Conflict, crisis fuel cholera surge across Mideast hot spots

By KAREEM CHEHAYEB

November 4, 2022

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Children play near open sewage in the Salaheddine camp in northwestern Syria on Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022. In recent weeks, thousands of cholera cases have swept across the crisis-stricken countries of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)


BHANINE, Lebanon (AP) — Shadia Ahmed panicked as rainwater flooded her shack one night, drenching her seven children. The next morning, the kids were seized by vomiting, diarrhea and other symptoms.

After an aid group administered tests for cholera in Ahmed’s Syrian refugee encampment in the northern Lebanese town of Bhanine, her youngest, 4-year-old Assil, tested positive.

Cholera has swept across Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq as the countries struggle with devastated infrastructure, turmoil and housing large populations of people who have been displaced by conflict. Lebanon last month reported the first cholera case in nearly 30 years.

The bacterial infection has surged globally across dozens of countries this year, with outbreaks in Haiti and across the Horn of Africa as well as the Mideast. The outbreaks of hundreds of thousands of cases driven by conflict, poverty, and climate change are a major setback for global efforts to eradicate the disease.

“Cholera thrives in poverty and conflict but is now turbocharged by climate change,” said Inas Hamam, a regional spokeswoman for the World Health Organization. “Regional and global health security is in jeopardy.”

Anti-cholera efforts focus on vaccination, clean water and sanitation. Last month, WHO announced the temporary suspension of a two-dose vaccination strategy because production couldn’t meet surging demand. Officials are now administering single doses so that more people can benefit from the vaccine in the short term.

A cholera infection is caused by consuming food or water infected with the Vibrio cholerae bacterium. While most cases are mild to moderate, cholera can cause death if it’s not treated correctly.

“I would spend the whole night taking her to the bathroom, giving her medication, washing and sterilizing her,” Ahmed, 33, said of Assil, her child who got cholera. “I couldn’t sleep, and was up all night just looking at her. I feared the worst.”

Assil and her siblings eventually got better; she was the only confirmed cholera case in the family.

Across the border in Syria, officials and U.N. agencies announced last month that a cholera outbreak was sweeping the entire country. The outbreak in Syria is due to people drinking unsafe water from the Euphrates River and using contaminated water to irrigate crops, according to the U.N. and the Syrian Health Ministry.

In the government-held areas of Syria and in the country’s northeast, held by U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces, there have since been roughly 17,000 cases of cholera and 29 deaths.

In the rebel-held Idlib province of Syria, most of the 4 million residents are displaced from the conflict. They depend on international aid and live in tent camps.

Over half of Idlib does not have regular access to water. Many families use polluted water from wells that are close to sewage.

There have been 3,104 cholera cases and five deaths in Idlib province. Dr. Abdullah Hemeidi of the Syrian American Medical Society anticipates a surge this winter.

“The health care system in the area is weak,” Hemeidi said. “Medical organizations and local councils are trying to sanitize water and they are holding workshops to limit the spread.”

In the Salaheddine camp in the opposition-held countryside northwest of Aleppo, children play near sewage. Community workers hold awareness sessions for residents.

“We’re worried it will spread in our camp,” resident Jamil Latfo said.

Iraq has struggled with cholera outbreaks for years. In Lebanon, the disease was rare for decades.

Three years ago, Lebanon fell into an economic crisis. Most Lebanese now rely on water trucked in by private suppliers, and private generators for electricity. Utilities can’t buy fuel and pump water into households.

Since last month, Lebanon has reported 2,421 cases and 18 deaths. About a quarter of these cases are children under the age of five. The Vibrio cholerae bacteria has been found in drinking-water, sewer systems, and irrigation water.

The country hosts more than a million Syrian refugees. Most cases of cholera have been detected in refugee camps, Lebanon’s Health Ministry says.

In Bhanine, Ahmed and her children are tucked between apartment buildings, along with dozens of other Syrian refugees. The families live in weak wooden shacks with tarp walls and ceilings. They share three toilets and three sinks.

Like most households in Lebanon, camp residents buy water trucked in by private suppliers. The state does not test the water for safety.

“The water was contaminated but we had no choice but to use it,” resident Ali Hamadi said. “There was no drinking water, let alone water to clean, wash the dishes, wash our clothes or for the shower.”

U.N. aid agencies started providing clean water for the camp, while disinfecting walls and doors and holding information sessions. They’re also donating fuel to the Lebanese government so that authorities can pump water again.

“The support we offer cannot replace the service lines and the national electricity grid, which is basically not functioning most of the time,” said Ettie Higgins, deputy representative for Lebanon of the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF.

WHO has been working with Iraqi health authorities to help bolster their cholera response, visiting water-treatment plants and testing laboratories in Baghdad last month.

UNICEF said it urgently needs $40.5 million to continue its work in Lebanon and Syria for the next three months.

“These camps are fertile ground for the outbreak of an illness,” said Hemeidi, of the Syrian American Medical Society. “We won’t be able to properly respond to it unless there is an intervention with medical equipment and aid.”

___

Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad and Ghaith Alsayed in Idlib, Syria, contributed to this report.

THIRD WORLD U$A
When destitute small towns mean dangerous tap water
By MICHAEL PHILLIS, LEAH WILLINGHAM and CAMILLE FASSETT

November 4, 2022

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Mitoya Wilson sits in her car with her daughter Charleigh Wilson, 8, as she talks about the history of troubles with the town drinking water, in Ferriday, La., Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. In many places, people struggle to find water or else drink water that isn't clean. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

KEYSTONE, W.Va. (AP) — Donna Dickerson’s heart would sink every time she’d wake up, turn on the faucet in her mobile home and hear the pipes gurgling.

Sometimes it would happen on a day when her mother, who is 86 and has dementia, had a doctor’s appointment and needed to bathe. Sometimes it would be on Thanksgiving or Christmas when family had come to stay.

“It was sickening, literally a headache and it disrupted everything,” she said. “Out of nowhere, the water would be gone, and we’d have no idea when it’d be back.”

It is hard enough to care for someone with dementia. Caring for someone with dementia with no safe water takes the stress to another level.

Donna Dickerson drinks a cup of tap water on the porch of her trailer in Keystone, W.Va., on June 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Leah Willingham)

While failures of big city water systems attract the attention, it’s small communities like Keystone, West Virginia, that more often are left unprotected by destitute and unmaintained water providers. Small water providers rack up roughly twice as many health violations as big cities on average, an analysis of thousands of records over the last three years by The Associated Press shows. In that time, small water providers violated the Safe Drinking Water Act’s health standards nearly 9,000 times. They were also frequently the very worst performers. Federal law allows authorities to force changes on water utilities, but they rarely do, even for the worst offenders.

“We’re talking about things that we’ve known in drinking water for a century, that we have an expectation in this country that everybody should be afforded,” said Chad Seidel, president of a water consulting company.

The worst water providers can have such severe problems that residents are told they can’t drink the water. For 10 solid years Dickerson and 175 neighbors in the tiny, majority Black community of Keystone had to boil all their water. That length of time is nearly unheard of — such warnings usually last only for days. The requirement added gas and electricity costs on top of the water bill. In addition, residents would lose water outright for days or even weeks at a time with no warning.

A coal company had built the original system, but since left, leaving no one in charge.

When Dickerson’s water went out, she would drive the dying county’s winding mountain roads to the food bank, or buy water at Dollar General – one of the area’s only stores. She’d haul containers back home and heat up pots on the stove to fill the tub, so her mother could bathe. She stored water in containers in her mobile home’s two bathrooms to flush toilets. Dishes and laundry would pile up.

There was the cost of gas, the cost of 5 gallon water jugs, the cost of washing clothes at the laundromat. There was also an emotional cost.

“It drains you,” she said. “You have to learn how to survive.”

Toney Lewis shows a bottle of tap water he saved, before his neighborhood was recently switched to the current Ferriday, La. water system, in Ridgecrest, La., Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

When President Gerald Ford signed the landmark Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, he said “nothing is more essential to the life of every single American,” than clean water to drink, also mentioning clean air and pure food. The law protected Americans against 22 contaminants, including arsenic. Nearly half a century later, evolving science has broadened the coverage to more than 90 substances, and strengthened standards along the way.

The miracle is that most water systems keep up – 94% comply with health standards.

But Dickerson lives in one of the places that didn’t, the AP found, that struggles and fails repeatedly.

After years of problems, Keystone finally got hooked up to a new water system last December, McDowell Public Service District, which focuses on upgrading systems in coal communities. The deteriorating water mains were replaced, and a nonproft called DigDeep helped pay to connect homes to the new infrastructure.

When a water utility doesn’t treat water properly or has high levels of a contaminant, states are supposed to enforce the law. They usually give communities time to fix problems, and often they do. But if there is intransigence or delay, the state can escalate and impose fines. In many towns, that doesn’t go well.

“Giving them a penalty is not going to get you anywhere. It’s just going to make the situation worse in most cases,” said Heather Himmelberger, director of the Southwest Environmental Finance Center at the University of New Mexico. The towns can’t afford the work.

Some 3% of all systems the AP analyzed landed on the EPA’s enforcement priority list last year. Even worse are the 450 utilities that stayed on the list for at least five of the last 10 years. Four million Americans rely on these systems.

Regulators rarely step in to force change.

“Mostly what regulators have is moral appeal and they’ll wag their finger,” said Manny Teodoro, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who focuses on public policy and water.

The EPA says the vast majority of systems do provide safe water and for those that struggle, the agency has increased technical assistance, inspections and enforcement. Those efforts have decreased the number of systems consistently committing health violations, according to Carol King, an attorney in the EPA Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance.

Teodoro said originally water systems sprouted up when communities did, giving rise to a fragmented drinking water sector dominated by small providers. School districts in America formed the same way, but went through a period of consolidation. That’s happened far less with community water systems.

The top concern of the sector is funding for infrastructure, according to a survey.

Deborah Elaine-Jones, tax clerk for the Town of Ferriday, talks with water plant operator Mike Gandy inside the newer water plant facility in Ferriday, La., Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Josiah Cox has a special view of which towns end up in the worst trouble. He spent years working on water issues and noticed many small utility owners failed to save money for maintenance or struggled when experienced staff members left.

So he started a business, Central States Water Resources, buying up problem utilities, doing upgrades and billing customers for the costs over time.

Terre Du Lac, Missouri was one. It’s a private, 5,200-acre community of roughly 1,200 homes nestled around 16 lakes. It advertises a relaxed atmosphere an hour south of St. Louis where people come to golf or water ski.

But rust coated the water tower. The community drinking water well was pulling up naturally-occurring radioactive material that can cause cancer.

He has seen a lot: bird feces in drinking water and one place that treated its water with chlorine tablets meant for swimming pools.

“You start what we call the death spiral of these utilities” where they don’t have the resources to pay for what regulators are demanding, Cox said.

Michael Tilley, who was slammed by regulators for how he operated the Terre Du Lac system before Cox took over, spent most of his life in the community and knows many residents. He said he felt a responsibility to serve them well, but repeatedly faced hurdles finding grant money.

“I think if I had any claim to fame it was just keeping the rates low and trying to operate this thing on a shoestring,” he said. “I look back a lot of times and that was my problem.”

Calbrial Smith, center, holds her son Torosiay Smith, Jr., 9 months, outside her home with family and friends, as she talks about what she believes are the effect of the drinking water on her children's health, in Ferriday, La., Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022.

 (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Recruitment of professionals to run small water system is also a major issue. The largely white, male workforce is aging, according to surveys.

Earlier in his career, Tim Wilson, a water project manager, spent time running the treatment plant in Wahpeton, Iowa, a community of just over 400 that expands when vacationers rush in during the summertime.

Small, rural communities have a “ridiculously hard” time recruiting certified operators, he said. Then once they trained, they can be lured away by better pay and benefits elsewhere.

The job demands can also be overwhelming. In Wahpeton, Wilson was the lone employee responsible for the treatment plant. He doubled as a snow plow driver and zoning expert at local government meetings. His crowning achievement, he says, was convincing officials to hire another person to help. It took six years.

Nearly 1,000 miles south in Ferriday, Louisiana, staffing is one problem, but the water has failed people in every major way.

You know your water is in trouble when it’s being distributed by the National Guard. That’s where residents of Ferriday took their bottles and buckets for four months back in 1999.

Jameel Green speaks to The Associated Press about the drinking water in Ferriday, La., on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Michael Phillis)

“I haven’t drunk the water since,” said Jameel Green, 42, who has lived in town most of his life. He now makes sure his two girls, ages 16 and 8, don’t drink Ferriday water either, even if it costs $60 a month.

He held up a garden hose caked with a white film from the water.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ferriday had a vibrant music scene – Jerry Lee Lewis was a local and acts like B.B. King stopped by. Some 5,200 people called Ferriday home. There are about 40% fewer people now, and Ferriday is a mainly Black community. The Delta Music Museum that celebrates the town’s place in music history is surrounded by mostly empty shops.

The Rev. James Edward Smith, Sr., who is a consultant to help improve the water system in Ferriday, La., speaks at the town water plant in Ferriday, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022

In 2016, the water situation was supposed to change. The U.S. Department of Agriculture helped fund a new treatment plant that went into operation.

But when the company that built the plant walked away after completion, the people operating it were left with little training on how to run it. Staff have struggled to find the right mix of chemicals, according to the Rev. James Smith Sr., who was brought in to help with the issue.

“That’s the big problem. Everybody is still doing trial and error,” Smith said.

Ferriday’s water problems represented “a system in total breakdown,” according to Sri Vedachalam, director of water equity and climate resilience at Environmental Consulting & Technology Inc, who reviewed public files.

Water disinfection in Ferriday is leaving behind levels of carcinogens that are too high. For failing to fix its problems, the state issued Ferriday a $455,265 fine in November 2021.

Water plant operator Mike Gandy takes a water sample of the Ferriday water system from neighboring Ridgecrest, La., which is now in the Ferriday system, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Smith said the water is now significantly improved. It’s tested regularly and plant operators are working on new treatment methods.

But Ferriday never responded to the fine and the Louisiana health department is threatening to ask a judge to impose a timeline for improvements and force payment.

Without a lot more money and more aggressive intervention in the worst places, experts say many Americans will continue to endure an expensive search for drinkable water, or else they’ll drink water that is potentially unsafe.

“In my view, this is a desperate problem,” Teodoro said.

___

Phillis reported from Ferriday, Louisiana, and St. Louis. Fassett reported from Seattle.

___

The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

Influencers debate leaving Twitter, but where would they go?

By ALEXANDRA OLSON and MARYCLAIRE DALE

yesterday

Pariss Chandler, of Randolph, Mass., founder of the recruitment platform website Black Tech Pipeline, sits for a photograph at her home, Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022, in Randolph. Chandler built a community for Black tech workers on Twitter that eventually became the foundation for her own recruitment company. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Pariss Chandler built a community for Black tech workers on Twitter that eventually became the foundation for her own recruitment company.

Now she’s afraid it could all fall apart if Twitter becomes a haven for racist and toxic speech under the control of Elon Musk, a serial provocateur who has indicated he could loosen content rules.

With Twitter driving most of her business, Chandler sees no good alternative as she watches the uncertainty play out.

“Before Elon took over, I felt like the team was working to make Twitter a safer platform, and now they are kind of not there. I don’t know what’s going on internally. I have lost hope in that,” said Chandler, 31, founder of Black Tech Pipeline, a jobs board and recruitment website. “I’m both sad and terrified for Twitter, both for the employees and also the users.”

Those qualms are weighing on many people who have come to rely on Twitter, a relatively small but mighty platform that has become a digital public square of sorts for influencers, policy makers, journalists and other thought leaders.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, took over Twitter last week in a $44 billion deal, immediately making his unpredictable style felt.

Just days later, he had tweeted a link to a story from a little-known news outlet that made a dubious claim about the violent attack on Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband at their California home. He soon deleted it, but it was a worrying start to his tenure for those concerned about the spread of disinformation online.

Musk has also signaled his intent to loosen the guardrails on hate speech, and perhaps allow former President Donald Trump and other banned commentators to return. He tempered the thought after the deal closed, however, pledging to form a “content moderation council” and not allow anyone who has been kicked off the site to return until it sets up procedures on how to do that.

Yet the use of racial slurs quickly exploded in an apparent test of his tolerance level.

“Folks, it’s getting ugly here. I am not really sure what my plan is. Stay or go?” Jennifer Taub, a law professor and author with about a quarter million followers, said Sunday, as she tweeted out a link to her Facebook page in case she leaves Twitter.

For now, Taub plans to stay, given the opportunity it provides to “laugh, learn and commiserate” with people from across the world. But she’ll leave if it becomes “a cesspool of racism and antisemitism,” she said in a phone call.

“The numbers are going down and down and down,” said Taub, who has lost 5,000 followers since Musk officially took over. “The tipping point might be if I’m just not having fun there. There are too many people to block.”

The debate is especially fraught for people of color who have used Twitter to network and elevate their voices, while also confronting toxicity on the platform.

“As a user of Twitter — as a power user in a lot of ways — it has had a great utility and I’m very concerned about where people go to have this conversation next,” said Tanzina Vega, a Latina journalist in New York who once received death threats on Twitter but also built a vital community of friends and sources there.

A software engineer, Chandler hoped to counter the isolation she felt in her white-dominated field when she tweeted out a question and a selfie four years ago: “What does a Black Twitter in Tech look like? Here, I’ll go first!” The response was overwhelming. She now has more than 60,000 followers and her own company connecting Black tech workers with companies large and small.

She also received hate message and even some death threats from people accusing her of racism for centering Black technologists. But she also had connections with Twitter employees who were receptive to her concerns. Chandler said those employees have either left the company or are no longer active on the platform.

Chandler’s company also uses Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn but none can replicate the type of vibrant community she leads on Twitter, where people mix professional networking and light bantering.

Instagram and TikTok are fueled more by images than text exchanges. Facebook is no longer popular with younger users. LinkedIn is more formal. And although some developers are trying to rush out alternative sites on the fly, it takes times to develop a stable, user-friendly site that can handle millions of accounts.

Joan Donovan, an internet scholar who explores the threat that disinformation poses to democracy in her new book, “Meme Wars,” said it’s not clear if Twitter will remain a safe place for civic discourse. Yet she called the networks that people have built there invaluable — to users, to their communities and to Musk.

“This is the exact reason that Musk bought Twitter and didn’t just build his own social network,” Donovan said. “If you control the territory, you can control the politics, you can control the culture in many ways.”

In his first few hours at the helm, Musk fired several top Twitter executives, including chief legal counsel Vijaya Gadde, who had overseen Twitter’s content moderation and safety efforts around the globe. And he dissolved the board of directors, leaving him accountable, at least on paper, only to himself. On Friday, Twitter began widespread layoffs.

European regulators immediately warned Musk about his duty under their digital privacy laws to police illegal speech and disinformation. The U.S. has far more lax rules governing Twitter and its 238 million daily users. But advertisers, users and perhaps lenders may rein him in if Congress does not first tighten the rules.

“If the advertisers go and the users go, it may well be that the marketplace of ideas sort of sorts itself out,” said Cary Coglianese, an expert on regulatory policy at the University of Pennsylvania law school.

That could leave Twitter to be just another magnet for extremists and conspiracy theorists — a concern driving some to urge their network of friends to stay, in order to counter those narratives.

Chandler said she can only “walk on eggshells” and take a wait-and-see approach.

“I’m personally going to stay on Twitter until there is really not a reason to stay anymore. I don’t know what the future holds, I’m kind of hoping for some sort of miracle,” she said. “For now, I won’t be going anywhere.”

___ Follow Maryclaire Dale on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Maryclairedale.

Equipment that’s designed to cut methane emission is failing

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ

yesterday

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Sharon Wilson sets up a thermal imaging camera near a compressor station in Arlington, Texas, Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2022. Wilson, a field advocate for Earthworks, which promotes alternatives to fossil fuels, uses the high-tech camera to detect methane leaks at oil and gas facilities. (AP Photo/LM Otero)


As Sharon Wilson pulled up to the BP site in Texas last June, production tanks towered above the windblown grass roughly 60 miles southeast of San Antonio. Cows and pumpjacks lined the roadsides.

All looked placid. But when Wilson flipped on a high-tech video camera, a disquieting image became visible: A long black plume poured from a flare pipe. Her camera, designed to detect hydrocarbons, had revealed what appeared to be a stream of methane — a potent climate-warming gas, gushing from the very equipment that is supposed to prevent such emissions.

“It’s very discouraging and depressing, but mostly it’s infuriating,” said Wilson, a field advocate for Earthworks, which promotes alternatives to fossil fuels. “Our government is not taking the action that needs to be taken.”

Methane is the main ingredient in natural gas. Measured over a 20-year period, scientists say, it packs about 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide. And according to the International Energy Agency, methane is to blame for roughly 30% of the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Aerial surveys have documented huge amounts of methane wafting from oil and gas fields in the United States and beyond.

It’s a problem the Biden administration has sought to attack in its recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. One of the law’s provisions threatens fines of up to $1,500 per ton of methane released, to be imposed against the worst polluters. Perhaps most crucially, the law provides $1.55 billion in funding for companies to upgrade equipment to more effectively contain emissions — equipment that could, in theory, help the operators avoid fines.

Yet some of the best equipment for reducing emissions is already installed on oil and gas infrastructure, including at the BP site that Wilson filmed. And critics say such equipment is failing to capture much of the methane and casting doubt on whether the Biden plan would go far to correct the problem.

What Wilson saw at the BP site was an unlit flare. It’s among the types of equipment the EPA recommends companies consider installing to reduce methane emissions. Resembling a tall pipe, a flare is supposed to burn off methane before it can escape. Flames typically burn from the top of the flares.

But in this case, the flame had gone out, so methane was pouring from the pipe. The flare’s mechanisms are supposed to alert the operator if it stopped working. That didn’t happen in this case, according to a report by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

“Energy companies have made pledges, but I’ve got to tell you, I haven’t seen anything from a practical standpoint that makes me believe there’s any reality to reductions on the ground,” said Tim Doty, an environmental scientist and former air quality inspector for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. “Maybe they’re making progress, but are they making enough progress to slow down climate change? I don’t think so.”

The spewing methane that Wilson detected was among more than a dozen such scenes she documented over three days in the Eagle Ford Shale, an oil and gas field in south Texas. The methane poured from unlit or broken flares, storage tanks, vapor recovery units and compressors. She found it escaping at sites owned by companies including BP and Marathon Oil, both of which have pledged to reduce methane emissions.

“They have the technology, but for some reason, whether they don’t maintain it, whether the technology doesn’t work, I don’t know, but if find it not working,” Wilson said.

BP did not respond to questions about the methane leaks Wilson documented. The company says it plans to eliminate routine flaring in U.S. onshore operations by 2025 and is advocating for policies to reduce methane emissions.

Marathon Oil disputed that it violated any regulations. A spokeswoman said the company recognizes the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the global climate and prioritizes concern for the environment.

Sometimes, methane escapes because the equipment designed to contain it hasn’t been properly calibrated or maintained. Emissions aren’t immediately stopped once new equipment is installed. Companies must still invest in properly designing the system and continuously monitoring and maintaining the equipment. This requires money and staff, which experts say many companies neglect.

The Biden administration hasn’t yet specified which types of equipment it recommends. But the EPA, which is working with the administration on the law’s methane reduction program, has recommended technologies for reducing methane emissions. Whether that equipment actually succeeds in capping emissions is an open question.

“There’s lots of technologies, but the reality in the field is it just doesn’t work,” Doty said.

That’s frequently also the case with another type of equipment the EPA recommends: vapor recovery units. These are systems of pipes and seals that are supposed to capture methane before it can escape from tanks. In Doty’s field work, which spans decades, he estimates that he’s seen vapor recovery units leaking some amount of methane or other hydrocarbons 75% to 85% of the time.

And hydrocarbons like methane, because they are corrosive, inevitably degrade the tanks, pipes and equipment that are supposed to contain them.

“All this stuff is going to be prone to leak — that’s just the way it is,” said Coyne Gibson, who spent about two decades as an engineer inspecting oil and gas equipment. “That’s mechanics. And there’s there’s not really any way to avoid it.”

One reason it’s hard for the industry to control methane emissions is that many leaks come from the nation’s vast gas distribution network. Millions of miles of pipelines are next to impossible to completely monitor. What’s more, Gibson said, pipelines are often buried, making leaks harder to detect.

That gas distribution network, which includes pipelines and compressor stations, is responsible for most methane emissions in the energy industry, said Antoine Halff, chief analyst at Kayrros, an energy analytics company. Using satellite data, Kayrros identified one compressor station — which adjusts the pressure of gas to move it through pipelines — that emitted methane continuously for eight days.

“It’s way too common,” Halff said.

Some large companies have invested in infrared cameras, like Wilson’s, that can detect methane leaks at facilities. They use them on the ground, or on drones or aircraft.

The process can help operators find and fix leaks. But it’s typically done only periodically, with cameras that don’t run continuously. Every few months, some companies will send a team with an infrared camera to check for leaks from the ground or a helicopter.

Much of the time, though, there is no such surveillance. Leaks or even planned methane releases can occur during these periods, as when companies open a stretch of pipeline to release methane before doing repairs. The staffing it would take to continuously survey the nation’s 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines would likely be prohibitively expensive.

Malfunctioning flares like the one Wilson found are also a major contributor to methane pollution. Flaring is supposed to burn off 98% of the methane that would otherwise shoot directly into the atmosphere. But whether because of malfunctions or poor design, flares are releasing five times that amount of methane into the atmosphere, according to a study by the University of Michigan.

“Flares often go out,” said David Lyon, senior scientist with Environmental Defense Fund. “They’ll be unlit and venting all the gas. Or they’ll just not be burning the gas properly. So that’s that’s a really big source of methane. And often I think the operators are not aware that the flare’s out.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is writing rules on methane reduction that will further detail what would be required of companies starting in 2024 under the Inflation Reduction Act.

The American Petroleum Institute, the main lobbying group for the oil and gas industry, says methane emissions intensity declined by nearly 60 percent across the nation’s major producing regions from 2011 to 2020. But companies base their reported methane emissions on estimates, not actual measurements, another custom that the Inflation Reduction Act seeks to change.

Climate scientists have shown, using satellite data, that methane emissions are often two or three times above what companies reported. Under the new law, companies would have to actually measure and report their methane emissions. But it’s still unclear how such a measurement program would work.

“Us and many others in this field, over and over again, have shown the huge gap between reporting by countries and companies and what can actually be detected,” Halff said.

Even so, he thinks there’s reason to hope that the methane provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act will make some difference.

“Emissions keep going up,” he said. “We’re moving in the wrong direction…but the potential, the conditions, to change course seem to be here.”

Russia strips climate advocate of citizenship

By Francesca Ebel
November 5, 2022

 

Climate activist Arshak Makichyan plays his violin in front of the Russian Embassy in Berlin. (Monika Skolimowska/Associated Press)

Climate activist Arshak Makichyan built a reputation as the Russian answer to Greta Thunberg, staging lonely weekly protests in central Moscow and often getting arrested.

Makichyan, 28, who fled Russia to Berlin in March following the invasion of Ukraine, is still pushing for climate action, but as of last week, the government says he is no longer Russian. In an unusual case, a Moscow court has decided to strip Makichyan along with his father and brother, who both remain in Russia, of their citizenship, in what appears to be payback for his public antiwar statements.

Makichyan, who is Armenian by birth, emigrated to Russia as a baby in 1995 and holds only a Russian passport, meaning the decision has rendered him effectively stateless. “I am at a loss as what to do going forward,” Makichyan told The Washington Post in a phone interview, saying that a refugee passport in Germany could restrict his climate activism.

After the February invasion of Ukraine, Makichyan, like many Russian activists, made the difficult decision to flee their country. He and his young wife, a fellow activist, had married the very same day Russian troops poured into Ukraine. They both continued to speak out against the war from Germany.

A trial to review his citizenship began in his absence over the summer, and a Moscow court decided to revoke it last month, accusing Makichyan of having provided false information to immigration authorities, despite being just 10 years old when his father made the citizenship application. The court only informed his lawyer of their decision a week later.

“This is my identity. I have engaged in activism in Russia for four years. I have lived all my life in Russia, and despite everything, I see myself in its future, when Russia becomes free,” Makichyan said. The court also revoked the citizenship of his father and brother. Like Makichyan, neither his father or brother hold any other passport and it is unclear what fate awaits them in Moscow.

“The court applied the law very liberally in this case,” Olga Podoplelova, a lawyer for Makichyan, told The Post, saying that they plan to appeal the decision. “Under normal circumstances, we could easily defend the citizenship of Arshak, his father and brother.”

But these are not normal circumstances. Since the invasion, Russian authorities have blatantly and repeatedly disregarded the law, arresting people simply for standing in the vicinity of an antigovernment protest, and forcing people ineligible for military service to sign up for the army. Ethnic minorities have also come under fire.

“Since I was a kid, I felt, well, not totally Russian,” said Makichyan. “I felt that I had no right to participate in political life, because if I said anything, people would say immediately that I am Armenian and that I should go back to my own country.”

“But I continued because I somehow felt responsible. I understood that if there are no changes in Russia, then we would not be able to fight the climate crisis,” he said. “Russia is part of the global world and needs a voice.”

To a certain extent, he succeeded. He drew media attention to his weekly protests and was invited to speak at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2019. He also helped inspire other climate protests in cities across Russia.

Makichyan said Russian authorities were concerned about any form of youth protest no matter how small. “It seems to me that the main threat was that I stood there and simply existed. Now they want to officially say that I do not exist at all, at least not on paper,” he said.

The Russian parliament passed a new bill amending citizenship rules this spring. The new law created what political analyst Ekaterina Schulman calls an “inequality” between two types of citizenship, enabling authorities to easily move against citizens who had previously held a foreign passport.

“When Makichyan became a nuisance, the authorities evidently checked his documents. They asked, what can be done with him? The answer: His citizenship can be annulled. It is much simpler than opening a criminal case,” said Schulman.

Lawyers say there is a practice that precedes the 2022 amendment of “catching out” citizens of predominantly former Soviet states with minor administrative faults. There have been alleged instances of officials claiming to have lost such passports and forcing the individuals to reapply for citizenship.

“This is a form of ethnic discrimination,” said Podoplelova. “Many migrants believe that Russian citizenship gives them more rights or protects them. But this is an illusion,” noted Valentina Chupik, the director of Tong Jahoni, a nonprofit organization that helps Central Asian migrants in Russ

Makichyan warned that his case could signal the emergence of a new tool of political repression against Kremlin critics. “The Arshak case is a very dangerous precedent, given the Soviet experience of depriving dissidents of their citizenship,” said Podoplelova.

This spring, Russian lawmaker Vyacheslav Volodin called critics of the invasion “traitors” and suggested they be stripped of their citizenship. He lamented there was “no procedure for revoking citizenship and preventing them from entering our country.”

Schulman said it is unlikely Makichyan’s case signals a new wave of repression, highlighting the rigidity of Russia’s legal framework. “If you are born the Russian citizen, if you have the citizenship from birth, then there is no way, at least for now, that the state can legally divest you of this status,” said Schulman.

Putin’s War On Ukraine Is Also A War On Dolphins



By Kelsey Vlamis

Dolphins. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

We all know the war in Ukraine started by Russian President Putin earlier in the year was a war of conquest and destruction. And yet, we don’t talk enough about the damage modern war does to the environment and fragile ecosystems.

Along with the thousands of men, women, and children who have died since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, there have been hundreds of casualties in the Black Sea among the resident dolphin and porpoise populations.

Scientists who study the region reported an “unusual increase” in strandings and bycatch — when animals are unintentionally caught by fishermen — of dolphins, porpoises, and whales, in the spring and summer of 2022, according to a recent report from ACCOBAMS, or the Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea, and Contiguous Atlantic Area.

“Russia’s war against Ukraine escalated in February 2022 puts the entire Black Sea basin under a huge threat. Military activities in the marine and coastal areas may affect the marine biota in the region, including cetaceans,” the report said.

More than 700 deaths, primarily in dolphins and harbor porpoises, have been recorded on the coasts of countries that border the sea, including Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine, according to Erich Hoyt, a research fellow at the UK-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation who consulted with the ACCOBAMS scientists.

Researchers are working to determine the cause of the deaths that have been observed, but the ongoing war — and the potential threat posed by drifting mines — make data collection and boat surveys difficult.

There have been reports of dolphins washing ashore with physical injuries, like burns, which could be a direct result of being caught in the crossfire. Ivan Rusev, research director at Ukraine’s Tuzla Estuaries National Nature Park, said earlier this year dolphins were washing ashore with burn marks from bombs or mines, while others appeared unable to navigate or like they had not eaten in days.

But the increase in strandings and dolphins caught in bycatch could be a direct consequence of the loud noises associated with warfare.

“Dolphins and porpoises rely on sound to navigate, find their food, and communicate with each other,” Hoyt told Insider. “Noise from increased ship traffic can have some impact but the sounds of explosions at the surface or underwater could disorient, wound, or kill dolphins and porpoises within a few mile range or cause increased numbers of strandings or bycatch.”

Dolphins, porpoises, and whales have an acute sense of hearing and use echolocation to map out their environment. They emit short, pulsing “clicks,” similar to a finger snapping, which travel through the water until they encounter an object and bounce back to the dolphin. But the dolphin’s uncanny ability to interpret the returning sound to identify food and understand their environment can be disrupted by loud noises.

Dolphins also use sound, similar to a whistle, to communicate with each other, and have even been documented using verbal labels to address one another — in a word: names.

Sounds also travel much further and about four and half times faster through water than air, making the impact of explosions in the sea all the more damaging.

Though scientists are working to confirm the reasons for the increased deaths, Hoyt said the noise disruptions could be disorienting the dolphins, leading to an increase in them getting stranded on shore or caught in a fisherman’s net.

Another factor could be that the fighting is driving the mammals away from familiar Ukrainian waters and bringing them to unfamiliar areas in search of food, where they may be more likely to end up in a net or stranded onshore.

The situation is also worsened by the fact that experts have identified coastal areas near Ukraine as vital for some dolphin and porpoise populations. Hoyt co-chairs the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force, which seeks to identify areas that are important to marine mammal conservation.

Several locations around Ukraine — including some that have been subject to fighting — have previously been designated as important habitats, including areas around the Crimean peninsula, the Kerch Strait, and the Sea of Azov, as shown in this interactive map.

The areas were identified as important habitats for three species that the IUCN classifies as threatened or endangered: the Black Sea common dolphin, the Black Sea harbor porpoise, and the Black Sea bottlenose dolphin.

“Of course, there are fears that the dolphins and porpoises known to use these areas year-round will have been killed or driven out,” Hoyt said. “But because no research can take place there now, we simply will not know until after the war ends.”

Kelsey Vlamis is a breaking news reporter for Insider (where this first appeared), where she also covers stories about the environment, religion, politics, and Indigenous communities. She previously worked on the world news desk at the BBC in London and received a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University.

California tenants rise up, demand rent caps from city halls
By JANIE HAR

yesterday

1 of 15

Kim Carlson, from left, and her two grandsons Thomas Heidt, 12, and Treveyon Carlson, 9, pose for a photograph outside her apartment at the Delta Pines complex, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022, in Antioch, Calif. Despite a landmark renter protection law approved by California legislators in 2019, tenants across the country’s most populous state are taking to ballot boxes and city councils to demand even more safeguards. They want to crack down on tenant harassment, shoddy living conditions and unresponsive landlords that are usually faceless corporations. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)


ANTIOCH, Calif. (AP) — Kim Carlson’s apartment has flooded with human feces multiple times, the plumbing never fixed in the low-income housing complex she calls home in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Antioch.

Her property manager is verbally abusive and calls her 9-year-old grandson, who has autism, a slur word, she said. Her heater was busted for a month this winter and the dishwasher has mold growing under it. But the final straw came in May: a $500 rent increase, bringing the rent on the two-bedroom to $1,854 a month.

Carlson and other tenants hit with similarly high increases converged on Antioch’s City Hall for marathon hearings, pleading for protection. In September, the City Council on a 3-2 vote approved a 3% cap on annual increases.

Kim Carlson, third from left, her two grandsons and community organizer Devin Williams, right, walk around the Delta Pines apartment complex, in Antioch, Calif. 

(AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Carlson, who is disabled and under treatment for lymphoma cancer, starts to weep imagining what her life could be like.

“Just normality, just freedom, just being able to walk outside and breathe and not have to walk outside and wonder what is going to happen next,” said Carlson, 54, who lives with her daughter and two grandsons at the Delta Pines apartment complex. “You know, for the kids to feel safe. My babies don’t feel safe.”

Despite a landmark renter protection law approved by California legislators in 2019, tenants across the country’s most populous state are taking to ballot boxes and city councils to demand even more safeguards. They want to crack down on tenant harassment, shoddy living conditions and unresponsive landlords that are usually faceless corporations.

Two buildings which were destroyed in a March fire remain at the Delta Pines apartment complex. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)


Elected officials, for their part, appear more willing than in years past to regulate what is a private contract between landlord and tenant. In addition to Antioch, city councils in Bell Gardens, Pomona, Oxnard and Oakland all lowered maximum rent increases this year as inflation hit a 40-year high. Other city councils put the issue on the Nov. 8 ballot.

Leah Simon-Weisberg, legal director for the advocacy group Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, says local officials can no longer pretend supply and demand works when so many families are facing homelessness. In June, 1.3 million California households reported being behind on rent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The situation in working-class Antioch — where more than half the population is Black or Latino — illustrates how tenuous even a win for tenants can be.

The two council members who voted in favor of rent stabilization are up for re-election Tuesday, with one of them, Tamisha Torres-Walker, facing a former council member she narrowly beat two years ago. The local newspaper endorsed Joy Motts and called Torres-Walker, who was homeless as a young adult, polarizing.

Mayor Lamar Thorpe, who provided the third vote, faces sexual harassment allegations by two women, which he denies. They are part of a progressive Black majority.

If either member loses her seat, the rent ordinance could be repealed.

The two council members who voted no are both in the real estate industry, and not up for re-election.

A once largely white suburb, Antioch has become more politically liberal as Black, Latino and low-income residents forced out of San Francisco and Oakland moved in. Advocates tried for years to mobilize tenants, but it took the shockingly high rent-hike notices and the expiration of a statewide eviction moratorium in June to get movement.

Outraged tenants jammed into council chambers describing refrigerators pieced from spare parts and washing machines that reeked of rotten eggs. They spoke of skipping meals, working multiple jobs and living in constant terror of becoming homeless, sleeping in their car and washing their children with bottled water.

Kim Carlson pulls back a curtain to show belongings she keeps on her terrace she says were destroyed by flooding from a sewage backup years ago at her home. 

(AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

“We saw a lot of fear, a lot of desperation,” said Rhea Laughlin, an organizer with First 5 Contra Costa, a county initiative that focuses on early childhood. But, she said, she also saw people summon the courage “to go before council, to rally, to march, to speak to the press and be exposed in a way that I think tenants were too afraid to do before, but now really felt they had little to lose.”

Teresa Farias, 36, said she was terrified to speak in public but she was even more afraid that she, her husband and their three children, ages 3 to 14, would have to leave their home. When the family received a $361 rent increase notice in May, she called the East County Regional Group, a parent advocacy organization supported by First 5. They told her to start knocking on doors and talk to her neighbors.

“I really don’t know where my strength came from, to be able to speak in public, to be able to speak in front of the City Council ... to ask them to help us with this issue,” she said in Spanish outside her home at the Casa Blanca apartments.

California’s tenant protection law limits rent increases to a maximum 10% a year. But many types of housing are exempt, including low-income complexes funded by government tax credits and increasingly owned by corporations, limited liability companies or limited partnerships.

Kim Carlson flips through a binder of documents chronicling grievances with the Delta Pines apartment complex. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

The tenants who flooded City Council meetings drew largely from four affordable-housing complexes, including sister properties Delta Pines and Casa Blanca, where an estimated 150 households received large rent increases in May. The properties are linked to Shaoul Levy, founder of real estate investment firm Levy Affiliated in Santa Monica.

The rent increases never took effect, rescinded by the landlord as the City Council moved toward approving rent stabilization. Levy did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Council member Michael Barbanica, who owns a real estate and property management company, called the rent hikes outrageous, but said the city could have worked with the district attorney’s office to prosecute price-gouging corporate landlords.

Instead, the rent cap penalizes all local landlords, some of whom are now planning to sell, he said.

“They’re not the ones doing 30-40-50% increases,” Barbanica said, “yet they were caught in the crossfire.”

But, Carlson said, the city needs to pass even more tenant protections. The apartment complex is infested with roaches and her neighbors are too scared to speak up, she said.

Her apartment has flooded at least seven times in the eight years she’s lived there, she said, flipping through cellphone photos of her toilet and bathtub filled with dark yellow-brown water. In October 2020, she slipped from water pouring down from the upstairs apartment and dislocated her hip.

She has never been compensated, including all the gifts lost when the apartment flooded with water on Christmas Eve 2017. Two months later, in February 2018, feces and urine bubbled from the tub and toilets.

“We got two five-gallon buckets and a bag of plastic bags brought to us and we had to (urinate and defecate) in those buckets for five days because the toilets were blown off the floor,” Carlson said.

The toilets still gurgle, indicating blockage. That’s when she shuts off the water and waits for plumbers to clear the backup.

Tenant organizer Devin Williams grew up in Antioch after his parents moved out of San Francisco in 2003, part of a migration of Black residents leaving city centers for cheaper homes in safer suburbs. The 32-year-old is devastated that the same opportunity is not available to tenants like Carlson now.

Devin Williams, left, talks with Kim Carlson and her two grandsons while looking at the two buildings which were destroyed by a fire in March at the Delta Pines apartment complex. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

“People have a responsibility to make sure people have habitable living conditions,” he said. “And their lives are just being exploited because people want to make money.”

Kim Carlson, right, hugs her 9-year old grandson Treveyon Carlson at her apartment at the Delta Pines complex. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Photos of the mayor and council members hang on a wall inside City Hall in Antioch, Calif.. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Thomas Heidt, left, and Treveyon Carlson, right, race to the playground at the Delta Pines apartment complex. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Kim Carlson poses for a photograph at her apartment at the Delta Pines apartment complex. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

A padlock and chain restricts access to a basketball court at Delta Pines apartment complex. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

The precarious position of the working class and the prospects for a radicalization of the masses in Russia

Andrei Ritsky

WSWS.ORG

A number of economic forecasts for Russia confirm that an attack on the already precarious position of the Russian working class is underway in the remaining months of 2022 and the year 2023. The forecasts emphasize the country’s volatile economic situation, which is increasing the pressure on the Putin regime and setting the stage for a widespread mobilization of the Russian working class.

On Wednesday, November 2, MBFinance, an online market analysis and forecasting platform, published a short, eight-minute forecast for the Russian economy. The very beginning of the article explicitly refers to the “disappointing forecasts of economists and analysts for the remainder of 2022-2023.”

“Many experts argue that unless Russia comes up with a detailed, new draft for economic reforms in the very near future ... the country will face imminent trouble. The greatest pessimists predict a situation similar to that of the wild 90s in the foreseeable future: widespread unemployment and poverty,” writes the author of the article, Igor Kuznetsov.

The article notes the shocking fact that only 3 percent of the population have no financial and material problems. The remaining 97 percent, or 140 million people have them, and most of them experience serious financial difficulties. This shows the whole essence of capitalism.

Only 12 percent of Russians can afford to pay for most commodities, except an apartment or a house. Thirty-five percent are unable to buy appliances. Twenty-three percent of the population can afford to buy groceries to avoid starvation but are unable to afford new clothes and shoes.

Eight percent of Russians are unable to buy even food, which puts them in real danger of dying of hunger or going into debt. For them, the only choice is either a slow and painful life of debt or an equally painful death by starvation. The number of poor Russians has risen by 3 million within just three months this year, and 60 percent of the population, or about 87 million people, are on the brink of poverty.

The article references the economic expert Konstantin Selyanin. In his opinion, the most pessimistic forecast suggests nothing less than the collapse of Russia’s economy in the very near future. According to Selyanin, we are effectively already witnessing the biggest economic collapse in the entire history of Russia since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

This is indeed true. While the world is sinking into recession due to tight central bank policies, Russia has already entered its own recession, caused by the reaction of the imperialist powers to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It would be too optimistic to believe that Russia has already “survived” this recession.

Despite all the sanctions, Russia was, and still is, an important raw material supplier for the world market. Direct economic relations between Western countries and Russia have indeed declined to a record low, but there are many intermediaries on the world stage. There is also a large uncontrolled trade market on a world scale, which plays no less of a role than the controlled one, and in which Russia has a substantial share.

Kuznetsov’s article brings up a report by Dmitry Belousov, head of the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting (CMASTF). The report raises three “possible” paths for Russia’s economic development:

The first path is autarky. Kuznetsov writes: “In this option, Russia will have to produce everything necessary for its development on its own, even if this means reducing the quality of manufactured products, including both consumer products and those that are necessary for the operation of industry. This will affect the standard of living of the country’s population, which could be significantly reduced by this path. This path will be the only possible one if Russia transitions to a ‘war economy’ as a result of a further escalation of the conflict with the enemy countries.”

Thus, this option is considered possible in the case of an expansion of the conflict in Ukraine between Russia and NATO. This is indeed quite likely to happen, since capitalist wars have always been accompanied by the dissociation of countries from the world market, a decline in industrial production and a serious collapse in living standards. But this situation seriously threatens the position of the capitalist class as well.

In the case of autarky, the country would be set back decades. Such a radical collapse can only lead to an equally radical explosion of the struggles of the working class against the bourgeoisie. The main question will not be whether this explosion takes place, but what level of consciousness the working class will have and the extent to which the revolutionary party of the proletariat will successfully influence it.

The second path is “institutional inertia.” According to the article, this is the most likely path of economic development.

“This is the situation that has been developing for the last 15 years: [the aim has been] to maintain as much macroeconomic stability as possible, implement investment projects, finance their obligations,” writes the author of the article. “Under this scenario, unemployment will remain high up to 2030, within 6%, wages and labor productivity will not increase. With such a method Russia will face the following: in such indicators as quality of life, national security, and technological development the country will inevitably lag behind the rest of the world, which will give rise to a ‘gray economy’ as it existed in the 1980s.”

The reader should recall that it was this “gray economy” of the 1980s that contributed to a serious political and economic crisis by the mid-1980s, which forced the Stalinist bureaucracy to adopt Gorbachev’s “perestroika” policies, which in fact proposed a counterrevolutionary way to resolve the crisis: the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.

The restoration of capitalism ended with the liquidation of the Soviet Union and the establishment in its place of 15 “independent” capitalist republics, open to “partnership” with Western and Eastern capital through the world capitalist market. The consequences of this disintegration are still being felt to this day. The U.S.-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is one such consequence.

Therefore, if this economic path is realized, it is safe to say that a serious political crisis awaits capitalist Russia. For Putin’s regime, this crisis could be fatal. Another question is: Who will replace Putin’s bourgeois rule: other defenders of bourgeois society or revolutionary Marxists who stand on the principles of the October Revolution?

The third and final possible path is the “struggle for growth.” The article presents this path as the second most likely to be realized after “institutional inertia.” These two economic strategies are the subject of debate among the Russian ruling elite, which is trying to somehow cope with the storm coming at them from the West and from within, that is, from the Russian working class.

“The authorities and business will act together,” Kuznetsov writes, “the role of the state in the economy will increase, but the profits will be kept by private companies. Technology would have to be borrowed, and active entry into all sorts of markets would have to be ensured. This path would allow to keep the unemployment rate within the natural 4-5%, and the incomes of the population would grow by about 2.5-3.7% every year. Forecasts for this scenario are more positive—in a couple of years the country would reach a pre-crisis state”—a very positive scenario indeed.

Looking at the global environment, there is no guarantee that the third “optimistic” scenario will work. For Russia to be able to gain access to all sorts of markets, the war must end. But the fact is that the war is not going to end, its very existence is testimony to the crisis of the entire global capitalist system.

The Russian working class faces the same threats as the working class in other capitalist countries. Unemployment in Russia is expected to reach 6.5 percent next year, thus putting 1.6 million jobs at risk. Food inflation will still remain at 9 percent, and the interest rate of the Central Bank of Russia will remain at 6 percent.

For the first time in many years, the state budget will go into deficit. State expenditure will be reduced, first of all in the social sphere. National debt will rise from 18 percent to 23 percent of GDP. GDP growth will be negative throughout 2023. The course of the global recession will also determine the domestic economic situation in Russia.

“All for the front, all for victory” will be the justifying slogan of the future financial and economic machinations of Putin’s regime. The first wave of mobilization has come to an end, but there is already talk in the open about the second wave. What guarantee is there that the second wave will be at least as good as the first? Putin’s regime can give no guarantees other than guarantees for a further deterioration of the situation.

In its report for the first half of 2022, published August 30, Labor Protest Monitoring, analyzing the feverish state of labor protest in Russia, noted:

“All of this suggests increasing fluctuations and at the same time an increase in protest. Periods of relative decline do not compensate for the growth [in protest activity]. The peak of periods of growth [in protests] and the minimum point reached in periods of growth are both constantly increasing. This means that there is a general increase in protest. In general, there is a rather alarming dynamic with a tendency to increase despite the high variability of the data.”

This was written only with regard to the first half of 2022, when the Russian working class was paralyzed in February and March by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and only began to engage in serious protest activity by the summer. The second half of the year will likely not only continue this trend toward growing protests and strike activity, but intensify it.

Ultimately, the fate of the Russian working class is closely linked to the fate of the international working class, which is now at a turning point in the class struggle. Workers internationally are challenging the reactionary trade union apparatuses in their struggle against the cost-of-living crisis, the war and the ongoing pandemic. Russian workers face the same problems as workers everywhere.

It is “optimistic” stupidity and short-sightedness to hope that the capitalist powers will bring about an early end to the war. The redivision of the world has just begun, with all major leaders acknowledging that the decisive decade in the establishment of a “new world order” is now underway. The perceived need by the capitalists for such a “new world order” and the drive by the imperialist powers toward a new redivision of the world is rooted in the crisis and irrationality of the world capitalist system, which is plagued by unresolved contradictions.

Some leaders seek the final realization of a “unipolar moment” (the US), others try to get out of a “stalemate” (Europe), others think about establishing a utopian project of “multipolarity” (China, Russia and others). Ultimately, all these methods are based on the preconception that capitalism must be preserved. We have nothing in common with these methods and conceptions, nor do we intend to.

The main purpose of the existence of the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections and supporters around the world is the overthrow of the capitalist system, which has become an irrational system leading humanity to self-destruction. We conceive of the overthrow of capitalism only on the basis of an internationalist socialist perspective, developed in the course of all the previous experience of the workers’ movement.

The only revolutionary force capable of realizing a socialist alternative to capitalist barbarism is the international working class, which has been woven together by the threads of a globalized economy.

Only a worldwide mobilization of workers is capable of resolving the contradictions of capitalism: between the public character of production and the private-capitalist form of appropriation, the global economy and the division of the world into nation-states.

This mobilization is impossible without building a conscious Marxist-Trotskyist leadership in the working class. The International Committee seeks to resolve the crisis of proletarian leadership and to lead the working class to victory over a society of exploitation of man by man.

This will be possible if a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International is built and strengthened in each country. The Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists is fighting for the construction of such sections in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union.

Bird conservationist marches through London wearing nothing but paint

Nov 5, 2022

WARNING: Contains partial nudity Author and conservationist, Hannah Bourne-Taylor, delivered a speech at Speaker’s Corner on Saturday painted from neck to toe in feathers in support of a national campaign for swifts, supported by the RSPB. The woman has marched through London unclothed and painted as a bird as part of a campaign to support declining species in the UK.

Bird conservationist prepares to march
through London wearing only paint

Rebecca Speare-Cole - 
A conservationist is preparing to march through London wearing nothing but paint to resemble a bird as part of a campaign to support declining species in the UK.

FotoJet© Provided by Evening Standard

Hannah Bourne-Taylor, 36, will launch a petition on Saturday asking to make “swift bricks” compulsory in new housing developments part of her campaign, The Feather Speech, which is supported by the Royal Society for Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the charity Rewriting Extinction.

Ms Bourne-Taylor, from London, will make a speech at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park at midday before marching to Downing Street.

It comes after her nature memoir Fledging went viral earlier this year following the publication of a newspaper article detailing how she reared a baby bird and let it nest in her hair for 84 days.

Speaking to the PA news agency as she got ready on Saturday morning, the author and conservationist said: “I’m feeling quite cold, I’m feeling quite weird that I’m naked and reasonably apprehensive about what’s to come but I’m excited.”

Ms Bourne-Taylor said the renowned artist Guido Daniele started painting her at 8am on Friday, adding she had to try to avoid smudging it as she slept overnight.

Asked why she is staging the protest unclothed and resembling a bird, she said: “Because I’m a person of no influence so when it comes to the environmental crisis, I feel completely helpless as an everyday person and I suddenly realised that I could change that if I could use visual imagery.”

“So the Feather Speech is all about how there are leading scientists and an world-renowned artist coming together for the birds.

“And I know that visual imagery can be very powerful, it can also be very positive and hopeful and this is not a disruptive campaign.

“And even though at the heart of it is something incredibly heartbreaking, which are these birds which are facing national extinction – a bit of a doom and gloom story – this body image is beautiful and positive and seeks to find the connection between us and the birds that live in our walls.”


Ms Bourne-Taylor added that she has “Lady Godiva” hair, hoping that the combination will “change the fate of these birds”.

She said the petition, which she hopes 100,000 people will sign so it will be debated in Parliament, is calling for “swift bricks” in all new housing developments because they are proven to be beneficial nesting environments for four red-listed species – swifts, house sparrows, house martins and starling

Bird Conservationist marches through London wearing only paint

Duration 1:26   View on Watch

Their decline is directly correlated with development projects despite not being acknowledged in the government’s Biodiversity Net Gains, Ms Taylor-Bourne said.

“I love these birds. The idea of them not being in British skies is a nightmare, much more than being naked in public subject to ridicule,” she said.

The conservationist also said the wider aim is to “try to engage everybody in this country”.

“If we all looked up and looked out for these birds, we wouldn’t need a change of policy to help protect them so it’s about creating awareness,” she said.

“These birds are epic, they are iconic. They come with their screening parties and their iconic silhouettes.”

“They’re worth fighting for, they’re worth it to me and they’re worth it to a lot of people,” she said, adding: “Every bird counts.

RSPB executive director Emma Marsh said: “Swifts are one of many species desperately in need of our help.

“More than half have disappeared from UK skies in just 20 years, partly because of a lack of suitable nesting sites.

“As Hannah’s amazing campaign highlights, swift bricks should be compulsory in all new housing developments,” she continued.

“I would urge everyone to sign this petition to help ensure swifts and other species that have traditionally nested in the cavities of our buildings have a safe home to return to every year.”

To sign the petition go to: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/626737.

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