UK

Civil Service has ‘no automatic right to exist’, warns Cabinet Secretary

Gordon Rayner
Fri, 17 February 2023 

Simon Case - Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The Civil Service has “no automatic right to exist” and must “seize the moment” to reform itself, the Cabinet Secretary has said.

Simon Case, the head of the Civil Service, said the 500,000 people who work under him must “earn and re-earn” the support and consent of the British public by working in their interest.

He reminded senior mandarins that their “marching orders” come from the Government and it is their job to “deliver on their promises”.

Mr Case has been fighting for his job in recent weeks amid claims that senior colleagues have tried to undermine him by leaking stories to the media about his handling of a number of controversies, including the Dominic Raab “bullying” saga.

He was hired by Boris Johnson to spearhead Whitehall reform – which made him unpopular with some senior staff – and has since served under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, both of whom saw him as the right man for the job.

Mr Case used a lecture at Bristol University, in his home city, to underline his determination to modernise the service.

He said: “The Civil Service is accelerating progress in critical areas. Focusing even more on outcomes, growing our skills, making better use of data … and we must do this because, like every institution, we have no automatic right to exist.

“If people see and believe that institutions are operating effectively, delivering in their interests, they’re more likely to trust them … if people feel an institution is no longer working in their interest, the relationship is at risk.”

‘Civil servants advise, politicians decide’

Civil servants, including those at the top of Whitehall departments, have been accused in recent months of failing to instigate government policy, and Mr Case told them: “Our marching orders come from the government of the day, which acts on behalf of the electorate.

“Civil servants advise, politicians decide. We answer to them day in, day out, for the advice we give and how effectively we are delivering on their promises.”

Mr Case set out five tests “to monitor how well we are earning and re-earning the support and consent of the people”, which comprised knowing who the “customers” are, staying true to the core purpose of the service, updating methods to stay relevant, managing risk proportionately and having the right people in the right places.

He cited the pandemic as an example of the Civil Service being able to react quickly to an unforeseen threat, and told his audience: “We must seize the moment and not miss the opportunity to keep applying the many lessons we learn – sometimes painfully, often successfully – from the day-to-day and the moments of crisis, to achieve lasting change.”

Mr Case defended the Civil Service and other traditional institutions by pointing out that, in totalitarian states, leaders such as Vladimir Putin “de-legitimise” institutions in order to create an “alternative and corrupting narrative”. But he said he could only give a “qualified defence” because critics “correctly call out our weaknesses”.

He delivered the lecture on Jan 25, but his comments have only just emerged. He was speaking days after it was reported that he had played an introductory role in discussions between Mr Johnson, future BBC chairman Richard Sharp and a third man, Sam Blyth, over an £800,000 home loan for the then prime minister.

UK's university and college union to pause strikes for two weeks

Fri, 17 February 2023

(Reuters) - Britain's University and College Union (UCU) said on Friday it was pausing strike action for the next two weeks across pay, working conditions and pension disputes to allow negotiations to continue.

"The strikes on Tuesday 21, Wednesday 22 and Thursday 23 February next week and Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 February and Wednesday 1 and Thursday 2 March will not go ahead," the union said in a statement.

All actions scheduled after these dates remain in place, it added.

The UCU in January announced more than 70,000 staff at 150 universities across the UK would go on strike for 18 days between February and March in disputes over pay and job conditions.

The union is demanding better pay after employers set a pay rise worth 3% following more than a decade of below-inflation pay awards.

Britain is experiencing its largest wave of strike action in decades amid a cost-of-living crisis, involving hundreds of thousands of workers from a range of professions and piling pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to settle the disputes, many of which involve the public sector.

UK

Change to treasure law would keep more artefacts in museums, says minister

Sam Russell, PA
Fri, 17 February 2023

A surge in the number of detectorists unearthing historical artefacts has prompted a bid to broaden the legal definition of treasure to help museums to acquire important items.

Heritage Minister Lord Parkinson said some items have been lost into private ownership, rather than displayed publicly in museums, due to the current wording of the Treasure Act 1996.

Under the current definition, an item is treasure if it is at least 300 years old and made at least in part of precious metal, like gold or silver, or part of a hoard.

This will be amended to cover exceptional finds of at least 200 years old, regardless of the type of metal they are made of.

Lord Parkinson and Sarah Harvey look at the Birrus Britannicus Roman figurine during a visit to Chelmsford Museum in Essex (Gareth Fuller/ PA)

If a coroner assesses an artefact as meeting the legal definition of treasure, it can be acquired by a museum rather than sold to the highest bidder.

Lord Parkinson said the Treasure Act has “saved around 6,000 objects which have been shared with museums, more than 220 museums around the country”.

“But, at the moment, the definition of treasure is very specific,” he said.

“An item has to be more than 300 years old, it has to be made of a precious metal or part of a hoard.

Sarah Harvey places the Birrus Britannicus Roman figurine on display

 at Chelmsford Museum in Essex (Gareth Fuller/ PA)

“We want to widen that so that other important objects don’t fall through the net.

“We’re proposing to change the law to make the definition something that is more than 200 years old, to say it can be made of any type of metal but also bringing in a new test of significance.

“So, to say if this is an item which is significant to a part of local, national or regional history, or if it’s connected with a particular individual or event, then it can be classed as treasure too and it can be shared with the public in a museum.”

He cited the Crosby Garrett Roman cavalry helmet, discovered near Penrith in Cumbria, as an example of an artefact sold to a private bidder as it did not meet the current definition of treasure.

“It was made of metal but not of precious metal so it wasn’t classed as treasure under the current definition,” he said.

“We want those sort of items to be shared.”

He said there had been a “big increase in the number of people being metal detectorists”.

“Most of the finds of treasure are by detectorists, so we’re seeing more objects being discovered and we’re seeing more examples of things that don’t currently meet the definition being lost or being at risk of being lost to the public,” said Lord Parkinson.

Lord Parkinson speaks to Sarah Harvey during a visit to Chelmsford Museum (Gareth Fuller/ PA)

“We want to make sure they can be saved for museums.

“Quite often they end up in museums very close to where they were discovered and that’s particularly important because it helps shed light on local history for people.”

Chelmsford Museum in Essex has a Roman figurine in its collection that does not meet the current definition of treasure, but was saved by another mechanism.

Lord Parkinson said the copper alloy piece, discovered in Roxwell, Essex, wears a hooded cloak known as a Birrus Britannicus that people wore in Roman Britain.

“It tells you about the weather at the time, it tells you about fashion, it tells you about the exports from Britain into the Roman Empire,” he said.

“These sorts of objects should be shared with people in museums so they can inspire future generations.”

Sarah Harvey, a curator at Chelmsford Museum, said that the Roman figurine is made of a copper alloy so it did not meet the current definition of treasure.

She said that the finder, a detectorist, was planning to sell it abroad, and the museum had to go through “quite a lot of administrative steps to keep it in this country”.

“With this new definition of treasure we won’t have to go through all of those steps, we would have first rights to acquire that sort of item,” she said.

Ms Harvey said it is not known what the figurine was used for, but it may have been a pendant or the top of a knife.

Lord Parkinson said that a statutory instrument will be laid in Parliament on Monday and, if both Houses of Parliament agree, the new definition will come in.

Analysis-Tesla's search for Mexico location shows bumps on nearshoring road

Fri, February 17, 2023 
By Daina Beth Solomon and Diego Oré

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Tesla Inc's quest to build its first factory in Mexico reveals some of the shaky underpinnings of the country's rise as a nearshoring darling, with proximity to U.S. buyers weighed down by concerns over power supply and political interference.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Nuevo Leon at the U.S. border and Hidalgo in central Mexico are the two states leading the race for the coveted investment, and his foreign minister said on Friday that the electric vehicle maker led by billionaire Elon Musk was close to announcing expansion plans in Mexico.

Nuevo Leon - which recent reports suggest is now the most likely destination - boasts quick access to the United States, a skilled workforce and comfortable living for executives.

Hidalgo, just outside Mexico City, is hundreds of miles from the border yet land and labor costs are lower.

In either place, Tesla will depend on the federal government to tap in to Mexico's strained energy supply and face difficulties securing substantial power from renewable sources.

That puts the Austin, Texas-based company - and any other major investor looking to build factories in Mexico - at the mercy of political forces mostly dictated by Lopez Obrador. The nationalist leader has prioritized Mexico's state power utility, CFE, despite criticism that its fossil fuel turbines pollute and that it crowds out private enterprise.

The United States and Canada have formally entered a trade dispute over Mexico's energy policy.

Many analysts also say the federal government appears to have tried to tip the scales in Hidalgo's favor, as the state government is aligned with Lopez Obrador's MORENA party and it is near one of the administration's flagship projects, the Felipe Angeles International Airport.

"The political issues right now are very important to take into consideration and this is a perfect example," said Claudio Rodriguez, a lawyer at Holland & Knight who specializes in energy. "The Nuevo Leon/Hidalgo issue is 100% political."

Tesla and a spokesman for Lopez Obrador did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

It remains unclear exactly what Tesla's investment in Mexico will look like and what the company plans to produce in the country.

RECENT DEALS

Musk's interest in plunking a large investment into Mexico comes as the country is increasingly seen as a hotspot for nearshoring – the trend to move production closer to North American buyers and away from Asia, where supply-chain snarls during the pandemic overshadowed the region's low-cost advantage.

With its low costs and location next to the U.S. market, Mexico emerged as an attractive alternative that is gradually luring manufacturing in sectors including autos, electronics and furniture.

Many deals have landed near Monterrey, Nuevo Leon's wealthy capital, including for Tesla suppliers. Those deals include the first plant outside Asia for Taiwanese electronics company Quanta Computer and an expansion for Italian brakes maker Brembo.

In another recently announced deal, Germany's BMW will invest near $870 million in the central state of San Luis Potosi to produce high-voltage batteries and electric cars.

Foreign direct investment in Mexico rose 12% last year to reach $35.3 billion, according to preliminary data, another sign that nearshoring is building momentum, analysts say.

Across the border, in another sign of the trend, U.S. manufacturing imports from Mexico rose 7% in 2021 versus 2019, the fastest pace in a decade.

Yet Mexico's capacity for a nearshoring boom has been held back by Lopez Obrador, particularly his energy policies, analysts said. The federal government holds the keys to Mexico's electricity supply, with the ability to speed up or delay requests to connect to the grid.

Lopez Obrador has rolled back a reform under his predecessor that he argues was too generous in opening up the energy market to private capital. He has suspended self-supply power generation permits, which allowed companies to arrange their own electricity supplies, and also hampered attempts by private companies to connect their power production to the national grid.

"Imagine what it would be like if you had profitable investment policy, energy efficiency ... we would be flying at 30,000 feet and having endless investments," said Juan Francisco Torres, an attorney at Hogan Lovells. "That is not happening."

(Reporting by Diego Ore and Daina Beth Solomonin Mexico City; Additional reporting by Kylie Madry in Mexico City; Editing by Stephen Eisenhammer and Matthew Lewis)

China launches climate prediction model for wind and solar power


 An electricity pylon is seen above a solar power plant which is under construction on a hill in Wuhu

Fri, February 17, 2023

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has launched a national wind and solar resources climate prediction model to enable provincial authorities to forecast energy demand and supply, the central government said on Friday.

The model, which provides data and graphic predictions on major variables in renewable energy supply, such as wind speed and solar radiation, as well as demand-side data such as average local temperature, was first issued on Thursday and will be released monthly, the government statement said.

China's electric grid system has faced challenges as peak demand spikes during abnormally cold or hot weather have exceeded local power supplies, leading to power outages.

This has been compounded by the country's swing toward renewable energy sources, which fluctuate depending on weather conditions. China has said it aims for renewable power to account for more than 50% of its electricity generation capacity by 2025.


In August last year, southwest China endured power cuts as scorching temperatures drove up household demand from air conditioning and low rainfall reduced output from local hydro plants.

(Reporting by Andrew Hayley; editing by Barbara Lewis)

Brazil's vaccine-skeptic Bolsonaro got the shot, document indicates

 Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro speaks at a Turning Point USA event in Doral


Fri, February 17, 2023 at 7:13 PM MST·1 min read

BRASILIA (Reuters) - A health ministry record indicates that former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a vocal skeptic of COVID-19 vaccines who vowed to never get the jab, may have received one in 2021, the country's comptroller general's office said on Friday.

The office said it was examining a vaccine card provided by the health ministry recording the far-right former president's vaccination, though in a statement it cautioned that the card could have been altered.

It said it had sought information about Bolsonaro's vaccination record from the health ministry following last month's inauguration of new leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

"The record exists, that's as much as we know," comptroller general's office head Vinicius Carvalho said during an interview with CNN Brazil.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Bolsonaro made repeated public statements minimizing the importance of vaccines and said he had not and would not get vaccinated himself. He was sick with COVID-19 in 2020.

Bolsonaro was quoted last week by the Wall Street Journal as saying he plans to return to Brazil in March after having spent more than a month in the United States to lead the political opposition to Lula and defend himself against accusations that he instigated violent election-denial protests.

Bolsonaro flew to Florida two days before Lula was sworn in on Jan. 1 and later applied for a six-month tourist visa to continue his stay in the United States.

(Reporting by Maria Carolina Marcello; Writing by Brendan O'Boyle; Editing by Will Dunham)

A lesbian lost her son to his sperm donor. Should other gay parents be concerned?

Matt Lavietes
Fri, February 17, 2023 


A court ruling this week that rejected an Oklahoma woman’s petition of custody over the son she raised for two years with her estranged wife should serve as a cautionary tale for same-sex parents, some legal experts say.

Kris Williams and Rebekah Wilson were legally married in June 2019, before Wilson gave birth to a boy that August, according to court documents. Shortly after the couple separated in November 2021, Wilson moved in with the child’s sperm donor, taking the boy with her and prompting Williams to petition for custody.

If Williams were a man, there would have been a “presumption of paternity” under Oklahoma state law, which says: “A man is presumed to be the father of a child if … He and the mother of the child are married to each other and the child is born during the marriage.”

Kris Williams, right, and Rebekah Wilson with their son. (Courtesy Kris Williams)

But a judge on Monday ruled against Williams, stating in her decision that the law does not apply to parents in same-sex relationships, because the state parentage law predates the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state.

The ruling surprised some legal experts, who noted the decision is an outlier when compared to similar cases across the country, and caused them to advise same-sex couples to take extra steps to ensure their parental rights.

“It’s a reminder for same-sex couples that we do continue to live in a legal system and a society that is not always fair and doesn’t always follow the law,” Shannon Minter, an attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said. “Those couples may face unfair and even unlawful obstacles to having their parental rights secured and protected, and that’s just a reality.”

The Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, Obergefell v. Hodges, found that same-sex couples are entitled to “civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.” Some legal experts, like Minter, argue that this decision alone should be enough to guarantee gay married couples the same parental rights as their straight counterparts.

Two years later, in June 2017, the high court ruled in Pavan v. Smith that states must extend equal treatment to same-sex parents, mandating the issuance of two-parent birth certificates for children born to same-sex spouses to recognize parentage.

Wilson was initially listed on the child’s birth certificate when he was born in 2019, according to court documents. However, Oklahoma County District Judge Lynne McGuire argued that Williams could not claim parentage rights over the child because Oklahoma’s parentage act predates the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state.

“[The act] does not take into account same-sex marriage, and there is no presumption that the wife of the mother is automatically presumed the parent of a child born during the marriage,” McGuire ruled.

Douglas NeJaime, a professor of family law at Yale Law School, disagrees with McGuire’s ruling. He argued that even if states have gender-specific parentage rules that were drafted in a time when same-sex couples could not marry, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell and Pavan decisions mandate that state law applies to married same-sex couples.

“It’s not like you’re looking at two statutes,” NeJaime said, referring to the comparison of the state’s parental act and the Supreme Court decisions. “You’re looking at a statute and a constitutional precedent that now tells you, ‘You have to apply that statute consistent with this constitutional precedent.’”

In the Monday ruling, McGuire wrote that the only way Williams could have claimed parentage legally was if she had adopted the child she was raising.

“The reality is that the law provides a legal remedy available to Williams,” McGuire wrote, referring to adoption. “She knowingly chose not to pursue it.”

Williams, 51, vowed to appeal the judge’s decision and expressed dismay that her sexuality played a role in her rights as a parent.

“As a queer person, being invisible, being erased is one of those traumas we have,” she said, at times choking up. “So on that level, going through this as a queer person, it’s a recurring trauma of being erased: ‘You’re not important, go away.’”

Williams said she and Wilson started dating in June 2014. The pair began looking for sperm donors to have a child in 2018, she added, finding Harlan Vaughn through the website Known Donor Registry, and connecting with him on Facebook. In September 2018, according to court documents, Wilson entered a “Known Sperm Donor Agreement” with Vaughn before the nonmedical insemination of Wilson took place in December of that year.

The pair chose Vaughn to be their sperm donor because they believed he was gay, and he had a boyfriend at the time, Williams said. She said she had hoped Vaughn could have a “guncle” (gay uncle) relationship with the child.

“I felt extremely safe,” Williams said. “I couldn’t have guessed in a million years that it would be two people in our community that were going to take these steps, and especially one that I very much was in love with.”

In October 2021, not long after the child’s second birthday, Vaughn moved to Oklahoma City and began spending time with the boy, according to court documents. The following month, Wilson left the couple’s shared home, taking their son, and moved in with Vaughn. Wilson and Vaughn have been raising the boy together and have since had a second biological child, court documents show. Williams has not seen the boy, now 3, since November 2021.

Vaughn declined an interview request from NBC News but issued a statement on behalf of himself and Wilson: “We remain focused exclusively on our child’s protection and well-being. We are grateful for the court’s validation.”

Minter and NeJaime said that most custody cases involving the children of estranged same-sex spouses or those who have already divorced have ended with the nonbiological parent maintaining their parental rights, with the exception of the Oklahoma ruling and an Idaho case, Gatsby v. Gatsby, in 2021.

However, they said that with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and the surge of anti-LGBTQ state legislation being introduced across the country this year, same-sex parents should do whatever they can to protect themselves. When possible, they both suggested, nonbiological same-sex parents should adopt their own children or apply for a judgment from a court to ensure their legal rights as parents.

“It should not be necessary, and it’s a shame, but it is a reality in many places,” Minter said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

Water crisis in West: Massive reservoir Lake Powell hits historic low water level


Colorado River Basin water levels drop to historic low, states mandated to cut use


Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
Fri, February 17, 2023

Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest reservoir and one that provides water and power to millions of people in southern California, has reached its lowest levels since its first filling in the 1960s.

Its companion reservoir, Lake Mead, is at levels almost as low.

Together, these reservoirs, fed by the mighty Colorado River, provide the water 40 million Americans depend on. Despite the storms that brought heavy rain and snow to California and other Western states in January, experts say it would take years of such weather to replenish the West's water resources.

“In the year 2000, the two reservoirs were 95% full. They’re roughly 25% full now,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University. "It’s hard to overstate how important the Colorado River is to the entire American southwest.”

What to know about the West's ongoing water crisis:

An abandoned and once-sunken boat sits along the shoreline of Lake Powell in this May 2022 file photo. The white ring above shows how high the water level was when the lake was full.
What is Lake Powell?

Lake Powell is the nation's second-largest reservoir. It was created by blocking the Colorado River at Glen Canyon in southern Utah and northern Arizona.

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READ MORE: Latest climate change news from USA TODAY

It stores water as part of the Colorado River Compact and produces electricity through the hydroelectric turbines in Glen Canyon dam.

Work on the dam that created Lake Powell began in 1956 and was finished in 1966. It took 16 years for it to fill. At its highest, in 1983, the lake was 3,708 feet above sea level.

Today it stands at 3,522 feet.
What happens if the water level goes lower?

Lake Powell hasn't been this low since June of 1965, just two years after it began to fill with water.

The biggest worry: If the lake’s level falls much lower, it won’t be possible to get water out of it.


Why? Tubes that run water out of the lake and into two hydroelectric turbines could soon be above the water. There are bypass tubes available below that point, but they weren’t designed for continuous use, so it’s not clear how they would fare.


Important quote: “If you can’t get water out of the dam, it means everyone downstream doesn’t get water,” said Udall. "That includes agriculture, cities like Los Angeles, San Diego and Phoenix."


Will water stop flowing? "That's a doomsday scenario," said Bill Hasencamp, Colorado River resources manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Before things get to that point the Department of the Interior will require reductions in use.


How long until water stops flowing downstream? If the lake falls another 32 feet – about the amount it fell in the past year – power generation concerns become more urgent, Udall said. Snowmelt this spring is forecast to bring levels up somewhat.
Why is the water level so low?

The water in Lake Powell is low because the amount of water in the Colorado River has been falling for decades. At the same time, demand has risen due to increased population growth in the West.

Overall, the river's flow is down 20% in this century relative to the 20th century.

BACKGROUND: Western water crisis looms as California complicates critical water deal

More than four scientific studies have pinned a large part of the decline on human climate change. It's partly that there's less rain and snow, partly that as temperatures rise, plants use more water and more water evaporates out of the soil which would otherwise have ended up in the river. In addition, the river itself experiences more evaporation.

"It’s unfortunate that the largely natural occurrence of a drought has coincided with this increasing warming due to greenhouse gases," said Flavio Lehner, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. "That has brought everything to a head much earlier than people thought it would."
What about Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam?

Lake Mead is the nation's largest reservoir, a companion to Lake Powell. Mead was created when the Hoover Dam was completed in 1935. It supplies water and power to Arizona, California, New Mexico and Mexico.

Lake Mead's level is 1,047 feet above sea level. You would have to go back to April of 1937, also two years into its initial filling, to find levels that low. It is forecast to have a new record low next summer, said Hasencamp.

The lake isn't low enough yet to cause concerns about getting water out, but any hope of it refilling is years away, if ever, due to lowered rain and snow and increasing evaporation.

Some of America’s largest cities depend on the water from Lake Mead. “It’s 90% of the water supply to Las Vegas, 50% to Phoenix, effectively 100% to Tucson and 25% to Los Angeles,” said Udall.

What will happen if water levels keep dropping?

The Department of the Interior had asked the seven states of the Colorado River Compact to come up with a plan to cut between 2 and 4 million acre-feet of water by January. They weren’t able to come up with an agreement.

Because of that, it’s expected that the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water management, will mandate one sometime next year.

"This is apparently a decent (water) year, but still, if it turns dry again there are some pretty big reductions on tap and every state could be affected," said Hasencamp.

It will be painful but it doesn't mean the area can't thrive.

"The West might look different," said Hasencamp. "You might not see the lush lawns of today and endless fields of alfalfa, but you will see thriving communities and agricultural regions."
Dig deeper on climate change:

DEFINITIONS: Is climate change the same thing as global warming? Definitions explained.


CAUSES: Why scientists say humans are to blame.


EFFECTS: What are the effects of climate change? How they disrupt our daily life, fuel disasters.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Lake Powell water level at historic low: Drought, water crisis in West

For the First Time, Genetically Modified Trees Have Been Planted in a U.S. Forest

Gabriel Popkin
Fri, February 17, 2023 

A hand-planting crew plants poplar trees in Vidalia, Ga., Feb. 13, 2023. (Audra Melton/The New York Times)

On Monday, in a low-lying tract of southern Georgia’s pine belt, a half-dozen workers planted row upon row of twig-like poplar trees.

These weren’t just any trees, though: Some of the seedlings being nestled into the soggy soil had been genetically engineered to grow wood at turbocharged rates while slurping up carbon dioxide from the air.

The poplars may be the first genetically modified trees planted in the United States outside of a research trial or a commercial fruit orchard. Just as the introduction of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 introduced a new industry of genetically modified food crops, the tree planters Monday hope to transform forestry.

Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced the poplars, intends for its trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change.

“We’ve had people tell us it’s impossible,” Maddie Hall, the company’s co-founder and CEO, said of her dream to deploy genetic engineering on behalf of the climate. But she and her colleagues have also found believers — enough to invest $36 million in the 4-year-old company.

The company has also attracted critics. The Global Justice Ecology Project, an environmental group, has called the company’s trees “growing threats” to forests and expressed alarm that the federal government allowed them to evade regulation, opening the door to commercial plantings much sooner than is typical for engineered plants.

Living Carbon has yet to publish peer-reviewed papers; its only publicly reported results come from a greenhouse trial that lasted just a few months. These data have some experts intrigued but stopping well short of a full endorsement.

“They have some encouraging results,” said Donald Ort, a University of Illinois geneticist whose plant experiments helped inspire Living Carbon’s technology. But he added that the notion that greenhouse results will translate to success in the real world is “not a slam dunk.”

🌳🌳

Living Carbon’s poplars start their lives in a lab in Hayward, California. There, biologists tinker with how the trees conduct photosynthesis, the series of chemical reactions plants use to weave sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into sugars and starches. In doing so, they follow a precedent set by evolution: Several times over Earth’s long history, improvements in photosynthesis have enabled plants to ingest enough carbon dioxide to cool the planet substantially.

While photosynthesis has profound impacts on the Earth, as a chemical process it is far from perfect. Numerous inefficiencies prevent plants from capturing and storing more than a small fraction of the solar energy that falls onto their leaves. Those inefficiencies, among other factors, limit how fast trees and other plants grow, and how much carbon dioxide they soak up.

Scientists have spent decades trying to take over where evolution left off. In 2019, Ort and his colleagues announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently. Normally, photosynthesis produces a toxic byproduct that a plant must dispose of, wasting energy. The Illinois researchers added genes from pumpkins and green algae to induce tobacco seedlings to instead recycle the toxins into more sugars, producing plants that grew nearly 40% larger.

That same year, Hall, who had been working for Silicon Valley ventures like OpenAI (which was responsible for the language model ChatGPT), met her future co-founder Patrick Mellor at a climate tech conference. Mellor was researching whether trees could be engineered to produce decay-resistant wood.

With money raised from venture capital firms and Hall’s tech-world contacts, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, she and Mellor started Living Carbon in a bid to juice up trees to fight climate change. “There were so few companies that were looking at large-scale carbon removal in a way that married frontier science and large-scale commercial deployment,” Hall said.

They recruited Yumin Tao, a synthetic biologist who had previously worked at the chemical company DuPont. He and others retooled Ort’s genetic hack for poplar trees. Living Carbon then produced engineered poplar clones and grew them in pots. Last year, the company reported in a paper that has yet to be peer reviewed that its tweaked poplars grew more than 50% faster than non-modified ones over five months in the greenhouse.

The company’s researchers created the greenhouse-tested trees using a bacterium that splices foreign DNA into another organism’s genome. But for the trees they planted in Georgia, they turned to an older and cruder technique known as the gene gun method, which essentially blasts foreign genes into the trees’ chromosomes.

In a field accustomed to glacial progress and heavy regulation, Living Carbon has moved fast and freely. The gene gun-modified poplars avoided a set of federal regulations of genetically modified organisms that can stall biotech projects for years. (Those regulations have since been revised.) By contrast, a team of scientists who genetically engineered a blight-resistant chestnut tree using the same bacterium method employed earlier by Living Carbon have been awaiting a decision since 2020. An engineered apple grown on a small scale in Washington state took several years to be approved.

“You could say the old rule was sort of leaky,” said Bill Doley, a consultant who helped manage the Agriculture Department’s genetically modified organism regulation process until 2022.

On Monday, on the land of Vince Stanley, a seventh-generation farmer who manages more than 25,000 forested acres in Georgia’s pine belt, mattock-swinging workers carrying backpacks of seedlings planted nearly 5,000 modified poplars. The tweaked poplars had names like Kookaburra and Baboon, which indicated which “parent” tree they were cloned from, and were interspersed with a roughly equal number of unmodified trees. By the end of the unseasonably warm day, the workers were drenched in sweat and the planting plots were dotted with pencil-thin seedlings and colored marker flags poking from the mud.

In contrast to fast-growing pines, hardwoods that grow in bottomlands like these produce wood so slowly that a landowner might get only one harvest in a lifetime, Stanley said. He hopes Living Carbon’s “elite seedlings” will allow him to grow bottomland trees and make money faster. “We’re taking a timber rotation of 50 to 60 years and we’re cutting that in half,” he said. “It’s totally a win-win.”

Forest geneticists were less sanguine about Living Carbon’s trees. Researchers typically assess trees in confined field trials before moving to large-scale plantings, said Andrew Newhouse, who directs the engineered chestnut project at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “Their claims seem bold based on very limited real-world data,” he said.

Steve Strauss, a geneticist at Oregon State University, agreed with the need to see field data. “My experience over the years is that the greenhouse means almost nothing” about the outdoor prospects of trees whose physiology has been modified, he said. “Venture capitalists may not know that.”

Strauss, who previously served on Living Carbon’s advisory board, has grown some of the company’s seedlings since last year as part of a field trial funded by the company. He said the trees were growing well, but it was still too early to tell whether they were outpacing unmodified trees.

Even if they do, Living Carbon will face other challenges unrelated to biology. While outright destruction of genetically engineered trees has dwindled thanks in part to tougher enforcement of laws against acts of ecoterrorism, the trees still prompt unease in the forestry and environmental worlds. Major organizations that certify sustainable forests ban engineered trees from forests that get their approval; some also prohibit member companies from planting engineered trees anywhere. To date, the only country where large numbers of genetically engineered trees are known to have been planted is China.

The U.S. Forest Service, which plants large numbers of trees every year, has said little about whether it would use engineered trees. To be considered for planting in national forests, which make up nearly one-fifth of U.S. forestland, Living Carbon’s trees would need to align with existing management plans that typically prioritize forest health and diversity over reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon, said Dana Nelson, a geneticist with the service. “I find it hard to imagine that it would be a good fit on a national forest,” Nelson said.

Living Carbon is focusing for now on private land, where it will face fewer hurdles. Later this spring it will plant poplars on abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania. By next year Hall and Mellor hope to be putting millions of trees in the ground.

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To produce an income stream not reliant on venture capital, the company has started marketing credits based on carbon its trees will soak up. But carbon credits have come under fire lately and the future of that industry is in doubt.

And to head off environmental concerns, Living Carbon’s modified poplar trees are all female, so they won’t produce pollen. While they could be pollinated by wild trees and produce seeds, Mellor says they’re unlikely to spread into the wild because they don’t breed with the most common poplar species in the Southeast.

They’re also being planted alongside native trees like sweet gum, tulip trees and bald cypress, to avoid genetically identical stands of trees known as monocultures; non-engineered poplars are being planted as experimental controls. Hall and Mellor describe their plantings as both pilot projects and research trials. Company scientists will monitor tree growth and survival.

Such measures are unlikely to assuage opponents of genetically modified organisms. Last spring, the Global Justice Ecology Project argued that Living Carbon’s trees could harm the climate by “interfering with efforts to protect and regenerate forests.”

“I’m very shocked that they’re moving so fast” to plant large numbers of modified trees in the wild, said Anne Petermann, the organization’s executive director. The potential risks to the greater ecosystem needed to be better understood, she said.

Ort of the University of Illinois dismissed such environmental concerns. But he said investors were taking a big chance on a tree that might not meet its creators’ expectations.

“It’s not unexciting,” he said. “I just think it’s uber high risk.”

© 2023 The New York Times Company

Decision to shoot down balloons puts spotlight on hobbyists
 

TODD RICHMOND and HARM VENHUIZEN
Fri, February 17, 2023 

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Decisions to shoot down multiple unidentified objects over the U.S. and Canada this month have put a spotlight on amateur balloonists who insist their creations pose no threat.

Over the last three weeks, U.S. President Joe Biden has ordered fighter jets to shoot down three objects detected in U.S. air space — a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the South Carolina coast as well as smaller unidentified objects over Alaska and Lake Huron. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week ordered another object to be shot down over the Yukon; a U.S. fighter jet carried out that mission.

U.S. government officials have yet to definitively identify the objects, but Biden said Thursday that they were probably balloons linked to private companies, weather researchers or hobbyists.

Tom Medlin, the owner of the Tennessee-based Amateur Radio Roundtable podcast and a balloon hobbyist himself, said he's been in contact with an Illinois club that believes the object shot down over the Yukon was one of their balloons. No one from the club responded to messages left Friday, but Medlin said the club was tracking the balloon and it disappeared over the Yukon on the same day the unidentified object was shot down.

The incidents have left balloonists scrambling to defend their hobby. They insist their balloons fly too high and are too small to pose a threat to aircraft and that government officials are overreacting.

“The spy balloon had to be shot down,” Medlin said. “That's a national security threat, for sure. Then what happened is, I think, the government got a little anxious. Maybe the word is trigger-happy. I don't know. When they shot them down, they didn't know what they were. That's a little concerning.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday that the Biden administration wasn't able to confirm reports that the object belonged to the Illinois club. He said the debris has yet to be recovered and “we all have to accept the possibility that we may not be able to recover it.”

U.S. officials said Friday that they've stopped searching for debris from the objects shot down over Alaska and Lake Huron after finding nothing. Search efforts for debris from the Yukon object are ongoing.

Kirby pushed back at the notion that Biden's decision to use missiles costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot down what were most likely balloons that cost less than $20 was an overreaction.

“Absolutely not,” Kirby said. “Given the situation we were in, the information available, the recommendation of our military commanders — it was exactly the right thing to do at exactly the right time.”

Medlin said the balloons he's flying right now cost about $12 and are about 32 inches in diameter.

The balloons carry solar-powered transmitters that weigh less than 2 grams and that broadcast a signal every 10 minutes or so that ham radio operators around the world can use to track the balloons' locations, he said. He has a balloon up right now that’s been in the air for 250 days and has circled the globe 10 times, he said.

The fun is watching the balloon circle the globe and building the tiny transmitters, said Medlin, adding that the devices are so small he needs a microscope to construct them. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been collecting data from ham radio operators to track wind patterns, he said.

The balloons are so light that the Federal Aviation Administration doesn't regulate them and doesn't require balloonists to file flight plans, Medlin said. He inflates his balloons with enough hydrogen to ensure they'll fly at about 50,000 feet. That is well above most commercial aircraft, he said.

Current regulations posted on the FAA’s website state that no one can operate an unmanned balloon in a way that creates a hazard, and agency regulations apply only to balloons that carry a payload of more than four pounds.

Medlin speculated that after U.S. officials detected the suspected Chinese balloon, they adjusted their radar to pick up very small objects. But the hobbyists' balloons don't pose a threat to aircraft, he said.

“We're following FAA rules and regulations,” Medlin said. “They're the experts on whether this should or should not be done. Take a cork and drop it in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Is a ship going to hit it? Probably not. And if it did it wouldn't do any damage to the ship.”

Ron Meadows co-founded San Jose-based Scientific Balloon Solutions with his son, Lee. He said the company produces balloons as large as 8 1/2 feet in diameter for university and middle school science students. He said those balloons carry a payload weight of around 10 to 20 grams, with transmitters the size of a popsicle stick. Some balloons feature a 20-foot (6-meter) antenna, he said.

He understands that government officials are trying to keep people safe, he said, but they don't understand that the balloons are totally benign and there's no question they're overreacting. Jet engines likely ingest far larger objects, such as birds, and most pilots probably wouldn't even know it if they hit a balloon, Meadows said.

He said he has tried to contact the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense to educate officials about the balloons, but that his calls went to voicemail.

“It would have been nice to get our government the information they needed,” he said.

Meadows said he anticipates that after this month's incidents, the FAA will come out with tighter restrictions on balloons. He said he's not overly concerned, since his balloon business is a side job; he also runs a swimming pool repair service.

“We are in this (balloon) business more for the students, not for making money,” he said. “This is for education. When we build these things, the time it takes to build them, we can make more at our day job.”

Medlin said balloons can reach speeds of up to 130 mph (210 kmh) if they get caught up in the jet stream. But Bob Boutin, a Chicago flight instructor, said its unlikely that such balloons pose much of a threat to aircraft.

Most commercial jets fly between 25,000 and 45,000 feet, below the balloons' level, he said. Some corporate jets climb higher than 50,000 feet, but at that altitude skies are typically clear with visibility of 20 to 40 miles, Boutin said.

The White House's Kirby said that the objects shot down were traveling low enough to pose a risk to civilian aircraft, but Boutin said even at lower altitudes, a small balloon wouldn't merit a military strike.

“Birds and planes are a heck of a lot more issue than a balloon would be,” he said. Even if the balloon were to enter a jet engine, “most jets have two engines, and if you lost one, technically it’s an emergency but not one that means the plane is going crash,” Boutin said.

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Associated Press reporter Aamer Madhani in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

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Harm Venhuizen is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Harm on Twitter.

- In this image released by the U.S. Navy, sailors assigned to Assault Craft Unit 4 prepare material recovered off the coast of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the Atlantic Ocean from the shooting down of a Chinese high-altitude balloon, for transport to the FBI, at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek in Virginia Beach, Va., on Feb. 10, 2023. U.S. officials say the military has finished efforts to recover the remnants of the large balloon, and analysis of the debris so far reinforces conclusions that it was a Chinese spy balloon. (Ryan Seelbach/U.S. Navy via AP, File)