to sell leaded gas, Algeria, banned it.

A century of leaded gasoline has taken millions of lives and to this day leaves the soil in many cities from New Orleans to London toxic.

The leaded gasoline story provides a practical example of how industry’s profit-driven decisions – when unsuccessfully challenged and regulated – can cause serious and long-term harm. It takes individual public health leaders and strong media coverage of health and environmental issues to counter these risks.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bill Kovarik is a Professor of Communication at Radford University.

The U.S. Military Poisons the People of Hawaiʻi

BY YOKO LIRIANO SEIJI YAMADA

 DECEMBER 10, 2021
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Perhaps the barbarians laying siege to cities of the Roman Empire were the first to figure out that the way to bring the Romans to their knees (or onto their butts on their fancy latrines) was to throw shit in their aqueducts. (Now Graeber and Wengrow might say that life might have been OK under barbarian rule, but the shit-chuckers were kind of cold, I’d say.)

The U.S. military has been very effective in destroying water infrastructure when they want to kill the enemy. It bombed dams in Korea during the Korean War to drown the people who lived in villages downstream.

During the first Gulf War, the U.S. military bombed dams in Iraq, because why should those enemy women and children have access to clean water? Those babies are going to grow up into terrorists anyway.

Then it practiced this stuff on Kahoʻolawe, and they broke the water table. WTF?

Destroying your enemies’ access to water has been a pretty effective means of waging war. But usually, you want your military to do this to those who you deem your enemy, the slant-eyes or the towelheads. You don’t want to do this to your own soldiers, or seamen, or their families, or their pets.

The U.S. Navy in Hawaiʻi seems to have gotten their flag signals crossed somehow. So, they have poisoned the underground water resources of ʻOahu with jet fuel or gasoline – initially sickening the people living in military housing around Joint Naval Station Pearl Harbor/Hickam Air Force Base.

******

The Navy’s Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility is a complex of 20 underground tanks constructed in the 1940s. Located in close proximity to Joint Naval Station Pearl Harbor/Hickam Air Force Base, each of the 20 tanks holds 12.5 million gallons of fuel. These underground tanks are located only 100 feet above the Southern Oʻahu Basal Aquifer water table that supplies essentially all of what most people think of as Honolulu, where 400,000 people live.

When constructed, the steel lining of the tanks was 0.25 inches thick. Over the decades, the lining has become as thin as 0.079 inches in some areas, less than one-third of the thickness when they were manufactured. Over their lifetime, over 200,000 gallons of fuel have leaked from the tanks. The largest prior leak occurred in 2014 when 27,000 gallons leaked from a single tank.

On Monday, November 22, the Navy reported that 14,000 gallons of fuel and water had spilled over the prior weekend but that all of the fuel had been captured. Residents of the area called 911 and the fire department responded. Over the subsequent week, residents began to report developing headaches, vomiting, abdominal pain, and skin rashes. They noted that the water from their tap began to smell like fuel. Elementary schools in the area taped off their sinks or sent their students home.

The affected areas were those served by the Red Hill shaft, a well-controlled by the Navy 3000 feet downhill from the fuel storage facility. The Navy’s water system serves 93,000 people, including military personnel, dependents, civilians, and area public schools. The Navy shut down the shaft on Sunday, November 28. The civilian-run Honolulu Board of Water Supply shut down its nearby Halawa well, a source of 20% of Honolulu’s water, on Friday, December 3. On Sunday, December 5, it was reported that the Navy turned over four months of water quality test results from July through October to the Hawaii Department of Health. These results showed petroleum hydrocarbons in the water exceeding toxic levels as early as July.

******

The US Military does not have the public’s trust. They have been caught in malicious lies that put their own people at risk. Our aquifers are connected—who is to say that the rest of our waters are not contaminated? It is only a matter of time before the rest of us are vomiting and putting our pets to sleep.

With orders from the governor to stop using the tanks, the Navy just says, “we can’t” as if they haven’t already dumped tens of thousands of gallons of petroleum into our water systems. They say they need that fuel to continue their fueling of fleets of ships and jets. They need to continue to rain hellfire on the global south from their convenient launching pad, which is what they consider Hawaiʻi to be. We won’t stand for it anymore.

It’s not just the jet fuel in our life blood water supply. It’s not just the bombing in sacred lands. It’s also the use of our home as a tool for their wars of aggression.

To the US military: Take your jet fuel. Take your bombs. Your fleets of destroyers, drones and submarines. Take your bases and secret underground intelligence tunnels. Pack it all up and leave this place. You were never wanted here.

Yoko Liriano is a long-time solidarity activist for the Philippines. She is Communications Coordinator of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines – US Chapter (ICHRP-US) and Co-Chair of the Hawaiʻi Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (HICHRP). Seiji Yamada, a native of Hiroshima, is a family physician practicing and teaching in Hawaiʻi.

Letter to the Editor: Legislators should ban the use of biosolids

Zanesville Times Recorder
Sat, December 11, 2021

Biosolids are the filth left over after water is separated from the sludge in city sewers so the water can be returned to our waterways free of pollutants. If the water is clean, what happened to all the pollutants? Did they magically disappear? No. They remain in sludge transported and sprayed on a farm field near you.

Consider what goes down the drain. Household cleaners, pesticides, industrial chemicals and waste, medical waste, petroleum products, human pathogens and parasites, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs and a cocktail of the PFAS forever chemicals.

The EPA has reported more than 400 identified pollutants in this septic sludge of which 61 are to be found on lists of hazardous toxins. They are linked to a wide range of health problems including cancer, hormone imbalance, diminished immune response, lung, liver and kidney ailments, developmental and growth problems, and a litany of other ills.

Most people have never heard of biosolids and those that have are told these are a green solution to waste management and a benefit to farmers as they are an inexpensive fertilizer they can use to improve the soil. But, that is only a fairytale, a deception based on wishful thinking. There is no free lunch.

That which was too dangerous and harmful to let flow into Ohio rivers is stored in open lagoons in unfortunate rural areas, then used as fertilizer to grow the crops we eat and fed to livestock. The toxins, hidden within the belly of the biosolids Trojan horse, are applied directly to the soil where it is absorbed into crops, leaches into groundwater and runs off right back into Ohio waterways. The toxins are showing up in grain, meat and milk. We are slowly poisoning ourselves and the practice must stop. There are other ways to dispose of wastewater sludge.

Ohio legislators must ban the use of this “beneficial nutrient” until the full impact of the health effects can be determined. Public consumption is not the science experiment we need to determine the hazard this practice poses to the public.

John Trimmer, Mount Perry

Atmospheric river storms can drive costly flooding – and climate change is making them stronger


Tom Corringham, Postdoctoral Scholar in Climate, Atmospheric Science and Physical Oceanography, University of California San Diego

Sun, December 12, 2021

Satellite photo showing a river of moisture extending from Hawaii to Calfiornia, Oct. 24, 2021. NOAA

Ask people to name the world’s largest river, and most will probably guess that it’s the Amazon, the Nile or the Mississippi. In fact, some of Earth’s largest rivers are in the sky – and they can produce powerful storms, like the ones now drenching northern California.

Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow bands of moisture in the atmosphere that extend from the tropics to higher latitudes. These rivers in the sky can transport 15 times the volume of the Mississippi River.

When that moisture reaches the coast and moves inland, it rises over the mountains, generating rain and snowfall. Many fire-weary westerners welcome these deluges, but atmospheric rivers can trigger other disasters, such as extreme flooding and debris flows.

In the past 20 years, as observation networks have improved, scientists have learned more about these important weather phenomena. Atmospheric rivers occur globally, affecting the west coasts of the world’s major land masses, including Portugal, Western Europe, Chile and South Africa. So-called “Pineapple Express” storms that carry moisture from Hawaii to the U.S. West Coast are just one of their many flavors.

My research combines economics and atmospheric science to measure damage from severe weather events. Recently I led a team of researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Army Corps of Engineers in the first systematic analysis of damages from atmospheric rivers due to extreme flooding. We found that while many of these events are benign, the largest of them cause most of the flooding damage in the western U.S. And atmospheric rivers are predicted to grow longer, wetter and wider in a warming climate.

Rivers in the sky

On Feb. 27, 2019, an atmospheric river propelled a plume of water vapor 350 miles wide and 1,600 miles long through the sky from the tropical North Pacific Ocean to the coast of Northern California.

Just north of San Francisco Bay, in Sonoma County’s famed wine country, the storm dumped over 21 inches of rain. The Russian River crested at 45.4 feet – 13.4 feet above flood stage.

For the fifth time in four decades, the town of Guerneville was submerged under the murky brown floodwaters of the lower Russian River. Damages in Sonoma County alone were estimated at over US0 million.

Events like these have drawn attention in recent years, but atmospheric rivers are not new. They have meandered through the sky for millions of years, transporting water vapor from the equator toward the poles.

In the 1960s meteorologists coined the phrase “Pineapple Express” to describe storm tracks that originated near Hawaii and carried warm water vapor to the coast of North America. By the late 1990s atmospheric scientists had found that over 90% of the world’s moisture from the tropics and subtropics was transported to higher latitudes by similar systems, which they named “atmospheric rivers.”

In dry conditions, atmospheric rivers can replenish water supplies and quench dangerous wildfires. In wet conditions, they can cause damaging floods and debris flows, wreaking havoc on local economies.

Helpful and harmful

Researchers have known for some time that flooding due to atmospheric rivers could cost a lot of money, but until our study no one had quantified these damages. We used a catalog of atmospheric river events compiled by Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, and matched it to 40 years of flood insurance records and 20 years of National Weather Service damage estimates.

We found that atmospheric rivers caused an average of .1 billion in flood damages yearly in the western U.S. More than 80% of all flooding damages in the West in the years we studied were associated with atmospheric rivers. In some areas, such as coastal northern California, these systems caused over 99% of damages.

Our data showed that in an average year, about 40 atmospheric rivers made landfall along the Pacific coast somewhere between Baja California and British Columbia. Most of these events were benign: About half caused no insured losses, and these storms replenished the region’s water supply.

But there were a number of exceptions. We used a recently developed atmospheric river classification scale that ranks the storms from 1 to 5, similar to systems for categorizing hurricanes and tornadoes. There was a clear link between these categories and observed damages.

Atmospheric River category 1 (AR1) and AR2 storms caused estimated damages under million. AR4 and AR5 storms caused median damages in the 10s and 100s of millions of dollars respectively. The most damaging AR4s and AR5s generated impacts of over billion per storm. These billion-dollar storms occurred every three to four years.
A moister atmosphere means worse storms

Our most significant finding was an exponential relationship between the intensity of atmospheric rivers and the flood damages they caused. Each increase in the scale from 1 to 5 was associated with a 10-fold increase in damages.

Several recent studies have modeled how atmospheric rivers will change in the coming decades. The mechanism is simple: Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet. This causes more water to evaporate from oceans and lakes, and increased moisture in the air makes storm systems grow stronger.

Like hurricanes, atmospheric rivers are projected to grow longer, wider and wetter in a warming climate. Our finding that damages increase exponentially with intensity suggests that even modest increases in atmospheric river intensity could lead to significantly larger economic impacts.

Better forecasting is critical

I believe that improving atmospheric forecasting systems should be a priority for adapting to a changing climate. Better understanding of atmospheric rivers’ intensity, duration and landfall locations can provide valuable information to residents and emergency responders.

It also is important to discourage new construction in high-risk areas and help people move to safer locations after major disasters, rather than rebuilding in place.

Finally, our study underlines the need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. These storms will keep coming, and they’re getting stronger. In my view, stabilizing the global climate system is the only long-term way to minimize economic damage and risk to vulnerable communities.


This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Tom Corringham, University of California San Diego.

Read more:

Why does some rain fall harder than other rain?

Deadly California mudslides show the need for maps and zoning that better reflect landslide risk

What would it feel like to touch a cloud?

Tom Corringham receives funding from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation; the California-Nevada Climate Applications Program (CNAP), a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments team; the Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center (SWCASC), a U.S. Geological Survey National Climate Adaptation Science Center; and the Multi-Campus Research Programs and Initiatives through the University of California Office of the President.

Scientists studying microplastics in Antarctica discover... it almost all came from their ship


Will Bolton
Sun, December 12, 2021

Ship paint fragments were found to make up most of the samples the scientists found - SWNS

Scientists studying the origins of microplastics in Antarctica have discovered that 89 per cent of the samples they analysed came from the paint on their own ship.

The researchers had initially been shocked to find such large concentrations of microplastics in such a remote expanse of water in the Southern Ocean.

However, when they studied the samples in a laboratory they were able to confirm that a large percentage came from flakes of paint from their own vessel.


Microplastics are small plastic pieces, less than five millimetres long, and are known to be extremely harmful to ocean and aquatic life.

The team of researchers, from the University of Basel and the Alfred-Wegener Institute (AWI) at the Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, were studying water from the Weddell Sea.
Area where Endurance got trapped

It is the same area where, in 1915, Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, got trapped and crushed by pack ice.

Over the course of two expeditions with the research vessel Polastern during 2018 and 2019, the researchers took a total of 34 surface water samples and 79 subsurface water samples.

They then filtered about eight million litres of seawater and discovered microplastics in it - albeit in very small quantities.

Earlier studies of microplastics in Antarctica were conducted in regions with more research stations, shipping traffic and people, but this one solely focused on a remote body of water.

The research team, led by Professor Patricia Holm and Dr Gunnar Gerdts from the AWI, thought that the remote Weddell Sea would have substantially lower concentrations of microplastics.

Prof. Dr. Patricia Holm (left) and Clara Leistenschneider on the research vessel Polarstern - SWNS

However, their measurements showed that microplastic concentrations were only partially lower than in other regions in Antarctica.

Clara Leistenschneider, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental Sciences, said: "Establishing that microplastics are present in a given region is one thing.

"But it's also important to know which plastics appear, in order to identify their possible origin and in the best case to reduce microplastic emissions from these sources."

In order to find out where these plastics came from, the team analysed the composition of the particles.

The team found that a significant proportion of the particles were in fact microplastics that were used as a binding agent in marine paint.

Other microplastic particles were identified as polyethylene, polypropylene and polyamides. These were used in packaging materials and fishing nets, among other things.

More than half of all the sample fragments were also visually similar to the ship paint on the vessel on which the team was travelling.

Identifying paint fragments

At the Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences (Marum) at the University of Bremen, the researchers analysed these fragments in more detail, by X-raying fluorescence (XRF) to identify pigments and fillers.

They were analysed in forensics, along with their plastic content, in a process normally used to identify cars in hit and run-type accidents.

In a circumstance like this one, paint slivers left at the accident site are the same as a vehicle's fingerprints.

The analysis showed that 89 per cent of the 101 microplastic particles that were studied in detail came from the Polastern.

The remaining 11 percent came from other sources.

Ms Lesitenschneider added: "Developing alternative marine paint that is more durable and environmentally friendly would make it possible to reduce this source of microplastics and the harmful substances they contain."

The findings were published in the journal Environmental Sciences and Technology.

How can the climate crisis enable terrorism?

Sam Hancock
Sat, December 11, 2021

(AFP/Getty)

Climate change is “an aggravating factor” for terrorism, the United Nations secretary-general has warned, adding that the world’s environmental decline puts any unstable or combative region at greater risk of security threats.

Antonio Guterres told a meeting of the UN security council this week that countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis are also the ones that “suffer from insecurity, poverty, weak governance and the scourge of terrorism”.

Painting a bleak picture, he said that when the impact of climate change leads to the loss of livelihoods and leaves populations in despair, “the promises of protection, income and justice – behind which terrorists sometimes hide their true designs – become more attractive”.


This goes a step further, Mr Guterres said, when climate disruptions hinder the ability of government institutions to provide public services, “fuelling grievances and mistrust towards authorities”.

Calling on the 15 council members present to protect the most “vulnerable” communities around the world, the UN chief laid out ways to sever the link between climate and terror-related issues – including making sure developed countries stick to their all-important net-zero targets.

Where in the world is this an issue?

Africa

Citing multiple African regions, Mr Guterres said it was essential for peace missions across the continent to be given the funding they need to fight terror groups and their growing influence.

Around Lake Chad, the jihadist group Boko Haram has been able to gain new recruits, “particularly from local communities disillusioned by a lack of economic opportunities and access to essential resources,” he told the UN security council.

Meanwhile, in central Mali, terrorist groups have exploited the growing tensions between herders and farmers to recruit new members from pastoralist communities – “who often feel excluded and stigmatised,” Mr Guterres said.

Charcoal production in Somali has also become a source of income for the al-Shabab extremist group, he told members, pointing to the global need for a reduction and eventual ban on manufacturing fossil fuels.

Middle East

In both Iraq and Syria, the militant group Isis has “exploited water shortages and taken control of water infrastructure to impose its will on communities” Mr Guterres said on Thursday.

What can be done to stop it?

The UN boss called for collective action to address the root causes of insecurity, stressing that “conflicts and terrorism do not take place in a vacuum”.

Instead, he said, each are the result of “deep fractures” in society such as poverty, human rights violations and poor governance.

It is only by addressing these issues, in addition to the well-documented steps needed worldwide to curb the effects of climate change, that the exploitative relationship between the climate crisis and terror groups can be annulled.

Mr Guterres laid out four key preventative measures to do this:

Increase investment in adaptation and resilience

Citing the recent Cop26 conference in Glasgow, Scotland, he reminded the council that developed countries must keep their promise to provide at least $100bn (£75.3bn) per year to developing countries for climate action.

Better analysis and early-warning systems

The UN chief stressed that understanding and anticipating the cascading effects of climate change strengthens all efforts to bolster peace and security.

“We also need to build on existing expertise in disaster risk reduction and integrate climate risk into all economic and financial decisions”, he said.

Development of partnerships and initiatives

He urged countries to make the best use of on-the-ground expertise, while drawing on the political, technical and financial capacities of regional and international actors.

“[Our] regional strategy for the stabilisation, recovery and resilience of the Boko Haram-affected areas of the Lake Chad basin region is a good example,” Mr Guterres said.

Jointly developed by the African Union, the Lake Chad Basin Commission, the UN and other partners, the strategy integrates humanitarian action, security, development and climate resilience, he explained.

Sustained investment

Finally, he warned that African peace missions in places such as the Sahel and Somalia often have limited room to manoeuvre and are faced with great funding uncertainties.

He asked the council to provide predictable funding “guaranteed by assessed contributions”.

“I urge you to consider this matter again as soon as possible”, he told ambassadors, insisting this would be key to ensuring terror groups can no longer exploit communities already succumbing to the effects of climate change.

Op-Ed: Climate migration will worsen the brutality and chaos on the Mediterranean


Ian Urbina
Sun, December 12, 2021

In July 2018, an Italian-flagged oil supply ship called the Asso 28 that was crossing the Mediterranean Sea encountered a stalled rubber raft carrying 100 desperate migrants. Trying to make the dangerous journey from Libya to Europe, the migrants had reached international waters when the supply ship rescued them. But the ship’s captain opted not to take the migrants to a port of safety in Europe, as required by law, but back to a gulag of migrant detention facilities in Libya where the United Nations and others have documented systematic torture, rape, extortion, forced labor and death.

In October, the captain of that supply ship, Giuseppe Sotgiu, paid a heavy price for his decision: An Italian judge sentenced him to a year in prison for violating humanitarian law. The painful irony of this conviction is that Sotgiu will be jailed for what European Union officials have been doing on a far grander scale for several years — pushing migrants back to a place of extreme human rights abuses.

Since at least 2017, the EU, led by Italy, has trained and equipped the Libyan coast guard to serve as a proxy maritime force, whose central purpose is to stop migrants from reaching European shores. Frontex, the EU border agency, locates migrant rafts, then alerts the Italians, who, in turn, inform the Libyan authorities. Once captured by the Libyan coast guard, tens of thousands of these migrants are then delivered into a dozen or so detention centers run by militias.

For the EU, and for the ship captains working the Mediterranean, the challenge of handling desperate migrants fleeing hardships in their native countries is only going to grow more pronounced.

Climate change is expected to displace 150 million people across the globe in the next 50 years. Rising seas, desertification and famine will drive the desperate to places like Europe and the U.S., testing the moral character and political imagination of countries better prepared to survive an overheated planet. The men and women working commercial ships in the Mediterranean will increasingly find themselves in an impossible bind. Even captains who abide by humanitarian law and decide to bring the migrants to Europe will sometimes face dire consequences.

In August 2020, for instance, the crew of a Danish-flagged oil tanker called the Maersk Etienne rescued 27 migrants, including a pregnant woman and a child, at the request of Maltese authorities. Malta then denied the Maersk ship entry to its port to offload the migrants, leading to a long and costly standoff that ended only after the migrants were handed over to a humanitarian organization. Italian prosecutors later alleged that Maersk had paid the organization more than $100,000 to take the migrants in a possible violation of immigration laws. Maersk called the payment a donation meant to help cover the costs of assisting with the migrants.

But most migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean never make it onto merchant ships because they are instead caught by the Libyan coast guard. Though it routinely opens fire on migrant rafts and has been tied to human trafficking, the coast guard continues to draw strong EU support. This year, the EU shipped six new speedboats to the coast guard, which uses them to capture migrants.

Even though the EU denies directly financing the abuse of migrants in Libya, an investigation by the Outlaw Ocean Project showed that EU money, typically flowing through humanitarian aid agencies, was nonetheless essential to the operation of both the coast guard and the detention centers where the migrants were kept.

I had long been interested in reporting on Libya’s gulag of migrant jails. A month before I was to head to Libya in May, I saw a tweet from an aid group about a shooting in one of Libya’s most notorious detention centers, Al Mabani, or “The Building,” located in the heart of the capital city of Tripoli. The victim was a young migrant from North Africa named Aliou Candé, who had been captured and sent there a few weeks earlier.

Through interviews, I learned that Candé was 28 and grew up on a farm near a remote village in Guinea Bissau, a place without plumbing or electricity. He was a fan of soccer and music, and in addition to speaking French and English, he was learning Portuguese in hopes of joining a brother in Portugal. He had a reputation as a dogged worker, who avoided trouble of any kind. “People respected him,” his brother Jacaria said.

But Candé would become a climate migrant — droughts in Guinea Bissau had become more common and longer; flooding became more unpredictable and damaging. His crops — cassava, mangoes and cashews — were failing and his children were hungry. Milk production from his cows was so meager that his children were allowed to drink it once a month. The shift in climate also resulted in more mosquitoes, and with them more disease.

But there was another way to survive — go to Europe. His brothers had done it. His family encouraged him to try. In the late summer of 2019, Candé set out for Europe. He took with him 600 euros, two pairs of pants, a T-shirt, a leather diary and the Quran. He told his wife he was not sure how long he’d be away, but he would be back.

Candé traveled by car across central Africa to Agadez, Niger, once called the Gateway to the Sahara. In January 2020, he arrived in Morocco, tried to pay for passage on a boat to Spain and learned that the price was 3,000 euros, more than he had. Eventually, he made it to Libya, where he heard he could take a cheaper raft to Italy. In February of this year, he and more than 100 other migrants pushed off from the Libyan shore aboard an inflatable rubber raft.

Roughly 70 miles from Libya, the Libyan coast guard rammed the migrants’ raft three times, then ordered them to climb a ladder to the ship. The migrants were taken back to land, loaded by armed guards into buses and trucks, and driven to Al Mabani.

Hundreds of detainees have died in these jails, subjected to deplorable conditions and violence by guards. Candé was killed in April when guards opened fire into part of the prison to stop a fight among detainees. He was buried in a migrant cemetery in Tripoli, more than 2,000 miles from his family in Guinea Bissau.

In Tripoli, I interviewed dozens of other migrants who had been imprisoned with Candé. They told me of cells so crowded the detainees had to sleep in shifts. They spoke of a special room where migrants were sometimes beaten while hung upside-down from ceiling beams. They shared with me the audio message that Candé recorded on a cellphone secreted into the jail where he made a final plea to his family to send the ransom he needed to be set free.

No one was punished for Candé’s death. EU officials called for an investigation, but then went silent. It all felt like one latest example of the impunity with which Libyan officials deal with some of the world’s most vulnerable people.

And then I got my own taste of Libyan impunity. A week into my reporting on Candé’s killing, I was abducted in my hotel room, and held for almost a week by Libya’s intelligence service, run by a militia called Al Nawasi. I was blindfolded, two of my ribs were broken, and I was held incommunicado for five days before my release. My crime? Reporting on migrants. Our four-person team was later forced at gunpoint by our captors to sign a confession document made out on the Libyan government’s official letterhead.

But some form of accountability from the EU and its partnership with Libya might be approaching. The conviction of the ship captain in October points to a growing discomfort with the illegality of delivering migrants back to Libya. Two cases were brought this year by migrants against Frontex, Europe’s border agency, before the Court of Justice of the European Union. The cases allege Frontex’s agents and its officials either ignored evidence of human rights abuses perpetrated by EU member states or themselves participated in the illegal turning back of migrants seeking asylum.

Of course, the EU is not alone in trying to outsource the dirty work of containing migration. In the last decade, the U.S. government has sought to reduce the flow of Latin American migrants to this country by pressuring Mexico to stop migrants at its southern border before they reach the U.S. So-called “remote vetting” for those seeking asylum also enables U.S. immigration authorities to avoid the quandary of what to do with people whose applications were denied but who come from places that lack deportation agreements. Migrants in detention centers in Mexico face extremely poor conditions, including overcrowding and lack of healthcare services, according to the Global Detention Project, a human rights organization based in Geneva.

Countries surely have a right and a duty to manage their borders, but the way the U.S. and the EU are handling waves of these migrants is ineffective and inhumane. Putting merchant ship captains in the middle of this crisis is hardly the solution. Worse still is outsourcing the problem to failed states like Libya where human rights abuses are a foregone conclusion.

Ian Urbina is an investigative journalist and the director of the Outlaw Ocean Project.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Nature's unsung hero, the humble fungus, could be the key to solving climate change


Evan Bush
Sun, December 12, 2021

Vast networks of microscopic, underground fungi serve a crucial role in Earth’s ecosystems — and there’s a lot we don’t know about them.

More than a quarter of Earth’s species live in soils underground, including the fungal networks that help store huge quantities of carbon, provide most plants with the majority of the nutrients they need to survive and allow the plants to receive important signals from others.

Now, a team of scientists is launching a first-of-its-kind effort to map the world’s mycorrhizal fungi, a process they hope can identify fungal biodiversity for conservation, grow understanding of how these species interact within ecosystems and keep more carbon in soil.

“These fungal networks have been a global blind spot in conservation and climate agendas. People haven’t woken up and realized there is this ancient life support form below our feet,” said Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist and professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who co-founded SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks.

“We need to know where biodiversity hot spots are. Where are the Amazon forests of the underground?” Kiers said.

Most of these fungi are underground and too small to see without a microscope — but they are plentiful. A handful of soil contains networks of tubular fungi that would span 60 miles if they were stretched out, Kiers said.

Confocal 3D-image of a fungal network with reproductive spores containing nuclei. (Vasilis Kokkoris)

Gardeners might recognize mycorrhizal fungi — pronounced my-core-eye-zal — as the white filaments that extend from the roots of trees and other plants, clinging to dirt clods like stringy, ancient hair. Combined in layers, they are massive networks of fungal threads called mycelium.

Kiers described tangles of mycorrhizal fungi as a “continuous pipe system” that branches, fuses and flows with nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.

“We follow them as if they are a river,” Kiers said, adding that the nutrients can flow in more than one direction.

The networks — which typically share a mutually beneficial relationship with the plants to which they connect — are fundamental to how forests and other ecosystems work.

“The fungi massively extend the trees’ root systems,” said Colin Averill, a co-founder of SPUN and a senior scientist at ETH Zürich. Some help decompose dead plants and animals and recycle nutrients.

The way scientists talk about the creatures can sound like fables.

Without mycorrhizal fungi, plants might never have reached land. Hundreds of millions of years ago, all flora were aquatic until a partnership with mycorrhizal fungi allowed them to settle on land, Kiers said.

Plants can receive chemical signals through the networks, which helps them share resources, learn from neighbors about pests and get warnings about competitors, recent studies suggest. The pioneering work by Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard and others has upended the idea that trees are solitary competitors duking it out for space, water and sunlight in the forest.

Instead, through fungal networks, “trees may really be cooperating as a family unit,” Averill said. More research is needed to better understand the nature of the relationships.

SPUN aims to map the world’s fungal networks by using machine learning to identify where biodiversity hot spots might exist and then work with local scientists to collect samples in remote locations where they’ve never been gathered before.

SPUN 2021 (Seth Carnill)

The DNA of each fungus species within the sample will be extracted, sequenced and then mapped to its location, giving scientists a census of which species live where. Scientists plan to combine the information with data about the surrounding climate and vegetation coverage to better understand patterns in different ecosystems.

The nonprofit organization, which recently received a $3.5 million donation from the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, hopes to collect 10,000 soil samples over the next 18 months.

It’s work that couldn’t have been done without recent advances in genomic sequencing, which allows scientists to see the genetic makeup of these tiny species.

“We really didn’t have tools to see the diversity and types of organisms living underground,” Averill said. “Now it feels like we’re inside the soil.”

Microorganisms — including bacteria and fungi — play critical roles in the carbon cycle, and the ability to rapidly analyze what is living within soils offers a deeper understanding of our changing climate and possible solutions.

“It really is a frontier,” said Serita Frey, a microbiologist and professor at the University of New Hampshire who isn’t involved with the project. “That can’t really be overstated. There’s so much we don’t know yet about what goes on below ground.”

Frey said the mapping project could help fill out scientists’ understanding of microbial communities and help target areas deserving of conservation.

“This sort of mapping has been done for macro-organisms for a long time. The idea of mapping microorganisms is quite new and only something we’ve been able to do in the last five to eight years,” Frey said.

As the world warms, understanding how mycorrhizal fungi and other microorganisms interact with soil could be crucial to slow down warming and adapt to a new climate.

“We’re just coming to understand this outsized role microbes play in the global carbon cycle, which has important implications for climate and future climate,” Frey said. “How these microbes are managed is going to be really important.”

Fungi promote plant growth, which sequesters carbon in trees and other plant species. They also help bury and store carbon in the soil.

About 75 percent of terrestrial carbon is in soil, and the scientists want to keep it there by preserving these biodiversity hot spots.

“We’ve got this amazing carbon sink,” Kiers said. “We can’t lose it.”

They are also exploring what tweaks to the system could promote more carbon absorption or cut down on fertilizer use in agriculture, which can have environmental costs.

“There’s a threefold variation in how fast a tree grows, depending on which fungi is living in those soils,” Averill said. “Can we accelerate carbon capture in forests by manipulating which mycorrhizal fungi live in the forest soil?”

Wetlands point to extinction problems beyond climate change

Sat, December 11, 2021



It's not just climate change that's driving extinctions: Wetland mismanagement is endangering 40,000 small but vital plant and animal species, according to the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).

A recent study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) cited by the center found that 16 percent of all dragon- and damselfly species, among many others, are at risk of extinction from factors including pesticide misuse and sewage discharge.

Wetland ecosystems around the world "are disappearing three times faster than forests," Bruno Oberle, IUCN director general, said in a statement.

"Marshes and other wetlands may seem unproductive and inhospitable to humans, but in fact they provide us with essential services. They store carbon, give us clean water and food, protect us from floods, as well as offer habitats for one in ten of the world's known species," Oberle said.

Across the United States, 85 percent of wetlands have already been destroyed by "careless planning" that has led to the extinction of species including Bachmann's warbler and the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Wetland species face a thousandfold risk of extinction compared to others, the CBD says.

Few of the species in question are household names, but many serve as key foundations in local ecosystems, with their absence risking broader collapses.

Populations of rabbitsfoot mussel a native of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River drainage basin, which has been reduced to about half its former range, are in danger from a planned increase in sewage discharge into creeks outside Columbus, according to the CBD.

And a new dam planned for the Little Canoe Creek in Alabama risks wiping out the Canoe Creek clubshell, an endangered mollusk that depends on clean, pollutant- and silt-free water for survival, the CBD says.

Sewage discharge and dams are only one part of the problem: 41 percent of insect species worldwide are in danger of extinction due to the conversion of their habitats to agriculture and the accompanying massive rise in water-borne pesticides including glycophosphates and neonicotinoids, according to a 2019 study in Biological Conservation.

"A rethinking of current agricultural practices, in particular a serious reduction in pesticide usage and its substitution with more sustainable, ecologically-based practices, is urgently needed to slow or reverse current trends," the analysis said.

Ninety percent of U.S. streams tested by scientists carried pesticides or their toxic byproducts, according to a study this year by the American Chemical Society - with impacts that scientists stressed might be higher by a factor of ten "or more."

"The pesticide industry has conditioned Americans to believe the fiction that these highly toxic pesticides just magically vanish," Jess Tyler, a CBD scientist, said in a statement about that research.

The Trump administration weakened many restrictions on pesticide use in 2019, particularly by limiting scrutiny of the effects when rains flush pesticides into waterways - measures that were "antithetical to the plain language and purpose" of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), according to legal filings from ten state attorneys general.

The Biden administration pledged to reverse the Trump-era rollback of environmental protections, and in August passed new measures restricting use of the insecticide paraquat, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

But the current administration has also defended many Trump-era pesticide policies, including an approval of the pesticide malathion that downplayed the number of endangered species it risked wiping out from 1,284 to 78, according to nonprofit news service Investigate Midwest.

Three overlapping bills, meanwhile, aim to confront America's extinction crisis.

The Extinction Crisis Emergency Act, sponsored by Democratic Reps. Marie Newman (Ill.) and Jesús Garcia (Ill.), would declare a national emergency around wildlife extinctions and direct all federal agencies to protect species and preserve habitats.

The Recovering America's Wildlife Act, sponsored by Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), would provide funds to states and tribes to keep populations of threatened species from declining to the point that they need ESA protections.

And the Extinction Prevention Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) would provide specific federal funding to the most-imperiled - but "least charismatic" - species in America, including butterflies, desert fish and freshwater mussels.

The new studies highlight a point with implications far beyond wetlands: Climate change is but one component in a far broader extinction crisis.

Recounting a friend's paper "about the extinction of Monte Verde golden toad," University of Arizona researcher Emily Schultz, working on a separate analysis, was left with a question: "Was it climate or was it the invasive chytrid fungus that caused frogs worldwide to go through massive die-offs? The bottom line, for the Monte Verde golden toad, was that it was an interaction between the two. The extreme drought year they had then reduced the size and number of the pools the frogs were found in. Because they were crowded into smaller pools, they transmitted the fungus more rapidly."

The way that climate and nonclimate factors stacked on top of each other suggested "that we're running out of time to save wildlife and ultimately ourselves," Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the CBD, said in a statement.

"The Biden administration has to muster the political will to move away from dirty fossil fuels, change the toxic ways we produce food, curtail the wildlife trade and halt ongoing loss of habitat. We actually can do these things," she added.