US, WHO officials and experts agree (sort of) on how COVID-19 spreads

COVID: ‘We need to stop wearing cloth masks and go to N95s for all,’ expert says


Anjalee Khemlani
·Senior Reporter
Fri, April 8, 2022,

Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is airborne. That simple declaration from the White House is what some experts around the world have known since 2020 — and it could have major implications for U.S. businesses and organizations.

Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and deputy assistant to President Joe Biden, announced the highly-awaited words in a recent statement.

"The most common way COVID-19 is transmitted from one person to another is through tiny airborne particles of the virus hanging in indoor air for minutes or hours after an infected person has been there," she said.

That single sentence confirms what was first uncovered in a March 2020 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIH) officials. However, that information was not relayed to Americans until several months later.

It took even longer for both the CDC and WHO to acknowledge COVID's spread via aerosols, despite growing evidence.

"SARS-CoV-2 remained viable in aerosols throughout the duration of our experiment (3 hours)" and was more stable on non-porous surfaces, the study said.

The latter point was emphasized by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) a month later, without acknowledging the former. Eventually, the U.S. adopted the idea that transmission in the air was dominant, but through larger particles, or droplets, in the summer of 2020.

Why droplets were favored over aerosols has to do with the difference in the way aerosol experts and public health experts define the size of the particle. A tug-of-war between both sides made headlines in the first few months of the pandemic and have continued under the radar ever since.

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden listens to Dr. Alondra Nelson, his pick for OSTP Deputy Director for Science and Society (Reuters)
Why it matters

Deeming the coronavirus airborne places a burden on businesses, schools, and other indoor venues to ensure proper masking when COVID-19 levels are high in an area. In addition, it also presents the problem of revamping air systems or adding filtration and ventilation.

Marina Jabsky, an industrial hygienist with the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, explained how to think about it.

"If you've ever been in the same room as somebody who's smoking, regardless of how far apart form them you're standing, you're gonna smell the smoke, right? Because the air particles will expand to fill the space," Jabsky said.

And size matters. The larger the space with fewer people in it, the lower the concentration is going to be.

"If you do not have a solid, well-functioning ventilation system, you're going to have a buildup of concentration of particles, and that's where the risk really increases," Jabsky said.

That's the reason behind the push for better quality masks, which the U.S. government has provided to Americans — via retail pharmacies and community health centers — for free. It's also why the American Rescue Plan (ARP) included $122 billion for schools and $350 billion for state, local and Tribal governments to help provide better ventilation systems.

One industry in particular was forced to quickly figure out how to keep its employees safe. After facing a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) at the start of the pandemic, hospitals are now able to regularly supply PPE to their staff. However, the cost of that PPE has gone up significantly compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Hospitals also adapted by either putting in better filtration systems, adding ventilation, or increasing the number of isolation rooms as needed. The steps to ensure filtration and ventilation came after it was discovered the virus was airborne.

"If it were droplet, and only droplets, then some of the masking requirements and some of the ventilation requirements might not be necessary," said Nancy Foster, vice president of quality and patient safety policy at the American Hospital Association.

Foster told Yahoo Finance that for droplets, proper masking is still be necessary, but some of the bigger facility upgrades might not be.

A person wearing a mask walks out of a store past a "Wear a face mask" sign, during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., February 9, 2022. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

'It doesn't make sense to completely remove the idea of droplets'

There is lingering pressure from some experts to maintain droplets as part of the definition of how the virus is transmitted. And that can impact the difference in which protective gear is used by health professionals.

Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease doctor at Stanford, explained why.

He said droplets may not be the primary route, but they aren't excluded in the range of particle sizes.

Scientists have noted "both droplets and aerosols, and particles of sizes in between the two" hold the potential for spread, Karan said.

"People can still have larger droplets that land in their mucosa or land in other exposed areas. So it doesn't make sense to completely remove the idea of droplets," he said.

In a February interview with Yahoo Finance, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky didn't call it airborne, but noted Sars-Cov-2 was like any other respiratory virus and that masking and ventilation are essential to curb transmission.

Kim Prather, an aerosol expert at UC San Diego, is another expert who has consistently asked for widespread acknowledgement of airborne transmission, pointing to another coronavirus, SARS, noting it was airborne as well.

"One of the biggest lessons learned (then) was you've got to follow the precautionary principle. If you think it has any chance of being airborne, that has to be out there....whether it's the dominant (pathway) or not," she said.

OSTP's Nelson agreed, citing the CDC's latest definition of the spread of the disease that included "small droplets and aerosol particles that contain the virus."

It's why in her statement, Nelson included ways to cost-effectively upgrade air systems for businesses.

"We’re saying it more loudly now and with a unified voice across the federal government that the most important mitigation measures for restaurants and businesses are masking, distancing, and dilution or removal of COVID-19 virus particles in the air. These actions are more effective at reducing the spread of COVID-19 than sanitizing surfaces, which the CDC has said is not a substantial contributor to new infections," Nelson said.

But, according to Dr. Georgia Lagoudas, sanitizing is still a useful strategy.

"Over the past two years, we've had to deal with an evolving virus and learning new science," said Lagoudas, OSTP's Senior Advisor for Biotechnology and Bioeconomy.
How we got here

In April 2020, (the same day former President Donald Trump infamously suggested digesting disinfectant to get rid of COVID-19), DHS acting under secretary Bill Bryan said the virus could survive on surfaces for up to 18 hours in low humidity, low temperature environments.

The idea of aerosolized virus staying suspended for up to three hours wasn't discussed. Officials were mostly focused on symptomatic or asymptomatic spread, in addition to figuring out how to detect and curb transmission, as well as identify what substances break down the viral particles.

However, identifying aerosols became especially important after it became clear asymptomatic spread was occurring at a higher rate than expected. It's why masking was recommended soon after Bryan's presentation.

"Those two things have made the difference for this over every other disease process that we've seen in our lifetimes," said Dr. Joe Vipond, an emergency room doctor in Calgary, about asymptomatic and airborne spread.

"But neither of these changes, by the WHO or the CDC, were done in an open fashion," Vipond added.

Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert and professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech, noted the reliance on droplets missed the mark of how easily and effectively COVID-19 transmits.

Nelson used "strong, powerful, clear words that we should have heard from the CDC two years ago," Marr said.

Saskia Popescu, an assistant professor in the biodefense program at George Mason University, recently told Yahoo Finance the topic remains important.

"We definitely need to talk about aerosol transmission," she said.

"We need to make it very clear to people you can get infected by breathing it," Popsecu added.

Dr. Leyla Asadi, an infectious disease doctor, expressed a similar sentiment.

“I think that the word airborne is very straightforward. It gives you a really excellent mental model, you don’t need a complicated chart," she said.

Long-term benefits and lessons

Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol expert and chemistry professor at the University of Colorado, has been one of the leaders of the effort to ensure global understanding of the virus's route of transmission.

He and Marr penned a recent op-ed highlighting the problem now is too many people will remember what they were first told — which was that the virus didn't spread far. This is why the combination of COVID-fatigue and politically-aligned resistance to mask use will remain an obstacle for ending the pandemic, they wrote.

However, the outlook isn't entirely grim. With the White House now behind the push, improving indoor air quality is a goal that can be worked toward beyond COVID.

It's "something we should be thinking about not just because of COVID, but because of general health," Popescu said.

There have long been studies showing those in urban or lower-income areas suffer from chronic health issues related to poor air quality. With upgraded air systems, that could improve overall health.

It’s a “chronic problem of not investing in infrastructure, not investing in ventilation,” NYCOSH's Jabsky said.

Prather noted, "We clean our water, we will not drink unfiltered water, but we will breathe unfiltered air. I mean, how does that make sense? We need cleaner indoor air."

Jabsky hopes the pandemic acts as a catalyst for the cause.

“At this point, if we’re having a global pandemic that is due to a disease that is airborne (and that is) not incentive enough to deal with our ventilation issues, I just don’t know what is going to be the stimulant,” she said.

Marr explained what's needed is an overhaul of regulations and standards.

"I think there's longer term changes, in terms of how we design and operate our buildings that we should be thinking about. And, ultimately, to put some teeth into this, there will need to be standards and regulations. And those will take years," she said.

Follow Anjalee on Twitter @AnjKhem

Oklahoma state officials resist Supreme Court ruling affirming tribal authority over American Indian country

Kirsten Matoy Carlson, Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Wayne State University

THE CONVERSATION
Fri, April 8, 2022

Large portions of Oklahoma are governed, at least in part, by tribal jurisdiction. crimsonedge34 via Wikimedia Commons

It’s unusual for someone to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit one of its decisions. It’s very rare for that to happen almost immediately after the ruling was issued. But in the two years since the court’s ruling in a key case about Native American rights, the state of Oklahoma has made that request more than 40 times.

State officials have also repeatedly refused to cooperate with tribal leaders to comply with the ruling, issued in 2020 and known as McGirt v. Oklahoma. Local governments, however, continue to cooperate with the tribes and show how the ruling could actually help build connections between the tribal governments and their neighbors.

In the McGirt ruling, the Supreme Court held that much of eastern Oklahoma is Indian country under the terms of an 1833 treaty between the U.S. government and the Muscogee Creek Nation. Based on that treaty and an 1885 federal law, the ruling effectively means that the state of Oklahoma cannot prosecute crimes committed by or against American Indians there. Federal and tribal officials are the only ones who can pursue these cases.

Since that ruling, federal courts have held that the lands in Oklahoma of five additional tribes – the Cherokee Nation, the Choctaw Nation, the Seminole Nation, the Chickasaw Nation and the Quapaw Nation – also remain American Indian country and are subject to federal and tribal jurisdiction under the 1885 federal law. Under these decisions, about 43% of Oklahoma is Indian country.

Together, these court decisions have closed a major legal loophole. Before these rulings, suspected criminals in eastern Oklahoma regularly avoided prosecution because police could not agree whether the state, tribal or federal government had jurisdiction over the land where the crime occurred.

The Supreme Court made clear that certain areas are tribal land, subject to federal and tribal criminal jurisdiction. This makes it harder for alleged criminals to avoid prosecution because now law enforcement officials, as well as average people, know definitively that federal and tribal authorities can prosecute these crimes.

State resistance

Oklahoma’s governor and attorney general have resisted the McGirt ruling and made several claims that the decision harms the state.

They contend that it has undermined public safety because it has led to the release of thousands of criminals from state prisons.

However, most of the people released from state custody after the McGirt decision have been charged in federal or tribal courts. Jimcy McGirt, whose name the Supreme Court case bears, has been tried and convicted in federal court of sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl. He is now serving a life sentence without parole in federal prison.

State officials also argue that the McGirt decision threatens to cost the state millions of dollars in tax revenue from income and sales taxes on tribal citizens in eastern Oklahoma. Tax experts counter that the state has overstated the concern because most of the land in eastern Oklahoma is owned by non-Native Americans and remains taxable by the state.
Requesting reversal

Based on these claims, state officials have repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to revisit its decision – and been rejected more than 30 times. In one of those attempts, in January 2022, the court declined to hear a case that would have applied the McGirt decision retroactively to convictions that were final at the time McGirt was decided. Defendants with final convictions will not be able to challenge them and will serve out their sentences in Oklahoma state prisons.

The Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether Oklahoma should have authority to prosecute non-Indians accused of committing crimes against Indians in Indian country, but refused to revisit its holding in McGirt. Any ruling in that case may adjust the McGirt decision, but cannot overturn it.
No longer working together

Beyond asking the Supreme Court to reverse itself, Oklahoma has simply stopped pursuing a productive working relationship with tribal governments.

In the past, Oklahoma had some mutually beneficial arrangements with tribal governments. For instance, the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations both say they have treaty rights to hunt and fish on their reservation lands without state permission. But since 2016, they have negotiated agreements to pay for state-issued hunting and fishing licenses for tribal citizens to use on tribal land. They were willing to continue those agreements even after the McGirt ruling suggested that under their treaties with the federal government, the state has no authority over hunting and fishing on their lands.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt had celebrated the agreements’ renewal in 2020, but refused to extend the agreements into 2022. He claimed that the agreements gave unfair treatment to tribal citizens because the tribal governments paid a discounted bulk rate for the licenses. The state will lose $38 million by not renewing the agreements.

However, state game wardens will still be allowed to enforce hunting regulations on tribal land under a separate agreement signed in 2020. As the hunting and fishing seasons begin, it remains to be seen if the state will seek to prosecute tribal members hunting and fishing on reservation lands without a state license.

The state of Oklahoma has also sought to limit the ability of tribal governments to regulate the environment on tribal lands by requesting that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency allow the state to continue administering its environmental programs in tribal country. Federal environmental laws recognize the rights of tribal governments to set and implement environmental standards, including water and air quality, on their lands. Oklahoma’s actions seek to prevent this.

A more collaborative approach

Despite the state of Oklahoma’s efforts to discredit tribal governments and their treaty rights, the McGirt decision has fostered cooperative federalism, or the sharing of responsibility among different governments to work together to govern people at the local level.

Local governments have cooperated with the tribes and built on preexisting relationships to implement the McGirt decision. Tribal governments have responded to the decision by increasing their law enforcement budgets, hiring additional public safety officers, prosecuting attorneys and judges, and improving their criminal codes.

Choctaw Public Safety has hired an additional 30 law enforcement officers. The Cherokee Nation, the Muscogee Nation and the Choctaw Nation have all entered into cross-deputization agreements with local law enforcement agencies to ensure the seamless administration of public safety. These agreements allow municipal officers to act as tribal officers and vice versa within specific areas and encourage cooperation among local and tribal law enforcement.

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The Cherokee Nation has signed agreements with 13 municipalities to handle fines for traffic citations. The McGirt ruling clarifies that the tribal government, instead of the towns, should receive the money. Under the agreement, the Cherokee Nation donates almost all of the traffic fines back to the local governments so they can continue to provide local law enforcement. Local officials have praised the increased cooperation with the tribal governments.

The tribes and local governments are demonstrating an example of collaboration that the state could also be part of. Tribal governments have expressed a willingness to work with the state of Oklahoma and acknowledged that they share common interests in providing for their citizens. By resisting the McGirt decision, state officials are missing an opportunity to build connections among, and improve government services for, all the people who live in Oklahoma.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Kirsten Matoy Carlson, Wayne State University.

Read more:

Supreme Court upholds American Indian treaty promises, orders Oklahoma to follow federal law


Supreme Court affirms tribal police authority over non-Indians

Apple snails: Slimy invader attacks La. crawfish and rice farms

Tristan Baurick
Fri, April 8, 2022

First it came for your wetlands. Now it’s coming for your crawfish and your rice.

A foreign snail that appeared in Louisiana just over 10 years ago and quickly infested ponds, bayous and streams in about 30 parishes has recently found its way to the farms that produce two of the state’s favorite foods.

The invasive apple snail has shut down harvest at some crawfish farms in Vermilion, Acadia and Jefferson Davis parishes and has made its first devastating appearance in rice fields. In March, the invasive mollusks wiped out a 50-acre field of rice, marking the first reported case of the snail damaging the crop in Louisiana.

"Where it’s hit ‘em, it’s hit ‘em hard,” said David Savoy, a Church Point crawfish farmer and chairman of the Louisiana Crawfish Promotion and Research Board. “In Vermilion, it’s so bad, you pick up a trap and there’s 5 to 10 pounds of them. It’s horrible.”




Attracted by the bait in traps, the snails crowd in, leaving little or no room for crawfish. At some farms, apple snails are being caught in such high numbers — sometimes 12 crates per day — that disposal of the thick-shelled snails is becoming a problem.

Some farmers have had to halt harvests and drain their ponds early, suffering revenue reductions of as much as 50%, said Blake Wilson, an LSU AgCenter researcher.

“The impact on some of those farms, particularly where snail populations have been building for years, has been immense,” he said.

Only about 10 crawfish farms have been affected, but new reports keep coming in.

Louisiana is by far the nation’s biggest crawfish producer. The industry contributes more than $300 million to the state economy each year and employs about 7,000 people, according to the research board.



“If the problem spreads to the whole industry, economic impacts could be tens of millions of dollars annually without effective control tactics,” Wilson said.

Those tactics are currently limited to pesticides. But what kills snails will also likely kill crawfish.

Native to South America, the apple snail’s first appearance in Louisiana was in a Gretna drainage canal in 2006.

They’re popular in the aquarium trade partly because they eat the algae that dirties tanks. But they get quite big — sometimes growing shells 6 inches in diameter — and they often have a strong, swampy odor. Their presence in the wild is likely due to aquarium owners dumping them in ditches and ponds.

The snails stay below the water's surface and aren’t often seen, but their bubblegum pink eggs are hard to miss. In clusters of 200 to 600, the tiny eggs have become an all-too-common sight on tree trucks and pilings just above the water line. Destroying the eggs is one of the best ways to reduce their numbers.



The state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries recommends people scrape the eggs off with a stick and crush them, or at least knock them into the water. Be careful not to touch them because the eggs contain a neurotoxin that can irritate skin and eyes.

The snails are edible but are known to carry rat lungworm, a parasite that can kill humans and other mammals.

Rapid reproducers and voracious eaters, the snail overpopulates waterways and kills off habitat important to native fish and other wildlife.

The snail’s appearance in crawfish farms comes at a particularly bad time for the industry. Crawfish have been hit with white spot syndrome, a deadly virus that was first discovered in farmed shrimp in Asia in the early 1990s and first appeared in Louisiana 2007.

The coronavirus pandemic has taken a toll as well. The AgCenter reported that some crawfish producers have been able to sell just 15% of their catch due to pandemic-related restaurant closures and occupancy limits.

Scientists and farmers are perplexed about how the snail arrived in crawfish farms and why certain farms are swarming with them.

“It’s weird,” AgCenter researcher Greg Lutz said. “It pops up in certain regions. You can have a farm with nothing, and three or four miles down the road they’re overrun.”

It could be that the snails benefit from flooding. An Acadia Parish farm started having a snail problem after its fields were flooded from a bayou linked to the Mermentau River, which is loaded with apple snails.

The snail has been identified in just one rice field so far, but the potential for widespread destruction is strong. It’s a major pest for rice growers in Spain, Asia and Central America. In the Philippines, the snail is considered a national menace, infesting about half the nation’s rice fields during the late 1980s.

The snail left almost nothing at the rice field near Rayne. Wilson estimated the field had two snails per square foot.

“There was no trace of rice,” he said. “If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a snail production farm.”

The Courier
This article originally appeared on The Courier: Slimy invader attacks La. crawfish and rice farms

PAKISTAN
Water crisis on horizon as snow melts at snail’s pace
Ahmad Fraz Khan

Published April 10, 2022 -

DAWN.COM

THIS file photo shows a general view of the black Shisper glacier in the Karakoram mountain range on June 28, 2019.—AFP


LAHORE: Despite an early onset of summer in mid-March and April getting hotter than usual, the snow melting process in mountainous and hilly areas has not picked up pace, putting profound pressure on the national water supplies and making the planners quite nervous.

For the last 10 days, national water supplies have dipped substantially below not only last year’s levels, but average supplies of the last five or 10 years for the day, forcing Pakistan to start its Kharif season with close to a 40 per cent shortage in both of its water-producing systems — 30pc in Indus and 10pc in the Jhelum arm.

“The situation is more precarious in Mangla, which is hosting less than 1pc of its capacity,” says Khalid Rana of the Indus River System Authority (Irsa).

On Saturday, Mangla held only 354,000 acre-feet against over seven million of its capacity. This is largely because the Mangla Lake is mainly rain-fed and there has virtually been no rain during March. The Met Office predicted five spells of rain, but only one took place.

“To make matters worse, 37 inches of snow fell this winter against the yearly average of 50 inches — a drop of 26pc. Even those 37 inches seem to have fallen on higher altitudes, where the temperature needs to be more than the current 23 degrees Celsius to melt it. These trends — less and high altitude snow and virtually no rain — have created a crisis in the Jhelum arm,” Mr Rana explains.

“The same trend seems to have impacted River Chenab as well,” explains an official of the Punjab Irrigation Department. The flows are improving, but too slowly to benefit the system — widening the gap between demand and supply.

On Saturday, the river was flowing at 22,000 cusecs against the last 10-year average of 25,000 cusecs. The Saturday flows included almost 30pc improvement; otherwise, it was flowing at 15,000 cusecs when the month started. So, the entire water-producing system has receded to a low level, and is not benefitting from the high temperatures, the official maintains.

The national water flow data, compiled by the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda), explains the extent of water poverty. On Saturday, the country received 90,000 cusecs in all its rivers against the last 10-year average of 137,700 cusecs — a drop of 27.73pc.

Individually speaking, Jhelum provided 27,200 cusecs against its 10-year average of 48,200 cusecs; River Kabul was flowing at 12,900 cusecs against the average of 32,600 cusecs; Indus provided 27,500 cusecs against its average of 31,200 cusecs and Chenab chimed in with 22,200 cusecs against the average of 25,700 cusecs.

“Even the temperatures in Skardu have doubled — from 11 degree Celsius last year to 22.2 degree on Saturday — but snow melting has not increased,” says a Wapda official dealing with the snow and its melting phenomenon. “We can still give a benefit of the doubt to river flows as they involve two to three days of lag when water leaves the mountains and reaches Tarbela Dam. The entire snow will eventually reach the rivers, but the current delay remains a cause of concern.

“Tarbela and Mangla lakes are almost at dead level and not improving due to the absence of rains and snow melt,” Sahibzada Khan, director general of the meteorological department, said.

The trend is expected to hold for another month or so before it improves by the end of May or beginning of June, when both high temperatures and rains would start benefitting the system.

Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2022

UK
Rishi Sunak is fighting for his political survival after admitting he held US green card while a minister




Catherine Neilan
Fri, April 8, 2022

Rishi Sunak is fighting for his political future after damaging leaks about his family's tax arrangements.


The chancellor was a favourite to take over for Boris Johnson, but those ambitions are now "done for," one MP said.


Another senior Conservative suggested Sunak might have to resign or take a demotion over the row.

Rishi Sunak is fighting for his political survival after admitting he held a US green card for several months after becoming chancellor.

The man who just a few weeks ago was a favourite to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister now seems to be completely out of the race – and could even lose his existing role, Westminster sources suggested.

At a Downing Street press conference Friday, Johnson backed Sunak, saying he was doing an "absolutely outstanding job".

Amid suggestions that Sunak is the subject of a hostile briefing campaign, the prime minister said any briefings against the chancellor "certainly aren't coming from us at No 10."

"Heaven knows where they are coming from," Johnson added.

But Johnson also said he was unaware of Sunak's wife Akshata Murty's non-domicile tax status, as reported by The Independent this week.

This afternoon, it further emerged that Sunak held a green card until his first American trip after becoming chancellor in October 2021. He was elected in 2015 and first became a minister in 2018.

Sunak and Murty, who own a £5.5m Californian penthouse holiday home, continued to keep the green card tax status when they moved to the UK before Sunak was elected as MP for Richmond in North Yorkshire in 2015

A spokesperson said: "Rishi Sunak had a green card when he lived and worked in the US… Rishi Sunak followed all guidance and continued to file US tax returns, but specifically as a non-resident, in full compliance with the law.

"As required under US law and as advised, he continued to use his green card for travel purposes. Upon his first trip to the US in a government capacity as chancellor, he discussed the appropriate course of action with the US authorities. At that point, it was considered best to return his green card, which he did immediately.

"All laws and rules have been followed and full taxes have been paid where required in the duration he held his green card."

MPs told Insider his leadership hopes were now dead and suggested he may even have to resign.

"The fact the party has sat back and let everyone go to town on him just shows you - his stock has collapsed through the floor," said one senior Tory. "Nobody believes he can continue as chancellor - you can't put taxes up that don't affect your wife."

In a best-case scenario, Sunak would be moved to foreign secretary, paving the way for Liz Truss to become the first female chancellor, the MP said.

This would both "wind up" Labour and help undermine Truss' efforts to woo backbenchers as it would "put her in a position where she has to start saying 'no' to colleagues."

However, the same MP added: "Maybe he should resign."

Sunak's star had been on the wane before this week, as the cost of living crisis builds. The spring statement, delivered in March, was widely seen as having fallen short of what was required from the Treasury, with many Conservative MPs left disappointed by Sunak's decision to plough ahead with the unpopular rose to National Insurance.

Even before that, MPs said he had missed his chance to become leader and that Conservatives were "past peak Rishi".

This week's revelations have tipped the scales further against the chancellor, sources said.

Another Tory said the green card would make things "tricky" for Sunak.

"Attacks on wealth don't land, except with those already against him, and I'm not sure attacks on his wife will either. But it's obviously not good for him."

Another senior Conservative agreed. "He has a very shallow supporter base in the party – there are very few out defending him… He should have resigned in January and then he might have won.

"My guess is this, the spring statement, the petrol station farce, and cost of living have done for him."

Sharif, frontrunner as next Pakistani PM, seen as 'can-do' administrator


Leader of the opposition Shehbaz Sharif speaks to the media at the Supreme Court of Pakistan in Islamabad

Syed Raza Hassan and Gibran Naiyyar Peshimam
Fri, April 8, 2022

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Shehbaz Sharif, the person most likely to be Pakistan's next prime minister, is little known outside his home country but has a reputation domestically as an effective administrator more than as a politician.

The younger brother of three-time prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Shehbaz, 70, is leading a bid by the opposition in parliament to topple Imran Khan, and if a vote of no-confidence goes ahead on Saturday he is widely expected to replace Khan.

Analysts say Shehbaz, unlike Nawaz, enjoys amicable relations with Pakistan's military, which traditionally controls foreign and defence policy in the nuclear-armed nation of 220 million people.

Pakistan's generals have directly intervened to topple civilian governments three times, and no prime minister has finished a full five-year term since the South Asian state's independence from Britain in 1947.

Shehbaz Sharif, part of the wealthy Sharif dynasty, is best known for his direct, "can-do" administrative style, which was on display when, as chief minister of Punjab province, he worked closely with China on Beijing-funded projects.

He also said in an interview last week that good relations with the United States were critical for Pakistan for better or for worse, in stark contrast to Khan's recently antagonistic relationship with Washington.

There are still several procedural steps before Sharif can become Pakistan's 23rd prime minister, not including caretaker administrations, although the opposition has consistently identified him as its sole candidate.

If he does take on the role, he faces immediate challenges, not least Pakistan's crumbling economy, which has been hit by high inflation, a tumbling local currency and rapidly declining foreign exchange reserves.

Analysts also say Sharif will not act with complete independence as he will have to work on a collective agenda with the others opposition parties and his brother.

Nawaz has lived for the last two years in London since being let out of jail, where he was serving a sentence for corruption, for medical treatment.

'PUNJAB SPEED'

As chief minister of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, Shehbaz Sharif planned and executed a number of ambitious infrastructure mega-projects, including Pakistan's first modern mass transport system in his hometown, the eastern city of Lahore.

According to local media, the outgoing Chinese consul general wrote to Sharif last year praising his "Punjab Speed" execution of projects under the huge China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative.

The diplomat also said Sharif and his party would be friends of China in government or in opposition.

On Afghanistan, Islamabad is under international pressure to prod the Taliban to meet its human rights commitments while trying to limit instability there.

Unlike Khan, who has regularly denounced India's Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Sharif political dynasty has been more dovish towards the fellow nuclear-armed neighbour, with which Pakistan has fought three wars.

In terms of his relationship with the powerful military, Sharif has long played the public "good cop" to Nawaz's "bad cop" - the latter has had several public spats with the army.

Shehbaz was born in Lahore into a wealthy industrial family and was educated locally. After that he entered the family business and jointly owns a Pakistani steel company.

He entered politics in Punjab, becoming its chief minister for the first time in 1997 before he was caught up in national political upheaval and imprisoned following a military coup. He was then sent into exile in Saudi Arabia in 2000.

Shehbaz returned from exile in 2007 to resume his political career, again in Punjab.

He entered the national political scene when he became the chief of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party after Nawaz was found guilty in 2017 on charges of concealing assets related to the Panama Papers revelations.

The Sharif family and supporters say the cases were politically motivated.

Both brothers have faced numerous corruption cases in the National Accountability Bureau, including under Khan's premiership, but Shehbaz has not been found guilty on any charges.

(Reporting by Syed Raza Hassan and Gibran Peshimam; Editing by William Mallard and Mike Collett-White)

Explainer-What political upheaval in Pakistan means for rest of the world


 PTI chairman Imran Khan gestures while addressing his supporters during a campaign meeting ahead of general elections in Karachi

Fri, April 8, 2022
By Jonathan Landay and Gibran Naiyyar Peshimam

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan faces a no-confidence vote in parliament on Saturday which he is widely expected to lose.

If that happens, or he resigns before then, a new government would be formed most likely under opposition leader Shehbaz Sharif, but it was unclear how long it could last or whether elections expected to take place later this year would bring greater clarity.

The nation of more than 220 million people lies between Afghanistan to the west, China to the northeast and India to the east, making it of vital strategic importance.

Since coming to power in 2018, Khan's rhetoric has become more anti-American and he expressed a desire to move closer to China and, recently, Russia - including talks with President Vladimir Putin on the day the invasion of Ukraine began.

At the same time, U.S. and Asian foreign policy experts said that Pakistan's powerful military has traditionally controlled foreign and defence policy, thereby limiting the impact of political instability.

Here is what the upheaval, which comes as the economy is in deep trouble, means for countries closely involved in Pakistan:

AFGHANISTAN

Ties between Pakistan's military intelligence agency and the Islamist militant Taliban have loosened in recent years.

Now the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan, and facing an economic and humanitarian crisis due to a lack of money and international isolation, Qatar is arguably their most important foreign partner.

"We (the United States) don't need Pakistan as a conduit to the Taliban. Qatar is definitely playing that role now," said Lisa Curtis, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security think-tank.

Tensions have risen between the Taliban and Pakistan's military, which has lost several soldiers in attacks close to their mutual border. Pakistan wants the Taliban to do more to crack down on extremist groups and worries they will spread violence into Pakistan. That has begun to happen already.

Khan has been less critical of the Taliban over human rights than most foreign leaders.

CHINA

Khan consistently emphasised China's positive role in Pakistan and in the world at large.

At the same time, the $60-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) which binds the neighbours together was actually conceptualised and launched under Pakistan's two established political parties, both of which are set to share power once he is gone.

Potential successor Sharif, the younger brother of three-time former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, struck deals with China directly as leader of the eastern province of Punjab, and his reputation for getting major infrastructure projects off the ground while avoiding political grandstanding could in fact be music to Beijing's ears.

INDIA

The nuclear-armed neighbours have fought three wars since independence in 1947, two of them over the disputed Muslim-majority territory of Kashmir.

As with Afghanistan, it is Pakistan's military that controls policy in the sensitive area, and tensions along the de facto border there are at their lowest level since 2021, thanks to a ceasefire.

But there have been no formal diplomatic talks between the rivals for years because of deep distrust over a range of issues including Khan's extreme criticism of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his handling of attacks on minority Muslims in India.

Karan Thapar, an Indian political commentator who has closely followed India-Pakistan ties, said the Pakistani military could put pressure on the new government in Islamabad to build on the successful ceasefire in Kashmir.

Pakistan's powerful army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa said recently that his country was ready to move forward on Kashmir if India agrees.

The Sharif dynasty has been at the forefront of several dovish overtures towards India over the years.

UNITED STATES

U.S.-based South Asia experts said that Pakistan's political crisis is unlikely to be a priority for President Joe Biden, who is grappling with the war in Ukraine, unless it led to mass unrest or rising tensions with India.

"We have so many other fish to fry," said Robin Raphel, a former assistant secretary of state for South Asia who is a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank.

With the Pakistani military maintaining its behind-the-scenes control of foreign and security policies, Khan's political fate was not a major concern, according to some analysts.

"Since it's the military that calls the shots on the policies that the U.S. really cares about, i.e. Afghanistan, India and nuclear weapons, internal Pakistani political developments are largely irrelevant for the U.S.," said Curtis, who served as former U.S. President Donald Trump's National Security Council senior director for South Asia.

She added that Khan's visit to Moscow had been a "disaster" in terms of U.S. relations, and that a new government in Islamabad could at least help mend ties "to some degree".

Khan has blamed the United States for the current political crisis, saying that Washington wanted him removed because of the recent Moscow trip. Washington denies any role.

(Additional reporting and writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Nick Macfie)

Russian soldiers at Chernobyl spent a month sleeping in a radioactive forest, exposed themselves to potentially dangerous levels of radiation, and ignored their own nuclear experts: report


Kelsey Vlamis
Sat, April 9, 2022

Maxar satellite imagery closeup of Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine on March 10, 2022.  Maxar Technologies 


Russian troops took over Chernobyl on February 24, the first day of the invasion of Ukraine.


The soldiers may have been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, according to reports.


Ukraine retook control of the plant last week after Russian troops retreated from areas around Kyiv.

Russian soldiers seem to have had a laissez-faire attitude while stationed in Ukraine at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant – one of the most toxic places on Earth.

Since one of the worst-ever nuclear disasters occurred at the plant in 1986, it has been dangerously contaminated with radioactivity. Chernobyl was taken over by Russian forces on February 24, the first day of the invasion, prompting international concern. Ukraine retook control last week after Russia retreated from the areas surrounding Kyiv.

Valeriy Simyonov, the chief safety engineer at Chernobyl, told The New York Times that Russian troops who took over the plant "came and did whatever they wanted" in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. He said the Russian military brought its own nuclear experts to the plant but their advice was not always taken.

For instance, Russian troops dug into toxic soil and camped out for weeks in the radioactive forest, The Times reported, adding there have not been confirmed cases of radiation sickness but that some health impacts of nuclear exposures can take years to appear.

In another instance, a Russian soldier picked up cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope, with his bare hands, The Times reported.

Ukrainian officials shared video on Wednesday they said showed Russia dug trenches in Chernobyl's radioactive "Red Forest," calling it a "complete neglect of human life, even of one's own subordinates."



Energoatom, Ukraine's state power company, also said Russian troops dug trenches and experienced signs of radiation sickness, prompting an investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations watchdog group.

Russian soldiers in Chernobyl 'picked up radioactive material with bare hands' and contaminated inside of plant

Rozina Sabur

TELEGRAM
Sat, April 9, 2022

WORD OF THE DAY

A dosimetrist measures the level of radiation around trenches dug by the Russian military in an area with high levels of radiation called the Red Forest - Gleb Garanich/Reuters

Russian soldiers who seized control of Chernobyl spread radioactive material around the plant, its staff have said, while one soldier even picked up a source of radiation with his bare hands.

Employees at the power plant have described how Russian soldiers, who seized the plant for a month in late February, may have been exposed to potentially harmful doses of radiation, which brings a high risk of cancer and other health issues, even decades later. One soldier is already reported to have died.

Drone footage released by the Ukrainian military revealed that the soldiers dug trenches in the nearby Red Forest, to this day one of the most radioactive places on earth at the site of one of the world's worst nuclear disasters

Journalists discovered food wrappings, military gear and even a blackened cooking pot, suggesting the Russian troops had spent an extended period of time in the trenches.

A room in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where Ukrainian National Guard servicemen were held as hostages - MIKHAIL PALINCHAK/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

One Russian military ration box found at the site exhibited radiation levels 50 times above naturally occurring values, CNN reported.

There was also evidence of a recent fire in the area, suggesting the soldiers were exposed to radioactive smoke along with dust from the disturbed ground.

Staff at the Chernobyl Power Plant said the Russian soldiers contaminated the power plant with radioactive material they carried back from the forest on their shoes.

The radiation levels increased at the power plant as a result, staff said.

"It's crazy, really," Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko told CNN. "I really have no idea why they did it.

"But we can see they went in there, the soldiers who went there, came back here and the level of radiation increased."

Officials at the plant said the increased radiation levels were only slightly above what the World Nuclear Association describes as naturally occurring radiation. But while a one-time contact may not be dangerous, continuous exposure poses a health hazard.

In one particularly ill-advised incident, a Russian soldier handled a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his bare hands, according to Valeriy Simyonov, the site's chief safety engineer.

He exposed himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of a Geiger counter, Mr Simyonov said. It was not clear what happened to the soldier.

Trenches dug by the Russian military are seen in an area with high levels of radiation called the Red Forest - Gleb Garanich /Reuters

While Chernobyl is not an active power station, its staff maintain the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster to avoid further radiation leaks.

Russian forces surrounded the area in late February, taking the Ukrainian soldiers guarding the plant hostage.

The Russians held the plant for a month but the site is now back under Ukraine's control.

Access to the site opened this week, providing evidence of how little regard the Russian soldiers had for nuclear safety.

During a visit to Chernobyl on Friday, Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine's former president, said that Putin's invasion of the site showed that Russia remained a real threat to the rest of Europe.

"Nuclear smoke is not limited by borders. It can reach Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and even Great Britain. The danger of nuclear contamination of Europe is very high, while Russia continues this war," he said.

What Does a Dosimetrist Do? | Indeed.com

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2021-07-23 · Dosimetrists are medical professionals who work in radiation oncology helping to care for cancer patients. Among their various job responsibilities, a dosimetrist has the important

Russian Blunders in Chernobyl: 'They Came and Did Whatever They Wanted.'

Andrew E. Kramer and Ivor Prickett

NEW YORK TIMES
Sat, April 9, 2022

LONG READ 

A crushed car and other debris litter a main intersection on Thursday, April 7, 2022, in the town of Chernobyl, Ukraine, where Russian forces established a staging ground for the assault on Kyiv. (Ivor Prickett/The New York Times)

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — As the staging ground for an assault on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, one of the most toxic places on Earth, was probably not the best choice. But that did not seem to bother the Russian generals who took over the site in the early stages of the war.

“We told them not to do it, that it was dangerous, but they ignored us,” Valeriy Simyonov, chief safety engineer for the Chernobyl nuclear site, said in an interview.

Apparently undeterred by safety concerns, the Russian forces tramped about the grounds with bulldozers and tanks, digging trenches and bunkers — and exposing themselves to potentially harmful doses of radiation lingering beneath the surface.

In a visit to the recently liberated nuclear station — site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, in 1986 — wind blew swirls of dust along the roads, and scenes of disregard for safety were everywhere, although Ukrainian nuclear officials say no major radiation leak was triggered by Russia’s monthlong military occupation.

At just one site of extensive trenching a few hundred yards outside the town of Chernobyl, the Russian army had dug an elaborate maze of sunken walkways and bunkers. An abandoned armored personnel carrier sat nearby.

The soldiers had apparently camped out for weeks in the radioactive forest. Although international nuclear safety experts say they have not confirmed any cases of radiation sickness among the soldiers, the cancers and other potential health problems associated with radiation exposure might not develop until decades later.

Simyonov said the Russian military had deployed officers from a nuclear, biological and chemical unit, as well as experts from Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear power company, who consulted with the Ukrainian scientists.

But the Russian nuclear experts seemed to hold little sway over the army commanders, he said. The military men seemed more preoccupied with planning the assault on Kyiv and, after that failed, using Chernobyl as an escape route to Belarus for their badly mauled troops.

“They came and did whatever they wanted” in the zone around the station, Simyonov said. Despite efforts by him and other Ukrainian nuclear engineers and technicians who remained at the site through the occupation, working around-the-clock and unable to leave except for one shift change in late March, the entrenching continued.

The earthworks were not the only instance of recklessness in the treatment of a site so toxic that it still holds the potential to spread radiation well beyond Ukraine’s borders.

In a particularly ill-advised action, a Russian soldier from a chemical, biological and nuclear protection unit picked up a source of cobalt-60 at one waste storage site with his bare hands, exposing himself to so much radiation in a few seconds that it went off the scales of a Geiger counter, Simyonov said. It was not clear what happened to the man, he said.

The most concerning moment, Simyonov said, came in mid-March, when electrical power was cut to a cooling pool that stores spent nuclear fuel rods that contain many times more radioactive material than was dispersed in the 1986 catastrophe. That raised the concern among Ukrainians of a fire if the water cooling the fuel rods boiled away, exposing them to the air, although that prospect was quickly dismissed by experts. “They’re emphasizing the worst-case scenarios, which are possible but not necessarily plausible,” said Edwin Lyman, a reactor expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The greater risk in a prolonged electricity shut-off, experts say, was that hydrogen generated by the spent fuel could accumulate and explode. Bruno Chareyron, laboratory director at CRIIRAD, a French group that monitors radiation risks, cited a 2008 study of the Chernobyl site suggesting this could happen within about 15 days.

Eventually, however, electricity was restored to the plant, allaying any fears.

The march to Kyiv on the western bank of the Dnieper River began and ended in Chernobyl for the 31st and 36th Combined Arms Armies of the Russian military, which traveled with an auxiliary of special forces and ethnic Chechen combatants.

The formation surged into Ukraine on Feb. 24, fought for most of a month in the suburbs of Kyiv and then retreated, leaving in its wake incinerated armored vehicles, its own war dead, widespread destruction and evidence of human rights abuses, including hundreds of civilian bodies on the streets in the town of Bucha.

As they retreated from Chernobyl, Russian troops blew up a bridge in the exclusion zone and planted a dense maze of anti-personnel mines, trip wires and booby traps around the defunct station. Two Ukrainian soldiers have stepped on mines in the past week, according to the Ukrainian government agency that manages the site.

In a bizarre final sign of the unit’s misadventures, Ukrainian soldiers found discarded appliances and electronic goods on roads in the Chernobyl zone. These were apparently looted from towns deeper inside Ukraine and cast off for unclear reasons in the final retreat. Reporters found one washing machine on a road shoulder just outside the town of Chernobyl.

Employees of the exclusion zone management agency based in Chernobyl suffered under the Russian occupation, but nothing approaching the barbarity visited on civilians in Bucha and other towns around Kyiv by the Russian forces.

The Russians had come in seemingly endless columns on the first day of the war, said Natasha Siloshenko, 45, a cook at a cafeteria serving nuclear workers. She had watched, warily, from a side street.

“There was a sea of vehicles,” she said. “They came in waves through the zone, driving fast toward Kyiv.”

There was little or no combat in the zone, so far as she could tell. The armored columns merely passed through.

During the occupation, Russian soldiers searched the apartments of nuclear technicians and engineers, firefighters and support staff in the town of Chernobyl. “They took valuable items” from apartments, she said, but there was little violence.

Workers tried to caution the Russians about radiation risks, to little avail.

The background radiation in most of the 18-mile exclusion zone around the nuclear plant, after 36 years, poses scant risks and is about equivalent to a high-altitude airplane flight. But in invisible hot spots, some covering an acre or two, some just a few square yards, radiation can soar to thousands of times normal ambient levels.

A soldier in such a spot would be exposed every hour to what experts consider a safe limit for an entire year, said Chareyron, the nuclear expert. The most-dangerous isotopes in the soil are cesium-137, strontium-90 and various isotopes of plutonium. Days or weeks spent in these areas bring a high risk of causing cancer, he said.

Throughout the zone, radioactive particles have settled into the soil to a depth of a few inches to a foot. They pose little threat if left underground, where their half-lives would tick by mostly harmlessly for decades or hundreds of years.

Until the Russian invasion, the main threat posed by this contamination was its absorption into mosses and trees that can burn in wildfires, disseminating the poisons in smoke, or through birds that eat radioactive, ground-dwelling insects.

“We told them, ‘This is the zone, you cannot go to certain places,’” Siloshenko said the workers had told the Russians. “They ignored us.”

At one dug-in position, Russian troops had burrowed a bunker from the sandy side of a road embankment and left heaps of trash — food wrappings, discarded boots, a blackened cooking pot — suggesting they had lived in the underground space for an extended time.

Nearby, a bulldozer had scraped away the topsoil to build berms for artillery emplacements and a half-dozen foxholes.

The forest around had recently burned, suggesting a fire had swept over the area during the Russian occupation, adding radioactive smoke to the exposure of the Russian soldiers, along with dust from disturbed ground.

The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, issued a statement Thursday saying the agency had been unable to confirm reports of Russian soldiers sickened by radiation in the zone or to make an independent assessment of the radiation levels at the site. The agency’s automated radiation sensors in Chernobyl have been inoperable for more than a month, he said.

The Ukrainian government’s radiation monitors ceased working the first day of the war, said Kateryna Pavlova, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Chernobyl Zone Management Agency. Readings from satellites, she said, showed slightly elevated radiation in some areas after the Russian occupation.

Armored vehicles that run on treads, rather than wheels, pose the primary risk for radiation safety in a wider area, as they churn up the radioactive soil and spread it into areas of Belarus and Russia as they retreat, Pavlova said. “The next person who comes along can be contaminated,” she said.

Although the five-day cutoff in electricity did not lead to any disasters, it was still cause for enormous anxiety among the plant’s operators, said Sergei Makluk, a shift supervisor interviewed at the nuclear station Thursday evening.

The backup generators that kicked in require about 18,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day. In the first days, Russian officers assured plant employees that they would have enough fuel, drawn from the supplies being trucked in for armored vehicles in the fighting in the Kyiv suburbs, Makluk said. But by the fifth day, with the military’s well-documented logistical problems, the officers said they would no longer supply the diesel.

“They said, ‘There’s not enough fuel for the front,’” and that a power cable leading to Belarus should be used to draw electricity from the Belarusian grid to cool the waste pool instead.

Simyonov, the chief safety engineer, characterized the threat to halt diesel supplies for generators as “blackmail” to force the authorities in Belarus to resolve the problem. However it happened, the electricity was restored in time and the nuclear fuel never came close to overheating.

All in all, the trench digging and other dubious activities posed a far-lower risk than the waste pool, and most of that to the Russian soldiers themselves, Simyonov said, adding wryly: “We invite them back to dig more trenches here, if they want.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CHERNOBYL 

 

FRACKING IS FASTER 

Shell's 13-Year Journey From Discovery to First Oil Shows Why U.S. Output Is Flat











Paul Takahashi
Fri, April 8, 2022, 4:01 AM·4 min read


(Bloomberg) -- Questioned by U.S. lawmakers this week, chief executives from the nation’s biggest oil companies took great pains to explain why they haven’t raised production fast enough to tame skyrocketing energy prices.

For Shell Plc’s highest-ranking U.S. manager, Gretchen Watkins, the answer was 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) southwest of Capitol Hill, floating in a shipyard near Corpus Christi, Texas. As Democratic lawmakers grilled Watkins and other executives about high gasoline prices, hundreds of workers in red and tan coveralls were putting the finishing touches on the Vito offshore oil platform. The 20-story production facility that weighs as much as a battleship is expected to begin pumping the equivalent of up to 100,000 barrels daily from beneath the Gulf of Mexico later this year.

By then, the multibillion-dollar project will have taken 13 years to evolve from the initial discovery of the Vito oilfield to production, underscoring the challenges of bringing offshore crude to market.

Unlike shale wells that cost $10 million or $15 million to drill and mere months to yield oil, offshore projects cost billions and rarely come online in less than a decade. This difference in business models explains why it’s so difficult for oil giants such as Shell to quickly ramp up production when geopolitical disruptions like Russia’s war in Ukraine upend markets. With crude fetching more than $100 a barrel, and retail gasoline prices soaring, politicians and consumer advocates want to know why the oil industry isn’t pumping faster.

“The 1.7 million barrels per day of production we have from the Gulf of Mexico right now is because of decisions made five, 10 years ago,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, which represents the offshore oil and wind industries. “It takes longer to bring offshore projects and barrels to market but you get massive volumes for long periods of time.”

Lawmakers’ calls to boost oil production come as the offshore sector is still recovering from the ascendance of shale more than a decade ago and more recent back-to-back oil busts. In the past half decade or so, drillers laid off thousands of workers and scrapped scores of rigs and other gear, in part because the oil industry’s attention shifted to shale fields that are cheaper and quicker to harvest.

The Biden administration’s campaign pledge to rid the world of fossil fuels to counter climate change has only complicated matters. White House efforts to curb leasing and drilling permitting in federal waters has crimped the flow of investment into the Gulf of Mexico, a key factor in the energy crunch now underway, Milito said.

Raising production rapidly is especially challenging for Shell as it moved aggressively in recent years to transition away from fossil fuels. The London-based company last year sold its shale holdings in the prolific Permian Basin and announced that its oil production had already peaked and will decline annually from here on out.

Shell, which competes with BP Plc for the title of top U.S. Gulf oil producer, has pledged to use the proceeds from its lower-emissions offshore oil business to help fund its energy transition and investments in wind and solar.

The Gulf of Mexico has historically been a stable source of domestic crude, producing 1.2 million to 2 million barrels daily over the past 20 years. A barrel of Gulf of Mexico crude has about half the carbon footprint of shale oil from the Permian Basin, in large part because the practice of burning off excess natural gas is much less common, according to S&P Global Platts.

“The Gulf of Mexico is a strong example of a strategic national asset that can play a key role in stabilizing supply and accelerating the transition to net-zero carbon emissions,” Watkins told lawmakers on Wednesday. “Oil produced from the Gulf of Mexico has one of the lowest greenhouse gas intensities in the world.”

Despite the lower emission benefits of offshore oil, the era of mega-projects and frenzied deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico may be over. When Shell began planning Vito a decade ago, the platform was expected to be similar to Appomattox, the company’s largest Gulf installation and capable of pumping 175,000 barrels a day for 40 years.

The Vito project was close to getting the go-ahead in 2014 when Saudi Arabia flooded the global market with cheap crude to hurt U.S. shale producers. The platform was redesigned in 2015 to slash the pricetag by 70 percent. When Vito departs coastal waters in June to finally tap the subsea field, it will be one-third the size of Appomattox and designed to work for 25 years.

“We designed an F-150, which can do 80 to 90 percent of what an F-350 can do,” Kurt Shallenberger, Vito’s project manager, said, referring to the iconic pickup trucks that are ubiquitous in Texas. “ You don’t design for a single cycle; it has to be affordable over the long cycle. If you look at the energy transition, we do think that that price is not going to stay where it is today.”