Why Donald Trump’s Tiktok and WeChat ban sets a bad precedent for gaming 

ROBERT N. ADAMS Friday, August 07, 2020

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Donald Trump’s Tiktok ban has been elevated to the next level. He’s effectively given both Tiktok and WeChat 45 days to sell the U.S. branch of their companies to a company that doesn’t have any Chinese ownership. Tencent is mentioned by name in the ban — and that could soon spell trouble for the gaming world.

The White House letter regarding President Donald Trump’s Tiktok ban reads:

“[The] spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. To protect our Nation, I took action, in an Executive Order of August 6, 2020 […] to address the threat posed by one mobile application, TikTok. I have now taken further action to address a similar threat posed by another mobile application, WeChat.”

At the moment, this ban is targeting Chinese-owned social media applications like Tiktok and WeChat. However, it sets a precedent that a day could soon come that gaming companies will be faced with a similar decree.
Why is the President banning Tiktok and WeChat?



The reasons for the ban are outlined in the White House letter detailing President Trump’s new executive order.

“Like TikTok, WeChat automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users — threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” the letter reads.

This wasn’t the only concern, though. The White House letter notes that both companies censor content the Chinese government considers “politically sensitive” and that this information could be used to track former or current Chinese citizens living in the United States.

These actions are being undertaken through the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). In short, this law allows the President to “deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.” Such an emergency has been declared, allowing President Donald Trump’s Tiktok ban to go forward.
How President Donald Trump’s Tiktok and WeChat ban could affect gaming



A plain reading of the White House letter shows that it doesn’t involve gaming whatsoever. Instead, this ban is solely focused on two social media apps. It does, however, mention one company by name — a company that has been gaining influence in the gaming world through investments and outright purchases of various publishers, developers, and related services. That company is, of course, Tencent.

The Executive Order mentioned by the White House letter prohibits any financial transactions with Tencent by name. This doesn’t affect gaming just yet. The E.O. is specifically focused on dealings in relation to WeChat. Additionally, Los Angeles Times tech reporter Sam Dean further confirmed that the gaming world is safe for the moment.


Video game companies owned by Tencent will NOT be affected by this executive order!

White House official confirmed to the LA Times that the EO only blocks transactions related to WeChat

So Riot Games (League of Legends), Epic Games (Fortnite), et al are safe

(pending updates)

— Sam Dean

 

(@SamAugustDean) August 7, 2020



“Video game companies owned by Tencent will NOT be affected by this executive order!” Sam Dean said on Twitter. “White House official confirmed to the LA Times that the EO only blocks transactions related to WeChat[.] So Riot Games (League of Legends), Epic Games (Fortnite), et al are safe[.]”

However, Tencent has invested in many gaming companies over the last few years. This includes an investment in Platinum Games earlier this year, millions in funding to Discord in 2018, and ownership of six of the ten largest mobile games in the world. Lest we forget, Tencent owns a significant minority stake in Epic Games (the owner of the blockbuster battle royale Fortnite), Riot Games (owners of League of Legends and Valorant), Ubisoft, and stakes in countless other gaming companies.

The concerns raised by President Donald Trump’s Tiktok ban can just as easily apply to gaming. Without independent audits of source code, we truly cannot say what information (if any) the various games and digital storefronts we use are quietly collecting in the background. We also don’t know what information is ultimately being collected and/or monitored by the Chinese government.

Given these concerns and the broad powers given to the President via the IEEPA, he may well make a broader executive order targeting Tencent itself. Should that happen, any companies that have been invested in by Tencent would likely have the same 45-day period to divest from their partial Chinese ownership. Such a move would likely be quite costly, potentially delaying or canceling goodness knows how many upcoming games and other projects.

For now, President Trump’s concerns are firmly focused on social media. We don’t have to be worried just yet, but a stronger action against Tencent is a possibility that game publishers, developers, and storefronts may soon have to contend with.

Marie Tharp pioneered mapping the bottom of the ocean 6 decades ago – scientists are still learning about Earth’s last frontier

Tharp with an undersea map at her desk. Rolled sonar profiles of the ocean floor are on the shelf behind her. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the estate of Marie Tharp
Despite all the deep-sea expeditions and samples taken from the seabed over the past 100 years, humans still know very little about the ocean’s deepest reaches. And there are good reasons to learn more.

Most tsunamis start with earthquakes under or near the ocean floor. The seafloor provides habitat for fish, corals and complex communities of microbes, crustaceans and other organisms. Its topography controls currents that distribute heat, helping to regulate Earth’s climate.  

Hand-painted rendition of Heezen-Tharp 1977 ‘World ocean floor’ map, by Heinrich Berann. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, CC BY-ND

July 30 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marie Tharp, a geologist and oceanographer who created maps that changed the way people imagine two-thirds of the world. Beginning in 1957, Tharp and her research partner, Bruce Heezen, began publishing the first comprehensive maps that showed the main features of the ocean bottom – mountains, valleys and trenches.

As a geoscientist, I believe Tharp should be as famous as Jane Goodall or Neil Armstrong. Here’s why.

Traversing the Atlantic

Well into the 1950s, many scientists assumed the seabed was featureless. Tharp showed that it contained rugged terrain, and that much of it was laid out in a systematic way.

Her images were critical to the development of plate tectonic theory – the idea that plates, or large sections of Earth’s crust, interact to generate the planet’s seismic and volcanic activity. Earlier researchers – particularly Alfred Wegener – noticed how well the coastlines of Africa and South America fit together and proposed the continents had once been connected; Tharp identified mountains and a rift valley in the center of the Atlantic Ocean where the two continents could have been ripped apart.

Tharp’s East-West profiles across the North Atlantic. The Floors of the Ocean, 1959

Thanks to Tharp’s hand-drawn renditions of the ocean floor, I can imagine a walk across the Atlantic Ocean bottom from New York City to Lisbon. The journey would take me out along the continental shelf. Then downward towards the Sohm Abyssal Plain. I’d need to detour around underwater mountains, called seamounts. Then I’d start a slow climb up the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a submerged north-south mountain range.

After ascending to 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) below sea level to the ridge’s peak, I would descend several hundred feet, cross the ridge’s central rift valley and proceed up over the ridge’s eastern edge. Then back down to the ocean floor, until I began trekking up the European continental slope to Lisbon. The total walk would be about 3,800 miles (6,000 kilometers) – almost twice the length of the Appalachian Trail.
Mapping the unseen

Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Tharp studied English and music in college. But then in 1943 she enrolled in a University of Michigan master’s degree program designed to train women to be petroleum geologists during World War II. “Girls were needed to fill the jobs left open because the guys were off fighting,” Tharp later recalled.

After working for an oil company in Oklahoma, Tharp sought a geology job at Columbia University in 1948. Women couldn’t go on research ships, but Tharp could draft, and was hired to assist male graduate students.

Tharp worked with Bruce Heezen, a grad student who gave her seafloor profiles to draft. These are long paper rolls that show the depth of the seafloor along a linear path, measured from a ship using sonar. 

An illustration of Marie Tharp’s mapping process. (a) shows the position of two ship tracks (A, B) moving across the surface. (b) plots depth recordings as profiles, exaggerating their height to make features easier to visualize. (c) sketches features shown on the profiles. The Floors of the Ocean, 1959, Fig. 1

Starting with a large blank sheet of paper, Tharp marked lines of latitude and longitude. Then she’d carefully mark where the ship had traveled. Next she’d read the depth at each location off the sonar profile, mark it on the ship’s track and create her own condensed profile, showing the depth to the ocean floor versus the distance the ship had traveled.

One of her important innovations was creating sketches depicting what the seafloor would look like. These views made it easier to visualize the ocean floor’s topography and create a physiographic map.

Tharp’s careful plotting of six east-to-west profiles across the North Atlantic revealed something no one had ever described before: a cleft in the center of the ocean, miles wide and hundreds of feet deep. Tharp suggested that it was a rift valley – a type of long trough that was known to exist on land.

Heezen called this idea “girl talk” and told Tharp to recalculate and redraft. When she did, the rift valley was still there.

Another research assistant was plotting locations of earthquake epicenters on a map of the same size and scale. Comparing the two maps, Heezen and Tharp realized that the earthquake epicenters fell inside the rift valley. This discovery was critical to the development of plate tectonic theory: It suggested that movement was occurring in the rift valley, and that the continents might actually be drifting apart.

This insight was revolutionary. When Heezen, as a newly-minted Ph.D., gave a talk at Princeton in 1957 and showed the rift valley and epicenters, geology department chair Harry Hess replied, “You have shaken the foundations of geology.”
Exploring mid-ocean ridges provides vast amounts of information about life on Earth.
Tectonic resistance

In 1959 the Geological Society of America published “The Floors of the Oceans: I. The North Atlantic” by Heezen, Tharp and “Doc” Ewing, director of the Lamont Observatory, where they worked. It contained Tharp’s ocean profiles, ideas and access to Tharp’s physiographic maps.

Some scientists thought the work was brilliant, but most didn’t believe it. French undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau was determined to prove Tharp wrong. Sailing aboard his research vessel, the Calypso, he purposely crossed the mid-Atlantic Ridge and lowered an underwater movie camera. To Cousteau’s surprise, the film showed that a rift valley existed.

“There’s truth to the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words and that seeing is believing,” Tharp observed in a 1999 retrospective essay.

What could have created the rift? Princeton’s Hess proposed some ideas in a 1962 paper. It postulated that hot magma rose from inside the Earth at the rift, expanded as it cooled and pushed two adjoining plates further apart. This idea was a key contribution to plate tectonic theory, but Hess failed to reference the critical work presented in “The Floors of the Oceans” – one of the few publications that included Tharp as a co-author.


Marie Tharp in July 2001. Bruce Gilbert, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Still surveying

Tharp continued working with Heezen to bring the ocean floor to life. Their collaboration included an Indian Ocean map, published by National Geographic in 1967, and a 1977 World Ocean Floor map that is now held at the Library of Congress.

After Heezen died in 1977, Tharp continued her work until her death in 2006. In October 1978, Heezen (posthumously) and Tharp were awarded the Hubbard Medal, the National Geographic Society’s highest honor, joining the ranks of explorers and discoverers such as Ernest Shackleton, Louis and Mary Leakey and Jane Goodall.

Today ships use a method called swath mapping, which measures depth over a ribbon-like path rather than along a single line. The ribbons can be stitched together to create an accurate seafloor map.

Left. Detail of Canary Islands from Marie Tharp’s physiographic map of the North Atlantic. Right. Modern swath mapping depiction of the same area. Colors indicate depth. Vicki Ferrini, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

But because ships move slowly, it would take one ship 200 years to completely map the seafloor. An international effort to map the entire ocean floor in detail by 2030 is under way, using multiple ships, led by the Nippon Foundation and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans.

This information is critical to beginning to understand what the seafloor looks like on a neighborhood scale. Marie Tharp was the first person to show the rich topography of the ocean floor and its different neighborhoods.

July 28, 2020 8.16am EDT
Author

Suzanne OConnell 
Suzanne OConnell is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Wesleyan University
Disclosure statement
Suzanne OConnell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Scientists have been drilling into the ocean floor for 50 years – here’s what they’ve found so far

September 26, 2018 



The scientific drilling ship JOIDES Resolution arrives in Honolulu after successful sea trials and testing of scientific and drilling equipment. IODP, CC BY-ND

It’s stunning but true that we know more about the surface of the moon than about the Earth’s ocean floor. Much of what we do know has come from scientific ocean drilling – the systematic collection of core samples from the deep seabed. This revolutionary process began 50 years ago, when the drilling vessel Glomar Challenger sailed into the Gulf of Mexico on August 11, 1968 on the first expedition of the federally funded Deep Sea Drilling Project.

I went on my first scientific ocean drilling expedition in 1980, and since then have participated in six more expeditions to locations including the far North Atlantic and Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. In my lab, my students and I work with core samples from these expeditions. Each of these cores, which are cylinders 31 feet long and 3 inches wide, is like a book whose information is waiting to be translated into words. Holding a newly opened core, filled with rocks and sediment from the Earth’s ocean floor, is like opening a rare treasure chest that records the passage of time in Earth’s history.

Over a half-century, scientific ocean drilling has proved the theory of plate tectonics, created the field of paleoceanography and redefined how we view life on Earth by revealing an enormous variety and volume of life in the deep marine biosphere. And much more remains to be learned.
Scientists have expanded human knowledge by drilling core samples from the world’s ocean basins, but their work is far from done.
Technological innovations

Two key innovations made it possible for research ships to take core samples from precise locations in the deep oceans. The first, known as dynamic positioning, enables a 471-foot ship to stay fixed in place while drilling and recovering cores, one on top of the next, often in over 12,000 feet of water.

Anchoring isn’t feasible at these depths. Instead, technicians drop a torpedo-shaped instrument called a transponder over the side. A device called a transducer, mounted on the ship’s hull, sends an acoustic signal to the transponder, which replies. Computers on board calculate the distance and angle of this communication. Thrusters on the ship’s hull maneuver the vessel to stay in exactly the same location, countering the forces of currents, wind and waves.

Another challenge arises when drill bits have to be replaced mid-operation. The ocean’s crust is composed of igneous rock that wears bits down long before the desired depth is reached.
The re-entry cone is welded together around the drill pipe, then lowered down the pipe to guide reinsertion before changing drill bits. IODP, CC BY-ND

When this happens, the drill crew brings the entire drill pipe to the surface, mounts a new drill bit and returns to the same hole. This requires guiding the pipe into a funnel shaped re-entry cone, less than 15 feet wide, placed in the bottom of the ocean at the mouth of the drilling hole. The process, which was first accomplished in 1970, is like lowering a long strand of spaghetti into a quarter-inch-wide funnel at the deep end of an Olympic swimming pool.
Confirming plate tectonics

When scientific ocean drilling began in 1968, the theory of plate tectonics was a subject of active debate. One key idea was that new ocean crust was created at ridges in the seafloor, where oceanic plates moved away from each other and magma from earth’s interior welled up between them. According to this theory, crust should be new material at the crest of ocean ridges, and its age should increase with distance from the crest.

The only way to prove this was by analyzing sediment and rock cores. In the winter of 1968-1969, the Glomar Challenger drilled seven sites in the South Atlantic Ocean to the east and west of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. Both the igneous rocks of the ocean floor and overlying sediments aged in perfect agreement with the predictions, confirming that ocean crust was forming at the ridges and plate tectonics was correct.
Part of a core section from the Chicxulub impact crater. It is suevite, a type of rock, formed during the impact, that contains rock fragments and melted rocks. IODP, CC BY-ND
Reconstructing earth’s history

The ocean record of Earth’s history is more continuous than geologic formations on land, where erosion and redeposition by wind, water and ice can disrupt the record. In most ocean locations sediment is laid down particle by particle, microfossil by microfossil, and remains in place, eventually succumbing to pressure and turning into rock.

Microfossils (plankton) preserved in sediment are beautiful and informative, even though some are smaller than the width of a human hair. Like larger plant and animal fossils, scientists can use these delicate structures of calcium and silicon to reconstruct past environments.

Thanks to scientific ocean drilling, we know that after an asteroid strike killed all non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, new life colonized the crater rim within years, and within 30,000 years a full ecosystem was thriving. A few deep ocean organisms lived right through the meteorite impact.

Ocean drilling has also shown that ten million years later, a massive discharge of carbon – probably from extensive volcanic activity and methane released from melting methane hydrates – caused an abrupt, intense warming event, or hyperthermal, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. During this episode, even the Arctic reached over 73 degrees Fahrenheit.

The resulting acidification of the ocean from the release of carbon into the atmosphere and ocean caused massive dissolution and change in the deep ocean ecosystem.

This episode is an impressive example of the impact of rapid climate warming. The total amount of carbon released during the PETM is estimated to be about equal to the amount that humans will release if we burn all of Earth’s fossil fuel reserves. Yet, an important difference is that the carbon released by the volcanoes and hydrates was at a much slower rate than we are currently releasing fossil fuel. Thus we can expect even more dramatic climate and ecosystem changes unless we stop emitting carbon.Enhanced scanning electron microscope images of phytoplankton (left, a diatom; right, a coccolithophore). Different phytoplankton species have distinct climatic preferences, which makes them ideal indicators of surface ocean conditions. Dee Breger, CC BY-NC-ND
Finding life in ocean sediments

Scientific ocean drilling has also shown that there are roughly as many cells in marine sediment as in the ocean or in soil. Expeditions have found life in sediments at depths over 8000 feet; in seabed deposits that are 86 million years old; and at temperatures above 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

Today scientists from 23 nations are proposing and conducting research through the International Ocean Discovery Program, which uses scientific ocean drilling to recover data from seafloor sediments and rocks and to monitor environments under the ocean floor. Coring is producing new information about plate tectonics, such as the complexities of ocean crust formation, and the diversity of life in the deep oceans.

This research is expensive, and technologically and intellectually intense. But only by exploring the deep sea can we recover the treasures it holds and better understand its beauty and complexity.

In northern China, scientists have found what may be the 2 billion-year-old birthmarks of Earth’s first supercontinent


The present landscape near Dongshen, China. Wan et al., Author provided

August 5, 2020


Far beneath the city of Dongshen in northern China, we have discovered what may be the 2 billion-year-old birthmarks of Earth’s first supercontinent.

An ancient dipping structure in the planet’s crust appears to be a trace of an early collision between two continental masses like the one that created the Himalaya – and may record the origin of the global system of plate tectonics that persists today.

Read more: How Earth's continents became twisted and contorted over millions of years
When did plate tectonics begin?

The theory of plate tectonics is one of the key scientific advances of the past century. It explains how Earth’s crust is made of enormous rocky “plates” floating on the planet’s molten interior, which slowly move around. These movements are responsible for earthquakes and mountain ranges.

Earth is the only planet we know of with plate tectonics. The motion of the plates gradually cycles elements between the interior of the planet, the surface and the atmosphere, generating the resources and environment that make human life possible.

Read more: Does a planet need plate tectonics to develop life?

At some point in the deep past, plate tectonics began as Earth cooled. When this happened, however, has remained controversial. Dates spanning three-quarters of Earth’s history have been proposed, from the Hadean eon (between 4.5 billion and 4 billion years ago) to the late Proterozoic eon (less than a billion years ago).

Many of these dates come from isolated samples showing the existence of single plates. However, plate tectonics is a global phenomenon in which plates interact with each other. We studied one of these early interactions: a collision in what is now northern China, in which the edge of one plate was thrust upwards while the other was pushed down.
The dipping Moho

Our new study suggests plate tectonics began globally somewhere between 2 billion and 1.8 billion years ago. The research, published in Science Advances, was carried out by an international team from China, Germany and Australia, led by Wan, Bo from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS).

We studied an area geologists call the Ordos block, which is part of the North China craton, a very stable chunk of the Asian continent that takes in parts of northeastern China, Mongolia and North Korea.

In April 2019, we deployed 609 seismic recording stations spaced every 500 metres along a 300-kilometre line. By combining the earthquake data from these stations, we were able to form a detailed picture of Earth’s crust in this area.

Beneath the city of Dongsheng, we found a feature called a dipping Moho in which the bottom of Earth’s crust dips from around 35km deep to more than 50km deep over a horizontal distance of only 40km.

This dipping structure looks nearly identical to what is found beneath the Himalayan mountains, except it is around 2 billion years old.
A global patternThe global network of ancient collisions that show the creation of supercontinent Nuna. Wan et al. / Science Advances, Author provided

Next, we collected seismic evidence from other studies around the world for similar dipping Moho structures that are about the same age. Putting observations from six continents together, we can form a picture of the creation of the ancient supercontinent Nuna.

Nuna (sometimes also called Columbia) is believed to have been made up of parts of most of the continents that exist today. If Nuna was the first supercontinent, we can interpret these tectonic collisions that occurred around 2 billion years ago as the oldest evidence of plate tectonics in the global sense. Even though such collisions may have occurred here and there early on, it is likely that plate tectonics did not become a global network until this time.
Author
Huaiyu Yuan

Senior Research Fellow, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Macquarie University
Disclosure statement

Huaiyu Yuan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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‘Throat of fire’ volcano signalling imminent, devastating COLLAPSEGet short URL

Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano has been in an active state since October 1999. © REUTERS/Carlos Campana

Scientists are warning that the Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador is showing early signs of impending catastrophic collapse, after satellite data showed substantial internal damage from ongoing magma activity.

Tungurahua, has been persistently active since 1999 so wear and tear was inevitable, especially given that the 'Throat of fire,' or 'Black giant' as the Quechua indigenous people named it, has already collapsed twice before thousands of years ago.

Tungurahua erupting on November 2nd, 1999. © US Geological Survey

"Using satellite data we have observed very rapid deformation of Tungurahua's west flank, which our research suggests is caused by imbalances between magma being supplied and magma being erupted," says geophysical volcanologist James Hickey from the University of Exeter in the UK, whose worrying research was recently published.

Tungurahua previously collapsed at the end of the Late Pleistocene, after which it then rebuilt itself for thousands of years, before collapsing again about 3,000 years ago.

Such collapses can trigger massive landslides and pyroclastic flows, which can travel for tens of kilometers. For example, the collapse 3,000 years ago is thought to have laid waste to an area of roughly 80km sq (11,000 football fields).

Meanwhile, an eruption in 1999 forced the evacuation of some 25,000 people, so the impact on human life in the area should the volcano collapse again would be truly staggering.

The team admits, however, that magma supply is just one of many risk factors which should be closely monitored to mitigate risk and protect life in the area. 

"Magma supply is one of a number of factors that can cause or contribute to volcanic flank instability, so while there is a risk of possible flank collapse, the uncertainty of these natural systems also means it could remain stable," Hickey says.

HOW NOT TO LOSE THE LOCKDOWN GENERATION
Lessons from the New Deal point the way forward in the era of Covid-19.

Naomi Klein
August 6 2020,

PICTURE THIS: You live in rural Arkansas and tragedy strikes. A family member has fallen ill with that contagious respiratory illness that has already killed so many — but you don’t have enough space in your small home to quarantine them in a room of their own. Your relative’s case doesn’t appear to be life-threatening, but you are terrified that their persistent cough will spread the illness to more vulnerable family members. You call the local public health authority to see if there is room in local hospitals, and they explain that they are all stretched too thin with emergency cases. There are private facilities, but you can’t afford those.



Related
Escape From the Nuclear Family: Covid-19 Should Provoke a Rethink of How We Live

Not to worry, you are told: A crew will be by shortly to set up a sturdy, well-ventilated, portable, tiny house in your yard. Once installed, your family member will be free to convalesce in comfort. You can deliver home-cooked meals to their door and communicate through open windows — and a trained nurse will be by for regular examinations. And no, there will be no charge for the house.

This is not a dispatch from some future functional United States, one with a government capable of caring for its people in the midst of spiraling economic carnage and a public health emergency. It’s a dispatch from this country’s past, a time eight decades ago when it similarly found itself in the two-fisted grip of an even deeper economic crisis (the Great Depression), and a surging contagious respiratory illness (tuberculosis).

Yet the contrast between how U.S. state and federal government met those challenges in the 1930s, and how they are failing so murderously to meet them now, could not be starker. Those tiny houses are just one example, but they are a revelatory one for the sheer number of problems those humble structures attempted to solve at once.

Known as “isolation huts,” the little clapboard houses were distributed to poor families in several states. Small enough to fit on the back of a trailer, they had just enough space for a bed, chair, dresser, and stove, and were outfitted with large screened-in windows and shutters to maximize the flow of fresh air and sunshine — considered essential for TB recovery.

As physical structures, the TB huts were an elegant answer to the public health challenges posed by crowded homes on the one hand and expensive private sanatoriums on the other. If houses were unable to accommodate safe patient quarantines, then the state, with Washington’s help, would just bring an addition to those houses for the duration of the illness.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe Coronavirus Crisis


It’s worth letting that sink in, given the learned helplessness that pervades the U.S. today. For months, the White House hasn’t been able to figure out how to roll out free Covid-19 tests at anything like the scale required, let alone contact tracing, never mind quarantine support for poor families. Yet in the 1930s, during a much more desperate economic time for the country, state and federal agencies cooperated to deliver not just free tests but free houses.

And that is only the beginning of what makes it worth dwelling on the TB huts . The cabins themselves were built by very young men in their late teens and early 20s who were out of work and had signed up for the National Youth Administration. “The State Board of Health furnishes the materials for these cottages and NYA supplies the labor,” explained Betty and Ernest Lindley, authors of a 1938 history of the program. “The total average cost of one hut is $146.28,” or about $2,700 in today’s dollars.

The TB cabins were just one of thousands upon thousands of projects taken on by the 4.5 million young people who joined the NYA: a vast program started in 1935 that paired young people in economic need, who could not find jobs in the private sector, with publicly minded work that needed doing. They gained marketable skills, while earning money that allowed many to stay, or return to, high school or college. Other NYA projects including building some of the country’s most iconic urban parks, repairing thousands of dilapidated schools and outfitting them with playgrounds; and stocking classrooms with desks, lab tables, and maps the young workers had made and painted themselves. NYA workers built huge outdoor pools and artificial lakes, trained to be teaching and nursing aides, and even built entire youth centers and small schools from scratch, often while living together in “resident centers.”

A group of men planting trees during a Civilian Conservation Corps project on the Nett Lake Reservation in Minnesota.  
THESE WERE LABOUR CAMPS IN THE USA AND CANADA WHERE SINGLE MEN WERE TAKEN OUT OF THE HOSTELS AND SHIPPED TO WILDERNESS CAMPS AS THEY WERE. NO PREPARATION FOR WORK IN THE NORTH COUNTRY.
THIS WAS BECAUSE THERE WAS NO RELIEF OR WELFARE AT THE TIME OF HIGH
UNEMPLOYMENT.
 TAKE A LOOK AT THE TOP PICTURE AND THIS ONE. SAME PROGRAM WAS USED DURING WWI TO INTERN REDS AND HAVE THEM BUILD JASPER AN KANANASKIS NATIONAL PARKS IN CANADA 

Photo: MPI/Getty Images


The NYA served as a kind of urban complement to FDR’s better-known youth program, the Civilian Conservation Corps, launched two years earlier. The CCC employed some 3 million young men from poor families to work in forests and farms: planting more than 2 billion trees, shoring up rivers from erosion, and building the infrastructure for hundreds of state parks. They lived together in a network of camps, sent money home to their families, and put on weight at a time when malnutrition was epidemic. Both the NYA and the CCC served a dual purpose: directly helping the young people involved, who found themselves in desperate straights, and meeting the country’s most pressing needs, whether for reforested lands or more hands in hospitals.

Like all New Deal programs, the NYA and CCC were stained by racial segregation and discrimination. And the gender roles were — let’s just say that the girls discovered they could sew, can, and heal; and the boys discovered they could plant, build, and weld. Black girls in particular were streamed into domestic work.

Yet the scale of these two programs, which together altered the lives of well over 7 million young people over the course of a decade, puts contemporary governments to shame. Today, millions upon millions of young people are beginning their adulthood with the ground collapsing beneath their feet. The service jobs so many young adults depend on for rent and to pay off student debt have vanished. Many of the industries they had hoped to enter are firing, not hiring. Internships and apprenticeships have been canceled via mass emails, and promised job offers have been revoked.

These economic losses, combined with the decision of many colleges and universities to close residences and move online, have abruptly severed countless young adults from their support systems, pushed many into homelessness, and others back into their childhood bedrooms. Many of the homes young people now find themselves in are under severe economic strain and are not safe or welcoming, with LGBTQ youth at heightened risk.

All of this is layered on top of the pain of the virus itself, which has spread grief and loss through millions of families. And that is now mixing with the trauma of tremendous police violence directed at crowds of mostly young Black Lives Matter demonstrators, compounding the murderous events that precipitated the protests in the first place. In the background, as always, is the shadow of climate breakdown, not to mention the fact that when members of this generation first heard terms like “lockdown” and “shelter in place” related to the pandemic, many of their minds immediately turned to the terrorizing active shooter drills U.S. schools have had them practicing since early childhood.

It should be little wonder, then, that depression, anxiety, and addiction are ravaging young lives.

According to a survey conducted by National Center for Health Statistics and the Census Bureau last month, 53 percent of people aged 18-29 reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. Fifty-three percent. That’s more than 13 percentage points higher than the rest of the population, which itself was off the charts compared with this time last year.

And that still may be a dramatic undercount. Mental Health America, part of the National Health Council, released a report in June based on surveys of nearly 5 million Americans. It found that “younger populations including teens and young adults (25<) are being hit particularly hard” by the pandemic, with 90 percent “experiencing symptoms of depression.”

Some of that suffering is finding expression in another invisible crisis of the Covid era: a dramatic increase in drug overdoses, with some parts of the country reporting increases over last year of 50 percent. It should all be a reminder that when we talk about being in the midst of a cataclysm on par with the Great Depression, it isn’t only GDP and employment rates that are depressed. Huge numbers of people are depressed as well, particularly young people.

This is, of course, a global crisis. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres recently warned that the world faces “a generational catastrophe that could waste untold human potential, undermine decades of progress, and exacerbate entrenched inequalities.” In a video message, he said, “We are at a defining moment for the world’s children and young people. The decisions that governments and partners take now will have lasting impact on hundreds of millions of young people, and on the development prospects of countries for decades to come.”

As in the 1930s, this generation is already being referred to as a “lost generation” — but compared to the Great Depression, almost nothing is being done to find them, certainly not at the governmental level in the U.S. There are no ambitious and creative programs being designed to offer steady income beyond expanded summer job programs, and nothing designed to arm them with useful skills for the Covid and climate change era. All Washington has offered is a temporary break on student loan repayments, set to expire this fall.

Young people are discussed, of course. But it is almost exclusively to shame them for Covid partying. Or to debate (usually in their absence) the question of whether or not they will be permitted to learn in-person in classrooms, or whether they will have to stay home, glued to screens. Yet what the Depression era teaches us is that these are not the only possible futures we should be considering for people in their late teens and 20s, especially as we come to grips with the reality that Covid-19 is going to be reshaping our world for a long time to come. Young people can do more than go to school or stay home; they can also contribute enormously to the healing of their communities.

While guest hosting Intercepted this week, I dug into what it would take to launch youth employment programs on the scale on the NYA and CCC — programs that, like their predecessors, addressed broad social needs while giving young people cash, skills training, and opportunities to work and possibly live in each other’s company. Put another way: What are the modern day equivalents of the home-delivered, NYA-built tuberculosis isolation hut?

Delving back in the history of New Deal youth programs, I was struck by how many of its projects have direct application to today’s most urgent needs. For instance, the NYA made huge and historic contributions to the country’s educational infrastructure, with a particular emphasis on low-income school districts, while training many young women as teaching assistants. It also provided significant reinforcements for an ailing public health system, training battalions of young people to serve as nursing aides in public hospitals.

Two members of the Fire Department of New York’s Emergency Medical Team wheel in a patient with potentially fatal coronavirus to the Elmhurst Hospital Center in the Queens borough of New York City on March 30, 2020.
Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images


It’s easy to imagine how similar programs today could simultaneously address the youth unemployment crisis and play a significant role in battling the virus. As just one example: We sure could use some of those nursing aides if there is a new surge of the virus this winter. A New York Times investigation last month quoted several doctors and nurses who are convinced that significant numbers of the Covid-19 deaths that took place in New York’s public hospitals could have been prevented if they had been adequately staffed. In emergency rooms where the patient-to-nurse ratio should not have been higher than 4 to 1, one public hospital was trying to get by with 23 to 1; others weren’t doing much better. Nightmare stories have emerged of disoriented patients pulling themselves off of oxygen machines and other vital equipment, trying to get up, and with no one there to stop them, dying alone. More nurses would have made all the difference.

Then there are the public schools, similarly understaffed after decades of cutbacks, that will be trying to enforce social distancing this year. If we weren’t in such a rush to get back to a bleak and diminished version of “normal,” there would be time for a NYA-style program to train thousands of young adults to help reduce class sizes and supervise kids in outdoor education programs.

And since we know that the safest place to gather is still outdoors, some college-age students could pick up the work begun by the NYA and expand the national infrastructure of trails, picnic areas, outdoor pools, campsites, urban parks, and wilderness trails. Thousands more could be enrolled in a rebooted CCC to restore forests and wetlands, helping draw planet-warming carbon out of the atmosphere.

Creating these kinds of programs would be complex, and costly. But the individual and collective benefits would be immeasurable. And as was the case during the Great Depression, many young people would be given the chance to do something they desperately want and need to do right now: Get the hell out of their childhood homes and live with their peers.

On Intercepted, I spoke about this prospect with Neil Maher, professor of history at Rutgers University–Newark and the author of a definitive history of the Civilian Conservation Corps, “Nature’s New Deal.” He told me that in his research into the CCC, he came across many participants describing their time in the program as a kind of sleepaway camp or even an outdoor university: a unique chance to live collectively, away from their families and the city, and become adults. But unlike so many actual university campuses that can’t reopen safely — given the daily commutes of faculty, staff, and many students — modern-day CCC-inspired camps could be designed as Covid “bubbles.”

The program would have to test participants on the way in, quarantine anyone who tested positive for two weeks, and then everyone would stay at the camp until the job was done (or at least their part of it). It could be that rare triple win: Heal some of the damage done to our ravaged planet, offer an economic and social lifeline to people in need, and design what might be one of the most Covid-safe workplaces around.

In the panic about this “lost generation,” there has been a lot of talk about how there is no work for young people. But that is a lie. There is no end of meaningful work that desperately needs doing — in our schools, hospitals, and on the land. We just need to create the jobs.

IRONY

The USA violates market rule with ban on apps, China denounces

Beijing, Aug 6 (Prensa Latina) China accused the United States today of violating market principles with its plan to ban the use of mobile applications developed here, arguing that they pose a security risk.

Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, condemned the move and denounced that it is rather intended to protect U.S. monopoly in the field of high technology.

He said that Washington does not have elements to proceed with this measure and urged its authorities to create conditions for the normal development of economic and commercial activities of foreign companies.

Wang responded this way after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced yesterday the extension of the program called 'Clean Network' directed against China.

Through this plan, the White House wants to ban mobile applications such as WeChat and Tik Tok because it considers them to be 'an unreliable and significant threat to the personal data of U.S. citizens.'

It also intends to prevent apps made in the United States from being pre-installed or available for download on phones and wireless devices made in China by firms like Huawei.

Pompeo's announcement follows President Donald Trump's pressure on Tik Tok, also over alleged security risks. Earlier this week, the U.S president told Chinese technology company ByteDance to sell its popular platform to Microsoft, or else he would shut it down in mid-September.

Frictions between the world's first and second powers are worsening, and the issue of mobile applications is just one of the ingredients that stir them the most.

In recent weeks, the United States imposed sanctions on Chinese companies for alleged abuses of Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region and charged two Chinese citizens with alleged theft of data from the Covid-19 vaccine and military technology secrets.

In addition to this, Pompeo made a controversial statement on Hong Kong and called on Washington's allied countries to use 'more creative and energetic ways' to pressure the Communist Party of China.

That call is interpreted by local analysts as the prelude to a new Cold War and the resurgence of McCarthyism, which is why they agree that China must remain alert for the possible outbreak of military clashes with the United States in the near future.

sus/aph/mem/ymr

The planet about to reach the dangerous 1.5 degrees of global warming

Brussels, Aug 7 (Prensa Latina) July 2020 was recorded as the third warmest month in Europe, behind this same period in 2016 and 2019, which drives the planet today to the brink of reaching the dangerous 1.5 degrees of global warming, experts warn.

According to data released by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which depends on the European Commission, July 2020 was 0.49 degrees Celsius (° C) warmer than the 1981-2020 average; the third hottest month in this data logging.

The figures show that, despite this figure, the seventh month of this year was colder by 0.07 ° C than July 2019, and by 0.04 ° C than the same period in 2016.

These anomalies in the average European temperature are generally greater and more variable than the global ones, the study indicates.

According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service study, the average European temperature for July 2020 was 0.2 ° C above the 1981-2010 average.

However, July 2010 still holds the record, with a temperature 2.1 ° C higher in Europe.

Recent research on climate indicates that global warming is constant and has been accelerating in the last decade. Since 2002, above-average temperatures have been recorded every month, and the planet is now around one degree warmer than in the pre-industrial period (1850-1900).

A study by the World Meteorological Organization indicates that the Earth may reach or exceed 1.5 degrees in one of the next five years.

This analysis, led by the UK Met Office based on 150 computer simulations that take into account natural variations and human influence on climate, warns that as time passes by, there is a greater chance of exceeding that limit.

According to this European institution, there is a 24-percent chance that in one of the next five years that 1.5 threshold be reached.

In addition, if they analyze only the average monthly temperature, the possibility of reaching the top - something that already exceptionally happened in February 2016 due to the great influence of the El Niño phenomenon – will rise to 70 percent.

sus/aph/mem/cdg

On Climate Policy, Biden’s Advisers Reveal More Than His Proposals Do

Several of Biden’s informal advisers and confidants are Obama administration veterans who have embraced fossil fuels and fracking.

Miranda Litwak, Max Moran

August 7 2020, 11:01 a.m.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event at the William “Hicks” Anderson Community Center in Wilmington, Del. on July 28, 2020.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP

LAST MONTH, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign released a sweeping climate proposal calling for 100 percent clean energy and net-zero emissions by 2050. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is working to finalize its 2020 platform. As of now, the platform is more aggressive than the 2016 document, but somehow does not mention fossil fuels in its section on climate change.

While some climate activists raised concerns about the party tiptoeing around the largest driver of climate change, most mainstream media marveled over Biden’s personal climate promises. These include calls to hold fossil fuel companies and polluters accountable, impose limits on existing oil and gas operations, and incorporate climate change into the country’s foreign policy agenda. To hear one former Republican congressman tell it, Biden is calling for “a version of the Sanders Green New Deal,” and has given progressive populists anything they could ever hope for.

But that’s only if you take platforms and campaign promises at face value. Vague platitudes in a speech or campaign proposal aren’t the best indicator of a candidate’s direction, nor of what will actually influence a Joe Biden White House. There is a better gauge: personnel.

Viewed through that lens, environmental activists may have serious reason to worry about the man who could lead the United States for about half of our remaining years to prevent an irreversible climate catastrophe. For all the warranted celebration of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez co-chairing a task force on climate policy, Biden has not yet agreed to follow its recommendations.

Meanwhile, several of Biden’s informal advisers and confidants on energy policy are veterans of the Obama administration’s “all of the above” strategy, which embraced fossil fuel development and technologies like fracking while publicly trumpeting clean energy commitments. These individuals oversaw the BP oil spill and the violent repression of the Dakota Access pipeline protests (a set of tactics which President Donald Trump is now emulating to put down peaceful demonstrators) and then went to work for oil and gas companies or law firms, investment companies, and think tanks funded by the fossil fuel industry. If appointed to key energy and environmental jobs, they could pose an existential threat to even the most ambitious climate plans.

Heather Zichal, deputy Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, center, during the daily news briefing at the White House in Washington on May 22, 2012.
Photo: Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP

Heather Zichal

Former Obama climate policy chief Heather Zichal began informally advising the Biden team on climate mere weeks after the former vice president threw his hat into the ring. Zichal served as a liaison between the Obama administration and the energy industry. During her tenure, Zichal worked closely with industry executives to “streamline” federal regulations on fracking, meeting more than 20 times with industry groups and lobbyists in 2012 alone. Leaders in the oil and gas industry have praised her for her efforts to decrease the regulatory burden on their sector.

Immediately after leaving her post in the Obama White House, Zichal joined the fossil fuel industry’s ranks, accepting a lucrative position on the board of Cheniere, one of the largest natural gas companies in the country. While Zichal was still in office, Cheniere was the first company to receive approval from the Obama administration to export fracked gas. The company has since ramped up its exports under this administration, earning praise from Trump.

Zichal also joined the Atlantic Council as a senior fellow, an industry-funded think tank that includes Cheniere as one of its many corporate sponsors. The Atlantic Council’s most recent work includes a report commissioned by Trump’s secretary of energy recommending the administration expand nuclear power, natural gas exports, and oil and gas exploration. Zichal also works as an independent energy consultant, offering up her connections and expertise to fossil fuel companies, including PG&E.

As an adviser, Zichal provides the fossil fuel industry with a direct line to the Biden camp. Zichal has already sought policy advice from Ernest Moniz, board member of Southern Company, and Frank Verrastro, head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Energy and National Security Program, which is funded by Exxon Mobil. Meanwhile, she has shown little patience for climate activists over the years, dismissing their policy platforms as unrealistic and going so far as to equate them to members of the tea party. Zichal did not respond to a request for comment.

Jason Bordoff, Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University and Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy during the 2018 Columbia Global Energy Summit in New York, on April 19, 2018.
Photo: Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Jason Bordoff

Jason Bordoff, who served as a climate adviser to the National Security Council and the Council on Environmental Quality under Obama, is informally advising the Biden campaign on energy and climate issues, providing the industry with yet another path to exert influence on a future administration’s energy policy. Bordoff, like Zichal, has argued in favor of increased natural gas exports and fracking.

Immediately after leaving the administration, Bordoff founded the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, a reputational laundromat. Underwritten by the oil and gas industry, the center produces reports that coincidentally lend support to industry talking points, such as advocating for privatizing Mexico’s energy sector and expanding fracking efforts in China. Bordoff personally authored a report arguing in favor of lifting the ban on crude oil exports in the U.S., a paper that has been widely cited by the oil and gas industry, as well as Republican legislators.

Bordoff’s assumption that the science and data behind climate change is up for debate should shock Democrats and disqualify him from a role in a potential Biden administration.

Huge oil and gas companies, including BP, Cheniere, Exxon, and Chevron, have opened their checkbooks to support CGEP’s research, which Bordoff hopes will “draw out all arguments on both sides” of the environmental “debate.” Bordoff’s assumption that the science and data behind climate change is up for debate should shock Democrats across the spectrum and immediately disqualify him from a role in a potential Biden administration. But even if one accepted Bordoff’s premise that there was a debate about the climate crisis, his financial backers and publications clearly reveal on which side he falls. In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Bordoff stated that he “has focused on the urgency of the climate crisis” and that he and CGEP “follow the facts and evidence wherever they lead, independently, objectively, and in accordance with the highest academic standards.”

Bordoff also serves on the National Petroleum Council, a federal advisory committee made up of oil and gas industry executives that provides advice to the Department of Energy. The NPC has advocated for lifting restrictions on oil and gas exploration in the arctic and developing new gas pipelines at the request of Energy Secretary Rick Perry. Both the Trump administration and the fossil fuel industry use NPC reports to defend their anti-environmental stances. The NPC has gained notoriety for attempting to shield energy company information from the public, including information on how the fossil fuel industry affects climate change. 

Former U.S. Sec. of Energy Ernest Moniz speaks during the National Clean Energy Summit 9.0 on October 13, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Photo: Isaac Brekken/Getty Images for National Clean Energy Summit

Ernest Moniz

Obama’s secretary of energy, Ernest Moniz, has also joined the Biden team as an “informal adviser.” Moniz was (and remains) a vocal advocate for fracking and natural gas — watch enough of Moniz’s speeches, and you’ll notice that he only ever calls for a “low-carbon future,” not a “zero-carbon future.” Moniz declined to comment.

Moniz has a personal stake in the carbon economy: He currently sits on the board of Southern Company, the Atlanta-based natural gas utility, and he’s called its CEO Tom Fanning “an industry leader.” Fanning says he and Moniz are “kind of a tag team.” Moniz, in other words, is business partners with a man who has publicly denied that human activity causes climate change. “Is climate change happening? Certainly. It’s been happening for millennia,” Fanning said on CNBC in 2017.

Southern was among the first companies to sue the Obama administration over its Clean Power Plan, which was a set of regulations aimed at cutting power plant emissions by 30 percent. The Center for American Progress found that the litigants on that suit, including Southern, were responsible for 21 percent of all U.S. carbon emissions in 2013.

Fanning isn’t the only fossil fuel CEO with whom Moniz is close. The former CEO of BP, Lord John Browne, is the chair of the advisory board for Moniz’s energy policy think tank, the Energy Futures Initiative. Moniz also sits alongside Browne on the advisory board of private equity fund Angeleno Group.

Moniz is business partners with a man who has publicly denied that human activity causes climate change.


The Energy Futures Initiative’s signature proposal is the “Green Real Deal,” a centrist alternative to the Green New Deal, which Moniz has suggested is a “demonstrably impractical, short-term, feel-good solution.” Moniz first pitched the Green Real Deal to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobbying group that spent decades denying climate change. And the Green Real Deal has a place for natural gas and fracking, both of which he’s defended against what he calls “the climate elite.”

In a debate at the Oxford Union, Moniz claimed that “the climate elite have done much too much moralizing and hectoring about the path for addressing climate change as opposed to working locally, regionally, [and] recognizing regional differences.” He demanded that college students adamant about ending fossil fuel emissions “translate that into a practical program that involves technology, social dynamics, politics, policy, all of the above.”

But Moniz is a former cabinet secretary. He is a Ph.D and multimillionaire, the very definition of an “elite.” If the energy transition thus far has failed to create the “practical program” he wants, that’s a failure of his own policymaking. In the years since that debate, young people created a “practical program” in the Green New Deal, which was propelled into the national spotlight by the youth-led Sunrise Movement. Moniz’s response? To castigate that work through a think tank advised by BP’s former CEO.

Brian Deese, global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock Inc., speaks during the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, California, on Sept. 13, 2018.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Brian Deese

Wall Street’s route into Biden’s climate policy may run through Brian Deese, a former senior Obama aide who now works for BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. On Friday, E&E News reported that Deese is working with the campaign, following rumors that have swirled throughout the campaign cycle about him receiving a plum job in a potential Biden administration, especially given Biden’s early favor-currying with Deese’s boss at BlackRock, Larry Fink. This has prompted plenty of fretting from climate-watchers. Reached through a spokesperson, Deese did not respond to a request for comment.

Deese, who helped negotiate the Paris Climate Agreement, now runs BlackRock’s sustainable investing division. This does not mean that he pushes BlackRock to use its wealth and influence for environmentally responsible purposes. Instead, his job is to factor the climate apocalypse into the firm’s investment decisions, such as avoiding “operating in extremely climate-exposed regions, like the coastal United States.” As John Patrick Leary wrote of BlackRock in the New Republic, “Managing the investment risk of climate change, in short, does not mean fighting climate change. It means making sure that your investment portfolio earns the highest returns despite climate change or even from climate change.”

BlackRock is the single largest investor in the fossil fuel industry, but it is also the largest investor in renewables: Due to its sheer size, as Deese puts it, “we end up being one of the top owners of every industry.” But he does not appear troubled by the company’s continued oil and gas holdings, declaring, “This is not just about excluding entire industries or entire classes of companies.”

Of course, for millions not to die, the entire fossil fuel industry must cease spewing carbon into the atmosphere (much sooner rather than later, preferably). But Deese’s job is to prevent low returns on financial investments, not extinction. As he told Christiane Amanpour, “We are very focused on these questions of ‘where is public sentiment?’ but to the degree that it will actually affect how long-term value is created.” Translation: The public only matters to the extent that it impacts BlackRock’s money. 

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He had similar aims in the Obama White House: Deese described his White House job to a Bloomberg podcaster as thinking about “how do we create the right conditions for private capital to move into lower-carbon solutions and accelerate the transition to lower-carbon economy?” In other words, his concern was “how do we set up Wall Street to profit from the green economy” — not just “how do we green the economy.”

And then there’s his record on non-climate issues. At a confirmation hearing to become the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget in 2013, he told Congress that he’d work toward a “comprehensive deficit reduction agreement” (read: austerity) focused on “entitlement reform and tax reform.” What kind of entitlement reform? “I think it is appropriate to look at means-testing Medicare. I think the president has put a proposal out that I think makes some sense, because as part of these overall reforms, I think we have to ask the questions about whether those who are the most fortunate should be paying a little bit more. It’s still going to be a good deal for them as part of the system.”

To this day, Deese advocates for drastic cuts to government spending and gets paid to do it. He gives paid speeches to corporate trade groups through the APB speaking agency, where his page advertises that he can speak about “how the budget process can actually be used to reform entitlements and the tax code.”