Thursday, January 06, 2022

The Old Man and the Tree

Ecologists thought America’s primeval forests were gone. Then Bob Leverett proved them wrong and discovered a powerful new tool against climate change

Robert Leverett walks through the old-growth forests in Mohawk Trail State Forest. David Degner

LONG READ

By Jonny Diamond

Photographs by David Degner

SCIENCE | JANUARY 2022

I meet Bob Leverett in a small gravel parking lot at the end of a quiet residential road in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. We are at the Ice Glen trailhead, half a mile from a Mobil station, and Leverett, along with his wife, Monica Jakuc Leverett, is going to show me one of New England’s rare pockets of old-growth forest.

For most of the 20th century, it was a matter of settled wisdom that the ancient forests of New England had long ago fallen to the ax and saw. How, after all, could such old trees have survived the settlers’ endless need for fuel to burn, fields to farm and timber to build with? Indeed, ramping up at the end of the 17th century, the colonial frontier subsisted on its logging operations stretching from Maine to the Carolinas. But the loggers and settlers missed a few spots over 300 years, which is why we’re at Ice Glen on this hot, humid August day.

To enter a forest with Bob Leverett is to submit to a convivial narration of the natural world, defined as much by its tangents as its destinations—by its opportunities for noticing. At 80, Leverett remains nimble, powered by a seemingly endless enthusiasm for sharing his experience of the woods with newcomers like me. Born and raised in mountain towns in the Southern Appalachians, in a house straddling the state line between Georgia and Tennessee, Leverett served for 12 years as an Air Force engineer, with stints in the Dakotas, Taiwan and the Pentagon, but he hasn’t lost any of his amiable Appalachian twang. And though he’s lived the majority of his life in New England, where he worked as an engineering head of a management consulting firm and software developer until he retired in 2007, he comes across like something between an old Southern senator and an itinerant preacher, ready to filibuster or sermonize at a moment’s notice. Invariably, the topic of these sermons is the importance of old-growth forest, not only for its serene effect on the human soul or for its biodiversity, but for its vital role in mitigating climate change

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Bob and Monica Jakuc Leverett. David Degner

As we make our way up the trail, the old-growth evangelist, as Leverett is often called, explains that though individual trees in New England have famously escaped the ax—the nearly 400-year-old Endicott pear tree in Danvers, Massachusetts, comes to mind—when ecologists discuss old growth, they’re talking not about single specimens but about systems, about uninterrupted ecological cycles over time. These are forests sustained by myriad sets of biological processes: complex, interconnected systems of perpetual renewal. While there is no universally accepted definition of old growth, the term came into use in the 1970s to describe multispecies forests that had been left alone for at least 150 years.

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing at Ice Glen, so-named for the deposits of ice that lived in its deep, rocky crevasses well into the summer months. Hemlocks hundreds of years old loom over gnarled and thick-trunked sugar maples as sunlight thickens into shadow through a cascade of microclimates. White pines reach skyward past doomed ash trees and bent-limbed black birch; striped maples diffuse a chlorophyll green across the forest floor through leaves the size of lily pads, while yellow birch coils its roots around lichen-covered rock; long-ago fallen, moss-heavy nurse logs return to earth only to re-emerge as philodendron and hemlock. Elsewhere, maidenhair, blue cohosh and sassafras abound, auguries of a nutrient-heavy, fertile forest floor. Walking through woods like these, the kind of hemlock-northern hardwood forests that once thrived in the Appalachians from Maine to North Carolina, is an encounter with deep time.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Leverett started to notice something on his weekend hikes in the New England forests: Every so often, in hard-to-reach spots—the steep sides of mountains, along the edges of deep gorges—he would encounter a hidden patch of forest that evoked the primeval woods of his childhood, the ancient hemlocks and towering white pines of the Great Smoky Mountains. But the idea that these New England sites were ancient remnant forest flew in the face of orthodox thinking.


This article is a selection from the January/February issue of Smithsonian magazine

Great swaths of New England forest were cleared of old growth by the turn of the 20th century. This is Rowe, Massachusetts, around 1900. Rowe Historical Society


“A lot of people were skeptical: Even forest ecologists at universities had just given up on the idea that there was any old growth in Massachusetts,” says Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology and a longtime friend of Leverett’s. “They just didn’t know how to recognize certain types of old growth—nobody in New England could see it.”

The turning point in Leverett’s nascent evangelism was when he went public with his observations in the Spring 1988 edition of the magazine the Woodland Steward, with an article about discovering old-growth forest in Massachusetts’ Deerfield River Gorges. The reaction among forest ecologists was unexpected, at least to Leverett. “By Jove, my telephone started ringing off the hook. People I’d never imagined getting to know called and said, ‘Are you really finding old growth in the Berkshires?’”

One of those calls was from Tad Zebryk, a Harvard researcher who asked Leverett if he could tag along to look at some of these trees. Leverett invited Zebryk for a hike near the New York-Massachusetts border, not far from the town of Sheffield, Massachusetts. “I was pretty comfortable that it was old growth—it’s around a waterfall, rather inaccessible to what would have been original lumbering operations,” Leverett recalls. Zebryk brought along an increment borer, a specialized extraction tool for making field estimates on the age of a tree based on its rings, and the two tramped along the watershed. “I pointed to a tree and I said, ‘Tad...I think if you core that hemlock, you’re going to find that it’s pretty old.’ And I thought to myself, maybe 300, 330 years old.”

Leverett is good with a yarn, and he has told this story—his origin story—many times. “Well, [Tad] didn’t buy that at all but he took me up on my offer and, as God as my witness, he did a field count, and it came out to 330 years. My stock went through the roof.”
Leverett, a.k.a. the old-growth evangelist, takes the measure of a tree in Stockbridge. He literally wrote the book on this practice. David Degner

When you have a lead on the biggest or the oldest tree, you call Leverett.

Ever the engineer, Leverett had also begun taking meticulous measurements of the height and circumference of old trees, and just a few years after the Woodland Steward article, he came to another startling realization: The height of American tree species, for generations, had been widely mismeasured by loggers and academics alike. This deep attention to detail—Bob’s remarkable capacity for noticing basic facts about the forest that others had overlooked—would fundamentally change our understanding of old forests, including their potential for mitigating the effects of climate change.

If the goal is to minimize global warming, climate scientists often stress the importance of afforestation, or planting new forests, and reforestation, or regrowing forests. But there is a third approach to managing existing forests: proforestation, a term coined by climate scientist William Moomaw to describe the preservation of older existing forests. (Moomaw was a lead author of five major reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.) All of these strategies have a role to play. But what Leverett has helped show in the last few years is how much more valuable proforestation is than we first thought. He has provided hard data that older trees accumulate far more carbon later in their life cycles than many had realized: In studying individual Eastern white pines over the age of 150, Bob was able to determine that they accumulate 75 percent of their total carbon after 50 years of age—a pretty important finding when every year counts in our struggle to mitigate the effects of climate change. Simply planting new forests won’t do it.
Besides discovering old-growth trees’ remarkable capacity to sequester carbon, Leverett developed a method for estimating a tree’s height within five inches. David Degner

As Leverett recalls it, one of his biggest insights came on a summer day in 1990 or 1991. He was measuring a large sugar maple deep in Massachusetts’ Mohawk Trail State Forest, about five miles south of the Vermont border. Something was badly off with his measurements, which were telling him he’d just discovered the tallest sugar maple in history. Leverett had seen enough big sugar maples in his life to know that this was definitely not the case.

The next time he went to measure the tree, Leverett brought along a specialist in timber-frame construction named Jack Sobon, who had a surveyor’s transit level. Using the transit, they cross-triangulated their positions relative to the tree, the better to account for its lean. And this is when Leverett and Sobon realized something critical: Measuring for height, no one, apparently—not lumberjacks, not foresters, not ecologists—had been allowing for the plain fact that trees grow crooked. Back then, Leverett explains, the standard way to field-measure a tree was pretty simple, and had been used for decades: “You stretch a tape out, level with your eye, to the trunk of the tree, then take an angle to the top and an angle to the bottom. This is basically treating the tree like it’s a telephone pole in a parking lot, with the top vertically over the base—but 99 percent of trees aren’t so conveniently shaped.” Leverett would discover over the subsequent years that this same method had led to widespread mismeasurement of numerous tree species.

We are standing over the fallen remains of that very same sugar maple on a drizzly fall day some 30 years later. “That was the mistake I made [at first]—the top wasn’t over the base....I was off by about 30 feet.”


Over the years, and often in collaboration with ecologist Robert Van Pelt from the University of Washington, Leverett would develop and popularize a better, more accurate way to estimate the height a tree, which is known as the sine method and is accurate to within five inches. But Leverett’s innovations haven’t been just about height: He’s also developed precise ways to approximate trunk, limb and crown volume. The resulting larger estimates of how much space old trees occupy have contributed to his discoveries about their heightened carbon-capture abilities. A recent study Leverett co-authored with Moomaw and Susan Masino, a professor of applied science at Trinity College in Connecticut, found that individual Eastern white pines capture more carbon between 100 and 150 years of age than they do in their first 50 years. That study and others challenge the longstanding assumption that younger, faster-growing forests sequester more carbon than “mature” forests. The research bolsters the importance of proforestation as the simplest and most effective way to mitigate climate change through forests. Indeed, according to a 2017 study, if we simply left the world’s existing forests alone, by 2100 they’d have captured enough carbon to offset years’ worth of global fossil-fuel emissions—up to 120 billion metric tons.

Walking through woods like these is an encounter with deep time.

A rarity in western Massachusetts and elsewhere: two root systems support trunks that merge into one. David Degner

As Frelich says, “It turns out that really, really old trees can keep putting on a lot of carbon at much older ages than we thought possible. Bob was really instrumental in establishing that, particularly for species like white pine and hemlock and sugar maple in New England.”

Over the decades, Leverett’s work has made him a legend among “big-tree hunters,” those self-identified seekers who spend their weekends in search of the tallest, oldest trees east of the Mississippi. Big-tree hunters are more like British trainspotters than gun-toting outdoorsmen: They meticulously measure and record data—the height of a hemlock, the breadth of an elm—for inclusion in the open database maintained by the Native Tree Society, co-founded by Leverett. The goal, of course, is to find the biggest tree of a given species. As with any amateur pursuit, there is disagreement as to standards and protocols, but the one thing everybody seems to agree on is that when you have a lead on the biggest or the oldest, you call Leverett, who is always ready to talk big trees and will often travel to larger specimens to measure them himself.
Leverett and others have learned that a good place to find old growth is in a ravine or amid other steep terrain, where logging is difficult. David Degner

But Leverett’s ready acceptance by this community of tree-lovers, many of them amateurs, wasn’t necessarily reflected in the professional forestry community, which can feel like a tangle of competing interests, from forest managers to ecology PhDs. It was going to take more than a single visit to some 300-year-old hemlocks to convince them of old growth in the Northeast, so ingrained were assumptions of its disappearance. So Leverett set about to change that. In the early 1990s, he wrote a series of articles for the quarterly journal Wild Earth to help spread his ideas about old growth among the grassroots environmentalist community (it was Wild Earth co-founder John Davis who first dubbed Leverett the old-growth evangelist). In 1993, Leverett co-founded the Ancient Eastern Forest conference series, which brought forest professionals together with ecologists from some of the most prestigious academic departments in the country. His work at the conference series led to the publication of Eastern Old-Growth Forests: Prospect for Rediscovery and Recovery (an essay collection edited by Mary Byrd Davis, for which Leverett wrote the introduction), and he co-authored The Sierra Club Guide to the Ancient Forests of the Northeast with the late forest ecologist Bruce Kershner in 2004.

An Eastern newt wanders under a tall white pine in a ravine in Stockbridge. David Degner

Since then, Leverett has led thousands of people on tours of old-growth forest under the aegis of groups like the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Sierra Club and the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, and published scores of essays and articles, from philosophical meditations on the spiritual importance of old-growth forest, to more academic work. Leverett is also set to lead a workshop on tree measurement this May at Harvard Forest—the university’s forest ecology outpost in central Massachusetts—for scientists, forest managers and naturalists. Leverett literally wrote the book on how to measure a tree: American Forests Champion Trees Measuring Guidelines Handbook, co-authored with Don Bertolette, a veteran of the U.S. Forest Service.

Leverett’s evangelism has had a tangible impact on the preservation of old growth in his adopted home state of Massachusetts. As a prominent figure in a loose coalition of groups—the Massachusetts Forest Trust, the Native Tree Society, the Forest Stewards Guild, Friends of Mohawk Trail State Forest—dedicated to the identification and preservation of old-growth forest, Leverett’s work has prompted the commonwealth to add 1,200 acres of old growth to its forest reserves. At the heart of Leverett’s quest lies a simple message that continues to appeal to the scientist and spiritualist alike: We have a duty to protect old-growth forest, for both its beauty and its importance to the planet.

Back in Mohawk Trail State Forest, after paying our respects to the decaying remains of the mismeasured sugar maple, we tack gingerly downward through a boulder field, from fairytale old growth into a transitional forest—called an ecotone—of black cherry, big-tooth aspen, red maple and white ash. We find ourselves suddenly in a wide meadow under a low sky, as a light rain begins to fall. Moving through a waist-high varietal of prairie grass called big bluestem, we notice a couple approaching along a trail in bright puffy jackets. We hear their calls of greeting—there are very few people in the park today—and the woman asks if we are familiar with the area. “Intimately, I would say,” says Leverett, with typical good humor.

At the heart of Leverett’s quest lies a simple message.

One benefit of old-growth forests is the variety of organisms they support, whether animal, microbe—or fungus. David Degner

She asks if he knows where the Trees of Peace are—a grove of the tallest Eastern white pines in New England, so named, by Leverett, in honor of the Haudenosaunee belief that the white pine is a symbol of peace. Leverett named the individual pines for Native leaders whom he has come to know over the years, largely through his first wife, Jani A. Leverett, who was Cherokee-Choctaw, and who died in 2003. The tallest among them is the Jake Swamp pine, which, at 175 feet, is also the tallest tree in New England.

As it becomes apparent just how familiar Leverett is with the area, the woman’s eyes widen above her mask until, in a hushed tone, she asks, “Are you...are you Robert Leverett?”

Leverett says yes, and her eyes fill with tears.

Susan and her partner Kamal have been camping here the last few nights. The couple, from Boston, have already paid their respects to other parts of the woods but haven’t been able to find the Trees of Peace. Leverett leads us across the field and back into the forest.

Leverett first recognized old growth in the Northeast when he discovered patches of forest that resembled the Appalachian woods of his childhood. David Degner

In all our conversations, Leverett is reticent about the extent of his influence. What he seems most interested in is how the forest affects individual people. “There’s a spiritual quality to being out here: You walk silently through these woods, and there’s a spirit that comes out. My first wife said, ‘You know, Bob, you’re supposed to bring people to the forest, you’re supposed to open the door for them. They’ll find out thereafter.’”

Leverett has led us to the center of the Trees of Peace. Susan and Kamal wander among the tall pines, each pausing to place a hand upon a trunk in quiet reverence. The storm that’s been threatening all day never really comes. Leverett leads us up and out, back along the main trail toward the park entrance. Email addresses and invitations are extended, and the couple express their gratitude. It feels like making plans in a church parking lot after a particularly moving Sunday service.

This is a familiar scene for Leverett: Over the decades, he has introduced thousands of people to old-growth forest. Ecologists and activists, builders and backpackers, painters and poets—no matter who he’s with, Leverett tells me, he wants to understand their perspective, wants to know what they’re seeing in the woods. It’s as if he’s accumulating a fuller, ever-expanding map of our collective relationship to the natural world.

“Other people are more eloquent in the way they describe the impact of the woodland on the human spirit,” he says. “I just feel it.”

Jonny Diamond | READ MORE
Writer Jonny Diamond, editor in chief of LitHub.com, is working on a history of the ax for W.W. Norton.

David Degner | READ MORE
David Degner is a photographer based in Cairo, Egypt.
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Getting off coal, how Capital Power plans to completely transform Genesee


Capital Power’s Genesee Power Station west of Edmonton. 
Cam Cook/Global News

As the world looks to eliminate emissions and Alberta transitions away from coal, companies like Capital Power faced a decision: shut down legacy operations like the Genesee power plant — or invest in them. Tom Vernon explains.

Towering over the coal rich landscape west of Edmonton, Capital Power’s Genesee Power Station has been providing electricity to the Alberta grid for three decades, but when Canada announced its intention to phase out coal power, the future of the site was uncertain.

“It became very evident that decarbonization would be driving significant changes in Alberta, and for that matter, around the world,” Capital Power CEO Brian Vaasjo told Global News.

“We took the initiative to actually look at our facilities and say what’s the best thing to happen.”

READ MORE: Major projects have Grande Prairie on the leading edge of new energy economy

Instead of mothballing Genesee, Capital Power decided to heavily invest in it.

“It has a tremendous capacity and capability in a future world.”

The plant is currently being converted from coal fired to natural gas, the new turbines are also hydrogen ready when there’s enough supply to make that switch.

Capital Power is also adding battery storage to the site, and plans to invest in carbon capture, utilization and sequestration technology to eliminate all emissions, and even produce a product known as carbon nanotubes.

“To our knowledge there is no facility like this in Canada, and likely not in North America and potentially not the world,” Vaasjo said.

READ MORE: Alberta set to retire coal power by 2023, ahead of 2030 provincial deadline

These types of investments will need to be made right across Alberta’s economy as the world searches for cleaner sources of energ

“Net zero changes everything,” said Transition Accelerator CEO Dan Wicklum.

The Transition Accelerator exists to not only help companies and other groups find solutions to these challenges, but build pathways to new business opportunities.

Wicklum believes companies that lean into eliminating emissions, and developing new technologies to make it happen, will thrive in the new energy economy, and he believes Alberta will be a key driver.

“Time and again we’ve seen over the last decades when Alberta was faced with some type of challenge, Albertan people and companies rose to that challenge.”


READ MORE: Several Canadian oilsands operators commit to become net zero emitters by 2050

Carbon capture, utilization and sequestration is being touted as a key technology to help achieve net zero here, but it is expensive.

Capital Power says it will need government support to make it happen, as have major oil sands companies who plan to use CCUS to achieve net zero by 2050.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has called on Ottawa to step up with more than $30-billion in funding, the Liberal government says it is consulting on the best tax structure to make money flow.

The goal is to ensure companies like Capital Power, which have invested billions to help power Alberta’s economy for generations, are able to be a part of the new energy economy of the future.

2:02Grande Prairie anticipating population boom as companies pledge billions in Alberta’s new energy economyGrande Prairie anticipating population boom as companies pledge billions in Alberta’s new energy economy
© 2022 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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A new Arctic fiber project aims to link Asia and Europe via the Northwest Passage

Alaska-based Far North Digital is teaming up with Finland’s Cinia on a new project connecting Japan with western Europe


This map shows a proposed fiber-optic cable route that would connect
 Europe and East Asia through Canada’s Northwest Passage.
 (Image courtesy of Far North Digital)

By Krestia DeGeorge
Arctic Today

A group of companies is planning an ambitious new fiber-optic cable connecting Europe and East Asia through the Arctic.

The Finnish telecom company Cinia, along with the Alaska-based Far North Digital, which was formed specifically to develop this project, and True North Global Networks LP, its Canadian affiliate, announced the deal on Dec. 23. The companies estimate the project will cost about US$1.15 billion.

The proposed new cable would cross the Arctic through the Northwest Passage and terminate in Japan on the Asian side, and Ireland and Norway (with a link on to Finland) on the European side.

The line will see additional landings in Alaska and in the Canadian Arctic and possibly elsewhere along the route, Far North Digital’s President Ethan Berkowitz told ArcticToday, though where exactly is “a little premature to say,” he cautioned.

A map on the project’s site includes tentative links to Greenland and Iceland.

Berkowitz said the companies plan to engage with communities in the region before settling on additional landings, citing a history of unrealized megaprojects in the Arctic, where developers “promise all kinds of things, and never deliver. We didn’t want to do that.”

The coronavirus pandemic has slowed that process, he said.

Still, the main branch of the project is already underway, Berkowitz said, with ground broken at the Ireland landing, and the companies have selected Alcatel Submarine Networks as lead contractor on the project.

Other major fiber-optic projects of varying sizes are either underway or in planning across the Arctic. Another Alaska-based company, Quintillion, has long been touting an Arctic cable linking Alaska to Europe and Asia — though that project suffered a blow when its co-founder and CEO pleaded guilty to fraud. Other networks under construction connect parts of Arctic Canada, including Nunavik and Nunavut, to broadband infrastructure further south.

In Russia, a government-backed project along the Northern Sea Route began laying fiber this summer. A separate, private project planned for the Northern Sea Route that also involved Cinia, along with Russian telecom company Megafon, was put on hold in May.

Berkowitz said he doesn’t see Far North Digital’s cable as competing directly with those efforts.

“We hope to be complementary” instead, he said.

Still, Berkowitz emphasized — as did the announcement — that the route is “geopolitically stable,” a reference to the potential for increased tension between the U.S. and Russia that could complicate links with a Russian route for some investors and users.

The project’s partners hope to have the cable in service by 2025.

This article originally appeared at Arctic Today and is republished with permission.
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GWYNNE DYER: Nuclear power: the missing piece of the puzzle

Gwynne Dyer · Columnist | Posted: Jan. 4, 2022
A nuclear power plant in Gundremmingen, Germany. German has taken futehr steps to shutter it's nuclear power grid, with the last reactors due to go offline later this year.

At the stroke of midnight last Friday, half of Germany’s remaining nuclear power stations closed down. The remaining three plants (of an original 17) will shut down on Dec. 31 of this year, and Germans will no longer have to live with the fear of a nuclear (power) holocaust.

What’s more, all the lost energy from the nuclear plants will be “compensated for by the expansion of renewable energies,” promised Claudia Kemfert, an energy expert at the German Institute for Economic Research.

An elegant solution, but there is a catch.

Most of the wind and solar power that Germany is building will go to replace its nuclear power plants, not to eliminate the coal and gas that it is still burning in huge amounts to generate electricity. So Germany will go on burning coal until 2038 (France is out now, the U.K. by 2024), and it also imports big volumes of gas from Russia (at great geopolitical cost).

Fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide; nuclear power doesn’t. By shutting down nuclear power instead of coal and gas, Germany has dumped an extra 350 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 into the air in the past decade — plus maybe another 350 Mt yet to come before they have built enough wind and solar power to replace the fossil fuels they should have dumped first.

There’s also an estimated extra 1,100 Germans a year dying from breathing in the fossil fuel pollution in their country, but they’re dying in a good cause: all their nervous fellow-citizens will sleep better at night.

Just one day ahead of Germany, Belgium announced on Dec. 30 that it will shut all of the country’s nuclear power plants by 2025. It too promises to replace the lost electricity with power from renewable sources eventually, but it will just burn more coal and gas in the meantime.

How long is meantime? Nobody knows, but it’s clearly a price that Belgians are willing to pay.

And when the European Commission proposed a new law last weekend that recognises nuclear power as “green” (provided that the plants have strict plans for the disposal of nuclear waste), there was an outcry all across the European Union. German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke condemned the proposal as simply “wrong.”

This is the triumph of fear over common sense. To advocate abandoning nuclear power when the great threat is carbon dioxide emissions (and we are losing the race to decarbonize) is folly.

There are currently 441 commercial nuclear reactors in the world, supplying about 10 per cent of the world’s electricity. There could have been three or four times as much nuclear power by now if the Green movement had not exploited a couple of accidents in the 1970s and ’80s to cripple it.

There is reason to suspect that the original Green hostility to nuclear power was encouraged and subsidized by the U.S. fossil fuel industry, which has always been quick to spot emerging potential rivals and sabotage them. But the hostility is self-sustaining now, fed by fantasy statistics and deliberate scare-mongering.

There have actually been just three major accidents in some 60 years of operation by hundreds of nuclear power plants, only one of which caused human casualties: Chernobyl in 1986, where 28 plant workers were killed and 15 other people subsequently died of thyroid cancer.

But nobody at all died at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011 (although 20,000 died as a result of the magnitude 9.0 sub-sea quake and the tsunami that devastated the city). Many more people die from coal pollution each and every day than have died from nuclear power accidents in the entire past half-century.

Yet a vocal minority of Europeans are terrified of the technology, and they are so well organized that most European countries have banned nuclear power or are shutting it down now. (France and the U.K. are the great exceptions.)

What can explain this strange behaviour on the continent that was once home to the Enlightenment?

I don’t know, but I once noticed that Europe’s anti-nuclear fervour plots nicely onto the witch-hunts of the 15th to 18th centuries. Of the 40,000 to 60,000 alleged witches hanged or burned, German-speaking Europe alone accounted for almost half, and it’s the heartland of anti-nuclear sentiment today.

Never mind. We can forgive the Europeans for their anti-nuclear foolishness, because in most other respects they lead the world in cutting emissions. And outside Europe, the only noteworthy countries that ban nuclear power are Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and the Philippines.

There are currently new 52 nuclear reactors under construction, most of them in Asia. A new generation of compact modular reactors that can be assembled in factories and cannot melt down will be on the market in less than five years.

The missing piece of the post-fossil-fuel puzzle has been found — and the Europeans can sleep in peace.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is “The Shortest History of War.”

Dyer: ‘Nuclear twilight’ – something else to worry about

As the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters.

Author of the article: Gwynne Dyer •
 Special to Postmedia News
Publishing date: Dec 31, 2021 •

As the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters. As I am under a contractual obligation to keep the readers worried, I was at my wit’s end — but then I interviewed Prof. Alan Robock of Rutgers University.

He’s a renowned climate scientist, but recently he led a team of researchers who re-examined the phenomenon of nuclear winter. That’s not really a climate phenomenon. It would be the by-product of a superpower nuclear war, in which the smoke from a thousand burning cities blocks out the sun and leaves the world freezing in the dark for years.

A different team of researchers discovered nuclear winter almost 40 years ago, and it helped to convince the great powers they must never fight a nuclear war.

True, there are now other countries with nuclear weapons. However, everybody assumed the damage would be confined to the combatants’ region. Wrong.

The Indian and Pakistani nuclear arsenals each amount to about 150 warheads — modest compared to the thousands held by the superpowers, but enough to cause, let’s call it, a nuclear twilight.

India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars and half a dozen major skirmishes since their independence. Another is possible, and the risk of escalation to nuclear weapons would be high, for two reasons.

First, most of their nuclear-capable aircraft and missiles are still vulnerable to being destroyed on the ground in a surprise attack. Second, the two countries are so close together that only a brief warning time is available. In these circumstances, a policy of “launch on warning” is the only rational option for both sides.

The first victims would be Pakistani and Indian civilians, because cities will be on the target lists: that’s where the major ports, airfields and critical infrastructure are. Robock’s team calculated those burning cities would loft enough black carbon into the stratosphere to create a shroud of soot over the whole world within a few weeks.

It wouldn’t be the full nuclear winter of superpower war. However, 300 nuclear explosions in the Indian subcontinent would dim the sun enough to drop temperatures and severely damage crop yields in the main food-producing regions of the planet.

The main effects would be a severe drop in the average global temperature and a comparable decline in global food production, with the worst-hit areas being north of latitude 30 degrees north. It’s counter-intuitive because almost all of India and Pakistan are south of that, but that’s the way the climate system works.

The most important breadbaskets of the planet — grain-growing areas that produce a big crop surplus for export — are the United States, Canada, and Europe and all north of 30.

The dimming effects of an Indo-Pak nuclear war in 2025, say, would drop the average global temperature by five degrees Celsius over all the continents, but the key regions of North America and Europe could reach 10 degrees colder. Maximum cooling would be reached in the fourth year after the war, and would gradually return to normal by around Year 15.

Australia, Brazil and Argentina, the southern hemisphere’s breadbaskets, might be able to export some grain, but are not remotely capable of compensating for the huge shortfalls from the northern hemisphere.

Tens, maybe hundreds, of millions would starve in the poorer parts of the North. That would certainly take our minds off our longer-term problem of global heating, but when the effects finally faded, it would be right back to that bigger climate crisis.

And it would be bigger, for carbon dioxide would not have stopped accumulating during the hungry years. The world might find it was returning not to the average global temperature of plus-1.3°C that prevailed when the war, but to a climate hovering on the brink of plus two degrees.

Happy new year.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.

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New research finds way to scrub carbon dioxide from factory emissions, make useful products

by Steve Lundeberg, Oregon State University

carbon dioxide
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Carbon dioxide can be harvested from smokestacks and used to create commercially valuable chemicals thanks to a novel compound developed by a scientific collaboration led by an Oregon State University researcher.

Published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, the study shows that the new metal organic framework, loaded with a common industrial chemical, , can catalyze the production of cyclic carbonates while scrubbing CO2 from factory flue gases.

Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, results from burning fossil fuels and is one of the primary causes of climate change. Cyclic carbonates are a class of compounds with great industrial interest, meaning the findings are a boost for green-economy initiatives because they show useful products such as battery electrolytes and pharmaceutical precursors can be derived from the same process deployed to clean emissions from manufacturing facilities.

The new, three-dimensional, lanthanide-based metal organic framework, or MOF, can also be used to catalyze cyclic carbonate production from biogas, a mix of , methane and other gases arising from the decomposition of organic matter.

A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change, and lanthanides are a group of soft, silvery-white metals whose applications range from night vision goggles to flints for cigarette lighters.

Examples of lanthanides include cerium, europium and gadolinium.

"We've taken a big step toward solving a crucial challenge associated with the hoped-for circular carbon economy by developing an effective catalyst," said chemistry researcher Kyriakos Stylianou of the OSU College of Science, who led the study. "A key to that is understanding the molecular interactions between the active sites in MOFs with potentially reactive molecules."

A MOF is an inorganic-organic hybrid, a crystalline porous material made up of positively charged metal ions surrounded by organic "linker" molecules, in this case lanthanide metals and tetracarboxylate linkers.

The metal ions make nodes that bind the linkers' arms to form a repeating structure that looks something like a cage; the structure has nanosized pores that adsorb gases, similar to a sponge. MOFs can be designed with a variety of components, which determine the MOF's properties.

Lanthanide-based materials are generally stable because of the relatively large size of lanthanide ions, Stylianou said, and that's true as well with lanthanide MOFs, where the acidic metals form strong bonds with the linkers, keeping the MOFs stable in water and at high temperatures; that's important because  and biogas are hot as well as moisture rich.

The lanthanide MOFs are also selective for carbon dioxide, meaning they're not bothered by the presence of the other gases contained by industrial emissions and .

"We observed that within the pores, propylene oxide can directly bind to the cerium centers and activate interactions for the cycloaddition of carbon dioxide," Stylianou said. "Using our MOFs, stable after multiple cycles of carbon dioxide capture and conversion, we describe the fixation of carbon dioxide into the propylene oxide's epoxy ring for the production of cyclic carbonates."

Cyclic carbonates have a broad range of industrial applications, including as polar solvents, precursors for polycarbonate materials such as eyeglass lenses and digital discs, electrolytes in lithium batteries, and precursors for pharmaceuticals.

"These are very exciting findings," Stylianou said. "And being able to directly use carbon dioxide from impure sources saves the cost and energy of separating it before it can be used to make cyclic carbonates, which will be a boon for the green economy."

David Le, Ryan Loughran and Isabelle Brooks of the College of Science collaborated on this research, as did scientists from Columbia University and the University of Cambridge.Enhanced stability in the presence of water could help reduce smokestack emissions of greenhouse gases

More information: David H. Le et al, Lanthanide metal–organic frameworks for the fixation of CO2 under aqueous-rich and mixed-gas conditions, Journal of Materials Chemistry A (2021). DOI: 10.1039/D1TA09463G

Journal information: Journal of Materials Chemistry A 

Provided by Oregon State University 

OSU research finds way to scrub carbon dioxide from factory emissions, make useful products

January 03, 2022


CORVALLIS, Ore. – Carbon dioxide can be harvested from smokestacks and used to create commercially valuable chemicals thanks to a novel compound developed by a scientific collaboration led by an Oregon State University researcher.

Published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, the study shows that the new metal organic framework, loaded with a common industrial chemical, propylene oxide, can catalyze the production of cyclic carbonates while scrubbing CO2 from factory flue gases.

Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, results from burning fossil fuels and is one of the primary causes of climate change. Cyclic carbonates are a class of compounds with great industrial interest, meaning the findings are a boost for green-economy initiatives because they show useful products such as battery electrolytes and pharmaceutical precursors can be derived from the same process deployed to clean emissions from manufacturing facilities.

The new, three-dimensional, lanthanide-based metal organic framework, or MOF, can also be used to catalyze cyclic carbonate production from biogas, a mix of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases arising from the decomposition of organic matter.

A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change, and lanthanides are a group of soft, silvery-white metals whose applications range from night vision goggles to flints for cigarette lighters.

Examples of lanthanides include cerium, europium and gadolinium.

“We’ve taken a big step toward solving a crucial challenge associated with the hoped-for circular carbon economy by developing an effective catalyst,” said chemistry researcher Kyriakos Stylianou of the OSU College of Science, who led the study. “A key to that is understanding the molecular interactions between the active sites in MOFs with potentially reactive molecules.”

A MOF is an inorganic-organic hybrid, a crystalline porous material made up of positively charged metal ions surrounded by organic “linker” molecules, in this case lanthanide metals and tetracarboxylate linkers.

The metal ions make nodes that bind the linkers’ arms to form a repeating structure that looks something like a cage; the structure has nanosized pores that adsorb gases, similar to a sponge. MOFs can be designed with a variety of components, which determine the MOF’s properties.

Lanthanide-based materials are generally stable because of the relatively large size of lanthanide ions, Stylianou said, and that’s true as well with lanthanide MOFs, where the acidic metals form strong bonds with the linkers, keeping the MOFs stable in water and at high temperatures; that’s important because flue gases and biogas are hot as well as moisture rich.

The lanthanide MOFs are also selective for carbon dioxide, meaning they’re not bothered by the presence of the other gases contained by industrial emissions and biogas.

“We observed that within the pores, propylene oxide can directly bind to the cerium centers and activate interactions for the cycloaddition of carbon dioxide,” Stylianou said. “Using our MOFs, stable after multiple cycles of carbon dioxide capture and conversion, we describe the fixation of carbon dioxide into the propylene oxide’s epoxy ring for the production of cyclic carbonates.”

Cyclic carbonates have a broad range of industrial applications, including as polar solvents, precursors for polycarbonate materials such as eyeglass lenses and digital discs, electrolytes in lithium batteries, and precursors for pharmaceuticals.

“These are very exciting findings,” Stylianou said. “And being able to directly use carbon dioxide from impure sources saves the cost and energy of separating it before it can be used to make cyclic carbonates, which will be a boon for the green economy.”

David Le, Ryan Loughran and Isabelle Brooks of the College of Science collaborated on this research, as did scientists from Columbia University and the University of Cambridge.

The College of Science and the OSU Honors College funded the study.

About the OSU College of Science: As one of the largest academic units at OSU, the College of Science has seven departments and 12 pre-professional programs. It provides the basic science courses essential to the education of every OSU student, builds future leaders in science, and its faculty are international leaders in scientific research.

Novel Compound Harvests CO2 to Make Useful Product

Jan 4 2022Reviewed by Bethan Davies

A scientific collaboration led by a researcher at Oregon State University resulted in the development of a new compound that can harvest carbon dioxide from smokestacks and use it to produce commercially beneficial chemicals.

Novel Compound Harvests CO2 to Make Useful Products.
Selmet Inc. Image Credit: Oregon State University.

The study demonstrates that the new metal-organic framework, loaded with a general industrial chemical known as propylene oxide, has the potential to catalyze the production of cyclic carbonates while CO2 is being scrubbed from factory flue gases.

The study has been published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is known to be one of the major reasons for climate change. Cyclic carbonates are considered to be a class of compounds having great industrial interest.

This implies the findings are a boost for green-economy initiatives since they exhibit useful applications like pharmaceutical precursors and battery electrolytes that could be derived from the same process dispensed to clean emissions from manufacturing facilities.

The latest, three-dimensional, lanthanide-based metal-organic framework (MOF) could also be utilized to catalyze cyclic carbonate production from biogas — a mix of methane, carbon dioxide and other gases emerging from the decomposition of organic matter.

A catalyst is defined as a substance that tends to raise the speed of a chemical reaction without experiencing any permanent chemical change, and lanthanides are known to be a group of soft and silvery-white metals whose applications range from night vision goggles to cigarette lighters’ flints.

Examples of lanthanides comprise gadolinium, europium and cerium.

We’ve taken a big step toward solving a crucial challenge associated with the hoped-for circular carbon economy by developing an effective catalyst. A key to that is understanding the molecular interactions between the active sites in MOFs with potentially reactive molecules.

Kyriakos Stylianou, Study Lead Author and Chemistry Researcher, College of Science, Oregon State University

Related Stories

A MOF is an inorganic-organic hybrid, a crystalline porous material composed of positively charged metal ions encircled by the so-called organic “linker” molecules. Here, tetracarboxylate linkers and lanthanide metals are being used.

The metal ions create nodes that exhibit the potential to bind the linkers’ arms to develop a repeating structure that looks somewhat similar to a cage. The structure consists of nanosized pores that adsorb gases, identical to a sponge. MOFs could be designed with a range of components, which decide the properties of MOFs.

Normally, lanthanide-based materials are stable due to the comparatively large size of lanthanide ions. Stylianou feels that is true as well with lanthanide MOFs, where the acidic metals develop powerful bonds with the linkers, retaining the stability of MOFs in water and at high temperatures. This is significant since biogas and flue gases are hot as well as moisture-rich.

Also, the lanthanide MOFs are known to be selective for carbon dioxide, implying they are not bothered by the existence of the other gases contained by biogas and industrial emissions.

We observed that within the pores, propylene oxide can directly bind to the cerium centers and activate interactions for the cycloaddition of carbon dioxide. Using our MOFs, stable after multiple cycles of carbon dioxide capture and conversion, we describe the fixation of carbon dioxide into the propylene oxide’s epoxy ring for the production of cyclic carbonates.

Kyriakos Stylianou, Study Lead Author and Chemistry Researcher, College of Science, Oregon State University

Cyclic carbonates consist of a wide range of industrial applications, such as being polar solvents, precursors for polycarbonate materials like digital discs and eyeglass lenses, precursors for pharmaceuticals and electrolytes in lithium batteries.

These are very exciting findings. And being able to directly use carbon dioxide from impure sources saves the cost and energy of separating it before it can be used to make cyclic carbonates, which will be a boon for the green economy.

Kyriakos Stylianou, Study Lead Author and Chemistry Researcher, College of Science, Oregon State University

David Le, Ryan Loughran and Isabelle Brooks of the College of Science collaborated on this study, along with researchers from the University of Cambridge and Columbia University.

The study was financially supported by the College of Science and the OSU Honors College.

Journal Reference:

Le, D. H., et al. (2021) Lanthanide metal–organic frameworks for the fixation of CO2 under aqueous-rich and mixed-gas conditions. Journal of Materials Chemistry A. doi.org/10.1039/D1TA09463G.

Source: https://oregonstate.edu/


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From airlines and restaurants to slaughterhouses, Canada's worker shortage is spreading rapidly

Businesses large and small are being forced to temporarily

close their doors

Brett Bundale · The Canadian Press · 
The spread of the Omicron variant has caused staff shortages for all sorts of businesses. (Sam Nar/CBC)

An intensifying labour shortage is rippling through the economy, forcing businesses to curtail operations, reduce hours and in some cases, euthanize livestock.

The situation is a result of a chronic worker shortage worsened by the crush of new COVID-19 cases forcing many into isolation. School closures have also left some workers scrambling for child care and unable to go into work.

The result is rising absenteeism, prompting airlines to cancel flights, drugstores to close early and restaurants to move to takeout only.

At a slaughterhouse in Quebec, the worker shortage became so extreme in recent days it opted to euthanize thousands of chickens that couldn't be processed.

Exceldor Co-operative said in a statement that rising COVID-19 infections and a significant shortage of personnel have forced the company to resort to "humane euthanasia."

It blamed the protracted worker shortage on federal delays processing temporary foreign worker applications.

Meanwhile, some provinces have tried to ease staffing woes by shortening isolation periods, allowing people to return to work sooner.

Yet the sheer number of new daily cases caused by the highly transmissible Omicron variant continues to leave many confined to their homes and businesses struggling to remain open. Even those that remain open are facing a scheduling nightmare as mounting unplanned absences — on top of shifting public health restrictions — make operating difficult.

"Omicron has resulted in more unplanned absences, not to mention complications from sudden government restrictions," Retail Council of Canada spokesperson Michelle Wasylyshen said.

A surge of people unable to work and changing public health measures "throw schedules that were often planned weeks in advance upside down," she added.

Some businesses have responded to the disruption by drafting new plans for how to operate during the latest wave, while some must alter hours or close altogether.

Pharmacy chain Jean Coutu impacted

Drugstore chain Jean Coutu said on its website some of its stores may need to modify hours to ensure essential services are maintained.

Marie-Claude Bacon, a spokeswoman for Jean Coutu's parent company Metro Inc., said the health and safety of employees and customers has been the company's priority since the beginning of the pandemic.

"As absenteeism has been fluctuating over the course of the last 20 months, we continue to make the necessary staffing adjustments as need be at store and (distribution centre) levels to minimize impact on our operations," she wrote in an email.

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B.C.'s public sector unions set to begin bargaining

Bhinder Sajan
Published Jan. 4, 2022

VICTORIA -

The Finance Ministry says the vast majority of the 186 collective agreements in B.C.'s public sector expire in March 2022 – including those of the teachers' and nurses' unions.

A previous three-year agreement saw two per cent wage increases in each year. With inflation now far beyond that, it’s unclear what impact that will have on negotiations.

According to the province, every one per cent increase in adds almost $400 million to the operating budget. About 385,000 public sector workers are unionized employees paid under collective agreements or professionals paid through negotiated compensation agreements.

Bargaining is done through employers' associations, with the province ultimately responsible.

In a statement, the ministry added, "While negotiations under the 2022 mandate have not yet begun, bargaining is always best left to the parties at the table. Government is looking forward to sharing when there are updates on tentative and ratified agreements over the coming months."
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Corning Inc. employees impacted by payroll vendor Kronos ransomware attack


by: George StockburgerPosted: Jan 5, 2022 

CORNING, N.Y. (WETM) – Kronos, a national payroll vendor contracted with Corning Incorporated, recently suffered a ransomware attack that Corning employees tell 18 News has impacted their payroll system.

After receiving several calls, emails, and messages from concerned Corning Inc. employees, 18 News reached out to the company for an update on their payroll and timekeeping systems.

A Corning Inc. spokesperson tells 18 News that the Kronos outage impacted a small portion of their employees who use the system and they are working to minimize any potential impacts that may arise until service is restored.

Corning says their ADP payroll platform continues to be fully operational, and employees are being paid as planned.

“We can confirm that Kronos, one of the third-party time and attendance tracking providers used at Corning, is experiencing an ongoing outage that has impacted many companies globally. Taking care of our people is our top priority, and we are committed to ensuring employees using the Kronos system are fairly and accurately compensated for hours worked.

In addition to their regular pay, Corning proactively took the extra step to thank our dedicated workforce who use the system with a one-time $500 cash gift they received in their last paycheck. For the upcoming pay period, we are providing a $1,000 advance of their annual bonus. Going forward, we will address any potential issues as they arise.”

CORNING INC.

A Corning Inc. spokesperson says they have also developed a support process to address employee payroll questions or concerns, as well as an interim, manual process to ensure all employees will quickly be made whole in their compensation

Kronos issued the following statement regarding the ransomware incident that was first reported in December impacting companies across the country:

We recently became aware of a ransomware incident that has disrupted the Kronos Private Cloud, which houses solutions used by a limited number of our customers. We took immediate action to investigate and mitigate the issue, and are working with leading cybersecurity experts. We recognize the seriousness of the issue and have mobilized all available resources to support our impacted customers. KRONOS

18 News will continue to monitor this story and bring updates on the system’s availability.

18 News can be contacted by emailing news@wetmtv.com

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ONTARIO

Union representing cleaners at London hospital gives employer deadline to fix payroll issues

If the issue is not resolved by Friday, the union will file a grievance procedure

Isha Bhargava · CBC News · 
Cleaning staff at LHSC has not been paid in full due to a ransomware attack on the payroll system their employer Sodexo uses. (Dmitry Kalinovsky/Shutterstock)

The union representing cleaning staff at London Health Sciences Centre has given their employer, Sodexo, until Friday to resolve payroll issues that led over 50 workers to not receive full pay for nearly a month. 

Maria McFadden, business representative for Labourers International Union of North America (LiUNA) Local 1059 tells CBC News that if the error isn't fixed by then, the union will start a grievance process against Sodexo. 

A union grievance is filed when there's infractions against employees, which is the violation of a collective agreement. It includes workers being shortchanged on their wages. 

The inconsistent paycheques are due to a ransomware attack on the American-based Kronos payment software which Sodexo uses for payroll, that started about four weeks ago. 

McFadden said each worker is owed different amounts depending on the days and hours they worked. These range anywhere from $300 to 25 hours of work missing on their paystub for the recent pay period on Dec. 31. 

"That day the [Sodexo] rep got about 54 calls from different folks that hadn't been paid properly and till today's date, they still have not been paid what is owed to them," she said. 

'Nasty time of the year for this to happen'

McFadden said Sodexo notified Local 1059 of the issue right away and the union has been very understanding, but believes that enough time has passed, and this needs to be dealt with.  

"It's now been four weeks, so it's been a little while and our expectation is that Sodexo needs to get things done so that corrections can be made," she said. 

Workers make about $20 per hour on a bi-weekly basis. She is especially concerned that workers will struggle to pay the bills that are piling up from the holiday season. 

"Come January 1st people have bills to pay and rent is due, so it's a very nasty time of the year for workers to be going through this, it's a very difficult situation" she added. 

Time will tell if situation improves

McFadden highlights that the cleaners are continuing to work because they want to help out an already burdened hospital system during a pandemic.  

"It's a hospital setting so people feel they are obligated to work and want to take the best step they can and help others," she said. 

She says some workers are turning to get cash loans in order to make ends meet because they are really concerned that they haven't been paid properly. 

McFadden hopes that Sodexo will do right by their employees. "I hope they have some compassion and get this fixed, but time will tell and we'll see what happens on Friday," she said. 

CBC reached out to Sodexo and Kronos for a comment, but did not hear back at the time of publication.

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