Most Canadians support health-care workers refusing treatment to threatening, disrespectful unvaccinated patients: Nanos survey


Brooklyn Neustaeter

CTVNews.ca Writer
 October 10, 2021


TORONTO -- Nearly two-thirds of Canadians say they support health-care workers refusing treatment to threatening or disrespectful patients who are unvaccinated against COVID-19, according to a new survey from Nanos Research.

The poll, conducted by Nanos Research and sponsored by CTV News, found that 40 per cent of Canadians support and 24 per cent somewhat support health-care workers refusing treatment to these patients.

Of those surveyed, 21 per cent said they oppose health-care workers refusing treatment to unvaccinated patients who are threatening or disrespectful, while 11 per cent said they somewhat oppose that. Four per cent of respondents said they are unsure.

Nanos reported that British Columbia residents were more likely to support health-care workers refusing treatment at 50 per cent, compared to residents of Quebec at 29 per cent support.

Nanos also asked Canadians how they feel about current COVID-19 restrictions imposed on people who are not vaccinated, and whether they are too strict or not strict enough.

According to the poll, the majority of Canadians said that restrictions requiring people to be fully vaccinated to go to indoor public spaces (60 per cent) and back to a workplace (63 per cent) are "just right."

Nanos reports that 14 per cent of respondents said the restrictions for both indoor public spaces and workplaces are too strict, while 22 per cent said they are not strict enough. Two per cent reported being unsure of strictness levels in indoor public spaces, and four per cent felt unsure about restrictions on being fully vaccinated to return to the workplace.

The survey found that residents of the Prairies are more likely to say these restrictions are not strict enough (28 per cent each), than residents of the Atlantic, who say that at 17 per cent for indoor public spaces and 15 per cent for workplaces.

The new polling from Nanos also found that 56 per cent of Canadians said staff of businesses should be responsible for ensuring that customers visiting their establishment are vaccinated, while one in five respondents (18 per cent) said it should be up to government employees.

Those aged 55 and older were more likely to say that the staff should ensure that customers are vaccinated at 68 per cent, compared to 51.6 per cent of respondents between the ages of 34 and 54, and 45.2 per cent of surveyed Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34.

According to the poll, 10 per cent of respondents said they are unsure of who should be in charge of ensuring customers that visit a business are vaccinated. Three per cent said it should be up to a combination of authorities, and five per cent said it should be no one's responsibility.

Three per cent of those surveyed said that private security firms should be responsible for ensuring customers are vaccinated. Another three per cent said that responsibility should be placed on police, while one per cent said it should be up to bylaw officers or health inspectors.

METHODOLOGY

Nanos conducted an RDD dual frame (land- and cell lines) hybrid telephone and online random survey of 1,017 Canadians, 18 years of age or older, between Sept. 30 and Oct. 3, as part of an omnibus survey. Participants were randomly recruited by telephone using live agents and administered a survey online. The sample included both land- and cell-lines across Canada. The results were statistically checked and weighted by age and gender using the latest census information and the sample is geographically stratified to be representative of Canada. Individuals randomly called using random digit dialling with a maximum of five call backs.

The margin of error for this survey is ±3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Charts may not add up to 100 due to rounding.

Families of young couple killed in 1980 Bologna bombing get new hope of justice

Patrick Sawer
Sat, October 9, 2021

One of the last photographs of Catherine Mitchell and John Kolpinski

Catherine was only identified from her signet ring and the watch she’d borrowed from her father, her boyfriend John from the passport he carried on him.

The newly graduated British couple were doing what hundreds of other carefree young people do every year: travelling around Europe by rail before setting out on their careers.

But by an awful stroke of fate, and a last minute change of plans, Catherine Mitchell and John Kolpinski found themselves at Bologna railway station in northern Italy on August 2, 1980.

Here, at 10.25am, a bomb planted by a fascist terror cell devastated the packed air-conditioned waiting room, killing them both along with 83 other people, in the worst terrorist attack in Europe until the Madrid train bombings of 2004.

Bologna Central station after the terrorist bombing that killed 85 people and wounded more than 200 others in 1980 - AFP

Now, more than 40 years on, newly discovered images from a tourist film placing a key suspect near the scene of the devastating blast could finally lead to justice for the victims’ families.

As a result of new analysis of the film, a former far right militant called Paolo Bellini is on trial, accused of playing a central role in the planning and execution of the plot to blow up Bologna station.

The families of Catherine and John - who had been a week into a four-week Interrailing holiday through the Mediterranean - have told The Telegraph of their hopes that all those suspected of having planned and carried out the attack will be fully held to account.

“We want justice. And we have had to wait a long time to get it,” said Catherine’s younger sister, Susan Kennedy, speaking publicly for the first time about her death. “All those who took part and planned it need to answer for their actions. This trial is an important part of that process.”

During a previous investigation, two witnesses claimed Bellini had been in Bologna the day of the attack.

Although he was initially acquitted on the basis of what was deemed "credible evidence", Super 8 film footage shot by a German tourist from Geneva has recently been re-examined using modern forensic methods.

Paolo Bellini, who is on trial for his part in the bombing of Bologna Station

The film shows a figure closely resembling Bellini on Platform 1, making his way from the scene shortly after the blast.

Bellini is accused of having transported the explosive used in the bomb to Bologna.

Although the ex-far right militant continues to deny he was there, his former wife, Maurizia Bonini, told the trial it was definitely him and that the previous alibi she had given for him to police was a lie.

The case at Bologna’s Court of Assizes holds out the prospect of a measure of justice for the victims’ families and ensures their loved ones will continue to be remembered.

“Catherine was a lovely girl. She was so outgoing, with lots of friends and loved her time at university,” said Mrs Kennedy. “She’d really come into her own there. She was 21 at the time, just graduated from Birmingham University with honours in economics and geography and had a job lined up with a big accounting practice in Birmingham, so it was the big holiday on a limited budget before settling down to work.

“John was also a very nice lad. He’d graduated from Birmingham with Catherine but hadn’t got a job lined up at the time and was still deciding what he wanted to do. They were very happy together. They were only just starting out on their lives and they were cut short. It was terrible.”

Mrs Kennedy, 61, spoke as Bellini’s trial resumed following a two-week adjournment to allow the now 68-year-old to rest after suffering heart palpitations.

Catherine Mitchell with her parents on her graduation day at Birmingham University in July 1980

For Mrs Kennedy, a retired secondary school teacher, talking about the case brings back painful memories of the agonising days that followed the bombing.

“After Catherine and John set off on their trip there was no contact from her apart from the postcards we received. That’s what it was like at the time. No phone calls home. No mobiles of course,” she said.

“As soon as I heard the news of what had happened I thought ‘My God, how terrible’ then immediately thought ‘No, they wouldn’t have been in Bologna’ because it wasn’t on their route. “But then it turned out they had suddenly changed their plan. I think they’d been to Venice and were on their way to Florence and then Rome and just happened to stop at Bologna.”

Mrs Kennedy, speaking in her front room in Launceston, Cornwall, its mantlepiece decorated with a portrait of Catherine looking radiant in her graduation gown and mortar board, continued:

“It happened on a Saturday and we didn’t hear anything until the police rang us on the Sunday to say John was dead and Catherine was missing. They’d found his passport on him, that’s how they knew.

“It wasn’t until the Tuesday, when the British Consul went up from Florence to Bologna and identified her, that we finally found out Catherine was dead. They identified her by the watch she’d borrowed from our dad for the trip and from the signet ring she was wearing with the initials CM, which had been a present from our grandmother.

The grave of Catherine Mitchell and John Kolpinski

“I was 20 months younger than Catherine and I still remember the shock when we found out. It was just devastating.”

Few in this country remember the attack, or that two young Britons were killed in it.

But Bellini’s trial has once again exposed the painful history of modern Italy and the fault lines that ran through the country at a time when "il bel paese" was still the westernmost front line of the Cold War and the setting of a violent struggle between left and right on its streets and piazzas, lasting through the Seventies into the mid-Eighties.

“We felt tremendous anger at first, but we didn’t hold it against the Italian people. How could we? You can’t be angry all the time against an entire nation. The Italians can be so lovely and you wonder how on earth could that happen? But there are terrible people everywhere,” said Mrs Kennedy.

In the months and years that followed Catherine’s death her family became aware of Bologna’s symbolic importance in Italy's post war history, and the reason it was targeted.

Italy's troubled past

The town had long been a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party and was recognised as one of the most efficient municipal governments in the country. Bologna’s citizens had also been in the forefront of the wartime resistance against Mussolini’s fascist regime and the Nazi invasion that followed its collapse.

That made Bologna station - packed with Italian and foreign tourists - a strategic target for the far right, who were suspected of being aided by eversive elements of the Italian state and secret services as part of the so-called "Strategy of Tension", designed to keep the left from taking power nationally.

“Catherine and John were just so unlucky to be caught up in that awful violence that Italy was going through at the time and to be in that particular city at a time when it was targeted because of its history. You become aware of that when you see the photographs in the main square of all the people who died in the resistance against fascism and the Nazis during the war,” said Mrs Kennedy.

Suspected collusion by some state officials hampered the official investigation, delaying until 1988 the trial and conviction of four members of the neo-fascist Armed Revolutionary Nuclei for their part in the bombing.

Catherine’s father Harry, who died in August at the age of 90 - still distraught at his eldest daughter’s death - followed closely the fight for justice mounted by the Victims’ Families Association and its own investigations into what Italians call "la strage di Bologna".

At his home in Launceston, to where he had retired from Bath with his wife Shirley after a career as a designer with the MoD, he accumulated more than half a dozen heavy boxes of documents and materials about the attack.

Both Mr Mitchell and his wife attended the first trial, despite the emotional ordeal it involved for them.

Mrs Kennedy is grateful for the help and support her family received from the Association and for the pension awarded by the Italian government to her parents, in recognition of the state’s failure to protect their daughter.

Support from Bologna City Council

“We’ve had a tremendous amount of support from the Association and from Bologna City Council. They have fought for everybody. Many people caught up in disasters don’t have that,” she said. “My parents even received a pension until their death from the Italian government, after they passed a special law for the victims’ families, even though they weren’t financially dependent on Catherine. It wasn't a huge amount, but it was a recognition that the state had failed to keep people like my sister safe.”

Mrs Kennedy last visited the scene of her sister’s murder - where a huge dent in the station wall caused by the blast has been preserved as a permanent memorial - in 2005, for the 25th anniversary commemorations.

“It’s always very emotional,” she said. “You march down to the station with all the families. I’ve never been anywhere where people line the streets and applaud you like they do in Bologna on those days. They are huge gatherings.

“Even though it was born of tragedy, we’ve met so many lovely people and made very good friends. That has helped a lot, to meet other people who had gone through the same terrible thing as we had.”

PRO NUKE PWR

Nuclear option: Earth's climate panacea or poison?

Issued on: 11/10/2021 - 

Nuclear plants such as Cattenom in France provide massive power loads with no direct emissions SEBASTIEN BERDA AFP

Paris (AFP)

For its supporters, nuclear energy is the world's best -- perhaps only -- hope to avoid catastrophic climate change. Opponents say it is too expensive, too risky and totally unnecessary.

Standing between the two camps are those who see atomic power as a necessary evil that will buy the time needed to develop cleaner and safer alternatives.

"We don't have the luxury of choosing one or the other," said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, which advises developed countries.

It's a hotly contested debate that continues to divide specialists and policymakers alike.

Unlike wind, solar and hydropower, nuclear plants do not depend on often unreliable climatic factors. A combination of drought and low winds, for example, has been blamed for the recent surge in natural gas prices that is stoking demand for dirty alternatives such as coal and oil.

Still, nuclear stations are plagued by high construction costs -- with recent projects taking longer to complete and blowing out budgets -- as well as the thorny problem of disposing of highly toxic waste and decommissioning power stations.

On the plus side, nuclear reactors create massive amounts of power with no direct emissions of carbon dioxide.

Even taking into account the emissions associated with mining uranium for fuel and the concrete, steel and other materials used in construction, nuclear power emits very few greenhouse gases: much less than coal or gas, and even less than solar, according to some studies.

- 'Absolutely vital' -

"Everything that brings emissions down is good news," said Birol.

The IEA says nuclear power has avoided about 55 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions over the past five decades -- about two years of global energy-related emissions of the greenhouse gas.

For those reasons, nuclear energy accounts for a bigger share of the world power mix in most of the scenarios put forward by the IPCC -- the UN's climate experts -- to hold average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above where they were at the end of the 19th century.

The Fukushima disaster soured public sentiment against nuclear power in many countries 

DAVID GUTTENFELDER POOL/AFP

The International Atomic Energy Agency -- whose mission includes the promotion of nuclear power -- has raised its projections for the first time since the 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima power plant, and now expects installed capacity to double by 2050 under the most favourable scenario.

Nuclear power is "absolutely vital in our efforts to achieve net zero emissions," IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said.

That's a central objective of the next major climate conference, COP26, to be held in Glasgow in November.

But while some countries -- most notably China -- are building new reactors, others are shuttering old ones: 5.5 gigawatts of capacity were installed worldwide in 2019 while 9.4 GW were permanently closed, the IEA says.

The divide runs through the European Union: while Germany decided to phase out nuclear power after Fukushima, countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic see it as a way to reduce dependence on coal.

"In the Czech Republic, nuclear energy is seen as a reliable and relatively cheap source of electricity," said Wadim Strielkowski, an energy expert at the Prague Business School.

This division is reflected in the debate in Brussels about whether or not to include nuclear power in the green "taxonomy", the classification of activities deemed good for the climate and the environment.

- False economy -

Opponents of nuclear power such as Greenpeace have put aside their traditional arguments -- stemming from pacifism and fears about nuclear waste -- to focus on efficiency calculations.

The costs of renewables have been falling steadily while major nuclear projects are expensive and have suffered major overruns.

"Spending money today on new nuclear power worsens the climate crisis, because investments are not being made in what is cheaper, faster and therefore more efficient," said Mycle Schneider, author of a critical annual report on nuclear.

However, the nuclear industry has another trick up its sleeve.

For some years now, it has been betting heavily on small modular reactors (SMRs): simpler, mass-produced in factories, they are less likely to go awry than huge construction sites.

Anti-nuclear groups such as Greenpeace have turned from fears over weapons and waste to economic arguments over efficiency to turn the public against atomic power 

ODD ANDERSEN AFP

So far, only Russia has commissioned this technology -- for a groundbreaking floating plant. Still, there are signs of interest from other countries.

"The future of nuclear energy, whether in the Czech Republic or elsewhere in the world, could be small reactors," said Strielkowski.

© 2021 AFP

In Global Energy Crisis, Anti-Nuclear Chickens Come Home to Roost

In virtually every country that has closed nuclear plants, clean electricity has been replaced with dirty power.

LONG READ

By Ted Nordhaus

OCTOBER 8, 2021,

The cooling tower at the Mülheim-Kärlich nuclear power plant collapses during a controlled demolition near Koblenz, Germany, on Aug. 9, 2019. The plant was shut down on Sept. 9, 1988. 

THOMAS FREY/DPA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES


For years, the proponents of wind and solar energy have promised us a green future with electricity too cheap to meter, new energy infrastructure with little environmental impact on the land, and deep cuts in carbon emissions. But despite the rapid growth of renewable energy, that future has yet to materialize. Instead, many of the places that are furthest along in transitioning to renewable energy are today facing a crisis of power shortages, sky-high electricity prices, and flat or rising carbon emissions.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered companies owning backup diesel generators to operate them nonstop when electricity demand is high in order to avoid rolling blackouts. In Britain, exploding natural gas prices have shuttered factories, bankrupted power companies, and threaten to cause food shortages. Germany, meanwhile, is set for the biggest jump in greenhouse emissions in 30 years due to surging use of coal for power generation, which the country depends on to back up weather-dependent wind and solar energy and fill the hole left by its shuttered nuclear plants.

The proximate cause of all these crises has been surging natural gas prices as the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. But the underlying problem is that despite huge bets on renewable energy over the last several decades, California, Britain, and Germany have chosen fossil fuels over carbon-free nuclear energy to backstop their electrical systems.

Germany and California have prioritized closing nuclear plants over decommissioning coal and gas plants. But with so much power still generated from fossil fuels, rapid declines in the cost of wind and solar have not translated into cheap electricity. Electricity prices, in fact, have tended to be highest in places with the greatest share of renewable energy. Public resistance to the growing land use impacts of renewable energy has further hobbled efforts to build out renewables and the infrastructure necessary to support them.

One might dismiss these inconvenient developments as hiccups in the early phases of a global energy transition. But in many ways, the early phases are the easiest: Wind and solar developers can cherry-pick the best locations with good access to existing transmission lines. There is a huge reservoir of existing, on-demand, fossil fuel power generation that can supply the lion’s share of electricity demand while also filling in for renewable energy sources when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow. Subsidies for renewable energy are manageable for taxpayers and electricity consumers as long as the share of wind and solar supplying the grid isn’t very high.

But as the share of renewable energy grows in places like California and Germany, the technical challenges associated with scaling up renewables become more difficult. Once the share of variable renewable energy (i.e., solar and wind) begins to approach 20 percent or so, it swamps the electrical grid whenever the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Surges of wind and solar power at particular times of the day not only undermine the economics of other power sources on the grid but also undermine the economics of adding additional wind and solar. This phenomenon, called value deflation, is already eroding the economics of wind and solar in California and elsewhere—even at relatively low shares of grid penetration.


Sustained phases of low wind and overcast skies, as much of Europe saw this summer, create the opposite problem, with wind and solar generating far less electricity than normal. During those periods, grid operators need to have enormous amounts of backup generation standing by—essentially an entire second grid of capital-intensive fossil fuel plants that, under the best of circumstances, rarely need to operate but must still be built and maintained. Then there are seasonal variations in wind and solar that are larger still, requiring a vast overbuilding of wind and solar generation capacity in order to produce enough electricity during those times of the year when wind or sun is scarce. This, in turn, requires idling much of that overbuilt wind and solar generation when wind and sun are abundant.




Left: Demonstrators protest the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California on Aug. 9, 1978. TERRY SCHMITT/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE VIA GETTY IMAGES Right: Anti-nuclear power bumper stickers plaster a vehicle near the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California in the fall of 1981. The plant, still under construction at the time, was the site of a series of protests. BROMBERGER HOOVER/GETTY IMAGES


On paper, the problems of renewable intermittency are solvable. In the spreadsheets and models of academics and clean energy advocates, the deserts bloom with megascale solar farms, while vast forests of skyscraper-sized wind turbines sprout in offshore waters. New transmission lines move power across hundreds or even thousands of miles from the sunny deserts and windy coasts to the population centers where it is needed. To store intermittent wind and solar power, the world’s hydroelectric dams are retrofitted to run backward and forward, using excess wind and solar power to pump water uphill to be released whenever power is needed. Industrial facilities, meanwhile, shift their production schedules to use electricity when it is available, while our refrigerators and air conditioners turn themselves off and on in response to fluctuating availability of wind and solar power.

The reality looks very different. Consider California’s energy challenges. The state boasts the highest renewable energy share of any U.S. state—and has among the highest electricity prices. It generates 23 percent of its power from solar energy and a further 7 percent from wind annually. It has committed to source 100 percent of its electricity from clean sources by 2045.

But California’s share of electricity from clean energy has been on a treadmill for most of the last decade, beginning around 2012, when the San Onofre nuclear power station in southern California closed down after regulators refused to allow the reactor to operate at reduced capacity to address issues related to the installation of a faulty steam turbine. Six years later, in 2018, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved a deal brokered by state environmental groups with the local operator Pacific Gas & Electric to shutter the state’s last nuclear power station, the Diablo Canyon plant, by 2025.

To speak of these failures is often seen by green energy advocates as an attack on renewable energy. It is not.

Political leaders and the environmental community in California insist Diablo Canyon will be replaced entirely with renewable energy and efficiency measures. But even before the closure, the state has struggled to keep the lights on. Since the San Onofre plant shut down, it has waived rules intended to close California’s dirtiest natural gas plants because they remain critical to grid reliability.

This year, in anticipation of the Diablo Canyon closure, a draft proposal by the CPUC acknowledged it would need to add additional fossil fuel capacity to its midterm generation plan—and then walked that plan back in response to outrage from the state’s environmental community. Instead, the commission announced it would approve “temporary” gas plants that would not be part of the state’s formal generation road map.

But the fact that the state has not allowed its dirtiest natural gas plants to close for the better part of a decade makes clear that the new temporary gas plants are likely to remain running for years to come. Worse, the temporary plants the state plans to procure are substantially more polluting than the new permanent plants it had originally proposed. The benefit of the allegedly temporary gas plants, though, is that they have allowed California’s political leadership and environmental community to maintain the fiction that the state is still on track to achieve its climate goals. This fig leaf of environmental correctness was quickly followed by the order to fire up emergency diesel generators, which are just about the dirtiest source of electricity the state could possibly utilize.

All this is necessary because California is not remotely on track to fill the hole Diablo Canyon will leave with clean energy. New geothermal generation slated to come on line by 2026 is now delayed until at least 2028. New facilities combining solar generation and battery storage are also being developed much more slowly than the planners’ Pollyannaish assumptions, not least because of the unrealistic amount of battery storage required in the state’s generation plan over the next three years compared to current global battery production capacity.

Meanwhile, the economic value of solar generation continues to fall, and public resistance to the expanding footprint of the state’s renewable energy industry is growing. San Bernardino County, the largest county in California by area and home to much of the state’s prime desert locations for both solar and wind energy, placed a moratorium on new solar and wind development on more than 1 million acres in 2019.

Unfortunately, California’s electricity follies are hardly exceptional. Germany’s hundreds of billions of euros in renewable energy subsidies have bought it the costliest retail electricity in Europe. The need to fill the hole left by the nation’s shuttered nuclear plants and back up growing wind and solar generation has forced Germany to become even more dependent on domestically produced (and extremely carbon-intensive) lignite coal and Russian natural gas, resulting in largely stagnant—and lately rising—emissions. The former has forced the nation to delay its climate ambitions. The latter has left Germany’s economy and citizenry vulnerable to price gouging and blackmail.

Belgium, bowing to pressure from the country’s Green parties, is moving forward with plans to retire its nuclear power plants by 2025 without so much as a pretense of replacing them with clean generation. Instead, it will subsidize construction of new natural gas plants. Spain, meanwhile, just announced electricity price controls in response to spiraling natural gas and electricity prices, a move that threatens both its renewable energy and nuclear power sectors.

Even Britain, which has been celebrated as a poster child for effective clean energy policy in recent years because its carbon emissions have fallen the fastest of any major economy in the world, appears to be descending into an ever deeper energy crisis, in part due to its much-lauded decarbonization achievements. The country has cut its emissions significantly by replacing coal with natural gas and shifting 20 percent of its electricity production to wind energy. Meanwhile, Britain has struggled to update its aging nuclear reactors, which still account for 17 percent of the nation’s power supply. With a sustained lull in wind generation, a number of nuclear stations down for maintenance, and escalating natural gas prices, Britain, like other countries in Europe and Asia, is facing severe energy shortages, a situation that may get much worse in 2022 absent a fortuitously mild winter.




A solar energy field stands next to a coal-fired power plant in Lippendorf, Germany, on May 10. JENS SCHLUETER/GETTY IMAGES


To speak of these failures is often seen by green energy advocates as an attack on renewable energy. It is not. There is no reason wind, solar, and other sources of renewable energy can’t play a significant role in modern electrical grids and the fight against climate change. Far more dubious, though, is the notion that wind and solar energy might be the sole or even primary source of energy for modern economies. The problem, in other words, is not that the countries now experiencing energy crises have invested considerable effort in scaling renewable energy. It is that they have done so largely to the exclusion of all other low-carbon energy technologies—and exacerbated this problem by simultaneously shutting down nuclear power plants.

In recent years, most energy analysts and even some green advocacy groups have moved away from the preposterous notion that the world might meet all of its energy needs via renewable energy technologies. But the consensus remains that the pathway to as much as 80 percent renewable energy, predominantly from ever cheaper wind and solar, is viable, well understood, and likely. The conceit, mostly unspoken, is that once the world gets there, we’ll figure out the rest, whether that be a bit of nuclear energy, fossil fuels with carbon capture, new geothermal technologies, or just good old-fashioned natural gas, offset by planting trees or some other “net zero” workaround. The future, after all, is a long way off.

Among purveyors of this new electricity math, “baseload power,” meaning large, centralized power stations that produce electricity day and night, is a thing of the past. Instead, wind and solar energy—arrayed across vast landscapes, connected by enormous networks of long-distance power lines, and assisted by yet-to-be-invented technologies capable of storing immense amounts of excess electricity for days, weeks, or even months until it is needed—would produce most electrical power most of the time.

Most energy analysts and even some green advocacy groups have moved away from the preposterous notion that the world might meet all its energy needs via renewable energy technologies.

But as experts and modelers have worked the problem over recent years, they have discovered that it is extremely difficult to cost-effectively run a grid with variable renewable energy without complementing it with technologies they’ve dubbed “clean firm generation.” To the untrained eye, many of the leading candidates for clean firm generation look a lot like the things that provide baseload power today: coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. The difference is that in the models, these baseload plants would not run constantly as in the past but mostly sit idle, ramping up and down in response to the vagaries of the wind and the sun. In the case of coal and gas plants, they would also capture all their carbon.

In theory, nuclear, coal, and gas are all capable of playing this role. In practice, nuclear and coal are not terribly well suited to doing so. Both have huge upfront capital costs and significant operating costs that must be maintained whether they are burning fuel or not. In their present iterations at least, they are only economically viable when they operate most of the time.

Gas, though, is a different animal. Gas plants are cheap to build and easy to operate highly variably. Indeed, natural gas first gained a foothold in electrical systems for precisely this characteristic, as a generation source that was intended primarily to operate intermittently, in addition to baseload power generation during periods of peak demand. Little wonder, then, that the great expansion of wind and solar in the electrical systems of advanced developed economies has been accompanied by the expansion of gas, even in places where it has remained relatively expensive. Gas turns out to be the killer app for scaling renewable energy. The problem is that it isn’t clean and, in most of the world, it’s also not cheap.





Left: Protesters demonstrate in front of a combined hard coal and natural gas thermal power station in Hanau, Germany, on Sept. 13, 2008. RALPH ORLOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES Right: A worker staffs the control room at a power plant owned by RusHydro in Anadyr, Russia, on June 28, 2018. The plant uses natural gas supplied from the Zapadno-Ozernoye field in the Chukotka Autonomous Region. YURI SMITYUKTASS VIA GETTY IMAGES


An honest discussion of the path to a renewable energy future would acknowledge the critical role natural gas plays and is likely to continue to play for many decades to come. There is no shortage of gas globally and ample opportunity to develop new reserves in the coming decades. But that would require environmentalists and proponents of renewables to come to terms with fracking and pipelines in the near term, and carbon capture technology longer term, both of which they mostly oppose.

It will also require a reconsideration of the green movement’s long-standing NIMBY predilections. If there is a lesson to be learned from the current electricity crises, it is that even with a lot of gas, a power supply dominated by renewables is unlikely to be reliable and affordable without building a lot of things that many people are not going to like having nearby—including massive high-voltage transmission lines and industrial-scale wind and solar facilities with very substantial land use consequences.

Alternatively, environmentalists and policymakers might move beyond their singular obsession with renewable energy, which would open up other possibilities that will almost certainly be less costly, more reliable, and more effective at cutting emissions.

That starts with ceasing the closure of nuclear power plants. Before the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident prompted a wave of nuclear plant closures across Japan, Europe, and the United States, nuclear energy provided 20 percent of electricity in the United States and more than 25 percent in the European Union and Japan. In addition to being clean, it was among the cheapest sources of electricity in all three places. And that clean electricity has proved impossible to replace with variable sources of renewable energy. In virtually every country that has closed nuclear plants, clean electricity has been replaced with dirty power, a testament to the unique capabilities of nuclear technology to produce vast quantities of always available electricity without carbon emissions.

In the United States, many leading green groups now give at least lip service to the idea of keeping existing nuclear plants open. In practice, though, what most of these groups have actually done in the face of pending nuclear closures—in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Illinois—has been to hold deals to keep plants open hostage to demands for still more subsidies for renewable energy.

In virtually every country that has closed nuclear plants, clean electricity has been replaced with dirty power, a testament to nuclear technology’s unique ability to produce vast amounts of always-on electricity without carbon emissions.

By contrast, European greens—and governments such as Germany’s—remain fully unreconstructed on the question, pressing forward with nuclear closures and campaigning to block the European Commission from including nuclear energy on its list of sustainable energy, a designation that would acknowledge nuclear plants as a source of clean power, qualify them for a range of public subsidies, and make them eligible for investment by sustainable investment funds.


Beyond existing nuclear technology, several companies are working to license new advanced nuclear technologies at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). These reactors, which use a range of different fuels and coolants, are typically smaller than conventional ones and can be fully manufactured (in contrast with conventional reactors, which are essentially large public works projects). Critically, they are also much better suited to ramping their output up and down, making them capable of operating more easily in concert with wind and solar energy.

Yet, in the U.S. Congress, draft budget legislation released recently by House Democrats contains significantly less support for advanced nuclear technology than wind, solar, and even carbon capture technology. This is despite the fact that advanced nuclear technology is still in its early stage, more in need of public support, and far more valuable to low-carbon electrical systems because of its ability to complement renewable energy.

Meanwhile, leading U.S. green groups are already gearing up to regulate advanced nuclear into obsolescence through the NRC’s licensing process before a single plant is built. Even though the reactors under development will be several orders of magnitude safer than already safe conventional reactors—which will make them by far the safest energy technology humans have ever invented—green groups are demanding regulatory measures far stricter than those currently required of conventional reactors.

At the same time, faced with a new generation of even safer reactors and the undeniable emissions benefits of nuclear energy, opponents have shifted their arguments, claiming that nuclear energy is simply too expensive. It’s an odd argument for climate advocates to make: For all other technologies, they insist that markets don’t properly value the benefits of cutting emissions, but when it comes to nuclear energy, markets apparently rule. The claim is also gaslighting of the highest order. The cost of building a nuclear power plant in any given nation today is roughly proportionate to the influence of the environmental movement in that particular place. China, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia have all demonstrated in recent years that it is entirely possible to build cheap, reliable, and safe nuclear power plants when anti-nuclear peccadilloes are disregarded.

Nuclear plants in the West, by contrast, are difficult and costly to build because their opponents have made them so, insisting on regulation with no analogue in any other domain, including, ironically, nuclear medicine. They successfully campaigned to halt nuclear deployment decades ago, creating huge barriers to restarting the industry, reestablishing efficient supply chains and a skilled workforce, and gaining technological learning that can only be gleaned by manufacturing or building something multiple times. These latter factors have been key to falling costs associated with manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels, and there is no reason that won’t also apply to new nuclear technology if the world is willing to build enough of it.

Western greens have also long insisted that nuclear was uniquely unpopular with the public and thus not worth pursuing, even if it seemed, on paper, like an obvious and proven solution to climate change. But if the risks of nuclear energy have occupied a massively outsized place in the public psyche, the massive footprint of a full-scale buildout of renewable energy on actual landscapes and the people who live in and near them is proving to be no less daunting.

Nuclear energy is, without question, a complex technology that has been tragically misunderstood. But once you turn it on, producing power to meet most of the energy demands of modern societies most of the time is relatively simple logistically. Windmills and solar panels, by contrast, are simple and seemingly approachable technologies. But harnessing them to meet society’s energy needs—even some of the time—is a sprawling and complicated endeavor.

Ultimately, a future with a lot of nuclear energy—especially next-generation technology—is also one that can accommodate a lot of wind and solar. A future that forecloses the option of zero-carbon nuclear energy is one that, one way or another, is likely to require a lot of gas and even coal. In the face of its escalating energy crisis, Britain has just announced a crash program to build over dozen new nuclear reactors by 2035. Policymakers and green advocates across the West are facing, or soon will face, a similar choice: build more nuclear or accept a continuing and significant role for fossil fuels for many decades. The current wave of electricity crises worldwide is what happens when they pretend that choice need not be made.


Ted Nordhaus is a leading global thinker on energy, environment, climate, human development, and politics. He is the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and a co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Twitter: @TedNordhaus

 

Concrete World: Engineers To Improve Reinforced Steel To Contain High-Level Nuclear Waste

By ASHLEY J. WENNERSHERRON, PENN STATE UNIVERSITY OCTOBER 9, 2021

$2.5 trillion is spent globally to assess, mitigate and repair corrosion of infrastructure, according to Penn State Assistant Professor Juan Pablo Gevaudan. He is leading a team investigating how to prevent his pervasive degradation.

Metals embedded in concrete can erode, rusting, and weakening until the concrete splits and the structure it supports falls. Such corrosion is believed to be one of the main issues that exacerbated the damage that led to the June 24, 2021, Surfside, Florida, condominium collapse, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

This corrosion is one of the biggest global durability challenges across infrastructure in all fields, according to Juan Pablo “JP” Gevaudan, assistant professor of architectural engineering and principal investigator of a three-year, $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Nuclear Energy University Program that will further explore the electrochemical corrosion degradation science of concrete as it applies to high-level nuclear waste (HLNW).

Defined by the DOE as any radioactive material that requires permanent isolation, HLNW can result from processing nuclear fuel and produce radionuclides, radioactive atoms that are inherently unstable and harmful to life. Currently, HLNW is packaged in metal canisters and embedded in concrete. Gevaudan’s collaborators include Andrea Argüelles, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics, and Rebecca Napolitano, assistant professor of architectural engineering. 

“Understanding and preventing corrosion — especially in infrastructure — is one of our great global durability challenges,” Gevaudan said.  “The degradation science of concrete applies to many engineering fields, and we all want to improve our infrastructure.”

According to Gevaudan, when he and his collaborators learned of the challenges at the end-of-life of nuclear fuel cycles, they immediately saw synergy between architectural engineering’s goal of improving the durability of the built environment with the DOE’s goal of studying corrosion in embedded HLNW metal canisters to extend the service life of the nuclear waste disposal infrastructure. To expand this synergy across University Park, Gevaudan said, the team has already met with faculty in the Ken and Mary Alice Lindquist Department of Nuclear Engineering to identify areas where their work may align, and they plan to continue their discussions on areas of convergent research.

The research team led by Gevaudan engineered the first-ever combined ultrasound-electrochemical impedance spectroscopy device, known as UT-EIS, to non-destructively asses the corrosion resistance between new cement buffer materials and high-level nuclear waste canisters. Credit: Penn State/Juan Pablo Gevaudan

“In this unique project, our goal is to create a new material that can protect the HLNW metal canisters, which contain the waste byproducts of reactions that occur in nuclear reactors,” Gevaudan said. “We hope we will develop a new cement-based buffer material that can immobilize harmful radionuclides that, in a critical situation, might leak from the HLNW canisters and keep the waste from reaching the environment and humans — which would be a catastrophe.”

For this project, Gevaudan will leverage recent advances by his research group, the Responsive and Adaptive Infrastructure Materials (Re-AIM) research group, utilizing organic and inorganic chemistry interactions to develop precisely designed, modern concrete materials. To predict degradation over time of these new buffer materials, Napolitano will create digital twins of systems to model proposed solutions and test potential outcomes. Argüelles will employ ultrasonic testing of the metal interface in a bespoke arrangement to non-destructively assess the corrosion potential of different buffer material formulations. Together, the team plans to spend the first 18 months of the grant period, which starts in October, developing a concrete that can bind harmful waste leaking from a reactor’s metal canister. During the second 18 months, they plan to improve the buffer material to help prevent the metal canister from corroding in the first place.

“It is said that reinforcement steel and concrete are best friends,” Gevaudan said. “The microstructural properties of concrete allow the steel to develop a passive layer, a kind of protective shell that protects it from corrosion — but it can break down due to age or environmental aggressors. The material we are developing will create a passive layer that will prevent corrosion over thousands to, potentially, millions of years.”

To help achieve a long-lasting, effective material, Gevaudan said, the team is purchasing an automated reactor from Mettler Toledo, a company that produces precision instruments for a range of fields. With the reactor, the researchers can synthesize modern cement materials with desired properties in precisely controlled conditions with high repeatability. The machine also helps track the phases formed in the new cements, which allows the researchers to learn more about specific mineral configurations that evolve as the cementitious material is created.

“We’ll be able to quickly identify which phase best binds radionuclides of interest, which will help us fast-track the development of the material,” Gevaudan said. “This grant allowed us to bring this advanced technology to cement research, which has traditionally used methodologies stuck in the past.”

The grant will also help fund student researchers to work on the project as they complete their degrees in architectural engineering, chemical engineering, engineering science and mechanics and acoustics, as well as other related disciplines. Gevaudan said the team plans to grow and has a specific interest in students who are traditionally underrepresented in engineering and are pursuing graduate degrees.

“Besides the science, one of the most-rewarding aspects about this project is building our team,” Gevaudan said. “This project symbolizes a group effort led by three early-career faculty members who are all underrepresented in engineering. We worked hard to earn this grant, and I’m proud of the work we have done and will continue to do to work across disciplines to prevent steel corrosion — one of the most pervasive degradation challenges we have.”

'No Thanks Given' protests target UCP government’s pandemic response




Timm Bruch
CTV News Calgary Video Journalist
Published Oct. 9, 2021 

CALGARY -

Fourteen UCP MLA constituency offices were plastered with messages and signs during a cross-province protest on Saturday.

"No Thanks Given" was an Alberta-wide event aimed at showing the government that citizens are unhappy with the province's pandemic response.

It was originally planned by the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), though individuals organized specific gatherings in Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Airdrie and Red Deer.


"It's so huge to send a message to (the party) that we are not OK with the current health system," Keira Gunn told CTV News.

Gunn posted signs and messages on Health Minister Jason Copping's northwest Calgary office doors.

There didn't appear to be anyone inside, but Gunn is hoping the notes might be read at a later date.

"Please start listening to us," she said.

"I'm at the point of absolute despair when it comes to UCP MLAs listening to the public," added Mary Spensley from Calgary-Currie. "I'm more used to them mocking us."

Spensley was at Nicholas Milliken's constituency office. She's part of a group angered by this summer's policy decisions.

"To declare that COVID was over was absolutely magical thinking," she said. "And now where we are today is a rather tragic place to be."

If trends hold, COVID-19 is on track to be one of the top two causes of death in the province in 2021.

"Almost everything that they touch has turned to disaster, particularly their COVID policy," said AFL president Gil McGowan. "The unacceptably high rate of infection, the unacceptably high rate of death and the fact that our hospitals are overwhelmed are all a result of irresponsible and reckless decisions made by this government.

"They're always too little, too late."

A recent ThinkHQ poll suggests Premier Jason Kenney is continuing to see a decline in approval across the province.

More than 1,100 respondents gave their opinion on the Kenney's leadership, with only 22 per cent offering any degree of approval.

Of the respondents, 77 per cent disapprove of Kenney’s leadership.


Sixty-one per cent of those strongly disapprove.

CTV News reached out to both the premier's office and Alberta Health for comment on the protests.

Neither responded to our request. 

Golden resident concludes that a meteor spotted in the area that night just missed her head


The hole left in the ceiling, and the space rock that created it. (Ruth Hamilton photo)
B.C. woman awakes to a hole in her roof and a space rock on her pillow

CLAIRE PALMER
Oct. 8, 2021 2:50 p.m.

On Oct. 4, many were treated to the sight of a fireball lighting up the night sky, with images of a meteor sailing above Lake Louise striking awe.

Longtime Golden resident Ruth Hamilton, however, was fast asleep.

Or at least she was until she was roughly awoken by the sound of a crash through her ceiling and the sensation of debris on her face.

“I just jumped up and turned on the light, I couldn’t figure out what the heck had happened,” said Hamilton.

She said she took a look around to get her bearings, and spotting a rock sitting neatly on her pillow next to where her head usually lays.

Hamilton called 911, unsure of what to make of the projectile. An police officer arrived on the scene, and after establishing that the rock was not there as a result of the ongoing construction in the Kicking Horse Canyon, they settled on the only other explanation – that a meteorite had come through her roof.

“We called the Canyon project to see if they were doing any blasting and they weren’t, but they did say they had seen a bright light in the sky that had exploded and caused some booms,” said Hamilton.

“I was shaking and scared when it happened, I thought someone had jumped in or it was a gun or something. It’s almost a relief when we realized it could only have fallen out of the sky.”

Hamilton says that she’s totally fine and avoided any injuries, and that she plans to keep the rock for the foreseeable future, stating that her grandchildren think it’s pretty cool.

“I’m just totally amazed over the fact that it is a star that came out of the sky, It’s maybe billions of years old,” said Hamilton.

She also says that the experience has given her a new perspective on life.

”The only other thing I can think of saying is life is precious and it could be gone at any moment even when you think you are safe and secure in your bed,” said Hamilton.

“I hope I never ever take it for granted again.”

As for the damage to her home, Hamilton says that her insurance company will be doing a walk-through to see if roof holes cause by space debris are covered. Evidently, the company has never had a claim filed quite like this before.

As for Hamilton, she has no plans to take up astrology or stargazing after her encounter.

“That’s enough for a lifetime, I think,” she said.

Oct. 12 (UPI) -- A British Columbia woman received an unusual rude awakening when a meteorite crashed through her roof and landed on her pillow.

Ruth Hamilton said she was asleep at her Golden home when she became vaguely aware of her dog barking in the house.

"The next thing was just a huge explosion and debris all over my face," Hamilton told CBC News.

Hamilton said she got out of bed and turned on the lights, revealing something had punched a hole in her ceiling.

"I didn't know what else to do, so I called 911," she said. "Talking to the operator, she was asking me all kinds of questions, and at that point, I rolled back one of the two pillows I'd been sleeping on and in between them was the meteorite."

Hamilton said the melon-sized space rock had landed just inches away from her head.

A police officer came to Hamilton's home and they initially suspected the rock may have been the result of construction at the nearby Kicking Horse Canyon.

"We called the Canyon project to see if they were doing any blasting and they weren't, but they did say they had seen a bright light in the sky that had exploded and caused some booms," Hamilton told the Victoria News.

Experts at Western University in London, Ontario, confirmed the rock that landed in Hamilton's bed was a meteorite.

"It's certainly a meteorite," said Peter Brown, a professor with the university's physics and astronomy department. "Everything about the story was consistent with a meteorite fall, and the fact that this bright fireball had occurred basically right at the same time made it a pretty overwhelming case."

Brown said his team is planning to examine the rock and determine the type of meteorite. He said it may have fallen from the solar system's main asteroid belt.

Hamilton said the experience has given her a new perspective on life.

"The only other thing I can think of saying is life is precious and it could be gone at any moment even when you think you are safe and secure in your bed," she said. "I hope I never ever take it for granted again."

 

Scientists pinpoint evolutionary genes that allow lizards to give birth like mammals

by University of Glasgow

Credit: Hans Recknagel

Scientists studying the evolution of birth in lizards, from egg-laying to live births, have pinpointed the evolutionary genes from which the species is evolving to 'build' a new mode of reproduction.

The study—led by the University of Glasgow and published in Nature Ecology and Evolution—found that a significantly similar amount of the same genes involved in the pregnancy of lizards were shared with other mammals and live-bearing vertebrates.

Evolving from egg-laying to live birth—also known as viviparity—is a major evolutionary step; however, it is almost impossible to study the genes that lead to such major changes because when animals have evolved live-birth it was usually in the distant past.

However, the so-called Common Lizard—a species found in much of Eurasia, including Scotland—only evolved to live-birth relatively recently.

All vertebrates are either egg-laying or live-bearing, yet the genes that determined being one or the other were not known.

For the study, the scientists spent several years studying rare hybrid offspring reproduced from breeding between egg-laying and viviparous (live birthing) lizards. The researchers tracked female reproduction in natural populations in remote regions in the Alps, then used advanced genome analysis to look at how and why these lizards' DNA differs.

The analyses revealed genetic profiles particular to live-bearing lizards included genes known to be associated with fertility and pregnancy in mammals. It also found that gene pathways of tissue growth and immune function used in mammal reproduction were active in the lizards. Genes in egg-laying traits included some involved in egg productivity in birds.

Dr. Hans Recknagel, who led the field and genome research during his Ph.D. and postdoctoral research, said: "This was fascinating research, not least because in this species of lizard egg-laying populations still occur and interbreed with live-bearing ones.

"Despite the 300 million years of evolutionary distance between reptiles and mammals, when we compared our findings across vertebrates—looking at seven independent origins of viviparity, or live birth, in mammals, squamates, and fish—we found that a significant amount of the same genes are involved in pregnancy in lizards and in mammals."

Professor Kathryn Elmer, the study's senior author from the University of Glasgow's Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, said: "Though the origins of viviparity, or live birth, are independent the genetic similarities are unlikely to be a coincidence."

"This shows how evolution tends to find similar answers to the challenges organisms face. It can be using similar established genetic networks, as we found here, but also new and different genes can be involved, allowing some flexibility in how evolution 'builds' a new reproductive mode again and again."

The study, "The functional genetic architecture of egg-laying and live-bearing reproduction in common lizards" is published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. The work was primarily funded by the UK's Natural Environment Research Council.

Lizard that lays eggs and gives live birth might be undergoing a major evolutionary transition

More information: Hans Recknagel et al, The functional genetic architecture of egg-laying and live-bearing reproduction in common lizards, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-021-01555-4

Journal information: Nature Ecology & Evolution 

Provided by University of Glasgow 

 

The genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes

by NYU Tandon School of Engineering

The evolution of primate species are divided into hominoids — a group of tail-less primate species that includes gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans — and nonhominoids, which have tails and are more distant primate relatives of humans. The measure of each species’ evolution is measured in “mya,” or million years ago.  Credit: NYU Tandon School of Engineering

NYU researchers at the Tandon School of Engineering and the Grossman School of Medicine are trying to understand an age-old question that bedeviled most of us at some point: Why do all the other animals have tails, but not me? The loss of the tail is one of the main anatomical evolutionary changes to have occurred along the lineage leading to humans and to the "anthropomorphous apes." The loss of tails has long been thought to have played a key role in bipedalism in humans

This curiosity-based question was addressed by using bioinformatics tools to look at differences between the genomes of humans (and the other apes, which all lack tails) and monkeys (which all have tails, like most other mammals).

Bo Xia, a Ph.D. candidate studying this problem in the labs of Jef Boeke and Itai Yanai, looked at sequence alignments of all genes known to be involved in tail development and discovered a movable piece of DNA called a retrotransposon inserted in the TBXT gene, which is a developmental regulator crucial for tail development. The reason it had not been spotted before was due its placement in noncoding (intron) DNA, where most people would not look for mutations.

Examination of the gene, which carried other copies of the Alu retrotransposon, led to a model for how the Alu might disregulate splicing of TBXT RNA. The researchers engineered a mouse model to test this hypothesis and found that indeed, many mice with a suitably altered genome lacked a tail. They also found that the mice without tails also suffered from spinal cord malformations. It's possible our ancestors who lost their tails also had this side effect, which may contribute to some health problems even today.

Simulations show bipedal dinosaurs swung their tails as they ran to help with balance

---

More information: Bo Xia et al, The genetic basis of tail-loss evolution in humans and apes (2021). DOI: 10.1101/2021.09.14.460388

Provided by NYU Tandon School of Engineering 

‘Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song’ Review: A Unique and Gratifying Pop-Music Documentary

It tells the story of Leonard Cohen, and of how his "Hallelujah" became the world's "Hallelujah."

By Owen Gleiberman

“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” is a documentary about the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah,” and if that sounds like a lot of movie to devote to one song — well, “Hallelujah” is a lot of song. The way we think of it now, it’s epic and lovely and trancelike: a hymn cast in a pop idiom. You might call it a feel-good hymn for a secular society, because the word “hallelujah” has obvious religious connotations, and part of the reason that people feel so good listening to “Hallelujah,” or singing along with it in oversize stadiums, is that the song says to its audience: If you find this beautiful (and really, who doesn’t?), then you’re a spiritual person.

The documentary, which was directed, written, photographed, and co-edited by the team of Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, is also a portrait of Leonard Cohen, who in a career that spanned half a century (he died in 2016) may have been the ultimate idiosyncratic pop-star-who-wasn’t-really-a-pop-star-except-that-he-so-was. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in a suburb of Montreal, he started off as a poet, and remained one. Yet when he began to set his words to music, he made them sing with a flukier magic than Bob Dylan. Cohen’s voice was a low-pitched drone, a stranger to any kind of vibrato, direct and becalmed; it seemed to scrape the bottom of the ocean and get to the heart of things. Songs like “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy” cast a gravely tuneful and radiant spell, and Cohen himself was sexy in a rapt Canadian Pacino-meets-Serge Gainsbourg way — a clean-cut troubadour, a professor of lyric enchantment.

When he began to work on “Hallelujah,” he kept writing verses, filling notebooks with perhaps 180 of them, and the song literally took years to complete. Cohen didn’t do this with other songs. It’s as if he knew that with “Hallelujah” he wasn’t just writing a song but birthing it. Yet part of the alchemy of “Hallelujah” is that, over time, the song it turned into isn’t the one that it started out as. The song took a journey — changing, becoming, acquiring layers of soul and enchantment. And I’m far from alone in having experienced that evolution in a strange kind of reverse order.

To state the obvious: A great many people got to know “Hallelujah” from “Shrek,” the 2001 DreamWorks animated fairy tale where it was used to lend a surprisingly wistful and melancholy dimension to the story of a cantankerous green ogre. (In the film, “Hallelujah” expresses the thawing of his heart.) The version of the song heard in “Shrek” is by John Cale, the former member of the Velvet Underground (though the soundtrack version, for synergistic corporate reasons, is by Rufus Wainwright, who directly imitated Cale’s version). A Cale rendition of the song had appeared on his 1992 live solo album “Fragments of a Rainy Season” (one of my favorite records), but even as Cale was performing it in concert to spellbound audiences, it remained, in the larger world, a well-kept secret.

Then Jeff Buckley got ahold of it. He began to perform it at Siné, the cave-in-the-wall East Village coffeehouse that Buckley, accompanying himself on a Fender Telecaster, made into a cozy cult venue. His version of the song was even slower and dreamier: a meditation that allowed Buckley’s voice to soar into the heavens. Buckley died in 1997, the victim of a tragic drowning accident, and it’s the documentary’s contention — presented not insensitively but simply as what happened — that his death played a key role in elevating “Hallelujah.” Buckley, who had the look of an indie-rock Jim Morrison and the voice of a tremulous angel, had been on the cusp of becoming a major star, and partly because so many of his fellow musicians revered him, new attention was paid to “Hallelujah.” It began to be covered almost in homage to Buckley, and the song now took on the quality of an anthem. Which may well have led to its use in “Shrek.”

But what about, you know, the original version by Leonard Cohen? The film captures how he sweated over the lyrics, with their waltz-like rhythm and mystery (‘I’ve heard there was a secret chord,/That David played and it pleased the Lord,/But you don’t really care for music, do ya?”). It also chronicles how, after a long break with the composer and producer John Lissauer (the two were in the middle of writing an album together when Cohen took off on a whim and ghosted him for eight years), Cohen then reunited with Lissauer to record “Various Positions,” the 1984 album with “Hallelujah” on it.

In the 2000s, after “Hallelujah” had become a thing, I was someone who owned a handful of Leonard Cohen albums, two of which I thought of as soundtracks: his first, the great “Songs of Leonard Cohen” (1967), which was used with tranquil majesty in Robert Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” and “The Future” (1992), several tracks of which carved out a majestic layer of pop gravitas in Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.” Yet I’d never encountered “Various Positions,” so I got a copy of it, eager to hear the version of “Hallelujah” performed by Cohen, the man who wrote it.

It was one of the biggest letdowns of all time.

John Lissauer is interviewed in the documentary, and he seems like a hale fellow, but I’m sorry, his arrangement and production of “Hallelujah” is lurchingly bombastic and unlyrical. You can listen to it countless times and it never acquires the magic we associate with the song. When Walter Yetnikoff, the head of Columbia, first heard the album, he disliked it so much that he refused to release it in the U.S. That became an infamous decision, and the film recounts a legendary anecdote in which Yetnikoff told Cohen, “Look, Leonard, we know you’re great. But we don’t know if you’re any good.” Yet though the album should by all means have been released, there was a gut instinct to Yetnikoff’s judgment. “Various Positions,” unlike Cohen’s best work, didn’t have a sound to match its vision. It really was John Cale who co-created the “Hallelujah” we know, using simple rolling piano chords and plaintive vocals to invest it with a mystic shimmer.

In “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song,” we hear a lot of good Leonard Cohen anecdotes, like one about how he was pressured to change his last name, and almost did (to Leonard September), but realized: Why should he be anyone but himself? Composing those endless lyrics to “Hallelujah,” he wound up in his underwear in a “shabby hotel room” at the Mayflower banging his head on the floor and saying, “I can’t do it anymore.” The creation of “Death of a Ladies Man,” the 1977 album that Cohen made with Phil Spector, becomes a fascinating lesson in how everything that shouldn’t go wrong can. And there are lively observations from the world-class raconteur Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who got to know Cohen when he profiled him for Rolling Stone, and Judy Collins, who knew him early on (in a clip from 1966, we hear her perform “Suzanne,” and it’s stunning). The documentary follows Cohen on his haphazard odyssey of a life — the tales of womanizing, the way he lost his money, the years he spent living in a Buddhist monastery, and his comeback as a graying legend in a fedora, playing to huger audiences than he’d ever had.

By the end of his life, the song “Hallelujah” had become such a sensation that a tiny part of you may almost wish it hadn’t. Yet there’s a glory to this tale. For years, Leonard Cohen toiled like a monk on a modern hymn, which was released into utter obscurity, then grew into a very different song — becoming, just maybe, the song it always was. “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey…,” which premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival, is still looking for a distributor, and it deserves one. There’s totally an audience for a music doc this rich (though it could use a catchier title), one about how a quiet artist, without planning to, created a song heard round the world.


‘Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song’ Review: A Unique and Gratifying Pop-Music Documentary
Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition), Sept. 4, 2021. Running time: 115 MIN.
Production: A Geller/Goldfine Productions production. Producers: Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine. Executive producers: Jonathan Dana, Morgan Neville.
Crew: Directors, screenplay: Daniel Geller, Dayna Goldfine. Camera: Daniel Geller. Editors: Dayne Goldfine, Bill Weber, Daniel Geller. Music: Leonard Cohen, John Lissauer.
With: Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Larry “Ratso” Sloman, John Lissauer, Brandi Carlile, Eric Church, Sharon Robinson, Rufus Wainwright.