AY, THERE'S THE RUB

Rich countries still don’t want to pay their climate change tab

More money is on the table at the Glasgow climate conference, but it’s not enough.

Climate activists protest at the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference on November 8, 2021, in Glasgow, Scotland. 

Alastair Grant/AP

By Umair Irfan Nov 11, 2021,

Climate change has a central injustice: The parts of the world that contribute the least to global warming stand to suffer the most as temperatures climb.

Rising sea levels, hotter heat waves, and more frequent torrential downpours disproportionately hammer low-lying coastal areas, islands, tropics, and deserts that are home to people who historically haven’t burned that much coal, oil, or natural gas. The slow and acute impacts of climate change are already destroying homes, forcing migrations, and taking lives, particularly in countries that have few resources to begin with. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the most vulnerable countries to climate change include Haiti, Myanmar, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and the Bahamas.

Meanwhile, major producers and consumers of fossil energy, like the United States, have become the wealthiest countries in the world. That wealth also means more government and private resources to respond to a warming world, whether by building infrastructure to withstand higher tides, managing forests to reduce severe wildfires, or compensating citizens for their flood-ruined homes.

That inequity is the undercurrent of the United Nations’ ongoing COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland. The meeting is an opportunity for major polluters and those suffering from the effects to sit across from one another — and the countries bearing the brunt of global warming say that addressing this central injustice must be at the core of any climate agreement. Otherwise, hopes of reaching concordance on other key climate issues could fall apart.

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“The largest share of the historical emissions originated in developed countries,” Diego Pacheco Balanza, head of the Bolivian delegation to COP26, told reporters Thursday. “So there is a historical responsibility of developed countries and [industrialized] countries to deal with the climate crisis.”

The most concrete way to fulfill this responsibility is to pay for it. And some wealthy countries at COP26 have said they will — to an extent, at least, and in principle.

“The countries most responsible for historic[al] and present-day emissions are not yet doing their fair share of the work,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said at the start of the summit.

The actions so far, however, are still lacking. “There were a lot of very positive statements,” said Janine Felson, deputy head of the Belize delegation and an adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States, a negotiating bloc of 39 island and low-lying countries. “What we are seeing, though, in the [negotiating] room is very different. It’s more business as usual, so rhetoric and deed are far apart.”

At COP26, several governments — including the US and the UK — have announced additional funding to aid low-income countries in transitioning toward clean energy, as well as more cash to help them cope with the unavoidable losses from climate change.

But the amount of money on the table still doesn’t meet past commitments, and it’s not enough to cover the enormous changes that are needed, negotiators from developing countries say.

Without settling the money issue, COP26 negotiations on other matters — trading carbon credits, phasing out fossil fuels, timelines for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — could stall or fall apart. “Climate finance is the glue that brings a package together at the end of a COP,” Richie Merzian, director of the climate and energy program at the Australia Institute, told reporters Thursday.

With the talks heading into their final day, the pressure is on wealthy governments to contribute more money toward global efforts to lower emissions. “My message to donor countries is very, very clear: Without adequate finance, the task ahead is nigh impossible,” said Alok Sharma, president of COP26.

Rich countries still aren’t meeting their commitments on climate finance

At the 2009 COP15 meeting in Copenhagen, wealthy countries set a target of pooling $100 billion by 2020 to help less wealthy countries adapt to changes in the climate already underway as well as to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The money, from public institutions like governments rather than private banks, would be deployed as a mix of loans, investments, and grants across initiatives from decarbonizing power generation to building seawalls.

The target was missed. The last tally shows that $79.6 billion in international climate financing was awarded in 2019. Now the goal post is 2023 for the $100 billion goal, given the current pace of commitments.

Negotiators in developing countries have been pushing to close that gap even faster and want the final agreement from the COP26 meeting to highlight their “serious concern” that the amount of financing available is not enough to cope with what’s needed to cope with climate change. They also want the text to emphasize that wealthy countries are required to contribute more money to climate financing programs.

“Finance is not the charity of developed countries to the developing world,” Pacheco Balanza said. “Finance is an obligation.”

At the same time, there are immense financial to mitigating climate change. One estimate found that shifting the global economy toward sustainable energy would save the world $26 trillion by 2030. But the costs of mitigating climate change and the benefits often accrue to different people, and it’s proven difficult to leverage that in negotiations.

Now, some developing countries now say they need vastly more money to meet their goals. India, the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, committed at COP26 to reaching net-zero emissions by 2070. But it says it wants $1 trillion in international climate financing by 2030 to meet its goal. African governments have said that climate finance funding should reach $1.3 trillion per year by 2030.

It’s likely that the $100 billion funding target will be solidified at COP26 with the momentum underway. However, it’s unlikely these far greater demands will be considered, given that parties to the Paris agreement failed to meet a much smaller objective on time.

Who will pay for climate devastation in the most vulnerable and poorest places?

Many of the talks at COP26 focus on climate change mitigation — what countries will do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, what their targets should be, when they should reach them, and what tactics count toward their goals.

But the world has already warmed up by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to global average temperatures before the industrial revolution, and that warming is already having effects. Global sea levels, for instance, have already risen 8 to 9 inches, leading to more devastating storm surges.

Dealing with the changes in climate already underway is a high priority for countries like island nations seeing their land swallowed up by rising seas and seeing disasters amplified with more rainfall and higher heat.

In COP-speak, this is known as loss and damage. There is a mechanism for dealing with this under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, building on an earlier framework known as the Warsaw International Mechanism. One estimate found that loss and damage from climate change would cost the world between $290 and $580 billion a year by 2030. And losses can go beyond those that are easily priced, like cultural heritage and ecosystems degraded by rising average temperatures.

The trouble is, there isn’t a set goal for how much money should be allocated to loss and damage, who is required to chip in and by when, and how that money should be distributed. And crucially, loss and damage has been largely excluded from discussions around climate finance.

“We heard a lot of about solidarity [from wealthy countries] for the losses and damages in our experiences,” said Felson. “But if, in the finance room, I raise loss and damage, I hear that it’s a red line. We can’t talk about life and damage in finance [discussions].”

For countries like Belize, the goal is to have a system that doesn’t respond to climate-related disasters and damages on a one-off basis like an emergency relief fund. Rather, they want a systematic approach that delivers consistent money not only in wake of hurricanes and wildfires, but for slow-moving problems like the decline of barrier reefs and falling crop yields.

On Thursday, Scotland announce that it would contribute £2 million to a loss and damage fund, making it the first country to chip in.

Money has also been allocated at COP26 to indirect measures that relate to loss and damage. Twelve donor governments pledged $413 million in new funding for the Least Developed Countries Fund, which helps countries like Gambia and Togo cope with the effects of climate change. The UN’s Adaptation Fund also announced it raised $351.6 in new pledges.

One of the big obstacles though is that wealthy countries do not want any language in a loss and damage agreement that hints that they are liable for climate change. Some are already pushing back against the loss and damage language in the draft agreement.

“With wealthy countries, it’s always a fear of some kind of reparations framework coming out which will impose higher and higher costs,” said Rachel Kyte, an advisor to the climate negotiations and dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “They’re prepared to talk about today and tomorrow. They don’t want to talk about yesterday.”

Negotiators for countries facing the brunt of climate impacts now say they at least want to get the ball rolling on paying for current climate destruction. They are calling for language in the COP26 agreement to create a dedicated funding mechanism for loss and damage and give it long-term stability.

But as the negotiations head into their final day with so many outstanding issues, loss and damage may once again end up shelved until the next COP.

4 Theses on Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Imperialism

ruthlesscriticism.com/rosa.htm

• 1. The expansion of capital over the globe – because of its growth or its growth difficulties? Rosa …
  2. Capitalism and imperialism – incompatible with the complete world market? For Luxemburg, the not …
  3. The violence of imperialism is not the act of the capitals but of the capitalist state, which forces its …
  4. The separation of business and force gives momentum to both! The organization of inter-state …

Rosa Luxemburg – Her analysis of Imperialism and her ...

https://kapacc.blog.rosalux.de/files/2014/02/Finished-ee-230412-Ros… · PDF file

(for the latter, see Krätke 2011a). Rosa Luxemburg was a trained economist, very well acquainted with political economy. What is more, she belonged to the relatively small group of people who actually had studied Marx’ Capital, all three volumes of it, and a lot more. Like Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg did make several contributions to a critical and

2050 is too late, we need to address climate change: Expert

The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased. At the same time, climate change has contributed to an increase in drought in many regions.

Published: 13th November 2021 


For representational purposes
By Express News Service

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole, and present state of many aspects of the climate system, are unprecedented over many centuries.

The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have increased. At the same time, climate change has contributed to an increase in drought in many regions. IPCC further concluded that more regions will be affected by drought due to global warming, and a larger fraction of land will also be affected by an increase in floods. In India, a large per cent of rural population depends on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, fisheries, animal husbandry and forest biodiversity.

Mitigation and adaptation are two actions to address climate change. Mitigation involving reducing carbon dioxide emissions and achieving Net Zero emissions by 2050 were debated at COP in Glasgow, to keep global warming within 1.5 deg C by the end of the century, which is agreed under the Paris Agreement. Even if this is achieved, which is highly unlikely, the benefits of stabilising warming below 1.5 deg C will be seen several decades later. But farmers, fishermen, forest dwellers, coastal communities, communities living in flood and drought-prone areas are already facing the adverse impacts.

The impacts will only intensify in the next 5 to 10 to 20 years, leading to increased loss and damage to food production, water resources and infrastructure, so farmers, fishermen and forest dwellers cannot wait for the world to reach Net Zero by 2050.

Measures and actions have to be taken now, urgently. We need to develop a good understanding of risks and impacts of projected climate change in the next 10 to 30 years on food production, water availability, forest fire, health, infrastructure, etc. Develop climate resilient agricultural and water management practices, provide early warning systems and weather forecasts on droughts, floods and cyclones at panchayat level, develop disease monitoring and surveillance systems, build climate-resilient and climate-proof infrastructure. The critical aspect of addressing climate change is the speed and urgency of action, and any delay will make it more expensive to address the adverse impacts.

Prof N H RAVINDRANATH
Professor (Retd), Centre for Sustainable Technologies (CST), Indian Institute of Science

Diamond hauled from deep inside Earth holds never-before-seen mineral

Harry Baker 

Within a diamond hauled from deep beneath Earth's surface, scientists have discovered the first example of a never-before-seen mineral.

© Provided by Live Science Researchers discovered the mineral davemaoite 

inside a diamond that was formed in Earth's mantle.

Named davemaoite after prominent geophysicist Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, the mineral is the first example of a high-pressure calcium silicate perovskite (CaSiO3) found on Earth. Another form of CaSiO3, known as wollastonite, is commonly found across the globe, but davemaoite has a crystalline structure that forms only under high pressure and high temperatures in Earth's mantle, the mainly solid layer of Earth trapped between the outer core and the crust.

Davemaoite has long been expected to be an abundant and geochemically important mineral in Earth's mantle. But scientists have never found any direct evidence of its existence because it breaks down into other minerals when it moves toward the surface and pressure decreases. However, analysis of a diamond from Botswana, which formed in the mantle around 410 miles (660 kilometers) below Earth's surface, has revealed a sample of intact davemaoite trapped inside. As a result, the International Mineralogical Association has now confirmed davemaoite as a new mineral.

"The discovery of davemaoite came as a surprise," lead author Oliver Tschauner, a mineralogist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Live Science.

Tschauner and his colleagues uncovered the davemaoite sample with a technique known as synchrotron X-ray diffraction, which focuses a high-energy beam of X-rays on certain spots within the diamond with microscopic precision. By measuring the angle and intensity of the returning light, researchers can decipher what's inside, Tschauner said. The sample of davemaoite within the diamond was just a few micrometers (millionths of a meter) in size, so less-powerful sampling techniques would have missed it, he added.

Davemaoite is believed to play an important geochemical role in Earth's mantle. Scientists theorize that the mineral may also contain other trace elements, including uranium and thorium, which release heat via radioactive decay. Therefore, davemaoite may help to generate a substantial amount of heat in the mantle, Tschauner said.

In a 2014 study published in the journal Science, researchers described another theoretical high-pressure mineral from the mantle, known as bridgmanite. However, the sample of bridgmanite did not originate from the mantle but rather inside a meteorite. The discovery of davemaoite shows that diamonds can form farther down in the mantle than previously thought, and it suggests that they might be the best place to look for more new minerals from the mantle, Tschauner said.

"The work by Tschauner et al. inspires hope in the discovery of other difficult high-pressure phases in nature," Yingwei Fe, a geophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study, said in a related Science article. "Such direct sampling of the inaccessible lower mantle would fill our knowledge gap in chemical composition of the entire mantle of our planet."

The study was published online Nov. 11 in the journal Science.

Originally published on Live Science.

Introducing Davemaoite: A Groundbreaking Mineral Discovery Named After Trailblazing Carnegie Geophysicist

Friday, November 12, 2021




Washington, DC—The first-ever silicate mineral recovered from the Earth’s lower mantle has been named after emeritus Carnegie scientist Ho-kwang “Dave” Mao, an experimental geophysicist whose work redefined our understanding of how materials behave under the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found inside Earth and other planets.

A team led by the University of Nevada Las Vegas’ Oliver Tschauner reported the discovery in Science this week and Carnegie’s Yingwei Fei wrote an accompanying essay in the same issue, contextualizing the importance of the work and the significance of the chosen name—davemaoite.

In 1976 Mao and colleagues were the first to bring materials to a million times atmospheric pressure, doubling the previous pressure limit. This momentous breakthrough transformed our understanding of the chemistry of Earth’s interior and behavior of materials under extreme pressure. Over a career spanning five decades he continually redefined the boundaries of pressure at which materials could be probed, and his discoveries had implications for understanding the chemistry and physics occurring deep below Earth’s surface, our planet’s evolutionary history, the interior dynamics of distant worlds, and materials science.

“This honor is a fitting tribute given the profound impact Dave’s work has had throughout the geosciences,” said Earth and Planets Laboratory Director Richard Carlson. “His contributions have shaped our understanding of our world and now a piece of the world will forever bear his name.”

Many materials that form under extreme pressures cannot retain their structures when brought to ambient conditions, which is what makes this discovery so exciting. Davemaoite, which was discovered encased inside a super-deep diamond, is only the second high-pressure mantle silicate ever seen on Earth’s surface. The other, named after Nobel laureate Percy Bridgman, was found inside a meteorite.

“The two form an exclusive club as the only lower-mantle silicate minerals confirmed in nature.” Fei said.

An illustration of the two pathways for obtaining high-pressure materials in nature—from mantle rocks that rise from the deep interior and as the result of meteorites crashing to Earth at breakneck speeds. Image is courtesy of Yingwei Fei.Together davemaoite and bridgmanite represent two distinct pathways for obtaining high-pressure materials in nature—from mantle rocks that rise from the deep interior and as the result of meteorites violently crashing to Earth at breakneck speeds. Laboratory scientists at Carnegie’s Earth and Planets Laboratory recreate both deep mantle conditions and the shock compression of a meteorite strike using a variety of research techniques that involve presses, anvils, and lasers.

The International Mineralogical Association’s Commission of New Minerals, Nomenclature, and Classification approved the davemaoite name. Minerals can only be properly named after their discovery in nature—even long-theorized or laboratory produced materials More than 50 minerals have been named in honor of Carnegie scientists, including hazenite, found in California’s Mono Lake, after current faculty member Robert Hazen. Earlier this year, a mineral found in a meteorite that originated on Mars was named feiite in honor of Fei.

“The discovery of davemaoite inspires hope for finding other difficult high-pressure mineral phases in nature,” Fei said. “Being able to obtain more direct samples from the inaccessible lower mantle would fill in our knowledge gap regarding the chemical composition and variability of our planet’s depths.”

Scientific Area:
Earth & Planetary Science
Reference to Person:
Yingwei Fei
Reference to Department:
Earth and Planets Laboratory
News Topic:
Earth/Planetary Science

Leader of cult-like Jewish sect that fled Canada is convicted of nighttime kidnap of child bride

They used burner phones, an encrypted phone app, disguises, aliases, false passports, and a secret pact to execute their plan

Author of the article: Adrian Humphreys
Publishing date: Nov 12, 2021 

Mayer Rosner in 2013.

 PHOTO BY DAVE CHIDLEY FOR NATIONAL POST

Two members of an extremist sect, including the group’s spokesman when they lived in Canada, were convicted in New York of kidnapping and child sexual exploitation.

Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner were found guilty of masterminding the kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl and her 12-year-old brother from their mother, who had fled the Lev Tahor compound in Guatemala, to return the girl to her adult “husband.”

Rosner, 45, was the genial but guarded spokesman for the Lev Tahor when 200 members of their sect left their homes in Quebec and settled on the outskirts of Chatham, Ont., east of Windsor.

“Everything is written upstairs,” Rosner said, pointing skyward, in an exclusive interview with National Post in 2013 , when he was asked about the group’s battles with child protection workers.

A U.S. jury found this harrowing plot was crafted closer to earth.

The Lev Tahor were founded in Israel in the 1980s by Helbrans’ father, Shlomo Helbrans, who built a cult-like sect on fringe beliefs and practices with an austere lifestyle and manner of dress, even by the usual standards of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, leading the Israeli media to call them the “Jewish Taliban.”

The Lev Tahor opposes the existence of the state of Israel, believing Jews must live in exile until the Messiah comes. Rosner said this is why his group is hounded from place to place.

They have always been trying to destroy our community

“This is something the Zionist government hates,” Rosner said in 2013. “They have always been trying to destroy our community.”

After leaving Israel, and later the United States, Shlomo settled with his acolytes in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Que., 100 kilometres northwest of Montreal, in 2001, where he was granted refugee status on the grounds of persecution in Israel.

The group fled from Canada in 2014 ahead of child welfare investigations and settled in Guatemala. There, Shlomo’s 39-year-old son, Nachman Helbrans, took over as supreme leader after his father drowned in 2017.

Rosner was described by U.S. authorities as Helbrans’ “top lieutenant” and right-hand man in the Lev Tahor’s authoritarian regime.

Under the new leadership, the sect’s practices became even more extreme, authorities said, particularly with child marriages. The practice met with resistance by some.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

She fled a 'Jewish Taliban' sect with her children. Then kidnappers tracked them down

Controversial sect dismisses child neglect allegations as ultra-orthodox Jews settle into new homes in Ontario

The two child victims of the kidnappings and their mother are relatives of Helbrans, and he arranged for the young girl to be religiously married at the age of 13 to a 19-year-old member of the sect, who was Rosner’s son.

They were not legally married, but a sexual relationship started immediately, court heard, as was the directive from Helbrans to start procreating as soon as possible.

The girl’s mother, a U.S. citizen, fled with her children in October 2018. A Brooklyn court granted her sole custody.

Shortly after, the Lev Tahor came for the children.

They were stolen in the night from the mother’s New York State home in 2019 and smuggled across the U.S. border to Mexico.

Although the group adopts a distinctly traditionalist lifestyle, the kidnapping plot was a modern enterprise.

They used burner phones, an encrypted phone app, disguises, aliases, false passports, and a secret pact to execute their plan. It fell apart after a three-week international manhunt by police, who found the children in a hotel in Mexico.

“Nachman Helbrans and Mayer Rosner brazenly kidnapped two children from their mother in the middle of the night to return a 14-year-old girl to an illegal sexual relationship with an adult man,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said after the four-week trial ended this week.

Even after the children were returned to their mother, members of the Lev Tahor tried twice more to kidnap them, authorities said

.

Mayer Rosner at his home in Chatham, Ont., 

after the Lev Tahor group moved from Quebec in 2013.

PHOTO BY DAVE CHIDLEY FOR NATIONAL POST

Child kidnapping charges do not make members of the Lev Tahor pariahs in their community. Instead, it is a mark of leadership.

Shlomo Helbrans himself was convicted in New York in 1994 of kidnapping a 13-year-old boy who he was tutoring for bar mitzvah. Rosner told the Post when he was in Ontario that his rabbi was only protecting the boy, who had run away from his parents, but the court saw it differently.

It was Shlomo’s conviction that led to his deportation to Israel followed by his move to Canada.

The community drew little attention in Quebec until 2011 when authorities stopped two teenaged girls arriving from Israel to join them; their uncle in Israel obtained a court order to have the girls returned, over fears they would be forced to marry.

It raised an alarm for Canadian authorities.

Quebec’s youth protection services investigated the group and sought to remove 14 children from the community.

Child welfare workers said the children suffered from poor dental health, skin problems and poor hygiene, and no adherence to the province’s school curriculum. There were rumours of beatings and child marriages.

Before Quebec authorities could act, the families boarded three buses in the night and headed west, settling in an out-of-the-way complex of identical one-story rental cottages on the outskirts of Chatham, 80 kilometres east of Windsor.

At that time Rosner denied his community beats their children or forces marriages on young girls.

“They say we have forced marriage. We don’t. But, like many orthodox religious communities, we have organized marriages,” Rosner said. A marriage broker pitches couples to parents and if both sets of parents approve, the children meet. If either of them objects to the union the marriage is halted, he said.

“Our boys are not allowed to pick up girls on the street. We allow marriage at the age of 16. Some people object to that; everyone has their own choice.”

At the time of the Post’s visit with the Lev Tahor, Rosner had nine children of his own, five of them girls. The boys, like all boys in the Lev Tahor, were in school studying religious texts while the girls were cooking, cleaning, listening to their father or quietly playing.

Rosner and Helbrans were convicted of conspiring to transport a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, conspiring to travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct, international parental kidnapping, and other charges.

The convictions could lead to a life sentence. There is a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison.

• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_Humphreys

U.S. to open talks with Japan on import steel, aluminum tariffs

Tokyo wants Trump-era levies abolished

The U.S. import tariffs on Japanese steel and aluminum products were imposed by then-President Donald Trump. © Reuters

TOMORROWS NEWS TODAY
November 13, 2021

 
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The United States said on Friday it will open talks with Japan that could lead to an easing of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, a longstanding irritant in trade relations between the two allies.

The U.S. Commerce Department and the United States Trade Representative's Office said the talks were aimed at addressing "global steel and aluminum excess capacity", restoring market-oriented conditions and preserving critical industries.

The discussions with Japan follow an agreement by the United States and the European Union to end a dispute over steel and aluminum tariffs, and hammer out a global arrangement to combat "dirty" production and overcapacity in the industry.

The future agreement, which is open to other countries, will pose a challenge for China, which produces over half of the world's steel and which the EU and United States accuse of creating overcapacity that harms their own industries.

Last year, the Global Forum on Steel Excess Capacity estimated the gap between global steelmaking capacity and global demand at an excess of nearly 600 million tons, a sum that will continue to grow given new capacity already planned or under way.

Japan last week asked the United States to abolish the "Section 232" tariffs imposed by former U.S. President Donald Trump's administration in 2018.

Friday's announcement comes before separate visits to Japan by Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai beginning next week.

The United States said the two countries will seek to address concerns over the Section 232 tariffs "and the sufficiency of actions that address steel and aluminum excess capacity with the aim of taking mutually beneficial and effective actions to restore market-oriented conditions."

"It's about time," said Myron Brilliant, head of the international affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "The tariff exclusion process needs to take place with Japan and Korea and the UK. We're strongly encouraged by any signals that the administration is pursuing that."

Tai is also due to visit South Korea this month, but sources said they did not expect a similar announcement there.

The U.S.-EU deal ended a festering dispute over the Trump-era U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs and averted a spike in EU retaliatory tariffs.

The agreement maintains Section 232 tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% aluminum, while allowing "limited volumes" of EU-produced metals into the United States duty-free.

It requires EU steel and aluminum to be entirely produced in the bloc - a standard known as "melted and poured" - to qualify for duty-free status. The provision is aimed at preventing metals from China and non-EU countries from being minimally processed in Europe before export to the United States.

Under the deal, Europe agreed to drop retaliatory tariffs against U.S. products, a move Raimondo said would reduce costs for steel-consuming U.S. manufacturers.

The Japanese steel industry is concerned that the U.S.-EU agreement will result in a comprehensive relaxation of measures for certain countries and regions, Eiji Hashimoto, chairman of the Japan Iron and Steel Federation, said last week.

WHO chief calls booster distribution 'scandal' as poorer countries wait for doses

BY JUSTINE COLEMAN - 11/12/21 



The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) called the distribution of booster COVID-19 vaccines a “scandal that must stop now” on Friday as poorer countries continue to wait for initial doses.

Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus slammed countries with the “highest vaccine coverage” at a WHO briefing for collecting extra vaccine doses and prioritizing giving their citizens third and fourth doses over getting at-risk populations in other nations vaccinated.

“This is a scandal that must stop now,” he said.

In fact, he cited data that six times more booster doses are administered globally than initial doses in low-income countries.

“It makes no sense to give boosters to healthy adults, or to vaccinate children, when health workers, older people and other high-risk groups around the world are still waiting for their first dose,” he added, noting that immunocompromised people are an exception.

Tedros also pointed out that countries need other coronavirus precautions in addition to vaccines, saying, “No country can simply vaccinate its way out of the pandemic.”

The WHO has consistently pushed back against the necessity of booster shots as countries like the U.S. have pressed forward and opened third and fourth doses to growing numbers of people.

In the U.S., certain mRNA vaccine recipients and all Johnson & Johnson recipients have been approved to get boosters at least six months and at least two months after their most recent shot, respectively.

Children aged 5 to 11 also became eligible for the Pfizer vaccine earlier this month, and the Biden administration has said the U.S. has enough doses for all 28 million in that age group to get vaccinated.

In the meantime, other countries are struggling to get high-risk populations their first shots. In order to reach the WHO’s goal of vaccinating 40 percent of the population of every country by the end of 2021, the world needs another 550 million doses, Tedros said.

Progress has been made though the COVAX program, co-led by Gavi, WHO and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, which has sent nearly 500 million doses to 144 countries and territories.

As of Thursday, at least 40 percent of the overall global population is considered fully vaccinated — but that number includes only 2.4 percent in low-income countries, according to the ONE campaign.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Wednesday that the U.S. is working with COVAX to send out the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines to those living in conflict zones. The U.S. has committed more than 1 billion doses as donations.

But at the same time, pressure is mounting on the administration to approve booster shots for the remaining American adult population as breakthrough cases have become more prevalent amid the highly transmissible delta variant.

Still, studies have repeatedly shown the risk of hospitalization and death is much lower among those who received the initial vaccine than among the unvaccinated. Recent research suggests boosters further increase this protection.

 

Animals need infrastructure, too

$350 million of Biden’s INVEST in America Act isn’t for people. It’s for wildlife that needs help crossing the road.

By Ben Goldfarb  Nov 12, 2021

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A bear crosses a wildlife bridge in Banff National Park. AP Clevenger, courtesy of ARC Solutions

This story is part of a group of stories called

The biodiversity crisis, explained

Fifty miles east of Seattle, a bridge crosses a steep stretch of Interstate 90 known as Snoqualmie Pass. This is no ordinary bridge, meant for automobiles or pedestrians. Covered in topsoil, boulders, and seedlings, it is intended to convey wild animals from one side of the highway to the other — and it’s working.

Since 2018, when the bridge opened and the first animal, a coyote, scampered over the six lanes below, the structure has carried creatures as large as elk and as small as toads. And it should attract even more users as the seedlings grow into trees and animals acclimate to its presence.

“As we get more shade, it’s going to be different,” Patty Garvey-Darda, a Forest Service wildlife biologist, told Vox during a recent visit to Snoqualmie Pass. “Hopefully someday we’ll see the exact same species up here as we see in the forest.”

The Snoqualmie Pass bridge is one example in a broader category of infrastructure, known as wildlife crossings, that help animals circumvent busy roads like I-90. Crossings come in an array of shapes and sizes, from sweeping overpasses for grizzly bears to inconspicuous tunnels for salamanders. A body of research demonstrates that crossings can reconnect fragmented wildlife populations, while protecting human drivers and animals alike from dangerous vehicle crashes. “This structure is paying for itself because of the accidents we haven’t had,” said Garvey-Darda, as trucks roared by 35 feet below.

The construction of such crossings has never been more urgent. Roadkill rates have risen over the past half-century; today, around 12 percent of North American wild mammals die on roads. And new satellite-tracking and genetic technologies have revealed subtler harms. Busy interstates prevent herds of elk and mule deer from migrating to low-elevation meadows in winter, occasionally causing them to starve. In California, freeways have thwarted mountain lions from mating, leaving the cats so inbred that they’ve fallen into an “extinction vortex.” Wildlife crossings allow animals to find food and each other across sundered landscapes, and help them access new habitats as climate change scrambles their range

But despite crossings’ benefits, they remain scarce in the US. Around 1,000 wildlife crossings currently dot America’s 4 million mile road network. (For comparison, the Netherlands’ road system is only 2 percent as large but boasts over 600 crossings.) The reason for their rarity? Money. The Snoqualmie Pass bridge cost $6.2 million, and even humble turtle tunnels can run up multimillion-dollar price tags. This kind of expense explains why wildlife crossings were once a punching bag for some conservative politicians, who decried animal passages as government waste.

Now that’s beginning to change. Earlier this month, the House passed the INVEST in America Act, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden is expected to soon sign into law. The bipartisan package earmarks billions of dollars in funding for highway maintenance, broadband internet, and airport upgrades — as well as $350 million for animal-friendly infrastructure like bridges, underpasses, and roadside fences. Although that provision is a tiny slice of the bill, it’s easily the largest investment in wildlife crossings in national history.

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These innovations are not only wildly effective at preventing roadkill, they’re also an underappreciated way to protect people. Hundreds of Americans die annually in car crashes with animals, and tens of thousands more are injured. “Whether it’s human safety or habitat connectivity or fiscal responsibility, there’s something in this bill for you,” said Renee Callahan, executive director of ARC Solutions, a group that studies and promotes crossings. “This has become a staunchly bipartisan issue.”

When the US interstate highway system was constructed more than half a century ago, ecosystems were damaged in ways we’re only now beginning to fully understand. Wildlife crossings and other animal-friendly infrastructure help mend that damage, and accommodate the creatures whose lives our highways have disrupted. Even within a bitterly divided Congress, it’s a rare area of consensus. One of the few things uniting some fiscal conservatives with climate-concerned Democrats is a literal bridge.

How wildlife crossings went mainstream

Roads have few equals as a destroyer of animal life. Vehicles claim more wild terrestrial animals — perhaps more than a million per day in the US alone — than any other form of direct human-caused mortality, like hunting, oil spills, or wildfires. And it’s not just common critters like squirrels that get flattened (though we should worry about their welfare, too). At least 21 species are imperiled by cars in the US, and one recent study found that collisions may soon wipe out globally threatened creatures like maned wolves, brown hyenas, and leopards. We are, quite literally, driving some of the world’s rarest animals to extinction.

For more than half a century, countries have attempted to solve this problem using wildlife crossings. France constructed the world’s first crossings, known as passages à faune, in the 1950s, followed by Germany and the Netherlands. During the 1970s and ’80s, a handful of American states, including Wyoming, Florida, and New Jersey, built their own crossings. Many showed promise: After a 100-foot passage was installed beneath I-70 in Colorado, for instance, hundreds of mule deer trotted through each summer.

A new section of the German Autobahn 14 and a wildlife overpass between the Colbitz and Tangerhütte junctions. Ronny Hartmann/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Yet crossings were slow to catch on in the US, for several reasons. Few states rigorously collected data on animal collisions, masking the problem’s severity. Some early structures were poorly designed or monitored, casting doubt on their efficacy. And even when agencies did document successful crossings, tight budgets rarely had room for more. “The unfortunate thing to date is that the most effective solution is also the most expensive,” wrote one California official in 1980.

Over time, though, collisions became impossible to ignore. As human populations grew, traffic spiked in rural areas. Meanwhile, elk, bear, moose, and especially deer were bouncing back after centuries of exploitation. When speeding cars struck these hefty mammals, the crashes could be catastrophic for both parties. In 1995, researchers estimated that deer collisions caused 29,000 injuries and around 200 human deaths every year in the US. Animal crashes had become a public safety crisis.

In 2005, Congress ordered the Department of Transportation to study the situation. Its report, published three years later, put some firm figures on the issue. The authors tallied all the expenses of a crash — the hospital bills, the vehicle damage, the value of the animal itself, and so on — and found that the average deer strike dinged society more than $6,000. Moose and elk were even pricier. All told, animal crashes were estimated to cost America over $8 billion a year.

Against that backdrop, wildlife crossings were no longer viewed as frivolous expenditures, but vital public safety measures. In Wyoming, underpasses on Highway 30, paired with roadside fencing that guided animals toward them, cut mule deer collisions within a critical migration corridor by more than 80 percent, offsetting construction costs in just five years. In Arizona, underpasses and fences prevented enough elk crashes to do the same.

Prongorn antelope approach a wildlife overpass across route 191 at Trapper’s Point near Pinedale, Wyoming. William Campbell/Corbis via Getty Images

New technology advanced the cause, too. Motion-activated cameras snapped high-quality photographs of animals moving through crossings, winning over skeptics, says Patricia Cramer, an ecologist who has studied crossings in Florida, Utah, and other states. “We could finally show the engineers that structures work,” she said. “Suddenly, they believed us.”

Money for animal infrastructure has been hard to come by — until now

As wildlife crossings proved their worth, transportation agencies took a new interest. Highway acts in 2012 and 2015 expressly allowed states to spend federal dollars on wildlife infrastructure. New overpasses and underpasses popped up, particularly in western states like Wyoming and Montana, where deer and elk followed predictable migration routes that highways happened to bisect. Their approval ratings soared, too: One poll found that more than 90 percent of voters in Nevada — hardly a state that habitually embraces government interventions — were in favor of more crossings.

But crossings remained underfunded. Wildlife projects drew from the same pots as basic transportation needs, like lane repaving and highway repairs. Pitted against America’s crumbling infrastructure, animals got short shrift. (This was especially true for small species that didn’t endanger drivers — it’s likely no one has ever totaled their truck by slipping on a salamander, for example.) In 2013, when researchers asked nearly 500 officials why crossings weren’t more common, two-thirds chalked it up to money.

In the face of chronic fiscal shortfalls, some states got creative. Colorado allocated lottery revenue. Wyoming sold specialty license plates. In California, where engineers will soon break ground on a massive bridge for mountain lions, the conservation group National Wildlife Federation solicited private donations. (Leonardo DiCaprio was an early contributor.) But these revenue streams were piecemeal and unreliable, and many otherwise worthy crossings never got built.

In 2013, road ecologists, led by ARC Solutions and a group called the Western Transportation Institute, began to discuss securing more permanent funds. Conservationists and scientists wrote policy papers, met with congressional aides, and hammered out the basic framework for wildlife-crossing legislation. As the proposal developed, it gained supporters. Animal welfare groups like the Humane Society backed crossings to reduce wildlife deaths and suffering. Conservation organizations like the Wildlands Network touted crossings as a way of stitching up fragmented ecosystems. Even pro-hunting organizations trumpeted the restoration of healthy deer and elk herds as a selling point.

“WE USE THE LINGO ‘WIN-WIN’ A LOT, BUT IN THIS CASE THIS WAS TRULY A WIN-WIN-WIN-WIN” —SUSAN HOLMES

“We use the lingo ‘win-win’ a lot, but in this case this was truly a win-win-win-win,” said Susan Holmes, federal policy director for the Wildlands Network. “Almost everyone could see the value in this.”

With backing from hunters and highway safety advocates alike, animal-friendly infrastructure racked up unlikely congressional support. In a 2019 hearing on crossings, Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming and a former surgeon, said that he’s taken care of patients injured in collisions with wildlife. “It happens every year,” he said. Although Barrasso has a history of impeding climate-friendly initiatives — and a 7 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters — he included a wildlife crossing program in the highway bill that he sponsored later that year. (That version of the bill never passed.) Crossings also garnered support from Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican senator who chairs the chamber’s Environment and Public Works Committee — perhaps because Capito’s home state of West Virginia leads the country in deer crashes.

The years of lobbying paid off this month, when the $350 million wildlife-crossing provision made it into the final infrastructure bill — the largest federal public works program since President Dwight D. Eisenhower kick-started the interstate system in the 1950s. (Thirteen GOP House members and 19 senators voted for the bill; despite Barrasso’s affinity for crossings, he wasn’t one of them.) The funding will be disbursed through a five-year competitive grant program, through which states, Native tribes, and other entities will submit proposals for new crossings within their jurisdictions. Now animals will have a separate pool of money from which officials will be able to draw.

“This is finally approaching a scale that’s needed nationwide,” said Rob Ament, road ecology program manager at the Western Transportation Institute. “We can’t treat every mile of highway, but we can take care of a lot of the areas that are seriously affecting wildlife populations.”

The future of wildlife crossings is mobile

The new funding comes at a crucial moment. As the climate warms, it’s imperative that animals are able to move freely around landscapes. Think of moose shifting their ranges northward to escape infestations of hungry ticks, or bears fleeing wildfires intensified by drought. Crossing structures allow these creatures to navigate roads in search of novel habitat.

Then again, crossings only go so far: An elk migration corridor might drift northward over decades, but a bridge or tunnel can’t follow. At least, not yet — but that, too, may change.

According to the INVEST Act, the wildlife crossing program will prioritize structures that incorporate “innovative technologies” and “advanced design techniques.” Among those techniques, says Callahan, might be the use of fiber-reinforced polymer, or FRP, a plastic that’s lighter and stronger than regular concrete, and should soon be cheaper as well. The Western Transportation Institute and the California Department of Transportation are currently designing America’s first FRP wildlife bridge, and experts say that future iterations could someday be modular and mobile, capable of being disassembled and relocated in response to changing animal movement patterns. “That would be a game changer,” Callahan said.

Eastbound Interstate 90 traffic passes beneath a wildlife bridge under construction on Snoqualmie Pass, Washington. Elaine Thompson/AP

As exciting as all that may be, it’s important to remember that the new funding for wildlife crossings is merely a good start. While $350 million may sound substantial, it is, as Cramer puts it, “decimal dust” compared to national transportation budgets. It’s also a fraction of what’s ultimately needed: According to one recent report, it would cost $175 million to deal with roadkill hot spots in California alone. What’s more, wildlife crossings can’t do much about traffic noise, salt pollution, stormwater runoff, or many of the other byproducts of roads — some of which will, ironically, be exacerbated by the infrastructure bill, which allots millions to highway expansion projects. And all the crossings in the world won’t help unless we get better at protecting the habitats that animals must move between.

“We can build a bridge,” said Matt Skroch, project director for public lands and rivers conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, “but let’s not build a bridge to nowhere.”

Correction, November 12, 10:40 am: A previous version of summary text for this story misstated the amount of INVEST in America Act funding that is related to wildlife crossings. It is $350 million.