Germany Is Closing Half of Its Reactors at Worst Possible Time

KNEE JERK REACTION TO FUKUSHIMA

Rachel Morison
Mon, December 20, 2021
(Bloomberg) -- Germany is set to close almost half of its nuclear power capacity before the end of the year, putting further strain on European grids already coping with one of the worst energy crunches in the region’s history.

The shutdowns of Grohnde, Gundremmingen C and Brokdorf -- part of the country’s nuclear phaseout -- will leave just three atomic plants, which will be taken offline by the end of 2022. Beyond the squeeze on supply, the closures remove a key source of low-carbon power in a nation where emissions are on the rise.

After the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Germany vowed to ditch all of its reactors. At the time, the country was a leader in renewables, but the phaseout has left it more reliant on coal and lignite for electricity generation. The nation fell behind in the net-zero race after making major concessions to the coal lobby, to protesters against wind farms and to manufacturers, particularly carmakers.

“From a pure emissions perspective, it was always a questionable idea to shut down German nuclear before the plants have reached the end of their lifetime,” said Hanns Koenig, head of commissioned projects at Aurora Energy Research. “It was always clear that the nuclear phaseout would need coal and gas plants to run more and therefore cause substantial extra emissions.”

Atomic plants are designed to generate power around the clock, providing valuable backup when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. While the shutdowns have been known about for years and are unlikely to cause a spike in prices, the removal of 4 gigawatts of baseload output highlights a dwindling reserve of buffer capacity in Germany. It’s one reason why prices are higher next year: electricity for delivery in 2022 has jumped more than fivefold this year.

The timing could hardly be worse. Power prices are near record levels across Europe, and Germany will need to rely on generation from costly gas and coal for another 20 years or so -- before they too are phased out. Keeping the nuclear stations open any longer isn’t an option since that would require hundreds of millions of euros of investment, Koenig said.

Increased reliance on fossil fuels will boost emissions further, and Germany is not alone. A number of countries in Europe have ramped up coal-fired power production in recent months as gas supplies failed to meet rebounding demand and wind generation fell short.

Germany intends to take all coal-fired generation offline by 2038, with the lignite power-plant fleet reduced almost 16% by 2024. By that year, high carbon prices and an expansion of renewable power will have cut Germany’s coal production “strongly,” according to the International Energy Agency.

And that trend is set to be replicated, with much of Europe deciding to “get out of coal,” leading to a likely increase in renewable-power assets in the long term, said Sabrina Kernbichler, an analyst at S&P Global Platts.

Yet in the short term, coal is helping to bridge the supply gap. One German utility, Uniper SE, has postponed the planned decommissioning of its Scholven-B coal plant beyond the end of 2022 following delays in building a replacement gas unit at the site.

That’ll provide some relief as market tightness persists. But it won’t help Germany meet net-zero goals.

FOR PROFIT HEALTHCARE U$A
'Get that money!' Dermatologist says patient care suffered after private equity-backed firm bought practice


Gretchen Morgenson
Mon, December 20, 2021, 5:59 AM·9 min read

The email to the health care workers was like something out of “The Wolf of Wall Street.” “We are in the last few days of the month and are only 217 appointments away from meeting our budget,” the August 2020 memo stated. “Don’t forget the August bonus incentive for all patients scheduled in August! That’s the easiest money you can make. Get that money!!”

The “Get that money!!” entreaty wasn’t addressed to a bunch of hard-charging, coke-snorting stockbrokers. It went to Michigan-based employees of Pinnacle Dermatology, a private equity-owned group of 90 dermatology practices across America.

The memo was shared with NBC News by a former Pinnacle employee, Dr. Allison Brown, a board-certified dermatologist and dermatopathologist. Brown says Pinnacle terminated her shortly after she advised management of questionable practices that she contends were hurting patients.

Among the practices Brown alleges: overlooked diagnoses, lost patient biopsies, questionable quality control in the company-owned lab and overbooking of patients without sufficient support staff.

Physicians have a duty to put their patients’ interests first. But when aggressive financiers take over medical operations, the push for profits can take precedence, doctors in an array of specialties have told NBC News. Paying bonuses for increased patient visits may result in unnecessary appointments and costs, for example.

Among the most aggressive health care financiers in the market today are private equity firms. The new titans of finance, these firms have taken over broad swaths of U.S. industry in recent years. Using large amounts of debt to finance their acquisitions, private equity firms acquire companies, aim to increase their profits and then try to resell them a few years later for more than they paid.

Outside investors, such as public pension funds and endowments, commit big money to the deals in hope of generating high returns.

Private equity is reshaping the health care industry, practitioners, economists and academic researchers contend. Private equity funds dedicated solely to health care operations have been especially busy, raising $350 billion from investors over the past decade, according to Preqin, a private equity data source. Last year, almost $50 billion was raised from investors for health care buyouts, up from $8 billion in 2010.

A focal point in such takeovers has been physician-owned dermatology practices, a highly fragmented sector of small operations that private equity firms have considered ripe for consolidation over the past decade. Just before the pandemic, researchers counted more than 30 private equity-backed dermatology groups in the country and said about 15 percent of dermatology practices were private equity-owned. The number has probably grown, the researchers say.

Private equity firms contend that they create jobs, support businesses and help provide comfortable retirements for pensioners invested in the strategy. But many outside the industry are especially critical of the industry’s involvement in health care. One private equity-owned hospital staffing company, for example, was behind many of the surprise emergency department bills that outraged hospital patients and resulted in a new law to curb the practices. It takes effect next month.

“The private equity business model is fundamentally incompatible with sound health care that serves patients,” concluded a paper in May co-authored by Richard M. Scheffler, professor of health economics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley; Laura M. Alexander, the vice president of policy at the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit organization; and James R. Godwin, a Ph.D. candidate at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

The researchers found that private equity’s focus on short-term profits “leads to pressure to prioritize revenue over quality of care, to overburden health-care companies with debt, strip their assets, and put them at risk of long-term failure, and to engage in anticompetitive and unethical billing practices.”

In addition, economists and practitioners who have studied private equity-backed health care entities say they often try to increase revenue by providing services typically outsourced to third parties. For example, many dermatology practices backed by private equity acquire their own labs to analyze specimens. They can be a source of additional revenue, research shows, and may provide incentives for the practices to run extra tests, presenting possible conflicts of interest.

Pinnacle Dermatology, which is based in Brentwood, Tennessee, and operates in 11 states, has been buying small physician-owned practices and outpatient services.

Dr. Jose Rios, Pinnacle’s president and chief medical officer, provided the following statement: “Our top priorities are always patient safety and clinical quality. Pinnacle Dermatology’s compliance and quality assurance programs lead the industry. We are proud of our track record, our high levels of patient satisfaction and the equally high patient loyalty that results and will continue to provide valuable dermatological care at the highest possible levels.”

Backing Pinnacle is Chicago Pacific Capital, a private equity firm founded in 2014. The firm “invests in companies that it believes are positioned to lead innovations in health-care delivery and in caring for aging populations,” a regulatory filing says. Chicago Pacific had $1.8 billion under management, including borrowings, as of December 2020.

Chicago Pacific didn’t respond to a phone call and a detailed email seeking comment about Pinnacle.

Brown, the former Pinnacle physician, who has also taught dermatology at two medical schools, said she decided to share her experience at the company out of concern for patient safety. “I worked in an office that was physician-owned until the physician passed away and we were bought out,” Brown said. “I experienced from the inside what happened to the practice” after private equity arrived.

Among the changes Brown said she saw after Pinnacle took over were an increase in patient biopsies that got lost and a drop in the quality and number of instruments purchased for the practice. She said the office booked her for 40 patient appointments a day without adequate support staff. Brown also described cases of patients were seen multiple times for problems that could have been resolved in single visits, raising the patients’ costs.

Brown says that when private equity firms take over health care practices, it hurts the quality of health care and is bad for patients. (Sarah Rice for NBC News)

Even worse, Brown said, patient diagnoses fell through the cracks; for months, the office didn’t follow through on treating a patient’s melanoma, for example. “If you miss a melanoma and you’re not being treated, there could be significant morbidity and mortality with that,” she said.

A letter Brown’s lawyer sent to Pinnacle in the fall of 2020 and reviewed by NBC News detailed her criticisms. Shortly after the letter went out, Brown was let go.

The company contended that she had behaved unethically, Brown said, but she said she and her lawyer obtained her personnel file and found nothing in it to support the claim. “They started targeting me,” Brown said. “They weren’t happy with me sending emails up the chain about stuff going wrong.”

Pinnacle declined to answer detailed questions about Brown’s criticisms and termination.

Brown said she got along well with her associates in the practice, some of whom called her Dr. Awesome and gave her a drinking glass with that title embossed on it.

The company’s laboratory in Lombard, Illinois, where Pinnacle offices sent specimens for analysis, was also problematic, Brown said. The operation was very disorganized; slides and specimens sent for second opinions and quality control got lost more than once, she said. She filed a complaint with the Illinois Public Health Department.

Rios, of Pinnacle, said Brown’s criticisms of Pinnacle’s lab “are baseless allegations brought by a disgruntled former employee.” He added that Pinnacle’s lab is accredited by the College of American Pathologists and certified under federal regulations associated with the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments.

Dr. Sailesh Konda is a Mohs surgeon — someone who performs a type of surgery used to treat skin cancer — and an associate clinical professor of dermatology at the University of Florida. He has also conducted extensive research into private equity’s impact on the dermatology field.

Konda said Brown’s experience isn’t unusual. “Dermatologists from all over the country have shared with me their experiences with private equity-backed groups promoting profits over patient care,” he said. “Many are shackled with non-disparagement agreements and are afraid to publicly share their experiences. These stories need to be told.”

Independent academic research also indicates that negative outcomes have resulted from private equity firms’ involvement in dermatology. A main source of problems is the tendency among private equity-owned practices to hire more “physician extenders” to see dermatology patients, including physician assistants and nurse practitioners who cost less to employ. An academic study from last year in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology concluded that private equity-backed dermatology practices employ greater numbers of physician assistants and a higher rate of such professionals to physicians. Rios declined to discuss the company’s reliance on physician extenders.

Physician extenders’ lack of experience can pose problems for patients by not identifying skin cancers, a 2018 investigation published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found. The study, which examined more than 33,000 skin cancer screenings among 20,000 patients, found that physician extenders failed to identify cancers significantly more often than doctors did.

The extenders also ordered more biopsies than doctors, generating increased fees for their patients. Physician extenders are supposed to be monitored by doctors, but private equity-backed companies often assign remote supervising physicians, in far-off locations, who have never met the people they are supervising. That diminishes effective oversight.

Research in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology in 2018 found physician extenders working at a private equity-backed group performing “dermatologic procedures of questionable medical necessity” on nursing home patients in Michigan. In the study, 75 percent of the treated patients had diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease.

Another study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Dermatology found that private equity-backed practices were more likely to offer appointments with physician extenders than with doctors. If physician extenders fail to make appropriate diagnoses, it can be a problem.

Rios declined to comment on the research showing negative outcomes among dermatology practices backed by private equity firms.

Five other former Pinnacle workers shared concerns about the company’s practices but asked not to be identified for fear of retribution or because they had signed non-disparagement agreements. They corroborated Brown’s experience of the push for more appointments, not ordering enough or high-quality supplies and problems with the lab.

Such agreements are common among medical practices bought by private equity firms. That’s why it’s so rare, practitioners say, for a physician like Brown to speak out about her experiences. Brown never signed such an agreement with Pinnacle, she said.

Brown and her lawyer continue to fight for three months of back pay she says she is owed, as well as reimbursement for insurance coverage that she paid out of her own pocket. The company’s most recent offer, Brown said, was $5,000 plus her signature on a non-disparagement agreement. She rejected the deal.

“Dermatology is often not a life-and-death situation,” Brown said. “But it’s still a specialty, it still requires expertise, and patients deserve to see the best-trained professionals at all times.”

THIRD WORLD USA

U.S. families fear hunger after child-tax credit expires


FILE PHOTO: Schumer holds a press conference on the Child Tax Credit payments at the U.S. Capitol in Washington

Mon, December 20, 2021
By Moira Warburton and Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The phone calls to Yvonka Hall's health nonprofit in northeastern Ohio from families begging for help feeding their children started in March 2020, and slowed down only when an expanded child tax credit came into effect last summer.

Now, Hall fears the calls will ramp up again as U.S. lawmakers quibble over renewing this program that expired after making final payments on Dec. 15, despite having been credited with helping millions of poor children.

"It's easy when you make $200,000 a year to drag your feet on someone that may be making $10,000 a year," Hall said referring to the $174,000 annual salaries earned by members of Congress.

The expanded Child Tax Credit's monthly payments of $300 for each child under the age of 6 and $250 for children 6 to 17, lifted some 3.6 million American children out of poverty in October, according to Columbia University research.

"It allowed our families to be able to live," Hall said.

The Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition in Cleveland, where Hall is executive director, has had to start setting aside $10,000 per month to fund an ad hoc food bank since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

When the expanded Child Tax Credit monthly payments kicked in, the calls to the ad hoc food bank dropped off and many families were able to move into better, more stable housing.

Hopes for a one-year extension dimmed on Sunday after moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin https://www.reuters.com/world/us/schumer-says-senate-vote-biden-plan-despite-manchin-objections-2021-12-20 said he would not vote for President Joe Biden's $1.75 trillion "Build Back Better https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/whats-bidens-175-trillion-build-back-better-package-2021-11-05" program, which includes the tax credit provision.

In so doing, he joined Republicans who are in lock-step opposition to Biden's plan, instead wanting a scaled-back child tax credit.

'INFLATIONARY BOMB'

Republicans oppose the size of the credit, as well as the aim of Democrats to attach it to the $1.75 trillion "Build Back Better https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/whats-bidens-175-trillion-build-back-better-package-2021-11-05" program.

Senator Lindsey Graham, the senior Senate Budget Committee Republican, described the Democrats' tax credit provision as an "inflationary bomb."

Without the expanded tax credit, the program for poor families reverts to a lump-sum payment that families need to file a tax return to claim, and a reduction to $2,000 annually per child from up to $3,600 this year. The Treasury Department in June estimated that families with as many as 2.3 million children did not file returns in 2019 or 2020 because their incomes were below the threshold for filing.

That presents a problem for Tiquanda Newton, a 43-year-old mother of daughters aged 21, 17, seven and four.

"I walk into the store and I have to figure out who gets what and who doesn't get what. The truth is, I don't get. I just make sure I stay hydrated," Newton said in a telephone interview from her home in New Haven, Connecticut.

Newton has been unemployed since the birth of her 7-year-old and has guardianship of her eldest daughter, who has a life-long disability.

A broken heater in her car goes unrepaired and she despairs over the rising costs of basics like food and school supplies.

"These babies are growing quicker than we can even buy clothes," she said.

Despite the breakdown in negotiations, "The fight to pass Build Back Better is not over," said House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro, a leading advocate for maintaining the expanded tax credit.

Already, there have been hints Democrats could move to shrink the $1.75 billion plan to win support from Manchin and Democratic Senator Krysten Sinema, who together oppose various parts of the bill.

Meanwhile, Mary Beth Cochran, 52, worries she may have to quit her job in western North Carolina if the expanded tax credit vanishes and she no longer can afford the used car she bought with the extra federal funding.

"I'm not asking for a handout," she said. "This money is to help us get by so our children don't have to struggle."

(Reporting by Moira Warburton, Richard Cowan and Jonelle Marte in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)

Joe Manchin Privately Told Colleagues Parents Use Child Tax Credit Money On Drugs

Tara Golshan
Mon, December 20, 2021

WASHINGTON — After months of haggling with President Joe Biden and other Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) dashed his party’s hopes on Sunday by announcing he wouldn’t vote for the Build Back Better legislation.

Publicly, his biggest gripes are about the cost of the bill. But privately, Manchin has told his colleagues that he essentially doesn’t trust low-income people to spend government money wisely.

In recent months, Manchin has told several of his fellow Democrats that he thought parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children, according to two sources familiar with the senator’s comments.

Continuing the child tax credit for another year is a core part of the Build Back Better legislation that Democrats had hoped to pass by the end of the year. The policy has already cut child poverty by nearly 30%.

Manchin’s private comments shocked several senators, who saw it as an unfair assault on his own constituents and those struggling to raise children in poverty.

Manchin has also told colleagues he believes that Americans would fraudulently use the proposed paid sick leave policy, specifically saying people would feign being sick and go on hunting trips, a source familiar with his comments told HuffPost.

Manchin’s office declined to comment for this story.

In a statement on Sunday, he said he opposed the Build Back Better agenda largely because of its cost.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) in November. On Sunday, he announced he would not be voting for President Joe Biden's Build Back Better bill, essentially ensuring that it will not pass. (Photo: Tom Williams via Getty Images)

“My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face,” Manchin said. “I cannot take that risk with a staggering debt of more than $29 trillion and inflation taxes that are real and harmful to every hard-working American at the gasoline pumps, grocery stores and utility bills with no end in sight.”

Manchin’s refusal to support the bill likely means December’s child tax credit payment will be the final one for the 36 million households that have been receiving the benefits since July.

The credit pays $300 per child under 6 and $250 for kids under 18 for two-parent households earning less than $150,000 annually and single parents earning less than $112,000. Parents don’t need to have earned money or to owe taxes in order to qualify.

Manchin previously suggested Democrats should impose “work requirements” on all the social programs in Build Back Better, but he seemed to drop that demand after the White House released a framework of the legislation in October. The White House said the framework resulted from negotiations with Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).

Low-income households that receive the credit have reported spending the money mostly on necessities like food, utilities, clothing and school supplies, according to monthly survey data from the Census Bureau. Four percent of households have reported using the money for “recreational goods” such as sports equipment or toys.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), a top proponent of the child payments, said he had heard of Manchin’s remarks about the money going toward drugs but wasn’t paying any mind to it.

“The stories I hear the most, if you put it in categories, are child care, school supplies, college fund, phone bills,” Brown told HuffPost last week. “My focus is getting this program — which is the best thing Congress has done in 25 years — making sure it continues.”

If Mr. Manchin and Republicans and anybody else who thinks struggling working families, who have a hard time raising their kids today, should not be able to continue to get the help ... they’ve got to come forward to the American people.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

The concern that some parents would use the benefit for drugs echoes years of conservative talking points on welfare. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans in Congress and state legislatures around the country sought to add drug testing to requirements to nutrition assistance, unemployment benefits and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which provides monthly cash benefits to poor parents.

More than a dozen states enacted drug testing policies from 2011 through 2017, resulting in less than 1% of applicants actually testing positive for drugs. States lawmakers have generally lost interest in the policy in recent years.

Since West Virginia launched its TANF drug screening program in 2017, just 131 applicants have tested positive for drugs ― a small fraction of the thousands of program beneficiaries. Nevertheless, state lawmakers this spring opted to continue the screening program for another five years. The puny number of welfare recipients kicked off the rolls might not save the state any money, but it sends a message: People on welfare can’t be trusted, and we’re making them prove they deserve help.

Manchin told HuffPost last week that he has always supported the child tax credit, but he refused to say whether he supported the version of it that Democrats were hoping to extend through 2022, calling the question “bullshit.” He later said that if Democrats want to continue the policy, they should do so for 10 years instead of just one.

Since the credit costs more than $100 billion per year, a longer extension would be costly, and it would force Democrats to drop other programs from the Build Back Better agenda. Democrats want their enhanced child tax credit to be permanent, but included a one-year extension to reduce the cost of the bill, arguing that it would be easy to extend the credit at a later time. Now the policy may expire after just six months.

Democrats’ frustration with Manchin began to boil over last week even before he announced he wouldn’t support the bill.

“If Mr. Manchin and Republicans and anybody else who thinks struggling working families, who have a hard time raising their kids today, should not be able to continue to get the help — that’s their view — they’ve got to come forward to the American people and say, ‘we don’t think you need help,’” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Thursday.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Corporate donations to Sen. Joe Manchin's PAC surged as he fought President Biden's agenda
Brian Schwartz 
CNBC

Sen. Joe Manchin's PAC saw a surge in corporate contributions this fall before his decision to oppose President Biden's $1.75 trillion social and climate legislation.

The political action committee received 17 contributions in October and 19 last month, according to a CNBC analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.

Corporations, business leaders and groups have pressured Manchin to oppose the agenda since the Democrats gained a slight majority in the Senate.

© Provided by CNBC U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) returns to a basement office meeting with other senators at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, December 15, 2021.

Sen. Joe Manchin's political action committee saw a surge in corporate contributions this fall, ahead of his decision to oppose – and apparently kill – President Joe Biden's $1.75 trillion social safety net and climate-change bill.

Manchin's leadership PAC, Country Roads, received 17 contributions from corporations in October and 19 last month, according to a CNBC analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. None of the four months prior to October saw as many corporate contributions.

The White House unveiled its framework for the bill, dubbed the Build Back Better Act, in October. It included about $550 billion to battle climate change by investing in green technologies. Manchin, a conservative Democrat who has profited from his links to the coal industry, opposed key climate provisions in the legislation.

In November, the Country Roads PAC received corporate contributions ranging from $2,500 to $5,000. Donors included financial giants such as American Express and Goldman Sachs, aerospace and defense leader Lockheed Martin, health insurance companies UnitedHealth Group and Blue Cross Blue Shield, and natural gas company CNX Resources. The PAC raised over $110,000 in November.

Country Roads raised over $150,000 in October from corporate donors such as Verizon, Union Pacific, Wells Fargo and PACs tied to the coal and mining industries. Manchin, a conservative Democrat, represents West Virginia, which overwhelmingly voted for former President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. The state is a key location for the fossil-fuel industry.

Corporations, business leaders and outside groups have pressured Manchin to oppose key parts of the Democratic administration's agenda ever since his party gained a slight majority in the Senate following the 2020 election.

The Koch network has lobbied Manchin to oppose key elements of the legislation, while billionaires such as Nelson Peltz and Ken Langone have cheered him on as he moved against his own party. Langone has said he plans to host a fundraising event for the West Virginia lawmaker, who is weighing running for reelection in 2024.

Jonathan Kott, who once worked for Manchin as a communications advisor and is now a lobbyist, gave $2,500 to Manchin's leadership PAC at the end of November. Kott started lobbying for energy giant ExxonMobil in the third quarter after he was hired by Capitol Counsel earlier this year.

Manchin said on Sunday that he won't support Biden's $1.75 trillion social spending and climate policy bill after months of negotiations with the president, his team and leaders in Congress. It was the latest in a set of issues that Manchin has pushed back on against his own party.

In October and November, a period that coincided with Manchin fighting his own party on the agenda, his PAC spent thousands of dollars on hotel arrangements and travel.

In November, the leadership PAC spent over $40,000 at The Greenbrier, a luxury resort in West Virginia, which is owned by the family of Republican Gov. Jim Justice. The November FEC filing says the money was used for catering, lodging, food and beverages.

In October, the PAC spent over $1,000 on travel for Manchin's son, Joseph Manchin IV, according to that month's filing. The Intercept reported that Manchin's son has leadership roles at companies with ties to the West Virginia lawmaker.

The PAC spent another $1,000 on the Sawgrass Marriot, a golf resort in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and over $2,000 on catering an event at RPM Italian, a restaurant in Washington, D.C. The PAC also spent just over $10,000 that month as a deposit for an event at The Greenbrier.

The purpose of the thousands of dollars spent on hotels, meals and travel is unclear. A representative for Manchin's office did not return a request for comment.

Lawmakers often use their leadership PACs on issues that watchdogs say are lightly regulated outside of politics, according to research from nonprofit groups Issue One and the Campaign Legal Center.

"Issue One and Campaign Legal Center found that the leadership PACs of 120 members of Congress spent less than 50% on politics between January 2019 and December 2020," the research says. Manchin's PAC, according to the report, spent about 65% of the funds over that time period on what the researchers describe as politics, leaving nearly 35% to be put toward travel, hotels, meals, campaign staffing and other investments.

While leadership PACs are meant to help fund candidates running for office, the report from the nonprofits says it appears that many lawmakers simply use the money at fancy resorts and restaurants.

"Instead, such spending patterns give the impression that some politicians are simply raising money at one posh location to pay for the next fundraiser at the next fancy destination — creating an endless fundraising cycle at luxurious restaurants and resorts, much of which is paid for by special interest money, with no cost to lawmakers' own pocketbooks," the report says.

Manchin's PAC did donate some of its money to a political campaign, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The PAC sent $10,000 to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto's, D-Nev., political operation in the early stages of the 2022 reelection campaign cycle. The Nevada race is expected to be competitive.

Manchin and Biden's agenda

Manchin has put himself in the thick of several policy debates that affect corporations in recent months, in no small part because he alone can swing a simple majority vote in the 50-50 Senate.

In June he voiced his opposition against the For the People Act, a bill that could make changes to future elections. The bill passed the House but has yet to go through the Senate.

When a debate ensued on Capitol Hill about raising taxes on corporations, Manchin said he wouldn't go above raising the corporate tax to 25% from 21%. After Democrats proposed enacting a billionaires tax, Manchin said he wasn't for it.

Manchin did end up supporting the Democratic plan to enact a 15% minimum corporate tax on declared income of large corporations. He also helped to craft and then advocated for the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan that became law last month.

In addition, the conservative Democrat voted with Republicans to block the Biden administration vaccine mandate for private businesses.

Manchin's most prominent role has come in shaping Biden's Build Back Better Act legislation that would transform social services for workers in the U.S., set the minimum tax rate on corporations and make the biggest federal investment ever in curbing climate change.

The senator pushed Democratic leaders to cut the bill's price tag in half, to $1.75 trillion from an initial $3.5 trillion.

When the White House announced a framework agreement on the bill in October, the administration noted that it came about after officials negotiated "in good faith" with Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a centrist Democrat from Arizona.

The West Virginia lawmaker never publicly supported the agreement, even as the House passed it in November along with the complementary infrastructure bill.

Russians Have Suddenly Stopped Buying Putin’s Anti-American Propaganda

Anna Nemtsova
Sun, December 19, 2021

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

MOSCOW—It’s easy to see why President Vladimir Putin might have thought ratcheting up tensions on Ukraine’s border and blaming it all on NATO and the U.S. would rally his faltering support back home, but this time something different is happening.

Most Russians aren’t buying it.

Domestic propaganda levels have reached near-hysteria this year after anti-Putin protests swept the country following the attempted murder and imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The drumbeat of war against Ukraine is becoming louder by the week and Putin has made ever wilder demands of NATO, which was the primary focus of his talking points in the video conference summit with President Biden earlier this month. He must surely know those demands can never be met.

Ukraine: America Dropped the Ball on Russia’s Invasion Threat

If you follow the local—state-owned—TV stations in Russia, you are constantly warned that a new war is on the horizon; that Russia will bravely stand up to the West; and that America is the real enemy.

That message is increasingly falling on deaf ears.

A study published this week by the Levada Analytical Center showed that for the first time in years more Russians think positively than negatively about the U.S.—by 45 percent to 42 percent.

When Levada asked the same question in May, only 31 percent said the U.S. was “good” vs. 54 percent “bad.”

In those intervening months, Moscow has accused Washington of “fueling tension” over Ukraine, gas pipelines, Navalny, and hacking. Tit-for-tat diplomatic spats have led to the U.S. embassy cutting 75 percent of staff in Moscow and no longer processing visas, meaning Russians wanting U.S. travel visas and green cards now have to apply in Warsaw. An agreement is in the works to fix that particular stand-off, but it shows the real world impact of diplomatic wrangling on ordinary people.

“Politicians and ordinary people often have different agendas,” said Susanna Emirali, a young advertising producer. “Most of my friends understand that ordinary Americans are cool.”

Emirali is typical of the Russians who are now rejecting state propaganda. She says she avoids watching political talk shows on television and prefers to read her news on independent outlets online. She believes the United States has nothing to do with Russia’s biggest problems and hopes the conflict between Moscow and Washington will soon end.

While Moscow and Washington are at loggerheads over “red lines” and security guarantees, ordinary Russians are growing tired of the aggressive anti-Western propaganda thrown at them from their TV sets every night. This flies in the face of years of assumptions that Putin can turn up the dial on anti-Americanism feeling among Russians at will.

The Russian Public Is Being Primed for Another of Putin’s Wars

During the pandemic last year Emirali said she saw her mother and father’s eyes begin to open. Both engineers in their late forties, they stopped watching television and began to read news on independent sites, learning first about the poisoning attack on Navalny, then about his arrest and about the mass opposition protests in both Russia and Belarus.

“They began to sympathize with arrested peaceful protesters, so their political views have changed, they openly blame Putin for domestic problems,” Emirali said.

The author of Levada’s report, Lev Gudkov, said there had been a fundamental shift in Russia. “We see increasingly deep public disillusionment in Putin’s leadership: incomes have decreased by 13 percent since 2010 and during the pandemic many more people lost jobs and grew poorer; there are nearly twice as many cases of political persecutions,” he said. “It is important to understand that Russians now have much less tolerance for anti-American propaganda, it makes people angry during the pandemic to see that the state spends more money on buying arms and preparing for wars than on new hospitals, district clinics—our medical service is in poor condition.”

Gudkov says a majority of Russians believe that it is Putin who is responsible for their woes. “Russians realize that it is not the United States that is responsible for domestic problems. As for the international issues, people are worried about the war—an absolute majority of our respondents, 75 percent, say that the military tensions on the border with Ukraine might blow up into a war between Russia and Ukraine,” he told The Daily Beast.

The winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, used the ceremony this week to invoke the words of another former Peace Prize winner, ex-president Mikhail Gorbachev. He once told ministers that were agitating for further military adventure to “stop your hawk squawk.”

Muratov repeated that demand, and called for journalists and politicians to “stop the hawk squawk” now.

Ordinary Russians dream of an end to the Cold War rhetoric and for the authorities to stop painting Washington as public enemy No. 1.

And yet, when The Daily Beast approached a pro-Kremlin analyst with questions about Russia’s tensions with the West and Ukraine, we were told it was all the fault of the U.S.

“Americans should understand the word ‘undo’ and restore the situation we had in Ukraine back in 2013 when it was in Russia’s sphere of influence,” Dmitry Drobniysky said.

On television, the propagandists continue to spin. After the Putin-Biden talks, one of the Kremlin’s key supporters Dmitry Kisilyov told viewers that Americans were beginning to realize that Russia is now the dominant force: “Ever since the 1990s America behaved as though it was the winner in the Cold War but their feeling of superiority has been melting as the decades passed and after the two-hour long Putin-Biden conversation there was nothing left of it.”

In reality, many people are now questioning the propaganda. Olga Alekseyeva, a retired doctor from Saint Petersburg, said she has been following the viral reports of inhumane practices, including torture, in Russian prisons where political dissidents like Navalny are confined.

She is one of nine million people who viewed an explosive recent Yuriy Dud documentary on YouTube. “People analyze the outrageously unfair court system, lawlessness in security services here, so I am not surprised more Russians like the West,” Alekseyeva told The Daily Beast. “My friends in San Francisco tell me how hard and expensive life is in the U.S. but I am personally thankful that the U.S. tries to help Russia. Maybe they have no genuine sympathy for our political prisoners, it’s just a political agenda, but at least they talk with Putin and he listens to them—that is wonderful. As sometimes, I think, maybe Putin is totally isolated.”

Biden’s First International Test: Can He Save Ukraine From Putin?

Many young Russians pay little attention to political news. Karen Shainyan films young Russians for his journalistic “Queerography” project on YouTube.

So far, he has filmed life stories of LGBTQ people in eight Russian regions, including Yakutia in the far north, Vladivostok in the east, Sochi on the Black Sea and Tatarstan on the Volga river. “We interviewed 10 people in Kazan, three of them were IT experts planning to move to the United States. There is a lot of respect for the West in our community, to countries like United States where queer people have rights.”

Putin is facing a slow moving generational issue, with young people striving for independence, but the coronavirus has also accelerated his problems.

There have been over 800,000 excess deaths in Russia since the pandemic began. Crowds of voters appealed to Russian politicians, complaining about poor medical service, tiny salaries, miserable pensions, and unemployment during recent parliamentary and local elections. “I have spoken with dozens of Russians unhappy about their lives who blame the government but I have not met anybody in Saint Petersburg who would blame the U.S. for their domestic troubles,” opposition deputy Boris Vishnevsky told The Daily Beast. “It does not surprise me that the propaganda does not work.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

'Humanity cannot live': The Amazon’s destruction has brutal effects. Is Bolsonaro to blame?

Georgina Gustin, Inside Climate News
Sun, December 19, 2021

This article is part of “The Fifth Crime,” a series on ecocide published in partnership with Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news outlet that covers climate, energy and the environment, and Undark Magazine, a nonprofit, editorially independent digital magazine exploring the intersection of science and society.

LONG READ

TRAIRÃO, Brazil — Jaim Teixeira surveys his property from the back of a motorcycle, wearing jeans and a long-sleeve, sun-proof shirt to shield him from the jungle’s breathtaking heat.

It’s the end of the dry season and, like everything and everyone in this part of the Amazon, the lean, 51-year-old rancher is covered in a fine brick-red dust.


Nearby, a plume of smoke rises at the edge of the jungle canopy, heading skyward until it blurs into an indistinct haze. Burning trees crackle and spit. One falls with a whack. Then another.

Teixeira lit the blaze the previous day to clear grazing land for his cattle.

“I know it’s illegal,” he says, gesturing toward the smoke. “If I had a salary, I wouldn’t need to do it. But how else can I feed my family?”

Image: A fire burns on Jaim Teixeira's land. (Larry C. Price for ICN)

Image: Jaim Teixeira surveys the burned landscape. (Larry C. Price for ICN)

The Amazon is enveloping and lush, a place of stupefying richness. But a powerful web of extractive forces is also at work here.

Every day, thousands of miners, loggers, farmers and ranchers burn or cut roughly 10,000 acres of forest, working to satisfy a growing demand for its resources. They are tiny cogs in a global machine that has destroyed nearly one-fifth of the Brazilian rainforest — an area about the size of California — over the last 35 years, driving more than 10,000 plant and animal species toward extinction.

During an extensive reporting trip through three of the Amazon’s most degraded and deforested states, Inside Climate News met with Indigenous leaders, farmers, ranchers, miners, activists and researchers to talk with them about the destruction and why it continues.

The sequence of that destruction in the Amazon has for decades unfolded like this: The loggers come first, often followed by miners who use the inroads that loggers have cut in the jungle. Then ranchers move in and graze on the pasture where the trees stood, and farmers plant soy and corn in those pastures. More recently, demand for soy has become so great that parts of the Amazon and the neighboring Cerrado region, a savanna biome that’s critically important for climate stabilization, are being converted directly to soy. American grain traders, including Cargill, Bunge and ADM, have profited from this escalating demand.

The Amazon is the biggest in a belt of forests that wraps the planet’s midsection. Its soil and vegetation store 150 billion to 200 billion tons of carbon — roughly five times the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions — helping provide a counterweight to global warming.

If the planet loses the Amazon, it will be almost impossible to maintain that balance.

“A vast amount of carbon would be converted from organic matter into carbon dioxide, and that would add to the carbon dioxide we’re already putting into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels,” said Scott Denning, a Colorado State University atmospheric scientist. “That would be a catastrophe for humanity and for everything else.”

For about a decade, beginning in 2009, deforestation rates in Brazil, which contains 60 percent to 70 percent of the rainforest, declined and then stabilized after the government imposed stronger protections. But in 2019, with President Jair Bolsonaro’s election, that trend quickly reversed. Since the right-wing former military captain took office, the annual deforestation rate has increased, rising nearly 60 percent from 2020, according to a Brazilian research institute. Bolsonaro has called recent government data on deforestation a “lie.”

The reversal has been so convincingly tied to Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental policies and rhetoric, his critics say, that advocacy groups, Indigenous tribes and some of the world’s most prominent human rights lawyers believe the president should be prosecuted as a criminal on a par with genocidal dictators or the architects of war crimes.

So far, four complaints against Bolsonaro have been filed with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, accusing him of crimes against humanity. The complaints could help persuade the court to adopt a new crime — ecocide — as the fifth international crime, along with genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and waging illegal war. It would be the first crime to have nature, not humanity, as the victim, and was defined this year by an independent legal panel as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment.”

The complaints to the court will take years to play out. But they bring to the world’s legal stage a longstanding conflict between industries that have exploited the Amazon’s resources and the Indigenous people who’ve lived in the rainforest for millennia.

The outcome of that conflict now has consequences for the entire planet.

Indigenous tribes in the Amazon are on the front lines of the climate battle, and increasingly, scientific research demonstrates that Indigenous land rights are critical for solving the climate crisis. When tribes have clear ownership of their land, the forest remains intact, and otherwise dangerous carbon stays locked away in roots and soils.

“Without the forest, we Indigenous people cannot live and humanity cannot live,” Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui, one tribal leader represented in the complaints, said in an interview at his village in the Sete de Setembro reservation. So, he added, Bolsonaro “is making genocide against the world.”

The Bolsonaro administration did not reply to requests for comment from Inside Climate News.


‘This is what we have to do’

Hundreds of thousands of Jaim Teixeiras live across the Amazon and share a similar story.

As a young man, Teixeira bought some land. Then he bought some more. He got married and had three kids. He built a house with a clay-tile roof and electricity. He now has 140 cattle on 500 acres — small compared to some, but an accomplishment for someone who never went to high school.

Teixeira doesn’t know where his cattle end up. He sells them in town to a man who brings them north to Santarem or Itaituba. His ranch is just one of tens of thousands that provide cattle for the Brazilian meat industry, with JBS — the world’s largest meat company, headquartered in São Paulo — at the top.

Since the 1960s, when government policies pushed the agricultural frontier deeper into the Amazon, the number of cows in Brazil has exploded. Back then, the Amazon was home to about 5 million cows. Today, it has nearly 90 million beef cattle, nearly half of Brazil’s total of more than 200 million, more than any other country in the world. This explosion of cattle, propelled by a demand for burgers and steaks, is the main driver of the Amazon rainforest’s disappearance.

The big Brazilian meat companies — JBS, along with Marfrig and Minerva — have promised to stop buying cattle from deforested land.

A spokeswoman for Marfrig said the company aims to eliminate deforestation throughout its supply chain by 2025 in the Amazon and 2030 in the Cerrado. A spokeswoman for Minerva said “100 percent of purchases made by Minerva Foods are monitored in all operating regions” of Brazil and pointed to a government audit showing high rates of compliance with its deforestation efforts. A spokesman for JBS said the company has “no tolerance for illegal deforestation” and intends to “achieve a completely illegal deforestation-free supply chain by 2025.”

Critics say that these commitments don’t add up to much and that the companies are not taking action fast enough.

Bolsonaro’s anti-environment rhetoric has emboldened ranchers, along with loggers and miners, to clear more rainforest. But burning and cutting virgin forest is still illegal, and federal agencies, though weakened under Bolsonaro, try to punish violators.

For Teixeira and thousands like him, it’s worth the risk. Tomorrow or the day after, when the flames die down, he’ll plant grass seeds in the ashes and soon his cows will graze there.

“We have no education. We don’t have anything,” he said. “This is what we have to do.”
‘This little piece of forest is protected’

When João Cohen moved to his patch of the Amazon 30 years ago, the place was wild and tangled, with no one around. He reached it on foot, walking a narrow path a couple of miles from the main road that leads to the port city of Santarem.

Now his property is an island of trees surrounded by soybean fields. Cohen, 78, spends most of his time these days fending off offers to buy his land.

Image: João Cohen (Larry C. Price for ICN)

“This little piece of forest is protected,” he said, sitting stern-faced on the porch of his bright blue house. “It’s not for sale. It’s not for sale. How many times can I say ‘No’?”

The soybean boom in Brazil has transformed the country into the world’s biggest producer of soy, overtaking the United States. Soybean growers have gobbled up giant swaths of the Amazon and the neighboring Cerrado. Roughly half of the Cerrado has been destroyed, much of it for soy and much of it illegally.

A spokeswoman for ADM said the company does not source its products from any newly deforested areas in the Amazon. A spokeswoman for Cargill said that the company is committed to eliminating deforestation from its supply chains “in the shortest time possible” and that it “will not source from farmers who clear land illegally or in protected areas.” The company has “the same expectations of our suppliers,” she said. Bunge did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but has said in past statements that it will eliminate deforestation from its supply chain by 2025.

Most of Brazil’s soy goes to China — more than $20 billion in sales a year — as animal feed for that country’s ever-expanding hog industry, sold to the Chinese by American companies.

The pressure will only ramp up, experts say. Soy farming across Brazil is predicted to grow even more in the coming years, with new “agricultural frontiers” opening up, especially in the north of the country.

Santarem, near the confluence of the Tapajos and Amazon rivers, sits at the terminus of BR 163 — the so-called Soy Road — which runs 2,200 miles north through the Cerrado and the Amazon basin. In the dry season, from May to October, a disjointed convoy of double-hulled, 90-foot-long tractor-trailers move grain northward along its potholed, deeply rutted surface.

Image: A massive tandem transport truck carrying soybeans north to the Amazon port city of Santarem passes a political sign promoting Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on the “Soybean Highway”—BR 163. (Larry C. Price for ICN)

The road stops at the edge of the Tapajos, where a towering grain terminal built by Cargill shuttles soy off to the rest of the world. The terminal has helped make Santarem a prosperous place, with schools, hospitals and infrastructure — a place where an old man like Cohen might be safer than alone, surrounded by soybean fields. His daughter wants her father to move to the city, away from the pressures of the jungle.

He won’t.

“There’s no way anyone will touch my forest,” he said. “No one will ever buy this land. I’ll scare them off like a lost ghost.”
‘People don’t think of the consequences’

Chief Almir Narayamoga Surui, leader of the Paiter-Surui tribe, emerges from his concrete house into a blaring sunny morning and sits on a bench.

He is holding a basket of worms, called gongo, which he pops into his mouth like peanuts.

Surui is famous, in Brazil and beyond, for his political activism, and he is considered a hero by his people for appealing to government leaders for support that has helped the tribe survive.

Surui connected with a team of Paris-based lawyers last year to file the complaint against Bolsonaro because, he said, he believes the president has steamrolled Indigenous rights and weakened environmental protections.

“The government has an important role to guarantee the future,” he said. “If the government doesn’t accept this duty, it’s an ecocide.”

Image: Chief Almir Narayamoga Suruí, along with another prominent Indigenous leader, Raoni Matuktire, asked the International Criminal Court in January to investigate President Jair Bolsonaro for committing crimes against humanity. (Larry C. Price for ICN)

Surui is not just angry at Bolsonaro, who, he says, has opened the door to more agribusiness, mining and logging on public and Indigenous land. He is also angry with the corporations that are taking advantage of Bolsonaro’s leniency and funding lobbying groups that are pushing laws to dismantle Indigenous and environmental protections.

“Illegal things happen because there’s a big market. Business gives us profit right away,” Surui said. “People don’t think of the consequences.”

He said he hopes the international court, by making ecocide a crime, can step in, but he knows the court moves slowly.

“I know it will take a long time and I don’t have much hope,” he said. “But I know with this filing the world will learn how unhappy we are with Brazilian politics.”

Walking through the rainforest surrounding the village, he points out a huge tract of forest that was burned by loggers in 2019, in retaliation for the tribe’s resistance to their trespassing. Now coffee, manioc, cupuacu and cacao plants grow there.

“It’s possible to produce responsibly,” he said. “We don’t need to deforest another inch of the Amazon.”
‘The dream of all miners’

Odacir “Gringo” Leseux has gone to jail three times for mining illegally in the Amazon rainforest.

“They caught me with diamonds in my hands.” he said, matter of factly. “But that was my job.”

In a suede-brimmed hat, polo shirt and jean shorts, Leseux looks like someone who used to bet on greyhounds at a dog track. Like someone who relies on a little luck.

“Mining is an illusion,” he said. “You only make coins, but you talk about millions. That’s the dream of all miners. It’s all about dreams.”

Image: Odacir

Leseux is traveling along a road called the Transgarimpeira, or “Trans-miners,” that stretches west off the BR 163, about a 20-hour drive northeast of the Surui territory. He has mined here for years, and like thousands of small-scale miners — known as wildcat miners or “garimpeiros” — he has no plans to stop looking for gems in the rainforest.

In the last several years, an Amazon gold rush has led to more incursions on tribal lands. One recent study found that about 30 percent of the gold mined in Brazil is extracted illegally, and from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2020, new mining areas destroyed more than 80 square miles of forest. A bill introduced by Bolsonaro would allow more mining on Indigenous land and, if it passes the Brazilian Congress, researchers estimate deforestation could rise another 20 percent.

“Bolsonaro’s father was a wildcat miner,” said Raoni Rajão, a researcher with the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and a co-author of the study. “He has this perception that wildcat miners are entrepreneurs and heroes.”

Mining doesn’t drive the same high levels of deforestation as soy or cattle, Rajão noted, but it poisons water and is leading to escalating conflicts with Indigenous tribes. “You have violence, the suffering of the Indigenous population,” he said. “That’s the most concerning issue.”

Leseux was a farmer, planting soy and rice, for a little while, but he was lured into gold and diamonds in the late 1980s. Sometimes he wishes he’d stuck with farming, he said.

“I know if I had never left grains, I’d be a rich man today,” he said.

But the thrill of illicit mining is now in his blood.

“It’s a huge adrenaline high,” he said. “All the time you’re running from the police. But then you get far into the forest and you’re free.”
‘They’re stealing’

Chief Munduruku rides down the Tapajos river in a jon boat, through the valley his ancestors have lived in for hundreds of years. A cluster of machetes rests in the boat’s bow. The chief, his wife and a few relatives sit in the back, drinking coffee from a thermos.

They make outings like this every once in a while, to check on the tribe’s lands, which occupy thousands of acres on either side of the river, a major tributary of the Amazon.

Over the last 10 years or so, more miners and loggers have crept in, setting up camps and digging for gold or gems, or coming with chainsaws, taking a mahogany tree here, an ipe tree there, eating into the rainforest like termites. The river, unpolluted seven or eight years ago, is now filled with silt, churned up by barges dredging for gold. The water feels and looks like milky tea.

Image: Chief Juarez Munduruku tests his bow while riding along the Rio Jamanxim to check on reports of illegal timber cutting on tribal lands. (Larry C Price for ICN)

“The destruction — we know it’s going on everywhere,” the chief said before the excursion. “Deforestation is coming from one side, fire from the other.”

The boat arrives at the river’s edge. A man approaches, saying he’s there to gather supplies from a camp about 30 miles (50 kilometers) away. He apologizes to the chief for being on his land. Later, they see the contents of the man’s pickup truck: a chainsaw, engine oil, diesel and salt, used to preserve food during long stays. At the base of some trees nearby is a stack of palm hearts — harvested illegally.

The chief is a mild-mannered man, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair that suggests business. But as his boat pulls away from the landing, his normally placid face turns cloudy. He bites down on a macaw feather-turned-toothpick that twitches angrily in his teeth.

“They’re stealing,” he said.

One of the complaints filed with the international court says that there have been 41 recent incursions into Munduruku lands, which have been “subject to an evident increase in violations by wildcat miners, palm-hear(t) gatherers and loggers, encouraged by President Jair Bolsonaro.”

Munduruku was appointed chief in 1999 and is now in his early 60s. He’s the father of eight, grandfather of 22.

“I miss my family a lot. My grandkids,” he said, talking about his travels. “The sounds of the howler monkeys in the morning, the birds. I get truly homesick for my people. The wildlife surrounding the tribe — the tapirs, hogs, paca. We see things, we don’t even know what they are. All this is the Amazon for me.”

Image: Trucks hauling cut timber legally must have license tags visible on the ends of the logs. The driver of this truck confirmed that his load of hardwoods is illegal and without the required tags. (Larry C. Price for ICN)

Loggers or miners who cut the forest often insist that the trees will grow back. Bolsonaro makes the same argument: The forest is renewable and will bounce back from “economic utilization.”

Science says otherwise. The towering hardwoods will take centuries to reach their full height. One square yard of rainforest might contain seven or eight tree species, millions of microbes, countless insect and animal species that depend on a network of interactions with the vegetation, rainfall and soil that has evolved over millions of years.

It is infinitely complex and interconnected.

“If it’s deforested, the forest will grow back again,” Munduruku said. “But not like it was.”

Photography by Larry C. Price

COLORADO

Boulder County says new oil and gas requirements shared Friday fail climate goals

Kelsey Hammon, Daily Times-Call, Longmont, Colo.
Sun, December 19, 2021

Dec. 19—Colorado's oil and gas industry will have to abide by new measures to reduce pollution and stop emissions leaks, following an Air Quality Control Commission revision announced Friday. But, Boulder County leaders said the requirements aren't enough to make sure the state will meet its climate goals.

The new revisions to Colorado's Leak Detection and Repair program require more frequent inspections and more prompt repairs to stop leaks at compressor stations and well production facilities. However, according to a Boulder County news release, the commission declined to approve stronger provisions proposed by state air quality experts or to strengthen provisions for pneumatic controllers, devices that open and close valves at production sites to regulate temperature and pressure.

While the new regulations will help move the state toward the goals set by HB21-1266, a 2021 environmental justice law, they fall short of the target to reduce emissions by 60% by 2030, the release said.

Cindy Copeland, Boulder County air and climate policy analyst, said in an email to the Camera on Saturday that the new requirements will mean increased leak detection and repair frequencies for more sites in the county. Previously, many smaller wells were only inspected once in their lifetime under state law, according to the release.

Boulder County's own inspection program data show that wells leak repeatedly, and frequent inspections are critical to reducing methane emissions, the release said.

While Copeland said there are no compressor stations in Boulder County, there are many across the state. Copeland said all well sites in the county do use pneumatic controllers.

"By design, these controllers bleed a certain amount of oil and gas because they open and close to do such things as release pressure," Copeland wrote. "Environmental Defense Fund's alternate proposal for pneumatics, that the Air Quality Control Commission did not approve but we strongly supported, would have required retrofits with nonemitting pneumatics."

As far as the timeline for implementation, Copeland wrote, the regulations have different implementation dates.

"Increased leak detection and repair at well sites will begin January 2023, and most other requirements will start in 2023, with some reporting requirements starting June 2022," Copeland wrote.

In a phone interview Saturday, Boulder County Commissioner Matt Jones said he wasn't satisfied with the requirements.

"It's going to mean some direct controls, and they're going to have to inspect more often for leaks, which is positive," Jones said. "But, it falls far short. They didn't do the frequency that needed to be inspected. They didn't do the amount of controllers."

Jones said more is needed to strengthen regulations and reduce pollution from oil and gas operations. He emphasized there is "no time to waste."

"I think there will be a little more (accountability), but they need a lot more, though," Jones said. "Our research that we have done here, shows that (wells) leak a lot, and they continue to leak even after they're fixed. It's an industry that thinks it's great to pollute, and they play with methane, which is climate gas on steroids. They play with benzene and other chemicals that are precursors of ozone."

In the news release, Boulder County Commissioner Marta Loachamin echoed this, saying the county has already experienced climate change impacts, including wildfires, flash flooding and extreme heat.

"The county has estimated that responding to only some of the potential effects of the climate crisis across Boulder County through 2050 will cost upwards of $157 million," Loachamin said. "We need improved controls on the oil and gas industry to help local governments that are struggling to deal with the ill effects of the climate crisis and poor air quality."

Boulder County Commissioner Claire Levy said in the release that the Air Quality Control Commission, "chose to weaken the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment proposal and did not adopt suggested requirements for pneumatic controllers."

The Colorado Oil and Gas Association, the regulatory voice for the oil and natural gas industry, responded to the requirements in an American Petroleum Institute news release.

Dan Haley, Colorado Oil and Gas Association president and CEO, highlighted the cost the changes will bring to the industry.

"Colorado's oil and natural gas workers have made incredible strides meeting our air emission goals, making our state one of the cleanest energy producers in the world," Haley said in the release. "But to maintain that mantle, we need cost-effective rules rooted in science. The innovations and commitment proven by Colorado's oil and natural gas workers will make these rules work, but make no mistake, the adopted rules will still add as much as $140 million per year to the cost of doing business, according to state estimates. That's on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars added after last year's rulemakings. These excessive costs threaten economic growth and competitiveness and will add to the rising energy costs faced by consumers domestically and abroad."

In Boulder County, methane and ozone precursor pollutants have been monitored at the Boulder Reservoir since 2017. The county's news release said that data from the site and modeling studies show air quality is heavily influenced by oil and gas development to the northeast. Similar patterns of influence from oil and gas have been noted in data collection by Broomfield and Longmont. This provides further proof that this industry contributes to high ozone levels and greenhouse gas emissions in the area, the release said.

Those interested in learning more about Boulder County's sustainability and climate action mission can contact Christian Herrmann, climate communication specialist, at cherrmann@bouldercounty.org.

U.S. to close border wall gaps and clean up Trump-era work sites

Camilo Montoya-Galvez
Mon, December 20, 2021, 12:51 PM·4 min read

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Monday it will use border security funding allocated by Congress to close wall gaps and pay for environmental and clean-up projects in areas of Arizona, California and Texas affected by barrier construction undertaken by the Trump administration.

The projects authorized by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas include installing drainage to prevent flooding, mitigating soil erosion, completing roads used by Border Patrol agents, demobilizing construction and equipment storage sites and discarding unused materials.

Mayorkas also authorized U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to erect barriers to close "small" gaps along some wall sections that were left open when construction was brought to a halt in January, saying the measures are necessary to mitigate safety concerns.

"There will be several places where barrier material will be used," a senior CBP official told CBS News. "We would say that that's existing barrier right there that we are addressing, like an open, unsafe construction situation, versus adding additional mileage, which would be adding new barrier."

The work will also include fixing and completing wall gates, including ones used by Border Patrol to rescue migrants trapped in irrigation canals. Citing pending site assessments, the CBP official, who requested anonymity to discuss the plans, said the overall cost for the new projects has not yet been determined.

Normandy fencing fills a gap in the border wall on the Johnson Ranch near Columbus, New Mexico, on Monday, April 12, 2021. / Credit: Bill Clark 

NORMANDY AS IN D DAY NORMANDY LANDING

The new construction and clean-up projects will take place in areas of the U.S.-Mexico border where the Army Corps of Engineers had been tasked to help build former President Donald Trump's wall. The corps is terminating wall construction contracts so DHS can assume control of the unfinished construction sites.

The projects approved by Mayorkas are part of a broader Biden administration plan to wind down the sprawling Trump-era border wall construction effort, which became one of the most expensive federal infrastructure projects in U.S. history.

Mr. Trump, who made construction of a border wall one of his main political aims, secured $15 billion to finance the project, most of which came from diverted military counternarcotics and infrastructure accounts. His administration ultimately built over 450 miles of border barriers, most of which replaced existing barricades.

On the campaign trail, President Biden criticized the border wall project as ineffective and wasteful, vowing that his administration would not erect "another foot" of barriers.

Hours after his inauguration, Mr. Biden ordered a halt to border wall construction and ended the national emergency his predecessor declared to divert military funds. Since then, his administration has been returning billions of unused Pentagon funds, many of which were initially allocated to finance construction at bases in the U.S. and overseas.

But Congress also allocated $6 billion for border barrier construction between fiscal years 2018 and 2021, complicating Mr. Biden's campaign pledge.

The Biden administration has urged Congress to cancel the unused funds, but has said that in the interim, it will focus on using the money to "address urgent life, safety, and environmental issues resulting from the previous Administration's wall construction."

Earlier this year, the administration announced it would use the money appropriated by Congress to repair a flood levee system in Texas' Rio Grande Valley and stabilize soil erosion at a wall construction site near San Diego. In July, Mayorkas also approved the repair of border barriers in San Diego.

Piles of unused border fence sit at one of the border wall construction staging areas on the Johnson Ranch near Columbus, N.M., on Monday, April 12, 2021. / Credit: Bill Clark

The projects announced Monday will take place within the Border Patrol sectors in San Diego and El Centro, California; Yuma and Tucson, Arizona; and El Paso and Del Rio, Texas. Work near El Paso, Tucson and Yuma will focus on closing wall gaps, adding gates and fixing barrier foundations, DHS said.

Work on the new projects is expected to commence during the first quarter of 2022, starting in the Tucson sector, CBP officials said. DHS said it will "work closely" with local, tribal and state officials, landowners and other federal agencies as it begins the projects.

"The Administration continues to call on Congress to cancel remaining border wall funding and instead fund smarter border security measures that are proven to be more effective at improving safety and security at the border," DHS said in a statement Monday.

The Biden administration's decision to stop most border barrier construction and terminate Trump-era contracts has faced criticism from congressional Republicans, who have tied the moves to the record number of migrant apprehensions this past fiscal year.

During a November hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn asked Mayorkas to explain "why a wall is effective and necessary at the White House and the Biden beach house but is not necessary at the southern border."

Mayorkas said the "key" to ensure border security is advanced surveillance technology, citing the "tremendous expanse" of the nearly 2,000 mile-long U.S.-Mexico border.

"We're not going to construct a border wall on the ragged and jagged cliffs in certain parts of the border," Mayorkas added.

CALIFORNIA

History: Little-known desert history of the Bradshaw Trail

Tracy Conrad
Sun, December 19, 2021

A portion of the Bradshaw Trail near Indio circa 1910.

The humble contribution of a scarce book by Francis J. Johnston entitled “The Bradshaw Trail” to the Palm Springs Historical Society was important. The book preserves a largely unknown part of the history of the Coachella Valley. Thoughtfully gifted by Bud Hoover — who has contributed to the entire desert in myriad ways, small and large — the little volume chronicles the taming of a daunting expanse of land, the New Mexico and Arizona Territories, which separated civilization on the East Coast and the emerging settlements of Southern California at the end of the 19th century.

Johnston explains it was “wild, barren and lonely, consisting of endless desert and great mountains. The white man found the land inhospitable and repelling. They looked upon its Indian cultures and civilizations as exotic, unpredictable and often very efficiently warlike.”

For centuries, the land was traversed by Indian tribes. The Spanish began colonizing it in the very early 17th century, unbeknownst to the fledgling settlers at Plymouth Rock. But the unforgiving desert prohibited any real connection or travel between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and San Bernardino, California, until enterprising frontiersmen blazed a trail.

Johnston explains: “By the 1820s this virtual ‘no-man’s land’ — free abode of the aboriginal American — was being penetrated by scouts and explorers of the eastern seaboard civilization. ... mountain men and trappers wandered into and out of Arizona, following no real route. A few ... came on to California and settled there under the Mexican regime. After the war with Mexico, still more Americans made their precarious way into this land which was without government and scarcely had legal status as part of the United States.”

The discovery of gold in Northern California made for through traffic en route to the gold fields. Southern cities promoted the overland passage for the commerce it brought along with it. According to Johnston: “New Orleans, Shreveport, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Houston, Texas, all encouraged or sent parties overland to California by the southern route” from Santa Fe westward following old wagon trails.

But in early 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, the New Mexico and Arizona territories were a wild, untamed land.

William Bradshaw had come to California in the Gold Rush of 1849 to find his fortune. Realizing that the strike was playing out, in June 1862 he gathered a party of adventurers and headed eastward from Los Angeles to a rumored new discovery of gold in La Paz ahead of what he anticipated would be another rush for gold and the boom that might make him wealthy.

Johnston writes that the effect was to “awaken this virtually undisturbed giant of raw wealth. The route they followed, the trail they broke, has become firmly and rightfully named The Bradshaw Trail. From its inception, central Arizona became accessible to California. By 1864 the California connection had been extended eastward into New Mexico. By the end of the Civil War, the link was complete to the eastern states. Bradshaw had, in fact, opened Arizona and joined it to the United States.”

The route began in San Bernardino, California, through great Banning plateau that included Highland Springs, Gilman Ranch and Whitewater, through the San Gorgonio Pass to Agua Caliente, current day Palm Springs. Bradshaw established stagecoach stations every 15 to 30 miles or so.

“Palm Springs, called Sexhi by the Cahuilla and Agua Caliente by the Spaniard and Mexican, had an important stop built of adobe ...”

The earliest accounts mark the next stop at Sand Hole, an unreliable watering spot on the trail beyond Agua Caliente in what is now Palm Desert.

The route trekked eastward toward Point Happy. “Indian Wells was just that. First called Old Rancheria on the maps, it was originally a Cahuilla village, and the present name developed from the known presence of a deep well dug there by the Indians ... where a permanent station was built of stone and adobe.”

Probing further eastward to the Salton sink, the depression that would become a sea by the escape of the Colorado river from its banks some four decades later, Bradshaw was befriended by Cabazon a Cahuilla chief and a visiting Maricopa Indian from Arizona who shared their knowledge of the ancient trade routes through the Colorado Desert and the location of springs and water holes, where Bradshaw would establish stations.

From the sink, Bradshaw pressed on. “Meandering on around the jutting Santa Rosas the road reached Toro Spring at the mouth of Toro Canyon. This area was heavily occupied by Desert Cahuilla, and their villages were found throughout it. Cabazon lived here. ... Another permanent station was established here. ... It is listed as Toro Mail Station in one table. The name Martinez, that applies to part of the Indian Reservation which includes this section came from Martin’s House, a part of Toro Village ...” The road went on to “Palma Seca, a place of bitter water that could not be used for men or teams” recorded as "Bitter Spring" on some maps.

The trail continued through the Orocopia and Chocolate Mountains to Dos Palmas, a lush oasis a few miles east and south of Palma Seca. “It has been in use as a way point since prehistoric times. The ancient Cahuilla-Maricopa trail passes through this grove as it follows the mesas and desert pavement from Tucson to San Bernardino Valley. From the abundance of artifacts and potsherd still scattered through the swamp grass and among the gravel on the periphery of the grove, it appears that the early Cahuilla not only passed through but often stayed in semipermanent camp.”

Further, Canyon Spring, Chuckwalla Well, Mule Spring, Laguna and Willow Spring station stops were established until the arduous trail finally encountered the mighty Colorado River. Here, Bradshaw built a ferry to shuttle gold miners across the river. On Nov. 7, 1864, the territorial legislature permitted the ferry to charge $4 for a wagon and two horses, $3 for a carriage and 1 horse, $1 for saddle horse, $.50 for a man afoot, $.50 per head for cattle and horses, $.25 per head for sheep.

Two-hundred fifty miles east of Los Angeles in La Paz there was gold. The inevitable exodus of miners and fortune-seekers from Northern California would now follow, availing themselves of Bradshaw’s trail, stagecoach and ferry. Other companies, like Wells Fargo, leisure travelers and traders in all sorts of goods began using the trail and, having no alternative, were obliged to use Bradshaw’s expensive ferry service across the river.

By 1870, the gold at La Paz was pretty well exhausted, but the trail remained a vital connection through the southwest desert. Much of the route would be paralleled by the interstate highway in the 20th century, speeding motorists from Blythe to Los Angeles, blissfully unaware of the fortitude and ingenuity it took to find the way.

To explore a bit of the unpaved trail and cultivate an appreciation for the remarkable feat of William Bradford, hire on Evan Trubee of Big Wheel Tours, bwbtours.com, for a special outing on the very desert Bradshaw traversed and tamed.

Tracy Conrad is president of the Palm Springs Historical Society. The Thanks for the Memories column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun. Write to her at pshstracy@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: History: Little-known desert history of the Bradshaw Trail