Friday, April 21, 2023

Suncor’s Fort Hills expansion to be reconsidered by regulator

The Alberta Wilderness Association had asked the regulator to revoke the permission after finding deficiencies in Suncor’s plan that pose “a serious risk” to the wetlands

Bloomberg News | April 17, 2023 | 

The Fort Hills oilsands mine, in northern Alberta, Canada. 
(Image courtesy of Suncor Energy.)

The Alberta Energy Regulator is reconsidering approval of a plan allowing Suncor Energy Inc. to extend its Fort Hills oil-sands mine into nearby wetlands after pressure from an environmental group.


The AER in September approved Suncor’s plan for protecting certain portions of the McClelland Lake Wetlands Complex, a necessary step for allowing mining to expand in the area. The agency said in an email that it’s now reconsidering that approval.

The Alberta Wilderness Association had asked the regulator to revoke the permission after finding deficiencies in Suncor’s plan that pose “a serious risk” to the wetlands.

Suncor hasn’t been told whether authorization would be reconsidered, Leithan Slade, Suncor spokesman, said by email. The plan for the wetlands was “the result of years of work informed by a Sustainability Committee struck in 2005, including representatives of local Indigenous communities.”

Located in northern Alberta, Fort Hills is Canada’s newest oil-sands mine. The site began operation about five years ago and produced about 164,000 barrels a day last year, AER data show.

The Alberta Energy Regulator is facing increased federal oversight and a third-party review of its response to a tailings-pond leak at Imperial Oil Ltd.’s Kearl oil-sands mine that was criticized by local indigenous communities.

(By Robert Tuttle)
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ALL CAPITALI$M IS STATE CAPITALI$M
Ontario and Ottawa spending billions to bring Volkswagen battery plant to Canada

Story by Ryan Tumilty • 

A Volkswagen logo during the New York International Auto Show, in Manhattan, New York City.© Provided by National Post

Ontario and the federal government are putting $1.2 billion into a new Volkswagen facility in St. Thomas, Ont, while the federal Liberals are also promising the German automaker up to $13 billion in subsidies to build batteries for electric vehicles.

News that Volkswagen had picked St. Thomas, Ont. for its next facility was announced in March, but at an event Friday in the southwestern Ontario community, Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will announce they’re bringing the plant to Canada with massive subsidies.

Ontario will contribute $500 million for the plant’s construction and the federal government will add another $700 million. The massive facility will be run by PowerCo. The company’s battery subsidiary is expected to employ 3,000 people directly and thousands more in spin-off industries.

Bloomberg was first to report that the federal government is also giving the company ongoing operating subsidies that could add up to more than $13 billion if the firm meets targets for producing batteries. Volkswagen is the world’s largest automaker and recorded a profit in 2022 of over $33 billion.

Jesse Kline: Canada races to the bottom of the pork barrel to secure Volkswagen battery plant

Canada secured a piece of the EV revolution in 2022, but with a multi-billion-dollar price to taxpayers

Ontario economic development minister Vic Fedeli, said the money the two governments are putting on the table is well worth it and will be paid back within five years. He said the plant will lead to spin-off companies to provide materials that are massive in their own right.

“There are companies that are needed. These will be billion-dollar companies needed to make cathode, anode separator, copper foil and lithium hydroxide,” he said.

He said the entire industry will benefit from the new plant, which will be the largest manufacturing facility in the country.

“It’s not about one or two companies. It’s about the 100,000 men and women whose jobs were at risk. And it’s about the 700 parts makers, 500 tool and die and mold maker companies, 300 connected and autonomous vehicle companies.”

Fedeli said in addition to the financial investment, Ontario offers close access to critical minerals, an educated workforce and carbon-free electricity.

“We can certify that it’s clean energy, zero-emission energy going into their plants, so they’re 100% emissions free. That’s a really important piece,” he said.

The two governments provided taxpayer money to another battery plant last year. The Stelantis – LG battery plant in Windsor is a $5 billion facility. Citing ongoing negotiations with firms like Volkswagen, they have not released the money involved in that deal, but Ferdeli said it was similar to the Volkswagen deal.

Federal Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne defended the $13-billion federal subsidy and said it would pay off.

“Talk to any banker. He would say if you get your money in five years for a plant that’s going to be there for 100 years, that’s a pretty good deal for Canadians,” he said.

The Volkswagen plant is the company’s first outside of Europe and one of only a handful of the company’s proposed battery plants.

The ongoing subsidies are designed as a match to U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration’s inflation reduction act, which is offering massive subsidies for green manufacturing. The $13 billion will be paid overtime if the company hits certain milestones, and if a future U.S. administration removes the subsidies, Canada will stop paying them to Volkswagen.

Champagne said Canada’s bid was about much more than money.

“We won because of the talent of our people. We won because we have the critical minerals. We won because we have renewable energy.”

Twitter: RyanTumilty

Email: rtumilty@postmedia.com

Canada offering more than C$13 billion for VW battery plant - govt source

Story by Reuters • Yesterday 

OTTAWA (Reuters) -Canada has agreed to provide up to C$13 billion ($9.7 billion) in subsidies and a C$700 million grant to lure Volkswagen AG into building its North American battery plant in the country, a government source said on Thursday.


Trucks at the IAA Transportation fair in Hanover

The total Canadian investment, which could also include funds from the Ontario government, will largely match what Volkswagen would have got from the United States through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the source said.

The carmaker declined to comment on the subsidies, which the source said would be disbursed over a decade. The plant will cost about C$7 billion to build, the source told Reuters, confirming an earlier report by Bloomberg News.

The deal showcases how the U.S. green package, which offers $369 billion of subsidies for electric vehicles and other clean technologies, is putting pressure on other governments to ramp up financial incentives to lure investments.

The new Volkswagen battery plant in Canada will have a maximum capacity of 90 gigawatt hours, enough to provide batteries for more than a million cars annually, Handelsblatt reported, citing a company source familiar with the matter.

Volkswagen declined to comment on the Handeslblatt report. It is expected to announce further details of the project on Friday in a meeting between the management of its battery unit PowerCo and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ontario, where the plant will be located.

Europe's biggest carmaker wants PowerCo to become a global battery supplier, and to meet half its own demand with plants mostly in Europe and North America, the carmaker's board member in charge of technology told Reuters in an interview in March.

PowerCo, set up last year, is targeting more than 20 billion euros ($21.94 billion) in annual sales by 2030. Production in Ontario is scheduled to start in 2027.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer, Riham Alkousaa and Victoria Waldersee; Editing by Franklin Paul and Jan Harvey)

Federal government giving Volkswagen up to $13B in subsidies to secure St. Thomas EV battery plant

Story by CBC/Radio-Canada • Yesterday 

The federal government has agreed to give Volkswagen up to $13 billion in subsidies over the next decade as part of a deal to ensure the automaker builds its electric-vehicle battery plant in southern Ontario.


Volkswagen plans to build its first overseas battery manufacturing plant in southwestern Ontario.© Chris Helgren/Reuters

The contract follows promises by Ottawa to remain competitive with the U.S. and convince electric vehicle battery producers to set up their plants in Canada. But the price tag is raising eyebrows.

"This is game-changer for our nation," said Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne while fielding questions from reporters Thursday.

The federal government will provide annual production subsidies to the German automaker and kick in funds for the massive factory in St. Thomas, which is estimated to be the size of 391 football fields, making it the largest factory in Canada.

Bloomberg News first reported the subsidy amount. Sources with knowledge of the deal have confirmed the details of the contract with CBC News.

According to details of the deal, federal production support for the plant is expected to range from $8 billion to $13 billion over 10 years.

Ottawa is also offering about $700 million in capital expense grants to Volkswagen through its Strategic Innovation Fund.

Champagne said those subsidies will come into effect after the company builds the $7 billion plant and begins production.

Sources say that, according to the terms of the contract between Ottawa and Volkswagen, Canada's production subsidies will stay in place only as long as the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act remains in force. That U.S. law offers billions of dollars in clean energy and net-zero subsidies south of the border.

If the U.S. reduces its incentives, Canada's subsidies will also go down.

Related video: $13B for an EV battery plant — and that's just from the feds (cbc.ca)
Duration 4:07 View on Watch

cbc.caFederal government pledges $13B in subsidies for new Volkswagen battery plant
1:55

AutoNETVW Battery Engineering Lab in Chattanooga, TN
4:03

WIONWION-VOA Co-Production: Ford battery plant using Chinese tech raises alarms in congress 16:10

The government has been open about its desire to be a player in electric vehicles, widely seen as the future of the auto industry.

Champagne defended the cost, arguing the job creation and supply chain spinoffs from bringing one of the world's largest automakers to Canada will be worth more than the cost of the subsidies to the government.

"When you see a transformation in history like that, you have to seize the moment. You lose that, what's going to happen to the auto sector? What's the cost of inaction?" he said.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Champagne argued Canada will see the economic impact of the plant in its first five years.

"Talk to any banker. He would say if you get your money in five years for a plant that's going to be there for 100 years, that's a pretty good deal for Canadians," he said.

Volkswagen announced last month that it had chosen St. Thomas, Ont., about two hours northwest of Detroit, as the site for its first North American "gigafactory."

At the time, it was not known how much the federal and provincial governments had put on the table to secure the plant.

The Ontario government is also expected to subsidize the project but those details are not yet public.

The Official Opposition is expected to attack the Liberals over the deal.

When news of the factory was announced last month, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre tweeted "this money belongs to Canadians. Not to a foreign corporation. Not to Justin Trudeau. How much of Canadians' money is he giving to this foreign corporation?"

Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association president Flavio Volpe said he knows not everyone will be comfortable with the price tag.

"We think it's incredibly worth it, but it is a very material number," he said.

"These are good jobs that pay for mortgages and feed kids and build communities. They're not, you know, short-term jobs that people slip in and out of. You can build a career on them."

More details of the deal are expected to be made public Friday.

The plant will be run by a Volkswagen subsidy called PowerCo.
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Ocasio-Cortez, Markey reintroduce Green New Deal resolution: ‘we need bold big climate action’

Story by Zack Budryk • Yesterday 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) announced the reintroduction of their signature Green New Deal resolution Thursday, along with a “Green New Deal for Health” co-sponsored by Markey and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).


Ocasio-Cortez, Markey reintroduce Green New Deal resolution: ‘we need bold big climate action’© Provided by The Hill

Speaking on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez said the successful passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 proved ambitious action on climate was possible. The bill would almost certainly never reach the House floor under the current Republican majority, but speakers repeatedly invoked the possibility of a restored Democratic trifecta in the 2024 elections.

“First, we were called unrealistic. Then, when it was when it came time for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, we started to fight,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We said we are not going to take crumbs, and we’re not going to settle for that — we need bold big climate action, and we need it now.”

“And that fight resulted in the largest piece of climate legislation in American history,” she added.

Markey and Khanna timed the reintroduction for the fourth anniversary of their original Green New Deal resolution in 2019, shortly after Ocasio-Cortez was sworn into Congress. The resolution proposed a broad swath of environmental and economic reforms, including expansion of high-speed rail, implementation of a “social cost of carbon” rule and creation of a state jobs program modeled after the Depression-era initiatives that are its namesake.

Khanna and Markey’s health care legislation, meanwhile, would revive the Hill-Burton program, a New Deal-era initiative that provided hospital construction grants, to provide $100 billion to hospitals for climate resilience. It would also require the Department of Health and Human Services to create a task force that would make policy on emission and climate risk disclosures for FDA-approved drugs and devices.

Ocasio-Cortez, Khanna and Markey were joined by Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), neither of whom were in Congress in 2019 but have signed onto the reintroduced resolution.

Frost, the youngest current member of Congress, outlined recent extreme weather events that have devastated parts of Florida to make the case for ambitious legislation.

“Usually in this building, when we talk about cost, we talk about dollars and cents,” Frost said. “But the real cost is human life, people, communities, and so we’re here today to be their voice and work with them to build a livable future and to build a world that’s more than a livable future, it’s about a thriving, livable planet.”

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Doug Ford opens door to storing CO2 underground to help hit climate change targets

Story by Mike Crawley • 

Premier Doug Ford's government is opening the door to allowing underground carbon capture in Ontario, a way of fighting climate change by trapping and storing greenhouse gas emissions.

The government brought in legislation to repeal Ontario's previous ban on injecting carbon dioxide underground, and is now proposing rules for carbon capture pilot projects.

The process involves capturing industrial emissions of CO2, compressing them into liquid, then putting them deep into the earth, in effect cancelling their release into the atmosphere.

Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources, Graydon Smith, calls carbon capture a big opportunity for the province.

"You look at other jurisdictions, not only in Canada but in the United States and really around the world, and carbon capture is seen as emerging effective technology that can really make a difference," Smith said in an interview.


Graydon Smith, left, is Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry.
© Evan Mitsui/CBC

While carbon capture has been touted particularly by the oil and gas sector as a way to neutralize emissions, the price tag can be hefty. Federal and provincial taxpayers have covered a significant chunk of the cost of projects in Canada so far.

Industry groups hoping Ontario will move faster

A range of companies and business lobby groups encouraged the Ford government to lay the groundwork for starting carbon capture in this province.

"This is one of those tools we need to use from our toolbox to help us get to net zero," said Dennis Darby, president and CEO of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters.

"I'm hopeful that Ontario will get there, but they've been slow," Darby said in an interview. "They've taken the right first step, but it's a bit of a baby step. Let's see if they go further."

"Industry always wants to to move very quickly and I understand that," countered Smith. "I think they're very excited by the prospects of this technology as are we. But it's also important to get it right."

Canada's leaders on carbon capture are Alberta and Saskatchewan. According to federal figures, Alberta captured more than three megatonnes of CO2 in 2021. (For a sense of scale, Alberta's emissions that year totalled 256 megatonnes.)

Ontario's biggest-emitting candidates for using carbon capture include steel mills, cement makers, gas-fired power plants and refineries.

Jim Redford, vice-president of energy services for Enbridge Gas, says his company's industrial customers are keenly interested in the opportunity.

"Carbon capture is a great way for those businesses to continue to use natural gas, but also to significantly reduce their emissions," said Redford in an interview.

"When you look at the energy future, no one type of energy is going to power Ontario," he said, calling carbon capture "a great way for natural gas to continue to be used, with lower [net] emissions."

Where to store captured CO2 will be key question

Ontario produced 150.6 megatonnes of CO2 emissions in 2021, the most recent year for which figures are available. The Ford government has pledged to reduce annual emissions to 144 megatonnes by 2030.

One of the issues facing Ontario will be where to store the captured CO2. The two likeliest candidates: disused oil and gas wells that dot southwestern Ontario and saline aquifers (where porous sedimentary rock is filled with saltwater), stretching from Windsor to Port Dover.

The liquefied CO2 would almost certainly be shipped from the emission sources to the underground storage by pipeline.

Enbridge "would have the ability to transport carbon dioxide," Redford said. "We are familiar with the geology of Ontario and the storage of underground gases. So transportation and storage [of CO2] is really a natural extension of the business we have today."

Keith Brooks, programs director with advocacy group Environmental Defence, says carbon capture may be useful for offsetting emissions by the cement or steel industries. But he opposes its use to offset emissions from the use of fossil fuels.

"We don't think that carbon capture is a good solution for the fossil fuel industry," Brooks said in an interview. "It doesn't actually move that industry into the net zero economy that we're trying to build, and instead it acts as a lifeline."

Brooks says allowing carbon capture from such industries amounts to prolonging dependence on fossil fuels while "deluding ourselves that we're actually taking action on climate change."

Gas-fired electricity production to ramp up

He's particularly concerned that carbon capture will be used to justify Ontario using fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Gas-fired power plants make up six of Ontario's 25 biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, accounting for 4.5 megatonnes of CO2 annually. The province is preparing to solicit bids to build even more gas-fired generation capacity to meet expected growth in demand for electricity over the coming decade.

There's also the question of who will pay for carbon capture.

"If companies want to invest in that as a technology, or as a solution to deal with their emissions, that's up to a company to decide, but it's not something that taxpayers should be footing the bill for," said Brooks.

The province of Alberta paid more than half the cost of Shell Canada's $1.3-billion Quest carbon capture project northeast of Edmonton, and the federal government kicked in nearly 10 per cent.

SaskPower, the Crown corporation that produces electricity in Saskatchewan, spent $1.5 billion on a project to capture carbon at a coal-fired generating station, and the facility has struggled to hit its targets.

"At this point, the Ontario government is not backing (carbon capture) projects or funding these projects," Smith said. "We're just creating a framework for them to take place."

As for a timeline, while pilot projects could start as early as this year, it's hard to see carbon capture going at a commercial scale in the province much before the end of the decade.

After Alberta announced funding for the projects in 2009, it took six years for the Quest carbon capture facility to launch and 11 years before the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line pipeline began operating.


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MUTUAL AID IS SOLIDARITY

Study shows human tendency to help others is universal

People of diverse cultures are more similar than previously thought

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY


Professor Nick Enfield 

IMAGE: PROFESSOR NICK ENFIELD, UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

A new study on the human capacity for cooperation suggests that, deep down, people of diverse cultures are more similar than you might expect. The study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, shows that from the towns of England, Italy, Poland, and Russia to the villages of rural Ecuador, Ghana, Laos, and Aboriginal Australia, at the micro scale of our daily interaction, people everywhere tend to help others when needed. Our reliance on each other for help is constant: The study finds that, in everyday life, someone will signal a need for assistance (e.g., to pass a utensil) once every 2 minutes and 17 seconds on average. Across cultures, these small requests for assistance are complied with seven times more often than they are declined. And on the rare occasions when people do decline, they explain why. This human tendency to help others when needed—and to explain when such help can’t be given—transcends other cultural differences.

The findings help solve a puzzle generated by prior anthropological and economic research, which has emphasized differences among people of diverse cultures in how resources are shared. For example, while whale hunters of Lamalera in Indonesia follow distributional norms when sharing out a large catch, Hadza foragers of Tanzania share food more for fear of generating negative gossip; or while wealthier Orma villagers in Kenya are expected to pay for public goods such as road projects, such offers among the Gnau of Papua New Guinea are likely to be rejected as they would create an awkward obligation to reciprocate. Cultural differences like these present a challenge for our understanding of cooperation and helping in our species: Are our decisions about sharing and helping shaped by the culture we grew up with? Or are humans equally generous and giving by nature? This new global study finds that, while special occasions and high-cost exchange may attract cultural diversity, when we zoom in on the micro-level of social interaction, cultural difference mostly goes away, and our species’ tendency to give help when needed becomes universally visible.

This study was coordinated by Giovanni Rossi (UCLA) and Nick Enfield (University of Sydney), director of the European Research Council grant ‘Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use’. See below for full list of team members.

Figure 1. Locations of data collection.

Shared cross-cultural principles underlie human prosocial behavior at the smallest scale: Scientific Reports

Talking points

  • Small requests for assistance (e.g., to pass a utensil) occur on average once every 2 minutes and 17 seconds in everyday life around the world. Small requests are low-cost decisions about sharing items for everyday use or assisting others with tasks around the house or village. Such decisions are many orders more frequent than high-cost decisions such as sharing the spoils of a successful whale hunt or contributing to the construction of a village road, the sort of decisions that have been found to be significantly influenced by culture.
  • The frequency of small requests varies by the type of activity people are engaged in. Small requests are most frequent in task-focused activities (e.g., cooking), with an average of one request per 1 minute and 42 seconds, and least frequent in talk-focused activities (conversation for its own sake), with an average of one request per 7 minutes and 42 seconds.
  • Small requests for assistance are complied with, on average, seven times more often than they are declined; six times more often than they are ignored; and nearly three times more often than they are either declined or ignored. This preference for compliance is cross-culturally shared and unaffected by whether the interaction is among family or non-family.
  • A cross-cultural preference for compliance with small requests is not predicted by prior research on resource-sharing and cooperation, which instead suggest that culture should cause prosocial behavior to vary in appreciable ways due to local norms, values, and adaptations to the natural, technological, and socio-economic environment. These and other factors could in principle make it easier for people to say “No” to small requests, but this is not what we find.
  • Interacting among family or non-family does not have an impact on the frequency of small requests, nor on rates of compliance. This is surprising in light of established theories predicting that relatedness between individuals should increase both the frequency and degree of resource-sharing/cooperation.
  • People do sometimes reject or ignore small requests, but a lot less frequently than they comply. The average rates of rejection (10%) and ignoring (11%) are much lower than the average rate of compliance (79%).
  • Members of some cultures (e.g., Murrinhpatha speakers of northern Australia) ignore small requests more than others, but only up to about one quarter of the time (26%). A relatively higher tolerance for ignoring small requests may be a culturally evolved solution to dealing with “humbug”—pressure to comply with persistent demands for goods and services. Still, Murrinhpatha speakers regularly comply with small requests (64%) and rarely reject them (10%).
  • When people provide assistance, this is done without explanation, but when they decline, they normally give an explicit reason (74% of the time). Theses norms of rationalization suggest that while people decline giving help “conditionally”, that is, only for reason, they give help “unconditionally”, that is, without needing to explain why they are doing it.
  • When people decline assistance, they tend to avoid saying “No”, often letting the rejection being inferred solely from the reason they provide for not complying. Saying “No” is never found in more than one third of rejections. The majority of rejections (63%) consist instead of simply giving a reason for non-compliance.

Data collection

Our research is based in extensive field work and on the analysis of video recordings of social interaction in everyday home/village life in a set of geographically, linguistically, and culturally diverse field sites (see the Table 1 and Figure 1 below).

We identified and analyzed over one thousand request events in domestic and informal settings on five continents. We extracted these events from video recordings of everyday life featuring more than 350 individuals—family, friends, neighbors—representing eight diverse languages and cultures: Cha’palaa (northern Ecuador), Lao (Laos), Murrinhpatha (northern Australia), Siwu (eastern Ghana), English (UK/US), Italian (Italy), Polish (Poland), and Russian (Russia).

 

Language

Language family

Location

Data collected by

Coding and analysis by

Cha’palaa

Barbacoan

Ecuador

Floyd

Floyd

English

IE (Germanic)

UK/US

Rossi

Kendrick

Italian

IE (Romance)

Italy

Rossi

Rossi

Lao

Tai

Laos

Enfield

Enfield

Murrinhpatha

Southern Daly

Australia

Blythe

Blythe

Polish

IE (Slavic)

Poland

Zinken

Zinken

Russian

IE (Slavic)

Russia

Baranova

Baranova

Siwu

Kwa

Ghana

Dingemanse

Dingemanse

 

Table 1. Languages included in this study and authors responsible for data collection and analysis. (IE = Indo-European).

Attached Figure 1. Locations of data collection. (This map is published with the paper and can be used under a Creative Commons license that attributes the source, citing the paper)

What did we NOT do?

  • We did NOT rely on introspection or second-hand reports about the cultures we studied. Reports about how people interact with one another (e.g., how often they ask for help, or what they say to refuse help) are often skewed by biased impressions. Our findings are instead based on direct observation of naturally occurring interactions captured on high-definition video and audio. We collected first-hand audio/video recordings from around the world, and systematically compared what we saw.
  • We did NOT make people play economic games. Much prior research on resource-sharing used economic games (e.g., Ultimatum Game, Dictator Game) to compare prosocial behavior across cultures. This experimental approach poses issues of ecological validity: does people’s behavior in the experiment reflect what they would do in the real world? To overcome this, we observed unconstrained, spontaneous interactions among people; interactions that would have occurred without our study taking place. Another issue with economic-game experiments is that they typically require at least one participant to be anonymous. This means that social relations are not (fully) invoked in, or affected by, the decision made. By contrast, our focus on helping/sharing events among social familiars, happening in public and repeatedly, allowed us to study interactions with clear implications for relationships and reputation.
  • We did NOT study requests in formal or institutional exchanges, such as when buying something at a store, or getting assistance from an employee. Exchanges in workplace, business, or religious settings are constrained by institutional obligations and goals. This not only restricts how participants conduct themselves but also makes interactions harder to compare across cultures. Our focus was instead on maximally informal interaction in the home or village among people who know each other well: family, friends, neighbors. Informal interactions of this kind represent the most basic and primary sphere of social life, providing a solid baseline for comparison across cultures.
  • We did NOT study requests among strangers. Our interest was specifically in cooperation among social familiars with close and enduring relationships. While encounters among strangers are common in large-scale, industrialized societies, in many communities around the world it is rare to interact with someone and not know who they are or how they are related to you. Also, helping/sharing events among social familiars have clear implications for reputation and reciprocity.
  • We did NOT study big requests (e.g., to share scarce resources, to borrow a large sum of money, etc.). Prior economic-game research focused on high-stakes helping/sharing decisions and found them to be shaped by striking cultural diversity. Such decisions are relatively infrequent, and more susceptible to the influence of local norms, values, and the socio-economic environment. By contrast, small, low-cost requests are pervasive, and often motivated by similar kinds of needs and practicalities that permeate mundane life in communities around the world: people everywhere need others to pass items, help to make food, move heavy objects, etc. Another reason for focusing on small requests is that, while the fulfillment of big requests is often deferred, small requests are typically fulfilled immediately, in the next few seconds or minutes. This allows us to capture these events on video, from start to end, and analyze them in their entirety.

Who are the authors of this study?

Corresponding authors:

Giovanni Rossi (project coordinator and lead author)

N. J. Enfield (project leader and corresponding author)

Co-authors:

Mark Dingemanse

Julija Baranova

Joe Blythe

Simeon Floyd (project coordinator)

Kobin H. Kendrick

Jörg Zinken

Related studies by the same research team

Gratitude goes without saying

Getting others to do things

Universal principles in the repair of communication problems

 

JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-023-30580-5 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Shared cross-cultural principles underlie human prosocial behavior at the smallest scale

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

19-Apr-2023

COI STATEMENT

This study received funding from the European Research Council, the Australian Research Council, the Dutch Research Council, the Max Planck Society, the Academy of Finland, and the University of Sydney.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert!

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'Awesome' solar eclipse wows viewers in Australia, Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Under a cloudless sky, 20,000 eclipse chasers crowded a tiny outpost to watch a rare solar eclipse plunge part of Australia's northwest coast into brief midday darkness Thursday while temporarily cooling the tropical heat.


The remote tourist town of Exmouth, with fewer than 3,000 residents, was promoted as one of the best vantage points in Australia to see the eclipse that also crossed remote parts of Indonesia and East Timor.

An international crowd had been gathering for days, camping in tents and trailers on a red, dusty plain on the edge of town with cameras and other viewing equipment pointed skyward.

NASA astronomer Henry Throop was among those at Exmouth cheering loudly in the darkness.

“Isn’t it incredible? This is so fantastic. It was mind-blowing. It was so sharp and it was so bright. You could see the corona around the sun there,” the visibly excited Washington resident said.

“It’s only a minute long, but it really felt like a long time. There’s nothing else you can see which looks like that. It was just awesome. Spectacular. And then you could see Jupiter and Mercury and to be able to see those at the same time during the day — even seeing Mercury at all is pretty rare. So that was just awesome,” Throop added.

First-time eclipse chaser Julie Copson, who traveled more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) north from the Australian west-coast port city of Fremantle to Exmouth, said the phenomenon left her skin tingling.

“I feel so emotional, like I could cry. The color changed and seeing the corona and sun flares …,” Copson said.

“It was very strong and the temperature dropped so much,” she added, referring to a sudden 5-degree-Celsius (9-degree-Fahrenheit) fall in temperature from 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit) when the moon’s shadow enveloped the region.

It was the fifth eclipse for Detroit resident Shane Varrti, who began planning his trip to Exmouth a year ago.

“It’s very exciting. All this effort has come to fruition,” Varrti said.

In Indonesia's capital, hundreds came to the Jakarta Planetarium to see the partial eclipse that was obscured by clouds.

Related video: Rare hybrid solar eclipse seen in Australia (Reuters)
Duration 0:40  View on Watch



Azka Azzahra, 21, came with her sister and friends to get a closer look by using the telescopes with hundreds of other visitors.

“I am still happy to come even though it is cloudy. It is happy to see how people with high enthusiasm come here to see the eclipse, because it is rare,” Azzahra said.

The call to prayer resounded from the city's mosques when the eclipse phase began as Muslims in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population said eclipse prayers as a reminder of God’s greatness.

In East Timor, people gathered around the beach in Lautem municipality, waiting to witness the rare solar eclipse through their eclipse glasses. Some of them came from other countries and gathered with locals to have a clear view of the eclipse.

“Timor Leste is one of the unique countries where the experience is less humid, less cloudy, so we are expecting a clear sky, that’s why many international astronomers wish to converge here. We are hoping that there is going to be a clear sky,” Zahri Bin Ahmad, astrophile from the South East Asia Astronomy Network of Brunei said as they waited Thursday.

People cheered as the sun and moon reached maximum eclipse.

“This is a very new natural phenomenon for Timor Leste. It is very important for us to be able to watch and experience it firsthand,” said Martinho Fatima, a civil protection authority officer.

The hybrid solar eclipse tracked from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and was mostly over water. The lucky few people in its path either saw the darkness of a total eclipse or a “ring of fire” as the sun peeked from behind the new moon.

Such celestial events happen about once every decade: The last one was in 2013 and the next one isn’t until 2031. They occur when Earth is in the “sweet spot” so the moon and the sun are almost the exact same size in the sky, said NASA solar expert Michael Kirk.

At some points, the moon is a little closer and blocks out the sun in a total eclipse. But when the moon is a little farther away, it lets some of the sun’s light peek out in an annular eclipse.

“It’s a crazy phenomenon,” Kirk said. “You’re actually watching the moon get larger in the sky.”

Several other upcoming solar eclipses will be easier to catch. An annular eclipse in mid-October and a total eclipse in April 2024 will both cross over millions of people in the Americas.

___

Burakoff reported from New York. Associated Press journalist Rod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia, contributed to this report.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Edna Tarigan And Maddie Burakoff, The Associated Press
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Ridgecrest faults increasingly sensitive to solid Earth tides before earthquakes

Reports and Proceedings

SEISMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA


Faults in the Ridgecrest, California area were very sensitive to solid earth tidal stresses in the year and a half before the July 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence, researchers reported at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)’s 2023 Annual Meeting.

“The signal of tidal modulation becomes extremely strong” after 2018, said Eric Beauce of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who noted that the signal was identified with seismicity that occurred around the faults that broke in the 2019 magnitude 7.1 earthquake.

The link does not mean that tidal stresses—which are very small compared to other tectonic stresses—triggered the earthquake, however.

“We don’t know if something started to happen in the fault zone, something that is an indicator of the upcoming earthquake,” Beauce said. “Maybe that process changed the properties of the crust in a way that made the crust be more sensitive to tidal stresses.”

Pulled by the same gravitational forces of sun and moon that create ocean tides, the solid earth also deforms in the same periodic way. People can’t feel the changes, but the ground deforms between 10 to 20 centimeters a day.

These solid tides “induce very, very small stress changes in the crust,” Beauce explains, “which can induce stress changes in all the faults within the crust.”

Although researchers have known about these tiny stress changes for more than a century, it has been difficult to extract their signal from the seismic record, and to determine whether they modulate seismicity.

In the past ten years, however, better earthquake detection and analysis techniques have made it possible to search through earthquake catalogs to find the signal of tidal stresses, Beauce said.

He and his colleagues built a rich, high-resolution earthquake catalog, using machine learning algorithms along with other techniques, for the past decade of microseismicity in the Ridgecrest area. (Microseismicity usually refers to earthquakes of magnitude 2.0 or smaller).

They found that “there is suggestive evidence that peak seismicity happens when tidal stresses are maximum,” Beauce said, “but this modulation is weak, and because it is weak, it is only suggested.”

Other researchers looking at the 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Tohoku megathrust earthquakes have detected an increase in modulation of seismicity connected to tidal stresses, decades before the earthquakes, said Beauce. And some scientists have been able to generate similar results in lab-created earthquake experiments.

The tidal findings do not have direct implications for earthquake forecasting, “as we do not know if we are looking at a general phenomenon or one specific to the Ridgecrest earthquake only, said Beauce, “but I see it as a way of getting new observational constraints on the physics of earthquakes, possibly the preparation and nucleation of earthquakes.”

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study


When an earthquake strikes, how do Mexico city hospitals respond?


Reports and Proceedings

SEISMOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Staff in public and private hospitals in Mexico City are likely to follow well-established and reinforced earthquake early warning (EEW) protocols for evacuation, according to an ongoing study.

Overall, staff are likely to follow the protocols especially when they are “reinforced with drills that help practice the correct protective action,” said Sandra Vaiciulyte of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She discussed her research at the Seismological Society of America (SSA)’s 2023 Annual Meeting.

In the study, there have been “no accounts of injuries of patients and staff because of the particular reaction by staff,” Vaiciulyte said. “In general, the correct protective action—following the protocol—has great impact in safeguarding people from injuries and protecting lives in hazardous situations.”

Vaiciulyte and her colleagues wanted to learn more about how EEW protocols have impacted the vulnerable hospital population, since Mexico City introduced its public earthquake warning system in 1991.

The research team is carrying out in-depth interviews to find out what the existing EEW protocols are for hospitals and how staff and patient populations respond to these protocols and earthquakes.

Hospital EEW protocols can include a variety of protective actions, including sheltering in a secure place in a building, evacuation procedures, drop-cover-hold on behavior and turning off equipment where necessary.

A hospital’s specific protocols are shaped by several elements, said Vaiciulyte. “So far, the determining factor for the preparedness to respond to an earthquake or EEW has shown to depend on the individual hospital management capacity as well as the geographic location of the hospital, which determines to what extent the hospital is exposed to earthquake consequences” depending on their seismic micro-zones.

Other factors such as building structure, which can control how easy it is to evacuate, and the hospital’s purpose—whether it has a large intensive care unit population, for instance—affect a specific hospital’s protocols.

“These existing differences also affect the challenges with developing and maintaining the protocol,” Vaiciulyte said. “For example, for children’s hospitals ingress—entering the hospital from the outside—during an earthquake or EEW is more likely by the parents who are worried about their children.”

The study aims to include four hospitals, but “the hospital staff experiences are often more diverse, stemming beyond just one or several earthquake events within the specific studied hospital,” she noted. “That means that additional accounts of their experience in other hospitals are also taken into consideration.”

Obtaining permission to talk to staff can be challenging for some hospitals, so the research team is supplementing its survey with consultations with civil protection and EEW providers in Mexico.

The researchers did find some instances where staff members evacuated against protocol or raised their voices in an anxious or hysterical way, “which often has shown to be related to that individual staff member’s negative experience in an earthquake in the past, or a lower threshold of handling stressful situations,” said Vaiciulyte.

“These are anecdotal accounts, but nonetheless important in thinking about the potential strategies in helping hospital staff to deal with their own and patients’ reactions, especially when many individuals in Mexico City have been through several devastating earthquakes,” she added.

Vaiciulyte has also studied how people behave in fire events, noting some similarities like an initial hesitation about what to do, nervousness when cues like ground shaking or the smell of smoke occur, and the potential for injuries when evacuating. “In both situations, the response time is very limited before the effects of the hazard can be felt,” she said.

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