Author Archives: Stoa

How Does it Feel? Watching People Die from the Cold Comfort of a Computer Chair

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A former intelligence analyst was sentenced on July 27, 2021 to nearly four years in prison after pleading guilty to giving classified information about the U.S. drone program to a reporter. Daniel Hale, a former airman in the U.S. Air Force assigned to intelligence operations and a onetime employee of the defense contractor Leidos, was given a 45-month sentence as well as three years supervised release by a Virginia federal judge. Mr. Hale was accused of giving numerous documents marked “Secret” and “Top Secret” to a journalist in 2014…

Mr. Hale has said he leaked the material because the public needed to know the full details about the U.S. drone program, which he believed led to unjustified civilian casualties and wasn’t being described forthrightly by political leaders…In a letter filed with the court  in advance of his sentencing, Mr. Hale recalled the first drone strike he witnessed against a handful of men drinking tea in Paktika province, Afghanistan—a group that included one suspected combatant and his companions.

“I could only look on as I sat by and watched through a computer monitor when a sudden, terrifying flurry of Hellfire missiles came crashing down,” Mr. Hale wrote. “Since that time and to this day, I continue to recall several such scenes of graphic violence carried out from the cold comfort of a computer chair. Not a day goes by that I don’t question the justification of my actions.”

Excerpts from Ex-Military Analyst Gets 45-Month Sentence for Leaking Classified Drone Information, WSJ, July 28, 2021

The Trillion Dollar Mess: Taking Down the Oil Infrastructure

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Some of the world’s largest oil companies have been ordered to pay part of a $7.2 billion tab to retire hundreds of aging wells in the Gulf of Mexico that they used to own, capping a case that legal experts say is a harbinger of future battles over cleanup costs.

A federal judge ruled last month that Fieldwood Energy a privately held company that currently controls the old wells and had sought bankruptcy protection, could pass on hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental liabilities to prior owners and insurers of the wells as part of its reorganization plan. Exxon Mobil,  BP, Hess , Royal Dutch Shell and insurance companies had objected to the plan. The dispute, litigated for months in federal bankruptcy court in Houston, centered over who should bear the enormous costs of capping and abandoning wells, primarily in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico where an oil spill could wreak havoc. The companies could still appeal the ruling…

Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy said that the expenses to decommission oil-and-gas infrastructure world-wide will in the trillions of dollars. “Who bears the costs?” he said. “There will be people who want to pass the buck.”

BP and Shell have pledged to reduce their carbon emissions to zero by 2050. To accomplish that, those companies will have to sell off some oil-and-gas wells to get their related emissions off their books, say energy analysts. But such asset sales present huge risks for big oil companies because many of the buyers are smaller, privately held firms, like Fieldwood, which may not have the financial wherewithal to bear cleanup costs, Ms. Usoro said. This was Fieldwood’s second bankruptcy in two years.

These smaller companies buy the wells for pennies on the dollar and assume the cleanup expenses in the hope that they can reduce the assets’ cost structure and squeeze out the remaining barrels of oil profitably. “I’ve always questioned this business model,” said Ms. Usoro. “Are these guys able to take care of the end of life?”

Excerpts Christopher M. Matthews, Oil Companies Are Ordered to Help Cover $7.2 Billion Cleanup Bill in Gulf of Mexico, WSJ, July 6, 2021

From Natural Landmark to an Oil Spill Wasteland

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Mohammad Abubakar, Minister of Environment  disclosed in July 2021 that Nigeria recorded 4,919 oil spills between 2015 to March 2021 and lost 4.5 trillion barrels of oil to theft in four years.

Mr Abubakar disclosed this at a Town Hall meeting in Abuja, organised by the Ministry of Information and Culture, on protecting oil and gas infrastructure. “The operational maintenance is 106, while sabotage is 3,628 and yet to be determined 70, giving the total number of oil spills on the environment to 235,206 barrels of oil. This is very colossal to the environment.

“Several statistics have emphasised Nigeria as the most notorious country in the world for oil spills, loosing roughly 400,000 barrels per day. “The second country is followed by Mexico that has reported only 5,000 to 10,000 barrel only per day, thus a difference of about 3, 900 per cent.

“Attack on oil facilities has become the innovation that replaced agitations in the Niger Delta region against perceived poor governance and neglect of the area.

Excerpts from Nigeria Records 4,919 Oil Spills in 6 Years, 4.5trn Barrels Stolen in 4 Years, AllAfrica.com, July 6, 2021

Yummy Plastics

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“From Waste to Food: A Generator of Future Food” by Ting Lu and Stephen Techtmann, won the Merck 1 million prize.  It concerns an efficient, economical and versatile technology that converts wastes such as end-of-life plastics into edible foods. These foods contain all the required nutrition, are non-toxic, provide health benefits, and additionally allow for personalization needs. This technology promises to transform waste streams into nutritious food supplements, thus solving the two problems of increasing food scarcity and plastic waste simultaneously.

The core of the proposed technology is to harness synthetic microbial consortia – a combination of natural and rationally engineered microorganisms – in order to efficiently convert waste into food. The project will comprise four research goals: conversion from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) to protein powder (goal 1), augmentation of biosafety for food and for the environment (goal 2), introduction of nutritional and health-promoting contents (goal 3), and expansion of the technology to include additional plastics or other types of waste (goal 4). The proposed work will establish a transformative basis for food generation.

  • Excerpts from Future Insight Prize, Merck Press Release, July 13, 2021

Who’s Not Giving a Damn about Nuclear Fallout

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On May 1st 1962, French officials in Algeria told Algerians to leave their homes in the southern city of Tamanrasset. It was just a precaution. France was about to detonate an atom bomb, known as Beryl, in the desert some 150km away. The blast would be contained underground. Two French ministers were there to witness the test. But things did not go as planned. The underground shaft at the blast site was not properly sealed. The mountain (Taourirt Tan Afella) above the site cracked and black smoke spread everywhere. The ministers (and everyone else nearby) ran as radioactive particles leaked into the air. Nevertheless, in the months and years after, locals would go to the area to recover scrap metal from the blast for use in their homes.

France carried out 17 nuclear tests in Algeria between 1960 and 1966. Many took place after Algeria’s independence from France in 1962, under an agreement between the two countries. There are no good data on the effects of the explosions on public health and the environment, but locals note that some people living near the test sites have suffered cancers and birth defects typically caused by radiation. The sites, say activists, are still contaminated.

Taourirt is a group dedicated to identifying the location of nuclear waste left by France. All that exists in the public domain is an inventory of the contaminated materials buried somewhere in the desert. (The known test sites are poorly secured by the Algerian government.) Others are pressing France to clean up the sites and compensate victims. There has been some progress in this direction, but not enough, say activists.

In 2010 the French parliament passed the Morin law, which is meant to compensate those with health problems resulting from exposure to the nuclear tests. (France carried out nearly 200 tests in French Polynesia, too.) But the law only pertains to certain illnesses and requires claimants to show they were living near the tests when they took place. This is difficult enough for Algerians who worked for the French armed forces: few had formal contracts. It is almost impossible for anyone else. Only a small fraction of the claims filed have come from Algeria.

Excerpts from Algeria and France: Lingering Fallout, Economist, June 26, 2021

How to Detect Humans Under-the-Ground: Surveillance Best

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Tunnel-digging in times of conflict has a long history. These days, secret tunnels are used to move weapons and people between Gaza and Egypt, and by Kurdish militia operating on the frontier between Syria and Turkey. But the same principle applies. What happens underground is hard for the enemy to observe. Digging for victory is therefore often a good idea…

That, though, may be about to change. Real-time Subsurface Event Assessment and Detection (RESEAD), a project being undertaken at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, uses novel sensors to make accurate maps of what is happening underground. This will, no doubt, have many civilian applications. But Sandia is principally a weapons lab…The sensors themselves are a mixture of accelerometers, which pick up vibrations, current detectors, which measure the electrical-resistance of rocks and soil, and subsurface radar…

Exactly how RESEAD sensors would be put in place in a zone of active conflict remains to be seen. But the system could certainly be useful for other sorts of security. In particular, America has a problem with tunnels under its border with Mexico being used to smuggle drugs and migrants into the country. RESEAD would be able to detect existing tunnels and nip new ones in the bud. 

Excerpts from Tunnel Vision: How to detect the enemy when they are underground, Economist, June 24, 2021

How to Spy on Your Own Country for $1.25 per day

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San Francisco-based Premise Data Corp. pays users, many of them in the developing world, to complete basic tasks for small payments. Typical assignments involve snapping photos, filling out surveys or doing other basic data collection or observational reporting such as counting ATMs or reporting on the price of consumer goods like food.

About half of the company’s clients are private businesses seeking commercial information, Premise says. That can involve assignments like gathering market information on the footprint of competitors, scouting locations and other basic, public observational tasks. Premise in recent years has also started working with the U.S. military and foreign governments, marketing the capability of its flexible, global, gig-based workforce to do basic reconnaissance and gauge public opinion.

Premise is one of a growing number of companies that straddle the divide between consumer services and government surveillance and rely on the proliferation of mobile phones as a way to turn billions of devices into sensors that gather open-source information useful to government security services around the world.

Premise launched in 2013,, As of 2019, the company’s marketing materials said it has 600,000 contributors operating in 43 countries, including global hot spots such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen. According to federal spending records, Premise has received at least $5 million since 2017 on military projects—including from contracts with the Air Force and the Army and as a subcontractor to other defense entities. In one pitch on its technology, prepared in 2019 for Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan, Premise proposed three potential uses that could be carried out in a way that is “responsive to commander’s information requirements”: gauge the effectiveness of U.S. information operations; scout and map out key social structures such as mosques, banks and internet cafes; and covertly monitor cell-tower and Wi-Fi signals in a 100-square-kilometer area. The presentation said tasks needed to be designed to “safeguard true intent”—meaning contributors wouldn’t necessarily be aware they were participating in a government operation…

 Another Premise document says the company can design “proxy activities” such as counting bus stops, electricity lines or ATMs to provide incentives for contributors to move around as background data is gathered. Data from Wi-Fi networks, cell towers and mobile devices can be valuable to the military for situational awareness, target tracking and other intelligence purposes. There is also tracking potential in having a distributed network of phones acting as sensors, and knowing the signal strength of nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points can be useful when trying to jam communications during military operations. Nearby wireless-network names can also help identify where a device is, even if the GPS is off, communications experts say.

Mr. Blackman said gathering open-source data of that nature doesn’t constitute intelligence work. “Such data is available to anyone who has a cellphone,” he said. “It is not unique or secret.” Premise submitted a document last July to the British government describing its capabilities, saying it can capture more than 100 types of metadata from its contributors’ phones and provide them to paying customers—including the phone’s location, type, battery level and installed apps. 

Users of the Premise app aren’t told which entity has contracted with the company for the information they are tasked with gathering. The company’s privacy policy discloses that some clients may be governments and that it may collect certain types of data from the phone, according to a spokesman…Currently the app assigns about five tasks a day to its users in Afghanistan, according to interviews with users there, including taking photos of ATMs, money-exchange shops, supermarkets and hospitals. One user in Afghanistan said he and others there are typically paid 20 Afghani per task, or about 25 cents—income for phone and internet services. A few months ago, some of the tasks on the site struck him as potentially concerning. He said the app posted several tasks of identifying and photographing Shiite mosques in a part of western Kabul populated largely by members of the ethnic Hazara Shiite minority. The neighborhood was attacked several times by Islamic State over the past five years…. Because of the nature and location of the tasks in a hot spot for terrorism, the user said he thought those tasks could involve spying and didn’t take them on.

Excerpt from Byron Tau, App Users Unwittingly Collect Intelligence, WSJ,  June 25, 2010

Green Con Artists and their Moneyed Followers

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Green investing has grown so fast that there is a flood of money chasing a limited number of viable companies that produce renewable energy, electric cars and the like. Some money managers are stretching the definition of green in how they deploy investors’ funds. Now billions of dollars earmarked for sustainable investment are going to companies with questionable environmental credentials and, in some cases, huge business risks. They include a Chinese incinerator company, an animal-waste processor that recently settled a state lawsuit over its emissions and a self-driving-truck technology company.

One way to stretch the definition is to fund companies that supply products for the green economy, even if they harm the environment to do so. In 2020 an investment company professing a “strong commitment to sustainability” merged with the operator of an open-pit rare-earth mine in California at a $1.5 billion valuation. Although the mine has a history of environmental problems and has to bury low-level radioactive uranium waste, the company says it qualifies as green because rare earths are important for electric cars and because it doesn’t do as much harm as overseas rivals operating under looser regulations…

When it comes to green companies, “there just isn’t enough” to absorb investor demand…In response, MSCI has looked at other ways to rank companies for environmentally minded investors, for example ranking “the greenest within a dirty industry”….

Of all the industries seeking green money, deep-sea mining may be facing the harshest environmental headwinds. Biologists, oceanographers and the famous environmentalist David Attenborough have been calling for a yearslong halt of all deep-sea mining projects. A World Bank report warned of the risk of “irreversible damage to the environment and harm to the public” from seabed mining and urged caution. More than 300 deep-sea scientists released a statement today calling for a ban on all seabed mining until at least 2030. In late March 2021, Google, battery maker Samsung SDI Co., BMW AG and heavy truck maker Volvo Group announced that they wouldn’t buy metals from deep-sea mining.

[However the The Metals Company (TMC) claims that deep seabed mining is green].

Excerpts from Justin Scheck et al, Environmental Investing Frenzy Stretches Meaning of ‘Green’, WSJ, June 24, 2021

Junk: the Engine of Green Growth

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“Plastic waste is not just a global crisis that threatens economic recovery, climate, and nature. It is also an investment opportunity that can flip it from a scourge into an engine for economic development,” said Rob Kaplan, who founded Circulate Capital in 2017. Initially the firm sought to back companies in India and Southeast Asia, such as recycling or waste-sorting companies, that help reduce the amount of plastic waste that winds up in the ocean.

In 2019 it raised a $106 million debt and project finance fund, Circulate Capital Ocean Fund, backed by a handful of large multinational corporations that include Coca-Cola, Danone,  Procter & Gamble,  and Unilever…Circulate is one of a small but growing number of firms investing in companies that contribute to what they call the circular economy, a business model that seeks to eliminate waste that organizations produce, continuously reuse products and materials and regenerate natural systems.

An estimated 30 private-market funds, including private-equity, venture and debt strategies focused on the circular economy in the first half of 2020, up from just three in 2016….A number of large multinational corporations are funding these firms’ efforts as part of a broader push to reduce both the overall waste their own companies produce and the amount of virgin materials they use.

Unilever, which has backed funds managed by Circulate and New York-based Closed Loop Partners, aims to cut in half the amount of virgin plastic it uses by 2025 and plans to collect and process more plastic packaging than it sells. Coca-Cola, also a backer of Circulate’s Ocean fund, aims to make all of its global packaging recyclable by 2025 and to use at least 50% of recycled packaging material by 2030, among other goals.

Excerpt from Laura Kreutzer, Growth Firms See Plastic Waste as an Investment Opportunity, WSJ, June 23, 2021
 

Who Benefits from Climate Change? Nuclear Ice-Breakers

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Melting ice in the Arctic Ocean is bringing a centuries-old dream closer to reality for Russia: a shipping passage through its northern waters that could put it at the center of a new global trade shipping route…A host of issues remain, such as icebreaker escort tariffs, transit costs and navigational unpredictability in the Arctic Circle. But an opening of the passage (the Northern Sea Route-NSR) would put Russia at the center of a new global shipping route for energy supplies and cargo. Moscow says it has the right to restrict passage and set prices for transit, and the route would also give it an important bargaining chip in its ties with China—one of the biggest beneficiaries of the 3,500-mile long passage…

So far this year, traffic regulated by the Russian government is up 11% from the record 1,014 trips made in 2020….The traffic in 2020 was up more than 25% from 2019 with 33 million tons of cargo, oil and liquefied natural gas, and Moscow expects that number to grow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he wants cargo to double to 80 million tons by 2024.The State Atomic Energy Corporation, or Rosatom, which manages a fleet of nuclear icebreakers that can cut through ice up to 10-feet thick, is drafting plans to station personnel along the route, boost port infrastructure along the shipping lane to allow for loading, and provide navigational and medical aid for ships. Rosatom has already stationed one floating nuclear-power plant on the route, to help with onshore construction…

 “There is a certain interest in the NSR from the Chinese Navy for strategic mobility to move troops between Pacific to Atlantic theaters,” said Vasily Kashin, an expert on Russia-China relations at the Moscow-based Higher School of Economics. “And they do have this interest in establishing their presence on the Atlantic.”

Russia has already boosted its military presence in the Arctic and along the Northern Sea Route, but the U.S. says Moscow’s legal jurisdiction doesn’t extend to the waters where the Kremlin is working to develop the passage….Russian authorities are still determining the transparent tariff duties, both for transit and for icebreaker escorts along the passage, that are key to attracting both investment and cargo.  Traffic on the route, however, is already guaranteed by Russia’s increasing production of Arctic oil and gas. The majority of vessels carry LNG from the port of Sabetta, where gas from Russian energy giant Novatek’s Yamal project is loaded for consumers in Europe or Asia. Crude from Rosneft’s planned Vostok oil field project will also be sent along the route when it comes onstream….

Excerpts from Thomas Grove, Melt Boosts Russia Shipping Arctic,  WSJ, June 24, 2021

Save Time and Money but Destroy Soil and Oceans

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The images of swaths of garbage floating on the oceans’ surface have become a rallying call to address plastic pollution, but there is more to this challenge than meets the eye. While plastics and microplastics – items smaller than 5 mm – accumulate and impact marine environments, much of the problem is rooted in land contamination. Land-based plastic pollution, which often feeds into the oceans, is estimated to be at least four times higher than what is in the oceans, according to a study published in Global Change Biology. 

“Soil is the main source of microplastics reaching oceans through soil erosion and surface runoff,”  Plastics settle in soil through disposal in landfills, as well as through the use of plastic-sheets in agriculture or application of microplastic contaminated compost. “Direct disposal of plastics to ocean is relatively less pronounced compared to the transfer of microplastics from land. Microplastics, lighter than soil particles, such as sand, silt and clay, are easily lost to waterways,”…

“We contribute to plastic pollution through indiscriminate disposal of plastics in landfills and use of microbeads in cosmetics and microfibers in textiles. There are efforts to produce biodegradable plastics, which may provide some solution to plastic pollution, but bioplastic may not be the silver bullet to manage plastic pollution.” Commonly used biodegradable bioplastics “retain their mechanical integrity under natural conditions, potentially causing physical harm if they are ingested by marine or terrestrial animals.” “The fate of biodegradable bioplastics in natural and engineered environments could be potentially problematic. Methane is a product of biodegradation in anaerobic environments in landfills.” These bioplastics, furthermore, require high temperatures, controlled aeration and humidity to degrade completely.

Due to their small size, microplastics, especially nanoplastics resulting from the degradation of microplastic, can enter organisms’ internal organs, where they could potentially transfer contaminants attached to them. These can include persistent organic pollutants, like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), as well as trace metals like mercury and lead. The plastics and pollutants that accumulate on or in them enter the food chain and can eventually be transferred to humans, causing growing food safety concerns.

The Joint FAO/IAEA Centre’s laboratories are equipped to research the presence of microplastics in food. “Techniques such as energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and infrared and Raman spectroscopy can be applied to screen for plastics in foods, enabling risk assessment and management,” said Andrew Cannavan, Head of the Joint Centre’s Food and Environmental Protection Section. 

Excerpt from Joanne Liou Out of Sight but not out of Mind: IAEA and FAO Launch R&D to Identify Sources, Impacts of Microplastic Pollution in Soil, IAEA Press Release, July 2, 2021

The Starving Manatees of Florida

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Florida manatees are dying at a record pace, prompting a federal investigation and calls to relist the aquatic mammals as endangered. So far this year, 800 manatees have died in Florida, more than double the average for the same period over the past five years, according to state data. Their estimated population numbered 5,733 in 2019, the most recent year in which wildlife officials conducted a count….

At the heart of the problem is deteriorating water quality that has depleted the seagrasses that manatees eat, researchers say. It highlights a broader threat to other marine species, they say, and to Florida’s economy, which relies heavily on visitors drawn to the state’s coastline. Manatees, which typically measure about 10 feet in length and weigh more than 1,000 pounds, have faced numerous perils in recent years, including collisions with watercraft and exposure to red tide, a harmful algal bloom. Now, researchers say, they are experiencing starvation.

Excerpt from Arian Campo-Flores, Manatees Are Dying in Florida, and the U.S. Wants to Know Why, WSJ, June 23, 2021

How to Remove Carbon from 30 Million Cars Every Single Year

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Gabon is the first country in Africa to receive results-based payments for reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. The first payment is part of the breakthrough agreement between Gabon and the multi-donor UN-hosted Central African Forest Initiative’s (CAFI) in 2019 for a total of $150 million over ten years.

At a high-level event organised on Tuesday, Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s Minister of Climate and Environment said on behalf of CAFI: “This is the first time an African country has been rewarded for reducing forest-related emissions at the national level.  It is extremely important that Gabon has taken this first step. The country has demonstrated that with strong vision, dedication and drive, emissions reductions can be achieved in the Congo Basin forest.” Gabon is leading the way in maintaining its status of High Forest Cover Low Deforestation (HFLD) country. ..

Gabon has preserved much of its pristine rainforest since the early 2000s in creating 13 national parks, one of which is listed UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its forests absorb a total of 140 million tons of CO2 every year, the equivalent of removing 30 million cars from the road globally.

Gabon has also made significant advances in sustainable management of its timber resources outside the parks, with an ambition to ensure that all forest concessions are FSC-certified. Forest spans over 88% of its territory, and deforestation rates have been consistently low (less than 0.08%) since 1990. Gabon’s forests house pristine wildlife and megafauna including 60% of the remaining forest elephants, sometimes called the “architects” or “gardeners” of the forest for their roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems and recently listed as critically endangered.

Excerpt from Gabon receives first payment for reducing CO2 emissions under historic CAFI agreement, Central African Forest Initiative, June 22, 2021

Do It 100 Trillion Times Faster! Race Quantum Supremacy

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiative is looking in a full picture of how quantum computing will shape the next 30 years of computing.  In April 2021, the agency embarked on a new initiative to support the development of quantum computers. Called the Quantum Benchmarking program, the effort aims to establish key quantum-computing metrics and then make those metrics testable.

“It’s really about developing quantum computing yardsticks that can accurately measure what’s important to focus on in the race toward large, fault-tolerant quantum computers,” Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said in an agency announcement. Historically, the U.S. has invested heavily in quantum science research, but it has not had a full national strategy to coordinate those efforts. The December 2018 National Quantum Initiative Act kickstarted the federal approach to accelerate quantum research and development for an initial five-year period.

Developing metrics would also help quantify and understand how transformative large quantum computers could be. ..The 2018 legislation also established various research centers and partnerships for quantum computing, such as the Quantum Economic Development Consortium comprising government, private and public entities. Under these partnerships, researchers have explored how quantum computing interacts with other technologies, like artificial intelligence, to impact health care. “One of the applications we’re excited about is enabling drug discovery. We want to investigate if we can help the pharmaceuticals industry,” said Altepeter…

“[Quantum computers] could be transformative and the most important technology we’ve ever seen, or they can be totally useless and these gigantic paperweights that are sitting in labs across the country. That window of potential surprise is the key. That’s the kind of surprise that DARPA cannot allow to exist,” said Altepeter. “It’s our job to make sure that we eliminate those kinds of surprises — hence why we wanted to do this program.”

Excerpts from Sarah Sybert, DARPA Aims for Quantum-Computing Benchmarks in New Program, https://governmentciomedia.com/, June 21, 2021

A team of Chinese scientists has developed the most powerful quantum computer in the world, capable of performing at least one task 100 trillion times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputers…In 2019, Google said it had built the first machine to achieve “quantum supremacy,” the first to outperform the world’s best supercomputers at quantum calculation. In December 2020, a Chinese team, based at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, reported their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang, is 10 billion times faster than Google’s. Assuming both claims hold up, Jiuzhang would be the second quantum computer to achieve quantum supremacy anywhere in the world.

The Reckless Gambles that Changed the World: darpa

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Using messenger RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionize medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses later, Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine sits alongside weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit.

It is the agency that shaped the modern world, and this success has spurred imitators. In America there are ARPAS for homeland security, intelligence and energy, as well as the original defense one…Germany has recently established two such agencies: one civilian (the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or SPRIN-d) and another military (the Cybersecurity Innovation Agency). Japan’s interpretation is called Moonshot R&D. 

As governments across the rich world begin, after a four-decade lull, to spend more on research and development, the idea of an agency to invent the future (and, in so doing, generate vast industries) is alluring and, the success of DARPA suggests, no mere fantasy. In many countries there is displeasure with the web of bureaucracy that entangles funding systems, and hope that the DARPA model can provide a way of getting around it. But as some have discovered, and others soon will, copying DARPA requires more than just copying the name. It also needs commitment to the principles which made the original agency so successful—principles that are often uncomfortable for politicians.

On paper, the approach is straightforward. Take enormous, reckless gambles on things so beneficial that only a handful need work to make the whole venture a success. As Arun Majumdar, founding director of ARPA-e, America’s energy agency, puts it: “If every project is succeeding, you’re not trying hard enough.” Current (unclassified) DAROA projects include mimicking insects’ nervous systems in order to reduce the computation required for artificial intelligence and working out how to protect soldiers from the enemy’s use of genome-editing technologies.

The result is a mirror image of normal R&D agencies. Whereas most focus on basic research, DARPA builds things. Whereas most use peer review and carefully selected measurements of progress, DARPA strips bureaucracy to the bones (the conversation in 1965 which led the agency to give out $1m for the first cross-country computer network, a forerunner to the internet, took just 15 minutes). All work is contracted out. DARPA has a boss, a small number of office directors and fewer than 100 program managers, hired on fixed short-term contracts, who act in a manner akin to venture capitalists, albeit with the aim of generating specific outcomes rather than private returns.

Excerpt from Inventing the future: A growing number of governments hope to clone America’s DARPA, Economist, June 5, 2021

Can the Switzerland of Chips Crush the Global Economy?

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) has emerged over the past several years as the world’s most important semiconductor company, with enormous influence over the global economy. With a market cap of around $550 billion, it ranks as the world’s 11th most valuable company. Its dominance leaves the world in a vulnerable position, however. As more technologies require chips of mind-boggling complexity, more are coming from this one company, on an island that’s a focal point of tensions between the U.S. and China, which claims Taiwan as its own.

The situation is similar in some ways to the world’s past reliance on Middle Eastern oil, with any instability on the island threatening to echo across industries….Being dependent on Taiwanese chips “poses a threat to the global economy,” research firm Capital Economics recently wrote. Its technology is so advanced, Capital Economics said, that it now makes around 92% of the world’s most sophisticated chips, which have transistors that are less than one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Samsung Electronics Co. makes the rest. 

The U.S., Europe and China are scrambling to cut their reliance on Taiwanese chips. While the U.S. still leads the world in chip design and intellectual property with homegrown giants like Intel Corp. , Nvidia Corp. and Qualcomm, it now accounts for only 12% of the world’s chip manufacturing, down from 37% in 1990, according to Boston Consulting Group. President Biden’s infrastructure plan includes $50 billion to help boost domestic chip production. China has made semiconductor independence a major tenet of its national strategic plan. The European Union aims to produce at least 20% of the world’s next-generation chips in 2030 as part of a $150 billion digital industries scheme.

The Taiwanese maker has also faced calls from the U.S. and Germany to expand supply due to factory closures and lost revenues in the auto industry, which was the first to get hit by the current chip shortage.

Semiconductors have become so complex and capital-intensive that once a producer falls behind, it’s hard to catch up. Companies can spend billions of dollars and years trying, only to see the technological horizon recede further. A single semiconductor factory can cost as much as $20 billion. One key manufacturing tool for advanced chip-making that imprints intricate circuit patterns on silicon costs upward of $100 million, requiring multiple planes to deliver…

Taiwanese leaders refer to the local chip industry as Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” helping protect it from such conflict. Taiwan’s government has showered subsidies on the local chip industry over the years, analysts say.

Excerpts from Yang Jie et al., The World Relies on One Chip Maker in Taiwan, Leaving Everyone Vulnerable, WSJ, June 19, 2021

Tesla as Catfish: When China Carps-Tech CEOs Fall in Line

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Many countries are wrestling with how to regulate digital records. Some economies, including in Europe, emphasize the need for data privacy, while others, such as China and Russia, put greater focus on government control. The U.S. currently doesn’t have a single federal-level law on data protection or security; instead, the Federal Trade Commission is broadly empowered to protect consumers from unfair or deceptive data practices.

Behind China’s moves is a growing sense among leaders that data accumulated by the private sector should in essence be considered a national asset, which can be tapped or restricted according to the state’s needs, according to the people involved in policy-making. Those needs include managing financial risks, tracking virus outbreaks, supporting state economic priorities or conducting surveillance of criminals and political opponents. Officials also worry companies could share data with foreign business partners, undermining national security.


Beijing’s latest economic blueprint for the next five years, released in March 2021, emphasized the need to strengthen government sway over private firms’ data—the first time a five-year plan has done so. A key element of Beijing’s push is a pair of laws, one passed in June 2021, the Data Security Law,  and the other a proposal updated by China’s legislature in Apr0il 2021. Together, they will subject almost all data-related activities to government oversight, including their collection, storage, use and transmission. The legislation builds on the 2017 Cybersecurity Law that started tightening control of data flows.

The law will “clearly implement a more stringent management system for data related to national security, the lifeline of the national economy, people’s livelihood and major public interests,” said a spokesman for the National People’s Congress, the legislature. The proposed Personal Information Protection Law, modeled on the European Union’s data-protection regulation, seeks to limit the types of data that private-sector firms can collect. Unlike the EU rules, the Chinese version lacks restrictions on government entities when it comes to gathering information on people’s call logs, contact lists, location and other data.

In late May 2021, citing concerns over user privacy, the Cyberspace Administration of China singled out 105 apps—including ByteDance’s video-sharing service Douyin and Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine and LinkedIn service—for excessively collecting and illegally accessing users’ personal information. The government gave the companies named 15 days to fix the problems or face legal consequences….

Beijing’s pressure on foreign firms to fall in line picked up with the 2017 Cybersecurity Law, which included a provision calling for companies to store their data on Chinese soil. That requirement, at least initially, was largely limited to companies deemed “critical infrastructure providers,” a loosely defined category that has included foreign banks and tech firms….Since 2021, Chinese regulators have formally made the data-localization requirement a prerequisite for foreign financial institutions trying to get a foothold in China. Citigroup Inc. and BlackRock Inc. are among the U.S. firms that have so far agreed to the rule and won licenses to start wholly-owned businesses in China…

Senior officials have publicly likened Tesla to a “catfish” rather than a “shark,” saying the company could uplift the auto sector the way working with Apple and Motorola Mobility LLC helped elevate China’s smartphone and telecommunications industries. To ensure Tesla doesn’t become a security risk, China’s Cyberspace Administration recently issued a draft rule that would forbid electric-car makers from transferring outside China any information collected from users on China’s roads and highways. It also restricted the use of Tesla cars by military personnel and staff of some state-owned companies amid concerns that the vehicles’ cameras could send information about government facilities to the U.S. In late May 2021, Tesla confirmed it had set up a data center in China and would domestically store data from cars it sold in the country. It said it joined other Chinese companies, including Alibaba and Baidu Inc., in the discussion of the draft rules arranged by the CyberSecurity Association of China, which reports to the Cyberspace Administration…

Increasingly, China’s president, Mr. Xi, leaned toward voices advocating greater digital control. He now labels big data as another essential element of China’s economy, on par with land, labor and capital.  “From the point of view of the state, anti-data monopoly must be strengthened,” said Li Lihui, a former president of state-owned Bank of China Ltd. and now a member of China’s legislature. He said he expects China to establish a “centralized and unified public database” to underpin its digital economy.

Excerpts from China’s New Power Play: More Control of Tech Companies’ Troves of Data, WSJ, June 12, 2021

The Giant Nuclear Graveyard in the Arctic

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The Nuclear Waste in Saida Bay, Russia, is financed by Germany as part of the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. Italy has paid for the floating dock that brings the nuclear reactor-compartments from the waters to the site. Reactor compartments from submarines and icebreakers will have to be stored for onshore for many decades before the radioactivity have come down to levels acceptable for cutting the reactors’ metal up and pack it for final geological disposal.

These giant containers contain parts of nuclear reactors in order to avoid leakages to the Arctic environment. Image Thomas Nilsen

The process of scrapping the 120 nuclear-powered submarines that sailed out from bases on the Kola Peninsula during the Cold War started in the early 1990 and has technically and economically been supported by a wide range of countries, including Norway and the European Union. Ballistic missile submarines scrapped at yards in Severodvinsk in the 1990s were paid by the United States Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program.

Excerpts from Kola Peninsula to get radioactive waste from southern Russia, The Barents Observer, May 2021

Fossil-Free in 2026

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Norrland (in Sweden) abounds in hydropower. Power that is cheap and—crucially—green, along with bargain land and proximity to iron ore, is sparking an improbable industrial revolution, based on hydrogen, “green” steel and batteries. SSAB, a steelmaker, is poised to deliver its first consignment of “eco-steel” from a hydrogen-fuelled pilot plant in Lulea, a northern city. 

Traditionally, to make steel, iron ore must be melted at high temperatures and reduced from iron oxide to iron, a process that typically involves burning fossil fuels, releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Replacing them with hydrogen eliminates more than 98% of the carbon dioxide normally released. The hydrogen is made by electrolysing water, using electricity produced by hydro-power. This approach involves almost no carbon-dioxide emissions at all…..

Northern Sweden’s steelmaking leaps are being emulated elsewhere in Europe, in response to similar environmental pressures which will only increase if, as looks very likely, Germany’s Greens enter government after the election in September 2021. Europe produces a still significant 16% of the world’s steel. Big producers in Germany and Poland, where the industry is mostly coal-based and very dirty, are nervy. Even neighbouring Norway is in danger of losing out. It too has the gift of rich renewable-energy resources, but underinvestment means there may soon not be enough of this green electricity to meet the demands of both households and industry.

Excerpts from Green steel: Plentiful renewable energy is opening up a new industrial frontier, Economist, May 15, 2021

Resurrecting Used Materials: the Battle against E-Waste

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Electric vehicles (EVs) continue to grow in popularity. According to IHS Markit, a research firm, almost 2.5m battery-electric and plug-in-hybrid cars were sold around the world in 2020—and the company expects that number to grow by 70% in 2021…. And, when all of these machines come to the ends of their useful lives, they will need to be recycled.

This coming avalanche of e-waste will be hard to deal with. When a petrol or diesel car is dismantled and crushed, as much as 95% of it is likely to be used again. Ways to do that are well-developed, straightforward and helped by the fact that, on average, almost 70% of such a vehicle consists of readily recyclable ferrous metals. EVs, by contrast, contain a far greater variety of materials. Separating and sorting these is tricky, especially as many of them are locked up inside complex electrical components.

For those who can manage to do so, though, there is good business to be had here. EVs contain lots of valuable stuff. The magnets in their motors are full of rare-earth metals, and their batteries of lithium and cobalt…Li-Cycle, a Canadian company founded in 2016 that is already the biggest recycler of lithium-ion batteries in North America, is one outfit betting on hydrometallurgy. Li-Cycle is not alone, though, in its hydrometallurgical ambitions. One rival is Redwood Materials of Carson City, Nevada…Northvolt… makes lithium-ion batteries for European carmakers. It is adding a recycling plant to its factory in Sweden, to process the batteries it produces there when they reach the ends of their lives. led. Similar “closed-loop” systems are being developed in other parts of the battery supply chain. For example, American Battery Technology, a firm in Nevada that mines and processes lithium, is adding a recycling plant intended to recover lithium and other metals from expired batteries. It will use the lithium in its own production processes and sell the other materials on.

The biggest battery-recycling operations of all, though, are not Western, but Chinese—not surprising, perhaps, given that China is the world’s largest market for EVs, and the country’s government has been promoting the recycling of lithium-ion batteries for some time. Brunp Reycling , a subsidiary of CATL, the world’s biggest EV-battery-maker, has half-a-dozen hydrometallurgical recycling operations around the country. Brunp says it can recycle 120,000 tonnes of old batteries a year, which it claims represents about half of China’s current annual battery-recycling capacity. …

Tesla itself also has trans-Pacific ambitions. It is setting up a battery-recycling facility at its  EV factory in Shanghai, to complement one it is developing at its battery factory in Nevada. Nor is Tesla the only vehicle-maker involving itself in the industry. In January, Volkswagen opened a pilot battery-recycling plant in Salzgitter. Salzgitter is close to the company’s battery factory in Braunschweig, which is being expanded to produce more than 600,000 EV battery packs a year. The idea is the firm’s battery experts will work with its recyclers to make battery packs easier to dismantle.

Designing recyclability in from the beginning will, in the long run, be crucial to the effective recycling of electric vehicles—and especially their batteries. Shredding lots of different types of e-waste at the same time inevitably results in contamination. Separating components before doing so would yield greater levels of purity.

Excerpts from Old electric cars are a raw material of the future, Economist, May 15, 2021

The Killing Fad: Agile Drones

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Drones built in Turkey with affordable digital technology wrecked tanks and other armored vehicles, as well as air-defense systems, of Russian protégés in battles waged in Syria, Libya and Azerbaijan. These drones point to future warfare being shaped as much by cheap but effective fighting vehicles as expensive ones with the most advanced technology. China, too, has become a leading war drone exporter to the Middle East and Africa. Iran-linked groups in Iraq and Yemen used drones to attack Saudi Arabia. At least 10 countries, from Nigeria to the United Arab Emirates, have used drones purchased from China to kill adversaries, defense analysts say.

Flying alone or in a group, these drones can surprise troops and disable poorly concealed or lightly defended armored vehicles, a job often assigned to expensive warplanes. The drones can stay quietly aloft for 24 hours, finding gaps in air-defense systems and helping target strikes by warplanes and artillery, as well as firing their own missiles. Militaries, including the U.S., are upgrading air-defense systems to catch up with the advances, seeking methods to eliminate low-budget drones without firing missiles that cost more than their targets. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory is also developing Skyborg and Valkyrie, lower-cost autonomous aircraft that are part of an innovation program

Israel and the U.S. have long used high-end drones in counterterrorism operations to target prominent enemies. But the countries have hesitated to sell their top models, even to allies, for fear of proliferation…Technological advances and global competitors have produced inexpensive alternatives.

The standard-bearer of the latest armed-drone revolution emerged last year on the battlefields around Turkey, the Bayraktar TB2. Compared with the American MQ-9, the TB2 is lightly armed, with four laser-guided missiles. Its radio-controlled apparatus limits its basic range to around 200 miles, roughly a fifth of the ground the MQ-9 can cover. Yet it is utilitarian, and reliable—qualities reminiscent of the Soviet Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle that changed warfare in the 20th century. A set of six Bayraktar TB2 drones, ground units, and other essential operations equipment costs tens of millions of dollars, rather than hundreds of millions for the MQ-9…

Ukraine signed a deal in January 2019 to buy TB2 drones from Turkey, receiving at least six so far, and Kyiv is in talks for joint production. A Ukrainian company is manufacturing engines for the latest Baykar drone, a larger model with a heavier payload than the TB2. The country hopes the drones will discourage a repeat of the Kremlin’s 2014 invasions. …Turkey’s drone sales have riled Moscow. …

The TB2 was born of Turkey’s dissatisfaction with available models from the U.S. and Israel, and the country’s desire for systems under its control to fight the PKK, a Kurdish militant group….Azerbaijan, geographically and culturally close to Turkey, procured a set of TB2 drones last year. The country had lost control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region to Armenia in a war that ended in a 1994 cease-fire. Rising petroleum wealth had bolstered Azerbaijan’s military in the years since. The TB2s, as well as Israeli-made drones, helped Azerbaijan overwhelm Armenian forces. Attacks were recorded for videos and posted online by Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry….

The Azerbaijan victory caught the attention of Turkey’s suppliers. Some companies and countries, including Canada, halted export of components used in the TB2. [Too little too late?]

Excerpt from James Marson and Brett Forrest, Armed Low-Cost Drones, Made by Turkey, Reshape Battlefields and Geopolitics, WSJ, June 4, 2021

UFOs: Aliens or Just Enemies?

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A forthcoming U.S. intelligence report contains no evidence that unexplained objects moving through the skies and witnessed by U.S. Navy pilots are alien spacecraft, but offers no conclusive explanation for the mysterious sightings, according to people familiar with its contents. The report, due to be delivered to Congress on June 25, 2021, appears unlikely to quell a debate over what the Pentagon calls “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” which pilots have observed moving at hypersonic speeds and conducting maneuvers that would be impossible using known technology.

Former President Barack Obama acknowledged in May 2021 that the U.S. government has no explanation for the strange objects. “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are,” Mr. Obama told CBS. “We can’t explain how they move, their trajectory,” he said. The draft report, the people familiar with it said, finds no evidence that the objects are alien spacecraft, but also no firm proof that they are not.

The New York Times, which first reported the study’s contents, said that it concludes that the most of the incidents didn’t originate from any advanced U.S. technology programs that might have been unknown to the pilots who witnessed them. One possibility officials have debated is that the craft are the result of secret research programs by a foreign adversary, such as Russia or China, both of which are believed to have experimented with hypersonic craft, which can travel more than five times the speed of sound.  The Pentagon last summer revived a small, secretive unit, called the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, to study the encounters.

Excerpts from Gordon Lubold and Nancy A. Youssef, U.S. UFO Report Doesn’t Explain Mystery Sightings but Finds No Sign of Aliens, WSJ, June 5, 2021

Smart Weapons Who Make Many Mistakes: AI in War

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Autonomous weapon systems rely on artificial intelligence (AI), which in turn relies on data collected from those systems’ surroundings. When these data are good—plentiful, reliable and similar to the data on which the system’s algorithm was trained—AI can excel. But in many circumstances data are incomplete, ambiguous or overwhelming. Consider the difference between radiology, in which algorithms outperform human beings in analysing x-ray images, and self-driving cars, which still struggle to make sense of a cacophonous stream of disparate inputs from the outside world. On the battlefield, that problem is multiplied.

“Conflict environments are harsh, dynamic and adversarial,” says UNDIR. Dust, smoke and vibration can obscure or damage the cameras, radars and other sensors that capture data in the first place. Even a speck of dust on a sensor might, in a particular light, mislead an algorithm into classifying a civilian object as a military one, says Arthur Holland Michel, the report’s author. Moreover, enemies constantly attempt to fool those sensors through camouflage, concealment and trickery. Pedestrians have no reason to bamboozle self-driving cars, whereas soldiers work hard to blend into foliage. And a mixture of civilian and military objects—evident on the ground in Gaza in recent weeks—could produce a flood of confusing data.

The biggest problem is that algorithms trained on limited data samples would encounter a much wider range of inputs in a war zone. In the same way that recognition software trained largely on white faces struggles to recognise black ones, an autonomous weapon fed with examples of Russian military uniforms will be less reliable against Chinese ones. 

Despite these limitations, the technology is already trickling onto the battlefield. In its war with Armenia last year, Azerbaijan unleashed Israeli-made loitering munitions theoretically capable of choosing their own targets. Ziyan, a Chinese company, boasts that its Blowfish a3, a gun-toting helicopter drone, “autonomously performs…complex combat missions” including “targeted precision strikes”. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says that many of today’s remote-controlled weapons could be turned into autonomous ones with little more than a software upgrade or a change of doctrine….

On May 12th, 2021, the ICRD published a new and nuanced position on the matter, recommending new rules to regulate autonomous weapons, including a prohibition on those that are “unpredictable”, and also a blanket ban on any such weapon that has human beings as its targets. These things will be debated in December 2021 at the five-yearly review conference of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, originally established in 1980 to ban landmines and other “inhumane” arms. Government experts will meet thrice over the summer and autumn, under un auspices, to lay the groundwork. 

Yet powerful states remain wary of ceding an advantage to rivals. In March, 2021 a National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence established by America’s Congress predicted that autonomous weapons would eventually be “capable of levels of performance, speed and discrimination that exceed human capabilities”. A worldwide prohibition on their development and use would be “neither feasible nor currently in the interests of the United States,” it concluded—in part, it argued, because Russia and China would probably cheat. 

Excerpt from Autonomous weapons: The fog of war may confound weapons that think for themselves, Economist, May 29, 2021

Unthinkable: What Happens When Water Floods a Nuclear Plant

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As the 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit the Japanese shore, the reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant shut down automatically to control the nuclear fission. The electrical lines collapsed, but the plant responded as designed, and the earthquake itself did not cause any other problems. The tsunami it triggered, however, did.

“The reactors were robust, seismically speaking,” said Gustavo Caruso, Director of the IAEA’s Office of Safety and Security Coordination. “But they were vulnerable to the high tsunami waves.” When the flooding hit, the ‘tsunami walls’ made to protect the plant from such events were too low to prevent the sea water from entering the plant. The water’s strength destroyed some of the structures, and entered the diesel generator room — which was built lower and at a closer distance to sea level than other plants in Japan — affecting Units 1, 2 and 3. “The diesel generators are essential for maintaining the plant’s electrical supplies in emergency situations,” said Pal Vincze, Head of the Nuclear Power Engineering Section at the IAEA. “They were drowned.”

If the diesel generator is affected, special batteries can be used to generate electricity, but these have a limited capacity, and, in the case of Fukushima Daiichi, some were also flooded. “In Japan, they put up a heroic fight to get the electrical systems up and running again, but it wasn’t enough,” Vincze added.

Without functioning instrumentation and control systems, or electrical power or cooling capabilities, the overheated fuel melted, sank to the bottom of the reactors, and breached the reactor vessels, leading to three meltdowns. In addition, data logs and vital systems operated by safety parameters were also flooded, which meant that there was no way for the operator to monitor what was going on inside the reactors.

As stated in the IAEA report on the Fukushima Daiichi accident, “a major factor that contributed to the accident was the widespread assumption in Japan that its nuclear power plants were so safe that an accident of this magnitude was simply unthinkable. But…When planning, designing and constructing the plant, experts did not properly take into consideration past tsunami experiences… “It must be noted that the combination of an earthquake of this magnitude and a tsunami is extremely rare, but unfortunately this is what happened.”…

Excerpt from Laura Gil Fukushima Daiichi: The Accident, IAEA Bulletin, Mar. 2021

When Others Do our Dirty Work: the Costs of Overdependence

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China is tightening its grip on the global supply of processed manganese, rattling a range of companies world-wide that depend on the versatile metal—including the planet’s biggest electric-vehicle makers.

China produces more than 90% of the world’s manganese products, ranging from steel-strengthening additives to battery-grade compounds. Since October 2020, dozens of Chinese manganese processors accounting for most of global capacity have joined a state-backed campaign to establish a “manganese innovation alliance,” led by Ningxia Tianyuan Manganese Industry Group, setting out in planning documents goals and moves that others in the industry say are akin to a production cartel. They include centralizing control over supply of key products, coordinating prices, stockpiling and networks for mutual financial assistance.

The squeeze sent prices soaring in metal markets world-wide, snagging steelmakers and sharpening concern among car makers. China’s metal industries already dominate the global processing of most raw materials for rechargeable batteries, including cobalt and nickel. Three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and half of its electric vehicles are made in China.  High-purity forms of manganese have increasingly become crucial for battery-powered automobiles, touted by Volkswagen AG and Tesla Inc. in recent months as a viable replacement for other, more-expensive battery ingredients….

While manganese ore is relatively abundant around the world, it is almost solely refined in China. Battery-grade manganese is traded mostly privately, and pricing can be opaque. Miners say a metric ton of the purified metal could cost up to $4,000—barely a 10th of the cost of cobalt, a widely used battery metal. By replacing cobalt, manganese could help auto makers produce 30% more cars with the same amount of nickel, analysts say.

Rival manganese projects outside China view the cartel-like activities as an opportunity to gain momentum for their own battery-grade developments…Still, analysts say such projects outside China might take years to start and heavy cost investments to develop. Viable bases of manganese ore are often located in remote regions, which require expensive infrastructure to ferry and process extracted ores.

Excerpt from Chuin-Wei Yap, China Hones Control Over Manganese, a Rising Star in Battery Metals, WSH, May 21, 2021

The Most Radioactive Sea on Earth and How to Save it

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No other places in the world’s oceans have more radioactive and nuclear waste than the Kara Sea. The reactors from the submarines K-11, K-19, and K-140, plus the entire submarine K-27 and spent uranium fuel from one of the old reactors of the Lenin-icebreaker have to be lifted from the seafloor and secured. While mentality in Soviet times was «out of sight, out of mind», the Kara Sea seemed logical. Ice-covered most of the year, and no commercial activities. That is changing now with rapidly retreating sea ice, drilling for oil-, and gas and increased shipping.

The submarine reactors dumped in shallow bays east of the closed-off military archipelago of Novaya Zemlya… had experienced accidents and posed a radiation threat at the navy yards where people were working.  Dumping the reactors in shallow waters, someplace at only 50 meters, meant they could be lifted one day when technology allowed.

A worst-case scenario would be a failed lifting attempt, causing criticality in the uranium fuel, again triggering an explosion with following radiation contamination of Arctic waters.  

A Russian-Norwegian expedition to the K-27 submarine in Stepovogo bay in 2012 took samples for studying possible radioactive leakages. Now, the Bellona group, an environmental NGOs, calls  an expedition in 2021  to thoroughly study the strength of the hull and look for technical options on how to lift the heavy submarine and reactor compartments. A previous study report made for Rosatom and the European Commission roughly estimated the costs of lifting all six objects, bringing them safely to a yard for decommissioning, and securing the reactors for long-term storage.

The estimated price-tag for all six is €278 million, of which the K-159 in the Barents Sea is the most expensive with a cost of €57.5 million. Unlike the submarines and reactors that are dumped in relatively shallow waters in the Kara Sea, the K-159 is at about 200 meters depth, and thus will be more difficult to lift.

Excerpt from Tackling dumped nuclear waste gets priority in Russia’s Arctic Council leadership in 2021, BarentsObserver, May 23, 2021

Can We Change Path? Saving Forests and Cutting Carbon

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No ecosystem is more important in mitigating the effects of climate change than tropical rainforest. And South-East Asia is home to the world’s third-biggest patch of it, behind the Amazon and Congo basins. Even though humans release carbon from these forests through logging, clear-felling for agriculture and other disruptions, some are so vast and fecund that the growth of the plants within them absorbs even more from the atmosphere. The Congo basin, for instance, locks up 600m tonnes of carbon a year more than it releases, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), an international NGO that is equivalent to about a third of emissions from all American transport.

In contrast, such is the extent of clearing for plantations in South-East Asia’s rainforests, which run from Myanmar to Indonesia, that over the past 20 years they have turned from a growing carbon sink to a significant source of emissions—nearly 500m tonnes a year. Indonesia and Malaysia, home to the biggest expanses of pristine forest, have lost more than a third of it this century. Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, relative newcomers to deforestation, are making up for lost time.

The Global Forest Watch, which uses satellite data to track tree cover, loss of virgin forest in Indonesia and Malaysia has slowed for the fourth year in row—a contrast with other parts of the world…The Leaf Coalition, backed by America, Britain and Norway, along with such corporate giants as Amazon, Airbnb, and Unilever, aims to create an international marketplace in which carbon credits can be sold for deforestation avoided. An initial $1bn has been pledged to reward countries for protecting forests. South-East Asia could be a big beneficiary,

Admittedly, curbing deforestation has been a cherished but elusive goal of climate campaigners for ages. A big un initiative to that end, called REDD+, was launched a decade ago, with Indonesia notably due for help. It never achieved its potential. Projects for conservation must jump through many hoops before approval. The risk is often that a patch of forest here may be preserved at the expense of another patch there. Projects are hard to monitor. The price set for carbon under the scheme, $5 a tonne, has been too low to overcome these hurdles.

The Leaf Initiative would double the price of carbon, making conservation more attractive. Whereas buyers of carbon credits under REDD+ pocketed profits from a rise in carbon prices, windfalls will now go to the country that sold the credits. Standards of monitoring are much improved. Crucially, the scheme will involve bigger units of land than previous efforts, the so-called jurisdictional approach. That reduces the risk of deforestation simply being displaced from a protected patch to an unprotected one.

Excerpts from Banyan: There is hope for South-East Asia’s beleaguered tropical forests, Economist, May 1, 2021

Nuclear Nightmare Coming Back to Haunt Us: Nuclear Waste Dumped at Sea

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A stock control inspection has revealed that about 2,800 barrels of radioactive waste partly originating from the healthcare and defense industries may have been handled carelessly, Swedish Television reported. The barrels are reportedly located on the floor of the Baltic Sea 100 kilometres north of Stockholm in Forsmark, where one of Sweden’s seven nuclear plants is situated. The barrels, dating from the 1970s and 1980s, are said to be of no danger at the moment but may pose a risk in the future if not taken care of and repositioned properly.

The government will now have to make decisions on the financial costs of inspecting and restoring the waste and how it will be handled in the future…

 Pekka Vanttinen, 2,800 radioactive waste barrels found near Baltic Sea, stored carelessly, EURACTIV.com, May 18, 2021

The Wild West Mentality of Companies Running the U.S. Oil and Gas Infrastructure — and Who Pays for It

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The ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline Co. in May 2021 has hit an industry that largely lacks federal cybersecurity oversight, leading to uneven digital defenses against such hacks.

The temporary shutdown of Colonial’s pipeline, the largest conduit for gasoline and diesel to the East Coast, follows warnings by U.S. officials in recent months of the danger of cyberattacks against privately held infrastructure. It also highlights the need for additional protections to help shield the oil-and-gas companies that power much of the country’s economic activity, cyber experts and lawmakers say. “The pipeline sector is a bit of the Wild West,” said John Cusimano, vice president of cybersecurity at aeSolutions, a consulting firm that works with energy companies and other industrial firms on cybersecurity. Mr. Cusimano called for rules similar to the U.S. Coast Guard’s 2020 regulations for the maritime sector that required companies operating ports and terminals to put together cybersecurity assessments and plans for incidents.

 More than two-thirds of executives at companies that transport or store oil and gas said their organizations are ready to respond to a breach, according to a 2020 survey by the law firm Jones Walker LLP. But many don’t take basic precautions such as encrypting data or conducting dry runs of attacks, said Andy Lee, who chairs the firm’s privacy and security team. “The overconfidence issue is a serious phenomenon,” Mr. Lee said.

Electric utilities are governed by rules enforced by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a nonprofit that reviews companies’ security measures and has the power to impose million-dollar fines if they don’t meet standards. There is no such regulatory body enforcing standards for oil-and-gas companies, said Tobias Whitney, vice president of energy security solutions at Fortress Information Security. “There aren’t any million-dollar-a-day potential fines associated with oil-and-gas infrastructure at this point,” he said. “There’s no annual audit.”

Excerpt from David Uberti and Catherine Stupp, Colonial Pipeline Hack Sparks Questions About Oversight, WSJ, May 11, 2021

Addicted to Weather Modification: Make it Rain Now

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Attempts to modify the weather can be dangerous. They require pilots to head into the kind of clouds they would normally avoid. But officials claim that China’s efforts to trigger or boost precipitation by scattering chemicals in the sky, which began in the 1950s, have been hugely successful. Today the country spends at least $200m a year on the programme. In 2018 about 50,000 people were involved in it, most of them part-time or seasonal staff working from small offices in rural areas.

Among the 50 or so countries where cloud-seeding is practiced, China is the most enthusiastic promoter of it….Officials claim it can help to put out wildfires and reduce air pollution. State media report that cloud-seeding brings down about 50bn cubic metres of extra rain or snow across the country each year—equal to about 8% of total water demand. Officials in Beijing claim that in the parched capital, seeding can boost rainfall by 15%…

Recent advances in radar and computer modelling have made rigorous tests more possible. Scientists now generally agree that cloud-seeding can slightly augment snowfall from specific types of cloud that form on the slopes of mountains. Some of China’s weather-modification projects take place in such environments. But elsewhere, despite the lack of convincing proof that it works, farmers still want the government to try. And the government likes getting credit when rain does fall. Cloud-seeding creates employment in poor rural places, in particular for army veterans who believe that the government owes them a job.

Only a few of China’s rainmakers use planes. More commonly, they fire silver iodide into the sky from artillery pieces. But that can be dangerous, too. Locals are often advised to keep an eye out for unexploded shells, which occasionally land on people’s homes….

Excerpts from No silver lining: Cloud-seeding will not solve China’s water shortages, Economist, Mar. 27, 2021

How Air Pollution Infiltrates the Seas

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A global effort to curb pollution from the heavy fuel oil burned by most big ships appears to be encouraging water pollution instead. A 2020 regulation aimed at cutting sulfur emissions from ship exhaust is prompting many owners to install scrubbing systems that capture pollutants in water and then dump some or all of the waste into the sea.

Some 4 300 scrubber-equipped ships are already releasing at least 10 gigatons of such wastewater each year, often in ports and sometimes near sensitive coral reefs…. The shipping industry says pollutants in the waste don’t exceed national and international limits, and that there’s no evidence of harm. But some researchers fear scrubber water, which includes toxic metals such as copper and carcinogenic compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, poses a rapidly growing threat, and they want to see such systems outlawed.

The emerging debate is the result of a 2020 regulation put into place by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), an arm of the United Nations that works with 174 member states to develop common rules for international shipping. By banning the use of sulfur-heavy fuel oil, the rule intended to reduce pollutants that contribute to acid rain and smog. IMO estimated the rule would slash sulfur emissions by 77% and prevent tens of thousands of premature deaths from air pollution in ports and coastal communities.

But cleaner fuel can cost up to 50% more than the sulfur-rich kind, and the rule allows ship owners to continue to burn the cheaper fuel if they install scrubbers. In 2015, fewer than 250 ships had scrubbers (often to comply with local regulations); last year, that number grew to more than 4300, according to industry figures.

A scrubber system sends exhaust through a meters-tall metal cylinder, where it is sprayed with seawater or freshwater, depending on the type, at rates comparable to gushing fire hydrants, to capture pollutants. In the most popular systems, called open loop scrubbers, seawater is discharged to the ocean after little or no treatment. Other systems retain sludge for disposal on land and release much smaller (but more concentrated) amounts while at sea….Researchers are particularly worried about discharges in areas that IMO has designated as ecologically sensitive. The Great Barrier Reef, for example, receives about 32 million tons of scrubber effluent per year because it’s near a major shipping route for coal. Ships also release scrubber water around the Galápagos Islands….

Ports see substantial discharges, too. Cruise ships dominate those releases, contributing some 96% of discharges in seven of the 10 most discharge-rich ports. Cruise ships typically need to burn fuel in port to continue to operate their casinos, heated pools, air conditioning, and other amenities. Most ports have shallow water, so pollutants are less diluted and can accumulate more rapidly….

Researchers, who are participating in a €7.5 million European effort to study shipping pollution called EMERGE, would like to study how scrubber water affects fish larvae.

But shippers have become hesitant to share samples and data with scientists. “We’re reluctant to give it to organizations which we know have already an established agenda,” says Mike Kaczmarek, chairman of the Clean Shipping Alliance 2020

The ultimate solution is to require ships to use the cleanest fuel, called marine gas oil. In the meantime, 16 countries as well as some localities have banned the most common scrubbers.

Excerpts from Erik StokstadShipping rule cleans the air but dirties the water, Science, May 13, 2021

The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) study, released on April 9, 2021

The Coin Curse: Bitcoin, Dogecoin and Carbon

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Environmentalists…fret about how much energy bitcoin uses. In a paper in Nature Communications, a group of academics…examine bitcoin’s energy use in China. They conclude that, in the absence of legal curbs, bitcoin could by 2024 become a “non-negligible” barrier to China’s efforts to decarbonize its economy.

Bitcoin’s hunger for energy stems from its design. It forgoes centralised record-keeping in favour of a “blockchain”, a transaction database that is distributed among users. The blockchain is maintained by “miners”, who validate transactions by competing to crack mathematical puzzles with solutions that are hard to find but easy to check. Each successfully mined block of transactions generates a reward, currently 6.25 bitcoins ($357,000).

The system varies the difficulty of the puzzles to ensure that one new block is created, on average, every ten minutes. High bitcoin prices make it worthwhile to spend more computing power—and therefore electricity—chasing mining rewards…

Despite the currency’s democratic ambitions, mining is concentrated among a handful of professional operators. About 70% takes place in China. Scientists have concluded that, without regulation, Chinese bitcoin mining could consume around as much energy as Italy or Saudi Arabia by 2024. Annual carbon emissions, at 130m tonnes, would approach those of Nigeria. Such numbers should be taken with a good deal of salt. Bitcoin’s energy use depends crucially on its price, which swings wildly…

But the general picture—that bitcoin is a dirty business—fits with other research. One oft-cited model, which uses publicly available blockchain data, reckons its global energy consumption is already equal to that of Kazakhstan, and that its carbon footprint matches Hong Kong’s.

Excerpts from The dirty truth: Totting up bitcoin’s environmental costs, Economist, Apr. 10, 2021

Dumping Carbon in the Seabed

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Oil companies have for decades made money by extracting carbon from the ground. Now they are trying to make money putting it back. Energy giants such as Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell are pushing carbon capture and storage (CCS)—where carbon is gathered and buried underground—as part of a drive to reduce both their own and their customers’ emissions. Executives say the service could become a new source of income when the industry is grappling with how to adapt to a lower-carbon economy.

Oil companies have long captured carbon from their operations, albeit mostly to produce more oil. Now they want to retool that skill as a service they can sell to heavy-polluting industries like cement and steel, burying their carbon in the ground indefinitely for a fee, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. Yet critics question the environmental benefits and high cost of such projects.

In 2021, Shell, Total and Equinor launched a joint venture to store carbon in a rock formation thousands of feet beneath the seabed off the coast of Norway. The state-backed Northern Lights project is set to be the first time companies outside the oil industry will be able to pay to have their carbon gathered and stored. Most carbon-storage projects rely on government funding. Norway is covering about 80% of the $1.6 billion cost of the Northern Lights project, with the rest split equally between Shell, Equinor and Total.

Exxon has said it plans to form a new business unit to commercialize carbon capture and storage, forecasting it could become a $2 trillion market by 2040. Chevron has formed partnerships on storage projects, while BP is codeveloping storage projects in the U.K. and Australia. Oil executives’ sales pitch to carbon-intensive companies: We will provide your energy, then take back the carbon to minimize your footprint. Carbon capture and storage iss becoming a business rather than just a solution. 

The U.S. offers companies a tax credit of as much as $50 a metric ton of carbon captured, while the U.K., Norway and Australia have collectively committed billions of dollars of funding for carbon-capture projects. But There are  concerns about whether storage sites could leak carbon. In Europe, public resistance to land-based storage has led to the use of aquifers and depleted gas fields in the North Sea….In the Norway project, carbon will be transported by ship around the bottom of the country before being pumped offshore via a 68-mile pipeline and then injected into an aquifer under the seabed. BP is working on a similar concept for a project it will operate in northeast England, where carbon will be collected from a gas-power plant and various industrial sites, then stored under the North Sea. “We’ll capture the carbon, we’ll take it offshore, we’ll stuff it underground,” BP Chief Executive Bernard Looney recently said of the project. “Taking the carbon back is what I like to describe it as.”

Excerpts from Sarah McFarlane, Oil Giants Turn to Carbon Storage, Apr. 20, 2021

Chasing Super-Polluters

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A constellation of satellites will be flown this decade to try to pinpoint significant releases of climate-changing gases, in particular carbon dioxide and methane. The initiative is being led by an American non-profit organisation called Carbon Mapper.
It will use technology developed by the US space agency over the past decade.
The satellites – 20 or so – will be built and flown by San Francisco’s Planet company.
Planet operates today the largest fleet of Earth-observing spacecraft.

There are already quite a few satellites in the sky that monitor greenhouse gases, but the capability is far from perfect. Most of these spacecraft can sense the likes of methane over very large areas but have poor resolution at the local level, at the scale, say, of a leaking pipeline. And those systems that can capture this detail will lack the wide-area coverage and the timely return to a particular location. The Carbon Mapper project wants to fix this either-or-situation by flying multiple high-resolution (30m) sensors that can deliver a daily view, or better.

They will look for super-emitters – the actors responsible for large releases of greenhouse gases. These would include oil and gas infrastructure, or perhaps poorly managed landfills and large dairy factory facilities.

Often these emitters want to know they have a problem but just don’t have the data to take action. “What we’ve learned is that decision support systems that focus just at the level of nation states, or countries, are necessary but not sufficient. We really need to get down to the scale of individual facilities, and even individual pieces of equipment, if we’re going to have an impact across civil society,” explained Riley Duren, Carbon Mapper’s CEO and a research scientist at the University of Arizona…The aim is to put the satellite data in the hands of everyone, and with the necessary tools also to be able to understand and use that information….

Excerpt from Jonathan Amos Carbon Mapper satellite network to find super-emitters, Reuters, April 16, 2021

A Gun to their Head: the Exclusive Vaccine Club

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International tensions over access to Covid-19 vaccines have intensified as supply hiccups disrupt mass rollouts of shots. But trade experts warn that restrictions on vaccine exports risk making a bad situation worse. That’s because the world’s major vaccine producers rely on each other for the essential ingredients to manufacture vaccines through a web of cross-border supply chains in complex chemicals, fatty acids and glass vials. If governments restrict vaccine exports, they risk retaliation from other members of this exclusive club of vaccine makers, who could withhold vital supplies, squeezing production just when it is needed most.

These supply chains stretch across the world, drawing in producers of basic chemicals that provide critical ingredients as well as the pharmaceutical powerhouses that make the vaccines. The  U.S. , the  European Union  and  China  are among a handful of territories that produce vaccine ingredients and final vaccines for the entire world. More than half of global vaccines and of key vaccine ingredients come from the  U.S.  and  EU . These 12 countries and the EU make up the “Vaccine Club”—producers that make both the key ingredients as well as final vaccines

The members of the vaccine club, though, source on average 88.3% of the imported ingredients used in vaccine production from other club members, according to economists led by Simon Evenett, professor of international trade and economic development at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, who have mapped trade flows between the world’s major vaccine producers. Limiting vaccine exports to another major producer would therefore risk retaliatory action that could undermine production, threatening the mass vaccination drives that are the key to ending the pandemic, Prof. Evenett said. “Everyone has a gun to each other’s heads,” he said.

Excerpts from The Covid-19 Vaccine Club: How the World’s Biggest Producers Depend on Each Other, WSJ, May 1, 2021

Begging for a Vaccine: the other COVID crisis

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On April 16, 2021  Adar Poonawalla, head of the world’s biggest vaccine-maker, the Serum Institute of India (SII), begged President Joe Biden, in a tweet, to ‘lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the us.’… because it would affect the manufacturing of vaccines: AstraZeneca’s, of which SII makes 100m doses a month, and Novavax’s, of which it expects to make 60m-70m doses a month.

That was shortly after the Biden administration announced, on February 5, 2021, plans to use the Defense Production Act (DPA)—a law dating from the 1950s that grants the president broad industrial-mobilization powers—to bolster US vaccine-making. This legislation…has helped American pharmaceutical companies to secure a variety of special materials and equipment, including plastic tubing, raw goods, filters and even paper, that are needed for vaccine production. But firms which export such products point out that the DPA  hinders their ability to sell them abroad. They must seek permission before exporting these goods. That requires time and paperwork. And if the government decides it needs the goods in question to remain in the country, the firms concerned may be barred from exporting them at all… 

To be used in vaccine manufacturing, products have to be approved by regulators. So finding substitutes quickly can be impossible. SII is not alone in its concern. On March 24, 2021  Micheal Martin, Ireland’s prime minister, warned that export bans (and not just from America) would harm global vaccine production. He noted that the Pfizer vaccine involves 280 components from 86 suppliers in 19 countries. Indeed, American export controls particularly harm European vaccine companies, which need special bags from America in which to make their products. At a vaccine supply-chain meeting in March, one such firm complained of 66-week delivery times for the supply of these bags.

Excerpts from A Vaxxing Problem: Covid 19 and the Defense Production Act, Economist, Apr. 24, 2021

Hazardous Waste Dumping on the Los Angeles Seafloor

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An expedition led by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography mapped more than 36,000 acres of seafloor between Santa Catalina Island and the Los Angeles coast in a region previously found to contain high levels of the toxic chemical DDT in sediments and the ecosystem. The survey on Research Vessel (R/V) Sally Ride identified an excess of 27,000 targets with high confidence to be classified as a barrel, and an excess of 100,000 total debris objects on the seafloor. 

“Unfortunately, the basin offshore Los Angeles had been a dumping ground for industrial waste for several decades, beginning in the 1930s. We found an extensive debris field in the wide area survey,” said Eric Terrill, chief scientist of the expedition and director of the Marine Physical Laboratory at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The expedition that ran March 10-24, 2021 was developed in collaboration with NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations…The project, part of ongoing collaboration with NOAA’s Uncrewed Systems Operations Center, tested autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) technology to map the seafloor….Two AUVs, the REMUS 6000 capable of working up to depths of 6,000 meters (19,600 feet), and Bluefin , capable of depths up to 1,500 meters (4,900 feet), were deployed to work in tandem to map the seabed at a high resolution…

In 2011 and 2013, UC Santa Barbara professor David Valentine discovered concentrated accumulations of DDT in the sediments in the same region, and visually confirmed 60 barrels on the seafloor. Scientists are also finding high levels of DDT in marine mammals including dolphins and sea lions, with exposure to PCBs and DDT linked to the development of cancer in sea lions. Reporting on this issue by the Los Angeles Times noted that shipping logs from a disposal company supporting Montrose Chemical Corp. of California, a DDT-producing company, show that 2,000 barrels of DDT-laced sludge could have potentially been dumped each month from 1947 to 1961 into a designated dumpsite. In addition to Montrose, logs from other entities show that many other industrial companies in Southern California used this basin as a dumping ground until 1972, when the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act, also known as the Ocean Dumping Act, was enacted…

There is a lot to be understood towards how DDT is impacting our environment and marine food webs, according to Scripps chemical oceanographer and professor of geosciences Lihini Aluwihare, who in 2015 co-authored a study that found high abundance of DDT and other man-made chemicals in the blubber of Bottlenose Dolphins that died of natural causes… “These results also raise questions about the continued exposure and potential impacts on marine mammal health, especially in light of how DDT has been shown to have multi-generational impacts in humans. How this vast quantity of DDT in sediments has been transformed by seafloor communities over time, and the pathways by which DDT and its degraded products enter the water column food web are questions that remain to be explored.”

Excerpts from SCRIPPS OCEANOGRAPHY COMPLETES SEAFLOOR SURVEY USING ROBOTICS, FINDS THOUSANDS OF POSSIBLE TARGETS OF INTEREST AT DUMPSITE OFF COAST OF LOS ANGELES, Apr. 26, 2021

The Leaky Oil Pipelines on Our Seafloor

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Federal officials aren’t adequately monitoring the integrity of 8,600 miles of active oil-and-gas pipelines on the Gulf of Mexico’s seafloor, and for decades have allowed the industry to abandon old pipelines with little oversight, a new report to Congress shows. The Government Accountability Office report faults the Interior Department’s offshore oil-safety regulator’s reliance on surface observations and pressure sensors, rather than  subsea inspection, to monitor for leaks.

The report urges the regulator, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE), to resume work on a long-stalled update to pipeline rules. BSEE currently requires monthly inspections of pipeline routes in the Gulf by helicopter or marine vessel, to look for oil sheens or gas bubbles on the surface to determine whether a pipeline is leaking. By comparison, the bureau’s Pacific office requires subsea pipeline inspections, in part because of seismic concerns, on its much smaller network of 200 miles of active pipelines.

The GAO also found that BSEE and its predecessors allowed the oil industry to leave thousands of miles of decommissioned pipelines on the seafloor rather than incur the cost of raising them back to the surface. Federal regulations allow BSEE to permit operators to decommission pipelines in place, cleaning and burying them in the seabed. The GAO found that the agency doesn’t ensure standards are followed, even as it allowed 97% of the miles of decommissioned pipelines taken out of active use in the Gulf since the 1960s—nearly 18,000 miles—to remain in place.

BSEE also has failed to fully consider whether decommissioned pipelines represent a hazard to navigation and commercial fishing, like trawlers that can be damaged by snagging equipment on undersea pipelines, the report said. Eighty-nine trawlers reported damage from snagging on oil-and-gas equipment between 2015 and 2019, the report found.

BSEE’s failure to inspect decommissioned pipelines also means officials don’t have a complete record of which equipment has been properly cleaned and buried, or whether hurricanes and underwater landslides have moved buried pipelines, potentially creating navigation hazards and environmental damage. A buried 9-mile pipeline segment was swept 4,000 feet out of place by Hurricane Katrina, the report said.

BSEE also allowed oil producers to leave in place some 250 decommissioned “umbilical lines” that carry electricity and hydraulic power to subsea equipment, the report said, over objections of some Interior officials who were concerned that these lines often contain hazardous chemicals that could leak over time as the equipment degrades.

Excerpt from Ted Mann, U.S. Needs to Better Monitor Oil, Gas Pipelines in Gulf of Mexico, Report Says, WSJ, Apr. 19, 2021

The Gung-Ho Way to Seize Space Real Estate

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Elon Musk’s internet satellite venture has spawned an unlikely alliance of competitors, regulators and experts who say the billionaire is building a near-monopoly that is threatening space safety and the environment. The Starlink project, owned by Mr. Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. or SpaceX, is authorized to send some 12,000 satellites into orbit to beam superfast internet to every corner of the Earth. It has sought permission for another 30,000.

Now, rival companies such as Viasat,  OneWeb, Hughes Network Systems and Boeing Co. are challenging Starlink’s space race in front of regulators in the U.S. and Europe. Some complain that Mr. Musk’s satellites are blocking their own devices’ signals and have physically endangered their fleets. Mr. Musk’s endeavor is still in beta testing but it has already disrupted the industry, and even spurred the European Union to develop a rival space-based internet project to be unveiled by the end of the year.

The critics’ main argument is that Mr. Musk’s launch-first, upgrade-later principle, which made his Tesla Inc. TSLA electric car company a pioneer, gives priority to speed over quality, filling Earth’s already crowded orbit with satellites that may need fixing after they launch.

“SpaceX has a gung-ho approach to space,” said Chris McLaughlin, government affairs chief for rival OneWeb. “Every one of our satellites is like a Ford Focus—it does the same thing, it gets tested, it works—while Starlink satellites are like Teslas: They launch them and then they have to upgrade and fix them, or even replace them altogether,” Mr. McLaughlin said. Around 5% of the first batch of Starlink satellites failed, SpaceX said in 2019…. 

Orbital space is finite, and the current lack of universal regulation means companies can place satellites on a first-come, first-served basis. And Mr. Musk is on track to stake a claim for most of the free orbital real estate, largely because, unlike competitors, he owns his own rockets.

Excerpts from Bojan Pancevski, Elon Musk’s Satellite Internet Project Is Too Risky, Rivals Say, April 19, 2021

A War Like No Other: the Covert Invasion of Iran

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Within hours of Iran proudly announcing the launch of its latest centrifuges, on April 10, 2021, a power blackout damaged some of the precious machines at its site in Natanz…One thing reports seem to agree on is that an “incident” affected the power distribution network at Natanz.

Natanz is critical to Iran’s nuclear program. The heavily secured site is protected by anti-aircraft guns and has two large centrifuge halls buried more than 50 feet underground to protect them from airstrikes. Despite the conflicting reports, it appears the facility’s main power distribution equipment — Natanz has its own grid — was taken out with explosives. Backup emergency electricity also was taken down, and power cut out across the multibuilding compound, Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesperson for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, told Iran’s state-run TV.

A blackout may not sound that serious, but it can be at an enrichment plant. Centrifuges are slender machines linked up in what are called cascades which enrich uranium gas by spinning it at incredibly high speeds using rotors. The stress on the advanced materials involved is intense and the process is technically immensely challenging. A small problem can send a centrifuge spinning out of control, with parts smashing into each other and damaging a whole cascade.

The question is: what caused the blackout – a cyber-attack or a physical act of sabotage, like a bomb?

Israel has a long history of sabotaging nuclear facilities in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, both through cyber means — including the sophisticated Stuxnet attack against Iran, which Israel conducted with U.S. and Dutch intelligence agencies — and with conventional bombs and explosives. Israel is also reportedly behind a number of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and officials over the last decade. The Stuxnet attack was particularly significant because it launched the era of cyberwarfare, as it was the first cyberattack known to use a digital weapon that could leap into the physical realm to cause actual destruction of equipment. The highly skilled covert operation was conducted in lieu of a kinetic attack to avoid attribution and an escalation in hostilities with Iran; it remained undetected for three years..

Excerpts from Gordon Corera, Iran nuclear attack: Mystery surrounds nuclear sabotage at Natanz, BBC, Apr. 12, 2021, Kim Zetter, Israel may have Destroyed Iran Centrifuges Simply by Cutting Power, Intercept, Apr. 13, 2021

The Plastics Revolution: A Century Later

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Businesses pay a fee to Tontoton,  a company established in 2019,  for every ton of plastic that they generate. Tontoton then uses the money to employ scavengers, who retrieve an equal weight of plastic garbage in Vietnam — the world’s No. 4 source of ocean debris…Tontoton said it has the only such program in Vietnam, while Plastic Bank runs a similar one in Indonesia and the Philippines, and the Plastic Collective covers Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia…Tontoton targets the worst ocean-bound rubbish, called orphan plastic because it cannot be recycled. Trash pickers find the single-use plastic along the cyan waters hugging Vietnam’s Phu Quoc and Hon Son islands. Their goal is to collect 5,000 tons a year and send it to INSEE, part of Siam City Cement, to be burned for energy….

These cleanup programs have sprung up globally as doubts emerge about recycling, which used to seem like a win-win idea because consumers could keep consuming and the environment could stay pristine. But instead, for decades, the public believed its plastic was being recycled, only to find that 91% of it was not, according to a study in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, assessing all plastic from 1950-2015.

Vietnam is a focus of cleanup campaigns because it’s among the top five countries sending litter to sea, along with China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand…These Asian countries earned this marker because they import so much waste for processing from the rest of the world.

Tontoton says clients sign a letter committing to multiple strategies beyond offsets, including plastic substitutes and reduction. The company helps them offset or “neutralize” plastic already used, but this isn’t a “getaway car” to escape broader responsibility. “Plastic neutralization cannot solve the problem by itself.”

Excerpt from LIEN HOANG, Vietnam tests waters for plastic credits to fight marine pollution, April 15, 2021

Better than Gods: Can We Master the Climate?

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Given the urgency of the risks posed by climate change, the U.S. should pursue a research program for solar geoengineering — in coordination with other nations, subject to governance, and alongside a robust portfolio of climate mitigation and adaptation policies, says a 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The report emphasizes that solar geoengineering is not a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
 
Solar geoengineering refers to strategies designed to cool Earth either by adding small reflective particles to the upper atmosphere, by increasing reflective cloud cover in the lower atmosphere, or by thinning high-altitude clouds that can absorb heat. While such strategies have the potential to reduce global temperatures and thereby ameliorate some of the risks posed by climate change, they could also introduce an array of unknown or negative consequences…

Scientific understanding of many aspects of solar geoengineering technologies remains limited, including how they could affect weather extremes, agriculture, natural ecosystems, or human health. There currently is no coordinated national effort for solar geoengineering research. The report recommends a comprehensive plan for governing solar geoengineering research, designed to ensure it moves forward in a socially responsible manner. Researchers should follow a code of conduct, for example, and research should be catalogued in a public registry, be subject to regular program assessment and review, and allow for public engagement.

Deliberate outdoor experiments that involve releasing substances into the atmosphere should be considered only when they can provide critical observations that cannot be provided by laboratory study, modeling, or experiments of opportunity — such as volcanic eruptions. Outdoor experiments should be subject to appropriate governance including permitting and impact assessments, says the report…The report says the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) should lead the effort to establish and coordinate a solar geoengineering research program across federal agencies and scientific disciplines, with funding in the range of $100 million-$200 million over the first five years. USGCRP would enable oversight and governance of research activities, including ensuring peer review, coordinating budget proposals and requests, periodically assessing progress, and defining program goals. Funding should be set aside specifically for implementation of governance and public engagement efforts.

Excerpts from New Report Says U.S. Should Cautiously Pursue Solar Geoengineering Research to Better Understand Options for Responding to Climate Change Risks, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Press Release, Mar. 25, 2021

Nuking Tahiti: the Moruroa Files

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From 1966 to 1974, France blew up 41 nuclear weapons in above-ground tests in French Polynesia, the collection of 118 islands and atolls that is part of France. The French government has long contended that the testing was done safely. But a new analysis of hundreds of documents declassified in 2013 suggests the tests exposed 90% of the 125,000 people living in French Polynesia to radioactive fallout—roughly 10

The findings come from a 2-year collaboration, dubbed the Moruroa Files, between Disclose, a French nonprofit that supports investigative journalism; Interprt, a collective of researchers, architects, and spatial designers affiliated with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who focus on environmental issues; and the Science & Global Security program at Princeton. The findings were presented on 9 March on the project’s website, in a book, and in a technical paper posted to the arXiv preprint server.

The abandoned testing facility at the Moruroa Atoll. The atoll is at the risk of collapsing due to nuclear blasts

Declassified documents suggest actual exposures were between two and 20 times higher than France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) estimates… Reasons for the discrepancies vary from test to test, he says. For example, CEA acknowledged that the first test, dubbed Aldébaran, exposed residents of the Gambier Islands to relatively high levels of fallout. But actual exposures were likely higher still… Although CEA noted that contaminated rainwater fell on the island, he says, it failed to consider that many residents likely drank the contaminated water, collected in household cisterns, for days.

Most important, the documents suggest a single test in 1974, called Centaure, exposed the entire population of Tahiti—87,500 people at the time—to fallout. French authorities set off a relatively tiny atom bomb with an explosive yield equal to 4 kilotons of TNT, and weather forecasts predicted that winds should carry fallout to the north. Instead, the wind blew to the west, carrying the plume directly over Tahiti. A new simulation based on data in the documents shows how the plume of radiation wafted over the island. CEA estimated that people on the island received a dose of about 0.6 mSv.  However, Phillipe and colleagues argue that CEA underestimated the total amount of radiation that accumulated on the ground over several days, didn’t account for radiation lingering in vegetables consumed later…

The new analysis moves the vast majority of French Polynesians past the exposure threshold to qualify for compensation. Philippe and Schoenberger would like to see France do away with the exposure standard and compensate anyone who lived through the tests and developed a qualifying cancer. “Our hope is to demonstrate that this kind of threshold can be prejudicial to claimants just because of the difficulties of proving exposure,” Schoenberger says.

Philippe estimates that, assuming a cancer rate of 0.2% per year, roughly 10,000 cancer patients or their families would qualify retroactively and that compensating them would cost about €700 million. Future cancers would cost about €24 million per year, he estimates. However, Hughes says it remains to be seen whether the French government will even acknowledge the analysis. “My fear is that they will simply ignore it,” Hughes says.

The declassified documents also show the French government routinely failed to warn Polynesians about the radiation risks, Philippe says. In the Centaure test, authorities could have warned Tahitians about the approaching fallout 2 days in advance, but did not. Ironically, Philippe notes, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries were monitoring the tests remotely. “Everybody knew what was going on,” he says, “except the Polynesians.”

Excerpt from Adrian Cho, France grossly underestimated radioactive fallout from atom bomb tests, study finds, Science, Mar. 11, 2021

Wild West: Mercury Pollution in the Amazon Rainforest

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Munduruku Indigenous people in the Tapajós basin – an epicenter of illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest – in southwestern Pará state have reported increasing encroachments upon their lands by armed “wildcat” miners known as “garimpeiros” since March 14, 2021. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office has warned of a potential for violence between local residents and the miners and urged the deployment of the federal police and other authorities to remove the trespassers. But the government has yet to act. The tension has escalated in recent weeks after a group of miners brought equipment to the area.

Illegal mining causes significant deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and has been linked to dangerous levels of mercury poisoning, from mercury widely used to process the gold, in several Munduruku communities along the Tapajós basin. Indigenous people also fear that miners could spread the Covid-19 virus in their communities.

In a public statement on March 16, 2021 the Federal Prosecutor’s Office reported that a helicopter appeared to have escorted the miners and their equipment, suggesting the invasion is “an orchestrated action” by an organized crime group. The office also reported that the miners may be coordinating the invasion with a “small group” of Indigenous people who support the mining. Members of Munduruku communities who oppose the mining and have reported the invasions to the authorities say they have faced threats and intimidation. On March 19, 2021 armed men reportedly prevented a group of Munduruku Indigenous people from disembarking from their boats in an area within their territory. On March 25, 2021 in the Jacareacanga municipality, miners and their supporters forced their way into a building that houses the Wakoborun Women’s Association and other community organizations that have opposed the mining. The attackers destroyed furniture and equipment and set fire to documents, Indigenous leaders reported…

President Bolsonaro has signaled his aversion to protecting Indigenous lands. As a candidate, he vowed not to designate “one more centimeter” of land as Indigenous territory. His administration has halted the demarcation of Indigenous territories – there are 237 pending requests – leaving Indigenous communities even more vulnerable to encroachments, deforestation, and violence. The Munduruku territory is already demarcated. In 2020, Bolsonaro introduced a draft bill in Congress to allow mining and other commercial activities in Indigenous territories. The bill is pending in Congress and is listed as one of Bolsonaro’s priorities.

Excerpt from Brazil: Remove Miners from Indigenous Amazon Territory, Human Rights Watch, Apr. 12, 2021

It’s Easy: How to Make a Radioactive Dirty Bomb

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A truck carrying highly radioactive materials has been stolen by armed criminals in central Mexico the Independent reported on April 12, 2012. The Mexican government is now warning that anybody who comes in close contact with its deadly payload could be risking their lives. The individuals got away with an industrial inspection equipment truck during an armed heist on April 11, 2021 in the town of Teoloyucan. Included in the bounty is a QSA Delta 800 gamma ray projector that holds radioactive iridium-192, selenium-75 and ytterbium-169 isotopes — a highly unusual bounty for any hijacker.

It’s still unclear why they targeted the truck in question, but during a previous robbery involving radioactive waste, Mexican authorities feared the ingredients may be used to build a dirty bomb. Contact with the contents of the truck, authorities emphasized, can be fatal. “At 10am today, there was a robbery of radiographic equipment reported,” reads a warning issued by the National Commission for Nuclear Security and Safeguarding, as quoted by the Independent. “If the radioactive material is extracted from the container, is moved, or makes direct contact with any persons handling it, permanent injury can occur in minutes.” “In case of making direct contact with the source over the course of hours or days, the effects can prove fatal,” the warning reads. Even just being 30 meters away could cause radiation poisoning, according to the Commission.

Members of the Commission for National Civil Protection (CNPC) have been dispatched across the central region of Mexico. Authorities have not ruled out the possibility that the truck may now be in Mexico City….This is not the first time radioactive material has been stolen in Mexico.

Excerpt ‘Extremely dangerous’ radioactive material stolen in Mexico truck hijacking, Independent, Apr. 12, 2021

Facing the Unprecedented: Nuclear Waste Burial in China

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China is building a massive underground laboratory to research disposal technologies for high-level radioactive waste, the most dangerous byproduct of nuclear technology and applications. This is meant to pave the way for a repository that can handle the disposal of at least a century’s worth of such materials for tens of thousands of years, the lab’s chief designer told China Daily in an exclusive interview.

The lab will be situated in granite up to 560 meters below ground in the Beishan region of Gansu province, said Wang Ju, vice-president of the Beijing Research Institute of Uranium Geology. The underground lab was listed as one of China’s major scientific construction projects in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20).

Its surface facilities will cover 247 hectares, with 2.39 hectares of gross floor space. The underground complex will have a total structural volume of 514,200 square cubic meters, along with 13.4 kilometers of tunnels, he added. The lab is estimated to cost over 2.72 billion yuan ($422 million) and take seven years to build. It is designed to operate for 50 years, and if its research proves successful and the site is suitable, a long-term underground repository for high-level waste will be built near the lab by 2050…

According to the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), China seeks to cut carbon emissions by optimizing its energy consumption structure and raising its proportion of nonfossil energy. This includes building a new generation of coastal nuclear plants,… small-scale reactors and offshore floating reactors.. As of 2020, China had 49 nuclear reactors in operation, making it the world’s third-largest nuclear energy producer, behind the United States and France. There are 16 nuclear reactors in construction in China, the most in the world, according to the World Nuclear Association.

Excerpts from Zhang Zhihao, Construction of radioactive waste disposal lab underway, China Daily, Apr. 8, 2021

 
 
 

The Moon Miners

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The joint announcement by China and Russia in March 20211 on their collaboration to explore the moon has the potential to scramble the geopolitics of space exploration, once again setting up competing programs and goals for the scientific and, potentially, commercial exploitation of the moon. This time, though, the main players will be the United States and China, with Russia as a supporting player.

In recent years, China has made huge advances in space exploration, putting its own astronauts in orbit and sending probes to the moon and to Mars. It has effectively drafted Russia as a partner in missions that it has already planned, outpacing a Russian program that has stalled in recent years. In December 2020, China’s Chang’e-5 mission brought back samples from the moon’s surface, which have gone on display with great fanfare in Beijing. That made China only the third nation, after the United States and the Soviet Union, to accomplish the feat. In the coming months, it is expected to send a lander and rover to the Martian surface, hard on the heels of NASA’s Perseverance, which arrived there in February 2021..

 According to a statement by the China National Space Administration, they agreed to “use their accumulated experience in space science research and development and use of space equipment and space technology to jointly formulate a route map for the construction of an international lunar scientific research station.”

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia became an important partner in the development of the International Space Station. With NASA having retired the space shuttle in 2011, Russia’s Soyuz rockets were the only way to get to the International Space Station until SpaceX, a private company founded by the billionaire Elon Musk, sent astronauts into orbit on its own rocket last year. China, by contrast, was never invited to the International Space Station, as American law prohibits NASA from cooperating with Beijing. 

China pledged to keep the joint project with Russia “open to all interested countries and international partners,” as the statement put it, but it seemed all but certain to exclude the United States and its allies in space exploration. The United States has its own plans to revisit the moon by 2024 through an international program called Artemis. With Russia by its side, China could now draw in other countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, establishing parallel programs for lunar development….

Excerpts from China and Russia Agree to Explore the Moon Together, NYT, Mar. 10, 2021

The Nightmare of Keeping the Lights On

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Some 330 million Americans rely on the nation’s critical infrastructure to keep the country humming. Disruptions to electrical grids, communications systems, and supply chains can be catastrophic, yet all of these are vulnerable to cyberattack. According to the government’s 2019 World Wide Threats Hearing, certain adversaries are capable of launching cyberattacks that can disrupt the nation’s critical infrastructure – including electrical distribution networks.

In recognition of the disruptions cyberattacks can cause, DARPA in 2016 established the Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization Systems (RADICS) program. The goal of RADICS has been to enable black-start recovery during a cyberattack. Black start is the process of restoring power to an electric substation or part of the grid that has experienced a total or partial shutdown without relying on an external power transmission network to get things back online…

“Cyberattacks on the grid can essentially do two things – make the grid not tell you the truth, and make the grid operate in an unexpected way,” said Walter Weiss, the program manager responsible for RADICS. “For example, the grid could show you that a substation has power when in reality it does not. This could unintentionally prevent power restoration to an entire area since no one thinks there is a need to bring power back online. The technologies developed under RADICS help provide ground truth around grid status, giving responders the ability to quickly detect anomalies and then chart a path towards recovery.”…

 The RADICS testbed is comprised of miniaturized substations that were designed to operate as they do in the real world, but with safeguards to protect the system and those operating the substations. The substations are connected via power lines, forming a multi-utility crank path. With a crank path, power is generated to black start one utility that then powers the next utility and the next until the grid is fully restored.

DARPA substation, Plum island NY

Technologies to Rapidly Restore the Electrical Grid after Cyberattack Come Online, DARPA Website, Feb. 23, 2021

Hearing the Naked Truth: Earth Observation

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In the middle of last year, Ecuadorians watched with concern as 340 foreign boats, most of them Chinese, fished just outside the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around their country’s westernmost province, the Galapagos Islands. The law of the sea requires such vessels to carry GPS-based automatic identification systems (AIS) that broadcast where they are, and to keep those systems switched on. Some boats, however, failed to comply. There were more than 550 instances of vessels not transmitting their locations for over a day. This regular radio silence stoked fears that the boats concerned were sneaking into Ecuador’s waters to plunder its fish.

Both local officials and China’s ambassador to Ecuador denied this, and said all the boats were sticking to the rules. In October 2020, however, HawkEye 360, a satellite operator based in Virginia, announced it had detected vessels inside Ecuador’s EEZ on 14 occasions when the boats in question were not transmitting AIS. HawkEye’s satellites could pinpoint these renegades by listening for faint signals emanating from their navigation radars and radio communications.

HawkEye’s satellites are so-called smallsats, about the size of a large microwave oven. They are therefore cheap to build and launch. HawkEye deployed its first cluster, of three of them, in 2018. They are now in an orbit that takes them over both of Earth’s poles. This means that, as the planet revolves beneath them, every point on its surface can be monitored at regular intervals…Unlike spy satellites fitted with optical cameras, RF satellites can see through clouds. Their receivers are not sensitive enough to detect standard mobile phones. But they can pick up satellite phones, walkie-talkies and all manner of radar. And, while vessels can and do illicitly disable their AIS, switching off their communications gear and the radar they use for navigation and collision-avoidance is another matter entirely. “Even pirates don’t turn those things off,” says John Beckner, boss of Horizon Technologies….

RF data are also cheap to collect. Satellites fitted with robotic high-resolution cameras are costly. Flying microwave ovens that capture and timestamp radio signals are not. America’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), one of that country’s numerous spying operations, is a big user of RF intelligence. It employs HawkEye’s data to find guerrilla camps and mobile missile-launchers, and to track both conventional warships and unconventional ones, like the weaponised speedboats sometimes deployed by Iran. Robert Cardillo, a former director of the agency who now advises HawkEye, says dozens of navies, Russia’s included, spoof AIS signals to make warships appear to be in places which they are not. RF intelligence is not fooled by this. Mr Cardillo says, too, that the tininess of RF satellites makes them hard for an enemy to destroy.

Beside matters military, the NGA also uses RFdata to unearth illicit economic activity—of which unauthorised fishing is merely one instance. Outright piracy is another. And the technique also works on land. In 2019, for example, it led to the discovery of an illegal gold mine being run by a Chinese company in a jungle in Gabon. And in 2020 the managers of Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo began using HawkEye data to spot elephant poachers and dispatch rangers to deal with them…

Horizon also plans to compile a library of unique radar-pulse “fingerprints” of the world’s vessels, for the tiny differences in componentry that exist even between examples of the same make and model of equipment mean that signals can often be linked to a specific device. It will thus be able to determine not merely that a vessel of some sort is in a certain place, but which vessel it is, and where else it has been…

Excerpt from Espionage: Ears in the Sky, Economist, Mar. 20, 2021

Shallow Your Tongue: The Giddy Western Plutocracy of Hong Kong

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You might think the death of liberalism in Asia’s financial center, Hong Kong, which hosts $10trn of cross-border investments, would trigger panic, capital flight and a business exodus. Instead Hong Kong is enjoying a financial boom. Share offerings have soared as China’s leading companies list there. Western firms are in the thick of it: the top underwriters are Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. In 2020, the value of us dollar payments cleared in Hong Kong, a hub for the world’s reserve currency, hit a record $11trn.

The same pattern of political oppression and commercial effervescence is to be found on the mainland…Yet when they talk to shareholders about China, global firms gloss over this brutal reality: “Very happy,” says Siemens; “Phenomenal,” reckons Apple; and “Remarkable,” says Starbucks…Tougher policing does not affect Westerners, says a mainland financier. His foreign clients in Hong Kong laugh about the anxious memos they receive from bosses at home, asking about political developments. “It doesn’t really affect their life, right? They’re not going on the street to try to demonstrate against the government.”

Mainland China attracted $163bn of fresh multinational investment in 2020, more than any other country. It is opening the mainland capital markets to foreigners, who have invested $900bn, in a landmark shift for global finance.

Moreover, the pull China exerts is no longer just a matter of size—although, with 18% of world GDP, it has that too. The country is also where firms discover consumer trends and innovations. It is increasingly where commodity prices and the cost of capital are set, and is becoming a source of regulations. Business is betting that, in Hong Kong and the mainland, China’s… government is capable of self-restraint in the commercial sphere, providing contractual certainty, despite the lack of fully independent courts and free speech. Though China’s best-known tycoon, Jack Ma, has fallen from political favor, foreign investors’ stakes in his empire are still worth over $500bn.

Excerpts from Dealing with China, The Way its Going to Be, Economist, Mar 20, 2021 

The Horrors of Bombing: 50 Years After

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 In Cambodia, however, fertile land often signifies danger rather than abundance. When America dropped an estimated 1.8m tonnes of explosives on the country during the Vietnam war, those falling on hard ground generally detonated, whereas many landing on softer earth did not. No one knows how many bombs remain in rich soil. But a paper by four academics at Ohio State University who studied satellite images and reports by landmine-removal groups from a single village, found that perhaps half of the munitions have not exploded.

These wartime remnants have given the United States’ bombing campaign of 1965-73—which ostensibly targeted Viet Cong supply lines, but caused perhaps 150,000 deaths—an enduringly lethal legacy. Since 1979, unexploded ordnance has killed at least 19,000 people in Cambodia (though some may have been blown up by landmines from subsequent wars, rather than by American bombs). Cambodia now has the world’s highest rate of amputees.

A recent study by Erin Lin shows that America’s bombardment injured not just Cambodia’s people but its economy as well. She first interviewed farmers in the country, who said they thought that richer, darker soil presented an unusually high risk of hidden ordnance—especially in heavily bombed areas. They work in constant fear of explosions. Some said that they only planted crops in parts of their farms that they were confident contained no bombs, or that they used hand tools instead of machines to reduce the risk of detonation.

Excerpt from Blood and Soil: American Bombing 50 Years Ago Still Shapes Cambodian Agriculture, Mar. 20, 2021

The Thirst for Rape that Won’t Go Away

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Ethiopia’s government says it is conducting a policing operation against the ousted rulers of Tigray, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. Yet as phone connections to the region are restored, having been cut off since the fighting started on November 4th, 2020 credible reports of atrocities and war crimes are emerging. Many involve troops from neighbouring Eritrea, who are fighting alongside Ethiopian forces.

Perhaps the worst incident took place in Axum, one of Ethiopia’s holiest cities. According to Amnesty International, a rights group, Eritrean soldiers killed hundreds of civilians over two days in late November 2020 in retaliation for an attack on their camp. The soldiers picked out unarmed young men and killed them on the spot. They then plundered the city. “All we could see on the streets were bodies and people crying,” one survivor told Amnesty…

Months of restrictions on journalists and NGOs make it hard to know exactly what has been happening. The state-funded Ethiopian Human Rights Commission says it is investigating the Axum massacre and that its preliminary findings indicate that Eritrean soldiers killed a number of civilians in the city. It says it is also investigating reports of shelling in several parts of Tigray. Ethiopian officials including the president, Sahle-Work Zewde, have admitted that women in Tigray have been raped in large numbers. “We cannot pretend that we do not see or hear,” she said on February 19th, 2021. But she failed to identify the perpetrators, even though the victims said their rapists were soldiers in Eritrean and Ethiopian uniforms.

One survivor recounted a harrowing 10-day ordeal during which she said she and five other women were gang-raped by Eritrean soldiers. She said the troops joked and took photos as they injected her with a drug, tied her to a rock, stripped, stabbed and raped repeatedly her. Doctors who’ve treated Tigrayan women have said one woman’s vagina was stuffed with nails, stones and plastic.

Excepts from Murder in the mountains: Soldiers have killed hundreds of civilians in Tigray, Economist, Feb. 27, 2021

The Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown: Ten Years — and Counting

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A resolution to the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant remains a distant goal a decade after three of its reactors melted down. The most challenging part of the cleanup—removing molten nuclear fuel from each reactor—has yet to begin because of high radiation inside the reactor buildings, putting the targeted decommissioning of the plant by 2051 into doubt.

More than 80% of the Japanese public doesn’t feel significant progress is being made and is concerned about further accidents because of recent events. On Feb. 13, 2021 a large earthquake centered near Fukushima, an aftershock of the one 10 years ago, caused water to slosh out of a tank containing spent fuel rods, which must be kept submerged to avoid overheating. A week later, a fish caught off the coast of Fukushima was found to contain 10 times the allowed level of radioactive cesium…This incident shows how risks from the plant continue to weigh on those who live and work nearby. 

“We are still struggling with harmful rumors from the nuclear plant accident,” said Tadaaki Sawada, a spokesman for the federation of Fukushima fishery cooperatives. “How many more years will it continue?”…By several measures, the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in 1986 has been contained. Only around 2% of Fukushima prefecture, or state, is still a no-go area, down from 12% immediately after the disaster. An extensive decontamination process removed topsoil from areas around the plant. Still, thousands of people remain forced out of towns closest to the plant.

In 2020, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co., known as Tepco, and the government were close to a decision to start releasing into the sea over a million cubic meters of water from the plant, but plans were suspended amid opposition from local fishermen and concerns raised by neighboring countries. Contaminated rain and groundwater is stored in large tanks that dominate one side of the plant site. Once treated to remove most radioactive elements, the water still contains tritium, a form of hydrogen that emits a weak form of radiation. Tritium is regularly released into the sea and air from nuclear plants around the world after dilution.

Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency visited the Fukushima plant in 2020 and said disposal of the treated water into the sea would be in line with international practice. “A decision on the disposition path should be taken urgently” to keep the overall decommissioning on track, the IAEA said.

The most challenging part of the cleanup—removing molten nuclear fuel from each reactor—has yet to begin…Tepco has yet to get a clear picture of the location of molten fuel in the reactors because the levels of radiation are damaging even to robots…Gov. Uchibori said that gaining an accurate grasp of the molten-fuel situation was critical to making headway. “If you look at the entire process, right now we are still around the starting point of decommissioning,” he said.

Excerpts from Alastair Gale Fukushima Nuclear Cleanup Is Just Beginning a Decade After Disaster, 

So You Want a Job? De-Humanizing the Hiring Process

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Dr. Lee, chairman and chief executive of venture-capital firm Sinovation Ventures and author of “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order,” maintains that AI “will wipe out a huge portion of work as we’ve known it.” He hit on that theme when he spoke at The Wall Street Journal’s virtual CIO Network summit.

Artificial intelligence (AI) (i.e., robots), according to Dr. Lee, can be used for recruiting…We can have a lot of résumés coming in, and we want to match those résumés with job descriptions and route them to the right managers. If you’re thinking about AI computer and video interaction, there are products you can deploy to screen candidates. For example, AI can have a conversation with the person, via videoconference. And then AI would grade the people based on their answers to your questions that are preprogrammed, as well as your micro-expressions and facial expressions, to reflect whether you possess the right IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence) for a particular job.

Excerpts from Jared Council , AI’s Impact on Businesses—and Jobs, WSJ,  Mar. 8, 2021

The Toxic Shadow of Abandoned Oil Infrastructure

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Wearing blue hard hats, white hazmat suits and respirator masks, workers carted away bags of debris on a recent morning from a sprawling and now-defunct oil refinery once operated by Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES). Other laborers ripped asbestos from the guts of an old boiler house, part of a massive demolition and redevelopment of the plant, which closed in 2019 after a series of explosions at the facility.

Plans call for the nearly 1,400-acre site to be transformed into a new commercial hub with warehousing and offices. All it will take is a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars, and confronting 150 years’ worth of industrial pollution, including buried rail cars and a poisonous stew of waste fuels poured onto the ground. A U.S. refinery cleanup of this size and scope has no known precedent, remediation experts said. It’s a glimpse of what lies ahead if the United States hopes to wean itself off fossil fuels and clean up the toxic legacy of oil, gas and coal.

President Joe Biden wants to bring the United States to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to fight climate change through a shift to clean-energy technologies, while reducing pollution in low-income and minority neighborhoods near industrial facilities. It’s a transition fraught with challenges. Among the biggest is what to do with the detritus left behind. The old PES plant is just one of approximately 135 oil refineries nationwide, to say nothing of the country’s countless gas stations, pipelines, storage hubs, drill pads and other graying energy infrastructure.

In Philadelphia, a private-sector company is taking the lead. Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a real estate firm that specializes in renovating old industrial properties, bought the PES refinery out of bankruptcy for $225.5 million in June…The full extent of the pollution won’t be understood for years. Also uncertain is the ability of the refinery’s previous owners to pay their share of the cleanup. The facility has had multiple owners over its lifetime and responsibility has been divided between them through business agreements and legal settlements.
Oil refining at the Philadelphia site began in 1870, 100 years before the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Gasoline, once a worthless byproduct of heating oil, was routinely dumped by the refinery into the soil, according to historians and researchers. Leaks and accidents spewed more toxins. The June 2019 blasts alone released 676,000 pounds of hydrocarbons, PES said at the time. The Philadelphia site is not unique. About half of America’s 450,000 polluted former industrial and commercial sites are contaminated with petroleum, according to the EPA.

Cleanup in Philadelphia will be painstaking. After asbestos abatement comes the demolition and removal of 3,000 tanks and vessels, along with more than 100 buildings and other infrastructure, the company said. Then comes the ground itself. Hilco’s Perez said dirt quality varies widely on the site and will have to be handled differently depending on contamination levels. Clearing toxins like lead must be done with chemical rinses or other technologies…The site also has polluted groundwater and giant benzene pools lurking underneath, according to environmental reports Sunoco filed over the years with the federal and state governments.

Excerpts from Laila Kearney, 150 years of spills: Philadelphia refinery cleanup highlights toxic legacy of fossil fuels, Reuters, Feb. 16, 2021
 

The Fake Green Labels Lulling Our Conscience

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Certification is a verification process through which an owner of a farm, a fishery or a forest can indicate they comply with social or environmental standards, and earn the right to sell their products as certified. Certified products often include consumer-facing ecolabels. Companies producing or trading “forest and ecosystem-risk commodities” often rely on certification to reassure customers. They want to show that they or their suppliers have taken action to minimize the negative environmental and social impacts linked to production, so their products can be considered ‘sustainable’.

According to a Greenpeace report, while some certification schemes have strong standards, weak implementation combined with a lack of transparency and product traceability means even these schemes have major failings. Too many certified companies continue to be linked to forest and ecosystem destruction, land disputes and human rights abuses. Currently, certification enables destructive businesses to continue operating as usual. By improving the image of forest and ecosystem risk commodities and so stimulating demand, certification risks actually increasing the harm caused by the expansion of commodity production. Certification schemes thus end up greenwashing products linked to deforestation, ecosystem destruction and rights abuses.

Excerpt from Certification schemes such as FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) are greenwashing forest destruction, Greenpeace Press release, Mar. 10, 2021

A Lethal Combination: Rusty Tanks and Melting Ice in the Artic

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A mining firm has paid a record $2bn fine over a huge oil spill that caused one of Russia’s worst environmental disasters. Norilsk Nickel, the world’s leading nickel and palladium producer, said it had paid the fine on March 10, 2021.The fuel spill in May 2021 saw 21,000 tonnes of diesel pour from one of the company’s storage tanks into rivers and lakes in Russia’s Arctic north…The penalty is the biggest ever issued for environmental damage in Russia, officials say.

How did the spill happen? The diesel oil began leaking on May 29, 2020. It is thought to have originated from a rusty storage tank at Norilsk Nickel’s power plant in Siberia.
Investigators believe the tank near Norilsk sank because of melting permafrost which weakened its supports. The Arctic had seen weeks of unusually warm weather – widely believed to be a symptom of global warming – prior to the disaster. The oil contaminated the Ambarnaya river and surrounding subsoil before drifting about 20km (12 miles) north of Norilsk. It then entered Lake Pyasino, which flows to the Kara Sea in the Arctic Ocean. In total, the oil contaminated a 350 sq km (135 sq mile) area…

The clean-up could cost $1.5bn and take between five and 10 years…Norilsk is already a well-known pollution hotspot, because of contamination from the industry that dominates the city.

Excerpt from Norilsk Nickel: Mining firm pays record $2bn fine over Arctic oil spill, BBC, Mar. 10, 2021

How the Global Trade in Plastics Spills Over the Oceans

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Low-value or “residual” plastics – those left over after more valuable plastic is recovered for recycling – are most likely to end up as pollution. So how does this happen? In Southeast Asia, often only registered recyclers are allowed to import plastic waste. But due to high volumes, registered recyclers typically on-sell plastic bales to informal processors…When plastic types were considered low value, informal processors frequently dumped them at uncontrolled landfills or into waterways.

Plastics stockpiled outdoors can be blown into the environment, including the ocean. Burning the plastic releases toxic smoke, causing harm to human health and the environment. When informal processing facilities wash plastics, small pieces end up in wastewater, which is discharged directly into waterways, and ultimately, the ocean.

The price of many recycled plastics has crashed in recent years due to oversupply, import restrictions and falling oil prices, (amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic). However clean bales of (polyethylene terephthalate) PET and (high-density polyethylene) HDPE are still in demand. In Australia, material recovery facilities currently sort PET and HDPE into separate bales. But small contaminants of other materials (such as caps and plastic labels) remain, making it harder to recycle into high quality new products. Before the price of many recycled plastics dropped, Australia baled and traded all other resin types together as “mixed plastics”. But the price for mixed plastics has fallen to zero and they’re now largely stockpiled or landfilled in Australia.

Excerpts from Monique Retamal et al., Why Your Recycled Plastic May End up in the Ocean, the Maritime Executive, Mar. 8, 2021

Beyond Deforestation–Toxic Waste Pollution at the Amazon Rainforest

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Maria do Socorro explains in graphic detail the spate of ailments affecting newborns in her remote community in the Amazon: her grandson died after being born with his intestines outside his body, while others were missing organs or had undeveloped bones.  For the 56-year-old community leader, there is little doubt about the cause of these illnesses. She said the rainforest town had for years suffered from toxic waste pollution from the local operations of Norwegian aluminum producer Norsk Hydro.

Long a simmering environmental scandal in Brazil, the allegations were brought on to the international stage in February 2021 when Socorro’s community sued the Norwegian giant in a Dutch court, seeking damages for claims that “the incorrect disposal of toxic waste” from operations in the area had caused a variety of health ailments, polluted the rainforest and destroyed economic opportunities.

“If business can be global, why can’t justice? These companies have businesses everywhere, but then when they do something wrong they want to smother the possibility of people getting compensation,” said Pedro Martins, partner at law firm PGMBM, which is representing 40,000 alleged victims bringing the suit against Norsk Hydro…

Through local entities, Norsk Hydro runs three facilities — a bauxite mine, a refinery and a smelter — in Pará, a vast Amazonian state that is a flashpoint for illegal deforestation, gold mining and land-grabbing.  The company…denied that in 2018 pollutants from its facilities spilled over during heavy rains and polluted nearby rivers and earth….

Locals say bauxite, lead and aluminium pollution have turned the region’s rivers red. A study from the Evandro Chagas Institute, a Brazilian public health body, found in 2018 that the region’s waters were so polluted with industrial waste from the Norsk Hydro facilities that they “cannot be used for recreation, fishing, or human consumption”.

“I invite these Norwegians to come and bathe in our waters. I challenge them. They have good water there in Norway. Our wealth just goes there,” said Socorro, who heads Cainquiama, a group representing mainly indigenous people and quilombolas — the descendants of runaway slaves. Nearly all of the claimants in the suit have complained about chronic pain, hair loss and skin conditions. The suit also contains claims in relation to birth defects, such as those that have affected Socorro’s grandson, who was born with gastroschisis — a hole in the abdominal wall.

The case is a sensitive one for Norwegian investors and the government, which owns a 34 per cent stake in Norsk Hydro. Oslo has long attempted to hold Brasília to account for the environmental destruction of the Amazon, even publishing its own data on deforestation in the world’s largest rainforest.

Excerpts from Bryan Harris, Norsk Hydro blamed for birth defects in Amazon forest pollution case, FT, Feb. 27, 2021

Planting Trees Can be Bad for the Planet

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Some scientists argue that deforestation is not always harmful for the planet. Christopher A. Williams, a professor at Clark University’s Graduate School of Geography (Worcester, Massachusetts), says that instead of warming up the Earth, deforestation can actually cool it down. (See Climate impacts of U.S. forest loss span net warming to net cooling, Feb. 2021) But some experts are concerned that Williams’ work is likely to be misconstrued as permission to continue deforesting, which is not his intention.

It’s widely accepted that our existing forests are vital carbon sinks, and the best course of action is to stop deforestation, while rewilding and reforesting areas already lost. Deforestation contributes to climate change, can cause wildfires, desertification, soil erosion and most of all – releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide which causes global warming.

While the above may be true, Williams’ new research argues that there are two factors we are not acknowledging: the significance of location and something known as ‘the albedo effect’. Put simply, ‘the albedo effect’ is the process in which forests retain heat. Forests tend to be darker than other surfaces, which means they absorb more sunlight and hold onto heat, explains Williams. As a result, some scientists believe that deforestation gets rid of unwanted heat which is contributing to global warming.

“We found that in some parts of the country like the Intermountain West, more forest actually leads to a hotter planet when we consider the full climate impacts from both carbon and albedo effects,” says Professor Williams. He adds that it is important to consider the albedo effect of forests alongside their well-known carbon storage when aiming to cool the planet.

The team discovered that for approximately one quarter of the US, forest loss causes a persistent net cooling because the albedo effect outweighs the carbon effect.  “It is all about putting the right trees in the right place,” explains Williams, “and studies like ours can help identify where the potential for cooling is greatest.”

For instance, loss of forests east of the Mississippi River caused planetary warming, while forest loss in the Intermountain and Rocky Mountain West led to a net cooling. “If we fail to consider both the carbon and the albedo effects, large-scale tree-planting initiatives, such as Canada’s 2Billion Trees Initiative and The Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees campaign, could end up placing trees in locations that are counterproductive for cooling the climate system,” he says.

Maeve Campbell, DEFORESTATION COULD BE COOLING THE PLANET DOWN, Euronews, SAY SCIENTISTS, Feb. 17,2021

Gorillas, Murders and Making $1.50 per day-Congo Rainforest

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Protecting the forests of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo – home to endangered mountain gorillas – could be described as one of the toughest jobs on the planet. In the past 12 months, more than 20 of the park’s staff have been murdered – and last week rebels were accused of killing the Italian ambassador to DR Congo, his security guard and driver in an attack within the park. “The level of sacrifice that’s involved in keeping this work going will always be the hardest thing to deal with,” says Emmanuel de Merode, who is in charge of more than 800 rangers at Virunga, Africa’s oldest and largest national park.


The Virunga park spans 7,800 sq km (3,000 sq miles) and is home to an astonishingly diverse landscape – from active volcanoes and vast lakes to rainforest and mountains.
The park was set up nearly 100 years ago to protect mountain gorillas, of which there are only 1,000 left in the world. It’s a national park which is part of the Congolese state which has been affected by civil war for the most of its recent history.

In  April 2020, 13 rangers were murdered in what park officials described as a “ferociously violent and sustained” attack by an armed group In January 2021, six rangers, patrolling the park’s boundary on foot, were killed in an ambush by militias. All of those who died were aged between 25 and 30.  It’s a national park which is part of the Congolese state which has been affected by civil war…. 

It’s estimated that a dozen or so armed militia groups survive off the park’s resources – poaching or chopping down wood to sell for fuel. DR Congo’s natural resources have been fought over for decades. The country – which is the size of mainland western Europe – has more mineral wealth, with diamonds, oil, cobalt and copper, than anywhere else on the planet. These are some of the elements essential to modern technology, making up key components in electric cars and smartphones.
Virunga is no different. It’s rich in resources underground as well as in nature and wildlife. But the two million people living in the region of the park mainly live on under $1.50 (£1.08) a day. This tussle for survival is not lost on Mr De Merode who sees protecting the park as essentially a social justice issue.

“It’s not a simple problem of protecting gorillas and elephants; it is overcoming an economic problem at the heart of one of the most horrific civil wars in history,” says Merode. 

Excerpt from Vivienne Nunis and Sarah Treanor, DR Congo’s Virunga National Park: The deadly job of protecting gorillas, BBC, Mar. 4, 2021

The Techno-spheres: Westerners against the Chinese

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Lithuania’s government on Feb. 17 prohibited Chinese security-scanner maker Nuctech Co. from supplying equipment to the country’s two airports, saying a proposed deal was “not in line with national-security interests.” State-controlled Nuctech, which the U.S. government in December 2020 listed among Chinese entities banned from certain transactions with U.S. parties, had won a tender launched a year ago by state-owned Lithuanian Airports.

Canada last year also abandoned a plan to buy Nuctech scanners for its embassies following controversy around the announced deal. Norway, Croatia and an EU directorate in recent months have also stopped scanner tenders involving Nuctech, although none publicly linked the cancellations to security, as Lithuania did. Lithuania banned China’s Nuctech from supplying security-scanning equipment to its two airports.

“We are choosing the Western technosphere. We are not choosing the Chinese technosphere,” said Laurynas Kasciunas, chairman of the Lithuanian parliament’s national-security and defense committee, which oversees a national-security review board that had recommended banning Nuctech. Such policy reversals remain a minority amid extensive Chinese business activity across the EU. 

Excerpt from Daniel Michaels and Valentina Pop, China Faces European Obstacles as Some Countries Heed U.S. Pressure, WSJ, Feb. 23, 2021

How Soil Can Fight Pollution

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Soil biodiversity is essential for most of the ecosystem services and functions that soils
provide and perform. Soil microbes (i.e., bacteria, fungi) and microfauna (i.e., protozoa
and nematodes) transform organic and inorganic compounds into available forms. These transformations are critical for nutrient cycling and availability, for plants, and other species growth, for cycling of soil organic matter and carbon sequestration, and for the filtration, degradation, and immobilization of contaminants in water and soil.

An important part of the food web is represented by mesofauna, such as springtails and mites, which accelerate litter decomposition and enhance nutrient cycling and availability (especially nitrogen), and predators of smaller soil organisms.

Soil macro, and megafauna such as earthworms, ants, termites, and some mammals act as ecosystem engineers that modify soil porosity, water and gas transport, and bind soil particles together into stable aggregates that hold the soil in place and thus reduce erosion.

Soil biodiversity can mitigate threats to ecosystem services, for instance by acting as a powerful tool in bioremediation of contaminated soils. Biostimulation and bioaugmentation are environmentally sound strategies that contribute to the filtration, degradation, and immobilization of target contaminants. Furthermore, the integral use of organisms such as microbes (bioaugmentation), plants (phytoremediation) and earthworms (vermiremediation) as a bioremediation strategy in hydrocarbon-contaminated soils has proven to be a viable alternative for increasing hydrocarbon removal. On the other hand, soil macrofauna, such as earthworms, termites, and ants, play an important role in improving soil structure and aggregation, which can improve resistance to soil erosion caused by wind and water.

Excerpt from FAO, State of Knowledge of Soil Biodiversity, Report 2020

The Great Green Wall and its Past Mistakes

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The Great Green Wall  aims to transform the lives of some 100 million people by planting a mosaic of trees, shrubs, and grasses along a corridor stretching some 8000 kilometers across Africa by 2030. Since the African Union first launched the Great Green Wall in 2007, the initiative has struggled to make headway. Made up of local efforts across 11 countries, it has reached just 16% of its overall goal to vegetate 150 million hectares.

But in January 2021, the project—which analysts estimate will cost at least $30 billion—got a major boost: a pledge of $14 billion in funding over the next 5 years from a coalition of international development banks and governments. The money is meant to accelerate the effort to sustain livelihoods, conserve biodiversity, and combat desertification and climate change, French President Emmanuel Macron said in announcing the pledges on January 11, 2021.

Environmental restoration and community development specialists welcomed the news. But many are also apprehensive. In recent years, research by ecologists, economists, and social scientists has shown that many forestry projects around the world have failed because they didn’t adequately address fundamental social and ecological issues…Many efforts, particularly those not led by local communities, stumble. Newly planted trees can die of neglect when planners don’t engage communities from the start in discussions about which species to plant, as well as whether residents are willing and able to provide the water, fertilizer, and protection from grazing animals that saplings need. Farmers are often busy and have their own priorities; they “will not … manage trees that they do not value.” …

Elvis Paul Tangem, who coordinates the Great Green Wall Initiative for the African Union Commission, agrees. He says promises to plant huge numbers of trees at low cost, for example at $1 per seedling, can distract from the real challenge. “You can plant a tree for $1,” he says, “but you cannot grow a tree for $1.”

Excerpt from Rachel CernanskyNew funds could help grow Africa’s Great Green Wall. But can the massive forestry effort learn from past mistakes?, Science, Feb. 11, 2021

Genomic Surveillance

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The use of DNA profiling for individual cases of law enforcement has helped to identify suspects and to exonerate the innocent. But retaining genetic materials in the form of national DNA databases, which have proliferated globally in the past two decades, raises important human rights questions.

Privacy rights are fundamental human rights. Around the world, the unregulated collection, use, and retention of DNA has become a form of genomic surveillance. Kuwait passed a now-repealed law mandating the DNA profiling of the entire population. In China, the police systematically collected blood samples from the Xinjiang population under the guise of a health program, and the authorities are working to establish a Y-chromosome DNA database covering the country’s male population. Thailand authorities are establishing a targeted genetic database of Muslim minorities. Under policies set by the previous administration, the U.S. government has been indiscriminately collecting the genetic materials of migrants, including refugees, at the Mexican border.

Governments should reform surveillance laws and draft comprehensive privacy protections that tightly regulate the collection, use, and retention of DNA and other biometric identifiers .They should ban such activities when they do not meet international human rights standards of lawfulness, proportionality, and necessity.

Excerpts from Yves Moreau and Maya Wong, Risks of Genomic Surveillance and How to Stop it, Science, Feb. 2021

Green-Shaming ExxonMobil

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ExxonMobil’s shareholders concerned about greenery are angered by ExxonMobil’s continued carbon-cuddling. Those who care more about greenbacks are irked by its capital indiscipline. Right now, both are pushing in the same direction.

D.E. Shaw, a big hedge fund, is urging ExxonMobil to spend more wisely… More eye-catchingly, Engine No.1, a newish fund with a stake of just 0.02%, is trying to green-shame Mr Woods with a mantra as straightforward as ExxonMobil’s: if the company continues on its current course, and demand shifts quickly to cleaner energy, it risks terminal decline. The fund has launched a proxy battle by proposing four new directors; the current board, it complains, is long on blue-chip corporate credentials but short on energy expertise. Engine No.1’s agitation for a shake-up has won backing from, among others, Calstrs, which manages $283bn on behalf of California’s public-sector workers.

Most important, the tone from ExxonMobil’s three biggest institutional shareholders—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street—has also shifted…In a recent letter to clients, Larry Fink, boss of BlackRock, talked of greener stocks enjoying a “sustainability premium” and dirty ones jeopardising portfolios’ long-term returns. He hinted that his firm—the world’s largest asset manager—might divest from firms that failed to appreciate the “tectonic shift” taking place. Vanguard, too, has called out ExxonMobil for flawed governance…

Excerpt from Schumpeter: The Long Squeeze, Economist, Feb. 6, 2021

Designers Not Doers: Who’s Gonna Save the Chip Industry?

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Although designing chips for electronic devices is now easier than ever, making them has never been harder requiring spending vast—and growing—sums on factories (called fabs) stuffed with ultra-advanced equipment.

At the turn of the millennium, a cutting-edge factory might have cost $1bn… More recently, a TSMC factory that produces 3 nm (nanometer) chips, completed in 2020, in southern Taiwan, cost $19.5bn. The firm is already pondering another for factory for 2nm chips, which will almost certainly be more. ..Asia’s nanoscale manufacturing duopoly remains fiercely competitive, as Samsung and TSMC keep each other on their toes… At some point, one company, in all likelihood TSMC, could be the last advanced fab standing. For years, says an industry veteran, tech bosses mostly ignored the problem in the hope it would go away. It has not…

The other big industry rupture is taking place in China. As America has lost ground in making chips, it has sought to ensure that China lags behind, too. The American tech embargo began as a narrow effort against Huawei over national security, but bans and restrictions now affect at least 60 firms, including many involved in chips. SMIC, China’s chip champion, has just been put on a blacklist, as has Xiaomi, a smartphone firm.

Excerpts from Betting All Chips, Economist, Jan. 23, 2021 and Semiconductors: A New Architecture, Economist, Jan. 23, 2021

Natural Capital and Human Well-Being

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What is the contribution of nature to the economy?… The breathable air, drinkable water and tolerable temperatures that allow humans to do everything they do, and the complex ecosystems that maintain them, tend to be taken for granted. Professor Dasgupta’s review on the Economics of Biodiversity does not seek to play on the heartstrings with tales of starving polar bears. Rather, it makes the hard-headed case that services provided by nature are an indispensable input to economic activity. Some of these services are relatively easy to discern: fish stocks, say, in the open ocean. Others are far less visible: such as the complex ecosystems within soil that recycle nutrients, purify water and absorb atmospheric carbon. These are unfamiliar topics for economists, so the review seeks to provide a “grammar” through which they can be analysed.

The report features its own illustrative production function, which includes nature. The environment appears once as a source of flows of extractable resources (like fish or timber). But it also shows up more broadly as a stock of “natural” capital. The inclusion of natural capital enables an analysis of the sustainability of current rates of economic growth. As people produce GDP, they extract resources from nature and dump waste back into it. If this extraction and dumping exceeds nature’s capacity to repair itself, the stock of natural capital shrinks and with it the flow of valuable environmental services. Between 1992 and 2014, according to a report published by the UN, the value of produced capital (such as machines and buildings) roughly doubled and that of human capital (workers and their skills) rose by 13%, while the estimated value of natural capital declined by nearly 40%. The demands humans currently place on nature, in terms of resource extraction and the dumping of harmful waste, are roughly equivalent to the sustainable output of 1.6 Earths (of which, alas, there is only the one)…Indeed, Professor Dasgupta argues that economists should acknowledge that there are in fact limits to growth. As the efficiency with which we make use of Earth’s finite bounty is bounded (by the laws of physics), there is necessarily some maximum sustainable level of GDP…

Professor Dasgupta hints at this problem by appealing to the “sacredness” of nature, in addition to his mathematical models and analytical arguments.

Excerpts from How should economists think about biodiversity?, Economist, Feb. 6, 2021

At Gunpoint in Congo: Is Coltan Worse than Oil?

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Tantalum, a metal used in smartphone and laptop batteries, is extracted from coltan ore. In 2019 40% of the world’s coltan was produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to official data. More was sneaked into Rwanda and exported from there. Locals dig for the ore by hand in Congo’s eastern provinces, where more than 100 armed groups hide in the bush. Some mines are run by warlords who work with rogue members of the Congolese army to smuggle the coltan out.

When demand for electronics soared in the early 2000s, coltan went from being an obscure, semi-valuable ore to one of the world’s most sought-after minerals. Rebels fought over mines and hunted for new deposits. Soldiers forced locals to dig for it at gunpoint. Foreign money poured into Congo. Armed groups multiplied, eager for a share.

Then, in 2010, a clause in America’s Dodd-Frank Act forced American firms to audit their supply chains. The aim was to ensure they were not using minerals such as coltan, gold and tin that were funding Congo’s protracted war. For six months mines in eastern Congo were closed, as the authorities grappled with the new rules. Even when they reopened, big companies, such as Intel and Apple, shied away from Congo’s coltan, fearing a bad press.

The “Obama law”, as the Congolese nickname Dodd-Frank, did reduce cash flows to armed groups. But it also put thousands of innocent people out of work. A scheme to trace supply chains known as ITSCI run by the International Tin Association based in London and an American charity, Pact, helped bring tentative buyers back to Congo.  ITSCI staff turn up at mining sites to see if armed men are hanging about, pocketing profits. They check that no children are working in the pits. If a mine is considered safe and conflict-free, government agents at the sites put tags onto the sacks of minerals. However, some unscrupulous agents sell tags on the black market, to stick on coltan from other mines. “The agents are our brothers,” Martin says. It is hard to police such a violent, hilly region with so few roads. Mines are reached by foot or motorbike along winding, muddy paths.

For a long time those who preferred to export their coltan legally had to work with itsci, which held the only key to the international market. Miners groaned that itsci charged too much: roughly 5% of the value of tagged coltan. When another scheme called “Better Sourcing” emerged, Congo’s biggest coltan exporter, Société Minière de Bisunzu, signed up to it instead.

Excerpts from Smugglers’ paradise: Congo, Economist, Jan. 23, 2021

When Life Colonizes Plastic: the Deep Sea Wonder

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The ocean deep, where pressure is high, light absent and nutrients scarce, is often seen as a desert. But, as with other deserts, it has oases. Hydrothermal vents, methane-gas seeps and whale corpses are hot spots for marine wildlife.  These natural loci of biodiversity are now being joined by unnatural ones made of plastic. Researchers obtained 33 objects from the deep sea in the South China Sea. Most were bags, bottles and food wrappers, but they picked up some derelict fishing ropes and traps as well…

These objects were teeming with life. When the researchers examined their finds in a laboratory, they found nearly 1,200 individual organisms representing 49 species of crustaceans, corals, echinoderms, flatworms, molluscs, polychaete worms and fungi. They also discovered evidence that some of these species were breeding. There were egg capsules from four different types of snail, and a cocoon from a flatworm known for parasitising crustaceans. This result suggests that accumulations of plastic are, indeed, benthic oases… As to why organisms colonise the objects in these accumulations, the short answer is, “because they are there”.

Excerpts from Marine Ecology: Deep-ocean plastic is a haven for life, Economist, Feb. 6, 2021

Who Will Rule the Arctic?

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Rosatom joined the Arctic Economic Council*in February 2021. Rosatom is a Russian state-owned corporation supplying about 20% of the country’s electricity. The corporation mainly holds assets in nuclear power and machine engineering and construction. In 2018, the Russian government appointed Rosatom to manage the Northern Sea Route (NSR). The NSR grants direct access to the Arctic, a region of increasing importance for Russia due to its abundance of fossil fuels. Moreover, due to climate changes, the extraction of natural resources, oil and gas are easier than ever before.

Since Russia’s handover of NSR’s management, Rosatom’s emphasis on the use of nuclear power for shipping, infrastructure development and fossil fuel extraction is likely to become more prevalent in the Arctic region. Rosatom already operate the world’s first floating nuclear power plant in the Siberian port of Pevek and is the only company in the world operating a fleet of civilian nuclear-powered icebreakers…The company has numerous plans up its sleeves, among them to expand the fleet of heavy-duty nuclear icebreakers to a minimum of nine by 2035.

*Other members of the Arctic Economic Council.

Excerpt from Polina Leganger Bronder, Rosatom joins Arctic Economic Council, BarentsObserver, Feb. 8, 2021

Building Factories in Space: DARPA

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DARPA announced on February 5, 2021  its Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program. The effort, pronounced “NOMAD,” seeks to pioneer technologies for adaptive, off-earth manufacturing to produce large space and lunar structures,  “NOM4D’s vision is to develop foundational materials, processes, and designs needed to realize in-space manufacturing of large, precise, and resilient Defense Department systems,” said Bill Carter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “We will also explore the unique features of in-situ resources obtained from the moon’s surface as they apply to future defense missions.” …

Concerning mass-efficient designs, the vision is for completely new concepts that could only be manufactured in space….In order to take the next step, we’ve got to go about materials, manufacturing, and design in a completely new way.

Excerpts from Orbital Construction: DARPA Pursues Plan for Robust Manufacturing in Space, DARPA Website, Feb. 5, 2021

Living in the World of Tesla: Cobalt, Congo and China

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 A 20% rise in the price of cobalt since the beginning of 2021 shows how the rush to build more electric vehicles is stressing global supply chains. 

A majority of the world’s cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in central Africa. It typically is carried overland to South Africa, shipped out from the port of Durban, South Africa, and processed in China before the material goes to battery makers—meaning the supply chain has several choke points that make it vulnerable to disruption…

Car and battery makers have been looking for more control over their cobalt supply and ways to avoid the metal altogether. Honda Motor Co. last year formed an alliance with a leading Chinese car-battery maker, Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. , hoping that CATL’s supply-chain clout would help stabilize Honda’s battery supply..

Meanwhile, China plays a critical role even though it doesn’t have significant reserves of cobalt itself. Chinese companies control more than 40% of Congo’s cobalt-mining capacity, according to an estimate by Roskill, the London research firm…China’s ambassador to Congo was quoted in state media last year as saying more than 80 Chinese enterprises have invested in Congo and created nearly 50,000 local jobs…

To break China’s stronghold, auto makers and suppliers are trying to recycle more cobalt from old batteries and exploring other nations for alternative supplies of the material.  Another reason to look for alternatives is instability in Congo and continuing ethical concerns about miners working in sometimes-harsh conditions with rudimentary tools and no safety equipment.

Excerpt from Yang Jie, EV Surge Sends Cobalt Prices Soaring, WSJ, Jan. 23, 2021

A Lethal Combination: Pentagon and NASA

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U.S. government and aerospace-industry officials are removing decades-old barriers between civilian and military space projects, in response to escalating foreign threats beyond the atmosphere. The Pentagon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are joining forces to tackle efforts such as exploring the region around the moon and extending the life of satellites. Many details are still developing or remain classified.  Driving the changes are actions by Moscow and Beijing to challenge American space interests with antisatellite weapons, jamming capabilities and other potentially hostile technology. Eventually, according to government and industry officials briefed on the matter, civil-military cooperation is expected to extend to defending planned NASA bases on the lunar surface, as well as protecting U.S. commercial operations envisioned to extract water or minerals there…

Large and small contractors are maneuvering to take advantage of opportunities to merge military and nonmilitary technologies. They include established military suppliers that already have a foot in both camps, such as Northrop Grumman,  the Dynetics unit of Leidos Holdings, and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Smaller companies such as Maxar Technologies Holdings,  closely held robotic-lander maker Astrobotic Technology, and small-satellite producer Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by Raytheon Technologies, also seek to diversify in the same way…

The U.S. astronaut corps always has included many military officers, some previous NASA scientists quietly shared data with military counterparts and NASA’s now-retired Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to launch Pentagon satellites. But today, veteran industry and government experts describe the cooperation as much more extensive, covering burgeoning capabilities such as repairing and repurposing satellites in orbit, or moving them around with nuclear propulsion. Intelligence agencies are more involved than ever in leveraging civilian technology, including artificial intelligence, robotic capabilities and production know-how.

Excerpt from Pentagon, NASA Knock Down Barriers Impeding Joint Space Projects, WSJ, Feb. 1, 2021

How to Find the True Cost of Water

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At current rates of consumption, the demand for water worldwide will be 40% greater than its supply by 2030, according to the UN. Portfolio managers are realizing that physical, reputational and regulatory water risk could hurt their investments, particularly in thirsty industries such as food, mining, textiles and utilities.

One worry is that shocks to supply could drown or dry out a company’s assets. In recent years Coca-Cola has been forced to close plants in India because of drought. In 2019 floods in America’s Midwest caused disruptions at the facilities of two food giants, Cargill and Tyson Foods. A survey by CDP, a non-profit firm, found that 783 big listed companies had faced a total of $40bn of water-related losses in 2018.

Another concern is that the price a company pays for water could rocket. The market price of water does not reflect the environmental and social costs of using it. Government subsidies also mean that companies often do not pay for its true cost. As aquifers are depleted, though, subsidies could become more costly and unpopular, forcing governments to retract them. S&P Global Trucost, a data provider, reckons that if Fortune 500 companies paid the true cost of water, based on estimates of scarcity, rather than current prices, their profit margins would shrink by a tenth. Margins for food, drink and tobacco firms would fall by three-quarters.

Disclosures of water risk are even patchier than those of greenhouse-gas emissions…Established names like Bloomberg and S&P Global are plugging the gap, as are startups. The result is that investors can approach management armed with data rather than questions. “We are getting rid of the black box that companies hide in.” 

Ceres, a non-profit firm, scores businesses on everything from direct water management to risks in the supply chain. Those seeking more detail can use visual tools, such as Bloomberg’s “maps” function, which plots a company’s facilities over a heat map based on water stress. (California is the same color as swathes of sub-Saharan Africa; far-eastern Russia looks a lot like western Europe.) Firms like Aquantix go further, and try to predict the financial cost of water risk.

The accuracy of such forecasts is not yet proven. For Andrew Mason of Aberdeen Standard Investments, though, they are still useful. They show companies that investors care about water risk and encourage them to share data. “This is where carbon was ten or 15 years ago,” he says.

Excerpt from An expanding pool: Investors start to pay attention to water risk, Economist, Jan. 9, 2021