TimB

Scientists believe that less than 4% percent of the world’s fungi have been documented, which adds up to only 150,000 species described out of an estimated 2.2-3.8 million worldwide. Mycologists Danny Newman and Roo Vandegrift have spent the last 12 years focusing on locations impacted by the climate crisis and increasing human interference, like Ecuador’s Reserva Los Cedros. Newman’s stunning photographs (previously) capture the vibrant hues, delicate gills, and thin stems of a vast range of fungi in the mountainous cloud forest.

In 2016, the Ecuadorian government declared the Los Cedros reserve—one of the last unlogged watersheds on the western slope of the Andes—open for mining, putting countless flora, fauna, and funga at risk. “In a stunning legal upset, the mining concessions which threatened to turn Los Cedros into a toxic, barren wasteland were rescinded by the Ecuadorian supreme court, who specifically cited…our fungal diversity research in their ruling,” Newman says.

Spanning six expeditions, the duo, with a team of scientists from both Ecuador and the USA, recently published an in-depth survey of their findings, cataloguing a wealth of previously unknown species and providing what Newman calls “one of the most comprehensive contributions to Ecuadorian mycology in the country’s history.” Vandegrift is also the producer of a visually stunning upcoming documentary titled Marrow of the Mountain, filmed in part during an expedition in 2018 and 2019.

Explore more images and descriptions on iNaturalist and both Newman and Vandegrift’s Instagrams.

 

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In an Ecuadorian Cloud Forest, Two Mycologists Catalogue Hundreds of Fantastical Fungi appeared first on Colossal.

Images found in two 1980s books, Naoyuki Katoh SF Illustrations I and II (there's also a volume III), which I occasionally have for sale at 50 Watts Books.

Naoyuki Katoh, Voyage of the Space Beagle, c 1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s




Naoyuki Katoh, c1980s

August was another month of relatively good news for the Amazon rainforest: The rate of deforestation has continued to decline significantly.

Earlier this week, Marina Silva, Brazil’s environment minister, announced a 66.1 percent decrease in Amazon deforestation compared to last August. That amounted to a loss of about 217 square miles, according to Reuters. These figures come during a time of year when destruction of the rainforest is usually quite high, and follows a similar trend seen in July. 

So far this year, the rate of deforestation is 48 percent lower than in 2022 and is at levels not seen since 2018. The numbers are another victory for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has made protecting the Amazon a policy priority. 

“These results show the determination of the Lula administration to break the cycle of abandonment and regression seen under the previous government,” Marina Silva said, according to the BBC. 

The Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covers some two and a half million square miles — an area roughly twice the size of India. It’s a critical carbon sink for greenhouse gas emissions and home to 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. But deforestation and climate change are degrading the Amazon and its ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Some scientists fear that if deforestation continues, the rainforest could reach a point beyond which it cannot recover and would become a grassy savannah.

The tenure of Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, saw a rollback of environmental regulations and enforcement, and a spike in deforestation. Since taking office in January, Lula has, among other steps, renewed efforts to combat illegal clearing and reactivated the $630 million Amazon Fund, which is aimed at supporting the government’s push to protect the rainforest. 

“This shows the importance of governments acting on climate change,” Erika Berenguer, a senior research associate focused on the Amazon at Oxford University, said of the figures released this week. She is currently doing field work in the rainforest, and says the decreasing rate of deforestation is an important signal for voters. 

“Often people vote and feel disempowered,” she said. “This shows how an election can change the fate of the Amazon.” 

Some scientists, however, prefer to follow the annual rather than monthly deforestation data. “It’s a hopeful story,” said Alexandra Tyukavina, a geographer at the University of Maryland who focuses on tropical forest loss. But she adds that there could be a lag in capturing deforestation via satellite imagery and “there is quite a bit of deforestation happening in the second half of the year.” 

While the progress so far has been critical, Berenguer calls it “low-hanging fruit” that largely revolved around getting back to where the country was before Bolsarano. “Then you have to pick the fruit at the top of the trees and it’s much more difficult,” she said. “The question becomes what we do to reduce rates even more from what they were pre-Bolsonaro.” 

The Lula administration has set a goal of zero deforestation by 2030. But whether Lula meets that goal, or how close he comes, remains an open question, and there is at least some cause for skepticism. A meeting of Amazon nations early this year, for example, failed to reach an agreement on important barriers to progress, such as deforestation targets and the future of oil and gas development in the rainforest. 

“We cannot just give ourselves a pat on the shoulder and be happy about it,” said Berenguer. “We cannot get too comfy.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Amazon deforestation continues to plummet on Sep 7, 2023.

The post Krabzaam appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.

At the time of its construction, the Panama Canal was (and still is) a marvel of modern engineering. But it is also a single point of failure in a global mesh of tightly coupled supply chains.

College students are still unable to find housing despite enrollment dropping since the start of the pandemic, and a major price-fixing lawsuit against corporate landlords sheds light on why.

Learn how to make a Spanish-style gin and tonic, also known as one of the best hot-weather cocktails ever. Chefs from the Basque region of Spain invented this great variation, and it tastes like it. Enjoy!

For the fully formatted, printable, written recipe, follow this link: https://www.allrecipes.com/spanish-gin-and-tonic-gin-tonica-recipe-7642408

To become a Member of Food Wishes, and read Chef John’s in-depth article about Spanish Gin & Tonics, follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRIZtPl9nb9RiXc9btSTQNw/join

You can also find more of Chef John’s content on Allrecipes: http://allrecipes.com/recipes/16791/everyday-cooking/special-collections/web-show-recipes/food-wishes/

It's Labor Day in the US, which means we're taking a break from the usual grind. Enjoy this classic story about the challenges of providing users with the authentication system they desire- one with no passwords or usernames. Original -- Remy

“It’s impossible,” Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, “simply impossible.”

“Now just so we’re clear,” Craig responded, “by ‘impossible’, you actually mean ‘a big pain in the ass’, but you’re a smart guy who can make it happen, right?” That drew a few chuckles from the handful of other coworkers who joined them in the conference room, but Gerald just sighed. “No, Craig, by impossible, I mean impossible. Not doable. Can’t be done. Im-poss-i-ble. Well I mean, unless you can somehow change the underlying structure of the way everyone communicates on the Internet.”

“But we don’t need to change it for everyone,” Craig jumped in, “just one client. Surely, you can do that!”

The situation at hand was not an uncommon one. Craig, one of the company’s top producing sales reps, had once again sold a client on a feature they did not have. He certainly didn’t lie about having the feature, but instead proposed an offer the client couldn’t refuse: if you buy it, we’ll build it.

Management, not being the type to turn down booked sales, couldn’t refuse the offer either. And thus, they sided with Craig on what ‘impossible’ actually meant. They also assigned Gerald and team to develop the much-needed feature: an IP-based authentication system that would allow users of their Software-as-a-Service product to access the system without ever needing to log in.

Gerald’s main objection with IP authentication was that the majority of users – and in fact, all of the users at the client site – were behind a router. Though they’d certainly each have an internal IP address assigned, they would all share the same public IP, making one computer indistinguishable from the next.

To make matters even more tricky, their application was used by hospitals to track certain kinds of patient data, which meant that HIPAA – the regulatory framework that defines how patient data must be stored and accessed – needed to be followed. And not just followed, but followed, tested, certified, re-certified, and double-tested. Any change to the HIPAA-related functions – authorization included – would need to go through a painful internal and external QA process.

Given the impossibility of getting the end-users internal IP address from the outside, Gerald figured that using cookies would be the next best thing. Have the user log-in once, and then store an authentication cookie on the computer for as long as possible. Sure, that meant clearing cookies would trigger a new login, but it seemed to be a fair and easy work-around. Well, not so much: the client vehemently rejected the idea, saying that their employees couldn’t be bothered with having to remember yet another login, even if only temporarily.

After going back to the drawing board, Gerald came up with another idea: configure the firewall proxy server on the client’s side to add a custom HTTP header (X-Forwarded-For) that included the original IP address. That idea went over just about as well: HTTP headers could be forged, and a malicious employee inside of the company could hack in too easily.

Gerald’s third proposal to the client involved a site-to-site VPN connection. The application server would be exposed access via the client’s internal network, which would not only allow them to use IP authentication, but Windows-integrated authentication as well. It was his best idea yet, and made things that much easier, as the client would be able to configure which username has access instead of which IP address. Unfortunately, the IT folks at the client weren’t a big fan of the approach, as “a VPN connection is inherently insecure.”

At wits end, Gerald came up with yet another idea: a “Single Sign On” approach of sorts. When the end-user would access their application, the system would look for an “authentication ticket” cookie. When not present, the user would be redirected to another server – which lived inside the network – whose sole purpose was to generate a secure authentication ticket that included the private IP address. The ticketing server would then redirect to hosted application, which would then verify the authenticity of the ticket and give the user access.

The client absolutely loved the idea. “This is exactly what we’re looking for,” the client’s project manager said, “no need to remember logins, plus solid security.” The sales contract was signed, and the project was officially a go.

And finally, three months later, the new feature was finished. It took three solid weeks of development time, two weeks of QA testing, several thousand dollars in new hardware, and tens of thousands of dollars for an external HIPAA assessment, but the sales rep and the client’s project manager said it’d be worth it: no more remembering logins. Now, all that was needed for implementation was a list of IP addresses that were allowed to use the computer.

“Hi Gerald,” the client’s project manager wrote in an email, “please provide the following IP with access to the system: 10.1.23.97.”

Gerald confirmed, and reconfirmed: only one user needed access to the system. And apparently, she really hated remembering logins.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Americans love to stuff their faces with cow meat. There may be nothing more stereotypically American than grilling burgers on the Fourth of July. Meatloaf is a home-cooking classic. And few dishes in the country’s cookbook have the same cachet as steak or match the succulence of a barbecued brisket. In 2021, Americans ate 20 billion pounds of beef. That’s roughly 60 pounds per person, or a Big Mac every other day, plus a Whopper every three or four days. So it’s no wonder that the United States is the world’s top producer of veal and beef. 

But this picture of the country’s beef consumption — a major factor in greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. agriculture, which accounts for about one-tenth of the country’s total — is more skewed than the raw numbers might lead you to believe. New research indicates that not all beef eaters are created equal. A small percentage of the country’s population — just 12 percent — accounts for half of the country’s beef consumption on any given day, according to a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nutrients. 

“It’s startling that it’s concentrated among a small minority,” said Diego Rose, a professor at Tulane University and a co-author of the paper.

From a climate standpoint, these beef guzzlers are not all that different from gasoline superusers — the 10 percent of drivers who account for one-third of the country’s gas use. A single cow can belch up to 264 pounds of methane in a year, the equivalent of burning almost 4,000 pounds of coal or driving a gas-powered car about 9,000 miles. That’s why climate advocates say people should eat less beef if they want to help ease climate change. “Beef is kind of like an environmentally extravagant source of protein,” Rose said. “It’s like the Hummer of the protein world.” 

According to previous research by Rose and researchers at the University of Michigan, getting Americans to cut their beef consumption by 90 percent – and other animal products by 50 percent – would reduce emissions by the same amount as taking every single car off the road in the U.S., and another 200 million cars off the roads in other countries, for a year. The good news, in other words, is that the entire population of the United States doesn’t need to be convinced; a focus on changing the eating habits of the small group of beef eaters could go a long way. 

Who, exactly, comprises that group? “There’s some of everybody,” Rose said, but men and people between the ages of 50 and 65 are most likely to be big beef eaters, the study found. The study doesn’t explain the gender gap, but other research has linked similar findings to a perception that meat is more masculine and to a conclusion that men’s spending habits are worse for the climate than women’s. 

The meat-eating gap doesn’t end with gender. College graduates, young people, old people, and people familiar with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines all tend to eat less beef, the study found. Past surveys have indicated that Republicans are more likely to eat meat (not just beef) than Democrats. And people with higher incomes tend to eat more meat at first but less meat over time compared to people in the low-income bracket. 

It’s not clear whether telling people who eat a lot of beef that their eating habits are contributing to global warming would actually make them change their ways. Some research suggests it might. But many people who feel wrong about eating meat still eat a lot of it. Psychologists call this the “meat paradox.” That term originally denoted the cognitive dissonance associated with consuming animal flesh while feeling morally wrong about animal suffering. But the same mental gymnastics appear to be associated with beef consumption and climate change, too.

Still, that doesn’t mean that ethical arguments are ineffective, according to Peter Singer, the moral philosopher and animal rights advocate who has spent much of his life trying to convince people not to eat meat. In a recent article in the Atlantic, he wrote that meat eaters can be convinced that eating meat is wrong, but the effect of that persuasion “is felt most powerfully at the level of the policy changes that voters will support, rather than in people’s choice of what to buy at the supermarket.” Getting money and lobbyists out of politics would be a start, Singer wrote. While his article focused on animal welfare, it might as well have been about climate change. Top U.S. meat and dairy companies have spent millions of dollars trying to kill climate legislation.

Voters, consumers, and political and corporate leaders still seem far from convinced enough to take collective action to lower beef consumption. Arby’s has shunned plant-based meat and even teased critics with its “Marrot” — a carrot look-alike made from turkey meat. One of the main Republican talking points in opposition to the ambitious climate proposal known as the Green New Deal, which aimed to tackle agricultural emissions without mentioning cows, was: “They want to take away your hamburgers.” Two years ago, a fake story made the rounds alleging that President Joe Biden would limit Americans to one hamburger a month. In response, Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, told the president to “stay out of my kitchen.” 

Knowing that a small portion of Americans eat much of the country’s beef won’t make the political climate any less hostile. But it might help hone arguments about the benefits of eating less beef and the dangers of guzzling it.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Beef guzzlers: 12% of Americans eat half of the country’s cow meat on Sep 1, 2023.

The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong.

In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies.

Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality?

If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 TRILLION DOLLARS.

This is a number so large that it surpasses human understanding. There are only a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way; $47 trillion is about twice the size of the annual U.S. gross domestic product.

This raises an obvious question. Traditionally, this kind of upward concentration of wealth has required mass slaughter. How did America’s elites pull this off without needing to mow thousands of us down in the streets?

The answer can be found in the new book “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.” It was written by Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard, and Erik M. Conway, a historian at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who previously collaborated on “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”

As Oreskes and Conway explain, “The Big Myth” grew out of their previous book. While writing “Merchants of Doubt,” they discovered that the groundwork of global warming denialism had been laid in the 1980s by prominent scientists who understood the reality of the situation quite well. However, these scientists were convinced believers in what Oreskes and Conway call “market fundamentalism” (borrowing from George Soros, one of market fundamentalism’s loudest critics). This is a system of belief that holds that political and economic freedom are indivisible. They quote the physicist Fred Singer, who wrote that “if we do not carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating … dangers there is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately control our lives.” 

In other words, government interventions in the economy — such as laws removing lead from gas, carbon taxes, or mandated cooling-off breaks for people working in 100-degree heat — not only make us all poorer, but also put us on the road to Stalinist tyranny. Hence it’s crucial to head them all off at the pass, even if that requires a vast misrepresentation of observable fact.

This worldview is such incoherent drivel that it’s hard to believe anyone with a functioning brain stem can buy into it. Meanwhile, market fundamentalists are oddly unconcerned with government intervention that’s profitable for large corporations. If you’re an entrepreneur who boldly tries to manufacture and sell any of the pharmaceutical industry’s patented products in a free market, you will quickly encounter the suffocating hand of the administrative state. Yet there are no Wall Street Journal op-eds decrying this injustice. (This doesn’t mean there’s no justifiable rationale for patents, but that there are rationales for other government regulations too.)

There’s also the reality that markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along. And since markets are created by us, it is legitimate and within our power to alter them to better serve our needs.

Finally, there’s the historical fact that no country has ever gone communist gradually, starting with minimum wage laws and ending up with gulags. Rather, it happened in various fell swoops in places with glaring injustices and vicious capitalistic inequality, and even then generally has required contemporary wars. As the renowned Soviet expert George Kennan put it in 1946, “communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.” Therefore, Kennan believed, “every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society” was a victory over communism. 

Markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along.

This equanimity about using democratic power for the common good was common among U.S. potentates in the decades following World War II. Averell Harriman, the son of a 19th-century robber baron who later became secretary of commerce and governor of New York, believed that “Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government in Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle of representative government and concern for civil liberties.”

The story of how we got from there to here is shocking even if you consider yourself a wised-up malcontent, and “The Big Myth” tells it in granular detail. It’s a sweeping tale of what must be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever, one that transformed the intuitive common sense — what everyone “knows” without thinking about it — of both American elites and regular people. 

You know the drill. Lowering taxes on billionaires will unleash their wondrous creativity and make us all richer in the long run. Minimum wage laws make regular people worse off and must stop going up. (Incredibly enough, the federal minimum wage has not increased in real terms since 1968 and, adjusted for inflation, is now worth less than in 1950.) Stultifying environmental regulations are the reason your boss can’t give you a raise. Social Security was a mistake and is destined for extinction. 

The funniest part is that this indoctrination into the glories of the “free” market could never have happened via free markets. Rather, as Oreskes and Conway illustrate, it required enormous subsidies from corporate America, much of it going to tenured professors working at nonprofit universities. 

The book is an incredible work of scholarship, and every page has at least one sparkling, fascinating fact. Adam Smith’s 1776 book “The Wealth of Nation” is now seen as the key text proving the virtues (economic and political) of unregulated capitalism. This is not true at all: Smith argues that bank regulation is crucial; that workers should unionize; that businesspeople have often “deceived and oppressed” the public; and that any political proposal they make should be viewed with the utmost suspicion. George Stigler, a prominent economist at the University of Chicago and colleague of Milton Friedman, produced an edition of “The Wealth of Nations” that dealt with Smith’s inconvenient views by quietly excising many of them.

Also striking: Corporate funders realized that another book central to their cause, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich von Hayek, was just too long and complicated for most people to get through it. So they paid for a simplified version that appeared in Reader’s Digest in the 1950s, where it found a devoted reader in Ronald Reagan.

“Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions.”

And there is just so, so much more. It’s all enough to make you paranoid about what other thoughts were put in your head on purpose by people without your best interests at heart. The most important lesson of “The Big Myth” is a meta one. They write convincingly, “Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions. [This] is the history of the construction of a myth.”

Speaking of, the RAND study was funded by the Fair Work Center in Seattle, which in turn is largely funded by the foundation of Nick Hanauer. Indeed, the question the paper answers was itself thought up partly by Hanauer, who’s a venture capitalist and early investor in Amazon — but one has with views much more in tune with the views of 1950s U.S. elites. Preposterous myths can be successfully promulgated with huge gobs of cash, but even getting the truth out there takes a lot of money.

Update: August 7, 2023

A previous version of this article stated that the federal minimum wage has not increased since 1968. It been updated to make clear that this refers to the fact it has not increased in real terms since 1968; it has been adjusted upwards on several occasions in nominal terms.

The post The Big Myth About “Free” Markets That Justified History’s Greatest Heist appeared first on The Intercept.

by Cezary Podkul

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It was a multibillion-dollar strike, so stealthy and precise that the only visible sign was a notice that suddenly vanished from a government website.

In August 2017, a federal agency with sweeping powers over the health care industry posted a notice informing insurance companies that they weren’t allowed to charge physicians a fee when the companies paid the doctors for their work. Six months later, that statement disappeared without explanation.

The vanishing notice was the result of a behind-the-scenes campaign by the insurance industry and its middlemen that has largely escaped public notice — but that has had massive financial consequences that have rippled through the health care universe. The insurers’ invisible victory has tightened the financial vise on doctors and hospitals, nurtured a thriving industry of middlemen and allowed health insurers to do something no other industry does: Take one last cut even as it pays its bills.

Insurers now routinely require doctors to kick back as much as 5% if they want to be paid electronically. Even when physicians ask to be paid by check, doctors say, insurers often resume the electronic payments — and the fees — against their wishes. Despite protests from doctors and hospitals, the insurers and their middlemen refuse to back down.

There are plenty of reasons doctors are furious with the insurance industry. Insurers have slashed their reimbursement rates, cost them patients by excluding them from their provider networks, and forced them to spend extra time seeking pre-authorizations for ever more procedures and battling denials of coverage.

Paying fees to get paid is the final blow for some. “All these additional fees are the reason why you see small practices folding up on a regular basis, or at least contributing to it,” said Dr. Terence Gray, an anesthesiologist in Scarborough, Maine. Some medical clinics told ProPublica they are seeking ways to raise their rates in response to the fees, which would pass the costs on to patients.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Karen Jackson, who until her retirement in March was a veteran senior official at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that posted, then unposted, the fee notice. Doctors, she said, shouldn’t have to pay fees to get paid.

But that’s precisely what’s happening. Almost 60% of medical practices said they were compelled to pay fees for electronic payment at least some of the time, according to a 2021 survey. And the frequency has increased since then, according to medical clinics. With more than $2 trillion in medical claims being paid electronically each year, these fees likely add up to billions of dollars annually.

Huge sums that could be spent on care are instead being siphoned off to insurers and middlemen. The fees can cost larger medical practices $1 million a year, according to an April poll by the Medical Group Management Association, which represents private medical practices. The figure sometimes runs even higher, according to a 2020 complaint to CMS from a senior executive of AdventHealth, which has 53 hospitals in nine states: “I have to pay $1.8M in expenses that I could use on PPE for our employees, or setting up testing sites, or providing charity care, or covering other community benefits.” Most clinics are smaller, and they estimated annual losses of $100,000 or less. Even that figure is more than enough to cover the salary of a registered nurse.

The shift from paper to electronic processing, which began in the early 2000s and accelerated after the Affordable Care Act went into effect, was intended to increase efficiency and save money. The story of how a cost-saving initiative ended up benefiting private insurers reveals a lot about what ails the U.S. medical system and why Americans pay more for health care than people in other developed countries. In this case, it took less than a decade for a new industry of middlemen, owned by private equity funds and giant conglomerates like UnitedHealth Group, to cash in.

How these players managed to create this lucrative niche has never previously been reported. And the story is coming to light in part because one doctor, initially incensed by the fees, and then baffled by CMS’ unexplained zigzags, decided to try to figure out what was going on. Dr. Alex Shteynshlyuger, a urologist who runs his own clinic in New York City, made it his mission to take on both the insurers and the federal bureaucracy. He began filing voluminous public records requests with CMS.

Dr. Alex Shteynshlyuger is on a crusade against payment processors’ fees, which he says threaten his practice. (DeSean McClinton-Holland for ProPublica)

What he discovered in internal emails and government documents, which he shared with ProPublica, was a picture sharply at odds with the image of CMS as a hugely powerful force in health care. The records showed, again and again, federal officials deferring not only to a single company, but to a single executive.

Over the past five years, CMS adopted that company’s positions on fees. Shteynshlyuger discovered that, when it comes to the issue he cares about, the most powerful decision-maker wasn’t a CMS official. It was the chief lobbyist for a middleman company called Zelis. And that man just happened to be a former CMS staffer who had authored a key federal rule on electronic payments.

For Shteynshlyuger, the intersection of medicine and money has a particular resonance. He was born in the Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine, and his brother nearly died of pneumonia as an infant because doctors refused to administer an antibiotic. The doctors wanted his family to pay a “bribe,” according to Shteynshlyuger. His grandmother ended up finding a different doctor to pay off and his brother got the medicine. Shtenynshlyuger’s parents emigrated to the U.S. in 1991, when he was an adolescent, and they settled in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach area.

Today, Shteynshlyuger sees the fees for electronic payment through a similar lens. He’s a gadfly, but one with a wry, sometimes humorous disposition and an intellectual bent. He studied biology and economics in college and is capable of both rage at perceived unfairness and dispassionate observations about health policy. The unjust fees, as he sees them, threaten his medical practice, which he designed to serve middle-class patients. He prices his services at a discount. “Low cost is what keeps me in the business,” he said.

As a result, administrative combat has become a big part of his life. Unmarried, Shteynshlyuger, 45, stays up into the wee hours, writing lengthy memos to regulators. One recent missive spanned 155 pages, including appendices.

This New Year’s, he joined his family for a week off at his parents’ condo near Miami. Shteynshlyuger arrived with a desktop computer, which he set up in one of the bedrooms alongside two monitors that he keeps at the condo. While his nieces and brother enjoyed the beach, Shteynshlyuger sat indoors, drafting a 38-page memo to aid in one of two lawsuits he has filed in an effort to pry documents out of CMS.

Shteynshlyuger’s accent, with its distinctive Brooklyn-Russian mix, is unmistakable in calls with customer service representatives at insurance companies and payment processors. (He recorded many of the calls and shared them with ProPublica.) The calls follow a similar pattern: Posing questions in the manner of a genial but persistent litigator, Shteynshlyuger asks why he’s being charged a fee.

Ultimately, he’s informed that there’s no way to have an electronic funds transfer, or EFT, sent straight to his bank account without paying a fee. When the calls get escalated, representatives sometimes offer to shave a tiny amount off the fees — charging, say, 2.1% rather than 2.5%, a proposal made on one recent call with Zelis — but rarely is he offered a free transfer.

Shteynshlyuger spends hours on the phone with payment processors like Zelis, fighting their attempts to impose fees on electronic payments. (DeSean McClinton-Holland for ProPublica)

A spokesperson for Zelis, the payment-processing company that Shteynshlyuger has tangled with most often, said the company refers requests for free electronic payments to the insurers, but recordings and transcripts of recent calls show that did not happen when Shteynshlyuger called.

Shteynshlyuger and other doctors say payment processors routinely sign them up for high-fee payment methods without their consent. A brochure for one payment company, Change Healthcare, boasted of automatically enrolling 100,000 doctors and hospitals in a plan to receive virtual credit cards and sharing some $8 million a year in revenues with the large insurer it was working for. (Virtual credit cards are a form of electronic payment in which a payer sends a string of numbers that are typed into a credit card reader to generate a one-time payment. Fees for VCCs run as high as 5% versus a typical 2.5% for other kinds of electronic payments.)

Payment processors often boost insurers’ revenues by sharing the fees from virtual credit cards. One processor, VPay, says in its marketing materials that insurers can “make money on every virtual card transaction.” In response to questions from ProPublica, UnitedHealth, which owns Change and VPay, asserted that its services help medical clinics streamline recordkeeping, reduce administrative burdens and accelerate payments.

Zelis and other payment processors say they offer value in return for their fees: Doctors can sign up to receive reimbursements from hundreds of insurers through a single payment processor, and they can also get services that help match up electronic payments and receipts. Zelis asserted in a statement that its services remove “many of the obstacles that keep providers from efficiently initiating, receiving, and benefitting from electronic payments.” Zelis and other companies insist that it’s easy to opt out of their services, but Shteynshlyuger and other doctors say otherwise.

Virtual credit cards come with fees as high as 5%. (Courtesy of Dr. Terence Gray. Redacted by ProPublica)

When Shtyenshlyuger embarked on his mission of fighting the fees in 2017, his first step was research. He quickly came across an article from the American Medical Association that said the law was on his side.

Shteynshlyuger then approached the companies. He emailed senior executives of Zelis and VPay, asserting that the fees violated CMS rules. The companies denied breaking any rules and wouldn’t budge on the fees.

So Shteynshlyuger started filing complaints with CMS. The responses he received struck him as curious. CMS itself usually didn’t offer an opinion. Instead, it forwarded letters from a Zelis executive named Matthew Albright, who answered Shteynshlyuger’s complaints on at least five occasions. (The agency said this passive approach is part of its “informal” complaint resolution process.)

When Shteynshlyuger pressed a CMS official to articulate the agency’s position after it passed along Albright’s answer, the official wrote that the agency receives the “identical legal response” from Zelis to all such complaints. She added: “They believe that, according to their interpretation of the regulation, they are compliant.”

Shteynshlyuger was flummoxed. Who was Matthew Albright? A quick Google search revealed that Albright had once worked for CMS. That only piqued Shteynshlyuger’s interest. Had Albright been involved in the removal of the CMS notice prohibiting fees?

To Albright, the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act was a historic event of a magnitude akin to the moon landing. Then a policymaker with Washington state’s Health Care Authority, Albright was awed by the importance of the looming rewrite of U.S. health care rules. He felt he had to be part of it. “This is the Apollo 11 for regulators,” he recalled thinking, in an interview with ProPublica. “I’ve got to get to D.C. and write regulations.”

Matthew Albright, now chief legislative affairs officer at Zelis, made a series of explanatory videos in his days at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (Screenshot via YouTube)

Now 55, Albright had unusual training for his new role. Instead of following the typical path through law school, he had studied sacred texts, first at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome and later at Harvard University, where he earned a master’s degree in divinity. Those studies, Albright said, fostered what he called a “scholastic fascination with words and how they’re used to tell people what to do,” whether those words are in the Ten Commandments or the Code of Federal Regulations.

Articulate and cheerful, today Albright can still sound more like a divinity professor than a lobbyist when he describes his current job as studying laws and rules. “Hermeneutics,” he said, “it’s just like Bible study, right? Breaking it down into its understandable parts. And then, frankly, turning around and teaching it or turning around and explaining it in the vernacular, if you will. So I think that most of my job is looking at regulations and reading them and then explaining them to internal and external audiences.”

At CMS, Albright drafted a rule, published in 2012, that laid out standards for paying doctors via electronic funds transfers. The Affordable Care Act required all insurers to offer EFTs and encouraged doctors to accept them, and electronic payments quickly became the go-to method for handling medical claims. A CMS analysis predicted that eliminating the labor of manually processing paper checks and receipts would lead to savings of $3 billion to $4.5 billion over 10 years.

Albright became the agency’s point man on the issue. He looked every bit the government bureaucrat in a gray shirt and dark suit as he extolled the virtues of “administrative simplification” in earnest-but-stiff video segments that emulated a talk show. (Albright also created a personal YouTube channel when he taught a philosophy course. It had bite-sized explanations of, among other things, Kantian ethics — “do not use people” — and Ayn Rand’s philosophy — “selfishness is good.”)

Albright’s work at CMS, by his description, became a “turning point” for health care payments. The shift to electronic funds transfers facilitated the growth of an industry of payment processors. It also made Albright’s skill set very valuable. In 2014, he was recruited to the industry he previously regulated. Two years later, he landed at Zelis. The company had just been created via a merger of four businesses owned by Parthenon Capital, a private equity firm. Zelis is now co-owned by private equity giant Bain Capital and headed by a former Bain partner. (Parthenon declined to comment; Bain referred a request for comment to Zelis.)

Zelis, which once described itself as having a “regulatory-based business model,” touted Albright’s government resume when it hired him as vice president of legislative affairs. Albright said at the time he would “advocate for rational regulatory approaches.”

Rational regulatory approaches, from Zelis’ perspective, included the right to charge doctors for electronic payments. That was a crucial revenue stream for the company, but it could dry up if CMS enforced a rule prohibiting such fees. Who better than Albright, the man who had drafted rules on electronic payments, to help the company navigate the situation?

When Shteynshlyuger began to receive documents from CMS in response to his Freedom of Information Act requests, he was first struck by how deferential CMS officials seemed to be to Albright. In July 2019, for example, as Shteynshlyuger continued to complain about Zelis, a CMS official named Gladys Wheeler contacted Albright. “You may be familiar with Dr. Alex Shteynshlyuger,” Wheeler wrote. “To assist with resolution of the complaints, I have a few questions. Can I send the questions to you, or can you redirect me?” She added, “Just let me know the best approach. Thanks, and take care, Gladys.” (Wheeler did not respond to requests for comment.)

The tone of the conversations between Albright and CMS could be downright chummy. “Should we respond to it as per usual?” Albright asked in another July 2019 email about a new complaint filed by a doctor in Washington state. “Send the Zelis response for documentation purposes,” Wheeler responded in between banter that she and Albright exchanged about Chicago’s winter weather (bad) and architecture (great).

Shteynshlyuger was growing more frustrated. He didn’t understand why CMS had yanked the notice about the prohibition on fees from its website. If his months of effort couldn’t extract clear answers, how could other doctors with less inclination for bureaucratic battle figure out what to do?

What Shteynshlyuger didn’t know was that, less than two years earlier, a lobbying campaign had begun behind the scenes at CMS. The documents that he eventually obtained would provide a rare, nearly day-by-day glimpse into how one lobbyist — Albright — managed to bend the agency to his will with an artful combination of cajoling, argument and legal threats.

On Aug. 11, 2017, CMS’ website had posted the notice that EFT fees were prohibited. Such notices, presented in the form of answers to frequently asked questions, are meant to explain the agency’s complex rules in plain language. CMS based the notice on a rule from 2000 that banned fees in excess of normal telecommunication costs (such as, say, the tiny fractions of a penny to cover the cost of an email) that a doctor would incur if they were receiving the bill “directly” from an insurer.

The notice triggered an immediate protest from Zelis, according to emails and an internal CMS memo. Albright had “multiple conversations” with CMS staff and demanded that the agency revise the notice.

The nub of Albright’s argument was that CMS’ 2000 rule prohibited insurers from charging excessive fees for “direct” transactions. But, he argued, the rule was meant to apply to insurers dealing with doctors. Albright represented payment processors who work for insurers; those weren’t direct transactions between insurers and doctors. Thus, he argued, the fee prohibition couldn’t apply to EFT payments.

CMS, which took months or longer to respond to Shteynshlyuger, quickly complied with Albright’s request and removed the fee notice on Aug. 14, 2017, only three days after it was posted.

CMS published an updated notice in late September 2017. But the agency stood firm on the key point: The new document stated that insurers and payment processors “should not charge providers communications fees” for EFTs.

Shortly after the revised notice went up, Albright emailed the director of the CMS division that issued it. “Hope the kids have settled into the school year okay,” he began. He then asked for “our day in court to educate” the agency. He suggested that Zelis was preparing to escalate its complaints but offered to “work through this without causing too much noise.”

Two days before Thanksgiving, Albright confronted Christine Gerhardt, then deputy director of the CMS division that issued the fee notice. In a phone call, Albright demanded that CMS revise the document again, according to Gerhardt’s summary of the call. Gerhardt refused. Albright began debating her on the legal differences between the explainer and the regulation that it summarized.

The following week, Albright pressed harder, asking Gerhardt whether the prohibition on fees was enforceable. He told Gerhardt that if she did not answer, that itself would be an answer. It would, Albright said, “give me a sense of what steps need to be taken next” to challenge the agency’s notice. Gerhardt, who is now retired, said she assured him that the agency wasn’t implementing a new rule; only clarifying existing rules. Albright was pushing hard, but at that point, Gerhardt hadn’t bent.

Then, in January 2018, Zelis brought in the lawyers. A firm called Nixon Peabody wrote to CMS, demanding that the agency “withdraw or correct the offending language” in its notice. Nixon Peabody argued that the fee prohibition wasn’t a restatement of existing rules but that it amounted to a new rule that should have been issued via the formal rulemaking process. Nixon Peabody threatened to sue if CMS didn’t comply with Zelis’ demand. (Nixon Peabody did not reply to a request for comment.)

The legal threat set off a scramble within CMS. “Let’s just take it down,” Gerhardt wrote in a Feb. 9, 2018, email to colleagues. Her division not only removed the notice saying that fees were prohibited but also went so far as to institute a moratorium on any new notices. CMS was essentially depriving all medical providers of guidance on these issues because one company had complained.

The response puzzled even some within CMS. “What was the basis for withdrawal if the request was from a single entity and potentially harms providers?” Jackson, then CMS deputy chief of operations, wrote in an email.

Albright, his goal accomplished, sought to soothe Gerhardt and two of her colleagues. “I know I butted heads with all three of you,” he wrote a few weeks later. Albright offered to meet to explain why Zelis is not “one of the bad guys in this area.” (Zelis did not address detailed questions about Albright’s interactions with CMS.)

In March 2018, after Zelis complained and CMS removed a notice saying that payments to doctors couldn’t carry fees, Albright emailed three key agency staffers to patch things up. (Email exchange provided by Alex Shteynshlyuger)

CMS told ProPublica in a statement that it reversed its position because it concluded that it had no legal authority to “flat-out prohibit fees.” The agency declined to comment on Shteynshlyuger’s complaints, but said it takes seriously any allegations of noncompliance with its rules. As for Zelis’ lobbying, CMS said it “receives feedback from a wide range of stakeholders on an ongoing basis. The information received helps the agency understand where guidance and clarification of existing policy may be needed.”

The American Medical Association and over 90 other physician groups have urged the Biden administration to reinstate guidance protecting doctors’ right to receive EFTs without fees. For its part, the massive Veterans Health Administration system has been refusing to pay the fees, which it has described as illegal in letters to Zelis and insurers.

So far the protests have had no visible effect. In fact, when CMS finally issued a new explainer that addressed fees in July 2022, more than four years after erasing the previous one, the agency made explicit what had previously been implicit: EFT fees are allowed.

Shteynshlyuger is continuing his lonely campaign. Two months after CMS stated that fees are OK, a Zelis customer service representative contacted him. Shteynshlyuger had just submitted his 80th complaint to CMS. Emails show the rep offered to help him get signed up for no-fee EFTs — but the offer only applied to payments from one of the more than 700 insurers and other payers that Zelis represents. Shteynshlyuger demurred, saying he did not want the issue resolved without CMS’ intervention because then other doctors could not get the same assistance. As often as not, Shteynshlyuger and other doctors are left with little recourse; many insist on being paid by paper check rather than allowing Zelis to take a cut.

In mid-December, Shteynshlyuger finally got the long-awaited replies to eight other complaints he had filed over the years. CMS dismissed all eight because Shteynshlyuger didn’t file them against insurers but instead against companies like Zelis, which CMS referred to as “business associates” of the insurers. CMS said it now believes its oversight extends only to insurers, not to their business associates. The phrasing may have been bureaucratic, but the news was dramatic: CMS had fully surrendered, giving up on regulating payment processors entirely.

Shteynshlyuger hasn’t filed a new document request yet to uncover whether Zelis or perhaps another company influenced that decision. He has his suspicions.

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Photographer Barry Webb (previously) continues his hunt for the speckled, glimmering, and ice-crested organisms that pop up near his home in South Buckinghamshire, U.K. Armed with a 90-millimeter macro lens, Webb ventures into woodlands and other natural areas where slime molds and fungi thrive. There, he zeroes in on their microscopic features, documenting their wildly diverse characteristics that often last for just a brief moment in time. Recent shots include a tuft of Muppet-like fuzz topping Metatrichia floriformis, a water droplet suspended between two cup-like Craterium minutum, and a cluster of Pink stemonitis filaments propped on spindly black legs.

Webb has won several awards in recent months, including from the Royal Photographic Society and Close-Up Photographer of the Year. Four of his photos will be featured at the Vienna Mushroom Festival next month, prints are available on his site, and you can find more of his work on Instagram.

 

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article In Macro Photos, Barry Webb Captures the Fleeting, Otherworldly Characteristics of Slime Molds and Fungi appeared first on Colossal.

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In April of this year, the End Child Poverty Act (ECPA) was reintroduced in Congress. The ECPA is a child allowance proposal that would replace the current intricate system of family tax credits with a simple, universal child benefit. The ECPA has the potential to help millions of families and significantly reduce child poverty. However, the ECPA has yet to receive a detailed analysis that estimates its cost and impact. That is until now. Recently, I collaborated with Max Ghenis, Founder of PolicyEngine, to create an in-depth analysis of the ECPA for 2023. Using PolicyEngine, Max and I were able to determine the program’s cost and effects on household income, poverty and inequality. This comprehensive evaluation sheds light on the true potential of the ECPA.

Cost

In the analysis, all the components of the ECPA were considered. The ECPA simplifies the existing tax system by abolishing the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC). It establishes a credit of $600 for single filers and $1,200 for joint filers, phasing out gradually at $20,000 and $40,000, respectively. The ECPA also includes a $600 credit for adult dependents. When these policies are combined, the net budgetary effect is $111.8 billion in increased tax revenue. 

The primary component of the ECPA is the universal child benefit. For 2023, every child from 0 to 18 will receive $5,140 a year ($428 a month). This alone would cost $382.1 billion. Therefore, the overall cost of the ECPA for 2023 is $270.3 billion. While this may seem like a steep cost, it only represents about 1% of annual GDP. For context, the U.S. spends more than 3% of its annual GDP on the military.  For a relatively modest cost, the ECPA has some astounding distributional effects. 

Household Impact

The ECPA would increase household incomes across every decile, with most families seeing a 5% or more increase in their net incomes. Families with little or no income would benefit significantly compared to the existing system. Since EITC and CTC benefits currently phase in based on earnings, a single parent with one child and no earnings receives no assistance from either credit. But under the ECPA, they would receive $5,140 from the universal child benefit and an additional $600 from the single filer credit (assuming they file their taxes). As a result, their income would soar by $5,740 compared to the status quo. This aid towards families with no income helps explain the staggering reduction in poverty that would occur under the ECPA. 

Poverty Reduction

While the primary goal of the proposal is to alleviate child poverty, it also does a great job of lowering poverty in general. The ECPA would reduce poverty by 26.2% and deep poverty by 32%. The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) would see its lowest rates on record. Black and Hispanic poverty would also decrease by 30.3% and 32.6%, respectively.  However, the decline in child poverty is obviously where this proposal shines the brightest. The ECPA would reduce child poverty by 60.7%, lowering the SPM child poverty rate from 8.2% to 3.2%. This exceeds the 46% reduction in child poverty that occurred in 2021, which was mainly attributed to the enhanced CTC. Furthermore, deep child poverty would decrease by a whopping 93.2%. The ECPA cuts the SPM deep child poverty rate to just 0.1%! The ECPA would lift tens of millions of people out of poverty. 

Inequality

Finally, the ECPA reduces income inequality. Under the ECPA, the Gini index would fall by 3.6%, dropping from 40.6 to 39.2. While this seems like a minimal dip, it’s important to note that the Gini index would reach its lowest level since 1992 under the ECPA. If the ECPA is paired with progressive taxation, income inequality would fall even more. The ECPA would also lower the percent of total income held by individuals in the top 10% and 1% of households. 

Conclusion

The End Child Poverty Act was already a good proposal. It is elegantly designed and would provide benefits to the poorest families, unlike the current system. However, after conducting the analysis, it is evident that the ECPA would substantially benefit millions of families, cut poverty to unprecedented levels and reduce income inequality to a 30-year low. It is undoubtedly the best child allowance proposal currently introduced in Congress, and now, it has the numbers to back it up. If the ECPA were signed into law, it would go up with Social Security as one of America’s best poverty reducers. I urge Democrats to coalesce around the ECPA. The enhanced CTC in 2021 was good, but the ECPA is better. But don’t take my word for it; just look at the numbers. 

This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.

When Donna Crawford didn’t hear back from her brother Lyle, she began to fear the worst. It was Monday, June 28, 2021, at the tail end of a blistering heat dome that had settled over the Pacific Northwest. Two days prior, daytime temperatures had soared to 108 degrees Fahrenheit in Gresham, Oregon, where Lyle lived alone in the small yellow house the siblings had grown up in. “I hope you’re doing OK in the heat,” she had said into his answering machine that day.

By the time Donna contacted the police, Lyle had already died alone in his house; a box fan was found swirling oven-hot air nearby. He was 62 years old. 

Lyle lived for most of his life in Gresham, a suburb outside Portland, spending his time hiking through the mountains and rivers of Oregon and caring for his mother before her death. Although he was friendly and enjoyed chatting with his barber and other acquaintances, he had few friends later in life and grew even more isolated during the pandemic. Donna, his only remaining family, lived 3,000 miles away in Richmond, Virginia. 

“He would have answered the door if someone knocked, and that might have done it. An actual human being,” Donna told county health officials. “But how can there be enough human beings to go to the door of every older person?” Lyle was one of at least 48 people living alone who died in Multnomah County, which includes Gresham and Portland, during the heat wave.

In May, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning that Americans are experiencing an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” The report lays out a worrying array of statistics showing that people are less socially connected than ever before. In 2021, almost half of Americans reported having fewer than four close friends, while only a quarter said the same in 1990. U.S. residents spent 24 more hours per month alone in 2020 than they did in 2003. Only 3 in 10 Americans know most of their neighbors. And people living alone now make up 29 percent of U.S. households, compared to 13 percent in 1960. 

The isolation crisis is compounding the dangers of deadly heat waves fueled by climate change. In the U.S. and many other countries, social isolation is a major risk factor for dying during a heat wave. Experts say that isolation is made worse by a shortage of social infrastructure like libraries, local businesses, green spaces, and public transit, leaving people who are older and live in disinvested neighborhoods most at risk from extreme heat. As heat waves become more frequent, cities are exploring strategies to build social connections and reach isolated individuals before it’s too late.

“We talk a lot about the emerging climate crisis, but far less about the social infrastructure crisis,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, told Grist.

In the U.S., up to 20,000 people died of heat-related causes between 2008 and 2017. At scorching temperatures, people can experience heat exhaustion, a condition that causes heavy sweating, nausea, and fainting. If left untreated, it can lead to heat stroke, a potentially fatal illness that causes delirium, a rapid heart rate, and eventually organ damage and shutdown. Many heat deaths are also caused by heart attacks and other cardiovascular issues made far more likely by exposure to extreme heat. 

Klinenberg and other experts stress that all heat-related deaths are preventable, including those that happen when a person is alone. During a heatwave, it’s possible to check in on neighbors and bring people air conditioning units or help move them to cooling centers. Analogous life-saving measures aren’t always possible during other extreme weather events, like hurricanes or floods.

“There’s been a long understanding of how heat affects your body and a long understanding of a range of interventions to get your core body temperature back down,” Kristie Ebi, a global health professor studying the impacts of climate change at the University of Washington, told Grist. “People don’t have to die.”

But without adequate outreach, it can be easy for isolated individuals “to get into trouble with the heat,” Ebi said. That’s because heat accumulates in the body gradually, so even a healthy person may not realize that their core temperature is reaching dangerous levels until it’s too late. 

For older adults, the risks of heat and isolation are especially acute. Older people are more likely to experience risk factors that can cause or exacerbate isolation, including living alone, chronic illness, and loss of family and friends. At least a quarter of Americans age 65 and older are considered socially isolated. At the same time, older adults are also more at risk during heat waves because they do not adjust as well as younger people to sudden changes in temperature. They are also more likely to have a chronic illness or take medication that affects their body’s ability to regulate temperature. 

Ebi notes that not only does isolation increase the risk of heat — heat can, in turn, increase isolation. Heat exhausts the body’s energy supply and can impact cognitive function, causing symptoms like confusion. Many people already not feeling up for socializing on a typical day due to chronic medical conditions may feel even less able to reach out during a heat wave.

Research has shown that due to sheer proximity, neighbors are among the most effective first responders during a natural disaster. In a well connected neighborhood, where residents trust their neighbors and participate in local activities and groups, people are more likely to share resources and help one another prepare for and recover from disaster events. As a result, communities with robust social networks tend to fare much better during extreme weather like heat waves. 

Klinenberg first observed this pattern while studying the social and economic disparities that shaped a devastating 1995 heat wave in Chicago. Over the course of five days, more than 700 people died as temperatures climbed up to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Residents who were poor, Black, and older died at disproportionately high rates. When comparing neighborhoods with similar levels of income and people living alone, he found that far fewer deaths happened in communities that were better connected than in more isolated areas. 

One aspect those neighborhoods had in common was an abundance of social infrastructure, or the physical places that enable interaction, Klinenberg found. It can be something as simple as a stoop or a park bench to pause on. At a larger scale, social infrastructure can look like a bustling sidewalk, a community garden, the subway, or a local library — anything that “gives people a place to gather and draws people out of their homes into contact with neighbors,” Klinenberg said. 

“The people who lived in depleted neighborhoods, places that had lost their social infrastructure, were far more likely to die alone than people who lived in neighborhoods with a rich social infrastructure,” he said — “for the simple reason that you’re more likely to wind up home alone.”

In Chicago and elsewhere in the U.S., access to those public spaces is highly unequal, owing to decades of disinvestment in historically redlined neighborhoods and other low-income communities. As a result of racist housing, lending, and transportation policies, predominantly Black communities and communities of color disproportionately live in neighborhoods that lack adequate housing, schools, transportation, parks, and other essential infrastructure. Previously redlined neighborhoods also tend to experience hotter temperatures due to the urban heat island effect, where a lack of green spaces and more paved roads and buildings lock in heat and raise temperatures up to 12.8 degrees Fahrenheit higher than non-redlined areas.

These inequalities have fatal consequences. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Indigenous people and Black people had the highest rates of heat-related deaths in the U.S. between 2004 and 2018. In New York City, local officials reported that the heat-related death rate among Black people from 2011 to 2020 was more than twice as high as that of their white counterparts.

Bharat Venkat, a professor of society and genetics at UCLA and director of the UCLA Heat Lab, said the issue of infrastructure is just one way in which extreme heat lays bare the dangers of existing inequities.

“Those vulnerabilities are ones that are produced socially and politically,” he said. “And that’s what makes the heatwave so deadly and dangerous.” 

Recognizing the risks of isolation, many cities have ramped up community outreach during heat waves. As part of early warning systems, cities like Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia send out text alerts, connect with community and faith-based organizations, and conduct on-the-ground outreach to at-risk populations. Phoenix, Miami, and Los Angeles have gone a step further by appointing chief heat officers to coordinate citywide responses to heat emergencies. Those plans include measures like distributing maps to cooling centers and water bottles, calling residents directly, and raising awareness of heat risks through broadcasting on television, radio, social media, and billboard ads. 

In Philadelphia, 6,000 volunteer “block captains” serve as neighborhood leaders for residential blocks ranging from as few as four households to as many as 99 households. The initiative, which was created primarily to lead street clean-up efforts, has also proven an effective way of reaching residents during heat emergencies, according to Dawn Woods, administrator of the program. Block captains receive information on city services and resources from the city’s Office of Emergency Management and help share knowledge by hosting block meetings and connecting with folks one-on-one.

“For neighbors who are sick or can’t leave their home, we ask block captains to just constantly check in on them and make sure that they have phone numbers on hand, so that they can reach out to somebody in the event of an emergency,” Woods told Grist.

Klinenberg and Venkat said that although community outreach is important, cities should also work to address the broader issues that deepen isolation and heat risk. That includes addressing a national shortage of affordable housing that leaves more people unsheltered, less able to access cooling and community resources, and at greater risk of dying during a heat wave. It also means investing in neighborhoods to build and maintain the local businesses and public facilities that give people the chance to connect with their neighbors.

Venkat pointed to other pressing needs, such as making energy costs more affordable so that people don’t have to choose between putting food on the table and running air conditioning. Another is ensuring rights to cooling for renters and people living in public housing. In Phoenix, for example, a city ordinance requires landlords to provide air conditioning or other cooling systems for rental units. Venkat said cities should also step up efforts to plant trees in neighborhoods that lack green spaces, which provide vital shade and cooling in places where asphalt and concrete trap heat.

“It’s not that people die from heat waves,” Venkat said. “What they die from are social and political decisions about how we govern and take care of people.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A crisis of isolation is making heat waves more deadly  on Aug 8, 2023.

It’s been nearly two years to the day since a freak heat wave obliterated temperature records across the Pacific Northwest. Portland reached a blistering 116 degrees on June 28, 2021, with the heat melting streetcar power cables, buckling pavement, and killing an estimated 69 people in Multnomah County. About 800 people died across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.

Now, that heat dome — which scientists deemed “virtually impossible” without global warming — is the subject of a new lawsuit. Multnomah County sued ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and other fossil fuel companies on Thursday, seeking to put them on trial for the role their products played in fueling the heat wave.

The lawsuit alleges that these companies, along with the American Petroleum Institute, committed negligence and fraud — and created a public nuisance — by concealing what they knew about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. It demands they pay $50 million for past damages, along with $1.5 billion for future damages. On top of that, Multnomah is seeking $50 billion for a fund to upgrade its public health services and “weatherproof” its infrastructure to withstand extreme weather.

“This lawsuit is about accountability and fairness, and I believe the people of Multnomah County deserve both. These businesses knew their products were unsafe and harmful, and they lied about it,” said Jessica Vega Pederson, Multnomah County chair, in a statement. “They have profited massively from their lies and left the rest of us to suffer the consequences and pay for the damages. We say enough is enough.”

Multnomah’s lawsuit is the latest addition to a growing group of lawsuits that cities and states have filed against oil companies for deceiving the public about the risks of oil, gas, and coal. They were set in motion by revelations that ExxonMobil had known that fossil fuels would heat up the planet, with catastrophic consequences, since 1977, but publicly cast doubt on the science and worked to block legislation that would limit carbon emissions. For about half a decade, these cases have been held up in legal limbo, with companies deploying maneuvers to move them from state courts they were filed in to more industry-friendly federal courts. In April, the Supreme Court rejected oil companies’ petitions to relocate the cases to a federal venue, clearing the way for these cases to progress — potentially to jury trials.

In response to the Multnomah lawsuit, an Exxon spokesperson said, “Suits like these continue to waste time, resources and do nothing to address climate change.”

Multnomah’s suit is one of the first to seek damages related to a specific weather event. A statement from the county calls the heat dome “one of the most deadly and destructive human-made weather disasters in American history.” Last year, a group of cities in Puerto Rico filed a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies for the damages they suffered by hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017, using the racketeering law that brought down mobsters, RICO, and seeking billions of dollars.

“While other communities are seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for the costs of hurricanes, rising seas, and wildfires, Multnomah County is the first to demand that oil companies stand trial for fueling the devastating 2021 heat dome,” said Richard Wiles, the president of the Center for Climate Integrity, in a statement. “Communities should not be forced to pay the price for these catastrophic climate damages while the companies that caused the crisis perpetuate their lies and rake in record profits.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Pacific Northwest’s deadly 2021 heat wave fuels a new lawsuit against Big Oil on Jun 22, 2023.

On a Saturday afternoon in the fall of 2021, Silvio Decurtins was leafing through a paper with a title that could have been pulled from a comic book for mathematically inclined teens: “Plato’s Cube and the Natural Geometry of Fragmentation.” It wasn’t the unusual title that caught his eye, but the pictures on the third page — geological patterns at every scale from cracked permafrost to Earth’s...

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Heat death held a morbid fascination for Victorian-era physicists. It was an early example of how everyday physics connects to the grandest themes in cosmology. Drop ice cubes into a glass of water, and you create a situation that is out of equilibrium. The ice melts, the liquid chills, and the system reaches a common temperature. Although motion does not cease — water molecules continue to...

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In Rain Szeto’s intricately rendered fictional universe, people partake in work and pastimes surrounded by stacks of books, snacks, merchandise, and mementos. Her detailed illustrations (previously) portray the organized chaos of everyday activities in domestic spaces and in shops, cafes, and outdoor areas. Typically centered around a single character like a baker behind a counter or a figure carrying a pot of flowers, the scenes are filled with with quotidian objects, providing a lived-in feeling that brims with colorful energy.

Based in San Francisco, Szeto began working in comics during art school, which cemented her interest in narrative drawings. Specific details like the design of food packaging, an elaborate audio mixer setup, or pastries in a glass case suggest individual hobbies, jobs, and personalities distinctive enough that they could be mistaken for real places. Many of her recent pieces also feature feline friends that stride by confidently or curl up on cushions, including an orange tabby that could just as well be making the rounds to all of the inviting spaces.

Most of these works are on view through April 26 in Szeto’s solo exhibition Idle Moments Too at Giant Robot’s GR2 location in Los Angeles. Find more of her work on Instagram.

 

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Through exquisite cut-paper motifs, Pippa Dyrlaga (previously) evinces the principles of biophilia, the theory that humans are predisposed to connect with nature and other life forms. This hypothesis grounds the Yorkshire-based artist’s first solo show in the U.S., which opens this week at Heron Arts in San Francisco.

Encompassing a range of Dyrlaga’s works from recent years, the exhibition is named after the theory and features meticulously carved compositions that meld flora and fauna. Patterned mesh backdrops surround entire ecosystems with avian and aquatic life, as in “Summer” and “River,” while smaller pieces focus on single creatures like a bluebird or swan as they take flight. Layered with acrylic paint, the works are nostalgic and full of reverence, evoking the immense, insatiable wonder of childhood and the joy of discovering the beauty of the natural world for the first time.

Biophilia runs from June 22 to July 21. Find more of Dyrlaga’s pieces on her site and Instagram.

 

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Through his innovative Dyadic Series, artist and designer Brian Peters defies the limits of clay and technologies. The collection is comprised of cylindrical sculptures that expertly weave soft blue and green with the natural color of ceramic, all created with a custom 3D printer.

Rather than achieve the two-toned compositions through glazes or paints, Peters coded the machine to fabricate each sculpture with both the pigmented and raw materials—most 3D printers add layers from a single body of wet clay—and the resulting forms elegantly entwine unique, textured patterns.

Born out of more than a decade of research into ceramics and the fabrication process, the series is proof that more variations in this technology are possible. Peters shares:

The idea of printing in two (or more) colors simultaneously has been something that has intrigued me for a while, and I finally developed the expertise in building 3D printers to pursue the idea. This new field of exploration is very exciting because you are able to directly print with color, rather than glazing the color afterwards, and will allow me to explore different patterns and textures (such as the woven-like texture created with this first collection).

Based in Pittsburgh, Peters frequently works on large-scale architectural works and wall sculptures, which you can find on his site. He’s currently in the midst of several commissions and building another 3D printer with new capabilities, so follow him on Instagram for updates. (via Design Milk)

 

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This story was originally published by Next City and is reproduced here with permission.

On a dead-end street in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood, on 18 acres of land that previously served as an illegal dumping ground, an entire food ecosystem has emerged and thrived under the leadership of local residents.

Rid-All Green Partnership started with a single hoop house erected in February of 2011; now acres of farmland support a community kitchen and farmer’s market. All food waste is turned into compost, which supports the farm and is sold across Cleveland. A training program and paid apprenticeships bring community members in, while an aquaponics and hydroponics system generates local jobs. Specialized programs emerged to serve veterans and youth.

“We’ve created a circular economy,” says Keymah Durden, a Rid-All co-founder who grew up in the neighborhood. “Piece by piece, we’ve built this business with things that complement each other.”

Durden is one of three co-founders, all childhood friends who grew up on Cleveland’s east side. Rid-All’s name comes from late co-founder Damien Forshe’s company, Rid-All Exterminating Corporation, which he operated for 15 years before transitioning to agriculture. He was inspired by a research report written by co-founder Randy McShepard that advocated for building urban farms in vacant land following the 2009 foreclosure crisis. (Cleveland had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, with many of the vacated homes demolished.)

The trio secured 1.3 vacant acres in Kinsman, a neighborhood struggling with disinvestment and entrenched poverty. They prompted the county and others to clean the illegal dumping ground; more than 2,000 tires, burned out cars and abandoned refrigerators were removed. They participated in a five-month training program at the Milwaukee urban farm Growing Power and were inspired by two things: creating their own soil to replace the contaminated soil in their lot, and investing in fish farming, which could become an income generator to support a larger urban farm.

In addition to building a hoop house to begin growing plants and vegetables, they collected food waste from local businesses around Cleveland, creating compost for their farm and selling it. They built a self-sustaining hydroponics system to grow fish in tanks and vegetables on a connected top tier, with the fish waste fortifying the plants and the plants supporting clean water for the fish. In the first three years, they grew and sold 10,000 tilapia fish out of one greenhouse.

It was enough success to secure an investment to build a 7,200-square-foot urban fish farm, which now grows 70,000 tilapia that Rid-All sells to local restaurants. “These two critical pieces of our business — the fish farm and the compost — came from our early learnings and realizing there was a market for both,” explains McShepard.

As Rid-All grew, the nonprofit secured adjacent land. It is now an 18-acre campus with two greenhouses, six hoop houses, a commercial composting station, and a rain catchment pond. The nonprofit was also named the official tree nursery site of the Cleveland Tree Coalition and will be growing and selling at least 5,000 trees over the next few years as part of a larger effort to reforest the city.

“We’ve looked at ways to stay current and evolve over time,” says Marc White, a founding partner who serves as operations manager. “We didn’t want to be stuck just growing vegetables, we wanted to grow community.”

To that end, Rid-All introduced workshops, trainings and apprenticeship programs, including specific programming for youth and veterans. The farm now employs 18 people, many of whom are from the neighborhood, and offers summer employment for young people.

Its two latest developments cemented Rid-All’s circular economy model. In the summer of 2020, Rid-All began operating a farmer’s market in Maple Heights, a suburb bordering Cleveland that’s considered a food desert. This was Rid-All’s first opportunity to sell produce at scale. “Whatever we grow at the farm we can sell at the market and any produce that doesn’t sell we bring back and it becomes compost,” says McShepard. A chef sets up in the market once a month to share meals and recipes using the produce currently for sale.

In the spring of 2021, Rid-All opened a new building on its campus to serve as a community kitchen, market and restaurant facility. Similarly to the market, anything grown by Rid-All is cooked up and sold in the community kitchen, any food waste becomes compost. “This is a full, closed-loop ecosystem now,” McSheperd says.

Durden oversees the community kitchen. “The building is styled like a log cabin, which is such a unique feature to inner-core Cleveland, that it’s almost become a showpiece,” he says. On Tuesdays and Fridays they sell meals cooked by rotating guest chefs; Kinsman residents often eat alongside local government officials and professional athletes.

Rid-All hosts cooking and nutrition classes here and rents the space out for meetings and special events. They also plan to use the kitchen as an incubator for emerging food businesses and staging facility for food products that require processing and packaging.

Durden calls the farmer’s market and community kitchen “game changers” in that “everything we grow here at the farm, we can translate to our market and our kitchen.”

“This is a real Cleveland story,” he says. “It’s as local as it gets — three kids who grew up on the east side who now represent this good-faith and hopeful messaging around agriculture that shows what can be possible.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The former dumping ground that became a flourishing food ecosystem on Jun 17, 2023.

What did the lost children eat during their 40 days? And who planted it?

How has Costa Rica managed to restore its natural wonders, while big, rich nations fail?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 21^st April 2023

One of the world’s greatest environmental heroes doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Though he has done more to protect the living planet than almost anyone alive, his name is scarcely known. It’s partly because he’s quiet and self-effacing and partly because of a general ignorance about Central America that so few of us have heard of Alvaro Umaña.

This might be about to change. He stars in a fascinating film, now released in the Netherlands and negotiating global sales, called Paved Paradise (disclosure: I was also interviewed). It’s the first feature-length documentary I’ve watched that engages intelligently with the most critical environmental issue: land use. By contrast with popular but misguided films such as Kiss the Ground or The Biggest Little Farm, it recognises that sprawling extractive land uses are a lethal threat to the living world. It makes the case that, unless we count the hectares and decide together how best they should be used, we will lose the struggle to defend the habitable planet.

Paved Paradise tells the story of the most remarkable ecological turnaround on Earth: the transformation of Costa Rica. From 1986 to 1990, Umaña was environment minister in Óscar Arias’s government. Arias received the Nobel peace prize for his regional diplomacy. But the equally astonishing environmental shift Umaña catalysed is less well known.

Until the Arias government took power, Costa Rica suffered one of the world’s worst deforestation rates: on one scientific assessment, its forest cover fell to just 24.4% of the country.

Today, forests occupy 57%, which, Umaña tells me, is close to the maximum: some parts were never forested, while others are now occupied by productive farms and cities. While a small amount of illegal timber felling continues, Costa Rica is the only tropical country to have more or less stopped and then reversed deforestation. It now has one of the world’s highest percentages of protected areas. How did it happen?

Umaña persuaded Arias to let him run a new department (energy and environment) with responsibility for protected areas. He saw that the key task was to change financial incentives. Though cattle ranching was unproductive, as the land could support just one cow per hectare, it was marginally more lucrative than allowing the forest to stand.

His department calculated the opportunity cost of forgoing a cow at $64 a year, so this was the money it offered for protecting or restoring a hectare of forest. He began by reaching out to small farmers and their representatives, in those regions where people were most sympathetic to the idea. The smallest landholders were offered grants, slightly larger ones were offered soft loans, with the promise that if their forest was still standing after five years, it could serve as the loan’s guarantee. The plan was astonishingly successful: 97% of those who received loans protected or restored the trees on their land. As landholders everywhere saw the scheme made financial sense, it became massively oversubscribed.

Needing more money, in 1988 Umaña agreed a debt-for-nature swap with the Dutch government. It would cancel part of the foreign debt if the money Costa Rica would otherwise have spent on servicing it were used instead for forest conservation.

Following a change of government, Umaña became the country’s climate ambassador. He helped introduce a special tax of 3.5% on fossil fuels to help pay for forest conservation.

Soon the tree protectors began to supplement their income. Tourists are now the country’s second-biggest source of revenue: government figures show that 65% of them list ecotourism as a principal reason for visiting. They come to see toucans, green macaws, howler monkeys, jaguars, caimans, poison dart frogs and other resurgent natural wonders. Landholders can also apply for a licence selectively to fell a small number of their trees, some of which are very valuable.

One reason for the programme’s success is its sharing of financial benefits, especially through its world-leading gender action plan. Another is cultural change. In building a new identity around “la pura vida” (the simple life), the government showed that, in combination with economic incentives, national pride can help bring long-established practices such as forest clearance for cattle ranching to an end.

Costa Rica helped to inspire the Bonn Challenge, a global programme to restore degraded and deforested land. It launched the international plan to protect 30% of the planet by 2030, and was one of the two founder members, in 2021, of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance (though it has since stood back, following a change of government). These are astonishing achievements for a tiny country.

Compare this record with policy in the UK, which, 37 years after Umaña set to work, is still pissing about with half-solutions and non-solutions, held to ransom by rich and powerful property owners and entirely incapable of making strategic environmental decisions, especially on land use. While Costa Rica’s wildlife is booming, ours is in freefall. The government seems determined, against all advice, to allow this disastrous trend to continue for the rest of the decade.

As for the fuel taxes that could have been used, like Costa Rica’s, to fund ecological repair, the UK government has now forgone a cumulative £80bn in revenue by both abandoning Labour’s fuel duty escalator and giving motorists a special rebate. As a result, our carbon emissions are up to 7% higher than they would otherwise have been.

So why does a rich, powerful nation fail, while a small, much poorer one succeeds? Talking to Umaña and researching the history of this transformation suggests a simple answer: quality of government. When governments are committed, decisive and consistent, things happen. When they are beholden to lobby groups, cronyism and corruption, and delegate responsibility to an abstraction called “the market”, they spend decades flapping their hands while chaos reigns.

Our self-hating state, which parades its can’t-do culture as a source of pride, insisting that government cannot and should not solve our problems, is constitutionally destined to founder. Why can’t we follow Costa Rica’s example? Because a small but powerful contingent insists on failure.

www.monbiot.com

February marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, 12 months of humanitarian, political, and economic crises. Tens of thousands of lives have been lost, millions of people have been displaced, and while the Ukrainian military surprised the world by holding its own and reclaiming half the land captured by Russia this year, the fighting has no clear end in sight.

The conflict also put the global oil trade in the spotlight. From the beginning, some argued that spiking gas prices in the absence of Russian fuel supplies would spur clean energy planning in Europe and elsewhere. But a year out, it has become clear that the war resulted in essentially a doubling down on dirty fuel, at least in the short term. European subsidies for fossil fuels rose higher than ever and carbon emissions reached a global peak as countries scrambled for coal, oil, and gas. Nations that couldn’t afford natural gas turned to burning more coal, and U.S. President Joe Biden called for more domestic fossil fuel production. Meanwhile, Shell, Exxon, and BP reported record profits.

Largely ignored, however, at least in many international circles, has been the war’s massive environmental impact on Ukraine itself. A year out, the extent of these damages are becoming clear. In its campaign, Russia has targeted electric grids, oil refineries, and nuclear plants, and wrought untold damage to ecosystems, soil, and water through the bombing of fields and industrial sites. 

“In 2015, we had a fire at an oil facility that was one of the biggest environmental disasters in Ukrainian history,” said Yevheniia Zasiadko, the head of the climate department at Ecoaction, a Ukrainian nonprofit. “Since the Russians invaded, there have been more than 40 such facilities destroyed across Ukraine.” 

Attacks on oil depots caused some of the tens of thousands of blazes that have burned across Ukraine mostly started by shelling. About a third of the country’s forests have been affected, and over 57,000 acres have completely burned down, according to data from Ukraine’s environment ministry (as reported in the Economist, the ministry’s website was down at publication time). Oil and trees set ablaze are some of the main contributors to the 46.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, or CO2, released into the atmosphere since Russia’s invasion. The ministry says air pollution has been one of the war’s most costly environmental impacts. 

Ecoaction has been tracking the environmental damage since last February, drawing information from media reports and local government announcements and publishing updated findings online every two weeks. Greenpeace joined the effort to provide satellite verification and mapping. So far the team has documented 863 instances of degradation, including widespread forest fires, destroyed terrestrial and marine ecosystems, burst pipelines filling wetlands with oil, sunken ships in the Black Sea, chemical plant waste spilling into rivers, and radioactive releases from nuclear plants. “A huge territory is still occupied so we don’t even know what is happening there,” said Zasiadko. Much of the liberated territory of Ukraine is full of explosive mines, which poses a challenge for mapping and ground-truthing.

“Ukraine is an industrial country and we have a lot of chemical and heavy metal [processing] factories,” said Zasiadko. A big part of that was destroyed, she said, which released toxic materials to flow into waterways and leach into the soil. In the early days of the war, part of a Russian missile hit a livestock waste storage facility near the Ikva river in the Rivne region of western Ukraine and caused a fish die-off in the neighboring region. In another case near the town of Sumy, in northeast Ukraine, people had to stay inside their homes for days after receiving notice of ammonia leaking from a struck power plant.

“Because lots of area was mined [with explosive devices], firefighters cannot do their job, and local scientists cannot go in to monitor the situation.”

Kateryna Polyanska, an ecologist with the Ukrainian environmental nonprofit Environment People Law, has been traveling around the country examining the landscape and taking soil samples from mine craters. “At the beginning I tried to analyze satellite images but that wasn’t enough,” she told Grist. “I understood that I should go to the fields.” Her early lab results have found nickel, zinc, and other heavy metals from shells, bombs, and shrapnel in the soil, as well as chemical contamination and fuel from unexploded missiles. In her travels, she also observed the growing problem of “war waste,” toxic materials from rubble, like asbestos in home ceilings, without any place for proper disposal. 

“A lot of these things have a huge risk for human health and lives,” said Polyanska, adding that the attacks and their aftereffects have also impacted animals, like foxes in the forest, dolphins in the Black Sea, and rare ecosystems like the Holy Mountains in the Donetsk province, in the east of Ukraine. Over 30 percent of the country’s natural protected areas have been hit and the environment ministry estimates 600 animal species and 880 plant species are at risk of extinction, as reported in the Guardian. 

Another area of particular concern has been nuclear radiation. Last February and March, Russian forces occupied the Chernobyl power station, the site of an infamous 1986 nuclear accident, for five weeks; they dug trenches in the thousand-square-mile radioactive exclusion zone, now effectively a protected area. Studies after they left showed radiation levels three times higher than normal in parts of the Red Forest.

“Because lots of area was mined [meaning scattered with explosive devices], firefighters cannot do their job, and local scientists cannot go in to monitor the situation,” said Denys Tsutsaiev, a Greenpeace campaigner in Kyiv. He added that just after the liberation of the Chernobyl territory, a fire truck drove over a mine and exploded.

Ukraine’s four active nuclear plants from which the country sources half its electricity are also at risk. For the past eleven months, Russian forces have occupied the Zaporizhzhia plant in the south of the country, and damages to surrounding power supply lines raise concerns about reactors overheating. “At the moment there is only one backup line connected to the plant,” said Tsutsaiev. Russians have also drained the nearby Kakhovka reservoir, used for cooling the plant’s reactors and providing water to large populations to the south.

Donbas, the country’s eastern region where much of its industry is concentrated, is also the country’s main coal producing area. It has long been a site of conflict, proclaimed partially as an independent territory by pro-Russian separatists in 2014 and currently under Russian occupation. Between 2015 and 2021, international monitoring showed that over 30 coal mines had been flooded in the region, polluting groundwater and surface water with metals, sulfates, and mineral salts. Since the beginning of full-scale invasion, 10 more have been flooded, though it’s possible that the actual number is higher. 

“Usually when Russia occupies a territory they cut off electricity,” said Zasiadko. “That means the pipelines aren’t taking out groundwater, and the mines flood.”

While much of Ukraine’s power grid miraculously remains standing, over 213 reported attacks on electric facilities over the last several months have left large parts of the country without power, limiting drinking water treatment and compromising human health. 

With war still raging, Zasiadko says it has been hard to get Ukrainian officials and international allies to pay attention to reconstruction in liberated areas. Harder still is drawing resources for environmental restoration.

“Ukrainian authorities are speaking about ecocide but there isn’t much action on ‘what are we going to do with the pollutants?’,” said Zasiadko. “There is mostly discussion about rebuilding infrastructure and roads.” In July, at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, Ukrainian authorities presented their first reconstruction plan to a large group of international leaders and finance institutions; environmental groups objected to it on the grounds that it consisted mostly of construction projects “without a systematic approach to nature conservation.”

Zasiadko says the priority, when it comes to the environment, needs to be testing, monitoring, and pollution clean-up. Ukraine’s economy is 40 percent agriculture, she said, and it’s already coming back in the reclaimed areas. “At the moment the soil is not always de-mined and there have been many examples of explosions on farmlands.” She is concerned that people are growing food in polluted soil. Soil cleanup is a long endeavor, specific to the site and the contaminant. And de-mining could take 10 years. “In the future, we will need special divers who can go in and clean the rivers from explosive materials and mines,” said Polyanska.

Ukraine’s environment ministry, for its part, is keeping an extensive record of the environmental damage and evaluating the cost with the goal of demanding compensation from Russia. The ministry’s most recent findings report that almost a third of the country remains hazardous, 160 nature reserves are under threat of destruction, and the total cost of environmental damage is over $50 billion. While Tsutsaiev appreciates the efforts to document the damage, he says the government and partners should also be seeking other funding and making a plan for how restoration is going to occur. 

Ukraine was in the midst of a “just transition” pilot program to help coal workers find new clean energy jobs in nine cities in the eastern coal mining regions when the war broke out. That project has been put on hold. Tsutsaiev hopes reconstruction can be used as an opportunity to rebuild with climate change in mind. 
“Greening the reconstruction means empowering local municipalities not to use all the old technologies but to think about energy independence and energy security,” said Tsutsaiev. He cited the example of a hospital close to Kyiv that was damaged in the first days of the war. Greenpeace helped with the installation of a heat pump and solar panels during reconstruction. “Now, when there is no electricity in the area, the hospital continues to receive power,” he said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline One year in, the toxic legacy of war in Ukraine comes into view on Mar 1, 2023.

While Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” is on loan to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for the largest-ever exhibition of the Dutch artist’s work, a cheeky surrogate takes its place. The Mauritshuis in the Hague is currently showing My Girl with a Pearl, a lighthearted and vastly creative digital installation, where the iconic painting usually resides.

Resulting from an open call last year that garnered nearly 3,500 submissions, the temporary piece features 170 renditions of Vermeer’s 1655 portrait presented on a loop. Mediums and styles vary widely, and the installation features everything from an abstract iteration using multi-color rubber bands to elegantly photographed portraiture to the viral corn-cob figure.

My Girl with a Pearl is on view through April 1 when the original painting—which has been the site of speculation in recent weeks as scholars revealed the earring to be an imitation—is slated to return to the Hague. Those who won’t be able to see the installation in person can find dozens of the renditions on Instagram, in addition to a virtual exhibition of the Vermeer exhibition on the Rijksmuseum’s site.

 

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Moments of coincidental humor, stark cruelty, and surprising inter-species intimacies are on full display in this year’s World Nature Photography Awards. The winners of the 2022 competition encompass a vast array of life across six continents, from an elephant’s endearing attempt at camouflage to a crocodile covered in excessively dry mud spurred by drought. While many of the photos highlight natural occurrences, others spotlight the profound impacts humans have on the environment to particularly disastrous results, including Nicolas Remy’s heartbreaking image that shows an Australian fur seal sliced open by a boat propellor.

Find some of the winning photos below, and explore the entire collection on the contest’s site.

 

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article The 2022 World Nature Photography Awards Vacillate Between the Humor and Brutality of Life on Earth appeared first on Colossal.

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for their newsletter.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a “climate-friendly” initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and the Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.

“That kind of risk is obscene,” said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “You can’t let that get out.”

That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within 3 miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

ProPublica and the Guardian asked Maria Doa, a scientist who worked at the EPA for 30 years, to review the document laying out the risk. Doa, who once ran the division that managed the risks posed by chemicals, was so alarmed by the cancer threat that she initially assumed it was a typographical error. “EPA should not allow these risks in Pascagoula or anywhere,” said Doa, who now is the senior director of chemical policy at Environmental Defense Fund.

In response to questions from ProPublica and the Guardian, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency’s lifetime cancer risk calculation is “a very conservative estimate with ‘high uncertainty,’” meaning the government erred on the side of caution in calculating such a high risk.

Under federal law, the EPA can’t approve new chemicals with serious health or environmental risks unless it comes up with ways to minimize the dangers. And if the EPA is unsure, the law allows the agency to order lab testing that would clarify the potential health and environmental harms. In the case of these new plastic-based fuels, the agency didn’t do either of those things. In approving the jet fuel, the EPA didn’t require any lab tests, air monitoring, or controls that would reduce the release of the cancer-causing pollutants or people’s exposure to them.

In January 2022, the EPA announced the initiative to streamline the approval of petroleum alternatives in what a press release called “part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s actions to confront the climate crisis.” While the program cleared new fuels made from plants, it also signed off on fuels made from plastics even though they themselves are petroleum-based and contribute to the release of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Although there’s no mention of discarded plastics in the press release or on the EPA website’s description of the program, an agency spokesperson told ProPublica and the Guardian that it allows them because the initiative also covers fuels made from waste. The spokesperson said that 16 of the 34 fuels the program approved so far are made from waste. She would not say how many of those are made from plastic and stated that such information was confidential.

All of the waste-based fuels are the subject of consent orders, documents the EPA issues when it finds that new chemicals or mixtures may pose an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment. The documents specify those risks and the agency’s instructions for mitigating them.

But the agency won’t turn over these records or reveal information about the waste-based fuels, even their names and chemical structures. Without those basic details, it’s nearly impossible to determine which of the thousands of consent orders on the EPA website apply to this program. In keeping this information secret, the EPA cited a legal provision that allows companies to claim as confidential any information that would give their competitors an advantage in the marketplace.

Nevertheless, ProPublica and the Guardian did obtain one consent order that covers a dozen Chevron fuels made from plastics that were reviewed under the program. Although the EPA had blacked out sections, including the chemicals’ names, that document showed that the fuels that Chevron plans to make at its Pascagoula refinery present serious health risks, including developmental problems in children and cancer and harm to the nervous system, reproductive system, liver, kidney, blood and spleen.

Aside from the chemical that carries a 25 percent lifetime risk of cancer from smokestack emissions, another of the Chevron fuels ushered in through the program is expected to cause 1.2 cancers in 10,000 people — also far higher than the agency allows for the general population. The EPA division that screens new chemicals typically limits cancer risk from a single air pollutant to 1 case of cancer in a million people. The agency also calculated that air pollution from one of the fuels is expected to cause 7.1 cancers in every 1,000 workers — more than 70 times the level EPA’s new chemicals division usually considers acceptable for workers.

In addition to the chemicals released through the creation of fuels from plastics, the people living near the Chevron refinery are exposed to an array of other cancer-causing pollutants, as ProPublica reported in 2021. In that series, which mapped excess cancer risk from lifetime exposure to air pollution across the U.S., the highest chance was 1 cancer in 53 people, in Port Arthur, Texas.

The one-in-four lifetime cancer risk from breathing the emissions from the Chevron jet fuel is higher even than the lifetime risk of lung cancer for current smokers.

In an email, Chevron spokesperson Ross Allen wrote: “It is incorrect to say there is a one-in-four cancer risk from smokestack emissions. I urge you avoid suggesting otherwise.” Asked to clarify what exactly was wrong, Allen wrote that Chevron disagrees with ProPublica and the Guardian’s “characterization of language in the EPA Consent Order.” That document, signed by a Chevron manager at its refinery in Pascagoula, quantified the lifetime cancer risk from the inhalation of smokestack air as 2.5 cancers in 10 people, which can also be stated as one in four.

In a subsequent phone call, Allen said: “We do take care of our communities, our workers and the environment generally. This is job one for Chevron.”

In a separate written statement, Chevron said it followed the EPA’s process under the Toxic Substances Control Act: “The TSCA process is an important first step to identify risks and if EPA identifies unreasonable risk, it can limit or prohibit manufacture, processing or distribution in commerce during applicable review period.”

The Chevron statement also said: “Other environmental regulations and permitting processes govern air, water and handling hazardous materials. Regulations under the Clean Water, Clean Air and Resource Conservation and Recovery Acts also apply and protect the environment and the health and safety of our communities and workers.”

Similarly, the EPA said that other federal laws and requirements might reduce the risk posed by the pollution, including Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s regulations for worker protection, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and rules that apply to refineries.

But OSHA has warned the public not to rely on its outdated chemical standards. The refinery rule calls for air monitoring only for one pollutant: benzene. The Clean Water Act does not address air pollution. And the new fuels are not regulated under the Clean Air Act, which applies to a specific list of pollutants. Nor can states monitor for the carcinogenic new fuels without knowing their names and chemical structures.

We asked Scott Throwe, an air pollution specialist who worked at the EPA for 30 years, how existing regulations could protect people in this instance. Now an independent environmental consultant, Throwe said the existing testing and monitoring requirements for refineries couldn’t capture the pollution from these new plastic-based fuels because the rules were written before these chemicals existed. There is a chance that equipment designed to limit the release of other pollutants may incidentally capture some of the emissions from the new fuels, he said. But there’s no way to know whether that is happening.

Under federal law, companies have to apply to the EPA for permission to introduce new chemicals or mixtures. But manufacturers don’t have to supply any data showing their products are safe. So the EPA usually relies on studies of similar chemicals to anticipate health effects. In this case, the EPA used a mixture of chemicals made from crude oil to gauge the risks posed by the new plastic-based fuels. Chevron told the EPA the chemical components of its new fuel but didn’t give the precise proportions. So the EPA had to make some assumptions, for instance that people absorb 100 percent of the pollution emitted.

Asked why it didn’t require tests to clarify the risks, a spokesperson wrote that the “EPA does not believe these additional test results would change the risks identified nor the unreasonable risks finding.”

In her three decades at the EPA, Doa had never seen a chemical with that high a cancer risk that the agency allowed to be released into a community without restrictions.

“The only requirement seems to be just to use the chemicals as fuel and have the workers wear gloves,” she said.

While companies have made fuels from discarded plastics before, this EPA program gives them the same administrative break that renewable fuels receive: a dedicated EPA team that combines the usual six regulatory assessments into a single report.

The irony is that Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard Program, which this initiative was meant to support, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and boost the production of renewable fuels. Truly renewable energy sources can be regenerated in a short period of time, such as plants or algae. While there is significant debate about whether ethanol, which is made from corn, and other plant-based renewable fuels are really better for the environment than fossil fuels, there is no question that plastics are not renewable and that their production and conversion into fuel releases climate-harming pollution.

Under the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard, biobased fuels must meet specific criteria related to their biological origin as well as the amount they reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared with petroleum-based fuels. But under this new approach, fuels made from waste don’t have to meet those targets, the agency said.

In its written statement, Chevron said that “plastics are an essential part of modern life and plastic waste should not end up in unintended places in the environment. We are taking steps to address plastic waste and support a circular economy in which post-use plastic is recycled, reused or repurposed.”

But environmentalists say such claims are just greenwashing.

Whatever you call it, the creation of fuel from plastic is in some ways worse for the climate than simply making it directly from fossil fuels. Over 99% of all plastic is derived from fossil fuels, including coal, oil and gas. To produce fuel from plastics, additional fossil fuels are used to generate the heat that converts them into petrochemicals that can be used as fuel.

“It adds an extra step,” said Veena Singla, a senior scientist at NRDC. “They have to burn a lot of stuff to power the process that transforms the plastic.”

Less than 6 percent of plastic is recycled in the U.S. Much of the rest — hundreds of millions of tons of it — is dumped in the oceans each year, killing marine mammals and polluting the world. Plastic does not fully decompose; instead it eventually breaks down into tiny bits, some of which wind up inside our bodies. As the public’s awareness of the health and environmental harm grows, the plastics industry has found itself under increasing pressure to find a use for the waste.

The idea of creating fuel from plastic offers the comforting sense that plastics are sustainable. But the release of cancer-causing pollution is just one of several significant problems that have plagued attempts to convert discarded plastic into new things. One recent study by scientists from the Department of Energy found that the economic and environmental costs of turning old plastic into new using a process called pyrolysis were 10 to 100 times higher than those of making new plastics from fossil fuels. The lead author said similar issues plague the use of this process to create fuels from plastics.

Chevron buys oil that another company extracts from discarded plastics through pyrolysis. Though the parts of the consent order that aren’t blacked out don’t mention that this oil came from waste plastics, a related EPA record makes this clear. The cancer risks come from the pollution emitted from Chevron’s smokestacks when the company turns that oil into fuel.

The EPA attributed its decision to embark on the streamlined program in part to its budget, which it says has been “essentially flat for the last six years.” The EPA spokesperson said that the agency “has been working to streamline its new chemicals work wherever possible.”

The New Chemicals Division, which houses the program, has been under particular pressure because updates to the chemicals law gave it additional responsibilities and faster timetables. That division of the agency is also the subject of an ongoing EPA Inspector General investigation into whistleblowers’ allegations of corruption and industry influence over the chemical approval process.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This “climate-friendly” fuel comes with an astronomical cancer risk on Feb 25, 2023.