Batteries get hyped, but pumped hydro provides the vast majority of long-term energy storage essential for renewable power – here’s how it works

 Andrew Blakers, Australian National University; Bin Lu, Australian National University, and Matthew Stocks, Australian National University.

THE CONVERSATION
Sun, January 22, 2023 

The U.S. has thousands of lakes and reservoirs that could be paired for pumped hydro storage without the need for rivers. Ollo via Getty Images

To cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half within a decade, the Biden administration’s goal, the U.S. is going to need a lot more solar and wind power generation, and lots of cheap energy storage.

Wind and solar power vary over the course of a day, so energy storage is essential to provide a continuous flow of electricity. But today’s batteries are typically quite small and store enough energy for only a few hours of electricity. To rely more on wind and solar power, the U.S. will need more overnight and longer-term storage as well.

While battery innovations get a lot of attention, there’s a simple, proven long-term storage technique that’s been used in the U.S. since the 1920s.

It’s called pumped hydro energy storage. It involves pumping water uphill from one reservoir to another at a higher elevation for storage, then, when power is needed, releasing the water to flow downhill through turbines, generating electricity on its way to the lower reservoir.

Two types of pumped-storage hydropower; one doesn’t require a river. NREL

Pumped hydro storage is often overlooked in the U.S. because of concern about hydropower’s impact on rivers. But what many people don’t realize is that most of the best hydro storage sites aren’t on rivers at all.

We created a world atlas of potential sites for closed-looped pumped hydro – systems that don’t include a river – and found 35,000 paired sites in the U.S. with good potential. While many of these sites, which we located by satellite, are in rugged terrain and may be unsuitable for geological, hydrological, economic, environmental or social reasons, we estimate that only a few hundred sites are needed to support a 100% renewable U.S. electricity system.

Why wind and solar need long-term storage

To function properly, power grids must be able to match the incoming electricity supply to electricity demand in real time or they risk shortages or overloads.

There are several techniques that grid managers can use to keep that balance with variable sources like wind and solar. These include sharing power across large regions via interstate high-voltage transmission lines, managing demand – and using energy storage.

The Kidston pumped hydro project in Australia uses an old gold mine for reservoirs. Genex Power

Batteries deployed in homes, power stations and electric vehicles are preferred for energy storage times up to a few hours. They’re adept at managing the rise of solar power midday when the sun is overhead and releasing it when power demand peaks in the evenings.

Pumped hydro, on the other hand, allows for larger and longer storage than batteries, and that is essential in a wind- and solar-dominated electricity system. It is also cheaper for overnight and longer-term storage.

Off-river pumped hydro energy storage

In 2021, the U.S. had 43 operating pumped hydro plants with a total generating capacity of about 22 gigawatts and an energy storage capacity of 553 gigawatt-hours. They make up 93% of utility-scale storage in the country. Globally, pumped hydro’s share of energy storage is even higher – about 99% of energy storage volume.

Pump hydro projects can be controversial, particularly when they involve dams on rivers that flood land to create new reservoirs and can affect ecosystems.

Creating closed-loop systems that use pairs of existing lakes or reservoirs instead of rivers would avoid the need for new dams. A project planned in Bell County, Kentucky, for example, uses an old coal strip mine. Little additional land is needed except for transmission lines.

Examples from the atlas of off-river reservoirs with the potential to be paired for pumped hydro near Castle Rock, Colorado. Andrew Blakers, CC BY

An off-river pumped hydro system comprises a pair of reservoirs spaced several miles apart with an altitude difference of 200-800 meters (about 650-2,600 feet) and connected with pipes or tunnels. The reservoirs can be new or use old mining sites or existing lakes or reservoirs.

On sunny or windy days, water is pumped to the upper reservoir. At night, the water flows back down through the turbines to recover the stored energy.

A pair of 250-acre reservoirs with an altitude difference of 600 meters (1,969 feet) and 20-meter depth (65 feet) can store 24 gigawatt-hours of energy, meaning the system could supply 1 gigawatt of power for 24 hours, enough for a city of a million people.

The water can cycle between upper and lower reservoirs for a hundred years or more. Evaporation suppressors – small objects floating on the water to trap humid air – can help reduce water evaporation. In all, the amount of water needed to support a 100% renewable electricity system is about 3 liters per person per day, equivalent to 20 seconds of a morning shower. This is one-tenth of the water evaporated per person per day in the cooling systems of U.S. fossil fuel power stations.

Storage to support 100% renewables

Little pumped storage has been built in the U.S. in recent years because there hasn’t been much need, but that’s changing.

In 2020, about three-quarters of all new power capacity built was either solar photovoltaics or wind power. Their costs have been falling, making them cheaper to build in many areas than fossil fuels.

Australia is installing solar and wind three times faster per capita than the U.S. and is already facing the need for mass storage. It has two systems under construction that are designed to have more energy storage than all the utility batteries in the world put together; another dozen are under serious consideration. None involve new dams on rivers. The annual operating cost is low, and the working fluid is water rather than battery chemicals.

Shifting electricity to renewable energy and then electrifying vehicles and heating can eliminate most human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. has vast potential for off-river pumped hydro storage to help this happen, and it will need it as wind and solar power expand.

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This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. 

Written by: Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering, Australian National University, Matthew Stocks, Research Fellow, ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University, and Bin Lu, Research Fellow, Australian National University

Read more:

These 3 energy storage technologies can help solve the challenge of moving to 100% renewable electricity


A radical idea to get a high-renewable electric grid: Build way more solar and wind than needed


The US needs a macrogrid to move electricity from areas that make it to areas that need it

Andrew Blakers receives funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency

Bin Lu receives funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Matthew Stocks receives funding from ARENA for the Australian pumped hydro analysis. 

ZIONIST ETHNIC CLEANSING

Israeli lawmakers demand clearance of Bedouin encampment






Mon, January 23, 2023

KHAN AL-AHMAR, West Bank (Reuters) - Two influential Israeli lawmakers demanded the clearance of a Bedouin encampment near Jerusalem on Monday, reigniting a years-long battle over the site and urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to defy international pressure.

Khan al-Ahmar has been at the heart of a battle over land rights in the West Bank for years, with international bodies including the European Union urging Israel not to evacuate the site and move its inhabitants out by force.

But the election of a new government which includes nationalist right-wing parties determined to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank has brought new pressure to clear the encampment. The pressure has been particularly strong since the army prevented a small group of Jewish settlers setting up an outpost in the West Bank last week.

"All the necessary permissions are on the table, including the approval of the Supreme Court of Israel, it's just up to the defence minister and the prime minister to decide," said Yuli Edelstein, a Knesset deputy and chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee who joined Danny Danon, a member of Netanyahu's Likud party and former envoy to the United Nations.

"I think the sooner the actions will be taken, the less problems it will create," he said.

In 2018, after years of legal battles, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the demolition of the site, which was built without construction permits. Palestinians say such permits are virtually impossible for them to obtain.

Successive Israeli governments have held off from enforcing demolition following international calls to refrain from compulsory evacuation of the residents, who say their families have lived in the area since the 1950s.

On Monday, as the deputies stood on with a police escort a hill opposite the hamlet to demand clearance, a group of demonstrators with Palestinian flags gathered in Khan Al-Ahmar to show support.

The standoff follows a prolonged battle over an order to evacuate the West Bank area of Masafer Yatta near Hebron, a group of hamlets where Palestinian shepherds and farmers claim a historic connection to the land.

A scruffy cluster of tin and wooded shacks by the side of a highway out of Jerusalem between the Israeli settlements of Maale Adumim and Kfar Adumim, Khan al-Ahmar is home to around 180 people and includes an EU-funded school.

Palestinians say the aim of the pressure to evacuate the areas is to clear the way for expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the area which would form the core of any future Palestinian state.

"The goal is to empty the land and give it to the settlers," said Eid Jahalin, head of the Khan al-Ahmar compound.

(Reporting by James Mackenzie and Ali Sawafta, Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Lula floats shared 'trading currency' during Argentina trip


Brazil bilateral agreement signing ceremony in Buenos Aires

Mon, January 23, 2023 
By Lisandra Paraguassu

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) -Brazil and Argentina are in early talks to establish a shared unit of value for bilateral trade to reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Monday, though the move is not aimed at replacing existing currencies.

In Buenos Aires on his first international visit since taking office, Lula made the comments alongside Argentine President Alberto Fernandez, a leftist ally, who said there was little decided about what would be involved in such a proposal.

The discussions surfaced as part of an agreement to boost bilateral trade with more Brazilian export financing backed by Argentina's international collateral.

Argentina's economy is suffering from a series of challenges, including a lack of dollars, with the government battling to replenish foreign currency reserves while also grappling with an inflation rate of nearly 100% last year.

Leaders from both countries are meeting at a regional summit in the Argentine capital, where Lula vowed to resume a closer relationship after former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro distanced himself from Argentina.

"Our finance ministers, each with his own economic team, can make us a proposal for foreign trade and transactions between the two countries that is done in a common currency," Lula told reporters alongside Fernandez.

Fernandez said that he and Lula also discussed the possibility of shipping gas from Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale formation to its neighbor.

Brazil's development bank BNDES may finance the building of a pipeline to deliver the gas, Lula said.

Brazil's Finance Executive Secretary, Gabriel Galipolo, told Reuters that the currency, or "regional unit of account," would come alongside extra credit to support exports to Argentina through Brazilian banks that operate locally.

Brazil's government would offer guarantees to banks that helped provide financing, while Argentina, a major grains exporter, would have to provide collateral via hard assets like grains, gas or oil.

Under the plan, the Brazilian real and Argentine peso would continue to exist, with the new tender targeted narrowly at trade.

Brazil's Finance Minister Fernando Haddad said the presidents of both countries requested the creation of a clearing house with a common currency to settle accounts.

The currency has no name or deadline and would not seek euro-style monetary unification, he added.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu and Marcela Ayres; Writing by Gabriel Araujo and Peter Frontini; Editing by Brad Haynes, Paul Simao and Rosalba O'Brien)

Brazil and Argentina to discuss common currency


Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez greets Brazil's President 

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia

Sun, January 22, 2023 
By Lisandra Paraguassu

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Brazil and Argentina aim for greater economic integration, including the development of a common currency, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentine leader Alberto Fernandez said in a joint article they penned.

"We intend to overcome the barriers to our exchanges, simplify and modernize the rules and encourage the use of local currencies," says the text published on the Argentine website Perfil.

"We also decided to advance discussions on a common South American currency that can be used for both financial and commercial flows, reducing costs operations and our external vulnerability," the article said.

The idea of a common currency was raised originally in an article written last year by Fernando Haddad and Gabriel Galipolo, now Brazil's finance minister and his executive secretary, respectively, and was mentioned by Lula during the campaign.

Lula chose Argentina for his inaugural international trip since taking office, keeping with the tradition of first visiting Brazil's largest trading partner in the region. That follows four years of tense relations during the government of former Brazilian right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro.

Lula's trip to neighboring Argentina also marks the return of Brazil to the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which Brazil left in 2019 under order from Bolsonaro, who refused to participate in the regional group due to the presence of Cuba and Venezuela.

Both presidents emphasized the need for a good relationship between Argentina and Brazil to strengthen regional integration, according to the article.

The leaders also emphasized strengthening the Mercosur trade bloc, which includes Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and which Brazilian Finance Minister Haddad recently lamented has been abandoned in recent years.

"Together with our partners, we want Mercosur to constitute a platform for our effective integration into the world, through the joint negotiation of balanced trade agreements that respond to our strategic development objectives," both presidents said.

Earlier in the day, the Financial Times reported the neighboring nations will announce this week they are starting preparatory work on a common currency.

The plan, set to be discussed at a summit in Buenos Aires this week, will focus on how a new currency which Brazil suggests calling the "sur" (south) could boost regional trade and reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar, FT reported citing officials.

Politicians from both countries have discussed the idea already in 2019, but met with pushback from Brazil's central bank at the time.

Initially starting as a bilateral project, the initiative would later be extended to invite other Latin American nations, the report said, adding an official announcement was expected during Lula's visit to Argentina that starts on Sunday night.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu; Additional reporting by Jyoti Narayan in Bengaluru; Editing by Tomasz Janowski, Diane Craft and Chris Reese)

Brazil and Argentina are laying the groundwork for a Latin American currency to rival the US dollar



Diego Lasarte
Mon, January 23, 2023 

The presidents of Brazil and Argentina are considering creating a common Latin American currency.

Presidents Lula Ignacio de Silva of Brazil and Alberto Fernandez of Argentina announced the discussions at the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) conference this week in Buenos Aires, reviving a perennial proposal to challenge the US dollar’s dominance in the region.

In an article published in Perfil, an Argentinian newspaper, presidents Lula and Fernandez wrote their countries are exploring options to create a common currency called the sur (south in Spanish), meant to encourage financial and commercial transactions between the countries. Argentina economic minister Sergio Massa added Brazil and Argentina would invite other countries in Latin America to join, but urged patience, citing the difficulty of trade integration.

The move illustrates how Lula is pushing forward on his campaign promises to foster greater economic interdependence in the region. Elected to office at a time when the majority of Latin American countries have left-wing heads of state—including the region’s five largest economies, Lula and other leaders have close ties, raising the possibility of a new era of collaboration for the rapidly developing countries to counter economic influence by the United States.

The day after the announcement, Brazilian finance minister Fernando Haddad played down the idea of completely overhauling the real, saying the countries were exploring all opportunities to increase trade. In the meantime, Argentina is battling its worst inflation in three decades, while economic growth in Brazil is expected to slow as Lula follows through on plans to boost public spending.
Argentina’s surging inflation rate:

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The gaucho: Latin America has flirted with a common currency before

In 1987, the leaders of Brazil and Argentina announced the creation of a “currency unit to enable regional payments,” called the gaucho. Sound familiar?

The idea of a joint currency has long held traction in the region, with populist leaders pointing to the dominance of the dollar as evidence of neo-colonialism. Three countries in Latin America (Ecuador, El Salvador, and Panama) use the greenback as their primary domestic currency, ensuring an outsized American influence in their economies.

However, the formation of a joint currency is not an easy task. Initial negotiations for the European Union’s unified currency took over a decade. And, when the euro was launched in 1999, it was considered an invisible currency for the first three years and only used for accounting purposes and electronic payments. It wasn’t until 2009 that the Lisbon Treaty formed the Eurogroup, the official governing body of the currency.

Demand for an alternative to the US dollar is increasing worldwide, with Russia and China promoting their currencies for international payments, most notably after recent US sanctions on Russian raised the possibility that the dollar could become a tool of political exertion.

Additionally, the dollar’s relative strength in 2022 caused consumer prices and debt-repayment burdens in some regions to rise, with the new government of Myanmar saying the dollar was used to “bully smaller nations.”

Explainer-What Brazil and Argentina's 'currency union' really means


Argentina-Brazil bilateral agreement signing ceremony in Buenos Aires

Mon, January 23, 2023
By Marcela Ayres

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil and Argentina sparked some excitement on Sunday over the possibility of a potential "currency union", though the two countries are unlikely to ditch the real or peso any time soon. So what is the plan all about?

WHAT DID THEY SAY?

In a joint letter, new Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentine leader Alberto Fernandez said they wanted to "advance discussions on a common South American currency" to be used for financial and trade flows.

That sparked off chatter about a European Union-style zonal currency for South America, though officials have since played that down and analysts say a full-on currency union is a distant prospect.

Lula has since said that early talks are focused on developing a shared unit of value for bilateral trade to reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar.

Brazil's Executive Secretary of the Finance Ministry, Gabriel Galipolo, told Reuters that the "regional unit of account" would come alongside expanded credit to support exports to Argentina through banks that operate in the country.

He said that Brazil's government would offer guarantees to banks that helped provide financing, while Argentina, a major grains exporter, would have to provide collateral via hard assets like grains, gas or oil.

SO NO SOUTH AMERICAN EURO?

Under the plan, the Brazilian real and Argentine peso would continue to exist, with the new tender targeted narrowly at trade. That's very different from, say, the euro, which is used for all kinds of transactions within the European bloc.

The tender would be used in clearing houses to execute trade payments between the two countries, helping in part to trim reliance on the dollar. That is key for Argentina, which is grappling with low foreign currency reserves after years of debt crises.

"This currency would not circulate within Brazil or Argentina. It's specifically to be a common denominator of trade exchanges," said Fabio Terra, professor of Economics at the Federal University of ABC.

WHAT WOULD IT BE WORTH?

How the new currency would be valued is still to be debated, but the Brazilian government is looking at stablecoins as a possible reference, Galipolo told Reuters.

Digital stablecoins, pegged to an asset like gold, or major currencies such as the euro, pound, and U.S. dollar, have emerged as issuers seek to expand uses for digital currencies, which are generally unregulated and volatile.

"It is obvious that the real will have the greatest weight in the equation because it is the most liquid currency we have in the international market," Galipolo said.

HAS THIS BEEN TRIED BEFORE?

In the late 1980s, Brazil and Argentina discussed the idea of a shared currency for trade called the 'gaucho', which fell by the wayside due to challenge implementing the idea. In 2019, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro touted plans for a currency union, which also never materialized.

The economic team of Brazil's government, however, now thinks a combined trade-focused tender and beefed-up financing could help the South American country claw back trade with Argentina it has lost to China in recent years.

(Reporting by Marcela Ayres, Editing by Adam Jourdan and Rosalba O'Brien)

Capitalist Economists Laugh Off South America’s Common Currency Idea



Juan Pablo Spinetto
Mon, January 23, 2023 at 9:39 AM MST·2 min read

(Bloomberg) -- Top economists dismissed the creation of a common currency by Argentina and Brazil, saying the idea floated by the presidents of both countries on Sunday faces too many practical obstacles for it to become reality.

Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz SE and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, wrote on Twitter that South America’s two largest economies are in no position to make the idea succeed given their current conditions, and that the implementation of a common currency is “far from probable.”

John Barrdear, an economist at the Bank of England, said a currency union between both countries would be “ambitious,” and Chile’s former central bank President Jose De Gregorio said Brazil would risk its sound monetary policy by linking its currency to Argentina: “It doesn’t make much sense,” he told Radio Infinita.

Olivier Blanchard, a former International Monetary Fund chief economist, called the proposal “insane” while former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers labeled it “highly problematic given the differences in the economies.”

Brazil and Argentina are seeking to renew discussions on forming a common currency for financial and commercial transactions, Presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Alberto Fernandez wrote in a joint article in a local newspaper on Sunday ahead of a regional summit taking place in Buenos Aires this week.

While the proposal aims to boost regional trade and integration of the neighboring countries, it faces numerous political and economic hurdles before becoming reality. Similar attempts in past decades failed to gather steam amid macroeconomic instability and government changes.

Argentina’s annual inflation of almost 100% compared to Brazil’s 5.8% and the fast depreciation of the peso in recent years are an immediate challenge to the idea of a common currency, among other different obstacles.

What Bloomberg Economics Says

“The idea of a single South American currency — or even one only for Brazil and Argentina — lacks in merit and has a poor timing. The region does not have what it takes to justify and sustain a single currency: there’s no labor and capital mobility, there’s price and wages rigidities in several countries, the business cycles are not synchronous, and most of the countries in the region do not have the fiscal space to afford the fiscal transfers that this kind of mechanism demands.”

— Adriana Dupita, Brazil and Argentina economist

Even if it’s hard to see a unified Argentina-Brazil currency any time soon, the idea still triggered a cascade of different comments on social media. Brian Armstrong, chief executive officer of Coinbase Global Inc., a publicly traded crypto exchange, suggested the South American countries should instead adopt Bitcoin in the long term.

Analysis-Lula confronts Brazil military's pro-Bolsonaro lean with carrot and stick


Argentina-Brazil bilateral agreement signing ceremony in Buenos Aires

Mon, January 23, 2023 
By Anthony Boadle

BRASILIA (Reuters) - President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has taken a carrot-and-stick approach to asserting authority over Brazil's armed forces and containing sympathies in the barracks for his predecessor after violent unrest in the capital this month.

On Saturday, Lula fired the army commander for not following his government's orders to dismantle a tent city of Bolsonaro supporters who clamored for a military coup and stormed government buildings on Jan. 8, a government source said.

Lula replaced the commander with another army general who days earlier was seen in a video on social media haranguing his troops on the need to respect the result of the October election in which the leftist Lula narrowly defeated far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.

In a televised interview last week, Lula said he was convinced that parts of the armed forces were complicit in the storming of Brasilia, the worst attack on Brazil's seats of power since the end of a 21-year military dictatorship in 1985.

"I thought it was the beginning of a coup d'état. I even had the impression that people were following the guidance that Bolsonaro had given them for a long time," Lula said.

Lula vowed to bring to justice anyone involved, civilian or military, as demanded by his Workers Party.

But at a Friday meeting the commanders of the armed forces, Lula did not bring up the attack, according to a government official who witnessed the meeting.

Instead, he focused on the resources the military says it needs to defend Latin America's largest nation, bringing industry leaders to the meeting to discuss investments in hardware and manufacturing, according to a defense ministry statement.

Lula's focus on industrial development and generous spending to win over skeptics in uniform echoed his 2003-2010 presidency, highlighting his readiness to build bridges with military brass even as fellow leftists call for him to clean house.

The armed forces' strategic plans to modernize its equipment included developing a nuclear-powered submarine contracted with France's Naval Group, a subsidiary of defense contractor Thales.

Defense expert and former foreign policy congressional staffer Pepe Rezende said Brazil's Navy is looking for additional frigates built with German technology by a joint venture between ThyssenKrup AG and Brazil's Embraer SA.

The Air Force wants to buy 26 more Gripen fighters from Saab AB to be built in Brazil via technology transfer, and funds to complete the development of the MTC-300 cruise missile, the Brazilian Tomahawk missile with a range of 300 kilometers, that has an artillery version for the army, Rezende said.

The army is looking to buy drones and auto-propelled cannons. Above all, it wants armored vehicles to replace the 50-year-old Cascavel, and is in talks with Italy's Iveco-Oto Melara Consortium, which is 50% owned by Leonardo, he said.

GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE

Whether a splurge on military hardware will help tamp down pro-Bolsonaro sentiment in the armed forces is open to question.

Lula has asked the commanders to rid the barracks of politics, the source with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Defense experts and political risk analysts say that cannot be done overnight after four years in which military officers gained prominence and wages in government posts under Bolsonaro.

The demonstrators clamoring for a coup outside the army headquarters in Brasilia included families of military officers with government jobs.

Oliver Stuenkel, at the Getulio Vargas Foundation think tank in Sao Paulo, told Reuters that Lula had to replace the army commander after media reports of his insubordination, out of political necessity, because he is facing public pressure to do something about pro-Bolsonaro sympathies in the military.

"The government is not willing to do more than that to remove anti-democratic elements from the military and go after the many skeletons in the armed forces closet," Stuenkel said.

Brazil's military dictatorship handed power to civilian government in 1985, but individual officers were never brought to trial for human rights abuses as in Argentina and Chile, so the armed forces still feel they have a say in the running the country, Stuenkel added. Reforming this relationship would take time and effort that would distract from Lula's main objective of reducing poverty and inequality, he said.

"Lula wants this to go away as soon as possible," he added. "Starting to punish members of the armed forces for what happened may be legally the right thing to do but politically it would open a Pandora's box."

Defense Minister Jose Mucio, a conservative politician whose appointment was well received by the armed forces, has sought to dissuade Lula from harsh steps antagonizing the military, said Paulo Kramer, a University of Brasilia professor that studies the army.

But distrust of Lula's Workers Party has become ingrained in a military force still trained in Cold War national security doctrines, said Andre Cesar at Hold Assessoria Legislativa consultancy.

"It is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle, because relations between the military and a left-wing government will always be strained," he said.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle and Lisandra Paraguassu)

Republican Governor Nixes Thousands of Green Energy Jobs, Fearmongers About Communism

Molly Taft
Mon, January 23, 2023 

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin delivers his State of the Commonwealth address on January 11, 2023.

The governor of Virginia is blocking a potential Ford battery factory that would have provided thousands of jobs in an impoverished area—based on fearmongering about China.

The proposed factory is a partnership between Ford and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., also known as CATL, a Chinese battery manufacturer. As of last year, CATL was the world’s largest manufacturer of batteries for electric vehicles, holding onto a whopping 50% of the market share; it is one of Tesla’s most important suppliers. The $3.5 billion factory, which would produce EV batteries for Ford vehicles, would have created some 2,500 jobs in one of Virginia’s poorest areas, the Richmond-Times Dispatch reported.

All those jobs, it seems, weren’t tempting enough for Youngkin. Just days after news of the Ford and CATL partnership—and the possible choice of Virginia as a location—broke, the Daily Caller, a right-wing outlet, reported that Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin had instructed the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, a state agency, to take Virginia out of the running for housing the plant.

Youngkin didn’t publicly comment on the move until his annual state address on January 11. “I’ve said before that I want ‘Made in America’ to mean ‘Made in Virginia.’ But let me be clear, ‘Made in Virginia’ cannot be a front for the Chinese Communist Party,” Youngkin said during the address. Later, Youngkin told reporters that the Biden administration has a “maniacal focus on getting rid of all fossil fuel generation, replacing it with solar, wind, or replacing every car immediately with batteries” when “the reality is that the technology that in fact drives all that is owned and dominated by the Chinese.”

Youngkin elaborated on his comments in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Friday, when he referred to the Ford-CATL partnership as “a Trojan-horse relationship.”

“This is not a zero-sum game and I would have loved to have Ford come to Virginia and build a battery plant, if they were not using it as a front for a company that’s controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

Youngkin’s actions don’t come in a vacuum; in fact, they may signal a coming wave of similar Republican attitude. As Axios reporter Jael Holzman outlined on Twitter last week, Republicans have begun raising concerns about Chinese control as a way to stymie or stall green energy developments. Politicians, including Sen. Marco Rubio and Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, have recently expressed concerns about a Texas-based battery company with some Chinese operations that got a Department of Energy grant, while the GOP is reportedly looking into other clean energy firms for Chinese connections, according to Holzman.

Bloomberg reported in December that the two companies were considering a setup that would allow Ford to own the plant, while CATL would oversee the production of the batteries. This arrangement would allow the factory to get production credits outlined in the Inflation Reduction Act that encourage national production of EV batteries. Youngkin told Bloomberg that he was also concerned about the potential complexities involving the subsidies when it came to the partnership.

Some Virginia politicians saw the move as little more than an attempt to court Republican voters ahead of Youngkin’s potential 2024 presidential bid.

“To deny [people in the community] jobs because you’re in last place in Republican presidential primaries [is] gubernatorial malpractice,” Democratic State Sen. Scott Surovell told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “I mean, this is clearly just obvious to me that the governor’s in some kind of out-China-bashing-contest with [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis and Governor Greg Abbott out of Texas.”

Gizmodo

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/01/former-pro-china-carlyle-group-ceo.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/01/cut-nose-spite-face-youngkin-says-ford.html

BYE BYE STOCKTON

California’s Next Flood Could Destroy One of Its Most Diverse Cities. Will Lawmakers Try to Save It?

Jake Bittle, Grist
Mon, January 23, 2023 

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)


In early 1862, a storm of biblical proportions struck California, dropping more than 120 inches of rain and snow on the state over two months. The entire state flooded, but nowhere was the deluge worse than in the Central Valley, a gash of fertile land that runs down the middle of the state between two mountain ranges. In the spring, as melting snow mixed with torrential rain, the valley transformed into “a perfect sea,” as one observer put it, vanishing beneath 30 feet of water that poured from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. People rowed through town streets on canoes. A quarter of all the cows in the state drowned. It took months for the water to drain out.

More than 150 years later, climate scientists say the state is due for a repeat of that massive storm. A growing body of research has found that global warming is increasing the likelihood of a monster storm that could inundate the Central Valley once again, causing what one study from UCLA and the National Atmospheric Center called “historically unprecedented surface runoff” in the region. Not only would this runoff destroy thousands of homes, it would also ravage a region that serves as the nation’s foremost agricultural breadbasket. The study found that global warming has already increased the likelihood of such a storm by 234 percent.

In the crosshairs of that storm is the Stockton metropolitan area, which sits at the mouth of the San Joaquin River. Stockton and its neighboring suburbs are home to almost 800,000 people, and they rank among the most diverse places in the country — as well as some of the most economically distressed places in California. Thanks to decades of disinvestment, the city’s only flood protection comes from decades-old, leak-prone levees. If a major rain event caused enough runoff to surge down the mountains and northward along the San Joaquin, it could burst through those levees, inundating the city and flooding tens of thousands of homes. One federal study found that much of Stockton would vanish beneath 10 to 12 feet of water, and floods in the lowest-lying areas could be twice as deep. The result would be a humanitarian disaster just as costly and as deadly as Hurricane Katrina.

The “atmospheric river” rainstorms that rolled into California from the Pacific Ocean this month have underscored the Golden State’s vulnerability to floods, but experts insist that the destruction of Stockton isn’t inevitable. As is the case in flood-prone communities across the country, local officials know how to manage water on the San Joaquin River, but they’ve struggled to obtain funding for Stockton and other disadvantaged cities along the waterway. Even as California lawmakers have plowed money into drought response in recent years, they’ve left flood measures by the wayside, and the federal government has also been slow to fund major improvements.

“Areas like Stockton that don’t have political clout … often get bypassed terms of consideration for funding,” said Mike Machado, a former California state senator who has long advocated for better flood management in the Central Valley. “Even if any funding is available, Stockton is usually at the bottom of the list.”

Even as Stockton’s infrastructure decays, the city’s flood risk is only increasing thanks to climate change, which will cause more severe rains in the San Joaquin Valley and further stress the city’s levees. The city has grown at a rapid pace over the past two decades, but state and local officials have been more focused on protecting local agricultural irrigators from drought than on protecting the city’s residents from flooding. When the next big storm hits, it is Stockton’s communities of color, which make up more than 80 percent of the city’s population, that will see the worst of the damage.

“We are at the bottom of the bowl,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, the executive director of Restore the Delta, a Stockton-based environmental nonprofit. “We’re the drain. And they don’t value us.”

The Central Valley’s flood protection system has never been equal. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, farmers and ranchers constructed a hodgepodge of levees along rivers like the San Joaquin, piling sand only high enough so that water would flood someone else’s land rather than their own. The levees were owned and maintained by local districts, rather than any centralized governing body, so wealthier areas ended up with stronger defenses.

As the region’s flood protection system expanded, the San Joaquin region fell behind. To protect the state capital of Sacramento in the 1920s, the federal Army Corps of Engineers built a diversion system called the Yolo Bypass that funnels water away from the city, but Stockton never saw any similar investment. Local authorities couldn’t raise as much money to bolster levees as their counterparts around Sacramento, and money from the state and the federal government never filled the gap.

This is in part because lawmakers have overlooked Stockton’s vulnerable populations, according to Jane Dolan, president of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, a state agency that oversees flood management. But Dolan says the disparity also exists because leaders along the San Joaquin River have long tended to focus more on securing water for agricultural irrigation than on managing the rivers, which has made it hard to secure momentum for big flood improvements.

“They don’t have that consensus about managing floodwaters and allowing space for the river,” she told Grist. “Politicians from city councils to Congress are all focused on water supply.”

Not only does the San Joaquin have the shoddiest flood protection infrastructure, but it also faces the greatest degree of risk from climate-fueled storms. Both the UCLA study and a separate study by Dolan’s organization found that warmer climates will increase runoff in the San Joaquin watershed by more than they will in the Sacramento watershed — in large part because higher temperatures will cause what used to be snow to fall as rain instead. Furthermore, Stockton faces flood risk from all sides: Not only does the San Joaquin River flood during rain events, but the Calaveras River on the city’s north side does as well. Water from the Pacific Ocean could even flood the city from the west during high tides as it pushes across a long flat expanse known as the Delta.

“The San Joaquin Valley is the most vulnerable to intense floods, because the climate science is clear that there will be less snow there, and more rain,” said Dolan. The river’s levee system was designed for a long snowmelt, not an all-at-once deluge, she added, which means that bigger atmospheric river storms are all but certain to overwhelm it.

Despite this risk, Stockton has expanded rapidly over the past few decades. Not only has the city grown into a hub for the valley’s all-important agricultural industry, its relatively cheap land and proximity to the populous San Francisco Bay Area has made it a boom site for new warehouses and packing facilities owned by companies like Amazon. During the last housing boom, developers built subdivision after subdivision along the San Joaquin River to house new arrivals, relying on the decades-old levees to protect them.

As it has grown, Stockton has become one of the most diverse cities in the country, with substantial Mexican, Filipino, Chinese, Cambodian, and African American communities. Many of these have poverty rates that are much higher than the state average, and they also face severe environmental justice risks: The neighborhoods of southwest Stockton are surrounded by freeways, factories, and port infrastructure, making them among the most exposed in the state to soot and diesel pollution.

“Because of redlining and historical discrimination, we have a lot of people of color, and people are at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, right behind these levees,” said Barrigan-Parrilla.

Mary Gómez is a 50-year resident of the Conway Houses, a low-income housing development on the south side of Stockton. The development sits just feet from the Walker Slough, a small waterway that drains off the San Joaquin River. Gómez, 70, told Grist that she worries about flooding from the river frequently and feels the area doesn’t get enough attention from city officials.

“It’s because they think we’re ghetto,” she said. “We are worried, because what if it floods [upstream] and we don’t hear about it, and they don’t tell us? Who’s gonna come and help us, or get us out? There’s so many of us that don’t have cars, that have kids.”

Gómez said she also worries about whether the neighborhood’s elderly and disabled could get out in time. The last time it came close to flooding, she said, her neighbors told her that she should protect her house with sandbags.

For decades, local officials have tried to secure state and federal money for flood protection projects, but progress has been slow as the risk has only increased. Way back in 1995, when the federal government was weighing whether to deem the levees in north and central Stockton inadequate, the area’s flood control authority had to self-finance levee improvements through tax assessments on local property owners — a costly proposition in a relatively low-income area with a meager tax base.

“We have a severely disadvantaged community,” said Chris Elias, director of the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency, the authority that manages the region’s levees. “We cannot impose too much burden on them — they’ve borne too much burden already. So we explore those other funding avenues. But just like everything else, we are competing with a whole bunch of other priorities that the state has.”

The state has passed a number of bond measures over the years to fund flood improvements, but local officials say Stockton hasn’t received a fair share of that money. For every five dollars spent in Sacramento, Elias said, Stockton has seen only one dollar of spending. He said that’s in part because the state money went to projects that were already “shovel-ready,” and Stockton-area officials lacked the resources to design projects and apply for grants.

Federal help has also been hard to come by. In 2010 the Army Corps of Engineers finally decreed that many of Stockton’s levees were inadequate and that much of the city was vulnerable to massive flooding. The agency spent the next seven years studying the problem, but in the end it proposed only a partial solution. While the Corps agreed to pursue a $1.3 billion suite of levee repair projects in north and central Stockton, it punted on a proposal to bolster the levees in south Stockton and two nearby suburbs — the parts of the area that faced the greatest economic hardship and the greatest exposure to flooding on the San Joaquin. The agency’s argument was that repairing levees in those areas would encourage new development, thus increasing the risk. It has since agreed to revisit that decision, but in the meantime tens of thousands residents in the area are still just as vulnerable to flooding as they were a decade ago.

In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson from the Corps’s Sacramento district said that the agency had been constrained by an executive order that limits federal investment in flood-prone areas.

“Deferring decisions regarding the area to the south of Stockton … allowed [the Corps] and its state and local partners to prevent further delays in gaining congressional authorization to protect Stockton from catastrophic flooding,” said the spokesperson. He added that the agency plans to “reexamine federal interest in the [area] and identify potential flood risk management and ecosystem restoration opportunities.… However, the outcomes of that study are not yet determined.”

Another problem is that levees alone aren’t sufficient as a flood management strategy. No matter how high you build a levee, a future flood can always overtop it, and the consequences when a levee breaks are often worse than they would have been if the levee hadn’t been there in the first place, as was demonstrated in New Orleans after Katrina. Many local officials believe that, instead of just building more levees, the state should give flood waters another place to go by creating natural floodplains out of conserved land. That’s what the state did near Sacramento with the Yolo Bypass.

“You can build a levee stronger and better, but it’s still vulnerable to breaking,” said John Cain, director of conservation at River Partners, a nonprofit that advocates for such floodplain restoration projects. “If you want to have more resiliency in the system, you literally need more room.”

Cain’s organization has put this approach to the test about 20 miles upstream on the San Joaquin by purchasing unused land and converting it into a natural floodplain. During big rain events, water flowing downstream on the river can spill onto the reserved land instead of flowing toward Stockton, taking pressure off the city’s levees. Officials in Stockton have been trying to replicate this strategy closer to the city by creating a wide flood bypass called Paradise Cut on reserved farmland. The project would reduce the depth of potential flooding in the Stockton area by as much as two feet, but the Army Corps rejected that project back in 2018 as well, questioning whether it would pass a cost-benefit analysis.

Meanwhile, state funding for flood management has all but dried up even as lawmakers plow billions into drought relief, leaving Stockton dependent on the slow-moving Army Corps of Engineers for project money. Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget for the coming year proposes to spend just $135 million on flood management, less than a third of what Dolan’s organization says the state should be spending every year. The proposed budget also seeks to claw back $40 million that was allocated in last year’s budget for floodplain restoration along the San Joaquin River.

Newsom’s office did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Machado, the former state senator, hopes this month’s storms will bring some attention to flood risk in the state, but he’s not sure the attention will translate into new spending.

“After a flood, the holes get plugged, the sun comes out, and they forget,” he told Grist. “All of a sudden you’re in a drought period, or an extended period with no imminent threat of a flood, and it becomes a backburner issue.”

Gabriela Aoun contributed reporting to this story.

Gizmodo

Julian Sands is the latest to vanish. Is the climate crisis behind a string of California hiker tragedies?

Josh Marcus
Mon, January 23, 2023 

From top, clockwise: The British actor Julian Sands who has been missing for several days after hiking on Mount Baldy, right. Jeffrey Morton and Crystal Paula Gonzalez recently died while hiking during California’s severe storms (Getty/iStock/Orange County Sheriff’s Department/cbsnews)

On a clear day, the peak of southern California’s 10,000ft Mount Baldy looms over the Los Angeles skyline.

The mountain is emblematic of a growing threat: the deadly impact of the climate crisis on one of America’s favourite pastimes, the great outdoors.

This month, as climate-amped superstorms battered California, first responders have carried out 14 rescue missions on Mount Baldy’s peak, the highest summit in the San Gabriel mountain range.

Two people have died and a third man, the British actor Julian Sands, is still missing after nearly a week.

“We’ve had so many storms over southern California. Those conditions up there are extremely dangerous at the moment,” Mara Rodriguez, of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, told The Independent.


Conditions are so treacherous on the mountain – wind-blown sheets of thick ice, avalanche risk and heavy snow – that police have often been unable to carry out rescue efforts on the ground.

“We had to pull ground crews out Saturday evening,” Ms Rodriguez said of the search for Sands, who has been described by family members to The Independent as a “heroic mountaineer” and experienced outdoorsman.

“We haven’t been able to reinsert them due to the condition of that area. There’s concerns about avalanches up there. The ice is just crazy dangerous so all of our search efforts at this point have been by air.”

Los Angeles with Mount Baldy and the San Gabriel mountain range behind (Getty)

Multiple people have died or been reported missing in the San Gabriel mountains during the storms.

Crystal Paula Gonzalez, a mother-of-four known to family as the “Hiking Queen”, died after falling more than 500ft down Mount Baldy last Sunday.

Her last posts on Facebook revealed how she had decided to turn around because of deteriorating conditions on the mountain.

“Our mother was a kind, loving, lively soul,” her daughters said in a statement. “She had a thirst for adventure that she instilled in all of us during our childhood. She inspired those that met her on the trails. She loved life and life loved her back.”

Another experienced hiker, Bob Gregory, 61, has been missing since last Friday on Mount Islip in the San Gabriel range.

Julian Sands has been missing in the San Gabriel mountain range for nearly a week (Getty Images)

Mr Gregory had shared a trail map of his planned route but rescue teams have been unable to locate him. Deep snow has impeded ground missions and limited rescuers to aerial searches over the massive snow drifts.

"My worst fear is that you know accidents, accidents happen," his son, Jimmy Gregory, told local TV station KCAL. "He probably slipped. He probably went off the wrong trail. Or even the weather right now – weather is, really, a big factor right now."

In early January, one missing hiker, 63-year-old Jeffrey Morton was found dead in southern California’s Carbon Canyon Regional Park after failing to return from a pre-dawn hike.

Officials said poor weather in the area had hampered their ability to use helicopters in the search.

Such dangerous conditions will only worsen due to the climate crisis, Joe Biden said on Thursday, as he visited California to assess the damage from the severe storms.

“If anybody doubts climate is changing, they must have been asleep for the last couple of years,” Mr Biden said.

“Extreme weather caused by climate change means stronger and more frequent storms, more intense drought, longer wildfire seasons, all of which threatens communities across California.”

The recent storms that have swamped California are called “atmospheric rivers” – bands of water vapour that form over the ocean and can be hundreds of kilometres wide.

When these atmospheric rivers hit the heights of mountain ranges, the water vapour becomes heavy snowfall.

Atmospheric rivers increase the risks of flash flooding and rock slides as California has witnessed across the state in recent weeks.

And the problem is worsening due to the climate crisis, scientists have warned. As the air heats up, it becomes capable of holding more water and leads to more rainfall.

Organisations like the American Hiking Society (AHS) have warned about the impacts of the climate crisis on outdoor pursuits.

“World renowned trails like the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), have been forced to close sections due to fires, drought conditions leave hikers without water sources, and views are obstructed and health impacted by smoke,” the AHS said. “Impacts like extreme heat, flooding, and other exacerbated weather events are being felt around the world.”

And it’s not just during winter rain storms.

Extreme heatwaves and wildfires, both exacerbated by the climate crisis, have led to the temporary closure of hundreds of kilometres of the Pacific Crest Trail, one of the US’s most treasured hiking trails which begins at the Mexica border and runs 4,264km (2,650 miles) through California, Oregon, and Washington to Canada.

“We see a lot of people altering their trip plans because of smoke, because of fire impacts,” Jennifer Tripp, trail operations manager for the PCT, told local TV station KCRA.

Last autumn, extreme heat was blamed for several hikers’ deaths in California and Arizona.

The new challenges to hiking in California are a reminder that the climate crisis goes beyond just impacting natural systems like polar bear migration or shark habitat, but extends to how humans interact with those systems, sometimes with deadly results.

This article was amended on January 23 2023. A caption previously identified one of the men photographed as missing hiker Bob Gregory, but this was not the case. The image shows Jeffrey Morton, whose body was found in January.

CORPORATE WELFARE BUMS

Canada oil group says federal, provincial tension blocking carbon capture talks


 TD Securities Calgary Energy Conference in Calgary

Mon, January 23, 2023 
By Nia Williams and Steve Scherer

Ottawa (Reuters) -The chief executive of Cenovus Energy Inc on Monday said friction between the federal and Alberta governments was making it difficult to hold meaningful discussions on funding carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology needed to decarbonize the oil and gas sector.

Cenovus CEO Alex Pourbaix was speaking on behalf of the Pathways Alliance, a collaboration between Canada's six largest oil sands producers targeting net-zero emissions by 2050. It is planning to develop a CCS hub in northern Alberta, expected to cost C$16.5 billion ($12.3 billion) by 2030.

Of that, the group wants public money to fund 66%, or roughly C$10.9 billion, and says government support would speed up decarbonization and help establish a competitive clean-tech industry in Canada.

So far the federal government has unveiled an investment tax credit worth C$2.6 billion over the next five years, but both Ottawa and Alberta say the other should contribute more.

Alberta's conservative Premier Danielle Smith is a vocal critic of Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and has slammed many aspects of federal climate policy, accusing Ottawa of trying to cripple the western province's energy sector.

Trudeau told Reuters in an interview earlier this month Alberta was "hesitating around investing in anything related to climate change".

"It's very hard to have meaningful discussions with another party when you're lobbing rocks at each other," Pourbaix told Reuters in an interview.

"I would like to see the temperature turned down a little bit."

Pourbaix said there still needs to be a "significant discussion" between the federal and provincial governments and industry, and Pathways has set a target for that to happen early this year.

"I've had both levels of government telling me that they're supportive of doing that and engaging on that. I think it has not occurred yet to the level it needs to resolve the differences that the groups may have," he added.

Smith must win an election in May in order to remain Alberta's premier.

Asked to comment on the industry's call to tone down political rhetoric, Taylor Hides, a spokesperson in Smith's office, said Alberta's government is willing to invest in CCS and is looking forward to "working with our industry partners" to create jobs.

Keean Nembhard, a spokesperson for the federal natural resources ministry, said the government is looking forward to "continued dialogue with provinces and territories" on the best ways to promote CCS growth, but noted the technology alone is not a "silver bullet" to cut emissions.

Canada is the world's fourth-largest producer of crude, most of which comes from Alberta's oil sands. The oil and gas sector is the country's highest-polluting industry and needs to drastically cut emissions if Canada is to achieve its climate commitments.

'NO TIME TO SLIP'

The Pathways Alliance has already said Ottawa's goal of cutting oil and gas emissions 42% by 2030, equivalent to a 35-megatonne reduction, is impossible.

The group could achieve a 22-megatonne reduction in emissions by 2030, said Pathways President Kendall Dilling, but that depends on key components like public funding being agreed and a smooth regulatory approval process for CCS.

"We don't have time to slip," Dilling said.

"Canada's track record on major infrastructure development in the last decade has been abysmal," he said. "If we run into those same kind of troubles, then 2030 will not be realized."

Another recent source of federal-provincial conflict has been Ottawa's "Just Transition" bill, which Ottawa says is meant to help retrain fossil fuel workers for clean energy jobs, but which Smith says will instead destroy better paying oil and gas jobs.

Pourbaix and Derek Evans, CEO of Pathways member MEG Energy Corp, said their biggest concern is that Alberta will not have enough workers for decarbonizing the oil patch.

"I'm terrified we don't have enough people on our side of the business to get the work done today, let alone what we're planning on doing if we're going to spend C$16.5 billion by 2030," Evans said.

The six companies in the Pathways Alliance, representing 95% of Canada's oil sands production, are Cenovus, MEG, Suncor Energy Inc, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, Imperial Oil Ltd and ConocoPhillips.

($1 = 1.3383 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Nia Williams in British Columbia and Steve Scherer in Ottawa; Editing by Marguerita Choy, Jonathan Oatis and Deepa Babington)

With Starship testing, SpaceX moves one step closer to making science fiction a reality



Aria Alamalhodaei
Mon, January 23, 2023 

SpaceX is poised to conduct a wet dress rehearsal of the Starship launch system from its Starbase site in southeastern Texas, a major milestone in CEO Elon Musk’s quest to turn long-haul interplanetary transportation from science fiction to reality.

It's the strongest signal yet that Starship’s first orbital flight test could well and truly be imminent. The wet dress is a critical series of prelaunch tests that includes propellant loading of both the upper stage and booster, and a run-through of countdown to around T-10 seconds, or just before engine ignition. If no major issues crop up during the testing, the next step would be “de-stacking,” or the separation of the Starship second stage and Super Heavy booster. That would be followed by a full static fire test, where engineers would light up all 33 of the booster’s Raptor 2 engines. The launch system would then be re-stacked before the first orbital flight test.

This could all take place in a matter of weeks -- March is not off the table for the orbital flight test -- but that’s assuming that everything goes well and no major mishaps take place (they’re not unheard of). It also assumes that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the body that regulates commercial launches, issues SpaceX the all-important launch license fairly soon. The FAA has been basically mum about the status of its evaluation of SpaceX’s plans, though it’s been conducting extensive assessments of the Starship launch program for some time.

One can think about Starship as SpaceX’s raison d’être, the means by which the company will, as Musk puts it, preserve “the light of consciousness” in the cosmos. Given that Starship could have the potential to put as much as 100 tons into orbit -- and given that there is not yet a robust market to support and exploit such a capability -- it seems clear that Starship was designed with Mars in mind. The company will likely end up spending billions of dollars to work toward this goal.

It’s not just SpaceX that is betting big on Starship’s success. NASA is also counting on Starship to work, to the extent that the agency made it a central piece of its Artemis moon program. In April 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to develop a version of Starship to land on the moon for the Artemis III mission, which will take place no earlier than 2024. The agency later expanded that contract by $1.15 billion to include a second crewed Starship mission for later in the decade.

But before any of that can happen, Starship needs to reach orbit. And it may happen sooner rather than later.

1% ER

Incoming Biden chief of staff Zients is nearly wealthy enough to buy the entire White House

Jan. 23, 2023

By Steve Goldstein

Jeff Zients, then the White House’s Covid-19 response czar, speaking in April 2021.

The person widely reported to be President Joe Biden’s next chief of staff has just about enough assets to swap it for the entire White House, were it ever for sale.

The financial disclosure form for incoming White House chief of staff Jeffrey Zients lists assets ranging in value between $89 million and $442 million. That form is based on data as of May 2022, from his previous role at coordinator of the COVID-19 response. Zients according to the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and other outlets, will replace Ron Klain as White House chief of staff.

Zillow Z, +2.92% lists the valuation of the White House at $481 million, though of course 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not for sale.

The disclosure form lists a mix of funds, including such broad based investments such as the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY, +1.20% and the Vanguard Total Stock Market VTSAX, +1.25% index fund. Other funds he held invested in bonds and gold.

Zients started his business career at the consulting firm Bain & Co., and later held a similar role at Mercer Management Consulting. He was also the former chief executive of the Advisory Board Company, a healthcare consulting firm that is now a unit of UnitedHealth UNH, -0.19%.

The vast wealth of Zients has led to criticism from groups including the Revolving Door Project, which said he became “astonishingly rich by profiteering in healthcare.” It pointed to settlements in firms he either controlled or invested in which paid millions to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraudulent billing.

In President Obama’s White House, Zients was director of the National Economic Council and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. He helped lead the effort to repair the Healthcare.gov website after a botched rollout.

AP sources: Biden to pick Zients as his next chief of staff





ZEKE MILLER, MICHAEL BALSAMO and SEUNG MIN KIM
Sun, January 22, 2023 

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to name Jeff Zients, who ran the administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the start of Biden's term, as his next chief of staff, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Biden's current top aide, Ron Klain, is preparing to leave the job in the coming weeks.

Since serving as COVID-19 response coordinator, Zients has returned to the White House in a low-profile position to work on staffing matters for the remainder of Biden's first term.

The two people familiar with the matter were not authorized to publicly discuss Biden's plans before an official announcement and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Washington Post first reported on Zients' expected appointment. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The change at the highest levels of senior staff comes as Biden passes his two-year mark in office and pivots to a defensive stance against a House Republican majority hungry to investigate his administration's actions and his family. The White House remains mired in controversy over discoveries of classified documents at Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at his former institute in Washington, with the latest tranche of found records disclosed Saturday evening.

Biden, 80, is also preparing to launch his reelection campaign in the coming weeks, bolstered by a string of legislative accomplishments in the first two years of his presidency when Democrats controlled both chambers of Capitol Hill. He is confronting a Republican presidential field that is far from formed but for now is led by former President Donald Trump, whom Biden defeated in 2020.

The president's main sphere of advisers, in addition to Zients, on politics and legislation will continue to include presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti, senior advisers Mike Donilon and Anita Dunn, legislative affairs director Louisa Terrell, and Jen O'Malley Dillon and Bruce Reed, who are deputy chiefs of staff.

Klain will remain in Biden's political orbit, according to a person familiar with his plans — not unlike the role played by Cedric Richmond, who was the president's first director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and now is a senior adviser at the Democratic National Committee.

The outgoing chief of staff was also known to be friendly with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But some liberal critics of Zients swiftly went on the attack against the appointment even before it was official, highlighting in particular his private-sector ties.

Jeff Hauser, the founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, a progressive group that advocates for liberal appointees in government, said Sunday that the selection of Zients as the top White House aide did not jibe with Biden’s “Scranton Joe” political image.

“Unfortunately, Zients is a veteran of private equity, rapacious health care providers, and Big Tech, which sets up a fundamental question that could determine Biden’s political future: Will a Zients-led executive branch pursue the unpopular misconduct of people like Jeffrey Zients?” Hauser said. “It would be against Zients’ character to pursue corporate lawbreaking, but it is also the only way Biden can retain the mantle of populist against the likes of (Florida Gov. Ron) DeSantis and Trump.”

“Ron Klain has been an open ear and even-handed engager of actors across the Democratic Party," said Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "Whomever the next Chief of Staff is, that will be the continued hope and expectation. There will likely be an early relationship and trust building stage.”

Zients, vice chairman of Biden’s transition operation after his November 2020 election, brings significant managerial expertise in government and the private sector. He was the director of the National Economic Council during the Obama administration and acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The longtime management consultant developed a Mr. Fix It reputation, tapped to lead the Obama administration's effort to repair HealthCare.gov after the bungled initial rollout of the site in fall 2013. Zients served as top executive at the Advisory Board Co., a Washington consulting firm.

Former President Barack Obama also enlisted Zients in 2009 to eliminate the backlog in applicants for the Cash for Clunkers program, which offered rebates to drivers who swapped old cars for fuel-efficient vehicles. Zients later took on a similar challenge to smooth sign-ups for an updated version of the GI Bill.

Another coming perk for White House aides: Zients, who was an initial investor in Call Your Mother, a bagel shop in Washington, had a penchant for hosting “Bagel Wednesdays” for staff. (Zients divested his shares before joining the White House in 2021).

Zients and his deputy on the White House’s pandemic response team, Natalie Quillian, left the Biden administration last April before returning quietly in the fall of 2022. As they left, Biden thanked him for “stunning” and “consequential” progress battling the pandemic.

“When Jeff took this job, less than 1% of Americans were fully vaccinated; fewer than half our schools were open; and unlike much of the developed world, America lacked any at-home COVID tests,” Biden said when the White House announced Zients' departure last year. “Today, almost 80% of adults are fully vaccinated; over 100 million are boosted; virtually every school is open; and hundreds of millions of at-home tests are distributed every month.”

___

Kim reported from Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.