Thursday, February 13, 2020

TODAY IN HISTORY FIREBOMBING DRESDEN

TODAY IN HISTORY FEBRUARY 13, 1945
‘The Most-Fearful Nightmare’: 
75 Years After The (FIRE) Bombing Of Dresden

In the final winter of World War II, allied bombers 

reduced one of Germany’s most elegant cities to 

rubble, killing tens of thousands (CIVILIANS) and 

sparking a bitter debate over whether the attack 

was justified.


 (NO! IT WAS AND IS A WAR CRIME)

A British Royal Air Force memo to pilots also noted the bombing 
would incidentally “show the Russians when they arrive what 
Bomber Command can do.”

EVEN BEFORE THE OFFICIAL START OF THE COLD WAR
THE ALLIES WERE PREPARED TO MARCH ON RUSSIA

A store in the ruins in late 1945 selling toiletries and beauty products, 
as well as fertilizer and house paint.

People started to clear away the rubble in 1952.
SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE BOMBING AND END OF WWII
Many of Dresden’s architectural treasures were rebuilt using historical photographs, as well as chunks of carved stone rescued from the rubble for reference.

Many of Dresden’s architectural treasures were rebuilt using historical
 photographs, as well as chunks of carved stone rescued from the rubble for reference.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE REST OF THIS PHOTO ESSAY 

How Many Germans Died Under RAF Bombs 
at Dresden in 1945?
JOHN WEAR • MARCH 24, 2019

Introduction
The bombing of Dresden remains one of the deadliest and morally most-problematic raids of World War II. Three factors make the bombing of Dresden unique: 1) a huge firestorm developed that engulfed much of the city; 2) the firestorm engulfed a population swollen by refugees; and 3) defenses and shelters even for the original Dresden population were minimal.[1] The result was a high death toll and the destruction of one of Europe’s most beautiful and cultural cities.
Many conflicting estimates have been made concerning the number of deaths during the raids of Dresden on February 13-14, 1945. Historian Richard J. Evans estimates that approximately 25,000 people died during these bombings.[2] Frederick Taylor estimates that from 25,000 to 40,000 people died as a result of the Dresden bombings.[3] A distinguished commission of German historians titled “Dresden Commission of Historians for the Ascertainment of the Number of Victims of the Air Raids on the City of Dresden on 13/14 February 1945” estimates the likely death toll in Dresden at around 18,000 and definitely not more than 25,000.[4] This later estimate is considered authoritative by many sources.
READ ON THIS IS A CONSPIRACY THEORY/ALT HISTORY/MUCKRAKING  SITE
BUT THIS IS SOURCED ARTICLE, FROM THE RIGHT USES DISGRACED
HOLOCAUST DENIAL SOURCES SUCH AS DAVID IRVING 

RAF heavy bombers are seen dropping bombs over Dresden, Germany toward
the end of World War II in this remarkable archive footage from 1945.


Slaughterhouse Five Or The Children's Crusade 
by Kurt Vonnegut

Publication date 1969-01-01
Topics fiction
Collection opensource
Language English

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor.


Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s classic novel comes to life in this haunting and darkly humorous film from acclaimed director George Roy Hill. Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) is an ordinary World War II soldier with one major exception: he has mysteriously become unstuck in time. Billy goes on an uncontrollable trip back and forth from his birth in New York to life on a distant planet and back again to the horrors of the 1945 fire-bombing of Dresden. This dazzling and thought-provoking drama co-stars Ron Leibman and Valerie Perrine.

Christina Jarvis
The Vietnamization of World War II in Slaughterhouse-Five and Gravity’s Rainbow
If World War II was the straightforward movie everyone could be in,Vietnam was the sequel that was so confused that it demanded a review of the original. Perhaps the seeds of a later confusion were present in the midst of seeming clarity. —George Roeder, The Censored War

Goodbye to Berlin
Erich Mendelsohn designed some of the world's finest buildings

 - and helped destroy the German capital. 

By Jonathan Glancey Mon 12 May 2003

 
 Mendelsohn's mock German Village in the Utah desert, 
based on a 1920s Berlin terrace.

Deep in a desiccated, Utah desert, surrounded by mountains and fringed with scorched sage and saltbush, stand the surreal remains of German Village. Out of bounds, out of place, out of time and 90 miles from Salt Lake City, it is surely the most bizarre feature of Dugway Proving Ground, a test site created by the Allied military during the second world war to develop weapons of mass destruction for use against civilian targets in Germany and Japan.

All that survives of German Village is a single block of high-gabled, prewar Berlin working-class housing. It is accurate in every respect. And it should be: commissioned by the chemical warfare corps of the US army, it was designed by Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953), the German architect who settled in the US in 1941 after a spell in England.

I was alerted to the story of German Village by Mike Davis, who features it in his provocative book Dead Cities: A Natural History, a study of the vulnerability of modern cities from New York to Tokyo to destruction by man and nature. Mendelsohn's involvement in this deathly project, seemed, at first, bizarre. A Jew from Allenstein in East Prussia (today, Olsztyn in Poland), Mendelsohn settled in Berlin, where he trained as an architect after studying economics in Munich. From the trenches of the great war he sent home visionary sketches of extraordinary streamlined, or expressionist, buildings. In 1919, during the great flu epidemic, he began work on the Einstein Tower, an astrophysics laboratory for the German mathematician and scientist, at Potsdam on the edge of Berlin.
Over the next 10 or 12 years, Mendelsohn developed beautiful, sweeping, clean-lined, light-filled architecture - much of it in Berlin - that appeared to catch the spirit of the old German Enlightenment and represent it afresh in the uncertain days of the Weimar Republic. These included the Metal Workers Union building, the Universum Cinema on Kurfürstendamm, the Columbushaus (Galeries Lafayette) and several villas, including his own. Outside Berlin, the streamlined department stores he built for Schocken at Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Chemnitz were hugely influential worldwide.

Mendelsohn left for England when Hitler was voted into power in 1933. Here, with the Russian-born dandy Serge Chermayeff, he built, among a number of fine houses, the De la Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea.

How can this Erich Mendelsohn be the architect of the dark and deathly German Village in the Utah desert? Mendelsohn left no correspondence or notebooks relating to the Dugway Proving Ground project, where napalm and poison gases were developed and tested. He had been under gas attack in the trenches, yet it is hard not to think that his primary motivation in the desert of Utah was revenge on the Nazis. If this seems fair enough, what remains disturbing is the fact that this work was expressly designed to destroy working-class districts of Berlin, including Wedding and Pankow. These had been communist strongholds, virulently anti-Hitler, before the Gestapo and SS all but destroyed opposition to the Nazi regime.

A concerted Allied attack, by the British and US air force on working-class districts of German and Japanese cities had, however, become more or less official policy by 1943. Churchill wanted to gas them. Killed and mutilated in sufficient numbers, the German working class would, he argued, rise up against Hitler and bring a quick end to the war. "It is absurd to consider morality on this topic," he told RAF planners when the first German V1 rockets fell on London. "I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people, and not by psalm-singing uniformed defeatists."

Sensible people included the prime minister's favourite scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), who insisted that "the bombing must be directed essentially against working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space around them, and so are bound to waste bombs." Psalm-singing uniformed defeatists included the US's air force's celebrated commander Jimmy Doolittle, who took against Churchill's proposed Operation Thunderclap that aimed to kill 275,000 Berliners in a single 2,000-plane raid scheduled for August 1944. It did not take place.

Washington's war secretary Henry Stimson said he did not want "the United States to get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities". His less diplomatic deputy, Robert Lovett, pleading the case for adopting anti-personnel bombs loaded with napalm and white phosphorous, said: "If we are going to have a total war, we might as well make it as horrible as possible." Churchill trumped Lovett by calling on US president Franklin D Roosevelt to speed up production of a promised 500,000 top-secret "N-bombs" - filled with anthrax, developed at Dugway - to be dropped on Berlin and five other German cities.

As the debate raged in political and military circles, Mendelsohn, with scientists from Standard Oil and German-emigre set designers from Hollywood's RKO studio, set to work on German Village. RKO expertise contributed the design of proletarian Berlin interiors down to the last detail. Using forced labour (inmates from Utah state prison), German Village and its six "mietskasernen" (rent barracks) apartment blocks were completed in 44 days, in time for experiments scheduled from May 1943.

Mendelsohn and his team had done a good job. Their designs were far superior to the German housing built in England for test destruction by the RAF at Harmondsworth, near Heathrow airport. Assaulted by napalm, gas, anthrax and incendiary bombs, German Village was rebuilt several times during 1943. Nearby, the Japanese Village (long since vanished), designed by the Czech-educated architect Antonin Raymond (1888-1976), paved the way for incendiary attacks on working-class districts of Tokyo. On March 9 1945, 334 US air force B-29 superfortress bombers dropped 2,000 tons of napalm and magnesium incendiaries on the timber and paper houses of Asakusa. Officially, 83,793 Japanese were killed, 40,918 injured and 265,171 buildings destroyed. The same month, German Village aided the fire raids on Dresden. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, US and British raids had destroyed 45% of German housing. And, as Davis wryly observes: "Allied bombers pounded into rubble more 1920s socialist and modernist utopias than Nazi villas."Mendelsohn was the architect of some of the very best of these white, concrete dreams. Dugway, Davis argues, "led the way to the deaths of, say, two million Axis civilians", and German Village remains "a monument to the self-righteousness of punishing 'bad places' by bombing them".

There is no doubt that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had to be defeated; but did the Allies really need German Village, Japanese Village and the refined architectural efforts of Mendelsohn and Raymond? At the fiery dawn of the 20th century, beneath the civilised, enlightened facades of Britain and the US, as well as Germany and Japan, was a desire for expansion, destruction and terrible revenge. Sitting on the sun-deck of Mendelsohn's pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, this axis of modern evil seems so very far removed, as far away, in fact, as the sole surviving "rent barrack" of German Village, Utah.

· Dead Cities: A Natural History by Mike Davis, The New Press, £16.95.


Web result

German Village (Dugway Proving Ground) - Wikipedia


German Village was the nickname for a range of mock residential houses constructed in 1943 by the U.S. Army in the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, roughly 85 miles (137 km) southwest of Salt Lake City, in order to conduct experiments used for the bombing of Nazi Germany. ... Mike Davis, "Berlin's Skeleton in Utah's Closet," in Dead Cities: And Other 

MacArthur fellow Mike Davis is the author of “City of Quartz”, “Ecology of Fear”, “Magical Urbanism”, and -- with Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller -- of “Under the Perfect Sun”. He lives in San Diego. Errol Morris is a filmaker who produced such works at Vernon, Florida, The Thin Blue Line, and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Recently I read a chapter from Mike Davis' Dead Cities that reminded me of part of Errol Morris' documentary Fog of War. They both talk about the use of firebombs in World War II: bombs designed not to destroy military compounds but rather to destroy dense, urban civilian populations in order to weaken the morale of the enemy. firebomb n : a bomb that is designed to start fires; are most effective against flammable targets (such as fuel) [syn: incendiary bomb, incendiary] v : attack with incendiary bombs; "The rioters fire-bombed the stores" 

Search Results


Sep 5, 2018 - 20 posts - ‎6 authors
The bombing of Dresden was a British/American aerial bombing attack ... By now, the thousands of fires from the burning city could be seen more ... In the Utah desert, during the Second World War, the Americans ... From Mike Davis ... Tokio not A Bombed, (burning in Napalm) looks similar to Hiroshima ?

Web results

fire power not only has the ability to destroy assets physically; it is also a most useful weapon ... coalition's offensive air campaign during Operation Desert Storm ... Biddle, Tami Davis, “British and American Approaches to Strategic Bombing: Their Origins and ... DresdenTokyo, Hiroshima and Hamburg, may drive home to.

180 DEGREES OUT: The Change in U.S. Strategic Bombing Applications, 1935-1955. 
By John M. Curatola 
Professor Theodore A. Wilson, Advisor 
This dissertation examines how the U.S. Army/Air Force developed strategic bombing applications during the 1930s and then changed them during World War II and in early Cold War planning. This narrative history analyzes the governmental, military, and social influences that changed U.S. bombing methods. The study addresses how the Air Force diverted from a professed strategy of precision bombardment during the inter-war years only to embrace area, fire, and atomic bombardment during WW II. Furthermore, the treatise continues in this vein by examining how the USAF developed atomic and thermonuclear applications during the post war era and the Cold War. 
Oct 2, 2014 - As Mike Davis recalls, initial discussions of singling out the mansions of the Nazi ... a replica of the slum districts of Berlin was built in the Utah desert, ... but Roosevelt eventually came around, and the bombing of Dresden was ... had had his eye on the potential for firebombing Japan as far back as 1932: ...

A look at the Allied “Revenge Bombings” in Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, ... Accounts describing the “Battle of Britain” refer to these bombings but ... Boren, Zachary Davies. ... Heavy AA fire prevented them from being accurate; the bombs caused ...
bombing with Kaiser-made "goop" had ...
Desert Storm. ... Tokyo and Dresden, area bombing in both theaters of war, and the dropping of the ... indiscriminate civilian attacks as firebombing, area bombing, and the ... Michael Walzer and William V. O'Brien, believe that jus ad bellum ... Tami Davis Biddle, "Air Power," in The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the.
Berlin and Tokyo resonated favorably with public opinion at the time, changing ... One can find numerous histories of specific strategic bomb- ... Richard G. Davis. Since ... B-17 Flying Fortresses attack railway centers in Dresden . ... B-29s drop fire bombs on Yokohama . ... Coalition Sorties against Scuds, DESERT STORM .

Aerial Attacks on Civilians and the Humanitarian Law of War ...

by M Lippman - ‎2002 - ‎Cited by 40 - ‎Related articles
See George B. Davis, The Launching of Projec- tiles from ... ary 1945 attack on Dresden in eastern Germany.67 Estimates are that, follow- ... the fire-bomb raids as "one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non- ... Judge Michael A. ... See International Military Tribunal at Tokyo (1948), in II THE LAW OF WAR: A.

by H Reinhold - ‎2002 - ‎Cited by 12 - ‎Related articles
Dec 15, 2005 - Ambassador David C. Scheffer, Lieutenant Colonel Michael A. Newton and Major ... EDOIN, THE NIGHT TOKYO BURNED (1987); Chris af Jochnick & Roger ... editorial, Simon Jenkins called firebombing, such as Dresden, ... Also called "The Second Persian Gulf War" and "Operation Desert Storm."
by PA Werth - ‎Cited by 4 - ‎Related articles
port of Mike Hilbruner (U.S. Forest Service, retired) is sincerely appreciated. University, C. ... Davis, K.P. 1959. Forest fire: ... Desert ecotones in which fire has historically been limited by low fuel ... in 1921 when a magnitude 7.9 earthquake hit the Tokyo,. Japan ... War II city bombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Hiroshima.
BRITAIN 1939-1945: THE ECONOMIC COST OF STRATEGIC BOMBING
By John Fahey
 Department of History
The strategic air offensive against Germany during World War II formed a major
part of Britain’s wartime military effort and it has subsequently attracted the
attention of historians. Despite the attention, historians have paid little attention
to the impact of the strategic air offensive on Britain. This thesis attempts to
redress this situation by providing an examination of the economic impact on
Britain of the offensive. The work puts the economic cost of the offensive into its
historical context by describing the strategic air offensive and its intellectual
underpinnings. Following this preliminary step, the economic costs are described
and quantified across a range of activities using accrual accounting methods. The
areas of activity examined include the expansion of the aircraft industry, the cost
of individual aircraft types, the cost of constructing airfields, the manufacture and
delivery of armaments, petrol and oil, and the recruitment, training and
maintenance of the necessary manpower. The findings are that the strategic air
offensive cost Britain £2.78 billion, equating to an average cost of £2,911.00 for
every operational sortie flown by Bomber Command or £5,914.00 for every
Germany civilian killed by aerial bombing. The conclusion reached is the
damage inflicted upon Germany by the strategic air offensive imposed a very
heavy financial burden on Britain that she could not afford and this burden was a
major contributor to Britain’s post-war impoverishment. 

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Web results

Strategic Air Warfare and Nuclear Strategy 

 THE FORMULATION
OF MILITARY POLICY IN THE TRUMAN ADMINISTRATION, 1945-1950
Patrick W. Steele. B.A., M.A.
Marquette University, 2010
This work analyzes the military decision making within the Truman
administration that culminated in the purchases of aircraft and the establishment of a
virtual nuclear only strategy. When Harry S. Truman became President in April 1945, the
United States Army Air Force (USAAF) was in the formative stage of a firebombing
campaign that attempted to burn the Japanese out of the war by targeting the civilian
population. Four months later, the use of nuclear bombs ushered in the atomic age and
completely altered the military and political decision-making processes within the
administration. Despite evidence to the contrary about the efficacy of strategic bombing,
the military view of the atomic bomb as an ultimate arbiter of warfare whose use virtually
guaranteed victory on American terms was immediately embraced across all the armed
forces. 

Postmortem city
Article (PDF Available) in City 8(2):165-196 · July 2004  
DOI: 10.1080/1360481042000242148
Stephen Graham  Newcastle University
Abstract
We tend to see contemporary cities through a peace-time lens and war as somehow exceptional. In this ambitious paper, long in historical range and global in geographical scope, Steve Graham unmasks and displays the very many ways in which warfare is intimately woven into the fabric of cities and practices of city planners. He draws out the aggression which we should see as the counterpart of the defensive fortifications of historic towns, continues with the re-structuring--often itself violent--of Paris and of many other cities to enable the oppressive state forces to patrol and subordinate the feared masses. Other examples take us through the fear of aerial bombardment as an influence on Le Corbusier and modernist urban design to the meticulous planners who devised and monitored the slaughter in Dresden, Tokyo and other targets in World War 2. Later episodes, some drawing on previously classified material, show how military thinking conditioned urbanisation in the Cold War and does so in the multiple 'wars' now under way--against 'terrorism' and the enemy within . City has carried some exceptional work on war and 'urbicide' but this paper argues that, for the most part, the social sciences are in denial and ends with a call for action to confront, reveal and challenge the militarisation of urban space.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-349-16180-5
Introduction 
My research is concerned with the ‘staging’ of the landscapes of twentieth century military conflict in the American and European theatres of war. An investigation of the history, theory, and application of camouflage provides the basis for a discussion of the interrelation between camouflage and scenography. The emphasis will be on the visualisation of landscape and the strategies adopted to control the conditions of perception; to demonstrate how the wartime landscape was a constructed space of the imagination- an object of vision and a place of action reinvented and redefined through the ‘logistics of perception’ and the aerial view. The focus will be on the scenarios, terrain models and scenic effects of the wartime scenographers. Examples of decoy landscapes including camouflage and terrain models will be used to illustrate how scenographic methods were deployed to create and visualise strategies of disguise and exposure. This is a multi-disciplinary perspective informed by a wide range of literature concerning perception, the aerial view, the miniaturisation of landscape, the theatrical metaphor, landscape as theatre and the theatre of war. I intend to discuss the wartime construction of performative spaces and experiences by professional scenographers and to analyse the construction and viewing in complex (scenographic, aesthetic, psychological, historic) terms. Both identification and distancing were necessary for the wartime scenographers to deal with their activities. Creativity, subjectivity and theatricality were prerequisites to design and construct an effective terrain model and I wish to show how the creation of a ‘theatre of war’ came to be at conflict with itself in the work of the camoufleurs. In this dissertation I use the term strategic scenography to refer to practices produced during wartime. The waging of war depends upon the mobilization of a range of artistic and performative activities. The theory and practice of conflict is not only informed by the tactical rules of engagement or the technicalities of ballistics and surveillance, weapons systems, operations but by the language and cultural frames provided by theatre. Similarly the strategy of the military is to impose their own vision of war on theatre practice through recruiting manuals, training manuals, propaganda and film

The city as destructive system: wildfires, Dresden and the case against urban sprawl

Dresden 1945
Since I wrote about the first glimpse of the bushfire season here in Sydney a few weeks ago, attention has switched to the south-west of the USA, where devastating wildfires continue to burn across California. While bushfires or wildfires have been a part of both areas since time immemorial (see also France, Portugal, South Africa, Greece, the Balkans, etc.) there seems little doubt that the drought attributed to climate change is exacerbating the situation. So fires both get worse and more widespread.
By chance I also happened to recently read an astonishing, sobering article on the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima in the Second World War, entitled 'The Mongol devastations', by Jörg Friedrich. (Originally publishd in Die Welt, on 10 February, 2005, it's hugely enlightening on this horrific, unnecessarily brutal end to the war, amidst the post-war carve-up of Europe and Asia, suggesting that the bombing by the British and Americans was essentially just a strategic show of strength to the Russians - "the demonstration of a capacity" - using already-defeated Germany and Japan as no more than a token.)
Dresden in ruins
In the aftermath of the Dresden firebombing
Friedrich's article, when taken with images of the wildfires in California, and those around Australian cities in recent years, gave me pause to consider how urban form and fire are related. I don't want to use the terrible fires around California, and in Australia before them, as my own spurious token in an academic argument about urban planning. And yet I can't help but correlate urban sprawl with placing more and more people into areas consistently threatened by fire. In this, the contemporary form of the sprawling city is not only something that is bad for the city in general - you could argue that point of course, but I don't think it can really be doubted  - but also just supremely dangerous.
Rancho Bernardo, San Diego County
Rancho Bernardo, San Diego County
We're now seeing deaths, upheaval of communities, destruction of property and vast economic losses. And this is to do with the form of the city,
In Friedrich's words, in their numbing horror, we see that urban form itself, as well as the motivation of bombers, either encouraged or discouraged the flames of late-World War 2. He describes the malevolent science of firebombing developed by the allies as they studied the effects of fire on various cities. These designers - why not use that word? - attempted to create more efficient city-destroying systems. In effect, they were a form of urban planner, yet looking at the landscape, structure and fabric of the city in order to destroy rather than create. Friedrich makes clear it was planning, rational enquiry and product development, with strategists asking questions such as "How could similar death zones be made to be safer, more manageable, more cost-effective and larger?" and describing the race to the atom bomb as "the most formidable development project of all time". (Disconcertingly, you can almost perceive this stance on the RAF Bomber Command's website, in the grimly satisfied terms deployed to describe their bombing of Dresden, which they still claim to have been of military importance, running against Friedrich's well-researched counterpoint.)
The firebombing of Dresden
A lengthy quotation from Friedrich's article:
"The fire bombing of Hamburg killed 45,000 people overnight, more than the Luftwaffe had achieved in nine months of dropping bombs on England. Only eight weeks earlier,the fire in Wuppertal had resulted in 3,000 deaths, an unprecedented figure until then."
"The fire in Wuppertal burnt in the air circulation pattern particular to enclosed river valleys. In Hamburg it was the dry summer heat; in Heilbronn, Dresden and Pforzheim it was winter snow. Tokyo was built almost entirely of wood and paper, Darmstadt of sandstone, Munster of brick. Hildesheim and Halberstadt were criss-crossed by narrow streets lined with half-timbered houses, Mannheim was divided into classic quadrants, Dortmund and Duisburg were made up of sprawling 19th century blocks. The thermonuclear planners delved into the fund of knowledge left by the area bombing of the Axis powers. This was the only way to understand how individual cities burn."
"The historic fires in San Francisco, Hamburg and London had nothing in common with the procedure whereby in only 17 minutes (Würzburg) or 21 minutes (Dresden), cities were showered with hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs. These sparked thousands of fires, which within three hours became a flaming sea, several square kilometres wide. Large natural fires normally have a single source, and are driven for days by the wind. But war statistics showed that such winds played a minor role in fires caused by bombs. The real destructive power was not in the wind that drives the fire, but in the fire itself, which unleashes its own hurricane on the ground."
"Neither buildings nor people can escape the logic of the elements of fire and air. A fire starts, it sets the air in motion, fire and air form a vortex extinguishing life and all that belongs to it: books, altars, hospitals, asylums, jails and jailers, the block warden and his child, the armourers, the people's court and all the people in it, the slave's barracks and the Jew's hideout, the strangler as well as the strangled. Hiroshima and Dresden, Tokyo and Kassel were transformed from cities into destructive systems. The agent of change is the bomb war, and the bomb war is its construction site."
Of course, the 'motives' behind the wildfires and bushfires - save for cases of arson - are entirely different, being the result of systemic interactions between wind, climate and terrain. Yet this is a dynamic system and at least one of those variables has been actively altered by humankind, and by city dwellers most of all. Developing Friedrichs' notion - that cities can become destructive systems - can we see that the form of the contemporary sprawl city, 65 years later, might be becoming a new kind of destructive system?
Map of fire damage in Dresden
Map of fire surrounding San Diego
Satellite image of California on fire
If the early-20th century urban forms of Hamburg, Tokyo, and Dresden set up their own destruction under the extreme conditions of their time - a bomb war, in that case - the new urban form of Sydney and San Diego in the early-21st century might also be setting up destructive systems, inadvertently unleashing a similar firestorm but at the edges of the sprawling city. In both cases, the combination of urban form introduced to a new agent of change results in the hurricane of fire: in the Second World War, firebombing destroys cities, flames sweeping from the centre out. In the 21st century, the rising temperatures create tinder-dry conditions in the bush and fire attacks the city from the edges inwards, edges that have begun to extend well into dangerous territory.
Harris Fire Mount Miguel
San Diego skyline under smoke
Santa Clarita, California
Santiago
In The Economist's recent piece on the wildfires, Joel Kotkin all but suggests that cities are over-extending their reach:
"Recent (fires) have caused more damage than those 30 years ago, because the population has grown and many more Californians have moved out of city centres and built big homes surrounded by foliage. “In more remote areas, you're more susceptible to fire,” argues Mr Kotkin, “and nature still has a lot of power.”
Similarly, an excellent recent documentary on bushfires on Australia's ABC Radio National makes a similar point about the "urban interface" and its new proximity to bushfires:
"The cities are sprawling outwards, into bushland, and closer to national parks. In Melbourne, it's the hills around the city; in Sydney it's the northern and southern suburbs and the Blue Mountains area. The edges of Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Hobart are all places where the city now meets the bush head-on."
In the same programme, Naomi Brown, CEO of the Australasian Fire Authorities Council, sounds frustrated that people don't see this "bigger picture" of urban development's role in recent bushfires around Australian cities:
"They very rarely have the ability or the inclination to take a few steps back and look at the really big picture on what actually led up to these fires, what's happening with land management ... You know, why is the vegetation doing what it's doing, what is happening with land planning. You know why are structures and developments where they are. You very rarely get that big look at what the total picture is"
Ross Bradstock, Head of the University of Woolongong's Centre for Environmental Risk Management:
"You know, there's hard decisions to make because real estate is valuable, and people value their lifestyles and all those sorts of things. And to some degree you know, you can't have your cake and eat it. People can't live right in the bush, and expect to enjoy low risk of damage to their property. So there's always going to be hard choices to make about the way development is managed in the future"
I recall Barista's post of last year, describing how those fires affected Melbourne:
"Now Melbourne - ultra-sophisticated, urban, discursive, computerised, air-conditioned, internationalised - carries an elemental haze of smoke. I walk the dog on beaches that smell of hydrogen sulphide and ash. My partner Susie reaches fretfully for her athsma inhaler"
The site for ABC's Background Briefing has a series of images of new habitation in and around the Ku-rin-gai National Park north of Sydney, such as this street, sitting just below the fire-blackened trees on the skyline.
Street near bush, Ku-rin-gai
I'm currently reading David Peace's shattering new novel Tokyo Year Zero, which is set in the almost mortally-wounded Tokyo of 1946. The sense of the city in ruins, physically and psychologically, has rarely been rendered more evocatively - Tokyo is utterly defeated, on its knees - yet each image also implicitly prompts you to consider how Tokyo responded, building one of the most advanced, civilised and affluent cities of our time.
The firebombing of Tokyo
The Tokyo skyline earlier this year
It is possible to calibrate the symbiotic relationship between cities and cultures - indeed, it's manipulating cities through the legislation of property development that has led to sprawl. What's more complex here, as with much these days, is that the imagery and problem is not rendered in sharp black-and-white contrast - a burnt-out Dresden or Tokyo - but is more amorphous, dynamically distributed and insidious. The sense of a few cities glowing at their edges, with a complex set of underlying causes, does not in itself provide enough traction for change. (Note Bryan Finoki's recent reportage from Flint, Michigan, a city largely in an advanced stage of decay, caught in the wake of contemporary economic development and struggling to respond. This slow demise may prove fatal, as opposed to the quick double-tap incapacitation of firebombing. Ironically, if the causal factors are apparently difficult to perceive until it's almost too late, the resolution of imagery has increased such that we can see the effects of these changes almost as vividly as those images of Dresden and Tokyo, and certainly from more angles; see the maps of CNN or Wikipedia. A form of City Informational Modeling - a derivation of BIM - may enable us to see - the changing city in real-time.)
So without undergoing world war, without the bomb as an "agent of change", we seem to have still developed the conditions for burning cities, through little more than avarice and a culture of individualism. It's not a time for pointing the finger at individuals suffering terrible upheaval and dealing with huge personal loss. It is a time, however, to look at the patterns of urban development - and the wider political context - that created this situation, with the fringes of metro areas the fastest growing parts of the USA and Australia. Not just enabling cities to sprawl but subsidising and encouraging them to do so, as Dolores Hayden suggests. In the context of accelerating a climate change, it has only increased the likelihood of bushfires in inhabited areas. This careless combination has already proved deadly in Australia and California.
Burnt-out housing in southern California
The only good that could come from these ongoing reports at the singed urban interface would be an increased impetus to reverse both these trends and focus on re-building the high-density city, diminishing the need for a sprawl of over-large detached houses with their associated environmental cost, and thus remaining easily defensible against these natural fires.
The cities described by Friedrich were old European or Asian forms and, frankly, didn't stand a chance:
"... There were cities like Berlin that did not work right. The width of the streets, the firewalls, the abundance of greenery and canals opposed the fire-injections and responded wrong. But Dresden's narrow streets, decorative old town and wooden buildings fed the fires according to plan. The carefully selected triangle between the Ostragehege park and the main railway station functioned as a "fire-raiser". The old cities, bent with age, testimonies to the distant past, were best suited to such attacks. Freiburg, Heilbronn, Trier, Mainz, Nuremberg, Paderborn, Hildesheim, Halberstadt, Würzburg: this avenue of German history shared the lot of Dresden in these months. For the allied fire bomb strategists, the study of their material composition was a science in itself."
But San Diego and Sydney are new cities - New World cities, even - and if urban progress is to mean anything, they shouldn't really be on fire. The "study of their material composition" doesn't need to be that forensic for us to realise it's not scalable to sprawl. Taking a reductionist approach, as if we were allied scientists attempting to come up with a formula for destroying new cities, you might conclude:
urban sprawl + climate change =  destructive fires




Fossil Fuel Giants Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan Slowly Going Green

WILL THEY BEAT ALBERTA?

By Bruce Pannier February 08, 2020

A solar power station in the city of Saran in Kazakhstan's Karaganda region

Long beholden to fossil fuels for all of their energy, the two most populous countries in Central Asia seem to finally be tapping into their abundant renewable resources.

Kazakhstan boasted early this year about some impressive renewable energy figures, while its southern neighbor, Uzbekistan, is planning to construct several projects as it moves to increase its usage of "green energy."

Kazakhstan's Energy Ministry released figures on January 9 that showed an increase in output during 2019 from three renewable energy sources: hydro, wind, and solar power.

The ministry said these green power sources added 504.5 megawatts (MW) to the country’s electricity grid last year.

And the ministry said 18 more renewable power sources are due to come online in 2020. Once they do, the total output from renewable sources will be some 1,655 MW, an increase of more than 600 MW from current production of 1,050 MW.

So what exactly do these numbers mean?

According to the Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company's website, at the start of 2019 the country had 18,894.9 MW of available capacity, which is the amount they actually generate. So 504 MW looks like a drop in the bucket.

But it is, actually, a relatively significant amount of energy.

To compare, the Kyrgyz and Tajik capitals, Bishkek and Dushanbe, respectively, have large thermal power plants (TPP) providing those cities with electricity and heat.

Chinese company Tebian Electric Apparatus (TBEA) built the Dushanbe-2 TPP and renovated the Bishkek TPP. According to the TBEA website, the total installed capacity of Dushanbe's coal-fired TPP is 400 MW. And the Chinese company replaced four 50-year-old units with two new 150 MW units at the Bishkek heat and power plant which, when added to existing units still in operation, boosted the TPP’s capacity to some 812 MW.

So, comparatively, 504 MW of electricity is not an insignificant amount of energy.

The Kazakh Energy Ministry also noted great international interest in helping develop the country’s renewable power resources.

It said that in 2018-19 tenders held for future renewable energy projects in the country, 138 companies from 12 countries took part.

Half of those countries were EU states, and part of the EU’s recently released strategy for Central Asia involves EU help and investment in the region's renewable energy capacity.

The Kazakh government wants renewable energy sources to account for some 3 percent of the country’s energy output by the end of 2020 and some 10 percent by 2030.

That might provide some relief to the residents of big cities in eastern Kazakhstan who are watching air pollution increase yearly as coal-fired TPPs continue to provide much of the electricity and heat that is used.

Tashkent Trying To Catch Up

Uzbekistan is behind Kazakhstan in developing its renewable energy sources but is also moving toward the use of more green-energy resources.

When Shavkat Mirziyoev came to power after President Islam Karimov’s death in 2016, he changed a lot of policies and put an emphasis on the development of the country's renewable power resources.

Qishloq Ovozi has looked at Uzbekistan’s hydropower ambitions, which aim for water-generated power to account for nearly 16 percent of the country’s energy balance by 2030.

Uzbekistan is also planning to tap other renewable energy sources.

There were reports in September that Chinese company Lioaning Lide was building a wind farm in the Gijduvan district of Uzbekistan’s Bukhara Province that will produce some 200 MW by autumn 2020 and eventually some 1,500 MW when the project is complete.

Aleksei Likhachev, the chief of Russian state nuclear power company Rosatom

Spanish company Siemens Gamesa is building a 100 MW wind farm in Uzbekistan’s Navoi Province and Turkish company ETKO CO Enerji A.S. is building a 600 MW wind farm in the Baysun district of Surhandarya Province.

In October 2019, the Uzbek Energy Ministry announced that U.A.E. firm Masdar was awarded a contract to build a solar park with 100 MW of capacity in Navoi Province, which is also part of the World Bank’s Scaling Solar program.

There is already a 130 MW solar park in Namangan Province, and French company Total Eren has built a 100 MW photovoltaic power station in the Nurabad district of Samarkand Province.

Uzbek Deputy Minister of Investment and Foreign Trade Shukhrat Vafaev said in October that the country would soon announce tenders for the construction of a solar park with a 400 MW capacity and another that could produce 500 MW annually.

In January, Viktor Vekselberg, the head of Russia’s Renova Group, met in Tashkent with Uzbek Energy Minister Alisher Sultanov and expressed his company’s interest in assisting to build solar parks in Uzbekistan. He also offered to form a joint venture to produce solar panels.

Uzbekistan is planning on increasing renewable energy resources so that they would make up 25 percent of the country's total power needs by 2030.

Completion of just the wind farm and solar park projects listed above would give Uzbekistan more than 3,000 MW of additional energy, which helps power a country that the Energy Ministry forecasts will consume twice as much energy in 2030 as it currently does.

Uzbekistan is a country that endures severe power shortages at different times of the year.​ At least one Uzbek website reported that the country imported 33 percent more electricity than usual in 2019.

Also Going Nuclear?

Along with renewables, Uzbekistan has plans to add another source of alternative energy to its energy balance: nuclear power.

Aleksei Likhachev, the chief of Russian state nuclear power company Rosatom, said on January 15 that negotiations on the construction of a nuclear power plant (NPP) would conclude before the end of March and actual construction would start in 2022.

Construction of an NPP will undoubtedly be a topic of conversation when Mirziyoev meets with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in a meeting reportedly set to take place later in February.

The NPP will have two VVER-1200 units, so it will add another 2,400 MW, which will probably be welcome news to those residents of Uzbekistan who are coming out of a winter that saw power shortages and blackouts hit areas all around the country.

But long-term it seems Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are moving toward more eco-friendly sources of energy and -- along with the other countries of Central Asia -- they can count on outside help from the European Union, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Asian Development Bank, and others.

Energy-wise, the future in Central Asia appears to be looking brighter -- and greener.


Bruce Pannier writes the Qishloq Ovozi blog and appears regularly on the Majlis podcast for RFE/RL.


Fitch: Solar Projects Much More Reliable Performers Than Wind Farms

Many wind farms are underperforming initial expectations, according to Fitch Ratings. Solar is a very different story. 

KARL-ERIK STROMSTA FEBRUARY 10, 2020

Solar plants have demonstrated "rock-solid performance," Fitch says.
 (Credit: Equinor)

It might be obvious to anyone in the renewable energy business, but a growing body of data collected by Fitch Ratings backs it up: Solar projects are a safer bet than wind farms when it comes to kicking out the expected amount of power.

Many wind farms significantly underperform expectations, according to a recent Fitch analysis. On the other hand, solar arrays are proving so reliable over time that developers are finding themselves able to secure financing on more favorable terms — an important long-term tailwind for the market.


Remarkably, the biggest threat to the credit ratings of some California solar projects these days is not the plants themselves but rather questions around the future viability of their utility offtakers.

"Rock-solid" solar performance

When renewable developers approach banks for project finance, they are often asked to provide what are called "P50 probabilities," which estimate how much power will be generated on an annual basis.

Taking a range of factors into account, from long-term weather assessments to how similar equipment has performed in the past, a P50 forecast puts a number on how much a project is expected to generate in a given year; half the time it should crank out more power than its P50 forecast and half the time less.

It turns out that many wind farms are generating less electricity than expected, and in some cases significantly less, Fitch said in a recent research note. That’s happening despite ongoing advancements in wind turbine technology and improvements in resource analysis.

Looking at a group of around 70 renewable energy projects globally, Fitch found that 86 percent of the time solar projects performed right around their P50 forecast — or better. Only 7 percent of the time did solar plants perform “significantly” (more than 10 percent) below their P50.

Solar plants, by and large, have demonstrated a “really rock-solid performance,” said Andrew Joynt, a senior director at Fitch Ratings focused on project finance. There are important implications for developers, with the market growing comfortable with “slightly more aggressive financing terms for solar projects,” Joynt told GTM.

“A solar developer trying to finance the development of a project can go out and borrow more money than it otherwise would have and doesn’t have to put quite as much equity into the project as it otherwise would have,” Joynt said.
Wind, on the other hand…

Compared to solar’s stability, wind “does not measure up,” Fitch said in its research note. Nearly 90 percent of the time, the wind farms Fitch looked at failed to reach their P50 forecast. And more than half the time they fell “significantly” below their P50.

Of the 70 global renewable projects Fitch looked at, two-thirds are wind farms (almost all onshore), and the bulk are in North America or Latin America.

A range of factors could contribute to wind’s underperformance, starting with the obvious fact that the wind is inherently less predictable than the sun, making estimates more difficult. For the purposes of project finance, such estimates are typically provided by independent consultants. Fitch did not look at whether assessments have improved over time.

“What we’ve certainly seen is that when projects have resource forecasts based on actual operations…they’re much better than ones done prior to completion,” Joynt said.

Despite wind’s shortcomings, most wind farms have held up in terms of their overall credit quality.

“What we’ve found is that even though wind projects have largely underperformed expectations, the way the financings are structured, there’s enough cushion there; there’s enough resilience built into these financing structures that we haven’t had a wide swath of downgrades or projects actually defaulting,” Joynt said.

Similarly, solar projects are not necessarily seeing their credit ratings upgraded. While the industry’s growing track record of reliability might yield higher ratings on projects at a given amount of leverage, developers are in many cases simply adding more leverage.

Their thinking, Joynt said, is: “I still get that low investment-grade rating, and I actually just get to borrow more — and that increases the equity returns.”
Utility PPAs not what they used to be

Having a huge American utility as an offtaker is typically a good thing for a renewable project’s credit rating. But that’s no longer a given in California, where PG&E is struggling to climb out of bankruptcy and the state's other two big utilities face challenging questions about their own futures.

Some U.S. solar projects now carry a credit rating equivalent to that of their utility offtakers, Joynt said. "That's pretty remarkable."

“It’s basically saying that the operating risk itself is not viewed as something that constrains the project; it’s really just how likely you are to get paid by the utility.”

“That wasn’t really seen as a very big risk until these wildfire liabilities popped up," Joynt said. “Obviously, the biggest issue is with PG&E, but even [Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric] have had their issues and had some erosion of credit quality.”

Inside the Wet’suwet’en Anti-Pipeline Camp That Police Are Blockading

Indigenous land defenders are keeping a close eye on cops as the standoff enters its fourth week.


By Jesse Winter Jan 28 2020


RCMP TURN AWAY A WET'SUWET'EN CAMP SUPPORTER AT A POLICE ROADBLOCK. ALL PHOTOS BY JESSE WINTER


A set of headlights came peering out of the darkness, accompanied by a rattling diesel engine.

Rising from beside a warming fire at a watch camp inside an RCMP roadblock, Sabina Dennis rushed to the road.

“Cops!” she shouted as the first RCMP officer’s boot hit the snowy ground. “Someone get a camera.” More people scrambled from the fire to join Dennis as a second officer got out of the truck. Someone started filming the interaction with a cellphone. Now that a standoff between RCMP and Wet’suwet’en First Nation land defenders who oppose a pipeline has entered a fourth week, the mood behind police lines is understandably tense.


“Hello, how’s everyone doing tonight?” the first officer asked gamely, walking forward with his arms at his sides, palms facing forward. “Everyone good? Anything you guys need?”

“Yeah, you off our territory,” said Cody Merriman, joining Dennis in the roadway.




“I can understand that,” the officer replied with a wry smile, as though his colleagues weren’t—at that moment—manning a roadblock limiting access to this very camp.

“No, like all the way out of our territory,” Merriman said, not laughing. The officers stopped approaching. After a few more words, they got back in their pickup truck and reversed slowly back down the road into the night.

"ALL THE WAY OUT OF OUR TERRITORY," CODY MERRIMAN TOLD TWO RCMP OFFICERS.

The watch camp where Dennis and Merriman are stationed was set up to monitor police movements along a roadway leading to more established Wet’suwet’en camps. The new roadblocks and checkpoints have become a sort of slow-moving chess game in a pipeline controversy that goes back nearly a decade.

Last January, militarized RCMP raided a blockade set up by the Gidimt’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en nation to prevent Coastal GasLink from building a natural gas pipeline through their traditional territory.

The company has agreements for access with all the First Nations band councils along the pipeline route, including those within the Wet’suwet’en Nation. But the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs say the band councils do not have jurisdiction over the traditional territory outside the reserve boundaries and should not have agreed to the project.

During last year’s raid, police deployed tactical officers armed with assault and sniper rifles, at one point brandishing a chainsaw. The officers forced their way over barbed wire and a reinforced gate, amid the screams of land defenders, some of whom had chained themselves to the gate itself.

MOLLY WICKHAM AND HER PARTNER CODY MERRIMAN STAY WARM BY A FIRE AT A WET'SUWET'EN WATCH CAMP.

As the police left the watch camp Friday night, Dennis, Merriman, and the others returned to the fire and huddled around a cellphone, watching video from the aftermath of last year’s raid.

Among them was Gidimt’en clan spokesperson Sleydo, a.k.a. Molly Wickham. Together she and Dennis became the faces of last year’s police violence. Wickham herself was arrested.

Watching the year-old video in the flickering firelight, Wickham’s face is set hard. Dennis dashed tears from her eyes. Just over a year later, and it seems little has changed.

“It’s a weird feeling,” Wickham said, of seeing the video. Last year “I was still in this traumatic bubble of trying to regain my footing and make sure all of our people were safe.”

“I think we’re definitely more prepared this year, mentally, emotionally for what might happen,” she said. “It’s a good reminder of how much caution we have to take, and how much risk we are at in this position.”

On December 20, the Guardian published an explosive report alleging that the RCMP officers at the raid had pre-authorization to use snipers and “lethal overwatch.” One RCMP commander reportedly said to “use as much violence as you want” against the Gidimt’en gate.

LAND DEFENDERS SIT AROUND A FIRE KEEPING WATCH FOR POLICE ACTIVITY LATE INTO THE NIGHT.

In the wake of the bombshell story, the hereditary chiefs issued an eviction notice to Coastal GasLink, kicking the company off their land and blockading the road again. They demand meetings with the federal and provincial government decision-makers, triggering the current stalemate.

On Monday, B.C. Premier John Horgan announced the appointment of former Skeena-Bulkely Valley MP Nathan Cullen as an official liaison between the provincial government and the hereditary chiefs.

Wet’suwet’en hereditary Chief Na’Moks, also known as John Ridsdale, said Cullen’s work as the region’s member of parliament gives him more credibility than most politicians. “As you know, we have been wanting to meet with government decision-makers,” Na’Moks told VICE on Monday. “Nathan has lived on our territories. We trust him.”

Na’Moks said while Cullen’s appointment is a positive step forward, ultimately he expects it will only delay the inevitable. The only acceptable outcome for the hereditary chiefs, he said, is for Coastal GasLink to peacefully withdraw from his people’s territory.

That demand means the prospect of a repeat of last year’s raid still hangs over the heads of everyone on the front line.

“It’s unsettling, to be honest,” Merriman said, “but you have to stay steadfast.”

RCMP VEHICLES BLOCK THE ACCESS ROAD LEADING TO WET'SUWET'EN CAMPS.

“In the end, this is what victory looks like,” he said. “You remove the RCMP checkpoint and the CGL workers, and this is it. We govern the territories, and they’re industry-free sovereign zones, with an access point controlled by Indigenous people.”

Since the checkpoint went up, Wickham and Merriman have been doing the lion’s share of logistical work, ferrying supplies through the police lines to the watch camp and making sure everyone is safe. Juggling that while also raising a family together has put a lot of stress on both of them.

The RCMP roadblock isn’t making things easier, Merriman said.

“It’s trapped people back here (at the watch camp) because they’ve threatened to briefly detain anyone who leaves,” Merriman said, adding that anyone who does leave and isn’t on the RCMP’s list of approved travellers will not be allowed back in.

In response to the police checkpoint, Wet’suwet’en supporters are building a second watch camp with an insulated bunkhouse to keep a vigil and monitor police movements. It also serves as a meeting place for the hereditary chiefs, and a place for supporters to gather.

WET'SUWET'EN SUPPORTERS CARRY PRE-FABRICATED WALLS TO BUILD
A BUNKHOUSE NEAR THE RCMP ROADBLOCK.

It sits only a few hundred metres from the RCMP roadblock which—as far as the supporters monitoring the RCMP can tell—appears to be guarded 24 hours a day in rotating 12-hour shifts.

As the stalemate has dragged on, a sort of daily rhythm has developed. Supporters test the RCMP checkpoint every day, probing for inconsistencies in the various reasons police give for turning people away. Every interaction is recorded by legal observers compiling evidence for a legal complaint about the checkpoint infringing the rights of the Wet’suwet’en and anyone wishing to use the otherwise public road.

The RCMP respond with near-daily surveillance flights over the camps—something the force at first denied it was doing, but later recanted after photos emerged of a plane with RCMP logos making repeated circles over each of the land defender camps.

On Friday morning, lawyers Noah Ross and Irina Ceric ran a training session for legal observers, instructing a group of Wet’suwet’en supporters in how best to document and record police actions.

LAWYERS TEACH WET'SUWET'EN SUPPORTERS HOW TO BE LEGAL OBSERVERS.

After the training, Ross, Ceric, and two legal observers tried to get through the police roadblock. They were turned around because they didn’t have a forestry radio or winter tire chains.

The next day, with little change in the road conditions, two minivans full of supplies but without tire chains, radios or even all-wheel drive were allowed through the police roadblock.

While the uncertainty over what comes next hangs in the air, Saturday provided some relief with a community day at the supporter camp outside the police roadblock.

BREAKFAST AT THE WET'SUWET'EN SUPPORTER CAMP OUTSIDE THE POLICE CHECKPOINT.

Smogelgem, the hereditary chief of the Wet’suwet’en’s Laksamshu Clan (who is also known as Warner Naziel), thanked the neighbouring Gitxsan chiefs for their support and time despite the death of a national matriarch over the weekend. He spoke at length to the dozens of people in attendance, some of whom had driven hours to be at the event.

He spoke about the last piece of untouched Wet’suwet’en territory to have a road carved through it, the damage he says that road caused to local wildlife. He described Coastal GasLink as a soulless organization bent on profit alone, and the Kweese War Trail that Unist’ot’en supporters say was bulldozed through last winter.

“We are at war again,” he said, again referencing the Guardian article and its allegations of “lethal overwatch,” which has hung like a pall over the movement since it was published.

HEREDITARY CHIEF SMOGELGEM SPEAKS AT A COMMUNITY RALLY.

It’s also sparked protests and demonstrations across the province and the country. There have been highway roadblocks in Ontario, and teen activists arrested in provincial ministers’ offices in Victoria. On Monday, students in Vancouver staged a walkout.

Canada’s former justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould recently weighed in with an op-ed parsing the complicated layers of history behind this decade long conflict.

As the afternoon wore on at the newest Wet’suwet’en camp, more supplies and donations were unloaded outside the roadblock, to be ferried up to the watch camp and onwards to the blockade further up the road.

The lines of this conflict are hardening, with no word yet on when—or how—it will end.
WISHFUL THINKING

The Paris Agreement set an unrealistic target for global warming. Now what?
Schroptschop / Getty Images

By Shannon Osaka on Feb 12, 2020

It’s been a rallying cry for activists and a key talking point for diplomats. For decades now, 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming has been viewed as a “do not cross” line in climate policy, a temperature at which cataclysmic and potentially permanent damage to the planet would take hold.

Countries that signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement vowed to keep global warming “well below” 2 degrees Celsius of warming since the Industrial Revolution. National policies and international agreements are evaluated for how well they can help meet this target. There’s a general sense that if the world’s governments work fast enough and hard enough, we can still avoid the worst.

But what if that goal was not as realistic as many have assumed?

“In no way should 2 degrees — from a scientific perspective — be seen as a safe target,” said Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

According to Frumhoff, 15 to 20 years ago climate scientists thought that 2 degrees of warming would avoid catastrophic climate change. “Our understanding of climate risks was that 2 degrees C would be a reasonably safe and achievable target.”

Over time, however, more updated research — most recently the special report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — indicated that 1.5 degrees C is a safer, more scientifically robust, target. (Scary sidenote: We have already warmed by approximately 1 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times. Whoops.)

But even though activists and some governments have pushed for more stringent targets, 2 degrees has stuck. The Paris Agreement commits to “pursue efforts” to hold warming to 1.5 degrees, but 2 degrees has emerged as a kind of middle ground between countries feuding over climate change.

The problem is, neither goal is currently possible without the massive, massive deployment of technologies that don’t exist yet. Yes, we’ll have to improve renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, and build better batteries to store it all. But the possibility of reaching that 2-degree target by reducing emissions alone has shrunk to essentially zero.

At this point, it requires substantial investment into and development of so-called “negative emissions” technologies to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide emissions would need to reach net-zero by mid-century; which means we would need to start developing the technology, er, now.

We only have a limited amount of carbon left to burn, so little that even with extraordinarily steep reductions in energy use and a rapid scale-up of renewables, keeping warming to 2 degrees isn’t possible. Unless there were somehow a way to turn back the clock and undo some of what the largest emitters have done.

That’s where so-called negative emissions come in. In 2014, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new assessment on the state of the climate. This report included something surprising; scientists and modelers still thought 2 degrees was possible. But they had to introduce a new variable.


The 2014 report included something new — a “huge reliance on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” said David Victor, a professor of international relations at University of California San Diego.

Six years later, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage remains relatively untested (though there’s recent cause for optimism). It involves growing crops, burning them for fuel, capturing the subsequent emissions and storing them deep underground. As of last year, there are only five examples of the technology worldwide, none operating at a large scale. The most recent UN report says we would need a lot of it to hit the 2-degree target.

How much? Experts estimate it would take about 500 million hectares of land — an area 1.5 times the size of India.

“From a modeling point of view, the reason we see so much carbon capture and storage is because models see the existing energy system, and they see this incredible heroic goal,” Victor said. “So they move all the chips on the board into these deep reduction technologies: carbon capture and storage, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage … and they do all that because they can’t solve the equation. They literally can’t get there from here.”

Essentially, since reaching the 2-degree limit based on mitigation alone is impossible, modelerss have to assume that we will somehow remove emissions from the atmosphere later.



Some experts have criticized the use of negative emissions in modeling. According to Oliver Geden, head of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, negative emissions technologies have mostly been used to mask failures of international action — the modeling form of kicking the can down the road. Negative emissions, Geden argues that it allow us to imagine that 2 degrees is possible, even as it becomes increasingly out of reach.

Victor agrees. “We need to grapple with the reality that we’re not going to meet the goals that we’ve talked about,” he said. The 2 degrees goal is probably out of reach; the flip side is, the worst-case climate scenario is probably not in the cards, either.



This doesn’t mean negative emissions shouldn’t be part of the picture. But experts say it does mean that policymakers and negotiators should be more transparent that the goal they have been working toward requires the adoption of technology at a scale that simply doesn’t exist yet.

Nigeria: One Billion Barrel of Crude Oil Discovered in North-East - Minister

Photo: Pixabay

Oil field
12 FEBRUARY 2020
The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Slyva, said that about one billion barrels of crude oil have been discovered in the Northeastern part of Nigeria.
Mr Sylva made the disclosure at a news conference to end the 2020 Nigeria International Petroleum Summit (NIPS), in Abuja on Wednesday.
"The figure we are getting, the jury is not totally out yet but from the evaluation results we are getting the reserve that has been discovered in the northeast is about a billion barrels.
"Those are the kind of figures we are seeing and we are beginning to understand the geological structure of the region," he said.
According to him, a lot of oil is yet to be found in the country.
He added that there was the need for more exploration in the country as more oil would be discovered.
Commenting on passing of the Petroleum Industry Bill ( PIB) by June, he said that he was confident that it would be passed based on cordial relationship between the legislature and the executive.

Hidden away: An enigmatic mammalian brain area revealed in reptiles


**Hidden away: An enigmatic mammalian brain area revealed in reptiles
The Australian bearded dragon Pogona vitticeps. 
Credit: Dr. Stephan Junek, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.
Reptiles have a brain area previously suspected to play a role in mammalian higher cognitive processes, and establish its role in controlling brain dynamics in sleep.
The state of unified perception, which is characteristic of a conscious state in humans, appears to require widespread coordination of the forebrain, and thus, the existence of a physical and anatomical substrate for this coordination. The mammalian claustrum, a thin sheet of  tissue hidden beneath the inner layers of the neocortex, is widely interconnected with the rest of the forebrain (a fact known from classical neuroanatomy). For this reason, the claustrum has been seen as a good candidate for such widespread coordination and hypothesized to mediate functions ranging from decision-making to consciousness. Until now, a claustrum structure had been identified only in the brains of mammals.
The laboratory of Professor Gilles Laurent, director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, studies brain function, dynamics, evolution and sleep. His group works on several animal model systems that now include reptiles (turtles and lizards) and cephalopods (cuttlefish). A few years ago, the Laurent lab provided evidence for the existence of rapid-eye-movement (REM) and non-REM sleep in the Australian bearded dragon pogona vitticeps, suggesting that the two main brain sleep states (REM and non-REM) date back at least to the time when vertebrate animals first colonized the terrestrial landmass over 300 million years ago.
In a paper in the upcoming issue of Nature, the researchers have identified a homolog of the claustrum in the pogona dragon and in a freshwater turtle using single-cell RNA sequencing techniques and viral tracing of brain connectivity. This is the first evidence of the existence of a claustrum in non-mammalian animals. Its discovery was entirely fortuitous; the investigators' attention was initially drawn to this region following functional investigations of brain activity during sleep.
Postdoctoral fellows Hiroaki Norimoto and Lorenz Fenk were recording brain activity in dragons during sleep and observed that events characteristic of non-REM sleep appeared to be initiated in a small and anterior region of the brain, whose exact identity was unknown. "Our initial goal was to study information processing during sleep," explains Norimoto. "Our approach was very explorative to begin with."
At the same time, postdoctoral fellow Maria Antonietta Tosches (now assistant professor at Columbia University in New York) was analyzing cell-molecular data taken from the dragon forebrain and noticed that a small anterior region of the brain, corresponding precisely to where electrophysiological recordings had been made, had a distinct molecular identity. By comparing this identity to published RNA-sequencing data from mice, she identified this area as equivalent to the mammalian claustrum. Fenk and  Hsing-Hsi Li then used viral tracing methods to map the connectivity of this reptilian claustrum to the rest of the brain and found, as is known in mammals, that it is widely interconnected with the rest of the forebrain.
"Interestingly, we found that the claustrum was also connected with areas of the mid- and hindbrain that have been implicated in the regulation of sleep in mammals. This is consistent with the idea that the claustrum may play a role in controlling brain dynamics characteristic of sleep," says Fenk.
Indeed, the Laurent lab then showed that the claustrum underlies the generation of sharp waves during . The researchers foudn that uni- or bilateral lesions of the claustrum suppressed sharp-wave ripple production during slow-wave sleep uni- or bilaterally, respectively, but did not affect the regular and rapidly alternating sleep rhythm characteristic of pogona sleep. The claustrum is thus not involved in sleep-rhythm generation itself, but rather in generating a particular dynamic mode during non-REM sleep, which it then broadcasts widely in the forebrain.
"The fact that we find a claustrum homolog in reptiles suggests that the claustrum is an ancient structure, likely present in the brains of the common vertebrate ancestor of reptiles and mammals," says Laurent. "While our results have not answered the question as to whether the claustrum plays a role in consciousness or higher cognitive functions, they indicate that it may play an important role in the control of brain states (such as in sleep), due to ascending input from the mid- and hindbrain, to its widespread projections to the forebrain and to its role in sharp-wave generation during slow-wave sleep," Laurent concludes.
More information: Hiroaki Norimoto et al. A claustrum in reptiles and its role in slow-wave sleep, Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-1993-6


Pension funds get tough on climate laggards


Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash


ImpactAlpha, Jan. 30 – As CO2 levels this week were projected to see their steepest annual rise ever, three large pension funds warned that they would crack down on companies and asset managers who are not doing enough to transition to a low-carbon future.  
The Brunel Pension Partnership, which manages a £30 billion pool of local pension funds in the U.K., issued a stark rebuke to the asset management industry, which it called “not fit for purpose” when it comes to addressing climate change.
“Climate change is a rapidly escalating investment issue. We found that the finance sector is part of the problem, when it could and should be part of the solution for addressing climate change,” said chief investment officer Mark Mansley. “How the sector prices assets, manages risk, and benchmarks performance all need to be challenged.”

Stern warning

As part of an ambitious new climate plan, the partnership said it would size up the efforts of both asset managers and portfolio companies to contain global warming within the benchmarks of the Paris climate agreement.
“Managers that fail to do so face the threat of having their mandates removed,” the statement said. Companies, meanwhile, could face votes against their directors’ re-appointments or divestment.

Burying coal

The New York State Common Retirement Fund put 27 thermal coal mining companies on notice to demonstrate their readiness to transition to a low-carbon environment or be dropped from the $210 billion fund. Ceres’ Mindy Lubber said the move by the country’s third largest state pension system would help it reduce climate risks and “ensure that the Fund invests in transition-ready companies.” Thermal coal mining, she said, “has a dim future in light of the accelerating transition to a sustainable, net-zero emissions economy.”

Passive aggressive
The Church of England Pensions Board has moved £600 million into a new passive index it created with the London Stock Exchange. The FTSE TPI Climate Transition Index is based on Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI), an asset owner-led initiative that tracks whether companies are aligned with Paris goals. In: Shell and Repsol. Out: ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP.
“The message is clear to all publicly listed companies: put in place targets and strategies aligned to Paris and be rewarded with inclusion in the Index, or work against the long term interests of beneficiaries and wider society, and be excluded,” said the pension board’s Adam Matthews.

Real estate risk

PGGM, a €160 billion Dutch pension manager and one of the world’s largest real estate owners, announced it would work with Munich Re to analyze each of the assets in its portfolio, from companies to real estate holdings, to identify those with the most climate risk. 
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Cash is hot: 

Investors find new options to put deposits to work for community development



Native American Holy Land, Devil's Tower, Wyoming (photo: Woody Hibbard)

ImpactAlpha, February 12 – Denver-based and Native-owned Native American National Bank serves Native communities, governments and enterprises across the U.S. To boost the bank’s lending power, RSF Social Finance, Candide Group’s Olamina fund and other impact investors have created deposit accounts and CDs at the bank.
“The best way to support our bank is through deposits,” the bank’s Tom Ogaard said on a webinar hosted by Transform Finance.
Such community banks, along with credit unions and community development financial institutions, are increasingly attracting foundations, impact funds and other investors looking for a way to drive impact, even with their idle cash. The capital allows bankers serving low-income and underserved areas that bigger financial institutions pass over to expand their community lending.
Financial intermediaries are innovating on plain-vanilla savings and checking accounts to overcome barriers such lenders have faced in attracting customers, including limits on federal deposit insurance.
Oakland-based CNote’s new Promise Account lets accredited investors divvy up to $3 million into insured deposit accounts across multiple CDFIs and low-income credit-unions, while managing their cash through a single interface on CNote’s platform. It follows the company’s high-yield, uninsured “savings account” for retail investors introduced in 2017. The opportunity is significant, CNote’s Catherine Berman tells ImpactAlpha, especially among foundations, who must have large amounts of cash on hand for grantmaking.
“The culture of impact investing has mostly lent itself to private deals,” says Berman. “But cash is the low hanging fruit.”
Tiedemann Advisors and StoneCastle Cash Management launched a similar cash management solution that allocates cash balances across insured deposit accounts at high-need community banks and credit unions. “It’s funny that there hasn’t been as much conversation over the years about cash,” says Tiedemann’s Brad Harrison. “It’s been overlooked”
Native American National Bank operates in “Indian Country,” the 3% of U.S. land, mostly sparsely populated and overwhelmingly low-income, that is populated by tribal and Alaskan natives. The bank has lent $128 million to support $250 million in projects in the last five years, including for affordable housing, grocery stores and native-owned enterprises. Financing for such projects often requires more complex capital stacks and longer timeframes than conventional banks are willing to underwrite.
For the Olamina fund, which was created last year to address the lack of access to capital in Black and Native American communities, keeping its cash with the bank “is a way for us to say, we see you and want to be able to support the work you are doing,” said the fund’s Lynne Hoey.