Virginia Tech researcher works to preserve the white shark in the Mediterranean Sea

The research team went on a ‘White Shark Chase’ in the Sicilian Channel and located evidence of white sharks at four sites.

Virginia Tech

 

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(From left) Brendan Shea, Chiara Gambardella, Francesco Ferretti, Jeremy Jenrette, Robert Schallert before departing for the "White Shark Chase" in 2021.

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Credit: Courtesy Francesco Ferretti

The Mediterranean Sea is a paradise.

Pristine waters and an incredible coastline spanning multiple continents that are renowned the world over.

Below those picturesque, and sometimes crowded, waters swim a legendary creature facing a treacherous and uncertain future: the white shark.

Francesco Ferretti, an assistant professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, is working to save one of the most endangered white shark populations on the planet. The research team located signs of the remaining white sharks in the Sicilian Channel.

“We decided to take on the challenge of locating the last remaining white sharks in the Mediterranean and saving them,” Ferretti said. “One of the most critical steps was tagging individuals so we could learn more about their abundance and distribution. This led to the ‘White Shark Chase,’ an initiative where we began identifying areas in the Mediterranean where these animals might be found. It was not easy as these sharks are rare.”

Incredibly rare, in fact.

Unlike places like California, where the sharks gather near seal colonies, they have no known aggregation areas in the Mediterranean. Finding them felt like searching for a needle in a haystack, or, more aptly, a grain of sand in the sea.

Taylor Chapple, an assistant professor at Oregon State University at the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station and white shark technical expert on the project, was a postdoc with Ferretti at Stanford and they have continued to work together ever since.

“These animals likely have a very different ecology than the white sharks from other global populations,” Chapple said. “These seem to be more likely based on tunas and smaller fish. It almost flips our understanding of white sharks on its head. It allows these animals that are a couple of tons – bigger than any land perdators – to exist on a resource that is very surprising. Seals are very fatty, and these sharks are feeding on tuna and still getting this large.”

This research is the first step in establishing a monitoring program for the sharks in the region in the ongoing efforts to help prevent the animal’s extinction in the area.

The research was published in Frontiers of Marine Science on Oct. 22, 2024, and was done in collaboration with Jeremy Jenrette and Brendan Shea of the Department of Fish and Wildlife; Shea and Austin Gallagher with Beneath the Waves; Chiara Gambardella with the Polytechnic University of Marche; Gambardella and Stefano Moro with Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn; Khaled Echwikhi with University of Gabes and High Institute of Applied Biology of Medenine; Robert Schallert and Barbara Block with Stanford University; Schallert with Tag-a-Giant; and Chapple with Oregon State University’s Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station.

Funding was provided by The Explorers Club, Discovery Channel, Sharkproject, the Bertarelli Foundation, the Augmentum platform, and individual donors.

Ferretti organized three pilot expeditions in 2021, 2022, and 2023, focusing on what we believed to be hotspots for the species – the Sicilian Channel. These expeditions used improved methods and technologies compared to previous efforts, such as environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling, which detects traces of animal DNA in water, like using a dog to sniff out an animal’s presence. The researchers also used surface and deepwater cameras with bait to attract the sharks, and chumming to try and lure them closer.

During the expeditions, they detected the presence of white sharks on five occasions at the four sites. The team was correct in their choice of location and timing of May through June, but did not interact directly with the sharks.

“They are extremely sparse, and we realized that even with our efforts, we weren't working on a large enough scale,” Ferretti said. “We need to recalibrate our approach and develop new strategies. Despite these challenges, we were able to identify a stronghold of this population, particularly in the southern Sicilian Channel off northern Africa. This area is highly impacted by fishing, and it is where we are focusing our efforts now. The pilot expeditions allowed us to recalibrate for a larger program and provided valuable insight into where to focus future efforts.”

Stormy seas

The research team, which included graduate students from Virginia Tech, used leisure boats, which, while suitable, were far from ideal as they were not dedicated research vessels. They lacked space, speed, and the necessary equipment to properly store chum material—primarily bluefin tuna, which is highly regulated in the Mediterranean and difficult to source continuously.

“We were able to carry out our research, gathering vital data that will guide future expeditions,” Ferretti said. “It was a demanding but crucial part of our ongoing efforts to protect this endangered population.”

The journeys took the team from Marsala, on the northwest tip of Sicily, to various islands like Lampedusa and Pantelleria, as well as Tunisia and Malta, deploying long-line cameras and collecting eDNA samples along the way. However, the intense commercial boat and fishing traffic in the Sicilian Channel made things challenging, and the researchers had to monitor their equipment closely to avoid collisions with ships.

In 2023, the team utilized a large 87-foot sailing yacht to conduct open water research and had a film crew document the mission.

While they did not directly see any white sharks, they successfully tagged a Mako shark for the first time in the region as part of another research project.

And, Ferretti said, the path for future research missions has been set.

The next horizon

Now, the research team is planning and fundraising for multiple future expeditions in the Sicilian Channel and beyond.

“We know that one hot spot is there, but there may also be other important areas in the eastern Mediterranean Sea hosting critical habitat such as a nursery,” Ferretti said.

The researchers are implementing a series of approaches, including monitoring ports in North Africa to track interactions between fishers and sharks and collect biological material. This allows them to gather genetic and isotopic samples for analysis. Through isotopic analysis, they can learn more about the population’s structure, diet, and changes in habitat as the sharks grow.

“We don’t do research in a vacuum,” Chapple said. “The research we do now is so multi-disciplinary and the questions that we can ask now are not achievable as a single entity. This white shark chase – there is so much knowledge held in local communities and stakeholders, that as a scientist we cannot step in there and say this is what we should do. These multi-institutional collaborations are critical for understanding the animals, the systems, and the culture that happens around the research.”

These collaborations across not only universities, but also regions, add additional tools to the researchers’ toolbox to improve effectiveness.

“We are expanding our network of local and international collaborators to maximize the value of the data we collect and establish a proper monitoring program for the Mediterranean,” Ferretti said. “Currently, there is no formal monitoring or conservation program in place for this population. We want now to keep monitoring this population because we do not want to lose it.”

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Journal

Frontiers in Marine Science

DOI

10.3389/fmars.2024.1425511 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Animals

Article Title

On the tracks of white sharks in the Mediterranean Sea

Article Publication Date

22-Oct-2024

The Atlantic Gulf Stream was unexpectedly strong during the last ice age – new study

Mark Maslin, Professor of Natural Sciences, UCL, 

Jack Wharton, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Paleoceanography, UCL, 

and David Thornalley, Professor of Ocean and Climate Science, UCL

Wed, 10 July 2024 

ittiz/wiki, CC BY-SA

Twenty thousand years ago the world was locked into a great ice age. Ice sheets two miles thick covered much of North America, Scandinavia and the British Isles.

Greenhouse gas concentrations were much lower, the world was 6°C colder, and because of all the water trapped in ice-sheets, the sea was at least 120 metres lower, exposing land that is submerged today. It would have been possible to walk from France to London via Doggerland or from Russia to Alaska through Beringia.

But our research, now published in Nature, has uncovered at least one surprise in the ice age climate: the Gulf Stream, which carries warm water northwards through the Atlantic, was stronger and deeper than it is today.

This research came about because as paleoceanographers (scientists who study oceans in the past), we wanted to understand how the oceans behaved during the last ice age to provide insights into how climate change might alter things in future.
Warm water – from Mexico to Norway

Today, warm salty water from the Gulf of Mexico flows northward as part of the Gulf Stream. As part of it flows past Europe it gives off lots of heat keeping the climate of western Europe very mild.

Then, as the surface water passes north of Iceland, it loses enough heat to increase its density, causing it to sink and form deepwater. This process initiates the global deepwater conveyor belt, which connects all the world’s oceans, slowly moving heat around the planet at depths greater than one mile below the surface.

Scientists previously thought the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – a complex system of deep and surface ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream – was weaker during extreme cold periods such as the last ice age. In theory, more sea ice in the Arctic would have reduced the amount of water sinking from the surface into the deep ocean, slowing down the global deepwater conveyor belt.

However, our new study reveals that the Gulf Stream was actually much stronger (and deeper) during the last ice age. This is despite the prevailing cold glacial climate and the presence of enormous ice sheets around the northern parts of the Atlantic.

In fact, our research suggests that the glacial climate itself was responsible for driving a stronger Gulf Stream. In particular, the ice age was characterised by much stronger winds over parts of the North Atlantic, which would have driven a stronger Gulf Stream. Therefore, although the amount of water sinking from the surface into the deep ocean was reduced, the Gulf Stream was stronger and still transporting lots of heat northwards, albeit not as far as today.

Reconstructing past ocean circulation

Since we don’t have any data from weather buoys or satellites, we instead reconstructed how the ocean would have circulated in the last ice age using proxy evidence preserved in marine sediment cores, which are long tubes of mud from the bottom of the ocean.

The cores we used contained mud that had been building up on the seafloor for the past 25,000 years and were retrieved from multiple locations along the US east coast using research vessels from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, where some of our team are based.

Red tube on side of ship

To determine the Gulf Stream’s strength during the ice age, we measured the size of sediment grains within the mud, with larger grains indicating faster flow and vice versa.

From the same mud, we also measured the shell chemistry of tiny single-celled organisms called foraminifera. By comparing data from a range of depths at multiple sites in the Northwest Atlantic, we were able to identify the boundary between those foraminifera that once lived in warm subtropical waters and those that lived in colder subpolar waters. This allowed us to determine the depth of the Gulf Stream at the time those organisms were alive.

This adds uncertainty to climate projections

Our research highlights how the Gulf Stream, and the wider system of Atlantic currents, is sensitive to changes in wind strength as well as meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet. This has important implications for future climate change.

Climate models predict the Gulf Stream will weaken over the 21st century, in part due to reduced windiness. This would lead to even higher sea levels along the US east coast and relatively less global warming in Europe. If climate change causes changes in wind patterns in the future, the Gulf Stream will also change, adding to the uncertainty about future climate conditions.

Our results also highlight why we should not make simplistic statements about Atlantic currents and future climate change. The Atlantic features a set of interconnected currents, each with own behaviour and unique response to climate change. Therefore, when explaining the impact of anthropogenic climate change on the climate system, we need to be very clear about which part we are discussing and the specific implications for different countries.

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

The Conversation

Jack Wharton receives funding from the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) and the European Union's Horizon Europe Project EPOC.

David Thornalley has received grant funding from NERC, NSF, Innovate UK, European Union Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Mark Maslin is Pro-Vice Provost of the UCL Climate Crisis Grand Challenge. He is co-director of the London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership and a member of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. He is an advisor to Sheep Included Ltd, Lansons, NetZeroNow and the UK Parliament. He has received grant funding from the NERC, EPSRC, ESRC, DFG, Royal Society, DIFD, BEIS, DECC, FCO, Innovate UK, Carbon Trust, UK Space Agency, European Space Agency, Research England, Wellcome Trust, Leverhulme Trust, CIFF, Sprint2020, and British Council. He has received funding from the BBC, Lancet, Laithwaites, Seventh Generation, Channel 4, JLT Re, WWF, Hermes, CAFOD, HP and Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.

We know how to prevent the next Deepwater Horizon spill: stop fast-tracking approval for drilling 

BY DONALD BOESCH, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/20/24 

FILE – A large plume of smoke rises from fires on BP’s Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, more than 50 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana’s tip on April 2010. A new National Academy of Science study says that 13 years after a massive BP oil spill fouled the Gulf…

Fourteen years ago, the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig suffered a blowout in water a mile deep. The Gulf of Mexico explosion took the lives of 11 people, released 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf over 87 straight days, wreaked widespread ecological harm, displaced communities, and devastated local economies.

Ultimately, the worst oil spill in U.S. history cost $17.2 billion in damage. President Obama appointed me to the national commission to investigate the causes of this disaster.

Through the course of our investigation, my colleagues and I discovered that (in addition to multiple direct errors) the Interior Department had performed no meaningful analysis of the potentially significant environmental consequences when it considered BP’s applications for Deepwater Horizon. Instead, the government had essentially rubber-stamped BP’s exploration plans and drilling permits using a decades-old policy to exempt them from the typically mandatory environmental review. Known as a “categorical exclusion,” this became a routine practice — one that the Interior Department continues to regularly employ.

In 1978, faced with looming oil shortages, Congress passed the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to promote offshore development of oil and gas resources. The act expressly singled out the Gulf of Mexico, which is the source of about 97 percent of all U.S. offshore oil and gas production, for less rigorous oversight under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The Interior Department then created the categorical exclusion policy to further bolster oil production. This allowed the government to fast-track approval of oil companies’ offshore drilling permits, declaring them not subject to the rigorous oversight normally required under NEPA.

Our commission’s investigation also uncovered troubling evidence that government personnel responsible for reviewing offshore oil drilling permits were made to understand that flagging environmental concerns would “increase the burden” on oil companies by “creating unnecessary delays.” And it was also evident that staffers were simply too under-resourced to meet the extraordinary expansion of oil development in the Gulf.

To be clear, the Interior Department had conducted general environmental reviews evaluating impacts of oil and gas development in the Gulf at large. But by using categorical exclusion, the government did not analyze the unique risks at the Deepwater Horizon site, thereby failing to account for the geological complexity and susceptible deep-sea life specific to that area in the Gulf.

At the close of the investigation, our commission recommended that the Interior Department strengthen its oversight procedures through the oil exploration and development process.

Six years later, the department issued a memorandum directing the discontinuation of categorical exclusions for offshore oil project approvals. However, the policy revision was never published in the Federal Register. Then, in 2017, under President Trump, the government reversed course and reinstated fast-tracking approvals for offshore oil drilling.


Fast forward to today, and the categorical exclusion still hasn’t been retired, while many other things have greatly changed concerning energy and the Gulf of Mexico. Over the last 14 years, offshore oil and gas exploration and production has continued to shift into waters even deeper and riskier than where BP was drilling. Human-caused climate change has become more obvious, with the waters of the Gulf warming faster than the world’s oceans as a whole. This is setting the stage for increasingly powerful hurricanes, making offshore drilling even more dangerous. While oil production in the Gulf has been generally steady, reserves are being depleted, leaving the Gulf littered with unproductive platforms, inadequately plugged wells and 18,000 miles of abandoned pipeline on the seabed.

Over the same period, as a result of inland fracking, U.S. crude oil production has dramatically increased and is at an all-time high. Our country has become a net exporter of crude oil, with more than twice as much of it shipped from Gulf ports than produced in the offshore waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Yet, there is global commitment to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid a climate catastrophe. This necessitates commensurate reduction in burning of fossil fuels and expansion of renewable energy. It is new renewable energy — wind, solar, and geothermal — that we must be fast-tracking (with appropriate environmental precautions), not more environmentally damaging production of fossil fuels.


Over the past five years, the Interior Department has fast-tracked approvals for more than 90 percent of proposed offshore oil projects, yet additional oil spills from risky wells have continued, including this year. It’s long past time to discontinue the routine use of categorical exclusions for offshore oil and gas development. This simple policy change could be the difference between setting the stage for the next Deepwater Horizon disaster and steering clear of another catastrophe — before it’s too late.

Donald Boesch, a professor of marine science, served as president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and vice chancellor for Environmental Sustainability.

 

Fourteen years after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, endemic fishes face an uncertain future

PENSOFT PUBLISHERS

 

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LEAD AUTHOR PROSANTA CHAKRABARTY IN THE FISH COLLECTIONS OF THE LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF NATURAL SCIENCE WHERE MANY SPECIMENS FROM THE GULF OF MEXICO ARE HOUSED.

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CREDIT: EDDY PEREZ, LSU

The 2010 Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon was the largest accidental oil spill in history. With almost 100 million gallons (379 million liters) of oil combined with dispersants suggested to remain in the Gulf, it is one of the worst pollution events ever. More than a decade later, its long-term effects  are still not fully understood.

In a new study, researchers from Louisiana State University and Tulane University examined the endemic Gulf of Mexico fish species that may have been most impacted by the oil spill to see how their distribution has changed over the years. To get their data, they studied museum specimens from natural history collections, looked at relevant literature, and combed biodiversity databases.

With 1541 fish species known from the region, and 78 endemic fish species, the Gulf of Mexico is one of the most biologically rich and resilient marine environments in the world, but how much of this diversity is still left intact?

The study found that 29 out of the Gulf’s 78 endemic fish species haven’t been reported in museum collections since 2010. The Yucatan killifish, for example, which is considered endangered, was last reported pre-spill, in 2005, off the Yucatán Peninsula.

Six of the non-reported species are considered of greatest concern, because their areas of distribution largely overlap with the affected area – although the authors note that their absence in the Gulf in recent years cannot automatically be attributed to the oil spill.

“Understanding the impacts of catastrophic environmental events such as the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill does not end when the wellhead is capped or when the last drops of oil cease to flow. The disaster only begins to end when the data no longer show impacts of the event. We are far from the beginning of the end for the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. Lingering chemicals, lost generations of wildlife and a continued ecosystem imbalance may all be factors that prevent an environment from rebounding from such cataclysmic events,” the authors note in their resear article.

However, they also point out that nature’s ability to recover should not be overlooked.

“The Gulf of Mexico continues to face many challenges, from the Dead Zone, to climate change, loss of coast habitats and continued oil spills. Efforts like this report aim to bring attention to vulnerable species that continue to be impacted by human activities and to the unique endemic fauna of the region,” the researchers write in conclusion.

Jars of voucher specimens of fishes at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science.

CREDIT

Eddy Perez, LSU

Research article:

Chakrabarty P, Sheehy AJ, Clute X, Cruz SB, Ballengée B (2024) Ten years later: An update on the status of collections of endemic Gulf of Mexico fishes put at risk by the 2010 Oil Spill. Biodiversity Data Journal 12: e113399. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.12.e113399

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JOURNAL

Biodiversity Data Journal

DOI

10.3897/BDJ.12.e113399 

ARTICLE TITLE

Ten years later: An update on the status of collections of endemic Gulf of Mexico fishes put at risk by the 2010 Oil Spill

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

8-Apr-2024

 

The Most Efficient Way to Minimize Social Inequality

by Eric Zuesse / April 12th, 2024

A Washington Post columnist, Catherine Rampell, headlined on April 5, “The Great Medicaid Purge was even worse than expected” and reported:

It’s a tale of two countries: In some states, public officials are trying to make government work for their constituents. In others, they aren’t.

This week marks one year since the Great Medicaid Purge (a.k.a. the “unwinding”) began. Early during the pandemic, in exchange for additional funds, Congress temporarily prohibited states from kicking anyone off Medicaid. But as of April 1, 2023, states were allowed to start disenrolling people.

Some did so immediately. So far, at least 19.6 million people have lost Medicaid coverage. That’s higher than the initial forecast, 15 million, even though the process hasn’t yet finished.

Some enrollees were kicked off because they were evaluated and found to be no longer eligible for the public health insurance program — maybe because (happily!) their incomes rose, or because they aged out of a program. But as data from KFF shows, the vast majority, nearly 70 percent, lost coverage because of paperwork issues. …

These “paperwork issues” were added by self-alleged conservatives, or Republicans, in order to reduce the number of beneficiaries, supposedly in order to protect taxpayers against “waste, fraud or abuse,” by poor people, against taxpayers. Wikipedia’s article on Medicaid says:

Medicaid is the largest source of funding for medical and health-related services for people with low income in the United States, providing free health insurance to 85 million low-income and disabled people as of 2022;^[3] in 2019, the program paid for half of all U.S. births.^[4] As of 2017, the total annual cost of Medicaid was just over $600 billion, of which the federal government contributed $375 billion and states an additional $230 billion.^[4] States are not required to participate in the program, although all have since 1982. In general, Medicaid recipients must be U.S. citizens or qualified non-citizens, and may include low-income adults, their children, and people with certain disabilities.^[5] As of 2022 45% of those receiving Medicaid or CHIP were children.^[3]

Medicaid also covers long-term services and supports, including both nursing home care and home- and community-based services, for those with low incomes and minimal assets; the exact qualifications vary by state. Medicaid spent $215 billion on such care in 2020, over half of the total $402 billion spent on such services.^[6] Of the 7.7 million Americans who used long-term services and supports in 2020, about 5.6 million were covered by Medicaid, including 1.6 million of the 1.9 million in institutional settings.^[7]

Medicaid covers healthcare costs for people with low incomes, while Medicare is a universal program providing health coverage for the elderly.

Medicaid is means-tested (it’s for only poor people), whereas Medicare is not. President Lyndon Baines Johnson introduced Medicaid in 1965, and Medicare in 1966. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had introduced the federal taxation-based trust-funded Social Security retirement program in 1935; and both of those Presidents were Democrats, which used to be the Party that had some ideological commitment to workers, whereas the Republican Party, ever since a Confederate’s (pro-slavery) bullet assassinated the first (and the only progressive, or pro-democratic) Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, in 1865, has been, and is, committed only to investors, which is to say, only to the class of only rich individuals, the owners of businesses — managers instead of workers and consumers.

There are just two basic philosophies of government: either it is democratic, meaning one-person-one-vote rule (rule equally by all residents), or else it is aristocratic (rule unequally by residents on the basis of each person’s wealth), meaning one-dollar-one-vote rule (which is the way that a corporation is run: the more shares a person owns, the more of a say in managing it the individual willl have). The Democratic Party used to believe in democracy (government rule as being a right that each resident has equally), and the Republican Party after Lincoln was shot has always believed in aristocracy (government rule as a privilege that only certain residents have, they generally being the rich ones, but also sometimes only Christians). Consequently, the Democratic Party was “populist,” and the Republican Party was “elitist.” (Republicans — after Lincoln — were the Party of “business,” meaning of the owners of corporations.)

In America, as in all countries, there is also race as a political factor, and it’s traditionally categorized as being based upon either nationality or else religion of a person’s ancestors, or else (for instantaneous categorization) the individual’s appearance marks one’s ‘race’. But, whatever a ‘race’ is, racism or support for race being considered as a qualification for receiving a benefit from government or else as being a qualification for exclusion from receiving that benefit, can be supported both by populists and by elitists.

However, whereas racism is intrinsic to aristocracy, it is not intrinsic to democracy. Aristocracy believes in hereditary right, such as to pass wealth on to one’s children, whereas democracy rejects that and can survive only where intergenerational transmission of privately acquired wealth is by law either severely limited or else totally prohibited. And that exclusionary right for an aristocrat, to pass on to the next generation the person’s private wealth, is what produces, after many successive generations, increasingly concentrated wealth, and increasingly widespread poverty, which then institutionalizes aristocratic government and rule by privilege, instead of rule by individuals’ work and merit. Consequently, any democrat (or populist) who tolerates aristocracy, is tolerating the end of democracy.

For example, many of America’s Confederates considered themselves to be democrats but supported slavery of Blacks. Not only the Confederate aristocracy did. But — just as in Israel, there is no democracy, because only the Jews can vote there — the Confederacy was no democracy, because only the ‘Whites’ could vote there.

Similarly, Germany’s Nazis weren’t only the aristocracy, but also many Germans who considered themselves to be populists, and Hitler exploited this widespread illogicality among the public, in order to create his extremely elitist-racist-imperialist (or ideologically nazi) nation.

The theory behind the cutbacks in Medicaid is that the poor are to blame for their poverty. Any aristocrat believes it to at least some extent, despite its being stupid. It is stupid because any aristocrat knows that money is power: the power to hire people to do your will, and to fire ones who won’t or can’t. Any aristocrat experiences that reality all the time. The most-powerless individuals in any society are the poorest. Obviously, something causes a person to be poor, but heredity — being born poor and surrounded by only poor people — will always be the biggest portion of that cause. The people with the power are the aristocrats, the super-rich few who own the vast majority of the nation’s private wealth. They create — and, by means of their lobbyists and media and politicians, constantly impose — the system that produces, the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and so of power. The poor don’t, and can’t. And won’t. Consequently, any theory that the poor ought to be blamed for their poverty is an obvious lie, which benefits the richest. Of course, an individual also has some effect on his or her getting and staying out of poverty, but, in an aristocracy, the system itself has a much bigger effect on that.

By contrast against the aristocratic view, an intelligent democrat acknowledges (not merely to oneself but also publicly) that money is power, and consequently blames the super-rich — the very few who possess most of it — for society’s problems. Not the poor. And not any ‘race’. This isn’t to say that there aren’t intergenerational factors that help to explain how wealthy a given individual is — of course, there are (and that is the problem). But whereas a democrat tries to reduce them, an aristocrat tries to enlarge them. And that’s the ideological difference between an aristocrat and a democrat.

If America’s supposed effort to increase economic opportunity for poor people is to rely upon the poor ‘raising themselves up by their own bootstraps’, then it isn’t relying upon the billionaires to have the responsibility for solving this problem. But they, the super-rich, are the ones who actually caused the problem by their controlling not only their corporations but the press, and the lobbyists, and the politicians, who have so deceived and so controlled the public, as to have instituted this widely oppressive system, which the poorest suffer the most. It would not exist in an authentically one-person-one-vote government and nation and culture. It can exist only in an aristocracy (which is what post-WW2 America is).

The most efficient way to minimize social inequality is to replace aristocracy with democracy. It’s that simple, and that difficult. Only the super-rich possess the means to do it, but none of them actually wants to. Are all of them psychopaths? They benefit from the system that they have imposed. They benefit not only in wealth but in their corporate protective immunity from having to go to prison for any corporate crimes they require their subordinates to do in order to generate their wealth. For example, on April 10, Good Jobs First headlined “The Trillion-Dollar Mark: Corporate Misconduct Cases Reach a Dubious Milestone,” and reported:

Regulatory fines, criminal penalties, and class-action settlements paid by corporations in the United States since 2000 have now surpassed $1 trillion. Total payouts for corporate misconduct grew from around $7 billion per year in the early 2000s to more than $50 billion annually in recent years, according to a new report by Good Jobs First.

This amounts to a seven-fold increase in current dollars — a 300% increase in constant dollars.

These figures are derived from Violation Tracker, a wide-ranging database containing information on more than 600,000 cases from about 500 federal, state and local regulatory agencies and prosecutors as well as court data on major private lawsuits.

• Explore Violation Tracker.

The database shows that 127 large parent companies have each paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements over the past quarter-century. The most penalized industries are financial services and pharmaceuticals, followed by oil and gas, motor vehicles, and utilities. …

Among the findings:

• Bank of America has by far the largest penalty total at $87 billion. It and other banks, both domestic and foreign, account for six of the 10 most penalized parent companies.

• Other bad actors include BP (mainly because of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill), Volkswagen (because of its emissions software cheating scandal), Johnson & Johnson (largely because of big settlements in cases alleging its talcum powder causes cancer), and PG&E (due to cases accusing it of causing or contributing to wildfires in the West).

• Recidivism is a major issue. Half a dozen parent companies—all banks—have each paid $1 million or more in over 100 different cases, led by Bank of America with 225. Two dozen parents have at least 50 of these cases on their record.

• All of the top 10 and 95 of the 100 most penalized parent companies are publicly traded. The most penalized privately held company is Purdue Pharma, which is going out of business for its role in causing the opioid crisis.

• In more than 500 of the cases involving criminal charges, the U.S. Justice Department offered the defendant a deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreement. …

That’s $1T during the reported 23-year period, and these fines are mere wrist-slaps to those stockholders’ annual profits. But the victims lost vastly more than that, and this report made no mention of anyone having gone to prison for any of these corporate crimes, though at least two of them did — Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried, both of whom had robbed their fellow-investors. But, for example, the Purdue Pharma case had killed at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, and yet none of the Sackler family that owned it, and that drove their employees to perpetrate it, had even a possibility of going to prison for any of those deaths, nor for the vast other harms that their personal wealth-building had driven.

In an aristocracy, the only super-rich who ever get imprisoned are ones who have harmed other corporate investors — never ones who have harmed or even killed vast multitudes of the middle and bottom economic classes.

Remarkably, the corrupt Democratic Party President of the United States has taken to the hustings in his fake-‘populist’ re-election campaign by citing a 2021 White House economic study, which calculated that America’s billionaires are taxed at far lower rates of income than regular Americans are. It found that if the 400 richest (highest-wealth) Americans (all of whom were multi-billionaires, and not merely billionaires, and who donate collectively around 30% of all of the money that is expended in U.S. political campaigns) had been taxed including their “income” from the corporate stock that they own (which now and always has essentially never been taxed because there are so many ways to avoid ever being taxed on it), then they were collectively being taxed at only an 8.2% rate on all of their income. It was a sound study. However, the billionaires-controlled think tanks and media slammed it by deceiving their public about it. For example, PolitiFact rated Biden’s statement “False” because (and this displays its contempt for the intelligence of its readers): “Under the current tax code, the top 1% of taxpayers pay an effective tax rate of 25% on the income the government counts.” But that’s exactly what the White House economists had been criticizing! They were criticizing the current tax-laws in the U.S., which DON’T include as reported income those stock profits.  For once (while campaigning for re-election), Biden told the truth, even though it’s a truth that his billionaire backers want the public NOT to know. (And PolitiFact is funded by numerous billionaires, both Democratic Party ones such a Soros’s Open Society, and Republican ones such as the Charles Koch Institute.) Is it any wonder, then, why the U.S. wealth-distribution is becoming increasingly skewed to the billionaires, even though so much of their wealth is being hidden and not even reported to the Government?

Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian. His new book, America's Empire of Evil: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. Read other articles by Eric.

How Federal Tax Dollars Meant to Fight Climate Change Could End Up Boosting Louisiana’s Fossil Fuel Production

BY NED RANDOLPH

 APRIL 3, 2024
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Louisiana accounted for nearly one-sixth of the nation’s oil-refining capacity and shipped 63% of its liquefied natural gas exports in 2022.
Adbar/Wikimedia, CC BY

Billions of federal tax dollars will soon be pouring into Louisiana to fight climate change, yet the projects they’re supporting may actually boost fossil fuels – the very products warming the planet.

At issue are plans to build dozens of federally subsidized projects to capture and bury carbon dioxide from industries.

On the surface, these projects seem beneficial. Keeping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere prevents the greenhouse gas from fueling climate change. In practice, however, this may lead to a net increase in fossil fuel production and more emissions.

That’s because many of these carbon capture projects will be handling emissions from facilities that rely on oil and natural gas – in fact, many of the projects are tied to major oil and gas companies through subsidiaries. Under new federal rules, the projects can receive generous tax subsidies. The more carbon dioxide the factories produce and capture, the more federal money the projects can receive.

The coup de grâce: Louisiana can authorize as many of these federally subsidized projects as it sees fit. The Environmental Protection Agency recently approved its quest to become only one of three states with regulatory “primacy” over such carbon storage wells.

Fossil fuel industry advocates are eager to get projects approved. “Louisiana has a chance with our geological structures to make a big splash in the pond for CO₂ in the world,” Mike Moncla, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, told a legislative task force in December 2023.

Louisiana has taken advantage of disasters to boost the fossil fuel industry before. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated Louisiana’s marshlands and disrupted oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico in 2005, Louisiana authorities pushed to expand drilling in federal waters in the name of hurricane recovery and coastal restoration.

In my book, “Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta: A Call for Reclamation,” I show how efforts to reduce such environmental destruction end up greenwashing industries that created the problem.

Using disaster to promote fossil fuels

Louisiana has been wrestling with environmental issues and coastal erosion since the early part of the 20th century, sped by a confluence of federal flood control levees on the Lower Mississippi River and oil and gas drilling.

Over the years, the fossil fuel industry drilled thousands of leaky wells and dug over 10,000 miles of pipeline and navigation canals. Coastal erosion accelerated, which also left oil and gas infrastructure exposed.

Fossil fuel pipelines and gas and petroleum facilities crisscross Louisiana.
U.S. Energy Information Administration

In the late 1990s, state leaders joined with the oil and gas industry on a public relations campaign to convince Congress to help fund a $14 billion coastal restoration plan. The effort stalled after Congress declined to approve the spending.

Then hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the state in 2005. Oil and gas production in the region went offline, and U.S. energy prices surged.

Within days of Hurricane Katrina, Republicans in Congress were calling for lifting a 25-year drilling moratorium on the Gulf of Mexico’s Outer Continental Shelf.

Within the year, Congress had voted to lift the moratorium and to share 37.5% of the federal royalties from the wells with Louisiana and the other Gulf states. The money would help fund the state’s coastal restoration plans, which were later bolstered by the huge disaster settlement from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The arrangement made coastal restoration dependent on future revenue from an industry that continues to damage the coast.

Carbon capture has similarly turned the oil and gas industry into a critical component of mitigating climate change while the industry continues producing products that are heating the planet.

Clearing the way for taxpayer funds

Congress first created a tax credit for carbon sequestration in 2008, but the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act opened the flood gates. It boosted the federal tax credit to $85 per ton of carbon dioxide captured and stored from industrial facilities and $180 per ton for carbon captured from the air and stored. Companies that reuse carbon dioxide for industrial products or enhanced oil recovery will receive $60 per ton.

The tax credits by some estimates could cost the federal treasury well over $100 billion, depending on the program’s popularity, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

At least 24 carbon capture applications are now pending in Louisiana. Many more are in preliminary stages, according to a Louisiana Department of Natural Resources spokesman.

Environmental advocacy groups say the program is riddled with problems, including lacking third-party verification that the carbon is being stored as claimed. An earlier federal investigation by the U.S. Treasury found that 90% of the $1 billion in tax credits awarded to companies for carbon storage between 2010 and 2019 was incorrectly documented.

Globally, there are only about 40 commercial carbon capture, use and storage facilities in operation. They capture 45 million metric tons of carbon annually – just over 1% of global emissions. The vast majority of this captured carbon is used to increase oil production from old wells.

The new gold rush

Carbon capture technology is now being used as a rationale to maintain oil and gas production.

Gregory Upton, executive director of the Louisiana State University Center for Energy Studies, testified on Capitol Hill in September 2023 that the Biden administration’s plan to limit new offshore leases would jeopardize Louisiana’s carbon capture projects. “In my opinion, policies aimed at reducing fossil fuel supply in the U.S. put this decarbonization strategy at risk,” he said.

Indeed, many planned carbon capture projects are tied to natural gas.

For example, a $4.5 billion “blue hydrogen” plant proposed by the Pennsylvania-based company Air Products uses natural gas to produce hydrogen, which also generates carbon dioxide emissions. The company has proposed burying 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year below Lake Maurepas, and presumably would garner $510 million in tax credits over 12 years.

Communities are worried

Critics argue that using carbon capture as a transition technology will divert billions of dollars in federal resources away from more proven renewable energy development and require building thousands of miles of specialized pipelines.

Capturing and storing emissions also requires energy. Adding carbon capture to a power plant, for example, requires one-sixth to one-third more power production, according to a Congressional Budget Office report. The tax credit rules also don’t account for the emissions released to produce the natural gas or transport and store the carbon dioxide.

When Louisiana petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency for regulatory primacy over these projects, the agency received 45,000 public comments. Residents raised fears that projects would contaminate underground aquifers or that stored carbon dioxide could escape through the state’s thousands of old oil wells.

The company Air Products triggered a public outcry when it began seismic testing with dynamite below Lake Maurepas, which had enjoyed no-dredging, no-drilling protection for decades.

Supporters of the industry, meanwhile, suggested to a state carbon capture task force that resisting even a single project would send a message that Louisiana is not open for business.

But, as I see it, the message seems quite the opposite. With a windfall of federal funding, Louisiana has put out the welcome mat.

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

Ned Randolph is an Adjunct Professor of Environmental Communications at Tulane University.