oldephartte(in training): 25 December

All Top News -- ScienceDaily

First movie of energy transfer in photosynthesis solves decades-old debate - Using ultrafast imaging of moving energy in photosynthesis, scientists have determined the speed of crucial processes for the first time. This should help scientists understand how nature has perfected the process of photosynthesis, and how this might be copied to produce fuels by artificial photosynthesis. 23 Dec

Hard-wired: The brain's circuitry for political belief - When people's political beliefs are challenged, their brains become active in areas that govern personal identity and emotional responses to threats, neuroscientists have found. 23 Dec

The way you move: Tumor cells move differently than normal ones - Tumor cells can't move the same way that normal cells do to get through tight squeezes in the body, opening up the potential for future, targeted therapies, new research suggests. 23 Dec

Multi-social millennials more likely depressed than social(media)ly conservative peers - Compared with the total time spent on social media, use of multiple platforms is more strongly associated with depression and anxiety among young adults, researchers have found in a national survey. People who report using seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than their peers who use zero to two platforms, even after adjusting for the total time spent on social media overall. 23 Dec

Giant cell blob can learn and teach, study shows - It isn't an animal, a plant, or a fungus. The slime mold (Physarum polycephalum) is a strange, creeping, bloblike organism made up of one giant cell. Though it has no brain, it can learn from experience, as biologists have demonstrated. Now the same team of scientists has gone a step further, proving that a slime mold can transmit what it has learned to a fellow slime mold when the two combine. 23 Dec

Thinking with our hands can help find new ways of solving problems, research reveals - New research by two cognitive psychology experts is demonstrating how our decision making is heavily influenced by the world around us, challenging the traditional idea that thinking takes place strictly in the head. 23 Dec

Temperature drives biodiversity - Why is the diversity of animals and plants so unevenly distributed on our planet? An international research team of researchers has provided new data on this core issue of ecology. They found biodiversity to be driven by temperature. 23 Dec

Sunlight offers surprise benefit: It energizes infection fighting T cells - Sunlight, through a mechanism separate than vitamin D production, energizes T cells that play a central role in human immunity, researchers have found. The findings suggest how the skin, the body’s largest organ, stays alert to the many microbes that can nest there. 22 Dec

One step closer to reality: Devices that convert heat into electricity - The same researchers who pioneered the use of a quantum mechanical effect to convert heat into electricity have figured out how to make their technique work in a form more suitable to industry. 22 Dec

Case for sexual transmission of Zika virus strengthened - Aedes aegypti mosquitoes harboring parasitic Zika virus (ZIKV) are the primary transmitters of virus to humans, potentially causing catastrophic congenital microcephaly in babies born to women bitten by infected mosquitoes. But confirmation earlier this year that ZIKV can also be sexually transmitted raised new alarm that virus could be passed between sexual partners in venues far from mosquito habitats. 22 Dec

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Will Coverage for 52 Million Americans With Preexisting Conditions Continue? - Future of Medical Coverage for Preexisting Conditions There is great concern that 52 million Americans will lose their medical coverage due to their preexisting medical conditions not covered by insurers before the Affordable Care Act was signed. Despite President-Elect Trump claiming that part of the ACA wouldn’t be removed, it’s not clear how the Republican alternative plans can afford to retain it. The national rate for “declinable” preexisting conditions averages 27 percent nationally with lower rate of 24 percent in California rates are higher (32 – 43 percent) in Republican controlled states. We know that without the national mandate established under the state and federal insurance exchanges, the coverage won’t be affordable. We will have to see this play out. (Sources: San Jose Mercury News, p. 1, Dec. 18, 2016 and “52 Million Americans Under Age 65 Have Pre-Existing Health Conditions: Kaiser,” December 15, 2016, http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/12/15/435229.htm) There are no meetings scheduled for this coming week. Have a great holiday as possible in the next weeks. Audrey 18 Dec

Stick with Hope Working with Others to Avoid Despair - Stick with Hope Working with Others and Avoid Despair These are trying times, especially, for highly educated professionals who research and made decisions based on fact and evidence. Hearing the potential EPA head would like to eliminate the EPA and potential head of FDA might want to cut back on regulations to decrease length of time of drug development is very upsetting. These negative attitudes question the importance of years of work to establish truths and principles to guide scientific work. I share with you that one can benefit by focusing on hope and practicing actions that will help us move forward in face of rash changes through the potential chaos created by appointees who don’t agree with science developed over decades. For some it is the pure economic benefit that supports their path. Optimism and pessimism are fact-based concepts familiar to us in our work while hope and despair are emotionally based. I find that this concept is helpful in moving on each day and facing the rough times ahead. As individuals we cannot bring much light to the situation but through communities of like-minded parities, we can together be effective with hope to avoid despair. Highlights of Bay Area Bioscience Events Week of Dec. 11, 2016 Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Evening, Dec. 13, 2016, Topic: “Earlens: Next Generation Hearing Technology Overview,” Speakers: Bill Facteau, CEO and Brent Edwards, CTO, Earlens Corporation Palo Alto AWIS, Wednesday Evening, Dec. 14, 2016, Event: “A Holiday Party (food and wine served)” BioScience Forum, Wednesday Evening, Dec. 14, 2016, Topic: “Improvement of Fibrosis in Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH) Patients: Clinical Development of a Potential Small Molecule Therapeutic,” Speaker: Laurent Fischer, M.D., Former Chief Executive Officer Tobira Therapeutics,Head of Liver Therapeutic Area, Allergan You can download the details for the upcoming events this week and those through March 2017 with audreys-picks-dec-11-2016. Audrey 11 Dec

Japanese Price Cutting to Become More Frequent - Japanese Drug Pricing Cuts Expected To Be More Frequent For decades Japan has cut prices on launched drugs every two years after launch. Anticipated pricing reforms will likely include reviewing drug reimbursements annually going forward according to Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association Director of International Affairs Takeshi Shigihara. Japan has recently undertaken several aggressive price cuts for prescription drugs. Earlier this month, Chuikyo cut the price of cancer drug Opdivo nivolumab by 50%, effective February 2017. This past March, the authorities finalized price cuts for high-revenue products, including Harvoni ledipasvir/sofosbuvir and Sovaldi sofosbuvir. The HCV therapies were each discounted 31.7%. The Japanese authorities are not expected to deny good prices for innovative drugs at launch but they will be subject to pricing cuts subsequently. Highlights of Bay Area Bioscience Events from Week of Dec. 4, 2016 Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Morning, Dec. 6, 2016; Speaker: Thor Rollins, Senior Scientist- Certified Microbiologist, Nelson Laboratories; Topic: “Have you done enough to meet new FDA Regulations for Biocompatibility Risk Assessment? “ WIB- San Francisco, Tuesday Evening, Dec. 6, 2016;Event: “Holiday Party at Devil’s Canyon;” Date and Time: Tuesday December 6, 2016, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. PST ASQ Biomedical NCDG Group Wednesday Evening, Dec. 7, 2016; Event: 2016 Northern California / Bay Area Medical Device Industry Review & Hot Topics Open Forum Discussion BIOMEDevice MD&M, Dec. 7-8, 2016, Topic: “Setting the Beat in Medical Technology, Education and Innovation” ASQ, Thursday Evening, Dec. 8, 2016, Event: “Mini-Quality Conference at ITU: An Evening with Quality -Opportunities & Learning” Stanford Bio-X Frontiers in Interdisciplinary Biosciences Seminar, Thursday Mid-day, Dec. 8, 2016, Topic: “The development of optical coherence tomography as a medical device” You can download the details for the upcoming events this week and those through March 2017 with audreys-picks-dec-4-2016. Audrey 4 Dec

Happy Thanksgiving - Happy Thanksgiving! If you have post-election anxiety, you may find the following advice which originated from a Santa Barbara Family Services Agency helpful. Some friends from the central coast passed on this information which I have found very helpful. I hope it might be of help to you and your family as you prepare for the normal stress of the upcoming holidays. I regret not being able to credit the original source. “Post-Election Stress Disorder” (PESD) is NOT a diagnosis, but it is a phenomenon that feels real nonetheless. Countless Americans are reporting feeling triggered, traumatized, on edge, anxious, sleepless, angry, hopeless, avoidant and alone. There is not just one type of American who has been experiencing these types of symptoms, and there is not just one reason for it. The recent election has highlighted our differences in values, our lifestyle, our early traumas, our relationships, and even our reality. Fear and anxiety are normal feelings after such an unsettling campaign season! The following stress reduction tips might help! Take care of yourself. Get enough sleep, eat properly, get regular exercise, limit substance use. 2. Grieve. Acknowledge feelings of pain and anger for the purposes of understanding and maturing with it. The deeper our attachment to a desire (or person), the stronger our reaction to the loss. So remind yourself your strong reaction is a reflection of your caring, your connection and your passion. And, give yourself time to grieve; there are no “timelines” to healing, and moving on is not a linear process. 3. Gather with like-minded persons to talk through your thoughts and emotions. 4. Connect with persons in your community with whom you share similar values (e.g., your place of worship, yoga studio, club, team, etc.) 5. Stick to your routine. Maintaining your regular schedule of activities and taking care of your usual responsibilities can help engage you and reestablish a sense of normalcy and regularity. 6. Limit media. Read/watch just enough to stay informed, then turn to something more satisfying. 7. Set aside time to worry, a behavioral technique called “thought-stopping.” Too much worry can be a prison. It hijacks the mind and limits its bandwidth. 8. Take the opportunity to model resilience for those who look up to you –your children, your extended family members, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc. 9. Apologize to anyone you’ve hurt. The process of apologizing is very freeing. Even if the other person doesn’t receive it well, your good intentions will help ease your stress. 10. Implement/maintain healthy boundaries with others. . Commit to talk with others respectfully, or not at all. . Respectfully confront those who disrespect your boundaries . Listen. Bear witness to what is happening in our country; seek to understand, empathize. . When tensions are particularly high, limit political debate and argument. When people feel anxious they move into a reactive mode. Anxious people tend to be less flexible and less open to new experiences and points of view. They’re more likely to oversimplify what’s upsetting them and have a binary (Right/Wrong) view. 11. Manifest the values of love, acceptance, unity, inclusion, respect for diversity, and benevolence. 12. De-catastrophize, maintain a balanced perspective.Remember that more than 50 million Americans embraced the message of moving forward together, seeing the importance of equality and fairness.13. Impermanence is built into our system of government. Our political system and the three branches of government mean that we can expect a significant degree of stability immediately after a major transition of government. Hard times pass. 14. Focus on that which you share in common with others. 15. Express yourself through writing– in a diary, a blog, or wherever it feels safe to do so. 16. Connect with people who inspire you (e.g., by reading books about inspirational persons, thanking helpful persons through letters, asking someone to mentor you, etc.). 17. Engage in “mindfulness,” the practice of noticing your present internal and external experiences without judgment. Mindfulness techniques can help quiet our fear and anxiety, which allows the nervous system to settle down. Then our perspectives can broaden and we are more likely to cope. 18. Become aware of the emotional pain that might express itself non-verbally/physically (e.g., tightness around the eyes, a tense jaw, contracted shoulders and throat, clenched abdominal muscles); then, engage in self-calming techniques. 19. Reframe, responsibly. There is a lesson in every painful experience and something to still be grateful for in every failure. 20. Take Action. Move with determination to organize, mobilize, and find new ways to create change. Channel your concerns to make a positive difference on issues you care about. Consider volunteering in your community, advocating for an issue you support or joining a local group, pursuing civic involvement.Highlights of Upcoming Bay Area Meetings Starting Week of November 27th Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Morning, Nov. 29, 2016, Topic: BioMedical Devices: How wide? How Narrow? Speaker: Guna Selvaduray, Professor, Materials Engineering; Director: Biomedical Engineering, San Jose State Uninversity Biopharma Consortium With Dla Piper, Wednesday Afternoon, Nov. 30, 2016, Topic: “Drug Pricing in 2016: Implications for Biotech, Pharma, and the Future of Healthcare” Palo Alto AWIS, Wednesday Evening, Nov. 30, 2016, Topic: Are you looking for a career transition to the Biotech Industry? You can download the details for the above mentioned events as well as those listed for balance of year in audreys-picks-nov-20-2016 Audrey 20 Nov

The Election if Over, Now What Happens? - The election results have left the majority of Americans in some form of shock and most haven’t been able to start working through stages of grief as yet. We fortunately have two months of transition to get organized. Some would say it is greed and international corporate values that have produced the state of depression that led the nonracist working class members of Trump voters to support him. They were looking for quick fix financial inequality from which they suffer and see him as potentially using nontraditional methods to achieve it. What they don’t recognize with their information sourcing that he is not as successful a businessman as he claims and that his associates share his misogynic, racist, sexist, dishonest and fascist values. But among.his voters are also upper middle class folks who see his election as making it okay to want more money despite its impact on the rest of the citizenry. He seemed to be able to get away with achieving wealth without suffering any empathy for those less off or showing any civic mindedness. I’d seen this among the neauveau riche in our industry. I see a lot of folks who never learned to share their toys and have grandiose sense of entitlement. We recognize It is time to reflect and plan hoe to overcome the potential rapid infusion of Trump ways and values into our industry and the larger culture. Although we may still be reeling, we need to channel our feelings and energy in a positive way. The more authoritarian among us already are reprimanding us to get other it but I suggest joining a nonprofit to help fight Trump values taking over, reconsider what are best ways to achieve improvements in our economy and protect our brothers and sisters who have brought such dynamism and innovation to us in California. This is not the time for blame but rather getting in gear together for movement forward. Highlights of Upcoming Life Science Events from November. 13, 2016 JLABS, Monday, Nov. 14, 2016;Topic:” Making the Connections: A Roadmap for Success at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference;”Speakers:Shelley Chu | Partner, Abingworth; William J. Newell | CEO, Sutro Biopharma; Lesley Stolz, Ph.D. | Head, JLABS, CA Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Morning, Nov. 15, 2016, Topic: “Human Factors – What does this really mean for medical devices?” Speaker: Shannon Clark, Founder and CEO, UserWise JLABS, Tuesday Mid Day, Nov. 15, 2016,Topic: “Out of the Lab and into the Newsroom;” Speakers: Carin Canale-Theakston | President and Founder, Canale Communications; Victoria Colliver | Health Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle; Michael Fitzhugh | Staff Writer, BioWorld Today; Ron Leuty | Biotech Reporter, San Francisco Business Times; Susan Schaeffer | Editor, BioCentury Golden Gate Polymer Forum, Wednesday Evening, Nov. 16, 2016; Event: GGPF Dinner Lecture “A Framework for Integrated Product Design and Control in 21st Century Manufacturing Processes: Application to Polymer Nanocomposites;” Speaker: Prof. Babatunde Ogunnaike, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Dean of the College of Engineering University of Delaware BioScience Forum, Wednesday Evening, Nov. 16, 2016; Topic: “From Cholera to Zika: Development Pathways for Prophylactic Vaccines,” Speaker: Nima Farzan, Chief Executive Officer & President, PaxVax You can download the details for the upcoming events this week and those through December 2016 with audreys-picks-nov-13-2016. Audrey 13 Nov

Election Has Citizenry Nervous on All Sides - Election Has Folks Extremely Nervous on All Sides The closing days of the presidential election have left citizens extremely anxious on both sides. With lots of negative, angry campaigning and unprecedented actions by FBI in the closing days of election, the campaign has rightly raised fear levels. Just yesterday FBI Director Comey announced there are no charges warranted by new Clinton emails found in another unrelated investigation by the FBI. In July Comey criticized Hillary Clinton with carelessness in handling classified information but determined that there was no basis for criminal charges. Clinton’s opponents cried for her persecution, jailing and worse as Donald Trump’s rallies and social media has taken on a negative role in trivializing the value of facts and a rush to punishment and imprisonment before reaching criminal charges. The association of Trump’s campaign with the alt right, authoritarianist Russia and potential fascism has raised grave concern on large numbers of people in both parties. Clearly, no matter what the outcome tomorrow there will be a period of healing of the country required before the polity can function effectively. The challenge will be whether or not the citizenry can accept the voters’ choice peacefully and the Congress can return to ending the gridlock driven by Republicans who couldn’t accept the Presidency of Barack Obama. Trump has cried election is rigged along with lots of conspiracy theories that have made me nervous that he has unearthed potential violent behavior of segments of the populace. “Comey Now Says No Charges Warranted by New Clinton Emails” by Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post November 6, 16. Highlights of Bay Area Bioscience Events the Week of November 7, 2016 Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Evening, Nov. 8, 2016, Topic: “SF Bay Area Biomedical Industry Emergence: Sectors, Talent, and Resources,” Speaker: Gregory Theyel, Director, Biomedical Manufacturing Network San Francisco WIB, Wednesday Evening, Nov. 9, 2016, Topic: “Intellectual Property (IP) Basics for Future Entrepreneurs;” Janet Xiao, Partner, Morrison & Foerster LLP, our panel includes the following industry, academia, and legal experts: Mei Hong, IP Manager, Eureka Therapeutics; Shannon Reaney, Partner, Morrison & Foerster LLP; Sunita Rajdev, Associate Director, Technology Licensing at UCSF;Mona Wan, Associate Director, Technology Licensing at Stanford University San Francisco AWIS, Wednesday Evening, Nov. 9, 2016; Topic: “Thriving in a Disruptive World: Leveraging Diversity to Drive Innovation;” Speaker: Julius Pryor III, Author and Expert in Innovation, Diversity & Inclusion PBSS Workshop, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016; Topic: “Statistics and Biostatistics for Non-Statisticians: Fundamentals and Applications in Research and Drug Development;” Speakers: Saling Huang and Zhen Zhang (Abbott Vascular) and Snow Ge (Nektar Therapeutics) Details for the above events and those through December are found in audreys-picks-nov-7-2016. Audrey 7 Nov

Drug Industry Will Come Under Severe Pricing Scrutiny under Clinton Presidency - Drug Industry Will Come Under Severe Pricing Scrutiny under Clinton Presidency Under a Clinton presidency, a reduction in pharmaceutical pricing will be a priority. Clinton has had a person working on this back as far as her 2008 presidential run. Neera Tanden, president and CEO of progressive think tank the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Ezekiel Emanuel Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. recently argued against PhRMA’s Lori Reilly and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research’s Paul Howard the motion that drug prices are fueling runaway. Health care costs. (Debating Drug Prices, By Steve Usdin, Washington Editor, BioCentury, week of Oct. 31, 2016, pp. 14-15}. Highlights for Bay Area Bioscience Meetings Week of Oct. 30, 2016 Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Morning, Nov. 1, 2016, Topic: “Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Chronic Disease Management,” Speaker: Cory Kidd, Founder and CEO, Catalia Health JLABS, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016, Topic: “Why Ya Buggin’ Out? Regulatory Hurdles and Other Obstacles on the Path to Microbiome Market?” Speakers: Vern Norviel | Partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati; KT Moortgat |CEO, Osel, Emma Taylor | Co-Founder & CEO, Naked Biome, [Moderator] Stephanie Robertson, | New Ventures, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) Innovation, California ACRP, Tuesday MidDay, Nov. 1, 2016, Topic: “Webinar: Diverse Women in Clinical Trials Webinar Series – Part I: Planning for Diversity” ASQ Course, Friday Morning, Nov. 4, 2016, Event: “B113 – Preparing & Submitting 510K’s & PMA’s” You can download details for the above events in a complete PDF list of upcoming events through Dec. 2016 by right clicking on audreys-picks-oct-30-2016. A new list of jobsthatcrossedmydeskthrough-oct-30-2016 can also be downloaded. Audrey 31 Oct

Our Industry is at Risk Unless We Overcome Larger Society Greed and Divisiveness - We Need to Cleanse Our Society of Sexism, Racism and Greed I’m rooting for the “just locker room talk” defense raising sufficient anger on part of wronged women and the many decent men in their lives to finally force a discussion of this discrimination and bring the abusers to justice. Michele Obama is speaking to the need for our culture to finally discuss the level of sexual abuse and discrimination by men and boys against women and girls with some hope of moving forward. We thought that we had advanced more in this regard but now we learn that this deep seated sexism along with racism and greed to advance oneself at the cost of others still needs to be torn out from the fabric of our culture. Our democracy is at risk with the selfish wanting their way with no willingness to work together or share the riches of our country. We can’t have a healthy economy until we share with each other. Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Morning, Oct. 25, 2016, “Medical Device Business Development: Partnering with Larger Companies – Benefits, Challenges, and Strategies.” Speaker: Karun Shimoga, PhD, MBA, Business Development Executive CSLA, Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2016, Event: Evening With Thought Leaders HBA, Tuesday Evening, Oct. 25, 2016, Event: “Chocolate, Wine and Networking!” HBA Webinar, Wednesday Evening, Oct. 26, 2016,Topic: “Advanced Practice Social Media,” Featured Speakers:Lea Carey, Global market strategy lead, Symplur; Julie Kelly, Vice president, business development, Ashfield, par of UDG Healthcare plc; Kelley Connors, President, KC Health, and global chair, HBA Digital Innovators; Jessica Pfenning, Enterprise digital leader, AstraZeneca, global chair, Digital Innovators, HBA Palo Alto AWIS, Wednesday Evening, Oct. 26, 2016,Topic: “Nonprofit Organizations,” Speaker: Amy Peabody, Executive Director of the Los Altos Educational Foundation JLABS, Thursday Afternoon, Oct. 27, 2016, Topic: “Accelerating Drug Discovery: Business Models for the Computational Pharmaceutical Company” Speakers: Steve Quake | Co-Founder, Agenovenir; Matt Ocko | Co-Managing Partner & Co-Founder, DCVC; Max Hodak | CEO & Co-Founder, Transcriptic; Anthony Rowe | Director & Business Technology Leader for Immunology Therapeutic Area, Janssen Human Microbiome Institute, Janssen Immunoscience & Janssen Prevention Centre PBSS, Friday, Oct. 28, 2016, Event: Minisymposium: Immuno-Oncology Biomarkers: Fundamentals, Technologies, and Applications in the Development of Cancer Therapeutics; Speakers: Scott Patterson PhD (Gilead), Terri McClanahan PhD (Merck), Rod Prell PhD (Genentech), Michael Angelo MD PhD (Stanford), Luciana Molinero PhD (Genentech), Take Ogawa (Second Genome) , Adil Daud MD (UCSF), Jeff Wallin PhD (Genentech), Jakob Dupont MD (Onco You can download details for the above events in a complete PDF list of upcoming events through Dec. 2016 by right clicking on audreyspicksoct-2320162016. Audrey 23 Oct

Will CEOs Get Punished For Their Own and Companies’ Misdeeds in Future? - Will CEOs Get Punished For Their Own and Companies’ Misdeeds? There is a lot of anger being unearthed as the small guys/the rank and file take the fall for the big CEOs. This was true when the bank CEOs and other high up management got the “out of jail” free card after the bank mortgage scandals of 2008-2009. The disruption of so many Americans’ lives, families’ futures and individuals’ careers will never be corrected from that terrible injustice carried out like some sort of game that the unscrupulous MBAs, mortgage salesmen and bean counters pulled off to increase profits for their companies and themselves. Some like Elizabeth Warren are still calling for their trials with seeming little hope to bring those at the top to justice—perhaps until now. This past week John Stumpf, the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, suddenly retired but may not be able to skip accusation and potential trial for his role in the scam at Wells Fargo which some are sure to call “just marketing gone too far”. When folks get mad enough, there can be an overwhelming force to bring the bad guys to justice. See details at http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/12/investing/wells-fargo-ceo-john-stumpf-retires/index.html?section=money_news_international We are witnesses to many folks having had enough with outrageous price increases for products in the life science industry in the recent year. We may also see some sort of justice demanded by the people in the future as they learn what is behind the political protection for our “marketing-based health care system” instead of the system payer system used by the majority of advanced western societies. Upcoming Life Science Events Week of Oct. 16, 2016 Biotech Bay Talent Connect, Monday Afternoon, Oct. 17, 2016, Event: Biotech Bay Talent Connect Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Morning, Oct. 18, 2018, Topic: “Lessons learned from Y Combinator and contrarian strategies for early-stage medtech;” Speaker: Nick Damiano , Co-Founder & CEO, Zenflow JLABS Bay Area, Tuesday Morning, Oct. 18, 2016, Topic: “The Real Deal: How to Lead with Authenticity,” Presenter: John Bates | Chief Executive Officer & Executive Whisperer, Executive Speaking Success & Business Coaching read bio» EMBS, Wednesday Evening, Oct. 18, 2016, Topic: “Surgical Robotics Development – From Research Lab to Commercialization,” Speaker: Jian Zhang, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Former CEO, RobotPhoenix BioScience Forum, Wednesday Evening, Oct. 19, 2016, Topic: “Probody Therapeutics Enable Safer and More Effective Oncology Therapies;” Speaker: Michael Kavanaugh, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Research and Non-Clinical Development, CytomX Therapeutics You can download the details for highlighted meetings as well as other meetings through Dec. 2016 in audreys-picks-oct-16-2016-2016. Audrey 16 Oct

Grave Threats to Our Industry and Economy in the Rise of Donald Trump and What He Represents - You might wonder why I haven’t been commenting on the industry these past two months. I’ve thrown myself into the political campaign in support of Hillary Clinton for president with a lot of emphasis on doing whatever I can to defeat Donald Trump. You might wonder why this has distracted me from my usual interests over the years. I see the problems in the pharmaceutical industry and biotech industry all interrelated with the political issues we face. I am shocked and horrified with the dishonesty and greed taking over the life science industry with accompanying disinterest in how pricing and business development has lost sight of the impact on our country, families and economy. The Donald epitomizes the greed and self-centeredness that I see in business in general. Our industry needs to support the industry professionals and not funnel all the profits to investors at the cost of not developing top companies to continue developing innovative products. Lying and lack of caring about our citizen patients and industry professionals manifested itself in the shift to short-term financial interest and destruction of future companies in our industry. It’s all about the money and for the big companies the bonuses for top management and how much money can be hidden oversees to avoid taxes with crippling effect on future company development. We have lost interest in the larger community and the country which as provided the opportunity for our industry to thrive. We cannot build future great products when the business development thinking and strategies look to sell new products as soon as possible and then lay off all the contributors and short change careers of professionals who have developed new products. Highlights of Bay Area Bioscience Events Week of Oct. 9, 2016 Bio2Device Group, Tuesday Evening, Oct. 11, 2016; Topic: Polymers as drugs and the Development of Veltassa; Speaker: Dr. Steve Harrison, SVP of Research, Relypsa Consensia, Thursday Morning, Oct. 13, 2016; Topic: “A New Paradigm for Medical Device Development Lean-Agile Software and Hardware Development Methodology” You can download the details for highlighted meetings as well as other meetings through Nov. 2016 in audreys-picks-oct-9-2016-2016. A list of Jobs That Crossed my Desk can be downloaded from document entitled jobsthatcrossedmydeskthrough-oct-9-2016 Through Oct. 9, 2016 which will be added to website tomorrow. Audrey 9 Oct

The Australian Climate Sceptics Blog

A Political Fad vs National Security; A US story - Posted here to show the AGW madness is world-wide.John Droz JrsaysGet some hot chocolate and a few nutritious cookies. Now sit by the fire in your favorite chair, and mull over this Enchanting tale.The fundamental questions we need accurate answers for are: How does our national energy policy come about? Is the way we’re generating it now, really in our best interest? The answers to those critical questions are:1) Science is all about assisting us solving technical problems. Since our national energy policy is a highly technical matter, it should be solidly based on Science. However, instead our national energy policy has been written by lobbyists. These lobbyists represent clients: a) who have economic interests at stake, and/or b who are promoting political agendas. Any connection of our energy policy with Science is accidental. 2) No. Lobbyist-driven technical policies benefit their clients — but are typically not good for our citizens, our economy, our military, or our environment. For example, costs end up being more than projected, benefits turn out to be less than promised, and unintended liabilities are often frequent and severe. None of these consequences should be a surprise, as they are the expected results of unscientific solutions. The point is that the methodology of coming up with our national technical policies is fundamentally flawed. An instructive case is what transpired with the large Desert Wind/Amazon project, currently being built in North Carolina. Here are some unsurprising results of a self-serving lobbyistdriven energy policy… 1 - The current administration’s position appears to be that promotion of industrial wind energy is more important than maintaining our military missions, assuring military readiness, and/or protecting the lives of military personnel. Sample Evidence #1: See Congressman Randy Forbes persistent and insightful questions (actual page 19, but labelled as page 15) to senior Obama staff officials in front of the House Armed Services Committee. Their answers make it quite clear as to what their priorities were. Sample Evidence #2: The DoD Wind Clearinghouse has been given 5000+ cases where there is some type of conflict between a proposed wind project and a military facility. Only once was a wind project cancelled. 2 - The primary justification of this aggressive wind energy promotion is that wind energy supposedly plays an integral role in reducing climate change. However, this marketing claim does not hold up under careful scrutiny. The fact is that there is zero scientific proof that wind energy makes any consequential contribution to alleviating climate change. Zero scientific proof. 3 - Few people have any idea what a ROTHR facility is. Even fewer are aware of the critical roles that the ROTHR facility has in protecting our national security — on several key fronts, like terrorism. (BTW this Virginia facility is one of only two in the continental US.) 4 - In its zeal to promote renewable energy, the current administration appears to knowingly have agreed to compromise our national security. They were aware of the serious potential risks the Desert Wind/Amazon project could have on the ROTHR facility, yet choose to play them down. 5 - In their one-sided commitment to promote wind energy, the current administration did not take some reasonable precautions in this situation, that would have better protected our national security. Example #1: Did they insist that the Desert Wind project be moved just 20+ miles away to protect our national security? No. (This might have been a nuisance to the developer, but not an insurmountable problem. Who should be inconvenienced here: the wind developer or our military?) Example #2: Did they have any provisions in the DoD-Developer Agreement that would automatically shut down nearby wind turbines that caused a major disruption in the ROTHR signal? 6 - This wind project was pushed through the NC “approval” process without any NC statewide wind energy rules or regulations being applied. (That situation has since been corrected with passed NC legislation.) 7 - Due to this lack of oversight, a lawsuit was filed that the state should require that reasonable wind energy rules and regulation be applied to this wind project, and not let this wind project get approved on a technicality. The state attorney general (and now Governor-elect) Roy Cooper fought against independent environmental tests (and a military assessment) being done, and he won. So consider that irony: Governor-elect Cooper is the highest “progressive” person in NC, yet he led the fight against a reasonable environmental assessment to protect the state’s ecosystems. 8 - The main argument made by the promoters of this wind project is that it will be an economic boon to a depressed rural area of North Carolina. Fact 1: our electrical energy sources are not selected due to the economics on a host community. Instead our electrical energy sources are chosen based on their reliability, true cost to ratepayers & taxpayers, proximity to demand centers, dispatchability, etc. Wind energy fairs poorly on all such metrics — which is why wind proponents try the sleight-of-hand tactic to talk instead about local taxes, local lease payments, etc. Fact 2: the reality is that the Desert Wind project is likely to be a substantial negative financial drain on local economies. Our webpage references the projections of independent experts who have no dog in the fight. Using their numbers results in the conclusion that the two affected NC communities could well have a net loss of $11± Million, per year! So if local economics is really of paramount importance, why don’t wind proponents ever show an objective, NET local financial impact? 9 - The electricity economics of this project were so bad, that all three NC utility companies (Duke, Progress and Dominion) declined to buy its power. The NC Democrat Governor at the time (following the national lead), interceded and tried to cajole the utilities to accept this higher-cost electricity. To their credit, they refused to pay for this expensive electricity. The only way this project survived was because Amazon stepped in to buy the expensive Desert Wind electricity. Even though Amazon was alerted to the national security issue involved here, they chose to look away. This appears to be a classic example of greenwashing. 10-It is with the knowledge of these matters that the leaders of the NC state legislature have formally appealed to the new Trump administration to intervene here to defend our military and to protect our national security. Congressman Walter Jones (co-chair of the House Armed Services Committee) wrote a good cover letter in support of the NC Legislators’ excellent correspondence. (We are hoping that our two senators will join in to present a united front.) Has there ever been an example where state legislative leaders have officially gone on record to ask the federal government to come in and shut down a wind project? No! Kudos to the NC state legislators for taking a principled stand on a VERY important matter. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Note From John Droz Jr:This information is to the best of my knowledge. If any errors are found here, please send supporting documentation to the undersigned, and suitable corrections will be made in an update. john droz, jr “ aaprjohn (at) northnet (dot) org” 12/21/16 23 Dec

Zsa Zsa and Me. (Should be Zsa Zsa and I?) - I was slightly disturbed to learn that the once beautiful Zsa Zsa Gabor died just shy of her 99th birthday.I bumped into her once in a Kings Cross hotel, the Sebel Townhouse.I was carrying my musical instruments into the Townhouse to play music for the Launch of a book by the Reverend Ted Noffs and was walking around a pillar. She came around the other side of the same pillar, and we met, can I say, chest to chest?What do you say when you meet a legend, chest to chest?Whooops?Sorrrrry?EEarppp?I said: "Nice to meet you."What can I say?She was gracious. Stepped aside because I was heavily laden.VALE: Zsa Zsa Gabor18 Dec

Why Big Mining Loves Big Green - The Carbon Sense Newsletter, December 2016To view the whole article plus images click: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/mines-love-greens.pdfThe Labor/Green coalition in Australia has declared war on coal, oil and gas and industries that use them. So why is Big Mining not fighting back?BHP Billiton is a big producer of coal, oil, gas, iron ore, copper, nickel and uranium. Rio Tinto is a big producer of uranium, coal, iron ore, copper and aluminium. Glencore is a big producer of coal, copper, zinc and nickel. And Shell is big in oil, gas and bitumen, manufactures biofuels, and generates peak power with natural gas.These companies employ competent geologists, physicists and chemists who could tell them that CO2 is not a pollutant, that it is not the primary driver of climate and that climate has been changing since time began. They must know there is no scientific justification for the green war on hydro-carbon fuels - but none of these big miners speak out against this baseless war on their products. Some even waste shareholder funds producing glossy brochures promoting the green agenda – the BHP Billiton document “Climate Change: Portfolio Analysis” reads like it was produced by the Greens.Big Mining is not that dumb. Their climate “concern” is more motivated by self-interest - they see long-term profits flowing from the silly green agenda. They are also political cowards wanting be loved by guilt-stricken billionaires, business haters from Hollywood and the green mob controlling the ABC/BBC.Wind and solar power are indeed “free”, but to extract electricity from them is not free – it needs turbines and solar panels, generators and transformers, transmission towers and power lines - all of which boosts demand for metals like steel, copper, zinc, nickel and rare earths.Moreover, wind and solar are very diffuse power sources and need large areas of land together with webs of access roads and power lines in order to collect significant power. The heavy machinery needed for construction, maintenance and replacements in these green power networks provide ongoing demands for petroleum and mining products. Before one watt of green electricity is generated for consumers, green power has boosted demand for most products of Big Mining.To download a print-ready pdf of the whole article plus image click: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/mines-love-greens.pdfPermission to use the cartoon is granted providing the source www.carbon-sense.com is mentioned.To download a tif file of the cartoon (2Mb) click:http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/flogging-green-horse.tifGreen power also needs back-up power ready to swing into action immediately the wind drops (or blows a gale) or clouds, fog, snow, rain, dust or night-time obscure the sun. This is great news for reliable energy suppliers capable of rapid backup, which usually means gas. So Big Gas loves Big Green - it is secretly delighted by the war on coal and the force-feeding of Green energy, as this will cause a boom in gas demand. Lead, nickel, cadmium and lithium miners are also delighted with the soaring demand for energy-storing batteries.Intermittent energy producers like wind and solar also cause destructive fluctuations in electricity supply and prices – prices can fall to zero on a sunny, windy afternoon, but soar during still, sunless periods. Coal power stations cannot adjust quickly to this destructive variability in electricity demand and prices and will be sent broke, thus providing even more markets for gas.Big Gas is thus delighted to secretly support the war on coal as it will do wonders for the demand for gas; but they fail to understand that once Greens have destroyed coal power, they will then turn their green guns onto gas.Uranium producers love the greens. They know that if coal and gas are banned from power generation, and all hydro-power sites are “world-heritage protected”, all that is left to stabilise the electricity grids of modern society is nuclear power.Even coal producers see short-term benefits in supporting inane green ideas like carbon capture and burial. This would greatly increase the amount of coal needed to generate the electricity consumed to collect, separate, compress, transport and bury exhaust gases as well as to refine and fabricate all the metals needed for gas collectors, compressors and pipelines. Even more silly is the academic dream to burn coal using oxygen, not air, for combustion to reduce the huge quantity of exhaust gases to be handled (mainly by removing nitrogen). This will consume even more energy and metals. Long term, the main beneficiaries of this industrial silliness will be nuclear power and uranium miners like Rio and BHP.So Big Mining can extract benefits from green energy while earning political credits. And their PC executives can polish their green credentials in their posh suburban circles by supporting the silliness.On the debit side are the usual victims - taxpayers and consumers of coal, oil, gas, electricity and metals; and employees and shareholders of industries being forced to close or emigrate because of expensive and unreliable electricity.Viv Forbes6/12/2016If you would like to comment on this article pls go to:http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/12/why_big_mining_loves_big_green_comments.htmlFurther Reading:Carbon Capture and Burial – a Stupid Answer to a Silly Question:http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/carbon-capture.pdfBHP’s green sympathies bite them back in South Australia, when their big Olympic Dam Mine was affected by blackouts:https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/05/dash-for-gas-green-south-australian-government-throws-in-the-towel-on-renewables/Why Wind Won’t Work:http://carbon-sense.com/category/wind-power/Media Bias favours Wind Farms:http://en.friends-against-wind.org/realities/the-media-is-biased-for-the-wind-industryFossil Fuel Is “Green Energy”:http://principia-scientific.org/fossil-fuel-green-energy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+psintl+%28Principia+Scientific+Intl+-+Current+News%29Clean Green Batteries?Greens and technically challenged scribes apparently believe that battery-powered cars and planes are exciting new clean “zero-emissions” vehicles.There is little new about batteries – battery powered cars were running on British roads over a century ago - they were pushed out of the market by petrol power.Batteries just store energy made elsewhere and all have a finite life. Every battery needs primary energy and resources for production, recharging, replacing and recycling. Every step produces its own emissions.Batteries require lots of expensive raw materials - lead, calcium, nickel, cadmium, lithium, hydrogen, plus ancillary copper, steel, zinc, aluminium and plastic. All need primary energy like coal or gas for mining, manufacture, construction, recharging and recycling plus coking coal for smelting metals.Even wind and solar are not emissions-free once construction, maintenance, and life-cycle replacement are fully accounted for.Greens think everything can be solved by “recycling”. But recycling batteries, like so many green dreams, may not save energy or emissions. There are real costs in collection, de-construction, separation and refining of the sometimes complex mess of metals and plastics in the hundreds of batteries we use. This recycling process may consume more energy than a well-organised mining/refining/fabrication operation using just one or two primary mineral deposits feeding an efficient battery factory.Moreover, all cars, even battery-powered ones, need road maintenance using bitumen, concrete and diesel-powered machinery, all costing money and producing emissions. Green cars also need a whole new network of recharging stations, demanding even more metals.Batteries have an important place in our lives. But they are not “emissions free”.Viv Forbes13/12/2016If you would like to comment on this article pls go to:http://www.pickeringpost.com/glance/clean-green-batteries-/6748Further Reading:Coal powered cars:http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/green-toys.pdfNobody today is making a viable battery-powered vehicle:http://breakingviewsnz.blogspot.com.au/2016/12/bryan-leyland-things-you-know-that-aint.html#moreFinally, a Sad, Sad Christmas Message –Wind Power has Derailed Santa:Viv ForbesDecember 2016Rosevale Qld Australiaforbes@clexit.netDisclosure:Viv Forbes has Tertiary qualifications in geology, physics and chemistry and experience in coal, oil, gas, investment analysis and mineral economics. He holds shares in a small Australian coking coal exporter which will benefit if the war on carbon sends more Australian industries to Asia.www.carbon-sense.com,“Carbon Sense” is an independent newsletter produced for the Carbon Sense Coalition, an Australian based organisation which opposes waste of resources, opposes pollution, opposes the baseless war on carbon fuels and promotes the rational un-subsidised use of all energy resources including wind, solar, nuclear and carbon energy.Literary, financial or other contributions to help our cause are welcomed. We get no government grants and unlike many of our opponents, we do not pose as a charity and in fact pay GST and income tax on our operations. We live on subscriptions alone.For more information visit our web site at www.carbon-sense.comIf you would like to keep Carbon Sense operating, send subscriptions to Carbon Sense Pty Ltd, by post to the address below, or direct deposit to: Acct No: 553 077 331BSB: 334-040Please spread “Carbon Sense” around.Authorised by: Viv Forbes, Chairman, MS 23, Rosewood Qld 4340 Australia. Phone 0754 640 533To Unsubscribe send a reply with “Unsubscribe” in the subject line.16 Dec

Past Potty Predictions that have Passed Away! - There are many failed Alarmist predictions. According to those fools, the planet should not exist.May 11, 1982: Mostafa Tolba, executive Director of the UN Environment Program said the world governments must take action now or face disaster. Lack of such action would bringby the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust. (Real Science)Century has turned, planet survived Cartoons by JoshJan 19, 2009: Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen declared:Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. (link)2013 arrived with the world still intact! March 24, 2009: Elizabeth May of the Canadian Greens Party:I remember when estimating how much time was available to avert a global climate catastrophe was measured in decades. We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours.Several Hours have gone by since 2009 - FAILJuly 9, 2009: The heir to the throne, [Prince Charles] told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James's Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. (Note that HE HAD CALCULATED)Do you really believe the World will die Next July?October 19, 2009: Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming. (Link) 19/12 plus 50 days - 8/12/09. TIMES UP!!!Cartoons by JoshWe cannot finish this post without ridiculing the 2007 Australian of the Year - Tim Flannery.He won the Award on the back of his book: The Weathermakers. Flannery's book, in a counter volume by Dr Wes Allen, was shown to contain23 misinterpretations, 28 contradictory statements, 31 untraceable or suspect sources, 45 failures to reflect uncertainty, 66 over-simplifications or factual errors, 78 exaggerations and over a hundred unsupported dogmatic statements, many of them quite outlandish.Tim Flim Flam also has some Potty Predictions from Australian Government wastes billions on Climate Change Hoax. Back then Flannery said to play a thought game ten years on i.e. 2016:We are coming to the peak of production of oil; and so inevitable fuel cutback which might help the fight against climate change;Governments would be spending even more money defending their low-lying areas;Oil prices 2 or 3 times what they were then;increased problems of Hurricanes and Insurance losses;problems of water unavailability - Warragamba Dam would never again be full;sea levels to rise;arctic ice to melt. Craig Kelly examines how reliable Flannery’s prediction are:Oil then 62.80/barrel prediction (2 or 3 times) - 125.60 -184.40 but has halved (See which way will oil price go?)Arctic see ice levels higher than what they’ve been at any time over the last decade (prediction period)Warragamba Dam for two year 80% full and now lapping at the brims at 95%. Now NSW taxpayers are paying half a million dollars per day for a rusting unneeded desalination plant.Craig says that, every time we have a difficult problem, we should put Flannery in a room and ask what his prediction is and then do the exact opposite. H/t Climate Depot; Real Science; Ian Plimer's not for greens.13 Dec

Energy & Environmental Newsletter - 12/12/16 (Peak Madness) - Alliance for Wise Energy DecisionsEnergy & EnvironmentalNewsletter - 12/12/16AWED Friends:The latest Energy and Environmental Newsletter, is now available online. Since so much is happening, this issue is again coming out a week early — and will be the last one for the exciting year of 2016.There continues to be a LOT of Trump related happenings, and many of the items on my 3 E’s Transition List look like they may come to pass! Again, it’ll be awhile before we can see how many of these recommendations are actually enacted, but based on the appointees so far, I’m now moderately optimistic.Some of the more informative Global Warming articles in this issue are:The Obama administration lawlessly rewards its supporters and punishes its enemiesWill Trump Stop The Rogue EPA?The Growth Of Global Warming Nonsense: Surely We've Reached Peak MadnessThe AGW Scam Runs ColdThe Climate Scam Corruption MetastasizesDerailing the Marrakech ExpressThe Rise of Political Correctness (e.g. re global warming)Climate Heretic - To Be, or Not To Be?Some of the more interesting energy articles in this issue are:Renewables Should No Longer Have Grid Priority: E.U. Energy CommissionerView from the Third World: The World Needs More EnergyHouse Bill would penalize any wind project within 40 miles of a US military base (HR-6397)GAO: The Renewable Fuel Standard program is unlikely to meet its targetsGo Big: Eliminate the US Department of EnergyQuestions for New DOE Head PersonScientists Turn Nuclear Waste into Diamond Batteries That’ll Last for Thousands of Years“InvEnergy owes Illinois County $480,298 in unpaid taxes”Actual wind energy costs are over 31¢/KWHNY Households with alternative energy suppliers paid $817 million extraEffects of Wind Turbine Acoustic Emissions (Schomer: 2015)How Big Will Wind Turbines Get? HUGE!Are Wind Turbines Too Close To Communities?John Droz, jr.physicist & citizen advocatePS: As always, please pass this on to open-minded citizens, and on your social media sites. If there are others who you think would benefit from being on our energy & environmental email list, please let me know. If at any time you'd like to be taken off the list, simply send me an email saying that.PPS: I am not an attorney, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or our WiseEnergy.org website) should be construed as giving legal advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent attorney when you are involved with legal issues.Copyright © 2016; Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (see WiseEnergy.org)Share on Facebook, Twitter, Forward to a Friend13 Dec

BREAKING NEWS: CLIMATE SCARE IS OVER! - Infowars Reporter Millie Weaver interviews Lord Christopher Monckton who reveals a breaking discovery which may prove the entire 'climate change' scare is based on faulty mathematics. At the "Global-Warming; an Inconvenient Lie" conference in Phoenix, AZ Lord Monckton covers in depth the mathematical discovery his team has made and announces that these findings have been submitted for proper peer review.The paper, on this revelation, is out for review for a major journal.Lord Monckton closes with:That's it! Bye, bye to the climate scare.10 Dec

Has the AGW hypothesis been falsified again? - The LHC - the biggest particle accelerator in the world.Brian Cox, the celebrity scientist, describes himself as a particle physicist. Will he believe the particle physicists from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research who have cast doubt on the theory that man's fossil fuel use is driving disastrous global warming.MANKIND'S burning of fossil fuels may not be the primary cause of global warming, according to the shock results of a new study by scientists behind the Large Hadron Collider (LCH). (JON AUSTIN - link)In a press release from CERN, According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Earth’s mean temperature is predicted to rise by between 1.5 – 4.5 °C for a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is expected by around 2050. One of the main reasons for this large uncertainty, which makes it difficult for society to know how best to act against climate change, is a poor understanding of aerosol particles in the atmosphere and their effects on clouds. To date, all global climate models use relatively simple parameterisations for aerosol production that are not based on experimental data. Now, data collected by CLOUD have been used to build a model of aerosol production based solely on laboratory measurements. This more robust understanding of the nucleation process that gives rise to aerosols has allowed researchers to establish the main causes of new particle formation throughout the troposphere, and could narrow the variation in projected global temperature rise. “This marks a big step forward in the reliability and realism of how models describe aerosols and clouds,” says CLOUD spokesperson Jasper Kirkby. “It’s addressing the largest source of uncertainty in current climate models and building it on a firm experimental foundation of the fundamental processes.”Trees helped change climate long before human activity, according to a new study that casts more doubt on the human impact on global warming.During an experiment where scientists were trying to create reflective clouds to combat global warming, researchers at CERN (Europe’s Organization for Nuclear Research) found that trees produce similar aerosols as burning fossil fuel. When directing ultra-violet light at said particles, the scientists found that vapor emanating from trees actually adds aerosols to the atmosphere just like the burning of fossil fuels. Scientists at CERN who are running the CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets) experiment also note that cloud cover, while it can add to global warming by trapping heat long term, can also lead to a cooling effect in the short term as less sunlight hits the surface of the Earth as a result.Jasper Kirby, a particle physicist at CERN said:“We found that nature produces particles without pollution. That is going to require a rethink of how human activities have increased aerosols in clouds.” While he and others on the team stop short of saying human activity is absolved completely, he does think our overall impact on global warming and greenhouse gasses needs to be revisited. Also claiming that computer model estimates of global temperature rise may have been overstated due to this new finding.See also Science News: Climate-cooling aerosols can form from tree vaporsThe cooling effect of pollution may have been exaggerated. Fossil fuel burning spews sulfuric acid into the air, where it can form airborne particles that seed clouds and cool Earth’s climate. But that’s not the only way these airborne particles can form, three new studies suggest. Tree vapors can turn into cooling airborne particles, too. The discovery means these particles were more abundant before the Industrial Revolution than previously thought. Climate scientists have therefore overestimated cooling caused by air pollution, says atmospheric chemist Urs Baltensperger, who coauthored the three studies.“These particles don’t just form in the laboratory, but also by Mother Nature,” says Baltensperger, of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland. 9 Dec

Warming causes epic reef die-off: expert - Case Smit reply to the Sunshine Coast Daily that was published on 2 December – see below.The burning of fossil fuels has caused the largest die-off of coral ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef, Australian scientists say.Two thirds of all coral in the northern third of the reef is dead after a mass bleaching event earlier this year, new dive surveys show.Leading reef expert Professor Terry Hughes says warmer waters caused by man-induced climate change have cooked corals in the north, which had been the most pristine part of the World Heritage-listed ecosystem.The worst-hit stretch is from Port Douglas north, where 67 per cent of shallow-water corals have died in the past eight to nine months.At Lizard Island, north of Cooktown, 100 per cent of corals are dead.The central and southern stretches of the reef fared far better, because the water didn't get as hot there.In the central third of the reef, six per cent of bleached corals are dead.In the southern third - where One Nation leader Pauline Hanson went this week to prove the reef isn't dying - the reef is doing very well, with the coral death rate is just one per cent.Prof Hughes is the director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University.He undertook extensive aerial surveys at the height of the bleaching, and says follow-up dive surveys in recent months confirm the north has taken "a giant step backwards".On Thursday, the federal government is due to update UNESCO on its reef protection efforts, as it tries to keep it off a list of World Heritage sites in danger.Prof Hughes says coral death rates in the north are likely to make that task much harder."In its ongoing dialogue with UNESCO, Australia has said the outstanding universal values of reef are in tact because of the pristine condition of the northern reef. That's simply no longer the case."He noted UNESCO's failure, so far, to draw links between the climate change policies of countries and the World Heritage sites they manage."It seems that should be a logical step," he said.Australia is relying on its Reef 2050 Plan to convince the UNESCO to keep the reef off the in-danger list.But Prof Hughes, who sits on an independent panel set up to help implement the plan, says it's about fixing water quality problems and avoids the primary threat of climate change.In defending its reef management plan last week, federal Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg pointed to Australia's participation in the Paris climate change pact.But a recent review by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) found existing international efforts to cut emissions are well short of what's needed to achieve the pact's goal of limiting warming to two degrees or less."The Great Barrier Reef has seen three major coral bleaching events since 1998 and that's with one degree of global warming," Prof Hughes said."With 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, we will not be in a safe place for the reef - and we're not even on track for either of them."Graeme Kelleher, who headed the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority for 16 years, last week said Australians must not buy the political lie that they can have the reef as well as projects like Adani's new Queensland coal mine."We've lost 50 per cent of the coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef in the last 30 years and the main cause of that is the burning of fossil fuel. I sincerely hope UNESCO rejects the claim that the government is doing enough," he told AAP.==============================================================Case Smit - reply to the Sunshine Coast Daily (with the help from experts)If ever we needed an example of the new word “post-truth”, it was found in your article (Warming causes “epic” reef die off – SSCD Nov 30). Your “leading reef expert” (Prof. Terry Hughes) is obviously anxious to preserve his Great Barrier Reef research funding by stoking the alarmism of the extreme greenies and the political left without regard to the facts. For instance, he implies that the current coral bleaching is unprecedented when in fact, no research on it was done before 1928/29 and there had already been 26 episodes reported by 1982.Coral bleaching is a common phenomenon from which corals recover, usually within a decade or so. A bleaching episode does not spell the end of the Great Barrier Reef in spite of what some people would have us believe.Bleaching is ascribed to a wide variety of causes of which unusually warm water is just one, but Prof Hughes has absolutely no grounds for stating that man-induced climate change is the present culprit. For a start, apart from the recent abnormally strong El Nino, the global temperature has been almost steady for the best part of 20 years in spite of continuously increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. There is in fact no evidence at all that there is a relationship between increasing carbon dioxide levels and the global warming that has been happening since the most recent ice age. Normal 0 false false false EN-AU JA X-NONE 2 Dec

France to drop carbon tax plan - Source: GWPFIt appears to be all crumbling for the elites:Brexit against their wishes;The Paris agreement;Trump wins popular vote in US; and nowFrance to drop carbon tax plan.From a report from Reuters:The French government is set to drop plans to introduce a carbon tax, French financial daily Les Echos said on Thursday. The newspaper, quoting several sources, said the socialist government will not include the carbon tax in a draft 2016 budget update currently being discussed. Environment Minister Segolene Royal had said in May that France would unilaterally introduce a carbon price floor of about 30 euros ($33) a tonne with a view to kickstart broader European action to cut emissions and drive forward the December 2015 United Nations-led international climate accord.Meanwhile, Roger Helmer (@RogerHelmerMEP) has posted on his blogI was recently discussing Lysenko with a friend (as you do), and naturally, we turned to Wikipedia to clarify a point. And I came across a quote that hit me between the eyes (figuratively speaking);“The term Lysenkoism can also be used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives”.Dear Reader, you’re way ahead of me. Yes, of course, I was struck immediately by the read-across to climate science. The parallels are remarkable. (Read more)Roger Helmer continued by comparing Lysenkoism to the parallels with climate theory:Lysenkoism was restricted to the USSR. And it was imposed by a totalitarian régime that could, and did, shoot dissenters. Climate alarmism, on the other hand is broadly speaking global (even if some countries merely pay lip-service to the orthodoxy). It is imposed not by a violent autocracy, but by an intolerant and often vindictive establishment – scientific, media and political. It threatens not imprisonment and murder, but the destruction of careers. Scientists who dare to challenge the prevailing view are denied tenure, and publication, and perhaps worst of all, grant funding. 30 Nov

The Aviationist

Check out the first 360° video filmed by a camera attached to the vertical stabilizer of the MiG-29 Fulcrum flying to the edge of space - This is the first time a 360° camera has been attached to the outside of a fighter jet flying at supersonic speed. The clip below was shot by famous aviation video producer Artur Sarkysian for MigFlug, the company that offers fighter jet flying experiences to their customers. One of the most famous experience they offer, […]23 Dec

Here are some interesting images of a “patched up” German C-160 Transall with the “EloKa” self-defense system - This C-160D using the EloKA self-defense system paid visit to Decimomannu airbase, Italy, recently. The photographs in this post were taken by our contributor Alessandro Caglieri at Decimomannu airbase, Italy. They show a German Air Force C-160D Transall about to land on runway 35 at “Deci” during one of the flights conducted to the Italian […]23 Dec

Here’s what happens if you are a bit too close to the exhaust on an EA-6B Prowler during catapult launch - Working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier can be extremely dangerous! The video below was reportedly filmed aboard USS Kitty Hawk during the final launches of the embarked U.S. Navy EA-6B Prowler electronic attack aircraft at the end of the deployment. It shows a “troubleshooter” or “Final Checker”, be blown away by the […]21 Dec

Ultimate Aviation Gift? A Ride With The Baltic Bees Jet Team - What holiday gift do you get the aviation fan that has everything? A ride with an aerobatic jet team! The Latvian aerobatic jet demonstration team, The Baltic Bees are an impressive private jet team, operating six L-39’s flown by pilots with combined civilian and military jet experience including two pilots with time in MiG-21’s and […]21 Dec

Impressive photos of the Polish Air Force MiG-29 Fulcrum Night Operations at Minsk Mazowiecki - Awesome Photos Show the Polish MiG-29s during Night Ops. Here are some shots taken at the 23rd Tactical Air Base of the Polish Air Force where MiG-29 aircraft are stationed. The set of photographs shows the night operations of the Fulcrum jets of the stationed in Minsk Mazowiecki. The 23rd Tactical Air Base continues the […]20 Dec

Rare footage provides interesting details about the world’s most advanced F-16s flown by UAE in the Air War on ISIS - The UAE Air Force takes part in the air war on Daesh with the most advanced F-16 in the world. And here’s some interesting footage. Filmed from aboard a KC-135 Stratotanker with the 340th Expeditionary Air Refueling Squadron, the video below shows United Arab Emirates F-16 Block 60+ Desert Falcons refueling during a mission in […]19 Dec

All U.S. Navy Super Hornets and Growlers grounded after incident injured aircrew - The U.S. Navy has temporarily grounded all its F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler jets after a ground incident at Whidbey Island. The U.S. Navy Naval Air Forces commander has suspended flight operations of both Super Hornet and Growler types after a canopy incident involving an EA-18G from the VAQ-132 “Scorpions” caused unspecified injuries to […]18 Dec

U.S. Air Force EC-130H Disrupts ISIL Communications in Iraq - In an uncharacteristic media release by the U.S. Air Force, U.S. EC-130H Compass Call electronic warfare aircraft have been reported as active in support of anti-ISIL operations in Iraq by official Air Force news outlets. The EC-130H Compass Call is a modified version of the versatile C-130 platform that was conceived as a transport but […]16 Dec

Here are the photographs of the first “operational” F-35A outside of the US landing at their new base - On Monday, Italy became the first country to operate the F-35 outside of the U.S. when two aircraft landed at the first F-35 base in Europe. Here are the first photographs. As reported yesterday, on Dec. 12, the 13° Gruppo (Squadron) of the 32° Stormo (Wing) of the Aeronautica Militare (Italian Air Force, ItAF) received […]16 Dec

Italy has become the first country to operate the F-35 outside of the U.S. - Actually, the Italian (not the Israeli) Air Force has been the first service to take delivery of the first operational F-35s outside the United States. On Dec. 12, whilst several Israeli and international media outlets focused on the delivery of the first F-35I “Adir” to Nevatim airbase (delayed by some 6 hours because of fog) […]15 Dec

Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog

Most downloaded antitrust law tenure track faculty of 2016 - Who are people reading downloading in 2016? Among tenure track antitrust faculty the list is below. To qualify you need to be a tenure track faculty member in law somewhere in the world and have written at least one antitrust...24 Dec

The Sokol girls choose the best Chanukkah video of the year - 2016 edition - The Maccabeats - Hasmonean - A Hamilton Hanukkah24 Dec

Harmonising Private Enforcement of Competition Law in Central and Eastern Europe: The Effectiveness of Legal Transplants Through Consumer Collective Actions - Kati Cseres, University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance and Amsterdam Center for Law & Economics is Harmonising Private Enforcement of Competition Law in Central and Eastern Europe: The Effectiveness of Legal Transplants Through Consumer Collective...23 Dec

Patents and Competition Law in India: CCI's Reductionist Approach in Evaluating Competitive Harm - Yogesh Pai, National Law University Delhi, Centre for Innovation, IP and Competition (CIIPC) and Nitesh Daryanani, Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property and Competition analyze Patents and Competition Law in India: CCI's Reductionist Approach in Evaluating Competitive Harm. ABSTRACT: The objective...23 Dec

The Ripple Effects of Online Marketplace Bans - Ariel Ezrachi, University of Oxford - Faculty of Law observes The Ripple Effects of Online Marketplace Bans. ABSTRACT: The strive for tighter control of distribution, quality and price - has led an increasing number of producers to include restrictions on...22 Dec

The Costs and Benefits of Antitrust Consents - Joshua D. Wright, George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School, Faculty and Douglas H. Ginsburg, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School, Faculty discuss The Costs and Benefits...22 Dec

A COMPETITION LAW ASSESSMENT OF PLATFORM MOST-FAVORED-CUSTOMER CLAUSES - Pinar Akman, University of Leeds offers A COMPETITION LAW ASSESSMENT OF PLATFORM MOST-FAVORED-CUSTOMER CLAUSES. ABSTRACT: Most-favored-customer (MFC) clauses adopted by online platforms in their relevant contractual relationships guarantee to an online platform that a supplier will treat the platform as...22 Dec

Communiqué that has been prepared for the last edition of the Rome Antitrust Forum (organized by Alberto Heimler, Giorgio Monti and Mel Marquis) - Communiqué of 25 November 2016 ROME ANTITRUST FORUM Summary of the third annual meeting of the Forum on 25 November 2016 The Rome Antitrust Forum is an initiative co-organised by the Scuola Nazionale dell’Amministrazione (Rome) and the Law Department of...21 Dec

Cartel Dating - H. Peter Boswijk, University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam School of Economics; Tinbergen Institute, Maurice J. G. Bun, University of Amsterdam (UVA) - Department of Quantitative Economics; Tinbergen Institute, and Maarten Pieter Schinkel, University of Amsterdam - Amsterdam Center for Law...21 Dec

On the Relevance of Market Power - Louis Kaplow has a fascinating article On the Relevance of Market Power. Worth downloading! ABSTRACT: Market power is the most important determinant of liability in competition law cases throughout the world. Yet fundamental questions on the relevance of market power...21 Dec

Brain Pickings

Art in the Light of Conscience: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Loving vs. Understanding and the Paradoxical Psychology of Our Resistance to Ideas - “Not to go onwards (in verse, as in everything) means to go backwards — that is, to leave the scene.” “People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them,” Bob Dylan observed in his 1991 conversation with journalist Paul Zollo about the unconscious mind and the creative process. More than half a century earlier, the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (October 8, 1892–August 31, 1941) explored the paradoxical psychological machinery of that resistance in one of the eight beautiful pieces in her collection of essays on art and writing, Art in the Light of Conscience (public library) — a discovery embodying my longtime saying that literature is the original internet, for I found a “link” to the book in a footnote in Tsvetaeva’s exquisite correspondence with Pasternak and Rilke, which was in turn “linked” to in Marina Abramović moving memoir. Marina TsvetaevaIn a sentiment of equal cultural and political perceptiveness, Tsvetaeva writes: Not to like a work is, in the first and most important place, not to recognize it: not to find the pre-cognized in it. The first cause of not accepting a work is not being prepared for it… A physical turning away of the head: I see nothing in this picture, therefore I don’t wish to look at it. — But, in order to see, one needs to look; in order to really see, one needs to look really closely. Disappointment of an eye that is used to seeing at first glance, which means used to seeing along its old track, that of others’ eyes… [an eye] used to not an act of cognition, but recognition. Tsvetaeva considers the only position from which we have the right — intellectual, creative, moral — to reject an idea or a work of art: The only case worthy of respect, the only legitimate non-acceptance of a work, is non-acceptance of it in full knowledge… No one is obliged to love, but every non-loving person is obliged to know — first, what it is he doesn’t love, and second, why he doesn’t love it. In a fine complement to her compatriot Leo Tolstoy’s ideas about the paradoxical nature of love, she adds: Anyone who loves only something, loves nothing. Although our instinctual reaction to that which we do not understand is to reject it, Tsvetaeva reminds us that such rejection is maladaptive and to the detriment of our evolution — be it in art or in politics or in our private lives. She writes: Not to go onwards (in verse, as in everything) means to go backwards — that is, to leave the scene. What we reject most often is that which rebels against and challenges the status quo, but such rejection, Tsvetaeva admonishes, is antithetical to the creative force that propels us forward. Once again, what is true of poetry is true of life itself: There is no poet who would reject any elemental force, consequently any rebellion. […] What doesn’t accept (rejects, even ejects) is the human being: will, reason, conscience. In this realm the poet can have only one prayer: not to understand the unacceptable — let me not understand, so that I may not be seduced. The sole prayer of the poet is not to hear the voices: let me not hear, so that I may not answer. For to hear, for the poet, is already to answer, and to answer is already to affirm, if only by the passionateness of his denial. The poet’s only prayer is a prayer for deafness. Complement this particular fragment of Art in the Light of Conscience with Hannah Arendt on thinking vs. knowing and André Gide on art’s vital role as both acceptance of and rebellion against reality. donating = lovingIn 2016, bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings took me thousands of hours and tremendous resources. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.22 Dec

Annie Dillard on the Winter Solstice and How the Snowy Season Anneals Us to Life - “Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” Rilke considered the cold season the time for tending one’s inner garden. “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer,” Albert Camus wrote a generation later. “If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely,” Adam Gopnik observed after many more revolutions of the Earth around the Sun in his lyrical love letter to winter. But if we are to reap winter’s quiet and invisible spiritual rewards, it seems that special regard must be paid to day of the season’s onset as the time to set such interior intentions. That’s what Annie Dillard (b. April 30, 1945) invites in a splendid meditation on the winter solstice, originally published in her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — which I revisit frequently as a sort of secular scripture — and later included in The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New (public library), one of the 16 finest books of 2016. Dillard writes: Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing touch. Last night Orion vaulted and spread all over the sky, pagan and lunatic, his shoulder and knee on fire, his sword three suns at the ready — for what? […] I stood at the window, the bay window on which in summer a waxy-looking grasshopper had breathed puff puff, and thought, I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent, and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf… Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note, but couldn’t catch the consonant that might shape it into sense. I wrenched myself from the window and stepped outside. Art by Isabelle Arsenault from Once Upon a Northern Night by Jean E. PendziwolShe considers how winter highlights one of the central perplexities of existence — the mystery of beauty. In a sentiment that calls to mind Baudelaire’s assertion that “beauty always has an element of strangeness,” Dillard contemplates winter’s strange and sorrowful landscape of loss, and writes: Is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all? […] A wind rose, quickening; it invaded my nostrils, vibrated my gut. I stirred and lifted my head. No, I’ve gone through this a million times, beauty is not a hoax… Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it. Art by Carson Ellis from Du Iz Tak?, a lyrical illustrated story about the cycle of life and the eternal cycle of growth and decayWatching a maple leaf twirl to the ground in its final flight, Dillard considers something else we easily forget, as essential as beauty — the irrepressible cycle of growth and decay, life and death, each rendering the other both necessary and inevitable: Another year has twined away, unrolled and dropped across nowhere like a flung banner painted in gibberish. “The last act is bloody,” said Pascal, “however brave be all the rest of the play; at the end they throw a little earth upon your head, and it’s all over forever.” Somewhere, everywhere, there is a gap… […] The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps … are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the solid, turn, and unlock — more than a maple — a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you. Art Alessandro Sanna from The River, a watercolor ode to the seasonality of being humanIn a passage that calls to mind Simone Weil’s beautiful notion of “the needs of the soul,” Dillard arrives at the ultimate existential gift that winter gives us when we make ourselves willing to receive it: There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed; your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you’ll come back, for you always come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for… Did you think, before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Did you think you would keep your life, or anything else you love? … You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outrageous guarantee holds. You see creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you’re gone… I think that the dying pray at the last not “please,” but “thank you,” as a guest thanks his host at the door… The universe was not made in jest but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part. The Abundance is a bountifully rewarding read in its totality. Devour more of its richness with Dillard on what it takes to be a writer, then revisit Henry Beston on solstice, seasonality, and the human spirit and Dillard’s abiding wisdom on the two ways of seeing, choosing presence over productivity, and how to reclaim our capacity for joy and wonder. donating = lovingIn 2016, bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings took me thousands of hours and tremendous resources. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.21 Dec

Hannah Arendt on Loneliness as the Common Ground for Terror and How Tyrannical Regimes Use Isolation as a Weapon of Oppression - “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” “Loneliness is personal, and it is also political,” Olivia Laing wrote in The Lonely City, one of the finest books of the year. Half a century earlier, Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) examined those peculiar parallel dimensions of loneliness as a profoundly personal anguish and an indispensable currency of our political life in her intellectual debut, the incisive and astonishingly timely 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (public library). Arendt paints loneliness as “the common ground for terror” and explores its function as both the chief weapon and the chief damage of oppressive political regimes. Exactly twenty years before her piercing treatise on lying in politics, she writes: Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men* as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. Hannah Arendt by Fred Stein, 1944 (Photograph courtesy of the Fred Stein Archive)What perpetuates such tyrannical regimes, Arendt argues, is manipulation by isolation — something most effectively accomplished by the divisiveness of “us vs. them” narratives. She writes: Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together…; isolated men are powerless by definition. Although isolation is not necessarily the same as loneliness, Arendt notes that loneliness can become both the seedbed and the perilous consequence of the isolation effected by tyrannical regimes: In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity, which is the capacity to add something of one’s own to the common world, is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable… Isolation then becomes loneliness. […] While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness concerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totalitarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man. This is why our insistence on belonging, community, and human connection is one of the greatest acts of courage and resistance in the face of oppression — for, in the words of the beloved Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, “the ancient and eternal values of human life — truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love — are all statements of true belonging.” The Origins of Totalitarianism is a remarkable read in its totality. Complement it with Arendt on the life of the mind, how we humanize each other, the difference between how art and science illuminate human life, and her beautiful love letters. donating = lovingIn 2016, bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings took me thousands of hours and tremendous resources. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.20 Dec

Physicist David Bohm on Creativity - “No really creative transformation can possibly be effected by human beings … unless they are in the creative state of mind that is generally sensitive to the differences that always exist between the observed fact and any preconceived ideas, however noble, beautiful, and magnificent they may seem to be.” “The most regretful people on earth,” Mary Oliver wrote in her exquisite meditation on the central commitment of the creative life, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” The past century has sprouted a great many theories of how creativity works and what it takes to master it, and yet its innermost nature remains so nebulous and elusive that the call of creative work may be as difficult to hear as it is to answer. What to listen for and how to tune the listening ear is what the trailblazing physicist David Bohm (December 20, 1917–October 27, 1992) explores in the 1968 title essay in On Creativity (public library) — his previously unpublished writings on art, science, and originality, edited by Lee Nichol. Bohm, who maintained a lively affinity for the arts in his forty-five years as a theoretical physicist, argues that the creative impulse in both art and science aims at “a certain oneness and totality, or wholeness, constituting a kind of harmony that is felt to be beautiful.” He writes: The scientist emphasizes the aspect of discovering oneness and totality in nature. For this reason, the fact that his work can also be creative is often overlooked. But in order to discover oneness and totality, the scientist has to create the new overall structures of ideas which are needed to express the harmony and beauty that can be found in nature. […] The artist, the musical composer, the architect, the scientist all feel a fundamental need to discover and create something new that is whole and total, harmonious and beautiful. Few ever get a chance to try to do this, and even fewer actually manage to do it. Yet, deep down, it is probably what very large numbers of people in all walks of life are seeking when they attempt to escape the daily humdrum routine by engaging in every kind of entertainment, excitement, stimulation, change of occupation, and so forth, through which they ineffectively try to compensate for the unsatisfying narrowness and mechanicalness of their lives. Illustration from What Can I Be?, a vintage concept book about how creativity worksCreativity, Bohm notes, isn’t a matter of mere talent, for “there are a tremendous number of highly talented people who remain mediocre.” (A century earlier, Schopenhauer made his famous distinction between talent and genius.) With an eye to Einstein — a scientist whose uncommonly creative vision is revolutionizing science a century later — Bohm points out that he possessed something greater than mere talent, for he had many contemporaries who knew more about physics and were better skilled at mathematics than him; what Einstein possessed was a certain quality of originality. Half a millennium after Galileo’s elegant admonition against the peril of clinging to one’s preconceptions, Bohm considers a central demand of originality: One prerequisite for originality is clearly that a person shall not be inclined to impose his preconceptions on the fact as he sees it. Rather, he must be able to learn something new, even if this means that the ideas and notions that are comfortable or dear to him may be overturned. Elizabeth Gilbert has a rather poetic term for this orientation of mind: “a state of uninterrupted marvel.” Bohm argues that we are born with it — a child, for instance, learns to walk by “trying something out and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened.” But as we grow older, we become indoctrinated in the standard way of doing things and our originality is gradually blunted as we relinquish the willingness to see alternative ways. Bohm considers what is needed for the conservation of creativity: The action of learning is the essence of real perception, in the sense that without it a person is unable to see, in any new situation, what is a fact and what is not… But real perception that is capable of seeing something new and unfamiliar requires that one be attentive, alert, aware, and sensitive. Long before pioneering psychologist Carol Dweck demonstrated this empirically in her trailblazing work on fixed vs. growth mindsets, Bohm articulates a key difference between the creatively fertile and the creatively withered mind: One thing that prevents us from thus giving primary emphasis to the perception of what is new and different is that we are afraid to make mistakes… If one will not try anything until he is assured that he will not make a mistake in whatever he does, he will never be able to learn anything new at all. And this is more or less the state in which most people are. Such a fear of making a mistake is added to one’s habits of mechanical perception in terms of preconceived ideas and learning only for specific utilitarian purposes. All of these combine to make a person who cannot perceive what is new and who is therefore mediocre rather than original. In a sentiment which John Cleese would come to echo a quarter century later in his famous assertion that creativity is not a talent but a way of operating, Bohm adds: The ability to learn something new is based on the general state of mind of a human being. It does not depend on special talents, nor does it operate only in special fields, such as science, art, music or architecture. But when it does operate, there is an undivided and total interest in what one is doing. Recall, for example, the kind of interest that a young child shows when he is learning to walk. If you watch him, you will see that he is putting his whole being into it. Only this kind of whole-hearted interest will give the mind the energy needed to see what is new and different, especially when the latter seems to threaten what is familiar, precious, secure, or otherwise dear to us. It is clear that all the great scientists and artists had such a feeling for their work. Illustration by Vladimir Radunsky for On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein by Jennifer BerneIn a point of importance which cannot be understated, Bohm asserts that because the nature of originality requires a lively attentiveness to the new and different, pioneers often end up creating entire fields that didn’t previously exist, often at great personal expense. (The history of creative work is strewn with examples, from Van Gogh, who took enormous creative risks only redeemed posthumously, to gravitational astronomy pioneer Joe Weber, who died a tragic hero of science but opened up the brand new field that eventually furnished one of the most significant discoveries in the entire history of science.) A decade after artist Ben Shahn’s exquisite case for why nonconformists are society’s engine of growth and greatness, Bohm writes: Such an opportunity arises in many fields which may at first show little promise, especially because (at least at first) society is not in the habit of recognizing them to be potentially creative. Indeed, real originality and creativity imply that one does not work only in fields that are recognized in this way, but that one is ready in each case to inquire for oneself as to whether there is or is not a fundamentally significant difference between the actual fact and one’s preconceived notions that opens up the possibility for creative and original work… Creativity of some kind may be possible in almost any conceivable field… It is always founded on the sensitive perception of what is new and different from what is inferred from previous knowledge. From these prerequisites Bohm extrapolates the central orientation of the creative mind in any field: The creative state of mind … is, first of all, one whose interest in what is being done is wholehearted and total, like that of a young child. With this spirit, it is always open to learning what is new, to perceiving new differences and new similarities, leading to new orders and structures, rather than always tending to impose familiar orders and structures in the field of what is seen. Echoing Annie Dillard’s warm wisdom on why a generosity of spirit is the greatest animating force of creative work, Bohm adds: This kind of action of the creative state of mind is impossible if one is limited by narrow and petty aims, such as security, furthering of personal ambition, glorification of the individual or the state… Although such motives may permit occasional flashes of penetrating insight, they evidently tend to hold the mind a prisoner of its old and familiar structure of thought and perception. Indeed, merely to inquire into what is unknown must inevitably lead one into a situation in which all that is done may well constitute a threat to the successful achievement of those narrow and limited goals. A genuinely new and untried step may either fail altogether or else, even if it succeeds, lead to ideas that are not recognized until after one is dead. Besides, such aims are not compatible with the harmony, beauty, and totality that is characteristic of real creation. Above all, Bohm argues, creativity demands the willingness to relinquish even our most dearly held ideas if they are contradicted by experiment and experience: No really creative transformation can possibly be effected by human beings, either in nature or in society, unless they are in the creative state of mind that is generally sensitive to the differences that always exist between the observed fact and any preconceived ideas, however noble, beautiful, and magnificent they may seem to be. In a sentiment of especial poignancy today, in a cultural climate dominated by reaction rather than creative response, Bohm emphasizes that creativity is predicated on rising above our mechanical reactions, which are conditioned by society and by habitual forms of thought, and which render us in “a painful and unpleasant state of dissatisfaction and conflict, covered up by self-sustaining confusion.” He considers the ennobling alternative: For as long as the individual cannot learn from what he does and sees, whenever such learning requires that he go outside the framework of his basic preconceptions, then his action will ultimately be directed by some idea that does not correspond to the fact as it is. Such action is worse than useless, and evidently cannot possibly give rise to a genuine solution of the problems of the individual and of society. […] If one is serious about being original and creative, it is necessary for him first to be original and creative about reactions that are making him mediocre and mechanical. Then eventually the natural creative action of the mind may fully awaken, so that it will start to operate in a basically new order that is no longer determined mainly by the mechanical aspects of thought… Just as the health of the body demands that we breathe properly, so, whether we like it or not, the health of the mind requires that we be creative. […] But, of course, to awaken the creative state of mind is not at all easy. On the contrary, it is one of the most difficult things that could possibly be attempted. Nevertheless, for the reasons that I have given, I feel that it is for each of us individually and for society as a whole the most important thing to be done in the circumstances in which humanity now finds itself. The orientations of mind and spirit most conducive to doing that — in science, in art, and in all domains of human life — is what Bohm goes on to examine in the remainder of the thoroughly awakening On Creativity. Complement it with pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner on the six pillars of creativity and Leonard Cohen on its mystique, then revisit Bohm on what is keeping us from listening to one another, how our perceptions shape our reality, and his magnificent conversation with the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti about intelligence and love. donating = lovingIn 2016, bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings took me thousands of hours and tremendous resources. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.20 Dec

The Conscience of Words: Susan Sontag on the Wisdom of Literature, the Danger of Opinions, and the Writer’s Task - “A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine… The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.” “Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf observed in the only surviving recording of her voice. “Words are events, they do things, change things,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote many decades later in contemplating the magic of real conversation. The poet David Whyte marveled at “their beautiful hidden and beckoning uncertainty” as he set out to reclaim the deeper meanings of everyday words. But what do words actually do — what is their responsibility to us and ours to them? That’s what Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933–December 28, 2004) explores in her spectacular 2001 Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, published as “The Conscience of Words” in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (public library) — the indispensable posthumous anthology that gave us Sontag on moral courage and the power of principled resistance to injustice, literature and freedom, beauty vs. interestingness, and her advice to writers. Susan Sontag by Peter HujarSontag begins by weighing the elasticity of language and the way in which words can expand meaning as much as they can contract it: We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we’d rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down. What do we mean, for example, by the word “peace”? Do we mean an absence of strife? Do we mean a forgetting? Do we mean a forgiveness? Or do we mean a great weariness, an exhaustion, an emptying out of rancor? It seems to me that what most people mean by “peace” is victory. The victory of their side. That’s what “peace” means to them, while to the others peace means defeat… Peace becomes a space people no longer know how to inhabit. Reflecting on the complete name of the prize that occasioned her speech — the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society — Sontag reflects on the writer’s relationship to words as a tool of personal agency: It isn’t what a writer says that matters, it’s what a writer is. Writers — by which I mean members of the community of literature — are emblems of the persistence (and the necessity) of individual vision. And yet because “there are contradictory impulses in everything,” as Sontag herself so poignantly observed a quarter century earlier, there is a dark side to this notion of individual vision. In a passage of particular timeliness amid our age of identity and self-broadcasting, Sontag, who lived through “the century of the self,” writes: The unceasing propaganda in our time for “the individual” seems to me deeply suspect, as “individuality” itself becomes more and more a synonym for selfishness. A capitalist society comes to have a vested interest in praising “individuality” and “freedom” — which may mean little more than the right to the perpetual aggrandizement of the self, and the freedom to shop, to acquire, to use up, to consume, to render obsolete. I don’t believe there is any inherent value in the cultivation of the self. And I think there is no culture (using the term normatively) without a standard of altruism, of regard for others. I do believe there is an inherent value in extending our sense of what a human life can be. If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader and then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other words, other territories of concern. In a sentiment almost countercultural today, as we watch entire careers be built upon rampant opinion-slinging, Sontag considers the true task of the writer: A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine… The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth … and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences. It is the job of the writer to depict the realities: the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on. Sontag’s words radiate an aching recognition of our contemporary tendency to form instant opinions and to mistake for informed opinions what are really reactions to reactions. She observes: There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive first-hand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion-mongering. […] The problem with opinions is that one is stuck with them. And whenever writers are functioning as writers, they always see … more. Attesting to literature power to reinstate nuance and celebrate what the poet Elizabeth Alexander calls “multivocality, polyphony, gumbo yaya,” Sontag adds: If literature itself, this great enterprise that has been conducted (within our purview) for nearly three millennia, embodies a wisdom — and I think it does and is at the heart of the importance we give to literature — it is by demonstrating the multiple nature of our private and our communal destinies. It will remind us that there can be contradictions, sometimes irreducible conflicts, among the values we most cherish. Susan Sontag’s diary meditations on art, illustrated by Wendy MacNaughtonOut of this recognition of multiplicity and complementarity arises the highest task of literature, as well as its greatest reward. Centuries after Hegel, one of her great influences, admonished against the peril of fixed opinions, Sontag writes: The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions… Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions — whenever asked — cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. In a sentiment of especial relevance today, as we increasingly struggle to live with wisdom in the age of information, Sontag echoes her hero Walter Benjamin’s timeless ideas about the crucial difference between information and illumination and considers the ultimate task of the storyteller: Information will never replace illumination… Let the others, the celebrities and the politicians, talk down to us; lie. If being both a writer and a public voice could stand for anything better, it would be that writers would consider the formulation of opinions and judgments to be a difficult responsibility. Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change. At the Same Time is a terrific and timely read in its totality. Complement it with Sontag’s abiding wisdom on the power of music, the role of silence in creative work, storytelling and what it means to be a moral human being, how photography helps us navigate complexity, and her spectacular Letter to Borges. donating = lovingIn 2016, bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings took me thousands of hours and tremendous resources. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. 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16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016 - From loneliness to love to black holes, by way of Neil Gaiman, Annie Dillard, and Mary Oliver. To look back on any period of reading with the intention of selecting one’s favorite books is a curious two-way time machine — one must scoop the memory of a past and filter it through the sieve of an indefinite future in an effort to discern which books have left a mark on one’s conscience deep enough to last a lifetime. Of the many books I read in 2016, these are the sixteen that moved me most deeply and memorably. And since I stand with Susan Sontag, who considered reading an act of rebirth, I invite you to revisit the annual favorites for 2015, 2014, and 2013. THE LONELY CITY “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeoise wrote in her diary at the end of a long and illustrious life as she contemplated how solitude enriches creative work. It’s a lovely sentiment, but as empowering as it may be to those willing to embrace solitude, it can be tremendously lonesome-making to those for whom loneliness has contracted the space of trust and love into a suffocating penitentiary. For if in solitude, as Wendell Berry memorably wrote, “one’s inner voices become audible [and] one responds more clearly to other lives,” in loneliness one’s inner scream becomes deafening, deadening, severing any thread of connection to other lives. How to break free of that prison and reinhabit the space of trust and love is what Olivia Laing explores in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (public library) — an extraordinary more-than-memoir; a sort of memoir-plus-plus, partway between Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk and the diary of Virginia Woolf; a lyrical account of wading through a period of self-expatriation, both physical and psychological, in which Laing paints an intimate portrait of loneliness as “a populated place: a city in itself.” After the sudden collapse of a romance marked by extreme elation, Laing left her native England and took her shattered heart to New York, “that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass.” The daily, bone-deep loneliness she experienced there was both paralyzing in its all-consuming potency and, paradoxically, a strange invitation to aliveness. Indeed, her choice to leave home and wander a foreign city is itself a rich metaphor for the paradoxical nature of loneliness, animated by equal parts restlessness and stupor, capable of turning one into a voluntary vagabond and a catatonic recluse all at once, yet somehow a vitalizing laboratory for self-discovery. The pit of loneliness, she found, could “drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive.” She writes: There were things that burned away at me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our pixelated age. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens? Bedeviled by this acute emotional anguish, Laing seeks consolation in the great patron saints of loneliness in twentieth-century creative culture. From this eclectic tribe of the lonesome — including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Hujar, Billie Holiday, and Nan Goldin — Laing chooses four artists as her companions charting the terra incognita of loneliness: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, who had all “grappled in their lives as well as work with loneliness and its attendant issues.” Art by Isol from Daytime VisionsLaing examines the particular, pervasive form of loneliness in the eye of a city aswirl with humanity: Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure. You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd. There is, of course, a universe of difference between solitude and loneliness — two radically different interior orientations toward the same exterior circumstance of lacking companionship. We speak of “fertile solitude” as a developmental achievement essential for our creative capacity, but loneliness is barren and destructive; it cottons in apathy the will to create. More than that, it seems to signal an existential failing — a social stigma the nuances of which Laing addresses beautifully: Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the loneliness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, break-up or change in social circles. Like depression, like melancholy or restlessness, it is subject too to pathologisation, to being considered a disease. It has been said emphatically that loneliness serves no purpose… Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think any experience so much a part of our common shared lives can be entirely devoid of meaning, without a richness and a value of some kind. Dive deeper here. HOPE IN THE DARK I think a great deal about what it means to live with hope and sincerity in the age of cynicism, about how we can continue standing at the gates of hope as we’re being bombarded with news of hopeless acts of violence, as we’re confronted daily with what Marcus Aurelius called the “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.” I’ve found no more lucid and luminous a defense of hope than the one Rebecca Solnit launches in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (public library) — a slim, potent book that has grown only more relevant and poignant in the decade since its original publication in the wake of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, recently reissued with a new introduction by Solnit. Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: Sallie Dean Shatz)We lose hope, Solnit suggests, because we lose perspective — we lose sight of the “accretion of incremental, imperceptible changes” which constitute progress and which render our era dramatically different from the past, a contrast obscured by the undramatic nature of gradual transformation punctuated by occasional tumult. She writes: There are times when it seems as though not only the future but the present is dark: few recognize what a radically transformed world we live in, one that has been transformed not only by such nightmares as global warming and global capital, but by dreams of freedom and of justice — and transformed by things we could not have dreamed of… We need to hope for the realization of our own dreams, but also to recognize a world that will remain wilder than our imaginations. Solnit — one of the most singular, civically significant, and poetically potent voices of our time, emanating echoes of Virginia Woolf’s luminous prose and Adrienne Rich’s unflinching political conviction — looks back on the seemingly distant past as she peers forward into the near future: The moment passed long ago, but despair, defeatism, cynicism, and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed, even as the most wildly, unimaginably magnificent things came to pass. There is a lot of evidence for the defense… Progressive, populist, and grassroots constituencies have had many victories. Popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. And the changes we’ve undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are astonishing. […] This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both. Engage more fully here. UPSTREAM To read Mary Oliver is to be read by her — to be made real by her words, to have the richest subterranean truths of your own experience mirrored back to you with tenfold the luminosity. Her prose collection Upstream: Selected Essays (public library) is a book of uncommon enchantment, containing Oliver’s largehearted wisdom on writing, creative work, and the art of life. In one particularly satisfying piece from the volume, titled Of Power and Time,” Oliver writes: The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. […] It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time. For a richer taste of this feast for the mind, heart, and spirit, see Oliver on how books saved her life and time, the artist’s task, and the central commitment of the creative life. BLACK HOLE BLUES In Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space (public library), which crowns the year’s finest science books, cosmologist and novelist Janna Levin tells the story of the century-long vision, originated by Einstein, and half-century experimental quest to hear the sound of spacetime by detecting a gravitational wave. This book remains one of the most intensely interesting and beautifully written I’ve ever encountered — the kind that comes about once a generation if we’re lucky. Everything we know about the universe so far comes from four centuries of sight — from peering into space with our eyes and their prosthetic extension, the telescope. Now commences a new mode of knowing the cosmos through sound. The detection of gravitational waves is one of the most significant discoveries in the entire history of physics, marking the dawn of a new era as we begin listening to the sound of space — the probable portal to mysteries as unimaginable to us today as galaxies and nebulae and pulsars and other cosmic wonders were to the first astronomers. Gravitational astronomy, as Levin elegantly puts it, promises a “score to accompany the silent movie humanity has compiled of the history of the universe from still images of the sky, a series of frozen snapshots captured over the past four hundred years since Galileo first pointed a crude telescope at the Sun.” Astonishingly enough, Levin wrote the book before the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) — the monumental instrument at the center of the story, decades in the making — made the actual detection of a ripple in the fabric of spacetime caused by the collision of two black holes in the autumn of 2015, exactly a century after Einstein first envisioned the possibility of gravitational waves. So the story she tells is not that of the triumph but that of the climb, which renders it all the more enchanting — because it is ultimately a story about the human spirit and its incredible tenacity, about why human beings choose to devote their entire lives to pursuits strewn with unimaginable obstacles and bedeviled by frequent failure, uncertain rewards, and meager public recognition. Indeed, what makes the book interesting is that it tells the story of this monumental discovery, but what makes it enchanting is that Levin comes at it from a rather unusual perspective. She is a working astrophysicist who studies black holes, but she is also an incredibly gifted novelist — an artist whose medium is language and thought itself. This is no popular science book but something many orders of magnitude higher in its artistic vision, the impeccable craftsmanship of language, and the sheer pleasure of the prose. The story is structured almost as a series of short, integrated novels, with each chapter devoted to one of the key scientists involved in LIGO. With Dostoyevskian insight and nuance, Levin paints a psychological, even philosophical portrait of each protagonist, revealing how intricately interwoven the genius and the foibles are in the fabric of personhood and what a profoundly human endeavor science ultimately is. She writes: Scientists are like those levers or knobs or those boulders helpfully screwed into a climbing wall. Like the wall is some cemented material made by mixing knowledge, which is a purely human construct, with reality, which we can only access through the filter of our minds. There’s an important pursuit of objectivity in science and nature and mathematics, but still the only way up the wall is through the individual people, and they come in specifics… So the climb is personal, a truly human endeavor, and the real expedition pixelates into individuals, not Platonic forms. For a taste of this uncategorizably wonderful book, see Levin on the story of the tragic hero who pioneered gravitational astronomy and how astronomer Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars. TIME TRAVEL Time Travel: A History (public library) by science historian and writer extraordinaire James Gleick, another rare enchanter of science, is not a “science book” per se, in that although it draws heavily on the history of twentieth-century science and quantum physics in particular (as well as on millennia of philosophy), it is a decidedly literary inquiry into our temporal imagination — why we think about time, why its directionality troubles us so, and what asking these questions at all reveals about the deepest mysteries of our consciousness. I consider it a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst. Gleick, who examined the origin of our modern anxiety about time with remarkable prescience nearly two decades ago, traces the invention of the notion of time travel to H.G. Wells’s 1895 masterpiece The Time Machine. Although Wells — like Gleick, like any reputable physicist — knew that time travel was a scientific impossibility, he created an aesthetic of thought which never previously existed and which has since shaped the modern consciousness. Gleick argues that the art this aesthetic produced — an entire canon of time travel literature and film — not only permeated popular culture but even influenced some of the greatest scientific minds of the past century, including Stephen Hawking, who once cleverly hosted a party for time travelers and when no one showed up considered the impossibility of time travel proven, and John Archibald Wheeler, who popularized the term “black hole” and coined “wormhole,” both key tropes of time travel literature. Gleick considers how a scientific impossibility can become such fertile ground for the artistic imagination: Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end. Wells’s Time Machine revealed a turning in the road, an alteration in the human relationship with time. New technologies and ideas reinforced one another: the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the earth science of Lyell and the life science of Darwin, the rise of archeology out of antiquarianism, and the perfection of clocks. When the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, scientists and philosophers were primed to understand time in a new way. And so were we all. Time travel bloomed in the culture, its loops and twists and paradoxes. I wrote about Gleick’s uncommonly pleasurable book at length here. THE VIEW FROM THE CHEAP SEATS Neil Gaiman is one of the most beloved storytellers of our time, unequaled at his singular brand of darkly delightful fantasy. His long-awaited nonfiction collection The View from the Cheap Seats (public library) celebrates a different side of Gaiman. Here stands a writer of firm conviction and porous curiosity, an idealist amid our morass of cynicism who, in revealing who he is, reveals who we are and who we can be if we only tried a little bit harder to wrest more goodness out of our imperfect humanity. An evangelist for the righteous without a shred of our culture’s pathological self-righteousness, Gaiman jolts us out of our collective amnesia and reminds us again and again what matters: ideas over ideologies, public libraries, the integrity of children’s inner lives, the stories we choose to tell of why the world is the way it is, the moral obligation to imagine better stories — and, oh, the sheer fun of it all. Neil Gaiman (Photograph: Amanda Palmer)Among the many gems in the collection, which include Gaiman’s meditations on why we read and the power of cautionary questions, is a particularly timely short piece titled “Credo,” in which Gaiman writes: I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast. I believe that you can set your own ideas against ideas you dislike. That you should be free to argue, explain, clarify, debate, offend, insult, rage, mock, sing, dramatize, and deny. I do not believe that burning, murdering, exploding people, smashing their heads with rocks (to let the bad ideas out), drowning them or even defeating them will work to contain ideas you do not like. Ideas spring up where you do not expect them, like weeds, and are as difficult to control. I believe that repressing ideas spreads ideas. Read more here. HOLD STILL “Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation,” pioneering researcher Rosalind Cartwright wrote in distilling the science of the unconscious mind. Although I lack early childhood memories, I do have one rather eidetic recollection: I remember standing before the barren elephant yard at the Sofia Zoo in Bulgaria, at age three or so, clad in a cotton polka-dot jumper. I remember squinting into a scowl as the malnourished elephant behind me swirls dirt into the air in front of her communism-stamped concrete edifice. I don’t remember the temperature, though I deduce from the memory of my outfit that it must have been summer. I don’t remember the smell of the elephant or the touch of the blown dirt on my skin, though I remember my grimace. For most of my life, I held onto that memory as the sole surviving mnemonic fragment of my early childhood self. And then, one day in my late twenties, I discovered an old photo album tucked into the back of my grandmother’s cabinet in Bulgaria. It contained dozens of photographs of me, from birth until around age four, including one depicting that very vignette — down to the minutest detail of what I believed was my memory of that moment. There I was, scowling in my polka-dot jumper with the elephant and the cloud of dust behind me. In an instant, I realized that I had been holding onto a prosthetic memory — what I remember15 Dec

The Invention of Empathy: Rilke, Rodin, and the Art of “Inseeing” - How a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a sculptor co-created the modern concept of empathy. Empathy, an orientation of spirit decidedly different from sympathy, has become central to our moral universe. We celebrate it as the hallmark of a noble spirit, a pillar of social justice, and the gateway to reaching our highest human potential — a centerpiece of our very humanity. And yet this conception of empathy is a little more than a century old and originated in art: It only entered the modern lexicon in the early twentieth century, when it was used to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us. That improbable origin and its wide ripples across the popular imagination are what Rachel Corbett explores in You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (public library) — a layered and lyrical inquiry into the personal, interpersonal, and cultural forces behind and around Rainer Maria Rilke’s iconic Letters to a Young Poet, a book so beloved and widely quoted in the century since its publication that it has taken on the qualities of a sacred text for secular culture. Out of its origin story Corbett wrests a larger story of “how the will to create drives young artists to overcome even the most heart-hollowing of childhoods and make their work at any cost.” Recounting her revelatory first encounter with the Rilke classic, a gift from her mother, who had in turn received it from a mentor as a young girl, Corbett captures the singular enchantment that this miraculous book has held for generations: Reading it that evening was like having someone whisper to me, in elongated Germanic sentences, all the youthful affirmations I had been yearning to hear. Loneliness is just space expanding around you. Trust uncertainty. Sadness is life holding you in its hands and changing you. Make solitude your home. […] What gives the book its enduring appeal is that it crystallizes the spirit of delirious transition in which it was written. You can pick it up during any of life’s upheavals, flip it open to a random page, and find a consolation that feels both universal and breathed into your ear alone. What most people don’t know, Corbett points out, is that as Rilke was bequeathing his poetic wisdom to the recipient of his letters, the nineteen-year-old cadet and aspiring poet Franz Xaver Kappus, he was also channelling his own great mentor — the French sculptor Rodin, for whom Rilke worked for a number of years and whom he revered for the remainder of his life. Despite their staggering surface differences — “Rodin was a rational Gallic in his sixties, while Rilke was a German romantic in his twenties,” Corbett writes, likening Rodin to a mountain and Rilke to “the mist encircling it” — the sculptor became the young poet’s most significant influence. But Rodin’s greatest gift to Rilke was the very thing that lends Letters to a Young Poet its abiding spiritual allure: the art of empathy. Corbett writes: The invention of empathy corresponds to many of the climactic shifts in the art, philosophy and psychology of fin-de-siècle Europe, and it changed the way artists thought about their work and the way observers related to it for generations to come. Empathy may be a concept saturating today’s popular lexicon so completely as to border on meaninglessness, yet it was entirely novel and ablaze with numinous meaning in Rilke’s day. Its invention is the work of two unlikely co-creators — Wilhelm Wundt, a German doctor who “accidentally forged the birth of psychology in the 1860s,” and Theodor Lipps, a philosopher from the following generation. In seeking to understand why art affects us so powerfully, Lipps originated the then-radical hypothesis that the power of its impact didn’t reside in the work of art itself but was, rather, synthesized by the viewer in the act of viewing. Corbett condenses the essence of his proposition and traces its combinatorial creation: The moment a viewer recognizes a painting as beautiful, it transforms from an object into a work of art. The act of looking, then, becomes a creative process, and the viewer becomes the artist. Lipps found a name for his theory in an 1873 dissertation by a German aesthetics student named Robert Vischer. When people project their emotions, ideas or memories onto objects they enact a process that Vischer called einfühlung, literally “feeling into.” The British psychologist Edward Titchener translated the word into English as “empathy” in 1909, deriving it from the Greek empatheia, or “in pathos.” For Vischer, einfühlung revealed why a work of art caused an observer to unconsciously “move in and with the forms.” He dubbed this bodily mimesis “muscular empathy,” a concept that resonated with Lipps, who once attended a dance recital and felt himself “striving and performing” with the dancers. He also linked this idea to other somatosensory imitations, like yawns and laughter. Half a century later, Mark Rothko would observe: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” He was articulating the model of creative contagion — or what Leo Tolstoy called the “emotional infectiousness” of art — that Lipps had formulated. Corbett writes: Empathy explained why people sometimes describe the experience of “losing themselves” in a powerful work of art. Maybe their ears deafen to the sounds around them, the hair rises on the backs of their necks or they lose track of the passage of time. Something produces a “gut feeling” or triggers a flood of memory, like Proust’s madeleine. When a work of art is effective, it draws the observer out into the world, while the observer draws the work back into his or her body. Empathy was what made red paint run like blood in the veins, or a blue sky fill the lungs with air. But although empathy originated in the contemplation of art, it was psychologists who imported it into popular culture, largely thanks to the cross-pollination of art and science in early-twentieth-century Europe. Corbett writes: In Vienna, the young professor Sigmund Freud wrote to a friend in 1896 that he had “immersed” himself in the teachings of Lipps, “who I suspect has the clearest mind among present-day philosophical writers.” Several years later, Freud thanked Lipps for giving him “the courage and capacity” to write his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. He went on to advance Lipps’s research further when he made the case that empathy should be embraced by psychoanalysts as a tool for understanding patients. He urged his students to observe their patients not from a place of judgment, but of empathy. They ought to recede into the background like a “receptive organ” and strive toward the “putting of oneself in the other person’s place,” he said. The concept, of course, was far from novel, even if the language to contain it was — half a century earlier, across the Atlantic, Walt Whitman had articulated the very same notion in his timeless treatise on medicine and the human spirit. But Lipps devised the right language to infiltrate the popular imagination and placed himself in the right place, at the right time. When he became chair of the University of Munich’s philosophy department in 1894, his students included the great Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who would later come to echo a number of Lipps’s ideas in his writings about the spiritual element in art, and Rilke, who enrolled in Lipps’s foundational aesthetics course as soon as he arrived in Munich from Prague. Central to Lipps’s invention of empathy was his notion of einsehen, or “inseeing” — a kind of conscious observation which Corbett so poetically describes as “the wondrous voyage from the surface of a thing to its heart, wherein perception leads to an emotional connection.” She writes: If faced with a rock, for instance, one should stare deep into the place where its rockness begins to form. Then the observer should keep looking until his own center starts to sink with the stony weight of the rock forming inside him, too. It is a kind of perception that takes place within the body, and it requires the observer to be both the seer and the seen. To observe with empathy, one sees not only with the eyes but with the skin. The concept struck Rilke as a particularly revelatory way of looking at not only art but life itself. He wrote in a letter to a friend: Though you may laugh if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing. Corbett captures the cruz of Rilke’s insight: In describing his joy at experiencing the world this way, Rilke echoed Lipps’s belief that, through empathy, a person could free himself from the solitude of his mind. At the same time that Rilke was studying at the zoo in Paris, Lipps was in Munich working on his theory of empathy and aesthetic enjoyment. In his seminal paper on the subject he identified the four types of empathy as he saw them: general apperceptive empathy: when one sees movement in everyday objects; empirical empathy: when one sees human qualities in the nonhuman; mood empathy: when one attributes emotional states to colors and music, like “cheerful yellow”; and sensible appearance empathy: when gestures or movements convey internal feelings. Out of this dynamic dialogue between inner and outer arises the most elemental question of existence: What is the self? This invites an auxiliary question: If we ourselves can possess a self, how can we know that others are also in possession of selves? Corbett writes: [This] was the question to which Rilke’s old professor Theodor Lipps’s empathy research eventually led him. He had reasoned that if einfühlung explained the way people see themselves in objects, then the act of observation was not one of passive absorption, but of lived recognition. It was the self existing in another place. And if we see ourselves in art, perhaps we could also see ourselves in other people. Empathy was the gateway into the minds of others. Rilke’s prodigious capacity for it, then, was both his greatest poetic gift and probably his hardest-borne cross. In the remainder of the spectacular You Must Change Your Life, Corbett goes on to disentangle the intricate mesh of influences and interdependencies that shaped Rilke’s enduring legacy and its broader implications for the inner life of artists. Complement it with Rilke himself on writing and what it means to be an artist and the life-expanding value of uncertainty. donating = lovingBringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes me hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.14 Dec

Marie Curie, Ambulance Driver: The Trailblazing Scientist’s Little-Known Humanitarian Heroism and Her Life-Saving Mobile X-Ray Units - How the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and her brilliant teenage daughter set out to mend the ugliness of war with ingenuity and sheer human courage. “Her wounds came from the same source as her power,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her sublime tribute to Marie Curie (November 7, 1867–July 4, 1934). The first woman to receive the Nobel Prize, Curie remains the only person ever awarded a Nobel in two different sciences. But, unbeknownst to most, she was also a humanitarian hero of unparalleled vision, determination, and courage. Curie was vehemently opposed to war. When the Great War broke out in Europe in 1904 and put all human activities on hold, including her scientific exploits, she lamented in a letter her friend Hertha Ayrton, the British mathematician, engineer, and inventor: Only through peaceful means can we achieve an ideal society. It is hard to think that after so many centuries of development, the human race still doesn’t know how to resolve difficulties in any way except by violence. Marie Curie by Rachel Ignotofsky from Women in Science, one of the best science books of 2016.And yet Curie felt compelled to counter violence with more than words. When France asked all citizens to donate their gold and silver to support the war effort, she offered to donate her prize medals. The offer was refused. A decade later, when World War I broke out, Curie responded not just with generosity but with actionable courage: She set out to mitigate the gruesome effects of the war using the X-ray technology which her own discoveries had made possible. In Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie (public library), biographer Barbara Goldsmith writes: Maimed soldiers were returning to Paris, limbs hacked off and bodies destroyed by probing because no X-ray equipment or technicians were available at field hospitals. Within a few weeks, [Curie] commandeered unused X-ray equipment from laboratories and the offices of doctors whose occupants had gone to war. At first, this equipment was placed in Parisian military hospitals. Then, in a moment of inspiration, Marie devised the idea of “mobile X-ray units” which could be used in battle-front hospitals to diagnose the wounded before treatment. The first two cars were donated by the Union des Femmes de France. The cars had to be small enough to navigate narrow roads and that the equipment must be lightweight. Each mobile unit contained a small generator that could be hooked up to a car battery when electricity was unavailable on-site. An X-ray tube was installed on a movable stand so that it could easily be wheeled to the crucial area. There was a folding table for the patient, photographic plates, a screen, heavy curtains to exclude light, and ampules filled with radon (emitted as the gaseous decay product of radium). For protection there were cotton gloves and a lead-filled apron. It was the perfect marriage of technology and practicality. Marie Curie in one of the mobile X-ray unitsThese mobile radiography units, known as “Little Curies,” treated an estimated one million soldiers. They stand as a testament to Curie’s monumental legacy both as a scientist and as an unflinching challenger of oppressive gender norms, her heroism all the more awe-inspiring in its cultural context. Goldsmith writes: The mobile X-ray units (now called “Les Petites Curie”) were off to a slow start, with bureaucrats forbidding women drivers and technicians to go to the front lines, but Madame Curie prevailed. Dressed in an alpaca coat with a Red Cross armband on the sleeve, she drove to field hospitals at twenty miles an hour. She quickly unloaded the equipment, hooked up a cable to the lightweight generator, covered the windows, unfolded the table, installed the ampoule, and activated the machine. Despite the life-saving effectiveness of the small mobile X-ray fleet, Curie’s efforts were frustrated by a dearth of drivers and skilled technicians. Above all else, she needed a collaborator she could trust with sharing the leadership duties. She found one in her seventeen-year-old daughter Irène. Goldsmith recounts the astonishing autonomy and confident competence of this brilliant teenage girl: Irène, alone and unassisted, X-rayed the wounded, those young men who in another time might have been her dancing partners or given her a first kiss. After completing the X-ray process, primly, deliberately, Irène made a geometric computation that revealed the exact location of bullets and shrapnel. She then directed the surgeons exactly where to probe. The surgeon in charge of the hospital had expected that the X-ray alone would instantly reveal a location and the calculation stymied him, as did the young woman who was telling him his business. He probed the wounded at random and unmercifully until finally he followed Irène’s directions with success. Marie and Irène CurieIrène would go on to become a scientist herself and would also win the Nobel Prize. Beyond the power of personal modeling, which is among the greatest gifts a parent can give to a child, Marie Curie’s broader bravery embodies what Susan Sontag celebrated as the transformative moral courage of an example. Obsessive Genius celebrates many more unheralded dimensions of Curie’s life and spirit. Complement this particular portion with Einstein and Freud’s forgotten correspondence about war, peace, and human nature, then revisit Einstein’s magnificent letter of advice and solidarity to Curie when she came under senseless attack for her personal life. donating = lovingBringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes me hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.14 Dec

The Difficult Art of Counter-Criticism: Rebecca Solnit on Celebrating Complexity, Savoring the Unquantifiable, and Defying the Urge to Simplify and Contain - “There is a kind of counter-criticism that … can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination.” “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her sublime meditation on the recognition of subtleties and interconnections at the heart of creative work. “There is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” And yet in the lapse between Woolf’s time and ours, we have lost sight of our thingness and ceased seeing the pattern behind the cotton wool. Ours is an age bedeviled by the urge — an urge bearing the ominous compulsiveness of addiction — to reduce, flatten, and simplify what is more expansive, dimensional, and complex than can be easily understood. Too often, we choose this ease — the ease of reflexive reactions and instant opinions — over the difficult but nourishing work of consideration. As if the sensationalist headlines of the news media weren’t corrosive enough to the contemplative necessities of the human spirit, even our cultural commentary on such supreme temples of contemplation as literature and art has taken on the same predatory tendency to traffic in simplistic, often sadistic criticism that impoverishes the conversation and our collective conscience of nuance. But there is another way — an antidote that, by countering these poisonous narratives, enriches and perhaps even saves our interior lives. That antidote is what Rebecca Solnit, unparalleled high priestess of nuance and intelligent contemplation, explores in a piece titled “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable,” found in her subversive and sanctifying essay collection Men Explain Things To Me (public library). Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: David Butow)Solnit notes that much of our commentary on art and culture embodies a “kind of aggression against the slipperiness of the work and the ambiguities of the artist’s intent” and “a desire to make certain what is uncertain, to know what is unknowable, to turn the flight across the sky into the roast upon the plate, to classify and contain.” She points to the alternative — an alternative we frequently forget exits at all: There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself great art. This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, to invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both of which are irreducible and subjective. The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end. Solnit borrows her friend Chip Ward’s term “the tyranny of the quantifiable” and considers how we impoverish our imagination whenever we relinquish the unquantifiable for “systems of accounting that can’t count what matters”: What can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having. The tyranny of the quantifiable is partly the failure of language and discourse to describe more complex, subtle, and fluid phenomena, as well as the failure of those who shape opinions and make decisions to understand and value these slipperier things. In a sentiment that calls to mind bryologist and Native American storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful case for how the naming of things confers dignity upon their existence, Solnit adds: It is difficult, sometimes even impossible, to value what cannot be named or described, and so the task of naming and describing is an essential one in any revolt against the status quo of capitalism and consumerism. With an eye to Virginia Woolf as a writer who consistently defied this tendency to reduce and contain by modeling its opposite for generations, Solnit — a Woolf, perhaps the Woolf, of our time in myriad ways — reflects: My own task these past twenty years or so of living by words has been to try to find or make a language to describe the subtleties, the incalculables, the pleasures and meanings — impossible to categorize — at the heart of things. This delicate mesh of meanings and subtleties is what Woolf meant by the pattern hidden behind the cotton wool. This, too, was what Albert Einstein had in mind when he marveled that there lies “something deeply hidden” behind the nature of things. Solnit herself offers an elegant definition of this expansive counterpoint to the contraction of certitude: Mystery is the capacity of something to keep becoming, to go beyond, to be uncircumscribable, to contain more. Men Explain Things To Me is a sobering and ennobling read in its totality. Complement this particular portion with astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with mystery in the age of knowledge, then revisit Solnit on the annihilation of space and time, living with intelligent hope in dispiriting times, the rewards of walking, how maps can oppress and liberate, and why we read. donating = lovingBringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes me hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.13 Dec

Acts That Amplify: Ann Hamilton on Art, the Creative Value of Unproductive Time, and the Power of Not Knowing - “It is the task of the artist to lead the leaders by staying at the threshold.” The daily act of living is the act of chiseling destiny through choice — from the bedrock of all possible lives we could have had, we sculpt with our choices the one life we do have. Those choices can be difficult or easy, conscious or not, made for us or made by us, but whatever their nature, they require a leap into the unknown. “The job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist,” Dani Shapiro wrote of the central task of the creative life, “is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.” Because every life is an act of self-creation, such is the job of each one of us, whether or not we self-identify as artists. We choose whether to be blunted or honed when we choose whether to hide behind false certitudes — for any understanding that claims to be final is inherently fraudulent in its finality — or to thrust ourselves into the open air of not-knowing, naked and vulnerable, and wear our goosebumps like a constellation of tiny medals awarded us for living with courageous curiosity. Artist Ann Hamilton, a rare philosopher of forms, celebrates that choice and the vitalizing power of not-knowing as the mightiest fuel for creative work in an extraordinary essay titled “Making Not Knowing,” adapted from her 2005 commencement address at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ann HamiltonHamilton writes: One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by necessarily knowing where one is going. In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know. You may set out for New York but you may find yourself as I did in Ohio. You may set out to make a sculpture and find that time is your material. You may pick up a paint brush and find that your making is not on canvas or wood but in relations between people. You may set out to walk across the room but getting to what is on the other side might take ten years. You have to be open to all possibilities and to all routes — circuitous or otherwise. But not knowing, waiting and finding — though they may happen accidentally, aren’t accidents. They involve work and research. Not knowing isn’t ignorance. (Fear springs from ignorance.) Not knowing is a permissive and rigorous willingness to trust, leaving knowing in suspension, trusting in possibility without result, regarding as possible all manner of response. The responsibility of the artist … is the practice of recognizing. Ann Hamilton, Untitled (body object series, 1984–1993Much of that recognition, Hamilton argues, happens in moments that bear no outward sign of productivity and yet invigorate the interiority of the imagination. In a fine addition to history’s greatest testaments to the creative purpose of boredom, Hamilton echoes German philosopher Josef Pieper’s countercultural case for why leisure is the basis of culture and writes: Our culture has beheld with suspicion unproductive time, things not utilitarian, and daydreaming in general, but we live in a time when it is especially challenging to articulate the importance of experiences that don’t produce anything obvious, aren’t easily quantifiable, resist measurement, aren’t easily named, are categorically in-between. Simultaneously with the invisible work of the mind and spirit, animating the creative life is the tangible work of the hands, which have their own way of knowing. Hamilton writes: A life of making isn’t a series of shows, or projects, or productions, or things: it is an everyday practice. It is a practice of questions more than answers, of waiting to find what you need more often than knowing what you need to do. Waiting, like listening and meandering, is best when it is an active and not a passive state. Ann Hamilton and Meredith Monk, Songs of Ascension, 2007In a passage that calls to mind Willa Cather’s insight into the crucial difference between productivity and creativity, Hamilton considers the lacuna between making and doing — between what it means to make art and what art “does”: I asked my ten-year-old son, Emmett, what he thought art was for and he said, “Nothing.” He said, “It isn’t good for anything.” And as he saw my eyes roll back in my head, thinking, this is what you get from a kid whose parents are both artists, he quickly added: “Art just is.” He said “Art just is” with an assumption that, like breakfast on the table, it will always be there — a given of a culture. In my head, I could hear a voice saying in response to his confidence: “Yes, but…” Can I really believe … that all the collective acts of making carry a weight that can counter the acts of unmaking that accrue daily? For acts of making to be acts of resistance and tools of remembering, this given-ness has to be made and maintained, and to have room made for it. […] Every act of making matters. How we make matters. I like to remember, and remark with regularity, that the word “making” occupies seventeen pages in the Oxford English Dictionary, so there are multiple possibilities for a lifetime of making: make a cup, a conversation, a building, an institution, make memory, make peace, make a poem, a song, a drawing, a play; make a metaphor that changes, enlarges, or inverts the way we understand or see something. Make something to change your mind — acts that amplify. Ann Hamilton and Meredith Monk, Songs of Ascension, 2007With an eye to Emerson’s abiding and vitally disquieting wisdom — “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” — Hamilton considers the essential awakening into which art unsettles us: It is the task of the artist to make material form, to give it presence, to make it social; it is the task of the artist to lead the leaders by staying at the threshold; to be an unsettler in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our first public tricksters: “Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past.” Complement with Georgia O’Keeffe’s kindred-spirited advice on what it means to be an artist, Marina Abramović’s manifesto for the artist’s life, and Mary Oliver on the artist’s task and the central commitment of the creative life. donating = lovingBringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes me hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner. newsletter Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most unmissable reads. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.12 Dec

Bluedaze: Drilling Reform

Free Deia: A message from Josh Fox - Deia Schlosberg, a journalist, has been charged with three felony charges that carry a maximum penalty of 45 years for reporting on a climate change protest in Walhalla, North Dakota. The Arrest of Journalists and Filmmakers Covering the Dakota Pipeline Is a Threat to Democracy—and the Planet By Josh Fox Deia Schlosberg, Amy Goodman, and Shailene Woodley are among those who have been arrested while covering demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Please sign on to a letter of support for Deia: www.howtoletgomovie.com Photo of Deia Schlosberg at the 35th College Television Awards (Danny Moloshok / Invision) The post Free Deia: A message from Josh Fox appeared first on Texas Sharon's Bluedaze.14 Oct

REGISTER NOW for the Earth, Wind, & Fire Summit - It’s not too late to still get the discount rate of $55 for the Earth, Wind, & Fire Summit as we extended registration through Monday, Oct. 10. But it won’t be extended again….so hurryREGISTER NOW for the Earth, Wind, & Fire Summit before the price increases Oct. 10! Go to earthwindfiresummit.org and see the list of 15 terrific speakers at this event: Katherine Hayhoe – Energy/Climate Change One of “Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people” and internationally known climate scientist will discuss energy/climate change. Warren Lasher – The State of Texas Energy Learn from the director of long range planning for ERCOT where energy and transmission is headed in Texas. Dr. Brian Stump – DFW Earthquakes and Injection Wells Hear the results of this SMU seismologist’s findings regarding earthquake activity in Irving, Reno & Azle as it relates to oil & gas operations. Chris Foster – The First Texas City to Become 100% Renewable A senior manager from the City of Georgetown will discuss their city’s fossil free energy future. Larry Howe – Affordable Solar for Your Home Learn about affordable plans and considerations for home solar from a nonprofit expert. Ken Starcher – What’s Blowing in the Wind for Future Texas Power? Hear about new trends in wind from this West Texas A&M University energy institute expert. Dr. Anne Epstein – Fracking & Health Effects In Communities Find out about the latest studies that connect fracking to health effects from this medical professional. Dr. Richard Erdlac – The Potential for Geothermal in Texas A Permian Basin consultant will discuss the commercial and residential potential of geothermal. Jack Farley – Battery Storage for Renewables APEX Energy Consultant will discuss all forms of commercial battery storage for renewables. Dr. Zac Hildenbrand – Fracking and Water Contamination Hear his most recent peer-reviewed findings on the Barnett, Eagleford, and elsewhere re: fracking and water. Paul Westbrook – Energy Efficiency Considerations for Residential Use Learn new applications for energy efficiency in your home. Dr. Arjun Makhijani – A Future for Nuclear Power? Where is nuclear power headed and what about the storage of nuclear waste? Dr. Jay Olaguer – Fugitive Emissions from Oil & Gas Operations Methane, Benzene, and more….learn more about the latest data from this Houston Advanced Research Council expert about emissions from oil & gas operations in Texas. And there are even more speakers for you to hear from….go to the website and learn more! The post REGISTER NOW for the Earth, Wind, & Fire Summit appeared first on Texas Sharon's Bluedaze. 7 Oct

C3

'Fake Science' Conviction: U.S. Gov’t Physicist Gets 18 months In Prison For Data Fraud - A California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist is going to be incarcerated for faking data (no, it's not the infamous Livermore climate modeler Ben Santer). It's been widely documented that just like today's mainstream news media, science has gone...24 Dec

Extreme Drought: British Columbia's Vancouver Island Climate Change Record - It is unequivocally true that climate change, both mild and extreme, is always happening - paleoclimatology research evidence establishes that. There is no debate that climate change existed prior to humans' impact on Earth, and will continue regardless of whether...23 Dec

Climate Models Versus Cyclones & Hurricanes: More Titanic-Like Climate/Weather Prediction Failures - Fortunately, the Titanic only sunk once because engineers and navigators did not continue to make the same mistakes over and over. But "experts" and climate models provide a never-ending loop of sinking and re-floating of a wide assortment of climate...22 Dec

A New Film About Climate Change: Snowmen Species Threatened - Based on this film, it would appear the anti-Trumpers have a serious case against the new administration's view of catastrophic climate change on snowmen genocide. Luckily, we can now share this new video with all of skeptical comrades in hopes...20 Dec

A Massive Sea Level Rise: Due to Human CO2 or Trump Tsunami? - Source -- (alternative election map)18 Dec

UK's Climate Centre Confirms Obvious: Global Warming Is Decelerating Despite Highest CO2 Levels Ever - UK's Daily Mail published article that discusses global warming collapse, based on latest empirical evidence being reported by the Met Office Hadley Centre.....the global temperatures have dropped hugely since the 2015-2016 El Nino peak... The global temperature chart image on...11 Dec

Skeptics Win! Trump/GOP Landslide Provides Firm Foundation for Empirical Science & Policies To Triumph - The Trump election landslide and Republican down ticket success in 2016 indicates a strong possibly of a return to common sense and honesty in climate science, as well as a massive voter rejection of Democrats’ climate fear-mongering ... catastrophic global...15 Nov

The Problem With Experts: They're Almost Always Wrong - "Can't predict squat" has become a climate science known ... thus, we have the common climate expert lament: so many predictions, yet so many failures ... but climate science "experts" are not the only ones who litter the public terrain...12 Nov

Climate Change We Can All Believe In: Trump Reduces CCWs, SJWs & BLM To A Flood of Tears - For the community of catastrophic global warming skeptics, it is a very welcome and enjoyable 'climate change' schadenfreude with Trump's election.... Climate change warriors, social justice warriors, and those pushing the violent and hate-filled Black Lives Matter movement have been...11 Nov

Scroll Through 1,500 Climate, Energy, Environmental & Other Science 2016 Headlines - This is a compilation of recent science/policy headlines regarding climate, energy, environment, medical, health and other topics of science interest. Each headline is clickable, linking to the original source article. Currently, there are an approximate 1,500 science headlines. Use 'Ctrl...30 Sep

Carnicom Institute

Preview Chapter – Hacking the Skies - On the 40th Anniversary of the Movie “Network”, Presenting a Book Preview & Chapter Download from:Hacking the Skies – The Geoengineers and Their Media Gatekeepers by Hudson Ynez Free PDF Download of the Chapter “The Gatekeepers” – Click Here Also on Amazon (Note : Free Kindle app for Iphone, PC, Mac, & Android here) and […]16 Dec

The Magnitude of Morgellons - The Magnitude of Morgellons by Clifford E Carnicom Dec 06 2016 Note: Carnicom Institute is not offering any medical advice or diagnosis with the presentation of this information. CI is acting solely as an independent research entity that is providing the results of extended observation and analysis of unusual biological conditions that are evident. Each […] 6 Dec

Morgellons Research Project : Primary Symptom Survey Results - Morgellons Research Project : Phase I Primary Symptom Survey Results by Clifford E Carnicom Nov 05 2016 Note: Carnicom Institute is not offering any medical advice or diagnosis with the presentation of this information. CI is acting solely as an independent research entity that is providing the results of extended observation and analysis of unusual […] 5 Nov

Carscoops

Mansory Gives The Mercedes G-Wagen A Widebody Stance - As it is the Mercedes G-Class is one of the most imposing-looking SUVs on or off the road. But Mansory is out to increase its visual impact with this new widebody kit.Read more » 13:05

Future Cars: BMW’s 2018 6-Series GT Is A Better Looking Oddity - Automakers baffle us at times with unusual models that offer answers to questions no-one really asked. BMW’s 5-Series Gran Turismo is one of those cars; a cumbersome attempt at a more practical 5-Series. What was wrong with just offering the 5-Series wagon to all? Sigh… Read more » 11:28

Is The C6 Corvette ZR1 Worthy Of All The Hype? - When the C6 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 was released in 2009, it came standard with a supercharged 6.2-liter V8 delivering 638 hp, just 23 hp shy of the all-conquering Ferrari Enzo. For a non-exotic sports car with a Chevy badge, that was extraordinary.Read more » 10:02

Ho Ho Ho! Merry Christmas With 10 Bespoke Santa Rides - Everyone at Carscoops wishes you a very Merry Christmas and happy Holidays, whether you've been naughty or nice - but that's for Santa to judge, right?Read more » 09:12

Ken Block Hoons The 2017 Ford F-150 Raptor Through The Snow - If you’re looking for a rugged, go-anywhere pickup truck that looks the part and performs in the toughest of conditions, it’s hard to go past the 2017 Ford F-150 Raptor.Read more » 06:54

This Zombie Proof Defender Is One Of The Coolest Landies Ever - This impressive 1959 Land Rover 109 S2 is only one of around 15 cars that have been track-converted by Scottish Cuthbertson.Read more » 05:29

UK Wants 'Drive Safe' Mode To Cut Down On Mobile Phone Use - Similar to the 'Airplane Mode' found on smartphones, UK ministers and officials will argue for the introduction of software that will prevent drivers from being distracted by calls or text messages.Read more » 03:30

Next-Gen Dacia Duster On Track For 2017 Debut With 7-Seat Option - Despite being given a new face, additional tech features, and even a dual-clutch automatic transmission, the Dacia Duster SUV needs a replacement to stay competitive and relative in its segment. Read more » 01:30

Someone Spent Nearly $70,000 Customizing This Tesla Model X - If you want your personalize your Tesla Model X, Unplugged Performance has a few solutions you may want to consider.Read more » 24 Dec

Nothing Says Merry Christmas Like 14,000 LEDs On A Toyota Tundra - While many people around the world celebrate Christmas by adorning their houses and gardens in brightly colored and festive-themed lights, the crew from AV Tuning & Development decided to decorate a 2006 Toyota Tundra instead.Read more » 24 Dec

A Chemist in Langley

Electrifying BC’s transportation system, debunking the myths: Part II night charging of vehicles - In my last post I started the process of debunking some of the fallacies being put forward by the electric vehicle (EV) community as part of their program to encourage people to convert to EVs while simultaneously maintaining their NIMBY attitudes towards energy generation and grid strengthening activities. As I wrote in that post, my desire is not to pooh-pooh the transition to an electric-powered transportation system or slow the transition to electric vehicles, both of which I believe are imperative. Rather, my intention is to demonstrate why the transition will need to be accompanied by a ramping up of our electrical grid and electricity supply. In my last post I debunked a widely cited number used to minimize concerns about how much electricity it will take to electrify our transportation system. Today I want to address two more of their talking points. The ones I plan on addressing are: that the median commute is only around 7 kilometers, and a favourite trope that electric vehicles will not have an effect on the electric grid as all the vehicles can be re-charged during off-hours. These two points are closely linked as one feeds into the other. Specifically, the argument goes that since the median commute is only 7 kilometers EV owners will not need to charge their vehicles during the day. This will theoretically leave all the re-charging to the overnight hours when electricity demand is low and in doing so avoid the need to build up electrical capacity in the system. Commuting distances When the attack on me by the EV community began the proponents of EVs were particularly quick to send me to a report “Electrifying the BC Vehicle Fleet” by the Pacific Institute for Climate (PIC). It is a useful document that make a number of useful points but also makes a number of interesting choices in how it presents data. The biggest weakness (in my mind) is its reliance on a median number for all its subsequent assertions about energy use etc…. As they point out: In a recent report of BC driving statistics (Norton, 2008), 79% of commuters used a vehicle to get to work. The median one-way travel distance for all commuters in B.C in 2006 was only 6.5 km. This data also shows that a large portion of commuters (40.5%) travel less than 5 km to work, and that only 8% of commuters are travelling more than 30 km one way (Statistics Canada, 2006). Now anyone who knows math and statistics knows that the median is a useful indicator, but not one upon which you will want to do statistics. When you rely on a median you inadvertently make a lot of assumptions about the underlying population. You assume the population is statistically normal and that the population is not heavily skewed. Since the median is literally the middle value it tells us nothing of interest about the population it is describing. To take an inane example, since females make up 50.4% of the Canadian population the median Canadian would be female. Using that knowledge would anyone seriously suggest that we abandon all services for men? Of course not. When looking at the commuting population what we want to consider is whether there is a large percentage of that population that commutes a distance substantially greater than the median. As the PIC report points out, 8% of commuters travel more than 30 kilometers, one way to work. Now this might sound like an insignificant number until you realize what that that 8% represents. According to Stats Canada almost 80,000 British Columbians commute more that 35 km to work and another 28,000 commute between 30 and 35 kms to work. This means that in winter time over 100,000 electric vehicles commute greater than 30 kms to work. Given the range limitations on electric vehicles (presented in my previous blog post) that could mean more than 100,000 vehicles that will need to be plugged in during the day. That reads a bit differently than saying that the median commute is only 6.5 km doesn’t it. Night-time-only charging of vehicles will not be as prevalent as claimed One of the biggest selling points by the supporters of EVs is their claim that most of the vehicles will be charged overnight and therefore we don’t need to add electrical capacity. That is frankly one of the big the take-away messages from the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions study. That, as I will demonstrate below, is likely not going to be the case. As I present above, a significant constituency of commuters are going to exceed the threshold where they will feel comfortable only charging overnight. Much like a driver who doesn’t want to get caught with an empty tank, most commuters are not going to want to get caught with a dead battery in the middle of the road. That means if they even come close to using half their charge on the way to work they are going to want to top up their batteries while at work because if you only have a few kilowatts leeway you are not going to want to risk running out of charge on a cold evening if there is an accident on the Trans-Canada. Moreover, as a family man I can assure you that our car doesn’t just get parked when the commute to work is done. Rather there are activities to go to: soccer, piano, basketball, shopping, these are the things we do every night and if I have used my entire battery charge commuting to and from work then what will I have in reserve to drive the kids to their activities? Because most EV users have a second, non-EV car (80% of British households with an EV have a non-electric car as back-up. I’m still looking for Canadian stats) this is not currently much of an issue. They just use the gas guzzler for chores while using the EV for the work commute. But what happens when all the cars are electric? Then you will need to have a charged car available for you after school/work and if the drive to the soccer pitch is more than just a few kilometers that will mean having to charge your car during the day. In winter electric vehicles need to be plugged in to keep engine (and cabin) warm As I mentioned in my previous post, one of the big downsides of EVs in winter is the power needed to keep the engine and the cabin warm. Without an internal combustion engine pumping out excess heat, all heat will need to be electric, which will drain your batteries, that is why many sources suggest “preconditioning” your auto. Preconditioning your auto is a nice way of saying turn on the heat a half-hour early to get the engine and the cabin warm enough for use. The funny part of the article I cite is where they recommend you plug your car in at work to keep it warm. That pretty much rules out the idea that the car will not draw power from the grid during the day. Rather the car will be drawing power during the daily peak, and thus will put added strain on the electrical grid. Moreover, can you imagine the spike around 4 pm on winter workday when all the employees are preconditioning their cars in preparation for the commute home, right at the start of the evening peak in power use? Off-hour charging and its effect on our energy supply Finally, I want to address one of the most-misunderstood arguments about electric vehicles: that by charging them overnight we can reduce demands on our energy system. While that will be true in some cases, it ignores some pretty important points about British Columbia’s energy picture. As everyone who talks energy in BC knows the vast majority of our electricity comes from hydro-electric sources (mostly large reservoir dams). Now the good thing about a dam is that the energy is readily dispatchable, that is energy parlance for energy sources that can be immediately turned on when demand is high and readily turned off when demand slows down. In a dam if you want to get more power you just let water through the generator. Want to reduce the amount of power? Close a water supply. There are limitations, however, you can only generate as much power as you have water behind your dam. This issue came to a head in California during their recent drought when, due to an absence of water behind the dams, hydroelectric generation dropped by 50%. To bring it closer to home, in 2015 during our West Coast drought 12 of BC Hydro’s 31 hydroelectric facilities had to be shut down due to lack of water. Now consider the idea of off-peak electricity. Under current conditions, during the off-peak hours, like in the middle of the night, BC Hydro just keeps the sluice gates closed and imports cheap power from outside of the province. Were demand to ramp up overnight (due to charging of EVs) in BC, Alberta and Washington (remember we are in a fossil fuel-free world) then the excess flow from out-of-province would become less available and we would be forced to use our hydro to meet the demand. Ramp up enough demand overnight and we would start putting excess stress on the system, essentially we would use up all the available water behind the dams. Given a multi-year drought we could have a scenario where we simply did not have enough water to generate power. As such, absolute demand for power is an important consideration in the equation. Adding extra reservoirs and more run-of-the-river (as well as geothermal) would provide the cushion necessary to get us through the dry years. This brings us right back to where I started. Electric cars are a good thing but contrary to what the EV activists claim their mass implementation will have a significant effect on our electricity demand in BC. We will not be able to get away with charging only overnight, the increase in EV numbers will result in increased demand spikes that will require us to increase capacity, even if we could charging overnight will draw down the levels of our existing reservoirs and leave us vulnerable to drought. To conclude, when EV enthusiasts claim on one hand that we need to all move to EVs and on the other hand that we don’t need to build new dams or other power generating facilities you can explain to them why those are two mutually exclusive positions. In order to achieve a fossil fuel-free BC we need to ramp up the production of electricity in BC and we need to expand and strengthen our transmission system.The movement away from fossil fuels will need to be accompanied by a massive upgrade to our electrical grid and a substantial increase in electricity supply. Any activist who tells you otherwise is simply having a pipe dream. Filed under: Canadian Politics, Fossil Fuel Free Future, General Politics, Renewable Energy, Uncategorized 16 Dec

Electrifying BC’s transportation system, debunking the myths: Part I that BC Hydro Load Estimate - A couple weeks ago I was on the receiving end of a surprising amount of vitriol over an old post (Starting a Dialogue – Can we really get to a “fossil fuel-free BC”?) that I subsequently turned into a Huffington Post piece (Dispelling Some Myths About British Columbia’s Energy Picture). The negative comments were coming from the electric vehicle (EV) community (of all places). The members take exception to my suggestion that electrifying the BC transportation system would require the energy generated by 9 Site C Dam equivalents (I will admit that my math was slightly off and I provide a better estimate later in this post). It would appear that many of these people want us all to convert to EVs, but also want everyone to believe that doing so won’t affect our need for electricity. It has the benefit of allowing them to be holier-than-thou about EVs while fighting the projects that might otherwise supply the electricity needed to provide them with juice (like Site C). The intention of this blog post is to start the process of debunking the fallacies being put forward by these people. My desire is not to pooh, pooh the transition to an electric-powered transportation system or the transition to electric vehicles, both of which I believe are imperative. Rather, my intention in this post is to demonstrate why the transition will need to be accompanied by a ramping up of our electrical grid and electricity supply. To do so, I will need to debunk a number of the recurring myths about the electrification of the BC transport system that have been repeated to me by these EV and anti-development activists. In the next couple blog posts I intend to debunk a few of their talking points. The ones I currently plan on addressing are: their favourite BC Hydro load estimate for electric vehicles, their favourite commute distance estimates, and their favourite trope that electric vehicles will not have an effect on the electric grid as all the vehicles can be re-charged during off-hours. For issues of length I will only address the first point in this blog post but promise to finish my thoughts another day. To be clear, in doing so I am not “helping deniers slow GHG reductions” (as suggested by one gent) but rather will demonstrate why we need to invest heavily into our electrical system by building projects like Site C and as many geothermal, run-of-river and wind facilities as we can muster as well as the grid capacity to transfer all that energy so we can finally get off fossil fuels. Debunking BC Hydro’s 2008 Load Forecast for Electric Vehicles Now let’s start with the one number that has been sent my way more times than I would care to admit and has been used by everyone from the Pembina Institute to the President of the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association to justify not needing to upgrade our electrical system to electrify our transportation system. As reported by the Pembina institute: according to BC Hydro, if all drivers in B.C. switched to electric vehicles today, the increase in electricity consumption would be approximately 15%, or 9,000 GWh per year. Now hearing it was from BC Hydro, I expected a well-referenced number that had a detailed derivation. So imagine my surprise when I went looking and discovered that the actual calculation comes from a footnote in the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority (BC Hydro) 2008 Long-Term Acquisition Plan (2008 LTAP). The actual report says: If all passenger vehicles currently in B.C. switched to electric plug-in vehicles (EPV), the impact on BC Hydro’s load would be approximately 9,000 GWh11 per year. That little 11 brings us to the footnote: 11 – Assumptions used in calculation: 2.7 million licensed vehicles in B.C., average passenger vehicle use is 17,000 km/year, and EPVs use 0.2 kWh/km. Yes, you are reading that right; the entire case being made by our multi-billion dollar utility provider and cited by the EV stalwarts is less detailed than something you would expect in an essay produced by a first year science student…I don’t even know where to begin? The biggest mind-blower is the bemusing realization that a report from a utility provider completely ignores charging efficiency. Charging efficiency you ask? Remember that when you plug a charger into a wall not all the energy that comes out of the wall is stored in the battery. The efficiency of the transfer depends on the type and age of the battery and the efficiency of the energy transfer mechanism. According to the references I can find, the charging efficiency for a new Tesla is 82% and a Nissan Leaf has a charging efficiency of 70% – 80%. So if we assumed the average charging efficiency was 75% then that 9,000 GWh immediately jumps to 12,000 GWh and that is only the first of the many problems with the number. The next consideration not included in the load forecast is the loss of efficiency associated with temperature. You see EVs don’t work as well in the cold due to efficiency losses. The EV folk don’t like to mention that when they chat with you. Of note, I chose the most pro-EV source (the Union of Concerned Scientists or UCS) I could find for these stats because I know if I had chosen any other source I would have got roasted in the comments section. As the UCS article points out in extreme cold the range of electric vehicles can decrease to 60% of its warm-weather range. The best way to address this problem is to plug your vehicle in during the work-day, but that defeats the whole requirement that charging be done in off-hours (a ridiculous assumption that I will address in a follow-up post). When you talk about efficiency losses in the cold, you have to also accommodate for efficiency losses in the heat. The same UCS article notes that come hot weather electric vehicles also lose efficiency with vehicles dropping to about 80% efficiency as you go over 30 degrees C. Moreover, unlike the cold, in the heat you can’t plug in your car to cool the batteries down. Having lost efficiency to heat and cold we have another consideration that affects performance of an electric vehicle: keeping the occupants warm or cool. One of the benefits of an inefficient internal combustion engine is that it gives off a lot of heat; heat that can be used to keep the occupants of the auto, and ironically the engine, warm. My parents used to live in the East Kootenays and while heat is an energy wasting byproduct of chemical combustion, it sure helps make the drive endurable when it is -25 degree Celsius in an Invermere winter.The efficiency that electric vehicles show on the roads results in them losing that benefit and thus the battery has to be used to heat the vehicle and the engine. Going back to that UCS article you discover that the act of heating the engine and the cabin can triple the load on the batteries. To give an example of the loss of efficiency consider this report from Red River College in Manitoba They tested a Nissan Leaf in a Manitoba winter and discovered that it could only travel 60 km on a charge. Doing the math that brings us to 0.7 kWh/km. That is a long road from the 0.2 kWh/km used in the BC Hydro load forecast. This is why I view the 0.2 kWh/km number as simply a joke for vehicles being used in urban/cold environments. Only the most efficient, well-maintained vehicle in warm (but not too hot) temperatures manages 0.2 kWh/km. If we assume a less efficient engine say (0.3 kWh/km) the load number jumps up to 16.4 GWh. Look how easy that was; we have already moved from 1.75 Site C dams to 3.2 Site C dam equivalents and we have barely begun our analysis. I will now go back to the calculation from my old blog post. According to the Globe Foundation’s Endless Energy Report (I used in that post) British Columbia used 380 petajoules (105,555 GWh) of petroleum hydrocarbons in 2000 with 50% (or 52,775 GWh) used in gasoline; 24% (25,333 GWh) by diesel, 20% (21,111 GWh) by aviation fuel; and 6% (6,333 GWh) by heavy oil. I will take this moment to admit my old calculation (relying on Dr. Jacobson’s analysis) was off by a bit since better references suggest that gasoline engines have an energy efficiency of around 30% while diesel engines are around 45% with diesels having the capacity of reaching the 55%-63% efficiency range. Using these numbers the gasoline burned would be the equivalent to 15,832 GWh (3.1 Site C dams). [Note that number ignores the heating effect of fossil fuel combustion]. Hey look at that: 3.1 Site C dam equivalents looks a lot like the 3.2 Site C dams I calculated using the other approach. Two independent sets of calculations coming to the same end result? A good thing to see in any analysis. Now that 3.2 Site c dam equivalents is a 15 year-old analysis and BC has grown a bit in population in the last 15 years. If we factor in population growth in the last 15 years we move that up to 4 Site C dam equivalents. So the gasoline component of our analysis still has a huge electricity draw and that is only part of the picture because the biggest oversight in this entire exchange with the EV enthusiasts is that they ignore the fact that the BC Hydro load was for passenger vehicles only. If we are to electrify our transportation system we would need to include pick-up trucks, transport and work vans and all those other vehicles out on the road, not to mention all the other pats of our transportation system that don’t roll on four wheels. The load forecast made the rather broad assumption that we are converting all our cars, trucks and minivans to small, efficient electric vehicles drawing a measly 0.2 kWh/km. I love the idea of a Nissan Leaf but trades people are not going to exchange their work vans to travel in a Nissan Leaf or a Tesla. They need trucks that can carry tools, supplies and goods. A Nissan leaf operating at 0.3 kWh/km is not going to tow a trailer full of tools around town and there is no white panel van delivering groceries to market that can be replaced by an electrical vehicle running at 0.3 kWh/km. Moreover, no tradesperson is going to be able to depend on a vehicle that can only travel 60 km on a charge in winter. I can imagine that discussion: “sorry boss I can only fix one sink a day because my work vehicle can only go 60 kms before it needs to spend eight-hours on a charger”. A lot of plumbers are going to have issues with that suggestion. Even assuming we can convince all the trades-people/ shipping companies and others, dependent their vehicles for their livelihoods, to live with massive losses of efficiency that dropping diesel for electricity would represent we are still talking about the energy equivalent to 11,400 GWh (2.2 Site C Dams) for all that diesel. So now we are up to a 6.2 Site C dam equivalents. Admittedly a drop down from 9 Site C dam equivalents, but that difference will be swallowed up by the aviation and marine fuels (another few Site C dam equivalents) that I left out of my last analysis. Moreover, the entire set of calculations completely ignores the replacement for the natural gas needed for a fossil fuel-free BC (26% of British Columbia’s energy usage or about 83,000 GWh which, with efficiency gains represents another 4-5 more Site C dam equivalents or so). To conclude this post, yes moving to electric vehicles will reduce the total amount of energy used in BC but the BC Hydro load forecast relied on by Pembina and the EV enthusiasts is so completely out to lunch that it needs to be carefully re-calculated. To have major policy decisions in BC influenced by a back-of-the-envelope calculation that was essentially a throw-away footnote in an old report is not how we should be making decisions. BC Hydro needs to provide a realistic analysis of what it will take to decarbonize our energy system so we can have an informed energy discussion in our province. As I will point out in a later post, that includes ensuring we acknowledge that we will be be using a lot of that electricity during the day and that means building redundancy and extra capacity into our system to account for those anticipated loads. To be clear, this blog post doesn’t mean I agree wholeheartedly with Site C but I do acknowledge that any discussion of the need for Site C, and other similar power projects, needs to include all the data and not just the stuff that activists want us to hear. Filed under: Canadian Politics, Fossil Fuel Free Future, Renewable Energy, Uncategorized 16 Dec

Debunking some activist myths about the Trans Mountain Expansion Project - On Tuesday November 29th the Trudeau government approved the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMX). I am someone who has researched the topic extensively and have a very nuanced view on the project. I also have a strong desire that any discussion about the project be evidence-based. As such I tend to keep my ears open for erronious information and in the last 24 hours I have encountered a number of commonly-held myths that are being spread by anti-pipeline activists. Given my desire to see a pragmatic discussion of the topic I have decided it was time to present a quick post debunking some of the most common myths presented about the Trans-Mountain Pipeline. Without further ado let’s get started on the debunking. Myth: A Spill in Vancouver Harbour would pose catastrophic human health risk Now we all agree that a spill in the Inner Harbour of Vancouver would represent an ecological catastrophe. However, the activists are not satisfied with scare-mongering solely on the ecological sphere and have repeatedly talked about it as being a potential human health catastrophe as well. The basis for this myth is the City of Vancouver (CoV) May 27th Trans Mountain Expansion Proposal Summary of Evidence which, as I wrote about in two posts Questions about the City of Vancouver May 27th Trans-Mountain Expansion Proposal Summary of Evidence and More on that “Toxic Benzene Plume”. In those two posts I demonstrate that the modelling exercise presented in the CoV May 27th Summary of Evidence represents extremely questionable science. In the second post I described the modeling as both “troubling” and “an outlier”. For those of you not familiar with science-speak that is not something upon which you want to base your evidence-based policy. To explain in layman’s terms the modelers in the CoV May 27th Summary of Evidence used a sort of bait and switch through the use of a “pseudo-surrogate”. As I explained in my post: As an analogy, imagine you were tasked with compiling a survey of the animal population of Vancouver. To simplify the survey you didn’t ask your surveyors to try to identify the dogs by species instead asking them to group the dogs by size. For a subsequent risk analysis you then assigned the pit bull as a “surrogate” to describe the behaviour of all dogs smaller than 2 feet tall identified in your survey. Would you then feel comfortable with the outcome of that risk analysis knowing that the analysis treated every Chihuahua it counted as if it were a pit bull for risk purposes? If someone subsequently warned you to stay off the street for fear of being attacked by “surrogate pit bulls”, based on this analysis, would you stay off the street? Well that is what they did in this report with benzene. I concluded my post with this: In the academic community there is a simple rule: if a new study runs contrary to a body of research then it is incumbent on the authors of the study to explain the discrepancy. Sometimes the new study is a paradigm changer, but most of the time it represents an outlier of dubious use in decision-making. Unfortunately, the Levelton report does not explain why its results differ so dramatically from the scientific consensus. More troublingly, it does not even acknowledge the existence of the body of research out there, including an almost identical modelling study, that came to such startlingly differing conclusions. In the programming and modelling world there is an expression “garbage in, garbage out”. In the case of the CoV modelling the information they used as an input was not even close to appropriate for the analysis and as such the conclusion of the study is simply a fairy tail not even worthy of consideration. A bitumen spill in the Inner Harbour would be an ecological catastrophe, but would have very limited human health repercussions and certainly nothing like the repercussions suggested by the City of Vancouver and reported by the anti-pipeline activists. Myth: Multiple Oil “Spills” on the Existing Trans Mountain Pipeline. I have heard repeatedly in the last 24 hours that the Trans Mountain pipeline has had numerous spills and is therefore not safe. This myth takes advantage of the rather unusual definition of a “spill” used by the National Energy Board(NEB). To explain, under the NEB definition, a release that occurs into a spill containment facility is still reported as a “spill”. So imagine you had a wonky faucet in your bathroom that dripped into your sealed bathtub. WEre the faucet oil that could potentially be considered a “spill” under the NEB definition. An examination of the data shows that most of those “spills” (almost 70%) involved releases to containment facilities. The point of a “spill containment facility” is to contain releases before they hit the environment and as such these “spills” posed essentially zero risk to human health or the environment. They represented limited releases into systems specifically designed to contain such releases. As Kinder Morgan points out at their web site, in the last 35 years there have been three reportable spills from the Trans Mountain pipeline which escaped containment (were released into the environment (one the three being the responsibility of a third party the 2007 Westridge spill in Burnaby). Now let’s also remember that absent the TMX, future oil expansion will be along the rails. Now let’s compare those three spills to the three latest Canadian oil-transportation rail spills: Gogama, Galenas and Lac Megantic and ask ourselves how many deaths did the three Trans Mountain spills cause and how many deaths have oil-by-rail spills caused? There are NEB “spills” and there are spills and the two should not be confused. When an activists suggests that a spill occurred the first question they should be asked is : how much of the product escaped to the natural environment. If the answer is none, then that is not what you or I call a spill. Myth: Increased Risks to the Fraser River Last night while watching Global News I heard a native leader saying he was going to fight TMX because of the risk it poses to the Fraser River. At that point I wanted to scream into my television set that he was looking at the the problem exactly backwards. As I have detailed in my blog the TMX poses a substantially lower risk to the Fraser River than the alternative (oil-by-rail). The reson for this is that our national railway system was built before our national highway system and as a consequence the rail lines that will carry those oil-by-rail trains mostly run along the sides of rivers like the Fraser. The Trans Mountain, which was built after the Trans-Canada Highway, runs well-separated from the river for most of its route. A derailment of a rail-train has a much higher probability of ending up in the Fraser than a spill from the Trans Mountain and when you do the numbers you come to realize that oil-by-rail is much more dangerous to the Fraser River than the TMX would be. Additionally, remember that if the TMX is not built the Puget Sound refineries will still need crude oil and that crude oil will come by rail. That rail route runs along the headwaters of the Kootenay River and along the Columbia River. A spill on that route risks polluting those two shared river ecosystems as well. Think I’m overstating the risk? Well look what a happened adjacent to the Columbia River last June. It was only freak luck that the spill was caught before it hit the river. Think that was a freak event? According to the Guardian, including that incident, at least 26 oil trains have been involved in major fires or derailments during the past decade in the US and Canada. Finally if the TMX is not approved that rail traffic is going to increase substantially. The Puget Sound needs its oil and if it doesn’t come via pipeline, it will come via rail. Myth: Substantially Increased Risks to Orcas The latest argument against the Trans Mountain has been its purported added risk to the resident Orca population. Originally the argument went: increasing the number of tankers would increase the number of collisions with marine mammals and this could result in the extirpation of the resident Orca community. That trope was quickly demonstrated to simply represent a mis-reading of a single scientific article by someone apparently unaware of BC geography. The paper indicates that the Orcas are at high risk of collision in Johnstone Strait, which would be a problem if tankers were heading in that direction, which they are not. As for the increase in tanker traffic, the TMX tankers would represent an increase of 720 more ship movements in a Strait that sees 23,000 ship movements a year. This at a port that is engaged in a build-out that will expand ship traffic significantly. If acoustics are really a concern for the activists then rather than fighting the TMX, they should be protesting the Port of Vancouver’s expansion plans. Never a group to let a good idea go to waste, once the collision myth was busted the activists turned to the risks to the resident Orca population posed by an oil spill. This myth comes courtesy of the Raincoast Conservation Foundation who prepared a study “Report on Population Viability Analysis model investigations of threats to the Southern Resident Killer Whale population from Trans Mountain Expansion Project. The study represents a modelling exercise to examine the effect of the TMX on the resident Orcas. Now, much like the City of Vancouver modelling, I was a bit surprised by the conclusions of the analysis and so looked a bit deeper into the methodology and like the Vancouver Study I discovered another case of garbage in, garbage out. The model itself seems sound and the statistical methodology was excellent. The problem with the exercise was the data used to generate the results. In this case the authors chose to use a very interesting source for their spill occurrence frequency input value. Specifically they relied on a “report” called Foschi (2014). Except when I go to the references I see that Foschi 2014 is not a peer reviewed journal article but rather a blog post by an interested engineer. The blog post that serves as the critical data input for this modelling exercise claims to use values from the Trans Mountain TERMPOL 3.15 General Risk Analysis and Intended Methods of Reducing Risk (caution large file), but in that blog post he uses the wrong numbers. Specifically he relies on Table 34 (p83 of 454 on the pdf) to get his risk of oil spills. Now looking at the table the TERMPOL 3.15 authors presented several scenarios, a current (Case 0), a Case 1 (expansion with no mitigation) and then Case 1a and Case 1b (expansion with specific mitigations to reduce risk). Now the intention of the TEMPOL 3.15 report is to provide a description of the appropriate and necessary mitigation efforts associated with the increase in tanker traffic that would come with TMX. The conclusion of the report was that Trans Mountain make use of those mitigations. Those mitigations (including tugs etc….) were subsequently written into the TMX proposal as a requirement for the project. Given that the mitigation plans were incorporated into the TMX proposal would anyone care to guess which number Foschi 29014 uses for his analysis? Yes you guessed it, the “no mitigations applied” number (Case 1). As a consequence do you know which number was used by the modelers in the Raincoast Conservation Foundation Report? Yes you guessed it the “no mitigation applied” numbers. They use the very numbers that the authors of TEMPOL 3.15 suggest are not relevant (since the intention of the work is to describe the mitigations). This is essentially like looking at the difference between a no seatbelt and mandatory seatbelt scenario in car crashes. If someone argued that we should ban cars because accidents for passengers without seatbelts is too risky your response would not be to ban cars. Your response would be to point out that seatbelts are mandatory and that modern cars have air bags as well thus any analysis that ignores the existence of seatbelts and air bags is not terribly relevant. Well sadly for the Raincoast Conservation Foundation, their analysis metaphorically argues that people are driving around without access to seatbelts or air bags and therefore driving is too dangerous. The model, which relies on the inflated risk of incidents thus presents a similarly inflated risk of extirpation of the resident orca population. Sadly, no one with the expertise to catch this bait and switch had read the report prior to it going to the TMX Ministerial Panel. As a consequence the flawed inputs were used to generate necessarily flawed outputs and those flawed outputs from that modelling made it into the TMX Ministerial Panel final report. So I suppose the opponents of the TMX Ministerial Panel were correct, maybe we should have been allowed to cross-examine presentations because then someone might have had the opportunity to debunk this flawed modelling exercise before it was broadcast to the world and treated as correct. Looking at this short list of myths it is easily understandable why so many people are fighting the Trans Mountain pipeline. Given the amount of mis-information that is being spread over multiple media platforms it is simply impossible for the common Vancouverite to get a grip on the real risks of the project. Like I’ve said in this post garbage in, garbage out. Public sentiment is being swayed because the truth is being flooded out by the myths. To conclude this post, I want to be clear, I am not saying that the project must go forward. As I note in my previous post, I have serious reservations about the project, However, I believe we need a fair debate on the topic and fair debates must rely on demonstrably sound evidence and not the scare-mongering that I have heard blasted across my social media feeds.Filed under: Canadian Politics, Pipelines, Trans Mountain, Uncategorized 30 Nov

On the Omnibus Changes to the BC Contaminated Sites Regulation - I am going to break one of my rules at my blog today and write briefly about work that is directly in my area of professional practice. My intention in this short piece is to explain in simple language some changes that are coming in the contaminated sites regime in British Columbia. The reason I am breaking my rule is that I have seen misinformation being spread by various groups (the one that set me off was from BC Green Party). It is clear that someone who actually knows what they is talking about needs to step in to ensure that this misinformation does not remain unchallenged. To provide some background, the Contaminated Sites Regulation (CSR) of the Environmental Management Act (EMA) provides the primary regulatory means by which the government of British Columbia regulates the investigation and remediation of contaminated sites in British Columbia. The CSR was enacted in 1996 and at that time the CSR included a number of Schedules that provide the soil (Schedule 4, Schedule 5 and Schedule 10), groundwater (Schedule 6 and Schedule 10) , vapour (Schedule 11 added in 2008) and sediment (Schedule 9 added in 2004) standards applicable under the CSR. For the most part (excepting vapours and sediments) the standards presented in these schedules were all developed in the years leading up to the implementation of the CSR in 1996. The standards, where possible at the time, were based on values called toxicity reference values (TRVs) which establish safe exposure concentrations based on toxicity testing. The derivation of these TRVs and how they are used in the assessment of risk (as well as the sources for preferred TRVs for risk assessment) are detailed in Technical Guidance on Contaminated Sites Document #7. The Stage 10 Amendments to the CSR also known as the Omnibus amendments (the Omnibus changes) provides the first comprehensive update of the standards in the CSR since 1996. As readers can imagine, science has advanced a bit since 1996. A lot of toxicological research has been done and as a consequence we know a lot more today about numerous chemical than we did in 1996. The Omnibus is an attempt to bring our regulatory regime up to 2016 standards. As part of the exercise the British Columbia Ministry of Environment re-calculated every regulatory standard for every chemical currently regulated under the CSR using the best available science from 2016 (not 1996). The TRVs used in the work are derived from Health Canada and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) values including the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS). We depend on IRIS because the US EPA has been mandated by the US government to maintain the most recent TRVs and they are typically much more recent that the Health Canada values which are not updated as regularly. So let’s be clear here, the point of the Omnibus is to modernize our regulatory standards to scientifically defensible 2016 values. This appears to be a good thing in my mind. For those questioning the science behind the work;, since 1996 it has become clear that the standards needed to be updated and as a consequence the Ministry of Environment (BCMOE) sought insight from an independent scientific body called the Science Advisory Board for Contaminated Sites in British Columbia (SAB). The SAB was “established as a non-profit foundation under the Societies Act of British Columbia to develop independent science-based tools of benefit to professionals working in contaminated sites management in British Columbia”. While partially funded by the BC Ministry of Environment (BCMOE) it is independent of government and provides a science-based approach to contaminated sites management in British Columbia. In 2010 the SAB provided a review of how the soil standards were derived and provided suggestions for how future standards be developed. So let’s look at some of the claims made by the Green Party. Their biggest complaint is that the standards became less protective of human and ecological health. Well the truth is that in some cases acceptable concentrations went up, in others it went down. As an example, the acceptable concentration of benzene in soil at a residential property (with a drinking water use water standard) went down but the acceptable concentration of toluene in that same soil went up. The basis of these changes was the best available science, not the whims of the Minster of Environment. In addition, 123 chemicals that were not previously regulated are now regulated. So before the Omnibus perfluorinated compounds (PFOS) were not regulated but thanks to the Omnibus they will be. I’m not sure in what world regulating compounds that were previously not regulated makes the regulations “more lax” Another complaint by the Green Party is that the process was secretive and there was insufficient consultation. The BCMOE maintains a “Contaminated Sites e-Link Mailing List” (CS e-Link) that emails subscribers regular updates on the comings and goings of the field of the contaminated sites management. Anyone can register for CS e-Link and a casual look at the archive shows that there have been literally dozens of updates provided for interested parties on the Omnibus changes. The CS e-Link archive includes details on how the standards were derived and included multiple opportunities for input and feedback from interested parties. It includes live links to how the standards were derived and all the opportunities interested parties (like the Green Party) had to provide input. It is absolutely laughable to read a statement like: What is also lacking from the Ministry is evidence that the changes are science-based; I call on the Minister to provide independent and peer-reviewed scientific evidence that justifies the increases to allowable limits of contaminants There is ample evidence that the work was science-based, there was ample opportunity for the Green Party technical specialists to provide feedback on the proposed changes and had they actually had anyone paying attention there would have been ample opportunity for the BC Greens to have sought face-to-face meetings on the topic. As the BC Liberal caucus points out dozens of organizations and groups had face-to-face meetings with the BCMOE on the topic. Simply put all the information was there, the Greens simply didn’t appear to care enough about the topic at the time. The best analogy I can think of is that the Green Party (and the other activists) is acting like someone showing up at the end of the fourth quarter of a BC Lions playoff football game and claiming that no one knew it was happening and that they should re-start the game from the beginning. Every football fan in BC knew it was happening and the real fans were in the stands before the game started. Similarly every organization actually interested in the field of contaminated sites knew this was coming and were given the opportunity to provide feedback over the course of the exercise. To conclude lets summarize. Anyone with any interest in the topic has known that the Omnibus changes were underway. The BCMOE has been engaged in a wide-ranging public consultation process for the last couple years and provided ample opportunity for interested parties to provide input on the process. The changes to the regulation are demonstrably science-based. They represent the best science available and contrary to what the Green claim anyone with an undergraduate science degree should be able to reconstruct every standard using the information provided by the Ministry. The standards did not get more lax, rather the standards were modernized to reflect the best available science in the field of toxicology. Some standards went up, some standards went down and 123 compounds that were previously not regulated will be regulated under the Omnibus changes. I’m not sure in what world regulating compounds that were previously not regulated makes the regulations “more lax” To conclude I want to make a clear statement. The suggestion by the Green candidate Dan Hines that the changes are “solely for the benefit of company profits” is demonstrably wrong and in my mind represents a libel against the hard-working and scrupulously ethical employees of the BCMOE. I have worked with these people for the last 16 years and they are some of the hardest-working and I can’t say it enough scrupulously ethical public servants I have ever encountered. I feel that the Green Party and Mr. Hines should publicly apologize to the BCMOE staff for making (Mr Hines) and broadcasting (Green Party) such an incredibly evil and unfounded slur against these hard-working public servants.Filed under: Uncategorized 24 Nov

On the trade-offs, real costs and human consequences of fighting climate change - There is an incredibly common misperception about the fight against climate change that I find intensely frustrating. The misperception is that fighting climate change has to be seen as easy to be sold to the public and is inherently good for everyone involved. This misperception is so acute that it has its own meme. This meme really took off with the famous Joel Pett cartoon that had a lecturer at a “climate summit” who says: “what if it’s just a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?” The meme died down for a while but since 2016 is a COP year (COP22) it is making the rounds again. I saw it first last week with another tweet making the rounds that said there aren’t really any downsides – even if climate change wasn’t real – acting as though it is can’t hurt us And this morning I saw it again this time Dr. Kate Marvel a respected climate scientist who tweeted: If you hate climate scientists, try aggressively cutting CO2 emissions. We’ll feel so silly when climate change isn’t that bad, trust me!” All these comments have one thing in common, they appear to completely miss the fact that fighting climate change involves trade-offs, lost opportunity costs and negative consequences for a lot of people. While I am a Lukewarmer, I am from the school of thought who accept that climate change is happening and will potentially have devastating consequences. My major difference with the alarmists is that I believe that climate sensitivity is on the lower end of the IPCC consensus scale and thus that we still have time, if we act now, to avoid the worst of those consequences. I’m not saying climate change is harmless (the common misconception spread about Lukewarmers) but rather that it will take more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, than many of the alarmists claim, to achieve some of the same levels of expected negative outcomes. Part of the process of building a consensus to fight climate change involves dealing with people who may be more skeptical about the topic. Some of these people are less informed, while others are far more qualified than myself and have legitimate scientific doubt about the science of climate change. Some disagree with the way the GCMs model the planet, noting the discrepancy between model outputs and actual observations; while others feel that natural feedbacks will buffer, not enhance, warming in the system. These are legitimate concerns. As a result, we need to make a good case for reducing our emissions and to put it simply, the argument that reducing global carbon dioxide concentrations is good, for its own sake, is not one that should be used because it does not hold any water. Let me say this again because I know that I will get flack on both sides for this post. It is my personal belief that fighting climate change is a necessary endeavour, but the fight to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions is not going to be cheap, it is not going to be easy and the transition to a global, fossil fuel-free energy system will hurt a lot of people. Specifically, the transition to a fossil fuel-free future will cost a lot of people their livelihoods; will suppress economic growth in many parts of the world; and will result in the premature death and continued misery for millions worldwide. From a pragmatic perspective, I can only believe that those millions of premature deaths will be offset by reduced suffering and death for billions of others, but to pretend that this pain will not happen can make climate activists appear both out of touch and insincere. So you ask what going to cause all these deaths? Energy poverty and increased costs for food and energy. Let’s start with a simple truth: energy poverty is a killer. There are 1.2 billion people in the world living in energy poverty and each year 4.3 million people a year die from preventable indoor air pollution directly resulting from that energy poverty. Absent the risk of climate change the world would be building those people energy systems based on clean coal and natural gas technologies. These are established technologies that are readily available and both cheap and easy to build. Absent climate change the World Bank wouldn’t think twice about providing financial aid to build coal power plants, but in our real world, with climate change, it pretty much refuses to support such projects except in “rare circumstances”. Putting coal aside, clean burning natural gas plants would be an obvious solution to global energy poverty in a non-climate change world. Realistically, for some countries low-GHG LNG actually represents a pretty reasonable compromise to reduce energy poverty even in a world with climate change. But because of climate change concerns in BC the government has to mediate battles over whether we should supply some of the planet’s lowest-GHG LNG to the world. In order to fight climate change, hundreds of millions of people who could be pulled out of energy poverty using fossil fuels, will not be; and they will suffer the health consequences. It is clear, from reading their reports that the various world financing organizations have agonized over the decision to leave millions behind in the fight against climate change but behind they are leaving them. Recognize, the face of the fight against climate change is not some well-fed, well-clothed university graduate blockading a pipeline. It is a young girl living in a house heated by burning cow dung; coughing out her lungs and unable to get to a hospital while living in a community where they can’t even guarantee that the hospital will have enough electricity to treat her effectively. Besides energy poverty, the fight against climate change has also resulted in some horrible policy decisions that have had global human health and ecosystem effects. I can’t think of one that is worse than the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) otherwise known as the ethanol mandate which has resulted in increased food prices and as a consequence has left many hungry. Frankly, the entire field of biofuels (one I have covered quite thoroughly) serves as an object lesson about how the best of intentions can have the worst end results. Our drive for biofuels has left human and ecological devastation in its wake and it still continues to this day. Absent the threat of climate change those policies would never have been put in place and those negative consequences would not have happened. From a domestic perspective, absent the threat of climate change do you think there would be a chance Quebec refineries would be importing oil from such human rights hotspots as Algeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria? Would the transportation of ethical Canadian oil not be happening today if not for the threat of climate change? Absent the threat of climate change Canada would be supplying developing countries with LNG, which I believe we should be doing anyways because by my climate math having Malaysians burning low-carbon Canadian LNG is much better than their burning higher GHG LNG from elsewhere or even worse, using coal to lift their population out of poverty. Besides the human health and ecological costs associated with fighting climate change there are also the opportunity costs. Alberta is completely right to shut down its coal plants as quickly as possible, but those closures are going to cost a lot of money. That is money that would not otherwise have been spent and could have been spent on anything from basic research at universities to finding homeless families a place to call home. Instead those resources are going to shutter otherwise fully functional power plants. Good for the fight against climate change? Yes. Good for reducing the number of homeless in Calgary? Not so much. Going back to the point of this post. In order to create good policy you need to consider the benefits and consequences of the policy action. In the climate change debate the activists keep trying to pretend that there are only benefits while disguising or ignoring the consequences and costs. Fighting climate change is a good cause and one worthy of our attention but the only way to fight it effectively is to lay out the case for it as honestly as possible. If the election of Donald Trump has taught us one thing, it is that telling our population that all is good, when you know otherwise in your heart, is the best way to lose the hearts and minds of the public. We need to have a serious discussion about climate change; one that lays out the challenges and the consequences of our actions. Only by doing so can we win a mandate for change. Now I ask myself: have I seen a serious case made for a reasonable approach to fight climate change? one that considers and highlights the good and the bad? As a policy wonk my answer is yes. They did it in Alberta not too long ago with their Climate Leadership Plan. But what about in the rest of Canada? There my answer is less positive. To date the only approaches I have seen from the climate activists in BC involve hectoring people on one side, and pretending it will be easy on the other. The Council of Canadians assure me that a “100% clean economy is 100% possible by 2050” and it will be both easy and will make us money while creating jobs. My response is simply that we will not be getting to 100% wind, water and sunlight by 2050 while creating millions of jobs and creating no economic hardship. I will close this post by reiterating a simple point. The fight against climate change is going to be long, slow, hard and expensive. It is going to take honest discussion and not trite statements of hope from high-flying celebrities who demand we do one thing while they do another. It is going to take political will and politicians willing to spend political capital to make it happen. The only way to convince those politicians to spend that political capital is to look at all the data and then to make a case that demonstrates that the benefits outweigh the costs and the projected future benefits far outweigh the real human and ecological costs. Trying to argue that it will be cheap and easy with no downside is both intellectually wrong and self-defeating. Trying to claim that we would do it anyways “even if climate change wasn’t real” is simply silly.Filed under: Uncategorized 18 Nov

On Trump voters, climate change and lessons learned from the 2016 US election - Last week Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. This came as a surprise to a lot of the media and to those of us who live in our media bunkers on the West and East coasts but was not as much of a surprise to the people who live in the “flyover states” and the “rust belt”. In retrospect, the pundits explain, it should have been obvious. The liberals on the East and West coasts were out-voted (technically out electoral voted) by the people they seldom deign to acknowledge or recognize: the “great unwashed” who form the backbone of the country, growing its food, hewing its wood and feeding its industry. Well as a British Columbian and a pragmatic environmentalist I see some lessons to be learned from the Trump victory. In this blog post I will consider some of these lessons starting with the climate change debate, moving to the upcoming BC election and finally considering a local example of a party being out of touch with the electorate. Coincidental to Trump’s election COP22 (The twenty-second session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 22) and the twelfth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 12)) got underway last week. At COP 22 the leaders of the world climate change community are debating how to address our ever-shrinking global carbon budget. Since COP21 there has been a lot of global posturing, a number of countries has submitted their national NDCs and global carbon emissions have continued to increase, admittedly at a lower rate than in previous years. You may ask: but what does this have to do with the US Election? My answer is that like in the US election, we western democracies have been navel-gazing so intently that we have missed the big issue: North American and Europe don’t represent the majority of world greenhouse gas emissions anymore. Like the coastal liberals in the US election; we think we are the big kids on the block but are now revealed to be minor contributors. As a EU report points out: The top 4 emitting countries/regions, which together account for almost two thirds (61%) of the total global CO2 emissions are China (30%), the United States (15%), the European Union (EU-28) (10%) and India (6.5%). Look at those numbers again, the US and Europe only represent 25% of global CO2 emissions. Canada meanwhile is down at the 1.6% zone. While we have a moral duty to lead by example and cut our emissions we also need to recognize that our actions alone will not make a whit of difference if we can’t get the rest of the world onside. Consider China; I keep hearing how China is weaning itself off coal and yet according to a report out last week: in a new five-year plan for electricity released Monday, the [Chinese] National Energy Administration said it would raise coal-fired power capacity from around 900 gigawatts last year to as high as 1,100 gigawatts by 2020. The roughly 200-gigawatt increase alone is more than the total power capacity of Canada. By comparison, the agency said it would increase non-fossil fuel sources from about 12% to 15% of the country’s energy mix over the same period. Coal would still make up about 55% of the electricity mix by 2020, down from around two-thirds in recent years. What this tells us is that we can spend billions in Canada to reduce our carbon footprint but we western elites had better pay attention to those flyover continents because that is where the real action is at. As I pointed out in a previous post, 2.7 billion humans in Africa and Southeast Asia live in energy poverty. Unless we can help them with access to cheap renewable energy sources, nuclear energy, LNG (as a bridge fuel) and grid upgrades; they will go to the easiest and most plentiful base-load energy source out there: coal. If they do that, then all the emission–control work we do in Canada won’t help a bit. We have to remember that we live on a single planet and while the Western elites continue to ignore these poor countries, the planetary atmosphere does not. The best efforts of Canadians can be erased with the flick of a pen in China so we have to recognize that from a global emission perspective maybe the best use of our limited dollars is in foreign energy investment and helping our poorer neighbours with access to lower (or zero) carbon energy sources. My environmental friends who insist that this may risk our meeting our Paris Agreement promises are missing the point. If we meet our Paris Agreement commitments but allow those gains to be overwhelmed elsewhere then we have simply wasted our money. From a provincial election perspective the Trump victory should come as a serious worry to our friends in the NDP. Before the last election it was readily accepted in the pages of the Tyee, the Georgia Strait and other progressive publications that the Christy Clark government was going to be soundly defeated. Instead she won a resounding victory. The basis of that victory was a lack of support for the NDP in the center and north of the province. Frankly the 2013 BC election map looks a lot like the 2016 US election map. The NDP won on the coast and in the enclaves of Vancouver, Burnaby and Vancouver Island and took a thumping in the communities dependent on natural resource jobs and in the “suburbs” south of the Fraser. Flip-flopping on pipelines, and other topics important to interior resource communities, left the NDP out of luck in the interior and the north and gave the election to the Liberals. Now never a group to learn from past mistakes, the NDP continues to ignore the issues that really matter to people outside of their favoured enclaves north of the Fraser and along the BC Ferry routes. Rather it looks like the NDP is doubling-down on those past mistakes with their stated policies on the Trans-Mountain expansion, Site C and other topics that are critical to interior voters. Instead of broadening their appeal progressive factions in the NDP caucus continue to narrow it and that does not bode well for their election prospects in 2017. Christy Clark doesn’t even need to appeal to the negative populism the way that Trump did in the US election either, because the NDP caucus has been doing her job for her. By ignoring and/or insulting potential voter blocks across the province they are handing her ridings that should really be competitive. Now for a simple example of where the NDP is getting things wrong and lets have a discussion about Lower Mainland transit priorities (sorry my international friends, I will try to make this quick and relevant to non-Lower Mainland dwellers). There are few topics that will get a Langley taxpayer more upset about the NDP priorities than listening to David Eby demand a subway or Skytrain along the Broadway corridor. To explain to our non-local readers, we have people in Vancouver whining because they get passed by a bus going to UBC and will have to wait a whole 4 minutes for the next one (sometimes the buses can be 6 minutes apart…the horror!!!). I, meanwhile, live in a community where if you miss the bus (in the approximately 25% of the community served by buses) then it will often be an hour or more before the next one shows up. Now this wouldn’t be an issue if it weren’t for the fact that the voters south of the Fraser, without bus service, don’t see a transit discount on their tax forms. We pay essentially the same amount for our non-existent transit service as the people in Vancouver pay for their frequent service. To go even more micro into this topic consider that we have a major commercial/warehousing district (Gloucester Industrial Estates) that serves as a hub for literally thousands of lower paid commercial and warehousing jobs (the type of people who would typically rely on transit) but Gloucester is completely unserviced by transit. The only reason Gloucester exists is because all those warehousing facilities were chased out of Vancouver proper when they gentrified Yaletown, False Creek etc.. and put in all those condos. The warehouses in Langley literally feed Vancouver. Trucks from these warehouses cross the Port Mann Bridge daily to supply their stores with supplies. Meanwhile the only thing we hear about that bridge from Vancouverites is that it was too expensive even though it has has eliminated a major bottleneck in our food and services transportation system in the lower mainland. As for Gloucester, I have talked to business owners who simply will not hire people who don’t own cars because it is too hard to ensure their workers get to their jobs absent transit. If you really want to get drivers off the road and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, setting up a bus service to Gloucester will do just that, while providing access to good jobs for the young people in our community. But have we ever heard a single NDP member pushing for better transit outside of their urban enclaves? Not to my memory. Instead we hear more complaints about the Port Mann, demands for more service in areas with already excellent service and more tax bills being paid by people who cannot even access the system their tax dollars pay for. The old adage goes that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it and in BC, Canada and the world we continue to ignore the lessons of history. In Canadian political history we are reminded former Prime Minister Joe Clark who lost his job because he miscounted how many members he had in parliament. Well Donald Trump won the presidency because the Democrats didn’t bother to count how many people live in the US heartland and so ignored the issues that were most important to those voters. Globally, the only way we are to going to win our fight against climate change is if we do a head count and recognize that huge number of people are living in energy poverty. Unless we can find a low-carbon way to advance their energy needs they will erase all our efforts and climate change is an inevitability. As for Provincially, until the NDP recognizes that voters south of the Fraser and north and east of Coquitlam mean something then we will have another “surprise” election result and another Liberal majority. Not that I will mind as I am one of those people who is sick of having my issues ignored by the provincial NDP.Filed under: Canadian Politics, Climate Change, Climate Change Politics, General Politics, Uncategorized 14 Nov

On tanker bans, oil spill response, coastal barges and government doing its job - For the last week my twitter feed has been filled with discussions about the grounding of the Nathan E Stewart and the ensuing diesel spill into the fragile ecosystem of Athlone Island. Now the activist community, never willing to let a tragedy go to waste, has jumped on this to reinforce their demand for a renewed tanker ban off the West Coast. To add a bit of flavour to their demands, some have included a demand that the tanker ban include a ban on barge traffic. As I have pointed out numerous times, a tanker ban would have had no effect on this spill as barges aren’t covered. As for the barge ban, well more on that below. Rather than harping on those topics, however, I am going to use the majority of this blog post to make a plea for a reasonable discussion about our spill response capabilities in the central coast. Before I do that let’s talk about barge bans. As I have had to point out numerous times on Twitter; Bella Bella is a coastal community with no road links to the mainland. You get there by air or by sea. As pointed out by Tom Fletcher Bella Bella gets its electricity from the former Ocean Falls pulp and paper mill backed up by diesel generators. Now where do those generators get their diesel from? You guessed it: coastal fuel barges. The same means by which the vehicles in the community get their refined gasoline and the cooking stoves get their naphtha. If one were to ban fuel barges the community would almost immediately cease to be tenable. The dock would close as the fishing/crabbing ships would not have any fuel to operate. The airport would close because the aviation fuel used at the airport comes via tanker. The back-up generators would have no fuel so come winter-time when the power line to Ocean Falls went down there would be no power. Heck even the chainsaws most people use to cut firewood would lack the fuel to allow them to operate. Now I, more than most, understand the risk associated with coastal barges running up and down our coastline. I highlighted the problem almost two years ago in my blog when I wrote: From a risk perspective, we have been trained to fear oil tankers even though they are highly regulated and have strict maintenance/piloting/tugboat requirements. Meanwhile, we are essentially oblivious to all those container ships travelling without tugs through our “narrow and dangerous” straits. Even more frightening are all those barges being towed along the coast. Few people ask how coastal BC communities get their fuel supplies? Well most are supplied by barges towed to their destinations by tugs. According to the spill response study 48 billion liters a year of fuels are transported by barge in coastal BC. Much of this material is considered “non-persistent” as it represents refined fuels that do not last as long in the environment once spilled. Lack of persistence, does not, however, mean risk-free. That lack of persistence must be tempered by the fact that these barges operate in inshore waters close to shore, so spills are more likely to migrate to land and cause damage to marine and coastal ecosystems. For volume comparisons, the biggest barges can carry 8 to 21 million liters of fuel. Now that I’ve addressed the ridiculousness of a barge ban let’s get to the meat of this issue: oil spill response times. The biggest complaint about this spill has been the relatively slow response time. West Coast Marine Response Corporation (WCMRC) is the private company with the responsibility to address oil spills on the BC Coast. Following the sinking, WCMRC sent a large team from their nearest response base (Prince Rupert) as well as a local contractors from a closer base in Shearwater (three miles from Bella Bella). Now Prince Rupert is over 300 kms north of Bella Bella and the crew from Shearwater simply lacked the equipment to mount a full-on oil spill response for a spill of that volume. The result was a loss of significant volumes of diesel from the tug’s onboard fuel supplies. Now that the WCMRC crew is on hand they are working to off-load as much of that diesel as is possible and the spill is mostly contained, but in the meantime it is likely that a local clam fishery has been damaged and there are clear indications of ecological damage. The question that is being asked is: why the relatively slow response? The simply answer is geography. The British Columbia coastline is immense, including inlets and islands it exceeds 25,000 kilometers. Now consider that spill response times assume that response ships will travel at 6 knots (approximately 11 km/hr) and you see the challenge faced by first responders. According to the 2013 West Coast Spill Response Study the current goal for a spill of over 2500 tonnes in that part of the coast is that a response team be on hand within 72 hours. 72 hours is a long time to wait when it comes to containing an oil spill and a lot of people have demanded that we do better, but no one has explained how that might happen. The problem that many of the armchair quarterbacks out there don’t seem to understand is that oil spill response is an expensive affair. You need to stockpile expensive material in caches available for the first responders and then you need crews and equipment on standby for when the inevitable spill occurs. Right now that funding comes entirely from industry under a “polluter pays principle” where the operators of commercial ships pay into a fund to allow for the operation of WCMRC. I have said again and again, you only get the quality of service that you are willing to pay for; and in spill response this 72 hour response time is what people have been willing to pay for. You want a faster response? Then under the current system that means paying for it in the form of higher fuel and food prices in coastal communities. Ultimately a “world class oil spill response” is only going to happen in the central coast if the money is there. With the exception of immediately after spills like the Nathan E Stewart, the coastal communities have not been clamoring to pay for increased spill response (and the ensuing increase in costs of living). As for the world class oil spill response associated with the pipelines, those resources are going to go where the models suggest the ships are going to travel. So if the Kinder Morgan Trans-Mountain expansion occurs that would be the south coast while the Northern Gateway would result in a drive to ensure adequate supplies in the north coast. None of these plans will likely do anything about the central coast because the volume of transport is simply not there. The only way the central coast sees improved oil spill response is if one of our levels of government decides to ante up, because a polluter pays system will never have enough money to provide a world class oil spill response over the entire central coast. The coastline is too long, the population centers too dispersed and the volumes transported are not sufficient to pay for a better service. When I started writing this blog post I was of the opinion that this was a chicken and egg situation. You aren’t going to get a world-class oil spill response until you increase the shipping volume and you aren’t going to increase shipping volume until one or more of these major projects is approved. Now this is very true for the north and south coasts, but in my research I have come to recognize that, as suggested above, neither scenario addresses the central coast and that is where I think it is time for our two senior levels of government to get involved. The movement of vessels in Canada’s inshore waters is regulated by Transport Canada and as a consequence I think that both the Feds and the Province should be kicking in to address the holes in the current system. While I strongly approve of the concept of polluter pays I think that this cannot be the only funding mechanism for oil spill response on the west coast. Think of this from a more familiar perspective. We don’t demand that shop-keepers in dangerous neighbourhoods pay for their own policing nor do we expect individual shop-owners to pay for on-call fire-fighting crews. Rather we accept that as communities, provinces and a country that we share the burden. The cost of maintaining oil spill response capabilities in the central coast should not be placed solely on the consumers in those communities (through pass-on charges associated with WCMRC fees). Rather, those fees should be supplemented by government fees to address shortfalls in the central coast. The best analogy I can think of is the BC Ferries system. BC Ferries, if it relied only on user fees, would operate solely on the short southern coastal routes. However, our government recognizes the need for its service on lesser-traveled routes and provides supplemental funds to cover operational costs. In a similar vein, I would suggest that our provincial and federal governments cough up a subsidy to improve spill response capabilities in the central coast. Polluter pays only works so well and in the case of spill response paying for a clean-up after the fact does nothing to address the damage that could be contained if only spill response capabilities were in place. It is time our senior levels of government stepped up to the plate and took on the responsibilities that the constitution places in their hands: to protect our coast. That means providing a governmental subsidy to top up the quality of our oil spill response capabilities in the central coastal region because irrespective of whether there is a tanker ban or a single pipeline built the central coast is going to be under-serviced by oil spill response capabilities if direct users are the only ones covering the costs of the program.Filed under: Canadian Politics, General Politics, Pipelines, Uncategorized 20 Oct

A challenge to the climate activists, Leapers and anti-pipeline activists: show us your plans - I started this blog to provide a venue for pragmatic discussions about evidence-based environmental decision-making. The problem with being both pragmatic and evidence-based is that it grounds you in the mundane realities of the world. It prevents you from taking the flights of fancy that seem to be the strength (and weakness) of the environmental community. My colleagues in the environmental community like to think big. They like big ideas and big plans. The problem is that their plans tend to concentrate on the big picture while being light on the details. What is most annoying is when I point out the holes in their plans and the needs to identify achievable goals; I get responses that question my sincerity or dedication to the “cause”. It is as if there is a requirement to put my scientific mind in neutral in order to be considered an environmentalist. Well I am a scientist, a pragmatist and an environmentalist and I want to make real advances not simply generate good in sound-bites. So I am going to challenge the climate activists, the Leap Manifesto proponents (Leapers) and the anti-pipeline activists. Provide a cogent, evidence-based mechanism to implement one of your plans? You see in all these discussions I keep hearing negatives about my ideas but never any positive, practical alternatives from you. Specifically: in the last year I have presented a cogent, environmentally-balanced and pragmatic viewpoint on pipelines and have been insulted and heckled. I have pointed out specific limitations in the renewable energy dreams of the Leapers (and their 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight acolytes) and have been assured that I must be working against environmental causes. I have poked holes in the numbers of the innumerate climate change activists and have been called a “denier”. I challenge you to present a plan that can actually achieve a goal, heck any goal, because right now all I get from you is platitudes and hand-waving. Climate Change Let’s start with climate change since these are the most self-righteous of the activists. As we enter the second year of a post-Paris Agreement world it is becoming increasingly clear that the activists do not have the slightest idea how to achieve the goals they claim are imperative. Under the Paris Agreement Canada’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) (note I have linked to our INDC as the NDC library does not have Canada’s submission), Canada has agreed to: achieve an economy-wide target to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030. Now I will give some credit where credit is due, Canadians for Clean Prosperity have presented a means to possibly get part-way to our 2 degree Celsius NDC by 2030 but it involves a massive rise in carbon taxes coupled with some pretty significant policy changes and even then they only achieve 13-14% below 2005 emissions by 2030? The issue is that Canada’s INDC was created when the goal was still to avoid 2 degrees Celsius. Since the NDC was produced we agreed to an aspirational goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Now consider the research by Dr. Simon Donner and Dr. Kirsten Zickfeld of the University of British Columbia. They have calculated what it would take to achieve the aspirational goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius and have presented it here. Under their model Canadians we would need to emit essentially zero carbon dioxide sometime before the year 2030 or as they put it: It would require a 90% to 99% reduction in emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. The budget is equivalent to less than seven years of emissions at current (2013, year with most recent data) levels Now think of that. By the year 2030 we would need to essentially emit no carbon dioxide? That means no gasoline automobiles, no diesel trains, no container ships, no trans-continental airliners, no diesel transport trucks, all by 2030? In the 14 years between now and 2030 our society would have to invent, prototype and mass produce engines capable of moving all the essential staples of our civilized society around the world. Within that time window we will have to get the entire existing fleet of automobiles, passenger trucks, transport trucks, airplanes, tugs, etc… out of commission and replaced with these, as yet, still hypothetical technologies. In reality it would take a monumental effort to simply address personal vehicles but to achieve our aspirational goal we have to do away with all fossil fuel-reliant technologies? No a World War II level mobilization will not do the trick, we need at least an order of magnitude greater effort to change virtually every vehicle out there. The activists say words like, “but we have to do it for the future” and my simple answer is: show me how? Now let’s play devil’s advocate and imagine a scenario where, by some miracle, we achieve that goal, that still leaves us only part-way to our goal since in that same time frame we still need to develop the electrical infrastructure to power those electric vehicles. I will go into more detail on that question when I deal with the Leapers. Leapers In order to electrify all those vehicles we would need to massively ramp up our electricity system? By how much? Well let’s ask the hero of the Leaper movement: Dr. Mark Z Jacobson of Stanford. I have previously described what Dr. Jacobson has to say about Canada in his 100% WWS scenario….that would be the one promoted by the Leapers. As I wrote in my previous post, their proposal is simply not tenable. It is reliant on us inventing new technologies that are subsequently implemented on an industrial scale, all by 2050. Consider it asks for us to have 27,323 0.75 MW wave energy devices when we still don’t have a working prototype for the first unit? It is really hard to industrial facilities to tool up to build something that has not even been invented yet. Besides being virtually impossible the Leaper approach would be devilishly expensive. Once again, I must give some credit, at least some economists associated with the Leap Manifesto tried to explain how they will pay for all this but they fell sadly short. They have proposed a set of policy alternatives that they estimate would raise $48.85 billion dollars a year. Now this list is essentially a poison pill for any politician who attempts to implement it, but that’s not the half of it since it doesn’t even cover the $53 billion a year Dr. Jacobson indicates it will take to pay for the power generating units for their 100% WWS program. Remember that $53 billion a year was prepared by their own expert Dr. Mark Z Jacobson from Stanford. Virtually every expert who has looked at his numbers suggest his costs are unrealistically low and still those numbers don’t include the infrastructure costs associated with the energy plants and necessary to build that infrastructure (roads etc…). It also excludes the costs or time to carry out the environmental assessments and all the consultations on all those projects or to purchase (or compensate owners for) the land used by that infrastructure. That $53 billion/year is simply the capital costs of the actual units themselves. And those aren’t one-time only costs since that infrastructure will not last forever. It is well understood that wind turbines and tidal power units have relatively short serviceable lifetimes. Barnacles, salt water and winds take their toll and these units seldom last the 25 years. Yet the Leapers need them to last much longer in order for their numbers to work. Moreover, because of where we would need to install these units we won’t simply be able to abandon them, we will need to decommission each unit and reclaim the land under it. None of these costs are factored into the equation? So let’s look at what we need by 2050: new technologies to generate power, new technologies to power vehicles and the replacement of all the existing vehicles in use today….all in 34 years in this case? Which brings me to the: Anti-Pipeline Activists As I have shown above we aren’t going to be anywhere near ready to get off fossil fuels before 2050. That means we will need updated infrastructure to move that oil, so how do the anti-pipeline activists respond? They simply insist that we should just stop using oil. Now I have addressed that topic in detail and it is not pretty scenario. Having quickly dispatched the anti-oil pipeline folks, let’s look at LNG. The major complaint about LNG is that it will blow us over our Paris Agreement numbers but as I point out, we shouldn’t let that stop us. There are 1.2 billion people living in energy poverty in the world today and they are not going to sit idly by as the rest of the word advances without them. Each year 4.3 million people a year die from preventable indoor air pollution. Let’s not let some confusion about how we calculate carbon emissions leave those 1.2 billion Indians, Indonesians, Malaysians and Africans using coal to power their future instead of cleaner, lower-carbon, BC natural gas. Conclusion It is clear that our nation and our planet are facing some monumental challenges in the next few decades. It is equally true that we are not going to be able to address all these challenges in the time-frame indicated. What does that mean? Well as a pragmatist it means we will have to make compromises. If we know that India has a choice between coal and natural gas, then we should make sure it chooses natural gas. If we know that 100% WWS is not possible, then we had better include hydro and nuclear into the energy mix for our renewable energy future. If we know we are not going to achieve our aspirational 1.5 degrees Celsius target then we should throw it away and fight for a target we can achieve. Wishing for unicorns is not going to make them appear. We need to identify our priorities and work as hard as we can to achieve them. We have to stop chasing rainbows and instead try and chase achievable targets. That means it is time to stop making enemies out of potential allies. It is time to recognize that standing on the sidelines throwing out insults is not getting us anywhere. We need to come up with pragmatic plans to achieve our joint environmental goals.Filed under: Canadian Politics, Climate Change, Climate Change Politics, Environmentalism and Ecomodernism, Leap Manifesto, Pipelines, Uncategorized 3 Oct

On Lukewarmism, denial and a look at the state of the environmental movement - This weekend was a busy one for me, but I had time early in the mornings (thanks to our new puppy) to spend a little time catching up on what is happening in the environmental world. In the process I caught the attention (and ire) of some of my least-favourite environmental activists: angry anonymous academics, grumpy retirees and numerous anonymous trolls. This blog post started as a light lark about the internecine battles between climate activists but has ended up as a state-of-the-union sort of piece that refutes a lot of malicious slander being directed my way by the likes of Miriam (SouBundanga) O’Brien and her acolytes who have filled my twitter feed with their rubbish, lies and insults. It puts some thoughts together in one place and describes where my mind is on the topic of Lukewarmism, climate change “denial” and the current state of the environmental movement. As regular readers of this blog know, I am a Lukewarmer. What does that mean? It means I agree with the fundamental science of climate change. I acknowledge that the anthropogenic addition of Tyndall gases into the atmosphere will have an effect on global climate. As such, I agree with consensus (as presented by the IPCC) on the topic of climate change. As a Lukewarmer my primary difference with the alarmists is that I believe that the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide is on the lower end of the consensus scale presented by the IPCC. The basis for this belief is a combination of my graduate-level education in global biogeochemical cycles and my personal knowledge of the early global climate models used to generate the original sensitivity numbers. I’ve been a Lukewarmer for over two decades (even before Lukewarmers had a name) and in that time my Lukewarmer viewpoint has been consistently demonstrated to be a better representation of climate sensitivity than the alarmists’ views. More specifically, in the last two decades the consensus climate sensitivity estimate has gradually decreased to approximately the point I guessed it would be when I last looked closely at the topic over a decade ago. Conversely, the current consensus climate sensitivity estimate is now much lower than the one the alarmists were using in their discussions of the same era. In my blog I have repeatedly discussed the policy means by which we can reduce our emissions of Tyndall gases while mitigating the effects of the climate change that is already locked into the system. I have promoted renewable and alternative energy technologies and have highlighted the policy needed to enhance our available renewable energy portfolio. Moreover, as a private citizen I worked to help get a carbon tax enacted in my home province of British Columbia. So I am exactly what I say I am: a pragmatic environmentalist who has worked to achieve evidence–based policy goals. My pragmatism represents one of my major “sins” in the climate change debate where the two choices are: true believer or heretic. Another is that while I am a progressive on social issues I am conservative on financial issues. I believe in the power of a free market that is overseen by, but not controlled by, a functioning regulatory regime. I believe in the motto “polluter pays” and have worked in a contaminated sites industry for the last 15 years where “polluter pays” is more than a motto, it is how we do business. Most of the alarmist crew are far more left-leaning in the political spectrum. They are mostly comprised of people with the politics of Naomi Klein (and the authors of the Leap Manifesto) who seek to throw out our capitalist system to be replaced by a socialist paradise. They have a stronger belief in the ability of government to manage change than I do and believe that government action is the only way to beat climate change. As a free-market type, I appreciate the existence of our regulators but have come to recognize their flaws and limitations. I have come to acknowledge that the government is extremely bad at picking winners and losers and that there is no such thing as a free lunch. I do not believe that the government can just magically make money appear. I know that the government gets its money by taxing or borrowing and money spent by government in one area restricts the amount it can spend in another. I recognize that infrastructure takes time to build and that history has taught us that environmental issues are thrown to the back-burner when the economy is bad. This means that maintaining a strong economy is a necessity if we are going to fight climate change. Finally I have crunched the numbers on what is needed to achieve a fossil fuel-free future and recognize that the infrastructure needs are staggering and thus the transition is not going to happen in 5-15 years but will take 30-50+ years and in the intervening time we will need to safely transport fossil fuels across our continent. Now let’s consider the nature of the climate change debate. Well, the alarmists are not doing too well these days. Certainly the Paris Agreement was passed, but that was more a testament to the pragmatists and the middle-of-the-roaders than the alarmists. The alarmists keep screaming from the tops of hills but the rest of the world has taken to tuning them out? Why you might ask? Well in my opinion, it is because they are too quick to make enemies and so unserious that it is hard to take them seriously. Consider their use of the term “denier”. Before I go further, a bit of background; I was a young boy when Ernst Zündel published the pamphlet “Did Six Million Really Die” (in 1974). I grew up in a time of the quiet growth of the Holocaust denial movement in western Canada. I was a young activist while the Keegstra case worked its way up to the Supreme Court of Canada and did my small part to support groups who fought anti-Semitism and the rise of Holocaust Denial. I watched as a tremendous effort was made to link a relatively benign word “denier” with the concept of Holocaust Denial. This was not a local phenomena but one that happened world-wide. This linking worked and for many of my generation the term “denier” has a power like few others. Happily, my kids are growing up in an era where (at least where I live) Holocaust denial is restricted to those with recognizably bad intentions. As a consequence many from younger generations do not have the same associations with that word that people of my age do. Given this background, you can imagine my disappointment when the term “denier” was misappropriated by a core of activists who recognizing its power (a power soaked in the blood, sweat and tears of people I knew and respected) who decided to use it to label their opponents in the climate change debate. I have even less time for the apologists who say, “well look it up in the dictionary” and thus excuse themselves of the implied slander associated with using the term. When I was a young man the “joke” used to be that calling a homosexual a “faggot” was not an insult because if you looked the word up in the dictionaries of the time the definition simply read “a bundle of sticks”. Everyone knew that the word had an incredibly evil use intended to degrade the person being addressed but for some the fact that the dictionaries had not caught up with the common usage meant it was okay to use this vile term. Nowadays I have mostly given up fighting the historically illiterate activists who insist on using the word but still pay attention to how it is being used. A decade ago, it was used to label a small minority of individuals who actually argued that climate change was not happening, but that, too, has changed. You would think that having misappropriated a term that has so much inherited power you would be careful how you used it….and in this you would be wrong. Instead of being treated with reverence it is bandied about these days like a minor insult just below “racist” but above “sexist”. So how is the word “denier” used these days? Well a “freelance consultant” with a Bachelor of Agricultural Science (Honours) by the name of Miriam O’Brien (known better as SouBundanga who has a huge online following) called me a “science denier” for no other reason than because I got into a disagreement on the semantics of the term. Locally a transportation planner and campaigner with no education in climate science has taken to calling people “soft climate deniers” in the newspapers and on social media because they disagree with him on transportation options in our community. When he does so what do we hear from the serious people in the activist community? Nothing. A political science grad whose research topics include welfare policy, poverty, inequality and economic security with no apparently no formal training in climate science calls anyone who disagrees with his progressive policy choices climate deniers and what do we hear from the activists? Nothing. Heck, Dr. Naomi Oreskes a specialist in the history of science calls the father of climate alarmism, Dr. James Hansen a climate denier because of differences in how nuclear energy can be used in fighting climate change and once again the great majority of activists in the alarmist camp say nothing. It is no wonder people have stopped taking the alarmists seriously, since they can’t be bothered to take what each other says seriously. Moreover their infighting is like something out of a Monty Python movie or 1920’s Russia. When Dr. Oreskes condemns Dr. Hansen I keep trying to remember which one represents the People’s Front of Judea and which is the Judean People’s Front? Frankly if the Romans (ooops I mean climate skeptics) had planned it I don’t think they could have done a better job turning the activist fringes of the climate alarmist brigades against each other or making them look more ridiculous. Perhaps it is time that the intellectual leaders of the movement speak out because right now they have become more of a punch-line than anything else. How else to explain how Donald Trump can run a presidential campaign denying climate change while Hillary Clinton runs hers without any useful discussion of one of the seminal issues of our generation. As a pragmatic environmentalist I am deeply saddened. I see the effort of individuals like myself being overwhelmed as progressives have gradually wrest the environmental movement from the hands of environmentalists and scientists and put it in the hands of philosophers, sociologists and political scientists. People who understand little about the complexity of the problems facing us but instead see this as their latest hobby-horse that they can ride to potential political power. In the end it is likely that the fading world economy will take the wind out of the environmental sails and we will once again have failed to make hay while the sun shone; because as history teaches us, when the economy goes down environmental awareness goes out the window. It is not too late to achieve some goals, but given the tenor and the quality of the people leading that debate, I am quite certain that we will have missed this window of opportunity. It reminds me of the old Alberta (Texas?) expression: Dear Lord, please give me another boom and I promise not to blow it only it looks like we took this opportunity and blew it again.Filed under: Canadian Politics, Climate Change, Climate Change Politics, Environmentalism and Ecomodernism, Lukewarmers, Uncategorized 26 Sep

The Citizen Lab » News and Announcements

Christopher Parsons on The Agenda with Steve Palkin - Citizen Lab Research Associate Christopher Parsons joined The Agenda with Steve Palkin to discuss the controversial Bill C-51, anti-terrorism legislation passed by the previous Conservative government. He joined a panel to discuss potential changes to the law, which has been used by agencies like the RCMP and Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police to petition for new powers to access telephone and Internet data. One of the central issues, which has drawn renewed legal interest in the United States, is allowing police the ability to unlock password protected mobile phones. Panelists also discussed the the growing number of police request for interception capabilities for telecommunications information. The panelists discussed how to balance privacy rights with effective policing strategies in the digital realm. Watch the full video of the program. Christopher Parsons’ remarks begin at the 6:00 minute mark in the video. The post Christopher Parsons on The Agenda with Steve Palkin appeared first on The Citizen Lab.13 Dec

Lotus Ruan interviewed by VOA Mandarin on WeChat censorship - Citizen Lab Researcher Lotus Ruan was interviewed by VOA Mandarin on the recent release of the report entitled “One App Two Systems, How WeChat uses one censorship policy in China and another internationally,” in which researchers found that keyword filtering is enabled on WeChat for users with accounts registered to mainland China phone numbers. They noted that filtering remains enabled even if users later link their account with a non-mainland China number, which means that users with accounts registered to mainland China will remain under censorship regardless if they travel or unlink their Chinese phone number from the account. Lotus Ruan spoke about domestic Chinese and international censorship, the recent shutdown of WeChat groups, and the company’s globalization move. The interview is in Mandarin, and can be watched in full. The post Lotus Ruan interviewed by VOA Mandarin on WeChat censorship appeared first on The Citizen Lab.13 Dec

Cyber Stewards Network Partners publish reports on surveillance and censorship, interviewed in the media - Citizen Lab’s Cyber Stewards Network Partners from Asia and Latin America have released reports, and been interviewed in the media on key censorship and cybersecurity issues. Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC) recently released a report titled “Surveillance and Intelligence in the Latin American Cybersecurity Agenda Comparative Report: Chile-Argentina.” The report is part of a broader project exploring cybersecurity programs in Latin America, analyzing the human rights implications from a civil society perspective. Read more information on ADC’s report. Donny BU, Executive Director of ICT Watch, was interviewed in a Jakarta Post article investigating Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) law. Donny comments on the ‘right to be forgotten’ provisions, and the possibility that they could be used to suppress information of public interest, particularly about the conduct of politicians. Read more information on the Jakarta Post article. Pirongrong Ramasoota of Chulalongkorn University spoke to the Bangkok Post about the rise of hate speech online in the wake of the Thai junta’s censorship of the media and other forms of expression. She suggested that social media, Facebook in particular, have been the source of increasingly vitriolic exchanges because it is one of the few remaining safe spaces for individuals to voice their political opinions. Read more information on the Bangkok Post article. Cyber Stewards Network Partner 7iber met with Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert, as well as Senior Research Fellows John-Scott Railton and Bill Marczak to discuss the Lab’s work in exposing spyware systems in various countries, and in particular, the middle east. In the interview, the group discuss Citizen Lab’s recent report on the discovery of Stealth Falcon, spyware used to target human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor, among other cybersecurity developments in the region. Read more information on the 7iber interview. The Tibet Action Institute has released a report titled “Erasing Tibet: Censorship on Chinese Video Sharing Site Youku,” which documents censorship on Youku, as well as the broader trend of China-based social media platforms being required to follow regulations on content filtering. Careful testing revealed that video content related to Tibetan culture and the Dalai Lama were blocked, including content that made use of the Tibetan language. Read more information on the Tibet Action Institute article. The post Cyber Stewards Network Partners publish reports on surveillance and censorship, interviewed in the media appeared first on The Citizen Lab.13 Dec

Morgan Marquis-Boire joins Ars Technica Live to discuss “data contraception” - Citizen Lab Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire joined the Ars Technica Live interview series to discuss the rise of what he calls “digital authoritarianism,” an extension of the activities of authoritarian governments into cyberspace. Morgan noted that in this respect, there was no meaningful distinction between the digital world and the ‘real world,’ because the political atmosphere in both spilled over onto each other. He recommended a series of steps citizen could take to protect themselves, in particular when expressing dissent. If going to a protest, for example, Morgan said that he recommend people “think about turning [phones] off.” Most importantly, he stressed the need for “data” contraception, the practice of restraining the amount of data we share. He recommended avoiding taking pictures, for example, that would implicate friends or other individuals in subversive activities. The interview also touched on topics like the recent hack of the Democratic National Convention as part of the 2016 United States Presidential elections, and the various ways to think about cybersecurity challenges in different contexts. Read more information on the interview, or watch it. The post Morgan Marquis-Boire joins Ars Technica Live to discuss “data contraception” appeared first on The Citizen Lab.13 Dec

Bill Marczak in Vanity Fair on iPhone spyware targeting activists - Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow Bill Marczak was featured in a Vanity Fair article exploring his discovery of the spyware used to target UAE dissident Ahmed Mansoor, detailed in a recent report. The case of Ahmed Mansoor report, released in August 2016, is titled “The Million Dollar Dissident: NSO Group’s iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender.” The Citizen Lab also released a report documenting the use of a sustained spyware program against UAE journalists and activists, dubbed “Stealth Falcon.” In the Vanity Fair article, Bill explained that Ahmed Mansoor and forwarded him an email that he had received, containing a URL which Marczak suspected would install malware on his iPhone were he to click it. In the process of analyzing the code in tandem with engineers from security firm Lookout, Bill discovered that the spyware gave its user the ability to spy on audio, text messages, email, and other sensitive content on a victim’s phone. Though it is rare to find even a single vulnerability, Marczak explained that the program was remarkable for exploiting three such vulnerabilities. He went on to situate the discovery in light of his broader work on the use of commercial spyware programs by government agencies and security institutions worldwide. Read the full Vanity Fair Article. Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow Bill Marczak also spoke at the University of California Berkeley at an event titled “Defending Dissidents from Targeted Digital Surveillance” on December 9, 2016. Bill’s research focuses on identifying and tracking nation-state information controls employed against dissidents, as well as government-exclusive “lawful intercept” malware tools, including FinFisher, Hacking Team‘s RCS, and NSO Pegasus. As part of his PhD dissertation, Bill developed Himaya, a defensive approach that readily integrates with targets’ workflow to provide near real-time scanning of a subject’s email messages to check for threats. He explained the architecture of the program, as well as the greater context of his work. Read more information on the event, or watch the full video. The post Bill Marczak in Vanity Fair on iPhone spyware targeting activists appeared first on The Citizen Lab.13 Dec

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert interviewed by CNNi on WeChat report - Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke to CNN International on Citizen Lab’s recent report, titled “One App, Two Systems: How WeChat uses one censorship policy in China and another internationally.” In the report, researchers provide the first systematic study of keyword and website censorship on WeChat, the most popular chat app in China. Notably, the report found that Chinese registered WeChat users can be censored even if they were not currently based in China. “The censorship follows them around, effectively,” Deibert explained. When asked about surveillance concerns, Deibert added that given other indications from the country, it was likely that WeChat was storing user data, and would be expected to hand it over to Chinese authorities upon request. The report forms part of a broader Citizen Lab initiative to study censorship practices on instant messaging applications. Watch the full interview with CNN International. The post Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert interviewed by CNNi on WeChat report appeared first on The Citizen Lab. 9 Dec

“一APP两制”：微信如何区别审查中国及海外用户 - 阅读报告全文（英文）多伦多大学公民实验室的最新报告揭露了微信平台的审查机制。微信是中国腾讯控股有限公司旗下的即时通讯应用，目前是中国最受欢迎的聊天软件之一，也是全球排名第四的最流行聊天软件。根据中国相关法律法规，互联网公司往往需要对内容进行过滤。公民实验室此前的研究报告揭露了在微信公众平台，新浪微博，Tom-Skype和新浪UC等即时通讯软件，以及直播平台上的审查机制。我们的最新研究发现微信使用了一种“一APP两制”的内容过滤机制，区别审查中国和海外用户。主要发现关键词过滤仅仅针对那些用中国大陆手机号码注册微信号的用户，即便这些用户之后更改绑定的手机号，用海外手机号码绑定原有微信号，审查机制也依然存在。关键词审查不再透明。过去，如果某条信息被过滤，微信用户会收到提示，但现在审查变为悄然进行。比起一对一聊天模式，群组聊天中有更多的关键词被过滤。群组聊天中的信息往往能被更多人阅读。关键词审查不是静态不变的。一些我们在最初研究时发现被过滤的关键词在随后的测试中能被成功发出和收取。一些在研究后期新发现的关键词则常与新闻事件有关。微信自带的浏览器对中国用户屏蔽了一系列赌博、色情、法轮功的网站以及对部分对中国持批判立场的新闻网站。微信在对中国用户屏蔽这些网站的同时，海外用户可以在不收到任何安全浏览警告信息下进入这些网站。但微信同时也被断断续续地对海外用户帐号屏蔽部分赌博、色情网站。 The post “一APP两制”：微信如何区别审查中国及海外用户 appeared first on The Citizen Lab. 1 Dec

Director Ron Deibert to testify at Canadian Senate committee - Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert will be giving testimony to the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights Wednesday November 30th 2016 at 11:30 AM. Deibert’s written testimony, which can be found here, concerns Citizen Lab research into dual-use digital technologies, and outlines several areas of possible policy response.The hearings will be video webcast live here. The post Director Ron Deibert to testify at Canadian Senate committee appeared first on The Citizen Lab.29 Nov

Christopher Parsons in “Reclaiming your Privacy in a Digital Age” panel - Citizen Lab Research Associate Christopher Parsons will be speaking as part of a panel on “Reclaiming your Privacy in a Digital Age,” hosted by the Toronto Public Library. The event will be hosted on Thursday November 10, 2016 from 6:30 – 8:00 pm at the Lillian H. Smith branch at 239 College Street, Toronto ON. Event Description: In the age of Big Data and constant connectedness, it’s easy to feel like privacy is a relic of the pre-digital age. But what about those of us who are uneasy about sacrificing this basic human right for the convenience of new technologies? Our panel – featuring Alison Macrina of the Library Freedom Project, Christopher Parsons of the Citizen Lab at UofT, and Brenda McPhail of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, will discuss surveillance threats and privacy rights and responsibilities, and will help participants get acquainted with technical tools that help people take back their digital privacy in the information age. Read more information on the event. The post Christopher Parsons in “Reclaiming your Privacy in a Digital Age” panel appeared first on The Citizen Lab.10 Nov

Irene Poetranto and Adam Senft at Giganet and IGF 2016 - Citizen Lab Researcher Officers Irene Poetranto and Adam Senft will be participating in workshops at the 2016 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (Giganet), from December 5-9 in Guadalajara, Mexico. Giganet is community of scholars that works in conjunction with the Internet Governance Forum. Irene Poetranto and Adam Senft will be presenting their paper titled “Internet governance during crisis: the changing landscape of Thailand” as part of a panel at the 1tth Giganet Annual Symposium on December 5 from 4:00pm – 5:15pm. The panel explores the various ways in which developing countries, emerging economies, and states in political transition have struggled with developments in Internet governance, and the broader relationship between power and access. The Abstract of their paper is as follows: This article will explore how Thailand’s ongoing political crisis has impacted the ways in which the Internet is governed in the country. In particular, it will examine how both the 2006 and 2014 coups have been drivers for significant changes to Internet governance in the country, how these changes have been to used to strengthen the post-coup government’s hold on power, and the resulting impact on human rights in the country. Given the overlapping and intersecting sources of authority in Internet governance—be they political, legal, technical or economic—it is important for research to cross disciplinary boundaries to develop a holistic understanding of these issues. Using a mixed-methods approach, we combined legal and policy analyses with network measurements to argue that Thailand is an important case for highlighting how Internet governance is affected by political conflict and its consequences on human rights. Read the full Giganet paper. The IGF is a multistakeholder forum which facilitates discussions on public policy issues related to Internet governance, first convened by the United Nations in 2005. The venue is the Palace of Culture and Communication (PALCCO), in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area. Citizen Lab Researcher and Communications Officer Irene Poetranto will be speaking at a workshop entitled “Where do Internet governance and Cybernorms debates converge?,” organized by the Regional Internet Registry for Asia-Pacific (APNIC). The workshop will explore the previously unexplored intersection of Cybernorms discourse and Internet governance debates, and is scheduled for December 8 from 4:30pm – 6:00pm. Read more information on the IGF or Giganet. The post Irene Poetranto and Adam Senft at Giganet and IGF 2016 appeared first on The Citizen Lab. 4 Nov

Civil Eats

The Year in Food Policy - From a new GMO labeling bill to an uptick in institutional purchasing and an increase in city-level food policy positions, here’s what you might have missed. The FDA Just Banned These Chemicals in Food. Are They the Tip of the Iceberg?By Elizabeth Grossman FDA banned three toxic food packaging chemicals and is considering banning seven cancer-causing food flavoring chemicals, but food safety advocates say the process highlights flaws in the system. California Soda Warning Label Bill Dies as Research Suggests EfficacyBy Steve Holt The Sugar War in the Golden State continues as new data shows warning labels could deter soda consumption. As Bees Die Off, the EPA Shuffles its FeetBy Elizabeth Grossman The agency says tiny amounts of “neonics” can harm bees and beekeepers file suit over treated seeds. An End In Sight for the School Food Fight?By Bettina Elias Siegel A bipartisan measure has passed that could improve the quality of the food served in schools. Will This Maryland Bill Get Big Chicken To Clean up its Act?By Kristine Wong Environmental groups are working with Maryland lawmakers to hold poultry companies responsible for the manure they produce—the first legislation in the nation to do so. Can the USDA Force Convenience Stores to Provide Healthier Food for SNAP Users?By Elizabeth Grossman Stricter SNAP eligibility rules could improve the selection in small neighborhood stores. Or it could prompt those stores to opt out of the program all together. How One Groundbreaking Set of Rules is Changing the Food in L.A. Schools and the System Behind ItBy Leilani Clark The Good Food Purchasing Policy specifies that everything the students in L.A. Unified School District eat must be local, sustainable, humane, fair, and healthy. And it’s becoming a model for the nation. Dispatch from Philadelphia: The City Prepares for a Soda TaxBy Amy McKeever Some retailers plan to pass the new cost of sugary beverages on to their customers. Others are holding out for a lawsuit. Congress Passed a New GMO Labeling Bill. How Will it Work?By Elizabeth Grossman Confused about what the bill means and how it might change your shopping experience? Here’s our explainer. If Your Veggies Weren’t Grown in Soil, Can They be Organic?By Elizabeth Grossman A new report by a government task force on hydroponic farming has left this raging debate wide open. Cities Hire Food Systems Experts To Address Obesity, Food AccessBy Rachel Cernansky At least 22 cities, from Baltimore to Denver, have created leadership roles for change-makers focused on food. Some Low-Income Kids Face a ‘Nutrition Gap’ Before Starting SchoolBy Lela Nargi A new study shows that thousands of children experience food insecurity in the year between aging out of WIC benefits and starting school, where they can receive free or reduced-cost lunch. It’s Now Legal to Share Seeds in CaliforniaKristine Wong The state just became the fourth to pass a law making it legal to swap seeds and collect them in non-commercial libraries. Will This New Bill Level the Playing Field for Urban Farms?By Jodi Helmer Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow just introduced urban farming legislation in anticipation of the 2018 Farm Bill. Will it stick? Opposing Soda Taxes, For a PriceBy Andy Bellatti When dietitians get paid to tweet against soda taxes, it’s a good sign that something larger is going on. Want to Understand Trump’s Rise? Head to the Farm.By Siena Chrisman For many angry rural voters, Donald Trump is fueling a fire that started with the farm crisis of the 1980s. How Hungry Kids Will Fare Under TrumpBy Bettina Elias Siegel President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress will likely walk back most of the progress made on school food and nutrition programs in recent years. If Trump Goes Hard on Immigration, Who Will Grow, Process, and Serve Our Food?By Elizabeth Grossman Workers are worried about Trump’s immigration policies, and so are some in industry. The post The Year in Food Policy appeared first on Civil Eats.23 Dec

Our Best Environment Stories from 2016 - From pesticides to climate change, we published a number of strong stories about the environment in 2016. Here are our top picks for the year. FDA to Start Testing for Glyphosate in Food By Carey Gillam The federal agency already tests for residues of many agricultural chemicals on food. Now it will include the widely used weed killer linked to cancer. California’s Grand Plan to Fight Climate Change on the Farm By Ariana Reguzzoni California lawmakers move toward paying farmers to adopt climate-smart practices. The EPA Says 3 Common Pesticides Could Harm Nearly All Endangered Species By Elizabeth Grossman The agency says 97 percent of the plants and animals listed under the Endangered Species Act are likely to be harmed by chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and malathion. North Carolina’s Factory Farms Produce 15,000 Olympic Pools Worth of Waste Each YearBy Christina Cooke CAFOs are often hidden in plain sight. A new mapping project reveals the locations and impacts of the state’s 6,500 industrial hog and chicken farms. Calculating the Hidden Cost of Industrial FarmingBy Dan Mitchell This preliminary, first-of-its kind data puts numbers behind the externalized costs and invisible benefits of several types of farming systems. Meet the Bee Heroes Working On the Front Lines to Save PollinatorsBy Nancy Matsumoto Can these scientists help our pollinators before it’s too late? Wrangling the Climate Impact of California DairyBy Susie Cagle Could new methane emissions regulations tend a greener California, or sour the state’s dairy industry? A New Sperm Bank for Honeybees Could Save AgricultureBy Taryn Phaneuf How cryopreservation techniques might sustain a threatened species, and us in the process. Saving Crop Diversity From Inside a Frozen MountainBy Lela Nargi With American climate policy now highly uncertain, the founder of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault talks about his efforts to protect our agricultural future. Why Seed Company Mergers Matter in a Warming WorldBy Doug Gurian-Sherman Consolidation in the seed industry would further reduce agriculture’s ability to respond to climate change. Instead, we need to support the original “crowdsourcing”—the genetic diversity of crops developed on millions of small farms. Invasive Lionfish Coming to a Menu Near YouBy Sarah Shemkus The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Program has given it a green light for consumers and chefs, and Whole Foods announced it will begin selling the invasive fish. How Carbon Farming Could Reverse Climate ChangeBy Vera Chang Eric Toensmeier’s new book explores carbon sequestration through carbon farming as a way to cool the planet. The Woman Fighting to Make Sustainability Part of the American DietBy Andy Bellatti Dr. Miriam Nelson was a key figure behind the effort to work sustainability into the nation’s 2015 dietary guidelines. And she has hope for the future. For Beginning Farmers in the West, Finding the Water to Grow Food is a Constant GambleBy Ariana Reguzzoni According to a new report, beginning farmers are bearing the brunt of climate change and drought, but they might also hold the key to surviving it. The post Our Best Environment Stories from 2016 appeared first on Civil Eats.22 Dec

Our Best Food Justice Stories from 2016 - Since its inception, Civil Eats has focused on covering issues of race and inequality in the American food system. We have sustained this emphasis over the last year, covering everything from pesticide exposure among children in farming communities to food companies that prioritize hiring the formerly incarcerated to the role of structural racism and white privilege in the food movement. Here are our top food justice story picks for 2016. Children in Farm Communities Pay a Steep Price for the Food We EatBy Elizabeth Grossman The evidence linking pesticide exposure to childhood cancers and learning and behavioral problems has grown increasingly strong. In Los Angeles, a Band of Food Rescuers is Getting Produce to the PeopleBy Leilani ClarkFood Forward, which began in 2009 with the gleaning of two tangerine trees, now recovers thousands of pounds of produce each week. Leaders of Color Discuss Structural Racism and White Privilege in the Food SystemBy Civil Eats What can the food movement learn from Black Lives Matter in this tumultuous moment? How the Food Industry is Providing Second Chances to the Formerly IncarceratedBy Lisa HeldDave’s Killer Bread, POP! Gourmet Foods, and other food companies are helping people with criminal records overcome the barriers to employment they often face. This Cooperative Grocery Store Wants to Break the Diversity MoldBy Susan Pagani The Seward Community Co-op in Minneapolis built its new Friendship store as a reflection of the community where it’s located, and hired a majority of people of color. Beyond Access: What the Movement for Black Lives’ Policy Says About FoodBy J. Ama Mantey A ‘Vision for Black Lives’ centers and amplifies the voices of Black food justice organizers from across the country. America’s Food Deserts Need Community Solutions, Not Big Box StoresBy David Love and Vijay DasIt’s just as important to address the lack of healthy food in neighborhoods like Flint, as it is to focus on getting residents clean water. But the way it’s done is also important. Beyond Talk: Searching For Real Solutions to Food AppropriationBy Cathy ErwayThe Sporkful’s latest series makes a valiant effort to take a deeper look at ‘other people’s food.’ But some critics say real change will take more than conversation. How One Immigration Lawyer Brought Justice to the FieldsBy Anna BronesFew migrant farmworkers have the time or money to seek out legal support. That’s where a mobile attorney like Melanie Gleason can help. Has the Organic Movement Left Black Farmers Behind?By Marissa EvansA history of discrimination and powerful cultural differences can often keep Black farmers from growing organic. Can This Market Be a Model for Getting Good Food Into Neighborhoods Shaped by Racism?By Stephen SatterfieldAfter years of planning, West Oakland’s People’s Community Market may finally come to fruition. Can it help counteract the decades of oppressive policies that shaped today’s ‘food deserts’? Dining in the Era of KaepernickBy Tunde Wey Is dining the final frontier of American racism? This chef says yes. Did Slaves Produce Your Food?By Elizabeth GrossmanNew report says 20 of the largest food and beverage companies need to do more to keep forced labor out of their supply chains. The People Behind Your Food Are More Vulnerable Than EverBy Lisa HeldNew data suggests workers across the food system are still struggling to feed themselves and their families. And it won’t get better under Trump. Why This Food Bank is Turning Away Junk FoodBy Whitney Pipkin D.C.’s Capital Area Food Bank stopped accepting candy, soda, and sheet cake in September. The post Our Best Food Justice Stories from 2016 appeared first on Civil Eats.21 Dec

Wendell Berry’s Radical Skepticism - Wendell Berry’s response to the recent election? “I’m still on the losing side and that’s where I’ve taken up my residence … If Hillary Clinton had won, I would still be on the losing side. And I would just have to go to work.” When the celebrated writer, farmer, and elder statesman of the local food movement sat down in front of a sold-out audience at Johns Hopkins University last week, the crowd seemed even more eager than usual to soak in Berry’s wisdom in this particularly fraught national moment. The event was a public conversation between Berry and Eric Schlosser, investigative journalist and author of Fast Food Nation, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. And many in the audience—made up of people who care about the work the Center does to study the intersections between food systems, the environment, and human health—were likely feeling a great deal worried about the fate of the issues about which they care deeply. Finding solace in genuine places Wendell Berry isn’t a pessimist. But implied within his worldview is a deep skepticism about American and Western beliefs in the inevitability of progress and in the power of science and industry to solve every problem. And, as he pointed out that night, that skepticism can give one the freedom to focus on more important work, to find hope and solace in more genuine places. It can put into perspective something even as truly upsetting as this year’s election. “I wasn’t surprised. The conditions for this election and the Trump triumph have been building up in rural America ever since VJ Day in 1945,” Berry explained. “These people out there in the country [who] have been dismissed as dispensable, unneeded, redundant—the economy has told them that there’s no need for them, and so a certain resentment has understandably built up.” Berry talked about “this very curious thing” where economic logic has led to dairy people sending their milk to town only to have to buy it back in the grocery store. As he sees it, on the other hand, an economy where people can actually do things for themselves “has an economic value, an economic worth, and it underwrites a kind of dignity that people ought not be caught without.” The radical nature of Berry’s skepticism allows him to see a problem for what it is, to avoid compartmentalization, and to speak to whole people and whole communities about what’s going on. “I can’t think about climate change and look away from the ruining land and the ruining communities and the ruining towns and the ruining lives that are around me. All that has to do with climate change. A lot of climate change starts right there,” he said. Berry spoke about the “great mistake” of separating the land and the people, in that it “permits people to treat the land as an inert material quantity” to be safely exploited. He told the story of the first time he saw strip mining, saying, “It never occurred to me that people could do a thing like that.” Calls for a “broad-fronted movement” The World-Ending Fire is the title of Berry’s forthcoming collection of essays, and in shockingly frank, dark, and prescient imagery, he said, “if you want to be desperate about it, you can say that the World-Ending Fire is burning in every internal combustion engine every day.” As someone reliant on an inefficient old pickup, he noted that this implicated him as well. “We’ve been burning the world up, literally, since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Coal is the earth. Petroleum is the earth.” But his most provocative statements were saved for the movement to put that fire out. “I think that the climate change issue is a big distraction. I’m not denying it,” he said, “But you mustn’t look away from the other things that are wrong.” He went on to say, “One thing I dislike about the climate movement is its almost exclusive appeal to guilt, anger, and fear. I just don’t think the answer’s going to come from there. I think it’s going to come from love. I think it’ll come from people finding work that they love, and loving one another.” Berry called for “a broad-fronted movement,” adding that “it would be economic, to protect everything that’s worth protecting, to stop permanent damage to everything that’s worth keeping. This is not something that I think can be enacted very soon, but that’s what I’m for.” “A whole program of that kind has to be carried on by whole people,” he went on to say. “People who are not ashamed to say that they love something, or that they have reverence, who are not ashamed of the upper branches of our language.” As the conversation went along, the wisdom seemed to wash over the audience, transforming the restless anxiety into a sense of joyous resolve in the face of all challenges. At least, it did for this young farmer. And urges living out our ideals Responding to a question from the audience, he said, “I can’t give anybody hope. Hope has to come up out of you. It’s been a struggle for me to be hopeful, and all I can do is invite other people to take up the same struggle.” As the event came to a close, Berry shared a recent story of civil disobedience in which he was part of a sit-in protest against mountaintop removal coal mining at the Capitol Building in his home state of Kentucky. He acknowledged that, on a practical level, the effort was futile, and he and everyone else involved knew it. “The score between conservationists and the coal industry is 100 to nothing … we haven’t got a chance,” he told the audience. And yet, they did it anyway, living out their ideals in how they interacted with each other, in how they interacted with the building staff. It was one of the best weekends of his life. “I think that’s the way you get on. You’re up against it, you’re hard up against it, you do what you can, and you have a good time. You love your allies,” said Berry. As the event ended, and the crowd filed back out into the world, we seemed to have a little bit more clarity and perspective—and perhaps a little more love for the work ahead. The post Wendell Berry’s Radical Skepticism appeared first on Civil Eats.20 Dec

U.S. Farm Policy Already Favors Big Business. Will it Get Worse Under Trump? - President Obama has compared the farm bill to a Swiss Army knife. Renewed every five years, this complex law includes everything from farm loans to crop insurance, on-farm conservation, and nutrition assistance, like SNAP and the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC). As New York University nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle wrote in Politico earlier this year, the multi-billion dollar piece of legislation “is crucial to practically everything about our food system: what crops get subsidized, how much foods cost, how land is used, and whether low-income Americans have enough to eat.” And, she added, “Whether you are rich or poor, much about your food choices is shaped by what’s in this bill.” The current farm bill went into effect in 2014. The next one is due to be passed by September 30, 2018. This means that it will likely be negotiated and finalized under the Trump administration and the new Republican-controlled House and Senate. And this will be the first that a farm bill has been written under an entirely Republican federal government since 1954. While the Trump campaign and transition team has said relatively little about agricultural policy—National Sustainable Agricultural Coalition (NSAC) policy director Ferd Hoefner calls it a “blank slate”—Trump’s cabinet picks thus far indicate a bias toward anti-regulatory policies that favor large business profits. And when it comes to agriculture, that approach could adversely impact the very farm and rural communities that voted heavily for Trump. Among the many potential Trump nominees for Agriculture Secretary being reported are Idaho Governor (and former Simplot president) Butch Otter, North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, former Georgia Governor Sonny Purdue, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, and National Council of Farmer Cooperatives CEO Chuck Conner—all choices that suggest a loyalty to Big Ag. Water is Key “Many of the counties that helped elect Trump have the highest food insecurity and worst water pollution of any in the country,” says Scott Faber, Environmental Working Group (EWG)’s vice president of government affairs. Not coincidentally, water pollution regulation is at the center of the conversation. A number of conventional commodity farmers have acknowledged voting for Trump because they feared increasing regulation under the Waters of the U.S. rule (WOTUS), which focuses on sources of pollution (think: fertilizer and waste from large animal farms) to downstream waters. Big agricultural interests such as the American Farm Bureau Federation have vigorously fought the rule. NSAC’s Hoefner doesn’t expect WOTUS to survive the Trump administration, but says, “There are other regulations to think about [where the battle lines] are far less clear. One that’s near and dear to our hearts is the water testing rule in the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).” Signed by President Obama in 2011, FSMA is designed to prevent food contamination throughout the supply chain starting on the farm. And even under an anti-regulatory Trump administration and Republican-led Congress, businesses will have to comply with the law. Unlike WOTUS, this food safety regulation (which will require farmers of all sizes to regularly test the water on their farms for pathogens) may be a place where farmers on both sides of the aisle come together. As Hoefner explains, “Agriculture is pretty united on this, from small farm advocates to the largest farms. Everyone agrees that the costs are astronomical” and that there’s no agriculture-specific standard for this testing. EWG’s Faber is also hopeful that, “At some point Republicans will listen to the voters whose wells are contaminated with pesticides and nitrates.” Further, he says, “weakening drinking water protections might curry favor with farm lobbyists, but it won’t deliver on any of the real challenges faced in rural America.” While the American Farm Bureau and environmental advocates rarely see eye-to-eye, Dale Moore, the American Farm Bureau’s (AFB) executive director for public policy, says that when it comes to water pollution and pesticides, the fact that farmers live in rural communities makes them sensitive to these impacts. “We’re not going to use something on our ranch that is dangerous,” he told Civil Eats. But he also says “there’s fairly strong indication that there will be broad stroke regulatory reform—some focused on policies like Waters of the U.S. and some focused on the process.” AFB, he explained, will be working to make sure that new policies are balanced, and based on sound science and a strong economic rationale. Yet, as we’ve seen, terms like “balance,” “sound science,” and “economic rationale,” have often triggered many a legislative fight. One-Size-Fits-All Farm Policy? The debates at the core of U.S. farm policy are often framed as pitting “farmers vs. environmental groups,” but not all farmers are the same—and many small and sustainable farms are working to meet environmental goals while producing food. But it’s unclear whether those farmers have seen any sizable benefits from the Farm Bill—and it’s unclear whether that will change. None of that seems to be stopping Hoefner of NSAC from thinking optimistically. “We need a big tent,” he says. “All farmers need a seat at the table. In Congress and at U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) … there is usually agreement that we don’t want to exclude farmers because they grow fruits and vegetables, not commodity crops, because they’re organic and not conventional, or because they’re new or Black or Hispanic farmers,” he says. “I’d be really surprised if they turn their backs on the constituency that voted them in. That’s the attitude we’ll be going in with.” AFB’s Moore explains that his organization represents farmers and ranchers across the country, “all sizes of producers and methods of production.” Hoefner hopes that when it “gets down to concrete issues we can make coalitions that span across the various farm ideologies and interest groups to make common cause.” While federal support for small farms is miniscule compared to that for commodity crop farmers, Moore points to bipartisan support for previous Farm Bills. “They have been written in “purple ink—not red or blue ink,” he says. EWG’s Faber isn’t quite so rosy about past legislation. As he sees it, farm subsidies have often been “rigged in favor of the largest, most successful farm businesses at the expense of the vast majority of farmers,” says Scott Faber. Since 1995, 75 percent of federal subsidies—which total over 322 billion—have gone to 10 percent of farms. “Many of the counties that helped elect Trump are among the counties where these subsidies largely flow to the largest most successful farm business at the expense of their smaller neighbors,” says Faber. The SNAP Split Seventy nine percent of the 2014 Farm Bill—or $756 billion—went toward nutrition subsidies such as SNAP and WIC. And because some GOP members of the House have long been debating the value of (and working to cut) nutrition assistance, some have pushed to separate it from the rest of the farm bill. In fact, in 2013, the House passed a version of the bill without nutrition subsidies that didn’t ultimately make it into the final bill. Now, that effort may be resurfacing in the 2016 Republican Party platform. EWG’s Faber is concerned that the debate about taking SNAP away from USDA, “will get more attention than it deserves”—meaning that such a fight in Congress could come at the expense of focusing on the much-needed programs. Republicans are also talking about new SNAP eligibility requirements and about overhauling the entire program. Meanwhile, rhetoric coming from Trump supporters suggests general hostility toward food assistance programs, thought it’s important to note that rural America and agricultural communities depend heavily on nutrition programs. “Nobody voted to make their neighbors go hungry. We need to do everything we can to defend our anti-hunger programs,” says Faber. How all of this will play out, says Hoefner, will depend on whether individuals with “hardcore ideologues” end up leading USDA and other federal agencies. And based on Trump’s recent picks for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Health and Human Services (HHS), Energy, Interior, Education, and Labor, it’s not looking good. “The range of issues that could be under attack is breathtaking,” says Faber. It is likely to be early spring before Congress gets down to the nitty-gritty on the Farm Bill—and it’s in these details where the needs of farms small and large and low-income agricultural communities could be heard—or not. The post U.S. Farm Policy Already Favors Big Business. Will it Get Worse Under Trump? appeared first on Civil Eats.19 Dec

Most Schools Are Serving Healthier Meals, Despite Challenges - It has been four years since the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act‘s (HHFKA) improved school nutritional standards went into effect, and we’ve been hearing conflicting reports about how districts are adapting to them ever since. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that over 95 percent of districts are now meeting the standards, which sounds like a resounding success, but to bolster its own campaign to roll back reforms, the School Nutrition Association (SNA) has tended to emphasize all the obstacles districts reportedly face, from lost revenue to increased food waste. So what’s the true story? A comprehensive report released last week by the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project (KSHFP) goes a long way toward answering that question. The KSHFP surveyed 489 school nutrition directors from across the country about their implementation of the new standards as of the 2014-15 school year, then shared their responses with a panel of 11 expert food service directors who offered their own insights and recommendations. Here are the key findings: Cost and Availability of Suitable Foods Remain a Challenge The KSHFP says “districts have emerged from the most challenging phase of the transition to healthier meals,” but when you drill down into the details of the study, the picture is a little less rosy: About 60 percent of the directors surveyed still report “some” or “a great deal” of difficulties implementing the new standards at lunch, and about 40 percent felt the same way at breakfast. The most commonly cited issues were the availability and cost of compliant foods that are acceptable to students. But it’s worth noting that districts that improved their meals in anticipation of the new rules experienced somewhat fewer challenges than those that waited until after the rules went into effect; newer data might therefore show even fewer districts still experiencing difficulties. Financial Concerns More than half of the directors surveyed said their revenue stayed the same or increased following the implementation of the HHFKA standards, while just under half had seen declines. But overall, 87 percent of the directors reported having financial concerns, often relating to the costs of labor and equipment. Interestingly, the directors only rarely reported that their financial concerns stemmed from factors such as food costs, decreased revenue from competitive food sales, drops in student participation, or an adverse effect of meal price increases. Increased Plate Waste for Fruits and Vegetables Under the HHFKA rules, children now have to take a half-cup serving of a fruit or vegetable at lunch, rather than being able to pass those foods by. The SNA has maintained that this change increases plate waste, while other studies, such as this one from the Harvard School of Public Health, found no such increase. But to the extent one can rely on the impressions of school food directors (as opposed to actual measurement), the KSHFP survey bolsters the SNA’s position: More than half of the directors surveyed reported increased plate waste for fruits, and 75 percent said that the amount of vegetable waste had increased. However, districts using strategies like cutting up fresh produce, offering a wider array of produce and serving it in salad bars felt those techniques were particularly effective in increasing student acceptance of fruits and vegetables. It’s also important to note that the survey took place in the 2014-15 school year, which means children have since had an additional year and half to become accustomed to the new rule; arguably, the more fruits and vegetables become the norm, the less likely kids are to spurn them. Salad Bars and Scratch-Cooking Increase Participation Notably, directors who prepared more foods from scratch and increased their use of salad bars were more likely to report that student participation either increased or remain unchanged, while declines in participation were seen most often by directors who purchased more pre-made foods or had fewer menu options. These findings should bolster efforts by parents around the country who would like to get salad bars into their kids’ schools, but are told by their district that they’re too expensive or won’t be popular with kids. Illegal Junk Food Sales Continue Only two-thirds of the directors said that all the foods and beverages sold “a la carte” in their meal programs met the Smart Snacks standards for competitive food, and only two in ten directors reported that products sold by other departments and groups on campus (e.g., through student fundraisers) were Smart Snacks compliant. Those figures are shockingly low, but it’s again important to note that the survey was taken in 2014-15—the first school year in which the Smart Snacks standards were in effect. One would hope that overall compliance is now significantly improved. (Then again, see this 2016 post regarding thriving junk food sales in my own district, Houston ISD: “Dispatch From Houston: Junk Food Sales Are Alive and Well.”) Not Enough Time for Kids to Eat Many districts remain challenged by lunch periods that give children too little time to eat, and nearly half have used some strategies to expedite service, such as offering “grab and go” options, increasing the number of cashiers and adding more serving lines. The report contains pages of advice from the expert panel on how districts can overcome challenges, making it a valuable resource for districts that are still struggling. But as I read through all that advice, I could only think of a post I wrote back in 2014 in which I mused that “there are few jobs on this planet harder than managing a district’s school food program.” It’s hard to read the KSHFP report without feeling tremendous empathy for school food directors, who have to juggle an array of competing concerns—financial constraints, regulatory compliance, a lack of equipment, student acceptance, parent input, too-short lunch periods—all on a budget that can be generously described as “meager.” It’s also impossible to read the report without wondering if all the work districts have so far put into adapting to the new standards will go up in smoke when/if the Trump administration and the new Republican-controlled Congress decide to roll those standards back. In a wide-ranging interview last week with Politico‘s senior food policy reporter Helena Bottemiller Evich, outgoing Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says he remains confident that most of the Obama nutritional reforms will be preserved: “”I don’t think that any administration, coming in, following this administration, would be able to roll back everything that’s been done in the nutrition space. I think there is a consensus—and I believe it’s a bipartisan consensus—that we have had, and continue to have, a challenge with obesity. We have, and continue to have, concerns about the impact that’s going to have on our military, on our children’s futures, on medical expenses.” We’ll see. This post originally appeared on The Lunch Tray. The post Most Schools Are Serving Healthier Meals, Despite Challenges appeared first on Civil Eats.16 Dec

“Nightmare” Bacteria Resistant to Last-Resort Antibiotics Discovered on Farm - Last week, a team of Ohio State University researchers published the results of a frightening scientific study. The group found bacteria possessing a gene resistant to carbapenems—a class of drugs used as a last resort when all other antibiotics have failed—on a Midwestern hog farm. The scientists fear their discovery could signal “the end of the antibiotic age”—a time when drugs no longer work against deadly diseases. This is an important development, and the news appears to have been overshadowed by recent political developments. Here’s what you need to know. What’s so worrisome about this particular type of resistant bacteria? The presence of this bacteria, called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), is troubling for two reasons. First, the bacteria, capable of causing infections in the human body, is highly mobile. While Texas Tech University researchers found non-plasmid-borne carbapenem-resistant bacteria on the feces of dairy cattle in New Mexico and Texas last January—and plasma-borne CREs have been discovered on farms in Europe and Asia—this is the first time plasmid-mediated gene has been found in U.S. livestock. Secondly, while the CREs have been found—and proven deadly—in hospitals before, its new presence on a hog farm means both that it’s spreading and that it now exists in a setting that antibiotic expert Dr. David Wallinga describes as a “petri dish for brewing up superbugs.” “It’s a bad-ass bacteria, to be blunt,” says Wallinga, who serves as senior health officer for the National Resources Defense Council. “Once it’s on the farm, because of the concentration of manure and bugs and antibiotics, it can amplify that resistance very quickly. To find that easily transmissible plasmid already carrying resistance to a really important drug class on a hog farm is not a good sign.” Keeve Nachman, who directs the Food Production and Public Health Program at the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University, agrees that finding the highly mobile resistance gene for the first time in a swine production context raises the stakes, and he is concerned about the big-picture implications. “The findings of this study are part of a larger story of the eroding effectiveness of lifesaving medications we rely on to treat sick people,” Nachman says. “It emphasizes the importance of how not just growth-promotion uses, but also inappropriate preventive uses, can contribute to antibiotic resistance risks.” So we know it’s a big deal—but let’s back up a little, shall we? Why are carbapenems so important as antibiotics? Carbapenems, along with colistin, are lifesaving antimicrobial drugs used as a last line of defense against severe infections that less toxic drugs can’t touch. Doctors prescribe them against infections from bacteria such as Salmonella, Shigella, Yersinia, Klebsiellae, and E. coli. Have carbapenem-resistant bacteria killed anyone yet? Yes. CREs cause an estimated 9,300 infections and 600 deaths in the U.S. per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and about half of the people who get bloodstream infections from CREs die as a result. In the past, Wallinga says, CREs have mostly shown up in hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare settings, usually among elderly people, transplant patients, and people whose immune systems are suppressed. But that’s changing. He describes carbapenem-resistant infections as “just like with MRSA [methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus], which started off in hospitals and now we see chronic cases out in the community.” In 2013, the CDC classified CREs as an “urgent threat” to public health in the U.S., one of three drug-resistant threats to earn the label. Centers for Disease Control Director Tom Frieden has referred to CREs as “nightmare bacteria.” What exactly did the Ohio State University study find? Four times over five months in 2015, Ohio State University researchers visited an indoor, 1,500-hog farm that operates by typical U.S. production practices. Using sterile gauze swabs, they collected fecal samples from various barns as well as piglets and harvest-ready pigs. When they analyzed the samples in the lab, they discovered the bla IMP-27 resistance gene in environmental samples from the nursery barn. The gene did not turn up in the pigs being fattened for slaughter. Wallinga expects that researchers looked at more of the 20,000 hog farms in the U.S., they would find similar results. “[The researchers] had reason to believe it might be on this one farm, and that’s the one farm where they did extensive sampling,” he says. “And guess what? They found it. I think there’s a strong likelihood this is just the tip of the iceberg.” Carbapenems are not approved for use on U.S. farms, so how did they get there? Because they’re so valuable to human health, the scientists were told that carbapenems had never been used on the farm where they showed up in Ohio. But the researchers hypothesized that the farm’s use of ceftiofur, an antibiotic that attacks bacteria in a manner similar to its relative carbapenem, might be to blame. Piglets on the farm (and many others in the U.S.) receive a dose of ceftiofur when they’re about a day old, and the males receive a second dose less than a week later when they’re castrated. The researchers suspect the use of this related drug provided the selection pressure for the carbapenem resistance to develop in the nursery barn. Dr. Karin Hoelzer, a senior officer in health programs supporting the food and antibiotic resistance projects at the Pew Charitable Trusts, says the resistant bacteria discovery demonstrates there are many things about antibiotic resistance we don’t fully understand yet. She points to the importance of more research “to get a better understanding of the dynamics of the anti-resistant bacteria—where they came from, what they mean for consumers, etc.” What’s the precedent for this type of antibiotic-resistant bacteria? About a year ago, Chinese and UK researchers found a strain of E. coli on a Chinese hog farm that proved resistant to colistin, another drug of last resort. The resistance spread, and in May turned up in the United States in a 49-year-old woman from Pennsylvania and in a pig intestine identified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “Generally, two drugs are being thought of as drugs of last resort for these gram-negative infections: carbapenems and colistin,” Wallinga said. “In the last 12 months, what we’ve found on pig farms are plasma-mediated resistance to carbapenems and colistin. So far, we haven’t found them on the same plasmid, but that’s the end of the road right there, when they’re on the same plasmid.” If and when they acquire that plasmid, he says, “they’re basically untreatable.” Could the carbapenem-resistant bacteria could eventually enter our food supply? The bacteria could colonize the people at work in the barns, the farm buildings, or the slaughterhouse. Or it could travel environmentally, through the air or runoff. “Right now, we haven’t been looking broadly enough for it, so we don’t know if that’s more than a hypothetical possibility,” Wallinga says. Nachman of Johns Hopkins says he is encouraged by the fact that the authors didn’t find the resistant bacteria in the older pigs. “That said, we can’t discount the possibility that if these types of antibiotic use continue, we may end up with a scenario where these bacteria are present on animal products or on produce fertilized with manure from this type of farm,” he adds. How big a problem is antibiotic use on farms? Kendra Kimbirauskas, chief executive officer of the Oregon-based Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP) and a small-scale pasture-raised hog farmer herself, sees big problems with industrial meat production in the U.S. today. To prevent illness in the confined operation, industrial farm operators administer regular doses of antibiotics via feed and water to all their animals, Kimbirauskas says. And thanks to these sub-therapeutic doses of promote growth, the industry uses antibiotics to produce larger animals with less feed, she continues. “Livestock are responsible for using 80 percent of antibiotics produced in this country, and those antibiotics are being fed to animals in concentrated feeding operations—not because the animals are sick, but as a substitute for good animal husbandry,” Kimbirauskas says. “The danger is that when you use antibiotics on a regular basis, these bacteria are wicked smart and their interest is to survive—they’re going to mutate so they can be resistant.” According to an assessment by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the use of “medically important” antibiotics—or antibiotics used to fight illness in humans—in food-producing animals increased by 23 percent between 2009 and 2014. (During that same five-year period, the number of cattle declined by more than 3,000 and the number of hogs fell by more than 6,700.) Nachman says the industry needs to target its use of antibiotics rather than using them routinely on all animals. “Plain and simple, we shouldn’t be using these drugs non-therapeutically,” he says. “Unless these drugs are being used to treat sick animals, or for curbing the spread of disease, their use is unnecessarily contributing to the selection of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.” How is the livestock industry responding to the ongoing threat of bacteria with antibiotic resistance? In the field of human medicine, professionals have taken measurable steps to reduce their antibiotic use. On the agricultural side, though, progress is not as clear. On the one hand, consumer demand for meat raised without antibiotics, or with fewer antibiotics, is exploding, and poultry companies including Purdue, Pilgrim’s Pride, and Tyson Foods have stepped up and pledged to strive to reduce or eliminate the use of human antibiotics from broiler chickens. The pork and cattle industries have not followed suit, however. “The agriculture industry continues to use antibiotics like it’s another feed additive,” Kimbirauskas says. Hoelzer explains that part of the reason the poultry industry has made more progress on the issue is the industry’s long history of vertical integration. “The same company controls everything, from the eggs to the bird’s slaughter to the feed. In a system where one company controls everything, it’s easier to make changes,” she says. “Chickens also have a shorter lifespan than cows, which makes it easier to reduce the need for antibiotics.” Big change across the livestock industry will require strong leadership, Wallinga says. “Purdue really had to re-examine and change what they do in raising chickens, and it’s going to take the same thing in pork,” he says. What should producers and consumers do? “Biology 101 tells us what to do,” Wallinga says. “If you know that exposing bacteria is going to select for resistance, what you need to do is stop exposing bacteria routinely to antibiotics, because the more you do so, the more selection pressure you create.” Whether the pharmaceutical companies that make those products are going to be on board with reducing their sales, he says, is “a bigger question.” On a big picture level, Kimbirauskas would like to see the livestock industry make radical changes to its production model. “They need to get animals out of confinement buildings and back on the ground. They need to reduce animal numbers, and grow them out longer … They need to use better husbandry, so their animals don’t require being fed routine antibiotics.” She also advises consumers to use their purchasing habits to exercise influence. “People who eat meat should be trying to find producers who raise animals responsibly and without the routine use of antibiotics,” she says. Hoelzer emphasizes the need for continued research. “These are very, very valuable drugs,” she says, “and we need to make sure we protect them for as long as possible.” The post “Nightmare” Bacteria Resistant to Last-Resort Antibiotics Discovered on Farm appeared first on Civil Eats.15 Dec

Food Boycotts, Buycotts, and Brand Busting in the Trump Era - As the election fallout continues, people on both sides of the political spectrum have been calling for boycotts of food and retail brands. Companies such as Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, Nabisco, and Target are being ensnared in the political discourse and increasingly forced to take sides. Food and beverage brands may be easy targets because we all eat and drink daily, and food is relatively inexpensive yet physically tangible as a symbol. But all this has us wondering: Will these efforts make some large food companies more politically responsive? Or is this just another distraction from the (real) news? The first consumer boycotts in the U.S. were in response to the consolidation of the meat-packing industry, known as the Beef Trust, in 1902. Since then, boycotts have become quite common. But for all the noise, even well-coordinated boycotts and divestment campaigns don’t seem to have much financial impact on companies. Experts say that activists can have much more influence in “mediated disruption,” or impacting a brand’s reputation through ongoing media attention and public discourse. But these days, judging where the boycott ends and other types of targeting begins can be tricky. “Trump is declaring war on some companies through social media. It’s unprecedented and companies are not prepared,” says Deborah Liepziger, author of Living Corporate Citizenship: Strategic Routes to Socially Responsible Business. Last May, for instance, the president-elect declared that he would never eat Oreos again after Nabisco relocated some operations to Mexico—and launched an avalanche of support on Twitter. Now, businesses may be readying crisis communication strategies in anticipation of similar “campaigns.” When Kellogg’s blocked their ad dollars from going to Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News last month, the site, known for its white supremacist slant, launched a #dumpkelloggs campaign. The site now has 375,000 signatories who believe the company doesn’t support their values and Breitbart followed with a torrent of stories such as Kellogg’s Besieged by Food Product Recalls over Listeria, Glass, Metal or #DumpKelloggs: Far-Left Cereal Giant Kellogg’s Warns of ‘Racial Privilege.’ These claims are intended to alarm their constituents, and contain numerous half-truths. Food recalls, of course, are more common within an industrialized food system and consumers rely on regulatory agencies to enforce policy and protect them. There was a limited recall due to potential listeria risk this year, possible glass contamination in 2013, and possible metal fragments from faulty equipment in 2012. And the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the independent philanthropic foundation founded by members of the Kellogg family, has granted nearly $1 million to Black Lives Matter. But, as Liepziger puts it, “The truth doesn’t matter.” Or at least it doesn’t stop many of Brietbart’s readers from following the site’s direction. And whether this tactic will impact Kellogg’s bottom line is an open question. But Liepziger adds that, “It can have an impact on reputation even if it’s not visible financially.” “Brand busting” is now a fairly common tactic and it will likely be used in the months ahead by constituents on both sides of the current political debate. The Coalition of Immokalee Worker (CIW)’s Marley Moynahan describes it this way: “You take the images, songs, ads of a company, elements of their public brand and twist it into a surprising or different form.” For example, CIW has often used the familiar image of a little girl with red pigtails in their boycotts of Wendy’s over tomato pickers’ wage rights. On the other side of the spectrum, users of bulletin boards like 4chan are pumping out imagery and memes to support the so-called alt-right agenda. Breitbart claims the lost ad dollars will have “virtually no revenue impact,” but its readers gleefully assume that the boycott will damage Kellogg’s. In response, some concerned citizens on the left are pooling their money to buy Kellogg’s cereal and donate it to food banks. Food blogger Sean Timberlake did this recently in San Francisco after reading another blogger’s list of progressive political actions to take every day: “We bought it specifically from Target because they are also under fire from the right-wing,” he told Civil Eats. This practice, called a buycott (not to be confused with the app by the same name, which encourages consumers to “vote with their wallets”), is considered a more positive approach, and it can neutralize the financial impact of boycotts. This famously—and perhaps the first example of this neutralizing phenomenon—took place during the Chick-fil-A same-sex marriage controversy, when protesters were met by an equally active counter-movement of customer support. The victor is unclear: the company saw an increase in profits, but gay marriage ultimately prevailed. The rapid spread of information on the Internet also means that some companies are being targeted by both sides, albeit for different reasons. Some Trump supporters began asking baristas to label their lattes “Trump” when asked their name, so it would be announced after the beverage was made (#TrumpCup). When a barista refused, supporters lashed out and threatened to boycott Starbucks. Trump himself weighed in on the use of “holiday” rather than “Christmas” cups. Meanwhile, some folks on the left have proposed boycotting Starbucks because they have locations inside Trump properties. In the midst of consumer projections of values, a few companies have made their positions on the election clear. Bill Penzey of Penzeys Spices continues to very publicly blast Trump supporters and what he sees as an overtly racist campaign. The company subsequently saw a spike in sales. Penzey was motivated to speak out after he witnessed the effect of dark money in the election of Scott Walker to Governor of Wisconsin: “It was in those first few months where most of the damage was done,” he told Civil Eats. “But a depression had set in amongst progressives.” The company launched their “support your local teachers” campaign in response to Walker’s attacks, but by then it was too late. Penzey says that if you know your customers—in his case, chefs and home cooks—and regularly interact with them, you will know that they support you. “I believe in the goodness of cooks,” he says. “You can’t make a better world by punishing people, you have to take care of people. That’s what cooking’s all about—[it’s] where our humanity comes from, learning to live together, learning around the fire.” Liepziger also observes that people are increasingly “claiming brands” in ways that don’t necessarily reflect a corporation’s policies and practices. But she adds that in a “reactionary” political climate, “some companies are actually more progressive than [the incoming] government. Companies are beginning to tackle big social issues like the environment and human rights.” While boycotts, buycotts, and brand busting may help some citizens stay engaged during this unprecedented political moment, Patty Lovera of Food & Water Watch worries that people will begin to see them as a substitute for engagement in policy organizing and advocacy. “It’s not that because they [boycotted a product], they’re done. We have to engage as citizens as well. We need functional government policy to shop well.” The post Food Boycotts, Buycotts, and Brand Busting in the Trump Era appeared first on Civil Eats.14 Dec

Our Favorite Food and Farm Books of 2016 - Looking for a holiday gift for a food and farm-obsessed friend or family member? Here are a few recommendations from the Civil Eats team. Here’s to good reading in a difficult year. Biting the Hands That Feed UsBy Baylen Linnekin Laws and regulations are designed to help us, right? When it comes to building a sustainable food movement, that may not always be true. In this provocative book, lawyer Baylen Linnekin makes a case for why U.S. food policy might benefit from a “less is more” approach. He shares examples of how laws have created unnecessary food waste, prevented residents from growing food in home gardens, and overburdened small producers and growers with regulations requiring them to use pricey equipment—instead of less expensive methods that would achieve similar outcomes. Linnekin leaves the reader with guiding principles of how we can transform food policy in a direction that promotes—not inhibits—sustainability. — Kristine Wong Bountiful Harvest: From Land to TableBy Betty LaDuke In a year when farmworkers’ rights came to the fore in food systems discussions, Betty LaDuke’s beautiful homage to the fruit, vegetable, and cut-flower harvesters of Oregon feels especially relevant. The 83-year-old artist, whose previous books have focused on women, artists, and social change throughout Africa and Latin America, dedicates this book to “the hands in the dirt people” who inspired her nearly life-sized plywood mural panels. Their pulsating colors and simplified forms convey both the joy and dignity of field work while the ever-present hunched backs of laborers speaks to the grueling, repetitive nature of their job. Referring to the current political climate, Moore points out that “this is work Americans don’t do any more.” At harvest time he adds 150 grape pickers to his team, noting that among the applicants, “We don’t have a single person who is a naturalized citizen.” To learn more about the LaDuke’s relationship with the farm laborers, watch this affecting video, Paintbrush Harvest. — Nancy Matsumoto Changing Season: A Father, a Daughter, A Family FarmBy David Mas Masumoto with Nikiko Masumoto This book inspired me to write about the need to support farmers earlier this year. The Masumotos are heroes to many, and here they lay bare their fears, hopes, and love of the land and for each other. As father and daughter, they share their stories of history, culture, and farming lessons on peaches and nectarines, as Mas prepares to hand down the family farm to Nikiko, who is leading a new generation of farmers to steward the land. — Naomi Starkman Fixing the Food System: Changing How We Produce and Consume FoodBy Steve Clapp Steve Clapp’s Fixing the Food System reviews the past and current history of calls for a national food policy, the most contentious controversies over food and nutrition issues that have impeded development of such a policy, and the work of advocates to achieve one. As this book makes clear, this history began decades ago. Clapp has been a keen observer of the food politics scene in Washington for decades and I can’t think of anyone who ought to know it better. Fixing the Food System reviews the major debates he witnessed—the Dietary Guidelines, of course, but also attempts to set policy for food safety, marketing to children, hunger in America, and humane treatment of farm animals, among others. — Marion Nestle (excerpted from her longer review) Food Anatomy: The Curious Parts & Pieces of Our Edible World By Julia Rothman We spend a lot of time here at Civil Eats reading the news and wonky food policy books. Once in a while, we do like to have some fun, and this illustrated food love letter offers just that. Rothman’s illustrations are beautiful, hand-made, and informative, from the multitude of grains to the plentitude of street food; from a how-to on making cheese to the edible parts of flowering plants. Her delicious drawings and descriptions of the universality of food are a joyful reminder that food is love. — Naomi Starkman Rancher, Farmer, FishermanBy Miriam Horn Horn traces the Mississippi River to meet a Montana rancher, a Kansas farmer, a Mississippi riverman, a Louisiana shrimper, and a Gulf fisherman. Through her time in each place, she records how these food producers—even those working at an industrial scale—are making important changes to address today’s environmental challenges with integrity and care, and in turn helping reshape the way we produce food. Heartfelt and beautifully written, Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman shows how large-scale farming and environmentalism can go hand in hand thanks to “remarkable innovators with the deep knowledge that comes from having worked the land for many generations.” — Cathy Erway (Here’s Cathy’s interview with Horn.) Scratch: Home Cooking for Everyone Made Simple, Fun, and Totally Deliciousby Maria Rodale Maria Rodale, the CEO and chairman of Rodale, Inc., was born on into a family of organic farmers and activists and she’s still most at home in her garden. Scratch gives Rodale’s admirers a glimpse at how her lifelong commitment to creating a sustainable and healthy food system plays out in her own kitchen every day. Via recipes like Silky Buttered Eggs and Lamb & Barley Soup, she tells readers how growing, cooking, serving, and appreciating fresh, simple, and good food enriches her life and family—and how others can follow her lead. — Lisa Held Soil Sisters: A Toolkit for Women FarmersBy Lisa Kivirist After spending 20 years farming, inn-keeping, and writing in rural Wisconsin, Lisa Kivirist has become a role model for this generation’s back-to-the-land set, publishing (often with her husband John Ivanko) regular how-to dispatches from the front lines of the rural renaissance. Kivirst, who founded and directs the Rural Women’s Project, regularly holds training workshops for aspiring and seasoned female farmers. In this book, she drawing on her rich community of farmers, tells members’ stories, and distills tips. Readers will learn about everything from conceptualizing and launching the farm of their dreams, to selecting farm tools and creating value-added products, and dissecting the Schedule F profit-and-loss statement that self-employed farmers must file with the IRS. Through it all, Kivirist’s voice is warm, encouraging, and gently humorous. Her resounding message? If she and her network can do it, so can you. — Nancy Matsumoto Vegetable Butcher: How to Select Prep Slice Dice & Masterfully Cook Vegetables from Artichokes to ZucchiniBy Cara Mangini It turns out “into pieces” isn’t the only way to cut vegetables, and the shape of each vegetable can tell us a lot about the best and tastiest way to peel, chiffonade, chop, and dice it. The Vegetable Butcher breaks down (pun intended) the basics of vegetable carving and offers selection and storage tips, bare-bones cooking methods, and vegetable pairings, as well as in-depth recipes. Even meat-carving aficionados can learn from Mangini’s simple, straightforward instructions in knife-wielding, and everyone can eat more veggies in the process. — Lisa Munniksma Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with RecipesBy Ronni Lundy My cookbook stacks runneth over with southern subjects, but the new standout is Victuals. Ronni Lundy is the real deal and the seasoned food writer takes us into the back pockets of the Appalachia region. This piece of Dixie is brimming with characters as Ronni’s Chevy Astro van takes us to many supper tables. Lundy is a founder of the Southern Foodways Alliance and the Appalachian Food Summit and she completes the book with recipes for foods like buttermilk cucumber salad, skillet corn, icebox green strawberry pickles, and skillet fried chicken. — Nicole Taylor Other books we’ve featured on the site this year: Contested Tastes: Foie Gras and the Politics of FoodBy Michaela DeSoucey Seeds on Ice: Svalbard and the Global Seed VaultBy Cary Fowler The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less WorkBy Ben Hartman The Rise of Women Farmers and Sustainable AgricultureBy Carolyn Sachs, Mary E. Barbercheck, Kathyrn Brasier, Nancy Ellen Kiernan, and Rachel Terman The Urban Farmer, Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed LandBy Curtis Stone Deeply Rooted: Herbal Medicine Cultivation in TechtropolisBy Bonnie Rose Weaver The post Our Favorite Food and Farm Books of 2016 appeared first on Civil Eats.13 Dec

Food is a Terrible Thing to Waste, And Your Mind Might Be at Fault - Nearly everywhere you look these days, there’s a list of tips to reduce food waste. It’s easy, we’re told. Just plan meals in advance, shop with a list, use up what’s in your fridge before hitting the store, and so on. But many of our own instincts—and our unconscious choices—often get in the way. Recognizing these innate behaviors—we’ll call them psychological barriers to reducing food waste—is a crucial step in moving toward a genuinely waste-free kitchen. The very first stumbling block is accepting that everyone is part of the problem. Most people tend to underestimate their own role in creating food waste—and overestimate their efforts to reduce it. In a survey last year, researchers found that 73 percent of people believe they waste less food than the average American. (In case you read that too fast, that’s mathematically simply not possible.) While precise data is sorely lacking on what exactly makes up the 36 million tons of food that Americans waste every year—and that’s a question researchers have literally digging through trash to be able to answer better—there are some things we do know about personal behavior that may be interfering with our ability to waste less food. We’re All Fooling Ourselves It also turns out that when it comes to food, and particularly when we’re at the grocery store, we tend to delude ourselves a bit. In background research conducted by Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Ad Council for the Save the Food campaign, researchers observed that people don’t like to have an empty refrigerator—or an empty shopping cart at the grocery store. “That tends to spur people to purchase more than they can realistically utilize promptly,” said JoAnne Berkenkamp, senior advocate with NRDC. She notes that more than half of grocery store purchases are impulse buys. People also want to have options, rather than be committed to particular meals, so they’ll buy more than they need. Dana Gunders, NRDC senior scientist and author of Waste-Free Kitchen Handbook: A Guide to Eating Well and Saving Money by Wasting Less Food, also points to what’s called a diversification bias, where people like the idea of diversity in food, but don’t necessarily practice it. “We as a society place a lot of value on choice, but the reality is we’re creatures of habit and we know what we like,” she says. The diversification bias is a subset of a larger tendency by people to be what NRDC calls “aspirational shoppers.” This looks different for different people, depending on their personal aspirations, but, in general, people seem to have high aspirations when they’re in the grocery store, and yet struggle to follow through on those aspiration when they get home. For some, that means buying more kale of lettuce than they’ll actually eat. (Perishable items tend to be wasted the most, but it’s unclear whether that’s because people are buying more than they can eat, or if it’s simply because they’re perishable.) For others, aspirational shopping may mean wanting to try a new food or new recipe, but never getting to it and that noble goal of branching out then ends up in the compost. Interestingly, some research has also found that people feel less guilty about wasting food if they compost it rather than throw it in the trash. And while that is a better way to manage food waste—nutrients can be recycled back in to the soil rather than contribute to climate-changing methane in a landfill—composting doesn’t balance out the initial resources used to produce the food in the first place—nor the impacts on everything from air and water quality to biodiversity.) Ironically, when it comes to children, having choices can be a key to reducing waste. David Just, co-director of the Cornell Center for Behavioral Economics in Child Nutrition Programs, said some of their research on food waste has found that both in school and at home, if children are able to choose what goes on their plates, they’re more likely to actually eat it, as opposed to being served carrots or broccoli they’re just going to refuse to eat. Of course, there’s only a net reduction in waste for the home if whatever the kid doesn’t choose is still eventually consumed. Gunders also notes that novel purchases generally go to waste more often than foods that we eat regularly. “If your household eats apples all the time, it’s unlikely that apples will go to waste in your house. But if you see a pomegranate and think, ‘Oh, I’ll try this,’ it’s more likely to be wasted because it’s not in your routine,” she said. Another funny thing the NRDC research turned up: People tend to be very cost-conscious when they’re shopping, but don’t think about the value of what they’re throwing away when they clean out of their fridge. “We saw many people being very focused on two-for-one deals, or conscious of a promotion,” said Berkencamp. In the home, these rules don’t seem to apply. The average family spends an average of $1,500 on wasted food every year. To complicate matters, much of the food we waste is a byproduct of good intentions, since food is so often a way to welcome people into your home, or to express love or gratitude—and people tend to overstock or over-serve in those situations. For example, the Food Lab at Cornell University recently found that among lower-middle income American families, stocking excess food is a core way to show family members affection. Knowing is Half the Battle Despite the obstacles, there are ways to get over some of these psychological barriers. It’s mainly a matter of identifying your personal weak spots—because while following tips from EPA and advocacy groups might immediately slash the amount of food wasted, it’s a rare person who can actually follow the tips on a thorough and consistent basis. A handy list of generalized tips is a good starting point, but it might be more valuable to start by identifying patterns of food waste in our own homes—and building a plan from there. While no one wants to run out of food when serving friends or family, for instance, there are ways to serve them that will minimize what goes uneaten and when the party’s over, the host can send leftovers home with guests or otherwise manage the surplus (freeze, repurpose, etc.) so it doesn’t end up as waste. The experts we spoke to also listed a few substitutions they’ve made in their own homes, such as replacing milk with non-dairy milk because it stays fresh longer or replacing salad greens (one of the most commonly wasted food items) with spinach, which can be used in more dishes. They also recommend freezing meals and ingredients that you don’t have time to eat, buying frozen vegetables first, and trying to stay focused at the grocery store (meditation: a half-filled cart may be a good thing). “We so often say, ‘What do I want for dinner?’ as opposed to, ‘What do I have for dinner?’” said Sarah Vared, interim director of ReFED, a collaboration of businesses, nonprofits and government leaders working to reducing food waste in the U.S. “I think we need to reframe the way we think about what we have in our fridges and pantries.” The post Food is a Terrible Thing to Waste, And Your Mind Might Be at Fault appeared first on Civil Eats.12 Dec

CleanTechnica

Low Costs of Solar Power & Wind Power Crush Coal, Crush Nuclear, & Beat Natural Gas - These are 5 messages that I think anyone wanting a better US economy (or a better economy in practically any country), anyone wanting national energy freedom (aka energy independence), anyone wanting to advance the most cost-effective choices for electricity generation, and anyone wanting to make logical energy decisions should know and share with others Low Costs of Solar Power & Wind Power Crush Coal, Crush Nuclear, & Beat Natural Gas was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.10:32

Christian Deilmann: “tado° believes in making your life more simple through intelligent and automated control.” - This week, Anne-Sophie Garrigou, journalist at The Beam, interviewed Christian Deilmann, CEO and Co-Founder of tado°, a company that develops technologies and products to significantly reduce home energy consumption without sacrificing comfort Christian Deilmann: “tado° believes in making your life more simple through intelligent and automated control.” was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.05:00

US States Where Large Energy Buyers Can Buy Renewable Energy From The Grid (Interactive Map) - If you're a large buyer of electricity, one would think that you could buy electricity from renewable energy from your utility if you so desired. Apparently, that's not the case in many US states. However, in a slight majority of states, there is one route or another for this US States Where Large Energy Buyers Can Buy Renewable Energy From The Grid (Interactive Map) was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.04:35

Waymo (Google/Alphabet) & Honda Collaborating On Self-Driving Tech - Waymo, the now independent self-driving vehicle technology arm of Google (well, technically, Alphabet), is now in formal talks with Honda about a potential partnership, according to recent reports Waymo (Google/Alphabet) & Honda Collaborating On Self-Driving Tech was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.03:23

Las Vegas Government Now Running Entirely On Renewable Electricity, Officials Announce - The city government of Las Vegas, Nevada, is now running entirely on renewable electricity, city officials have announced. The announcement marks the achievement of a nearly decade-long effort to embrace renewables and achieve the 100% goal. (Note that the achievement isn't for "100% renewable energy" since transport isn't included, and it only concerns the city government — not everyone living in Las Vegas.) Las Vegas Government Now Running Entirely On Renewable Electricity, Officials Announce was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.01:57

Smog “Red Alert” In China Closes Schools & Businesses, & Ground Flights - In an example of just how bad air pollution has gotten in parts of China, and why authorities there are incentivizing electric vehicles so aggressively (both personal vehicles and public transit vehicles), a smog "Red Alert" was recently issued in 24 major cities across the northeastern part of the country Smog “Red Alert” In China Closes Schools & Businesses, & Ground Flights was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.01:47

Solar-Powered Tesla Superchargers With Extreme Power (#ElonTweets) - One thing readers have been asking about for years is when exactly Tesla's Supercharger network will be solar powered, and, similarly, how many Tesla Superchargers currently include solar panels Solar-Powered Tesla Superchargers With Extreme Power (#ElonTweets) was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.24 Dec

Tesla Model X Christmas Easter Egg - If you have a Tesla Model X and missed Elon Musk's tweet early this morning (late last night), note that you can now activate a Christmas-related Easter Egg — "ModelXmas" — with a few easy steps. Here's the tweet Tesla Model X Christmas Easter Egg was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.24 Dec

10 More Cleantech Solutions For Your City - Following up on my initial "10 Cleantech Solutions Your City Should Implement" post, here are 10 more 10 More Cleantech Solutions For Your City was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.23 Dec

Steve Wozniak Inches Away From A Chevy Bolt, Gets Another Tesla Model S - Despite all of the pro-Bolt comments and reporting at the time, it seems that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's enthusiastic test drive of a 2017 Chevy Bolt EV back in September didn't lead to him purchasing one. Instead, he has gotten a new Tesla Model Steve Wozniak Inches Away From A Chevy Bolt, Gets Another Tesla Model S was originally published on CleanTechnica. To read more from CleanTechnica, join over 50,000 other subscribers: Google+ | Email | Facebook | RSS | Twitter.23 Dec

Climate Change Dispatch

Mongolia’s nomad herders facing winter disaster as temperatures plunge - Mongolia's traditional nomads are facing a natural disaster known as "dzud", where frigid temperatures and heavy snow cause widespread livestock deaths, threatening herders' livelihoods.23 Dec

Polar Bear Population Is Rising, Despite Green Fears - Polar bears are much more resilient to changing levels of sea ice than environmentalists previously believed, and numerous healthy populations are thriving.23 Dec

Bone-chilling temps sink to -80 degrees F in Siberia, shattering records - Western Siberia is currently stuck in a mini Ice Age as temperatures plummeted to nearly -80 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking all previous cold records. And meteorologists say that even icier weather is coming. Temps tumbled to -62 degrees Celsius (-79.6°F) at the Bolshoe Olkhovskoe oilfield in the Khanti-Mansi region this week. And the Kazym village in the Beloyarsky district showed a biting -58 degrees C (-72.4°F).23 Dec

Why Nobody Needs To Freak Out Over The North Pole’s Higher Temps Right Now - Much has been made about the well-above-average temperatures the Great White North has experienced this year and during the winter of 2015. For example, The Washington Post ran a story on December 20 titled “Pre-Christmas melt? North Pole forecast to warm 50 degrees above normal Thursday.”23 Dec

Obama Issues Last-Minute Rule, Wants to Finish Off U.S. Coal Industry - In a rather vindictive move, his Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining (OSM) is out with a broad new “stream rule” that could potentially designate as much as two-thirds of U.S. coal reserves off-limits to mining.22 Dec

Congress: Obama Fired Scientist to Advance “Climate” Agenda - The Obama administration fired a top scientist, intimidated other staff, censored important information from Congress for political reasons, and waged “a reckless and calculated attack on the legislative process itself,” U.S. lawmakers concluded in a blistering new report22 Dec

The Hockey Stick Collapses: 50 New (2016) Scientific Papers Affirm Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable - In 2016, an examination of the peer-reviewed scientific literature has uncovered dozens of paleoclimate reconstructions that reveal modern “global” warming has not actually been global in scale after all, as there are a large number of regions on the globe where it has been cooling for decades.22 Dec

Activists Set Up A ‘Hotline’ For Climate Scientists To Tattle On Trump - Environmentalist worry over President-elect Donald Trump reached new heights when activists set up an anonymous hotline for government climate scientists to report “political meddling” by the incoming administration. Bloomberg reports “outside scientists are setting up an anonymous hotline for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s employees to report political meddling” over fears Trump could delete public climate data and silence researchers.22 Dec

Enviros Launch Lawsuit Against Justin Trudeau-Approved Oil Pipeline - Environmentalist are attacking a Canadian oil pipeline approved by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a self-proclaimed climate change warrior. Activists with the Oceans Society and Raincoast Conservation Foundation filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the approval of the Kinder Morgan Trans-Mountain pipeline, a $6.8-billion project tripling the capacity of the northern Alberta-to-Burnaby pipeline system to nearly 1 million barrels of oil a day.22 Dec

The ‘climate’ thought police - No longer does the Catholic Church hold sway over Christendom and even over the whole world, but an ersatz religion that demands that we all believe that Mankind is polluting the Earth by burning fossil fuels and thereby releasing Carbon Dioxide into the Atmosphere now holds sway.22 Dec

☀ Cyber ♆ Space ☄ War ☠

#MorningMonarchy: December 20, 2016 - A.I. awakenings, sex spies and the shortest solstice + this day in history w/“Funky Drummer” and our song of the day by Best Coast on your Morning Monarchy for December 20, 2016.20 Dec

#MorningMonarchy: December 13, 2016 - Hacking quest, BS detectors and stoping Stingrays + this day in history w/Operation Red Dawn and our song of the day by Tomar & The FC's on your Morning Monarchy for December 13, 2016.13 Dec

#MorningMonarchy: December 6, 2016 - Intelligence authorization, spy kids and the art of misdirection + this day in history w/Encyclopædia Britannica and our song of the day by Kaiser Chiefs on your Morning Monarchy for December 6, 2016. 6 Dec

#MorningMonarchy: November 29, 2016 - Secretly editing, deleting everything and satellite sounds + this day in history w/Pong and our song of the day by NxWorries on your Morning Monarchy for November 29, 2016.29 Nov

#MorningMonarchy: November 22, 2016 - Snooper's Charter, Titanpointe and last ditch efforts + this day in history w/JFK blown away and our song of the day by The Pretenders on your Morning Monarchy for November 22, 2016.22 Nov

#MorningMonarchy: November 15, 2016 - Data firms, monitoring children and the dark web + this day in history w/March Against Death and our song of the day by GOAT on your Morning Monarchy for November 15, 2016.15 Nov

#MorningMonarchy: October 31, 2016 - October surprises, the church of bleach and political clowns + this day in history w/Debbie Gibson's séance and our song of the day by Leonard Cohen on your Morning Monarchy for October 31, 2016.31 Oct

#MorningMonarchy: October 25, 2016 - Heart hacks, company collusion and the crash site + this day in history w/Operation Urgent Fury and our song of the day by Classixx on your Morning Monarchy for October 25, 2016.25 Oct

#MorningMonarchy: October 18, 2016 - Unclassified clouds, Putlocker down and devastating space events + this day in history w/home satellites and our song of the day by Alien Knife Fight on your Morning Monarchy for October 18, 2016.18 Oct

#MorningMonarchy: October 11, 2016 - Overbroad overreach, siren servers and security fatigue + this day in history w/SNL and our song of the day by Elohim on your Morning Monarchy for October 11, 2016.11 Oct

The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, Tech

Holiday "Galaxy" Stream --Climate Change & Chaos (VIEW) - How well can we predict climate change? The forecast for our future may lie at the intersection of chaos theory and a new breed of supercomputing, Tim Palmer, a physicist with the University of Oxford, explains in his public lecture from the Perimeter Institute on May 4, 2016. Image credit: Antarctica expedition with thanks to nationofchange.org Related articles Climate Change Impact--A 3-D Look at the Planet's Mountain Ranges Rocky Planet with a 3-Day Orbit --"Only 21 Light-Years Away" NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory --A New "Systems" Approach to the Search for Alien Life 11:07

"A Hidden Agenda?" China's Mission to the Far Side of the Moon --Site of Solar System's Largest Impact Crater and the Peaks of Eternal Light (A 2016 Most Popular) - China will launch a mission to land on the dark side of the moon in two years' time, state media reported, in what will be a first for humanity. The moon's far hemisphere is never directly visible from Earth and while it has been photographed, with the first images appearing in 1959, it has never been explored. Earlier reports from the Xinhua news agency hinted that China may be considering the construction of a pioneering radio telescope on the moons virgin far side, which will give it an unobstructed window on the Cosmos that was confirmed this June, 2016 when an agreement was announced between the Netherlands and China, that a Dutch-built radio antenna will travel to the Moon aboard the Chinese Chang’e 4 satellite and usher in a new era of radio astronomy allowing for the study of objects that might otherwise be invisible or hidden in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. “Radio astronomers study the universe using radio waves, light coming from stars and planets, for example, which is not visible with the naked eye," commented Heino Falke – a professor of Astroparticle Physics and Radio Astronomy at Radboud University. "We can receive almost all celestial radio wave frequencies here on Earth. We cannot detect radio waves below 30 MHz, however, as these are blocked by our atmosphere. It is these frequencies in particular that contain information about the early universe, which is why we want to measure them.” The Chang'e-4 probe -- named for the goddess of the moon in Chinese mythology -- will be launched to the moon in 2018, the official Xinhua news agency reported. "The Chang'e-4's lander and rover will make a soft landing on the back side of the moon, and will carry out in-place and patrolling surveys," according to the country's lunar exploration chief Liu Jizhong. Beijing sees its military-run, multi-billion-dollar space program as a marker of its rising global stature and mounting technical expertise, as well as evidence of the ruling Communist Party's success in transforming the once poverty-stricken nation. But for the most part it has so far replicated activities that the US and Soviet Union pioneered decades ago. "The implementation of the Chang’e-4 mission has helped our country make the leap from following to leading in the field of lunar exploration," Liu added. In 2013, China landed a rover dubbed Yutu on the moon and the following year an unmanned probe completed its first return mission to the earth's only natural satellite. Beijing has plans for a permanent orbiting station by 2020 and eventually to send a human to the moon. Space flight is "an important manifestation of overall national strength", Xinhua cited science official Qian Yan as saying, adding that every success had "greatly stimulated the public’s... pride in the achievements of the motherland’s development." Clive Neal, chair of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group affiliated with NASA, confirmed that the Chang'e-4 mission was unprecedented. "There has been no surface exploration of the far side," he told AFP. It is "very different to the near side because of the biggest hole in the solar system -- the South Pole-Aitken basin, shown above, which may have exposed mantle materials -- and the thicker lunar crust". The basin is the largest known impact crater in the solar system, nearly 2,500 kilometers wide and 13 kilometers deep. Meanwhile, a 'research station' on the 'peaks of eternal light' at the Lunar South Pole would prevent anyone else from approaching. A Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics senior astrophysicist, Martin Elvis, has sounded the alarm of how an unfriendly power – the Chinese for example – could seize control of an important piece of lunar real estate. They could do it legally by exploiting provisions of the Outer Space Treaty, that bars any nation — and by extension, corporation — from owning property on a celestial body, but a loophole in the pact may amount to the same thing, warns Elvis. The real estate in question are the so-called “peaks of eternal light” around the permanently shadowed craters at the Lunar South Pole. Unlike the Earth, which is tilted so the poles are in six months of darkness and six months of light, the moon is almost perfectly aligned with its orbit around the sun. Because of the way the moon tilts, these peaks are bathed in sunlight for most if not all of the time, which means you can have an almost continuous power supply, ideal for a photovoltaic power station. Thus this part of the moon would be perfect places to erect solar power stations that would support mining operations in the nearby craters, where water and other valuable resources such as Helium 3 have been deposited over billions of years. Elvis says that provisions in the treaty allow nations to exploit resources, including through establishing research stations, and bar others from disrupting such endeavors. In some cases, this could amount to de facto ownership, Elvis said. As China and Japan plan moon landings, and corporate leaders eye their own space ventures, the loophole has gained in importance. Not only are China and Japan planning a series of missions to the moon, China just announced that one of its missions would land at the south pole somewhere. There are also private companies, stimulated by the Google Lunar X Prize. And there are two teams that have rocket flights booked for 2017, an Israeli team and Moon Express, a U.S. company. And they seem to be looking at being able to send a lander to the moon for $50 million, which is very cheap by space standards. So this makes it a very urgent issue. People will soon want to start putting power stations on these Peaks of Eternal Light and use them for exploiting the resources. What we pointed out is that a very simple experiment, similar to the one that the Chinese have already landed on the near side of the moon, [could serve to limit access to others]. You land on one end of the ridge and a little rover goes off, trailing a little copper wire behind it. It trundles off to the other end of the ridge, and that would then form a radio telescope to explore the Cosmos. During the 40th Anniversary Commemoration Event for Apollo 17, moonwalker and NASA retired astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmitt said "one of the most significant contributions of the Apollo Missions was confirming the presence of Helium-3 on the moon." Helium-3 (He-3) is a light, non-radioactive isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron. Its presence is rare on Earth, it is sought after for use in nuclear fusion research, and it is abundant in the moon's soil by at least 13 parts per billion (ppb) by weight. In 2007, shortly after Russia claimed a vast portion of the Arctic sea floor, accelerating an international race for the natural resources as global warming opens polar access, China announced plans to map "every inch" of the surface of the Moon and exploit the vast quantities of Helium-3 thought to lie buried in lunar rocks as part of its ambitious space-exploration program. Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration, was quoted on government-sanctioned news site ChinaNews.com describing plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon for future mining of Helium 3: "There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons." "Helium-3 is considered as a long-term, stable, safe, clean and cheap material for human beings to get nuclear energy through controllable nuclear fusion experiments," Ziyuan added. "If we human beings can finally use such energy material to generate electricity, then China might need 10 tons of helium-3 every year and in the world, about 100 tons of helium-3 will be needed every year." Helium 3 fusion energy - classic Buck Rogers propulsion system- may be the key to future space exploration and settlement, requiring less radioactive shielding, lightening the load. Scientists estimate there are about one million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the world for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 25 tons could supply the entire United States' energy needs for a year. Thermonuclear reactors capable of processing Helium-3 would have to be built, along with major transport system to get various equipment to the Moon to process huge amounts of lunar soil and get the minerals back to Earth. The harvesting of Helium-3 on the could start by 2025. Our lunar mining could be but a jumping off point for Helium 3 extraction from the atmospheres of our Solar System gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter. UN Treaties in place state that the moon and its minerals are the common heritage of mankind, so the quest to use Helium-3 as an energy source would likely demand joint international co-operation. Hopefully, exploitation of the moon's resources will be viewed as a solution for thw world, rather than an out-moded nation-state solution. The Daily Galaxy via NASA, Beijing (AFP) and Xinhua News Agency, and the The Harvard Gazette Image credit: top of page South Pole ichef.bbci.co.uk and PBS, Peaks of Eternal Light Related articlesImage of the Day: NASA Sizes Up Pluto and Its Moon CharonEarth's Oxygen Levels Altered Climate Past 541 Million Years"Search Older Super-Earths for Detectable Life" --Their Oceans Can Last for Billions of Years 10:07

NASA/Goddard: "Our Milky Way Galaxy is Embedded Within a Vast Sphere of Black Holes" (A 2016 Most Popular) - "This study is an effort to bring together a broad set of ideas and observations to test how well they fit, and the fit is surprisingly good," said Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard. "If this is correct, then all galaxies, including our own, are embedded within a vast sphere of black holes each about 30 times the sun's mass." Dark matter is a mysterious substance composing most of the material universe, now widely thought to be some form of massive exotic particle. An intriguing alternative view is that dark matter is made of black holes formed during the first second of our universe's existence, known as primordial black holes. Now a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, suggests that this interpretation aligns with our knowledge of cosmic infrared and X-ray background glows and may explain the unexpectedly high masses of merging black holes detected last year. In 2005, Kashlinsky led a team of astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to explore the background glow of infrared light in one part of the sky. The researchers reported excessive patchiness in the glow and concluded it was likely caused by the aggregate light of the first sources to illuminate the universe more than 13 billion years ago. Follow-up studies confirmed that this cosmic infrared background (CIB) showed similar unexpected structure in other parts of the sky. In 2013, another study compared how the cosmic X-ray background (CXB) detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory compared to the CIB in the same area of the sky. The first stars emitted mainly optical and ultraviolet light, which today is stretched into the infrared by the expansion of space, so they should not contribute significantly to the CXB. Yet the irregular glow of low-energy X-rays in the CXB matched the patchiness of the CIB quite well. The only object we know of that can be sufficiently luminous across this wide an energy range is a black hole. The research team concluded that primordial black holes must have been abundant among the earliest stars, making up at least about one out of every five of the sources contributing to the CIB. The nature of dark matter remains one of the most important unresolved issues in astrophysics. Scientists currently favor theoretical models that explain dark matter as an exotic massive particle, but so far searches have failed to turn up evidence these hypothetical particles actually exist. NASA is currently investigating this issue as part of its Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope missions. "These studies are providing increasingly sensitive results, slowly shrinking the box of parameters where dark matter particles can hide," Kashlinsky said. "The failure to find them has led to renewed interest in studying how well primordial black holes -- black holes formed in the universe's first fraction of a second -- could work as dark matter." Physicists have outlined several ways in which the hot, rapidly expanding universe could produce primordial black holes in the first thousandths of a second after the Big Bang. The older the universe is when these mechanisms take hold, the larger the black holes can be. And because the window for creating them lasts only a tiny fraction of the first second, scientists expect primordial black holes would exhibit a narrow range of masses. On Sept. 14, 2015 gravitational waves produced by a pair of merging black holes 1.3 billion light-years away were captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. This event marked the first-ever detection of gravitational waves as well as the first direct detection of black holes. The signal provided LIGO scientists with information about the masses of the individual black holes, which were 29 and 36 times the sun's mass, plus or minus about four solar masses. These values were both unexpectedly large and surprisingly similar. "Depending on the mechanism at work, primordial black holes could have properties very similar to what LIGO detected," Kashlinsky explained. "If we assume this is the case, that LIGO caught a merger of black holes formed in the early universe, we can look at the consequences this has on our understanding of how the cosmos ultimately evolved." In his new paper, published May 24 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Kashlinsky analyzes what might have happened if dark matter consisted of a population of black holes similar to those detected by LIGO. The black holes distort the distribution of mass in the early universe, adding a small fluctuation that has consequences hundreds of millions of years later, when the first stars begin to form. For much of the universe's first 500 million years, normal matter remained too hot to coalesce into the first stars. Dark matter was unaffected by the high temperature because, whatever its nature, it primarily interacts through gravity. Aggregating by mutual attraction, dark matter first collapsed into clumps called minihaloes, which provided a gravitational seed enabling normal matter to accumulate. Hot gas collapsed toward the minihaloes, resulting in pockets of gas dense enough to further collapse on their own into the first stars. Kashlinsky shows that if black holes play the part of dark matter, this process occurs more rapidly and easily produces the lumpiness of the CIB detected in Spitzer data even if only a small fraction of minihaloes manage to produce stars. As cosmic gas fell into the minihaloes, their constituent black holes would naturally capture some of it too. Matter falling toward a black hole heats up and ultimately produces X-rays. Together, infrared light from the first stars and X-rays from gas falling into dark matter black holes can account for the observed agreement between the patchiness of the CIB and the CXB. Occasionally, some primordial black holes will pass close enough to be gravitationally captured into binary systems. The black holes in each of these binaries will, over eons, emit gravitational radiation, lose orbital energy and spiral inward, ultimately merging into a larger black hole like the event LIGO observed. "Future LIGO observing runs will tell us much more about the universe's population of black holes, and it won't be long before we'll know if the scenario I outline is either supported or ruled out," Kashlinsky said. Kashlinsky leads science team centered at Goddard that is participating in the European Space Agency's Euclid mission, which is currently scheduled to launch in 2020. The project, named LIBRAE, will enable the observatory to probe source populations in the CIB with high precision and determine what portion was produced by black holes. Astronomers found outbursts in the supermassive black hole centered in the small galaxy NGC 5195 shown in the Chandra x_ray image at the top of the page. This companion galaxy is merging with a large spiral galaxy NGC 5194, also known as “The Whirlpool.” Both of these galaxies are in the Messier 51 galaxy system, located about 26 million light years from Earth The Daily Galaxy via NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Image credits: NASA, ligo.caltech.edu, and newevolutiondesigns.com Related articles The Cygnus Black Hole --"Fires Up In An Outburst of High-Energy Light" "Our Invisible Universe" --The Foamy Structure of Spacetime NASA's Fermi Space Telescope Finds First Gamma-Ray Binary Star Beyond the Milky Way --"A Morphed Supernova?" "Biggest Known Explosion Since the Big Bang" (Today's Most Popular) Supermassive Black-Hole Eruptions --"Shape the Cosmic Landscape" Image of the Day: Galaxies in Collision --Preview of the Milky Way/Andromeda Destiny 09:11

This Week's Most Popular --From China's "Star-Trek" Propulsion Drive to Mystery of the Big Bang - The Strange, Unsolved Case of the Alien Megastar China Trumps NASA With Working "StarTrek" EM Propulsion Drive --"Testing Now Aboard the Tiangong-2 Space Laboratory" Stunning X-Ray Satellite View of Earth --"Reveals a Jet-Stream at Molten Core" Betelgeuse: Supergiant Red Star Poised to Explode --"May Have Swallowed a Companion" CERN Discovery --"We're One Step Closer to Illuminating Mystery of the Big Bang" 24 Dec

With Our Thanks and Best Wishes for the Holidays! - The IceCube Lab at the South Pole, lit up by star trails in this photo taken in July 2015 by the IceCube Collaboration. 24 Dec

NASA's Fermi Space Telescope Finds First Gamma-Ray Binary Star Beyond the Milky Way --"A Morphed Supernova?" - Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other facilities, an international team of scientists has found the first gamma-ray binary in another galaxy and the most luminous one ever seen. The dual-star system, dubbed LMC P3, contains a massive star and a crushed stellar core that interact to produce a cyclic flood of gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light. "Fermi has detected only five of these systems in our own galaxy, so finding one so luminous and distant is quite exciting," said lead researcher Robin Corbet at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Gamma-ray binaries are prized because the gamma-ray output changes significantly during each orbit and sometimes over longer time scales. This variation lets us study many of the emission processes common to other gamma-ray sources in unique detail." LMC P3 (circled) is located in a supernova remnant called DEM L241 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy about 163,000 light-years away. The system is the first gamma-ray binary discovered in another galaxy and is the most luminous known in gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves and visible light These rare systems contain either a neutron star or a black hole and radiate most of their energy in the form of gamma rays. Remarkably, LMC P3 is the most luminous such system known in gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves and visible light, and it's only the second one discovered with Fermi. LMC P3 lies within the expanding debris of a supernova explosion located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small nearby galaxy about 163,000 light-years away. In 2012, scientists using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory found a strong X-ray source within the supernova remnant and showed that it was orbiting a hot, young star many times the sun's mass. The researchers concluded the compact object was either a neutron star or a black hole and classified the system as a high-mass X-ray binary (HMXB). In 2015, Corbet's team began looking for new gamma-ray binaries in Fermi data by searching for the periodic changes characteristic of these systems. The scientists discovered a 10.3-day cyclic change centered near one of several gamma-ray point sources recently identified in the LMC. One of them, called P3, was not linked to objects seen at any other wavelengths but was located near the HMXB. Were they the same object? Observations from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (magenta line) show that gamma rays from LMC P3 rise and fall over the course of 10.3 days. The companion is thought to be a neutron star. Illustrations across the top show how the changing position of the neutron star relates to the gamma-ray cycle.(NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) To find out, Corbet's team observed the binary in X-rays using NASA's Swift satellite, at radio wavelengths with the Australia Telescope Compact Array near Narrabri and in visible light using the 4.1-meter Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile and the 1.9-meter telescope at the South African Astronomical Observatory near Cape Town. The Swift observations clearly reveal the same 10.3-day emission cycle seen in gamma rays by Fermi. They also indicate that the brightest X-ray emission occurs opposite the gamma-ray peak, so when one reaches maximum the other is at minimum. Radio data exhibit the same period and out-of-phase relationship with the gamma-ray peak, confirming that LMC P3 is indeed the same system investigated by Chandra. "The optical observations show changes due to binary orbital motion, but because we don't know how the orbit is tilted into our line of sight, we can only estimate the individual masses," said team member Jay Strader, an astrophysicist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "The star is between 25 and 40 times the sun's mass, and if we're viewing the system at an angle midway between face-on and edge-on, which seems most likely, its companion is a neutron star about twice the sun's mass." If, however, we view the binary nearly face-on, then the companion must be significantly more massive and a black hole. LMC P3 (circled) is located in a supernova remnant called DEM L241 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy about 163,000 light-years away. The system is the first gamma-ray binary discovered in another galaxy and is the most luminous known in gamma rays, X-rays, radio waves and visible light. Both objects form when a massive star runs out of fuel, collapses under its own weight and explodes as a supernova. The star's crushed core may become a neutron star, with the mass of half a million Earths squeezed into a ball no larger than Washington, D.C. Or it may be further compacted into a black hole, with a gravitational field so strong not even light can escape it. The surface of the star at the heart of LMC P3 has a temperature exceeding 60,000 degrees Fahrenheit (33,000 degrees Celsius), or more than six times hotter than the sun's. The star is so luminous that pressure from the light it emits actually drives material from the surface, creating particle outflows with speeds of several million miles an hour. In gamma-ray binaries, the compact companion is thought to produce a "wind" of its own, one consisting of electrons accelerated to near the speed of light. The interacting outflows produce X-rays and radio waves throughout the orbit, but these emissions are detected most strongly when the compact companion travels along the part of its orbit closest to Earth. Through a different mechanism, the electron wind also emits gamma rays. When light from the star collides with high-energy electrons, it receives a boost to gamma-ray levels. Called inverse Compton scattering, this process produces more gamma rays when the compact companion passes near the star on the far side of its orbit as seen from our perspective. Prior to Fermi's launch, gamma-ray binaries were expected to be more numerous than they've turned out to be. Hundreds of HMXBs are cataloged, and these systems are thought to have originated as gamma-ray binaries following the supernova that formed the compact object. "It is certainly a surprise to detect a gamma-ray binary in another galaxy before we find more of them in our own," said Guillaume Dubus, a team member at the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble in France. "One possibility is that the gamma-ray binaries Fermi has found are rare cases where a supernova formed a neutron star with exceptionally rapid spin, which would enhance how it produces accelerated particles and gamma rays." The Daily Galaxy via Francis Reddy/Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Related articlesThe Cygnus Black Hole --"Fires Up In An Outburst of High-Energy Light""Our Invisible Universe" --The Foamy Structure of SpacetimeNASA Goddard: "All Galaxies are Embedded Within a Vast Sphere of Black Holes" (Holiday Feature) - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries ChannelSouth-Pole Telescope Reveals an Ancient Hyper-Bright Galaxy --"An Enigma" - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel"The Opaque Galaxy" --Starving Black Hole Dims Its Host'A Cosmic Miracle' --"Behemoth Black Holes of the Early Galaxies Emerged From a Single Central Supermassive Star" - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel 23 Dec

"Feeding Sagittarius A*"--The Monster at the Center of the Milky Way - The colossal black hole at the center of the Milky Way -- called "Sagittarius A*" because it is found in the constellation Sagittarius -- has a gravitational mass that is four million times greater than our own sun. Yet the accretion disk plasma that spirals into this mass is "radiatively inefficient," meaning that it emits much less radiation than one would expect. Scientists at Princeton University and the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a rigorous new method for modeling the accretion disk that feeds the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The paper, published online in December in the journal Physical Review Letters, provides a much-needed foundation for simulation of the extraordinary processes involved. Accretion disks are clouds of plasma that orbit and gradually swirl into massive bodies such as black holes -- intense gravitational fields produced by stars that collapse to a tiny fraction of their original size. These collapsed stars are bounded by an "event horizon," from which not even light can escape. As accretion disks flow toward event horizons, they power some of the brightest and most energetic sources of electromagnetic radiation in the universe. "So the question is, why is this disk so quiescent?" asks Matthew Kunz, lead author of the paper, assistant professor of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University and a physicist at PPPL. Co-authors include James Stone, Princeton professor of astrophysical sciences, and Eliot Quataert, director of theoretical astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. To develop a method for finding the answer, the researchers considered the nature of the superhot Sagittarius A* accretion disk. Its plasma is so hot and dilute that it is collisionless, meaning that the trajectories of protons and electrons inside the plasma rarely intersect. This lack of collisionality distinguishes the Sagittarius A* accretion disk from brighter and more radiative disks that orbit other black holes. The brighter disks are collisional and can be modeled by formulas dating from the 1990s, which treat the plasma as an electrically conducting fluid. But "such models are inappropriate for accretion onto our supermassive black hole," Kunz said, since they cannot describe the process that causes the collisionless Sagittarius A* disk to grow unstable and spiral down. To model the process for the Sagittarius A* disk, the paper replaces the formulas that treat the motion of collisional plasmas as a macroscopic fluid. Instead, the authors use a method that physicists call "kinetic" to systematically trace the paths of individual collisionless particles. This complex approach, conducted using the Pegasus computer code developed at Princeton by Kunz, Stone and Xuening Bai, now a lecturer at Harvard University, produced a set of equations better able to model behavior of the disk that orbits the supermassive black hole. This kinetic approach could help astrophysicists understand what causes the accretion disk region around the Sagittarius A* hole to radiate so little light. Results could also improve understanding of other key issues, such as how magnetized plasmas behave in extreme environments and how magnetic fields can be amplified. The goal of the new method, said Kunz, "will be to produce more predictive models of the emission from black-hole accretion at the galactic center for comparison with astrophysical observations." Such observations come from instruments such as the Chandra X-ray observatory, an Earth-orbiting satellite that NASA launched in 1999, and the upcoming Event Horizon Telescope, an array of nine Earth-based radio telescopes located in countries around the world. The Daily Galaxy via Princeton University Image credit: With thanks to deviantart.net and NASA Related articlesImage of the Day: Dusty Cloud at Milky Way Core Survives Supermassive Black Hole Encounter"The Great Migration" --10,000 Black Holes and Neutron Stars Swarm at Milky Way's Center (Today's Most Popular)NASA: "Milky Way Center is a Bizarre Place --It's a Mystery" 23 Dec

Today's "Galaxy" Stream --Dark Matter and Dinosaurs (VIEW) - If the solar system, as it orbited the center of the galaxy, were to move through the Milky Way's dark-matter disk, Lisa Randall (Warped Passages, Knocking on Heaven's Door), one of our most influential theoretical physicists, suggests that the gravitational effects from the dark matter might be enough to dislodge comets and other objects from what’s known as the Oort Cloud and send them hurtling toward Earth. Their theory suggests that those oscillations occur approximately every 32-35 million years, a figure that is on par with evidence collected from impact craters suggesting that increases in meteor strikes occur over similar periods. “Those objects are only weakly gravitationally bound,” said Harvard's Lisa Randall. “With enough of a trigger, it’s possible to dislodge objects from their current orbit. While some will go out of the solar system, others may come into the inner solar system, which increases the likelihood that they may hit the Earth.” Though the exact nature of dark matter remains unknown, physicists have been able to infer its existence based on the gravitational effect it exerts on ordinary matter. Though dark matter is otherwise believed to be non-interacting, Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece, assistant professor of physics, suggested that a hypothetical type of dark matter could form a disk of material that runs through the center of the galaxy. “We have some genuinely new ideas,” Randall said. “I’ll say from the start that we don’t know if they’re going to turn out to be right, but what’s interesting is that this opens the door to a whole class of ideas that haven’t been tested before, and potentially have a great deal of interesting impacts.” Working with postdoctoral fellow Jakub Scholtz, Randall and Reece are also investigating whether the newly proposed form of dark matter may play a role in one of the largest mysteries in astrophysics: how the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies form. “One possibility is that it may ‘seed’ black holes at the center of galaxies,” she said. “This is a work in progress. It’s an entirely new scenario we’re working out, so I don’t want to overstate anything, but it’s a very interesting possibility.” Though the hypothesis adds additional complexity to a number of already-thorny questions about the nature of the universe, Randall believes it will be important to understand if a portion — even a relatively small portion — of dark matter behaves in unexpected ways. The image at the top of the page above is composite of the dark matter disk (red contours) and the Atlas Image mosaic of the Milky Way obtained as part of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology. (J. Read & O. Agertz) Related articlesThe "Oort Star" --Did a Rogue Star Pass Through Our Solar System? (Weekend Feature)Ripple at Edge of the Milky Way --"Reveals Veil of Dark Matter Cloaking a Dwarf Galaxy""Dark Matter Observed in the Innermost Region the Milky Way" 23 Dec

Interstellar Human Hibernation --Science of Deep-Space Travel from From 'Aliens' to 'Arrival' - In "Passengers," a 2016 science-fiction thriller film two space travelers wake up 90 years too soon from an induced hibernation on board a spaceship bound for a new planet. From "Aliens" to "Interstellar," Hollywood has long used suspended animation to overcome the difficulties of deep space travel, but the once-fanciful sci-fi staple is becoming scientific fact. The theory is that a hibernating crew could stay alive over vast cosmic distances, requiring little food, hydration or living space, potentially slashing the costs of interstellar missions and eradicating the boredom of space travel. But the technology has always been unattainable outside the fertile imaginations of filmmakers from Woody Allen and Ridley Scott to James Cameron and Christopher Nolan—until now. Atlanta-based Spaceworks Enterprises is using a $500,000 grant from NASA to leverage techniques used on brain trauma and heart attack patients to develop "low metabolic stasis" for missions to Mars and the asteroid belt. "It takes about six months to get out to Mars... There are a lot of demands, a lot of support equipment required to keep people alive even during that period," said SpaceWorks CEO John Bradford. The aerospace engineer told a panel in Los Angeles marking the release Wednesday of "Passengers," the latest movie to explore suspended animation, that his company was adapting the medical technique of induced hypothermia to astronautics. Hospitals lower the core temperature of trauma patients by around 10 degrees Farenheit (12C) to achieve a 70 percent reduction in metabolism, although they are "shut down" for a couple of days rather than the months astronauts would need. "We're evaluating it. We think it's medically possible," Bradford told journalists. Morten Tyldum's "Passengers" stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as strangers on a 120-year journey to the distant colony of Homestead II when their hibernation pods wake them 90 years too early. While the research being done by SpaceWorks could make 180-day journeys to Mars much more affordable, the technology is not capable—not yet—of extending human life to allow for the thousands of years required to reach our next nearest star. Even at the relatively small Mars-like distances, "induced torpor" is not without its challenges, says Bradford, especially on short missions where astronauts have little time to recover after being woken from stasis. For deep space travel to be possible the astronauts would need to be in some form of suspended animation as a hibernating crew would require little food, hydration or living space. "You're going to be tired. In this process, you're not really sleeping, your body doesn't enter a (rapid eye movement) state," said Bradford. "If we look at animal hibernators, they will actually come out of hibernation to sleep and then go back into hibernation." "Passengers" screenwriter Jon Spaihts says he found himself running into tensions between the dramatic requirements of the movie and "hard science" when it came to designing his hibernation pods. Neither induced torpor nor any of its most realistic alternatives are "states in which Sleeping Beauty in her bed would look particularly gorgeous," he said. "The hibernation in this movie is a little more magical just because we need people to look cute in those pods. People floating in a sea of sludge or frozen like popsicles are a little less romantic." The idea of finding a sufficiently Earthlike planet or moon in the sterile vastness of space is another problem on which science has made giant progress in recent years. Before 1989 humanity was aware of just nine planets in the universe—those orbiting our own sun—but scientists have since identified some 3,545 "exoplanets" in 2,660 solar systems. "To have kids wake up these days and think there are thousands and thousands of planets out there, that's a crazy thing to grow up with—knowing there's probably life on these distant worlds," said Tiffany Kataria, a weather specialist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA says the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launching in 12 months, will seek out yet more new worlds among the galaxy's brightest stars, where the discovery of Earthling-friendly planets is deemed more likely. A year later, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch on a mission to provide the clearest picture yet of the chemical composition of interesting exoplanets. So what are the odds of finding a planet with the right atmosphere, roughly the same gravity and protection from radiation—a real-life version of the Homestead II depicted in "Passengers?" "We simply don't know. It must be out there," says Kataria. Explore further: NASA investigating deep-space hibernation technology The Daily Galaxy via AFP , spaceworkseng.com and nasa.gov Related articlesNASA: "The Rosetta Stone for Super-Earths?"NASA: "Wacky World of Exoplanets Continues to Surprise Astronomers"NASA: "Rejuvenated Planets Can Survive a Stars' Red-Giant Death Cycle" 22 Dec

Today's "Galaxy" Stream: 'The Radio Species' --Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Probability of Life in the Cosmos (VIEW) - Are we alone? It’s a question that has obsessed us for centuries, and now we have the technology to do more than wonder. Scientists on the hunt for distant planets and extraterrestrial intelligence explore faraway galaxies and barely visible realms. Neil deGrasse Tyson and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins journey to the brink of discovery to contemplate what it would mean to have company in the cosmos. Related articlesRocky Planet with a 3-Day Orbit --"Only 21 Light-Years Away"NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory --A New "Systems" Approach to the Search for Alien Life"Our Early Solar System Harbored SuperEarths" (Weekend Feature)"A Universe of Planets" --A Short History of NASA's Search for Life Beyond Our Solar SystemNASA's Amazing Comet Hunter --"Nobody Dreamed We'd Approach 200 a Year" 22 Dec

Deeplinks

Technical developments in Cryptography: 2016 in Review - While 2016 may not have been the banner year for cryptographic exploits that 2015 was, researchers around the world continued to advance the state of the art. TLS 1.3 design finalized The biggest practical development in crypto for 2016 is Transport Layer Security version 1.3. TLS is the most important and widely used cryptographic protocol and is the backbone of secure Internet communication; you're using it right now to read this blog! After years of work by hundreds of researchers and engineers, the new TLS design is now considered final from a cryptography standpoint. The protocol is now supported and available in Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. While it might seem like a minor version upgrade, TLS 1.3 is a major redesign from TLS 1.2 (which was finished over 8 years ago now). In fact, one of the most contentious issues was if the name should be something else to indicate how much of an improvement TLS 1.3 really is. How might users notice TLS 1.3? Speed. TLS 1.3 is designed for speed, specifically by reducing the number of network round-trips required before data can be sent to one round-trip (1-RTT) or even zero round-trips (0-RTT) for repeat connections. These ideas have appeared before in experimental form through the QUIC protocol and False Start for earlier TLS versions, but as part of the default behavior of TLS 1.3 they will soon become much more widespread. This means latency will decrease and webpages will load faster. In addition, TLS 1.3 should be a big improvement security-wise. It has absorbed two major lessons from decades of experience with TLS. First, the protocol is much simpler by removing support for a number of old protocol features and obsolete cryptographic algorithms. Additionally, TLS 1.3 was designed with the benefit of model checking (which has been used to find flaws in many older versions of TLS and SSL). TLS 1.3 was analyzed extensively by the cryptographic community during the standardization process, instead of waiting until the protocol is widely deployed and it's difficult to patch. The quest for post-quantum cryptography continues The cryptography community has been hard at work trying to transition away from today's algorithms (many of which are completely insecure if practical quantum computers are developed) to post-quantum cryptography. This was nudged forward towards the end of last year as NIST announced a standardization project for post-quantum algorithms. NIST published its first report on this effort in February and a draft call for algorithm proposals in August. Researchers continue to debate what the goals for post-quantum algorithms should be (and if NIST should take a leadership role in this process after its involvement in the backdoored DualEC standard). Meanwhile, Google ran a practical experiment in which it used the New Hope post-quantum key exchange algorithm to protect real traffic between Google servers and the Chrome Web browser, one of the first real-world deployments of post-quantum cryptography. Results from the experiment suggested that computation costs were negligible although bandwidth consumption increased due to larger key sizes. Another team of researchers experimented with adding quantum-resistant key exchange to TLS using a different algorithm. There's a lot we still don't know about post-quantum cryptography but we're starting to learn about the practical engineering implications. New thinking on how to backdoor cryptographic algorithms The concept of designing cryptographic systems that appear secure but have subtle backdoors has been discussed for a long time. (The term kleptography was coined in 1996 to describe this type of concept.) But the Snowden revelations, in particular that the DUAL_EC pseudorandom number generator was deliberately backdoored by NSA, have inspired more research on how backdoors might be created. A very clever paper by a team of French and American researchers showed that it's possible to carefully choose a prime number such that computing discrete logarithms becomes easy, which is enough to make Diffie-Hellman exchanges insecure. What's worse, such a backdoored prime would be indistinguishable from any other randomly-chosen prime. RFC 5114: Another backdoored crypto standard from NIST? Speaking of backdoors, another potentially compromised standard was identified this year: RFC 5114. This little-known standard, written back in 2008, is somewhat mysterious all the way around. It was written by defense contractor BBN to standardize some parameters previously published by NIST. It defines eight Diffie-Hellman groups "that can be used in conjunction with IETF protocols to provide security for Internet communications" which eventually made their way into some widely-used cryptographic libraries like OpenSSL and Bouncy Castle. However, some of the groups have been identified as suspicious: They provide no explanation of how they were generated (meaning they might be backdoored as described above) and they're vulnerable to small group confinement attacks if parameters aren't checked carefully. This has led to some discussion about if the standard could have been intentionally backdoored, although there is no smoking gun. In response, one of the authors of the standard stated it was written in part to give an intern a "relatively easy" project to complete. A NIST cryptographer stated that it was written just to provide test data for people using the curves and "certainly not as a recommendation for people to use or adopt them operationally." It's certainly possible that this bad standard arose simply due to incompetence, but the suspicion around it highlights the ongoing lack of trust in NIST as a standardization body for cryptography. Cryptographic deniability pops up in the US presidential election Deniability and its antithesis non-repudiation are basic technical properties that cryptographic communications can have: should the system provide proof to outsiders that a message was sent by a specific sender (non-repudiation)? Or should the system ensure that any outsider can alter the transcript as desired (deniability) so that leaked communications are not incriminating? The real-world desirability of these properties is an age-old controversy in the cryptographic community. Mostly lost in the coverage of the 2016 election was that non-repudiation cropped up in a major way. Senior Democratic Party politicians, including vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine and former DNC chair Donna Brazile, stated on the record that leaked DNC emails had been doctored and were not accurate. However, web sleuths quickly verified that the emails were correctly signed using the DKIM protocol with the correct keys for the hillaryclinton.com email server. There are a lot of caveats to these signatures: some of the emails were from outside addresses not supporting DKIM and hence could have been modified, DKIM only asserts that a specific email server sent the messages (and not any individual user) so it's possible the hillaryclinton.com DKIM key was stolen or used by a malicious insider, and it's possible the leaked email caches were modified by omitting some emails (which DKIM evidence would not reveal). Still, it's perhaps the most high-profile data point we have on the value (or lack thereof) of non-repudiable cryptographic evidence. Attacks only get better A number of new and improved attacks were discovered, building on prior work. Among the highlights: The HEIST attack improves the versatility of previous compression-oracle attacks like BREACH and CRIME, potentially stealing sensitive data across Web origins using malicious JavaScript. While it was decided back in 2014 to drop support for compression altogether in TLS 1.3 due to the risk of these attacks, this vulnerability further shows how difficult it can be to add encryption into complicated protocols like HTTP. The DROWN attack leverages weaknesses in the decades-old SSLv2 protocol to compromise a Web server's RSA signing keys. Like many previous TLS/SSL attacks (POODLE, FREAK, etc.), this relies on an old protocol that no modern Web browser supports. Yet this is still a major flaw in practice because an attacker can use this method to steal the same key a Web server uses with modern clients. This attack is another reminder of how much insecurity is caused by maintaining support for outdated (and in some cases deliberately weakened) cryptographic protocols. The Sweet32 attack showed that old 64-bit block ciphers (notably Triple DES and Blowfish) can be vulnerable in practice to collision attacks when used in CBC mode. Due to the birthday bound, this requires observing about 2^(64/2) = 2^32 encrypted blocks-or about 32 GB of data. Again, these are legacy ciphers that should have been disabled years ago, but are still used in about 1% of encrypted Web traffic. A bit further away from practical systems, new attacks were found on certain classes of pairing-friendly elliptic curves, including the popular Barreto-Naehrig curves. While pairing-friendly curves are not commonly used today for encryption on the internet, they are essential to a number of advanced cryptographic systems like efficient zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge used in Zcash or group signatures used in Pond. Secure randomness continues to be a fragile point in cryptography: if you can't generate truly random numbers, you can't create truly unpredictable cryptographic keys. The GnuPG project (who maintain widely used PGP software) announced and fixed a bug in the way Libcrypt generates random numbers from 1998–2016. While no easy way to exploit this in practice has been shown, the attack shows how subtle bugs in PRNG libraries can exist unnoticed for decades because they never cause any visible loss in functionality. Out with the old, in with the new: HTTPS still being slowly hardened HTTPS is also slowly being made more secure: The SHA-1 hash function turned 21 years old in 2016, but nobody's celebrating that birthday. Instead we're nearing the end of a long process to retire the obsolescent algorithm. Somewhat surprisingly, no SHA-1 collision was found this year, which would be an irrefutable public demonstration that the algorithm is cryptographically broken. Yet browser vendors aren't waiting for a collision. Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla have all announced that their browsers will no longer accept SHA-1 certificates after early 2017. While it took a while, we consider the coordinated deprecation of SHA-1 a big win for the community. It's been observed that the browser market incentivizes vendors not to unilaterally remove insecure old protocols, so it's a positive sign that the vendors were able to agree on a timeline to kill off SHA-1 before it's completely broken. Support for Certificate Transparency, a protocol designed to provide public logging of which certificates have been issued for which Web domains, continues to grow. All Symantec certificates issued since June 1 are included in CT logs (and will be rejected by Chrome and Firefox otherwise). Domains can opt-in to require CT using Chrome's HSTS preload list (also used in Firefox). Just this week Facebook released a preliminary Web-based tool to monitor Certificate Transparency logs. RFC 7748, standardizing the elliptic curves Curve25519 and Curve448 ("Goldilocks"), was finalized. These two curves are both available already in TLS 1.3, offering fast performance and an alternative to the classic set of NIST-supported curves such as P-256. This article is part of our Year In Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2016. Like what you're reading? Support digital freedom defense today! Share this: Join EFF11:29

Open Access Rewards Passionate Curiosity: 2016 in Review - In February 2016, a team of scientists published one of the most important pieces of scientific research so far this century. For the first time, researchers had directly observed gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime whose discovery Albert Einstein first predicted a century ago. The team effectively placed the last piece in the puzzle confirming Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity—in doing so, they took a giant leap forward in humans’ understanding of how the universe works. Something else was confirmed that day, too: open access publishing is no inferior sibling to closed publishing. The paper—Observational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger (PDF)—was published in an open access journal under a Creative Commons license that ensures anyone can copy, adapt, and reuse it as long as they give the authors credit. Put simply, open access is the practice of making research and other materials freely available online, ideally under licenses that allow anyone to share and adapt them. For years, open access publishing has been at the center of a struggle over the future of research: will cutting-edge scholarship be published in the open for anyone to see, use, and build upon? Or will it stay trapped in a labyrinth of closed publications only to be read by those who can afford expensive journal subscriptions and academic databases? In many ways, 2015 was academic publishing’s Napster moment. As publishing giant Elsevier fought to keep Sci-Hub off the Internet, it accomplished just the opposite. While the legal battle between Elsevier and Sci-Hub has trudged through 2016, more people than ever have begun using the unauthorized academic research repository. Maybe 2016 was the year publishers realized they had to change course. Elsevier agreed to compromise with the Dutch academic community, allowing researchers covered by the publisher’s blanket agreement with Dutch universities to publish their research openly. That’s a small step, but an indicator that Elsevier recognizes the significance of the demand for open access. Elsevier hasn’t always chosen to compromise, however. The publisher stunned the humanities and social sciences communities by buying beloved preprints server SSRN. (Preprints are versions of academic papers that have not yet completed a formal peer review process. Sharing preprints online is an increasingly popular practice in many fields.) Early signs have made many observers question whether Elsevier will steward SSRN appropriately, and open access advocates quickly launched an alternative. On the heels of the SSRN incident came another bombshell from Elsevier: the publisher filed a patent on online peer review. Together, the SSRN purchase and the flimsy patent paint a disturbing picture of Elsevier’s new strategy: if you can’t control the content anymore, then attempt to control the processes and infrastructures of scholarly publishing itself. Many, though, are working to keep that research open. Several universities in the U.S. adopted open access policies, including Florida State University, the University of Arizona, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Middlebury College. Funders of research stepped up to the plate too: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation strengthened its existing open access policy, lifting the embargo period and requiring that research be made freely available immediately. At the legislative level, Congress failed to pass the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), which would have required that all research funded by the federal government be made available for free to the public no later than six months after publication. FASTR would have been roughly equivalent to the White House’s 2013 memo on open access publishing. We hope that the new administration recognizes the importance of keeping federally funded research available to the public and that it continues to enforce an open access mandate. We continue to urge both Congress and the Executive Branch to adopt policies that will ensure that works created by the government are fully available too. We praised the OPEN Government Data Act, which would have required that many government-created data sets be made public. The act would have locked into law the provisions of a 2013 Executive Order, but, unfortunately, it stalled in the House of Representatives. We also praised a proposed White House policy on government-created software, but were disappointed with the final result. As with open access publishing, we hope that the new administration recognizes the importance of open data to a transparent and effective government. Open access isn’t an abstract, academic issue. It’s about our right to learn and be curious. As a graduate student at the University of Quindio in Colombia, Diego Gomez shared another researcher’s Master’s thesis with contacts over the Internet. He now risks a prison sentence of up to eight years in a case that has progressed very slowly throughout 2016. “I have no special talents,” Albert Einstein famously said. “I am only passionately curious.” Today, open access publishing rewards the passionate curiosity of readers and researchers all over the world, regardless of their institutional connections. As we look forward to 2017, we hope that lawmakers, researchers, and publishers can work better together to make sure that such passion is rewarded, never punished. This article is part of our Year In Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2016. Like what you're reading? Support digital freedom defense today! Share this: Join EFF24 Dec

Censorship on Social Media: 2016 in Review - Censorship comes in many forms. Most often, when we talk about it at EFF, we’re talking about the measures that governments take to restrict their citizens’ freedom of expression or access to information. Online, that can mean blocking websites, restricting the right to anonymity, or shutting down the Internet, among other things.But as our speech increasingly takes place on social media platforms—like Facebook or Twitter—so has our thinking about censorship. And while we still believe that companies have a right to restrict content on their platforms, we also believe that they have a moral obligation to consider the implications of doing so. Companies should do their best to uphold the spirit of free expression and minimize harms that their policies might have to innocent users.Onlinecensorship.org—a joint project of EFF and Visualizing Impact—launched at the end of 2015 to document social media censorship and hold companies accountable for their actions. In the past year, we’ve learned a great deal about how users perceive and are impacted by censorship on a number of platforms, as well as what types of content are commonly taken down.One of the more interesting things to emerge from our research is just how seriously this kind of censorship can affect social media users. Several years ago, when EFF was just beginning to look at this issue, companies like Facebook were much smaller, making it easier to suggest that users simply find another platform on which to express themselves. Today, companies like Facebook and Google have integrated their services across so much of the web that leaving isn’t so easy.In Onlinecensorship.org’s most recent paper, we highlight some of the most egregious examples of content takedowns on social media from 2016, including the censorship of the iconic Terror of War image, and the bizarre account deactivation that occurred as the result of sharing a cat photo.In addition to these examples, 2016 saw the emergence of new trends, most notably the censorship of live videos. In July, the police shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota hit national headlines, in part because Castile’s partner, Diamond Reynolds, had managed to livestream the incident...until Facebook cut her off. Although the company later apologized, similar censorship incidents occurred throughout the year.As we move toward a new year, we will continue to monitor content takedowns through Onlinecensorship.org (where we’ve recently revamped our user survey to include more platforms) and keep you informed.This article is part of our Year In Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2016. Like what you're reading? Support digital freedom defense today! Share this: Join EFF24 Dec

Defending Student Data from Classrooms to the Cloud: 2016 in Review - In classrooms across the country, students as young as kindergarteners are turning on school-issued devices and logging into their online school accounts. While students and teachers can benefit from educational apps and services, behind the scenes edtech companies are inhaling troves of data on students, often without the awareness and consent of students and their families. Over the past year, EFF has fought for the privacy and security of student data on multiple fronts. A year ago, EFF filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) urging the agency to investigate whether Google violated public promises to protect student privacy in its deployment of Chromebooks and Google Apps for Education (now called G Suite for Education) “cloud” services in schools. As one of 300 signatories to the Student Privacy Pledge, Google publicly vowed, among other things, to “Not collect, maintain, use or share student personal information beyond that needed for authorized educational/school purposes, or as authorized by the parent/student,” as well as to “Not build a personal profile of a student other than for supporting authorized educational/school purposes or as authorized by the parent/student.” Yet, it appeared Google was tracking and recording students’ online activity, without parental consent, and for non-educational purposes. Unfortunately, the FTC has yet to take action on our complaint. However, our FTC complaint inspired an inquiry from Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) this year, a response from Google, and a subsequent change in Google policy, or at least a clarification of Google policy. While Google continues to collect data, without parental consent, on students who are logged into their school accounts and use non-educational Google services, Google has made public assurances that it is not using collected data to target ads to student users. Google still has room for improvement. The company’s policy of not targeting ads only applies to K-12 student accounts, not those of college or university students, and of course Google could limit the collection of student data in the first place. Additionally, Google’s G Suite for Education Privacy Notice asks parents, teachers, and school administrators to cross-reference three legal documents, rather than putting policies related to student data in a “one-stop shop” document. While the FTC has so far failed to take steps to enforce the Student Privacy Pledge, in 2016 we critiqued the pledge itself and recommended ways to strengthen the language to better hold edtech companies accountable. This year we also began analyzing information from our student privacy survey. We shared the concerns of a school administrator in rural Indiana, who struggled with understanding what Google’s complex privacy policies mean for his school, all while balancing the resource needs of teachers, the educational needs of individual students, and the technological preferences of their parents. Case studies like this highlight the need for edtech companies to take the privacy concerns of students, parents, teachers, and school administrators seriously and we plan on writing more of them. Finally, in 2016, EFF consulted with the California Attorney General’s office about student privacy. In November the Attorney General released a set of best practices to help edtech companies better protect the privacy of student data. This article is part of our Year In Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2016. Like what you're reading? Support digital freedom defense today! Share this: Join EFF23 Dec

How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on Slack - For the twelfth and final day of the 12 Days of 2FA, we will look at how to enable two-factor authentication on Slack. If you are a member of multiple Slack “teams” (e.g. work.slack.com and school.slack.com), you will need to set up 2FA separately for each account you use. Slack supports 2FA via text message and via one of many authenticator apps. Authenticator apps are more secure for most people and do not have the potential for interception that text messages do. If you decide to use an authenticator app, Slack does not require a backup method or phone number, meaning you can keep your number off Slack if you choose. Click on “Profile & account” under your username in the top left corner. In your profile summary that pops up on the right, click “Account Settings.” “Expand” the section on two-factor authentication. Click “Setup Two-Factor Authentication.” Before making security changes to your account, you may be prompted to enter your password. Now you can choose whether you’d like to receive verification codes via text messages or an authenticator app. Authenticator apps are more secure and avoid a lot of the downfalls of SMS. However, SMS is more practical if you do not use a smartphone. Consider your threat model and choose the best mode for you. If you choose to use an authenticator app, select “Use an app” and follow the instructions to download an authenticator app if you haven’t already, scan the QR code, enter your verification code, and click “Verify Code and Activate.” If you choose to use text messages, select “SMS Text Message.” Enter a phone number at which you can receive texts and click “Add phone number.” Soon after you click, you’ll receive a text message with your verification code. Enter it and click “Verify code and enable.” With 2FA set up, you’ll be asked to sign in again and enter a 2FA verification code. Before returning to your settings page, you’ll get your backup codes. Print or copy them and keep them in a safe place. Stay tuned for more posts on two-factor authentication during the 12 Days of 2FA. Share this: Join EFF23 Dec

Protecting Net Neutrality and the Open Internet: 2016 in Review - In 2016 we won one battle in the fight for the Open Internet – but several others are well underway and we expect Team Internet will have to mobilize once again to protect our gains and prevent further efforts to undermine network neutrality. Almost two years ago, thanks in large part to a massive mobilization of Internet users, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally issued an Open Internet Order to protect net neutrality. While far from perfect, the new Order was on strong legal footing, with some limits in place to help prevent FCC overreach. Before the year was out, however, the battle for the Internet moved to the courts, as broadband providers tried to get a judge to derail the new rules. After months of wrangling, in June 2016 a federal appeals court instead approved the Order – a crucial win for Team Internet. With that done, the FCC has focused on establishing privacy rules for users, including giving users new rights and requiring providers to seek user permission before using our private information. So while a handful of victory laps were taken this year for network neutrality, new threats are emerging and 2017 promises to be struggle to preserve the gains millions of Internet users fought so hard to win. Moving from the Courts to the Legislature As noted, as of June 14, 2016, when the federal appeals court overwhelmingly sided with Internet users, it is now settled law that companies that provide broadband service are “common carriers” and therefore subject to the nondiscrimination laws that exist under Title II of the Communications Act. This decision settled what has been a multi-year fight over the role of the FCC in consumer protection and oversight of the broadband industry. But that has simply shifted the struggle to Congress. In particular, members of Congress attempted to remove funding from the FCC as a means to block the Open Internet rule as well as other threats to lawfully connecting devices to the network. It seems unlikely that the next Congress will continue the series of attacks on the agency as they will want to allow the new incoming leadership an opportunity to lead the agency. While we do not know who will be the new Chair of the FCC, we suspect the incoming Trump Administration will want to appoint Commissioners that have the intent to reverse course on an open Internet despite support from both Republican and Democratic FCC Chairmen from years past. The Open Internet Order and Privacy Rights One of the unfinished parts of the 2015 Open Internet Order was how the changed legal status of broadband providers would impact their obligations to protect consumer privacy. After all, it was already well established law that the telephone company was not allowed to know who you talked to, listen in on your call, or monitor who is contacting you unless it was for the purposes of providing you the service. How would that prohibition apply to broadband companies? On November 2, after soliciting extensive public comment, the FCC release new rules to answer that question. Those rules explain what network practices are acceptable and under what circumstances broadband providers must ask for consumers' permission to use their information. They also gave breathing room for "pay for privacy" business models. The rules were a net positive for Internet users. We can now look forward to new privacy protections for online activities, and new powers to grant or deny providers permission use of our information. New Threats Emerge in the Form of Zero Rating Despite these big wins, Internet service providers have been working all year to find ways to undermine net neutrality and regain their positions as arbiters of how traffic is treated on their networks—particularly via zero rating. Back in January, EFF showed how T-Mobile's Binge On program, which claimed to "optimize" streaming video, was nothing more than a system designed to throttle video bandwidth. When EFF asked T-Mobile's CEO to come clean about the program, his infamous response was "Who the $%&* are you anyway EFF, why are you stirring up so much trouble, and who pays you?"—which of course prompted many of our supporters to educate the sadly uninformed telco executive. T-Mobile wasn't the only ISP to try to undermine net neutrality via zero rating. AT&T and Verizon have also been major offenders, particularly when it comes to zero rating their own content. By doing so, ISPs are using their position as Internet gatekeepers to funnel customers to their own content, thereby distorting the open playing field the Internet typically provides. While the FCC has begun to take measures to rein in some of the most egregious practices, it's clear that zero rating will continue to be a major battlefield in the fight for net neutrality. We Must Stand Firm in Our Continued Fight for Internet Freedom As long as there are players (whether they be governments or major corporations) that stand to gain by changing the fundamental openness and neutrality of the Internet, the fight will always continue. We are prepared to aggressively defend the Open Internet order at the FCC and in Congress next year because the stakes are too great. Too many Americans have only one choice for high speed broadband and far too many lack access all together. While EFF has had a long history of wariness at FCC involvement in regulating broadband companies, the fact of the matter is the U.S. market is excessively concentrated and lacks real choice. Without some fundamental basic rules ensuring nondiscriminatory treatment of network traffic, we fear that a free and open Internet will come to an end. So while we do not know what new arenas or new fronts the battle for a free and open Internet will take, we can promise that EFF will always be there fighting on behalf of the user community, whether it is in Congress, the FCC, or the courts. This article is part of our Year In Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2016. Like what you're reading? Support digital freedom defense today! Related Cases: Net Neutrality LobbyingShare this: Join EFF23 Dec

EFF to Supreme Court: Strike Social Media Ban for Sex Offenders - Yesterday, EFF and its allies Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy & Technology filed an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down under the First Amendment a North Carolina law that bans “registered sex offenders” (RSOs) from using all Internet social media. This law sweeps far too broadly. Social media are one of the most important communication channels ever created. People banned from social media are greatly handicapped in their ability to participate in the political, religious, and economic life of our nation. In the past year, EFF advocated for RSOs in three other cases: two about the right to anonymous Internet speech, and the third about location tracking with electronic shackles. EFF does this work because everyone should enjoy digital liberties. And all too often, rights denied to the few are eventually denied to the many. Access To Social Media North Carolina banned all of its RSOs from accessing any social media that are commercial and that permit minors to become members. Thus, it is now a crime in that state for an RSO to view anything posted on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. As written, the exclusion extends far beyond what are commonly considered to be social media, to also bar RSO access to news media and retail websites that allow visitors to create accounts and share information with other visitors. In Packingham v. North Carolina, an RSO argues that this law violates the First Amendment. In 2015, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled against him. The U.S. Supreme Court decided to review the case. EFF's amicus brief argues that North Carolina’s banishment of RSOs from social media violates the First Amendment right to gather and publish information on the Internet. As the Court explained in Reno v. ACLU (1997), the Internet empowers everyone to “become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.” In the two decades since that seminal ruling, social media have emerged as the foremost soapbox on the Internet. Last year, a Pew survey found that 65% of U.S. adults use social media, up from 7% in 2005. Grassroots movements from Black Lives Matter to the Tea Party have successfully used social media to achieve political results by educating and mobilizing thousands of supporters. People also use social media to accomplish myriad other critical goals, from practicing their faith to finding employment to seeking medical information. Our brief was written by Professor David Post, and by Jonathan Sherman, Perry M. Grossman, and Henry Bluestone Smith of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. The U.S. Supreme Court will rule on this case in the first half of 2017. Anonymous Online Speech EFF also advocates for the First Amendment right of RSOs (and everyone else) to express themselves anonymously on the Internet. In the words of the U.S. Supreme Court in McIntyre v. Election Commission (1995), anonymous speech “is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent.” In Doe v. Harris, EFF teamed up with the ACLU of California to file a lawsuit challenging parts of Proposition 35. This California law required all RSOs (even those with decades-old misdemeanor convictions unrelated to the Internet) to disclose to the police all of their Internet identifiers and service providers (including usernames and online political discussion groups). The law also allowed police to freely share this sensitive information with the public. In 2013, the federal trial court preliminarily enjoined the law, and in 2014, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling. In 2016, the California legislature narrowed the statute in a way that will moot this lawsuit when the new law goes into effect in 2017. We were less successful earlier this year in a case called Illinois v. Minnis. There, EFF joined the ACLU of Illinois to file an amicus brief challenging a similar Illinois statute. It requires RSOs to disclose all of their online addresses and identities, as well as every website they visit, including retail and news sites. The law then permits the government to share this information with the public. Unfortunately, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the law. Doing so, it rejected the arguments in our brief and the reasoning of the Ninth Circuit in Doe v. Harris. Electronic Shackles EFF regularly advocates before judges and legislators to protect our location privacy from unreasonable electronic surveillance by the government, most often to prevent police from secretly turning our cell phones into tracking devices. We argue that the Fourth Amendment and privacy statutes require the government to obtain a probable cause warrant before tracking an individual’s location. This is because, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, digital location tracking “generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” Government tracks the movements of unpopular subpopulations by forcing them to wear ankle shackles embedded with GPS devices. These surveillance tools, which one manufacturer calls “prison without walls,” achieve around-the-clock location tracking that is accurate to a few meters. Some states deploy these electronic shackles against court-involved juveniles, as well as the targets of anti-gang injunctions. Most states require RSOs to wear electronic shackles. In Wisconsin, for example, all RSOs must wear electronic shackles 24/7 for the rest of their lives. This includes RSOs who have successfully completed their sentences and terms of supervised release. In Belleau v. Wall, an RSO challenged this law in federal court, with representation from the ACLU of Wisconsin. In December 2015, EFF filed an amicus brief with the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that this law violated the Fourth Amendment, in light of the severe technological intrusion on location privacy. Unfortunately, while the trial court had struck down the law, the Seventh Circuit reversed, upheld the law, and rejected EFF’s arguments. Why EFF Does This Work EFF opposes many kinds of laws that burden the digital liberties of RSOs, for three reasons. First, digital liberties are fundamental human rights. All people should enjoy them. Second, government often imposes new technological burdens on “the worst of the worst,” and then expands those burdens to other populations. For example, forced DNA extraction began with people convicted of the most violent crimes, and then expanded in many states to people arrested—not even convicted—for a much broader range of offenses, including juveniles and those accused of misdemeanors. Third, the government has designated 850,000 people as “registered sex offenders.” The ever-expanding list of crimes that trigger lifetime registration is so overbroad that many non-dangerous people are unjustifiably stigmatized as RSOs. Next Steps No matter how the U.S. Supreme Court decides Packingham, EFF will continue to advocate for the digital liberty of all—including RSOs. We will oppose laws that expel RSOs from social media, unmask their anonymous Internet communications, and compel them to wear electronic location shackles every moment for the rest of their lives. Even unpopular groups have rights at the electronic frontier. And if the government gets away with taking away their rights, the government might get away with taking away everyone else’s rights, too. Related Cases: Doe v. HarrisShare this: Join EFF23 Dec

Don’t Sell Government-Funded Inventions to Trolls - Research funded by the United States government should benefit everyone. That’s why EFF so strongly supports the idea of writing an open access requirement for federally funded research into the law as soon as possible. It’s also one reason why we recently launched Reclaim Invention, a campaign asking U.S. universities to rethink their patenting policies. It’s crucial that federally funded research be made available to the public so that anyone can read and use it, not just people with institutional connections. But even if the public can read government-funded research, patents on inventions that arise from it can still fall into the wrong hands and undermine the public interest. Federally funded inventions are supposed to stimulate innovation and new business models, but in the hands of patent trolls—companies that do nothing but amass patents and sue others for patent infringement—they do just the opposite. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently asked the public to weigh in on the rules that guide how universities patent federally funded inventions. We urged NIST to consider amending the rules to address the problem of universities selling patents to patent trolls. NIST is working on updates to the federal regulations that guide patents on inventions paid for by the government. 37 CFR Chapter IV is the set of regulations implementing the Bayh-Dole Act, the 1980 law allowing those conducting research with government funds to file for patent protection. The purpose of the Bayh-Dole Act is to encourage licensing of federally funded inventions to companies that can bring those inventions to public use, with special preference given to small businesses based in the United States. (Whether Bayh-Dole was the right way to achieve this goal is beyond the scope of this post.) The rules provide specific requirements that contractors must include in their agreements with patent licensees, and outlines circumstances in which the government may intervene if a licensee fails to comport with the law’s intent to bring inventions to the public market. EFF urged NIST to explore ways to tackle the problem of universities selling patents to non-practicing entities (NPE), or patent trolls. Trolls fail to meet the Bayh-Dole Act’s charge to promote active use of government-funded inventions. They almost never play any substantive role in bringing an invention to market (in the overwhelming majority of patent infringement suits brought on by NPEs, the defendant developed the product or service independently). We asked NIST to consider adding guidelines for grantees that would give preference to licensees that have shown a commitment to research and development in the area of technology the patent covers and who do not have a history of merely using aggressive patent litigation against practicing, independently inventing companies. Such guidelines would work within the confines of the statute, and clearly support its intent to use practicing businesses to produce and develop government-funded inventions. In our comment, we mention that several universities have acknowledged the problem of universities licensing patents to trolls. Over 100 institutions have endorsed a whitepaper warning of the dangers of licensing to non-practicing entities (unfortunately, many of those same institutions have sold patents to notorious troll Intellectual Ventures). Some institutions have taken active steps to address the issue. Stanford University’s standard patent license (PDF) bars licensees from suing third parties for patent infringement, unless the licensee is “diligently developing or selling” the licensed invention. We hope to see such policies become the standard rather than the exception. Clarifying the rules to prioritize licensing to practicing companies would be a big step in the right direction. University students, alumni, faculty, and community members: please sign our petition urging your institution not to sell patents to trolls. Tell your university: Don’t sell patents to trolls. Share this: Join EFF22 Dec

Stupid Patent of the Month: Carrying Trays on a Cart - As you head home for the holidays, perhaps passing through a checkpoint or two, take some time to think about U.S. Patent No. 6,888,460, “Advertising trays for security screening.” The owner of this patent, SecurityPoint Holdings, Inc., has sued the United States government for infringement. SecurityPoint recently won a trial on validity [PDF] and the case will now proceed to a damages phase. So, unless the validity decision gets overturned on appeal, we’ll soon be paying tax dollars for the idea of moving trays on carts. Although the title of the patent mentions advertising, some of its claims do not require any ads at all. In fact, the patent is so broad it reads on almost any system of using trays and carts at a checkpoint. The first claim of the patent (with limitations labeled), reads as follows: 1. A method comprising: [a] positioning a first tray cart containing trays at the proximate end of a scanning device through which objects may be passed, wherein said scanning device comprises a proximate end and a distal end, [b] removing a tray from said first tray cart, [c] passing said tray through said scanning device from said proximate end through to said distal end, [d] providing a second tray cart at said distal end of said scanning device, [e] receiving said tray passed through said scanning device in said second tray cart, and [f] moving said second cart to said proximate end of said scanning device so that said trays in said second cart be passed through said scanning device at said proximate end. In plain English, this claim means: send trays through a checkpoint and use two carts to move the trays back and forth. As is common with patents, the claim uses obtuse language for ordinary things. For example, the word-salad at limitation [f] pretty much just says: “use a cart to move trays from the end of the checkpoint back to the start.” In a trial before the Court of Federal Claims, the government argued that this claim was obvious because moving trays using carts was well-known in many contexts. The court disagreed. The court suggested that even if using carts to move trays was well known, the government needed prior art specifically for security checkpoints (arguably the government had such evidence, but the court disagreed on that point too). In fairness to SecurityPoint, evidence at trial suggested that it had developed a good system for managing trays and carts within the confined space of an airport security checkpoint. But the patent’s claims are far broader than any specific solution. This is something we often see in patent law: someone develops a (fairly narrow) innovation, but then broadly claims it, capturing things that are well-known or banal. This sort of claiming hurts follow-on inventors who develop their own ideas that wouldn’t infringe any narrower claim, and weren’t invented by the patent holder. But because the broader claim is allowed, their own inventions become infringing. Here, claim 1 is not limited to any particular kind of cart, tray, or scanner. The claim really reads on using a couple of carts to move trays and, in our view, should have been found obvious. Together with Public Knowledge, we recently filed an amicus brief [PDF] asking the Supreme Court to consider the obviousness standard in patent law. We argue that, as applied by the Federal Circuit, obviousness law has abandoned common sense. Specifically, we argue that the Federal Circuit has failed to apply a Supreme Court case called KSR v. Teleflex that calls for a flexible, common sense approach. We hope the Supreme Court takes that case. If it does, it might help us save some tax dollars that would otherwise have gone to SharePoint. Unfortunately, whatever happens, we’ll likely still be stuck waiting at airport checkpoints. Share this: Join EFF22 Dec

Energy Trends Insider

OPEC’s Announced Production Cuts Are A Big Deal - By now you have undoubtedly heard that late last month at OPEC’s 171st Ordinary Meeting in Vienna, the group announced that it would reduce output by about 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) by January. This is the first announced output cut by the group in eight years. Saudi Arabia will bear ~40% of the cuts, with Iraq reducing output by nearly 20%. Nigeria and Libya were exempted from the cuts. OPEC also secured agreements from non-OPEC members. Russia led this group of non-OPEC producers by agreeing in principle to cut production by about 300,000 bpd. Most of these non-OPEC cuts are symbolic, as many are in line with the natural production declines expected to be experienced by these countries. The market response to the OPEC cuts was swift. Global prices for crude quickly jumped >10% to above $50/bbl. Shale oil producers surged across the board, with Continental Resources and Whiting Petroleum jumping 23% and 30% respectively. For those who have argued that OPEC is a paper tiger, I would ask what other organization has the power to move the price of oil so dramatically? They may sometimes behave like a paper tiger. But they are capable of rapidly moving the global oil markets. That is real market power. I have seen some suggest that this agreement is much ado about nothing, on the basis of two (valid) points. The first is that OPEC members historically cheat on their quotas. This is true, and some members are likely to cheat this time. But keep in mind the underlying theme. OPEC has now made a strategic shift after their costly decision two years ago to defend market share. In announcing these cuts, what they are really saying is they are tired of living with low oil prices. That’s a big deal, because it is a strategy they will likely pursue for several years. It is also being driven by Saudi Arabia, and they usually get what they want within OPEC. While we may not get an accurate accounting of production in all OPEC countries, we will see the ongoing status of global crude oil inventories. We can gauge whether OPEC’s strategy is having success by whether crude oil inventories start to return to normal levels. And if they don’t start falling, expect to see more cuts. The other valid point that is being made is that shale oil producers are likely to rush in and fill the gap from these cuts. This is certainly true to an extent. The question is to what extent they can do this. This isn’t like turning on the taps. It’s going to take some time to ramp up production. Meanwhile, OPEC will likely opt for more cuts should additional shale production negate their first round of cuts. The total announced production cuts of OPEC and non-OPEC producers total about 1.8 million bpd. To fill that gap would require U.S. producers to reverse the 1 million bpd decline that took place in the U.S. over the past year, and add another 800,000 bpd. That may be doable, especially if oil prices surge much higher. But it will take time, and as time ticks away those sweet spots in the shale plays are depleting. U.S. shale production will peak eventually, and OPEC may risk defending price while waiting for that to happen. So it’s a gamble on OPEC’s side, just as deciding to defend market share two years ago was a gamble (which they lost). OPEC is likely betting that it can cut production more than the shale producers can increase production. If they had a crystal ball and knew U.S. oil production could increase to 20 million bpd (as Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm recently claimed), then it would be clear that it’s a fruitless exercise. If, on the other hand, they end up cutting production by 2-3 million bpd and non-OPEC producers are unable to close that gap, then the gamble will pay off. But OPEC can afford to play the long game. They collectively produce 42% of the world’s oil. More importantly, they control 71% of the world’s oil reserves. They know global demand is forecast to continue growing. Regardless of whether shale oil producers can make up for the cuts, this OPEC announcement is a big deal. It is a wave of the white flag by OPEC, and likely a strategy shift that will last for years. And it’s hard to see anything but upside from this move for America’s shale oil industry. Link to Original Article: OPEC’s Announced Production Cuts Are A Big Deal Follow Robert Rapier on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or at Forbes. 18 Dec

20 Billion Barrels Of Oil Were Not Discovered In The Permian Basin - Some readers may have noticed that I haven’t been posting as many articles here as I have in the past, but it’s simply because I am busy keeping up with deadlines elsewhere. I have an article due once a week for Forbes, and two weekly articles and one longer biweekly article for Investing Daily. Add to that occasional articles I do for other sites, and I am writing around 200 articles a year with firm deadlines. On top of that, I have a regular day job as an engineer, and this year has been exceptionally busy. This column doesn’t have a firm deadline. It’s a place I can write when everything else is caught up. But lately those other commitments have been taking up most of my spare time, and I have been lucky to get one column posted a month here. So, that’s the reason my posting frequency here has declined. I have had some people tell me that they don’t like dealing with the ads on the Forbes site, and they have asked if I could repost some of my Forbes articles here. I am allowed to do that after they have appeared exclusively at Forbes for a few days. So today, I want to reproduce a modified version of one that got pretty good traffic at Forbes, and has gotten a lot of attention in the press. ————– Earlier this month the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced the largest estimate of continuous oil that it has ever assessed. The area assessed is in the Permian Basin, a region that has been producing oil continuously for nearly 100 years. Below I will get into the specifics of what this news means, but the mainstream media mostly interpreted it as CNN did in Mammoth Texas oil discovery biggest ever in USA. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding by CNN of what the news entails. The Permian Basin lies underneath western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The geology of the Permian Basin is rich and complex, both horizontally and vertically. The Permian Basin has commercial accumulations of oil and gas in stacked layers, at depths ranging from 1,000 feet to more than 25,000 feet. The greater Permian is made up of several subsidiary basins, the largest of which are the Midland and the Delaware. The new USGS assessment is of the Wolfcamp shale in the Midland Basin portion of Texas’ Permian Basin. The new USGS survey estimates that there are 20 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in the Wolfcamp alone. Quoting from the USGS news release: “The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more,” said Walter Guidroz, program coordinator for the USGS Energy Resources Program. “Changes in technology and industry practices can have significant effects on what resources are technically recoverable, and that’s why we continue to perform resource assessments throughout the United States and the world.” It is important to understand what this assessment actually means. This oil has been assessed as an “undiscovered resource.” This scientific assessment means the forecasters have a certain degree of confidence that the oil is there. For this particular assessment, the 50% confidence level is that there are at least 20 billion barrels there. The study further estimates that there is a 95% chance that there are at least 11 billion barrels there, and a 5% chance that there are at least 31 billion barrels there. However, the fact that the assessment refers to the “resource” means that they are estimating the technically recoverable oil in place. This says nothing of the economics of recovering this oil. The amount that would be economically worthwhile to recover at prevailing commodity prices — which would be classified as “proved reserves” — will be a smaller subset of the assessed amount. It would even be zero at a sufficiently low oil price. This is merely an attempt by the USGS to estimate the amount of oil that could be extracted over time if cost was not a concern. But given the history of the Permian Basin, it’s a pretty safe bet that there is still a lot of oil still left to produce there. The Permian Basin began producing oil in 1921. The Texas side of the Permian has already produced nearly 30 billion barrels of crude, as well as 75 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas. Permian crude oil production has more than doubled since 2010 largely as a result of hydraulic fracturing in six low-permeability formations: Spraberry, Wolfcamp, Bone Spring, Glorieta, Yeso and Delaware. According to the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) most recent Permian Region Drilling Productivity Report, the Permian is presently producing 2 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil and 7.3 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas. This accounts for more than 23% of current U.S. crude oil production, and exceeds the combined oil output of the Bakken and the Eagle Ford: Source: Energy Information Administration. I have heard some characterize this news as a new oil discovery. It it not. This new USGS assessment is merely an attempt to put some framework around how much oil may exist in one of several producing formations within the Permian. But to the critics that would hand wave this assessment away as much ado about nothing, I would remind them that the Permian has seen oil production more than double in the past six years. That is significant. There is also still a lot of oil to be produced there. So while you are on solid ground when correcting anyone who calls this a new discovery, you shouldn’t underestimate the Permian Basin. Link to Original Article: 20 Billion Barrels Of Oil Were Not Discovered In The Permian Basin Follow Robert Rapier on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or at Forbes. 27 Nov

Ethanol From Carbon Dioxide Is Still A Losing Proposition - If I told you that I had created a process to extract pure gold from seawater, you might deem it an amazing accomplishment. If I issued a press release stating these facts, it very well could go viral. In fact, the oceans do contain an estimated 20 million tons of dissolved gold, worth close to a quadrillion dollars at the current spot market price. But you may have noticed that I have omitted a very important fact. I haven’t mentioned how much it costs to produce a troy ounce of gold using the process I have designed. That seems like an important detail, so I explain that the production cost is only $50,000 or so per ounce (which today is worth about $1,265), but I am sure that with enough investment dollars — and maybe a few government subsidies — I can get that cost down to something more reasonable. (This is how we subsidize some advanced biofuels where production costs are an order of magnitude above what could be considered economical). Readers immediately understand the problem. You don’t spend more to produce something than you can sell it for. But change the equation to energy instead of money and people suddenly forget that lesson. Or they fail to recognize that is what is taking place. That brings me to the point of today’s article, one I’m forced to reiterate often: in the world of energy as in most others, there is no free lunch. Earlier this month a research paper was published by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) called “High-Selectivity Electrochemical Conversion of CO2 to Ethanol using a Copper Nanoparticle/N-Doped Graphene Electrode.” The paper reports on some truly interesting science, and the researchers were measured and cautious in their conclusions. But something got lost in translation as media outlets sought to portray this as a “holy grail,” “game changer,” “major breakthrough” or “solution to climate change.” The benefits, one story said, were unimaginable. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that the press release from the Department of Energy was titled Scientists Accidentally Turned CO2 Into Ethanol. The word “accidental” plays into the misconception people have of how science is done. Many take the romantic view that game-changing, eureka discoveries are merely awaiting the next lucky accident, so when they read this headline the translation becomes something like “New Discovery Solves Climate Change.” That’s because the public loves its energy miracles. People love the idea of a car that can run on water or the car that gets 400 miles per gallon (which of course GM and Ford suppressed) or the magic pill you can pop in your tank that greatly enhances fuel efficiency. So it isn’t surprising that this kind of story goes viral (in notable contrast to the articles debunking these viral stories.) In order to understand what’s really going on, let’s consider a fundamental principle of thermodynamics. If you burn something containing a combination of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen — e.g., gasoline, ethanol, wood, natural gas — that combustion reaction is going to produce heat, carbon dioxide and water. These are the combustion products. It is possible to reverse the combustion reaction and convert that water and carbon dioxide back into fuel. But you have to add heat. A lot of heat. How much? More than you can get from burning the fuel in the first place. No new catalyst, and no discovery, accidental or otherwise, can get around that fundamental issue without overturning scientific laws observed and confirmed over 150 years. Given that, what can we say immediately about this process? Going back to the fundamentals of thermodynamics, we can say, without a doubt, that the process consumes more energy than it produces. In other words, to produce 1 British thermal unit (BTU) of ethanol will require the initial consumption of more than 1 BTU of energy (and generate CO2 emissions.) The resulting 1 BTU of ethanol would ultimately be consumed. The net effect once the ethanol is consumed is more than 2 BTUs’ worth of emissions per BTU of ethanol produced. Or, to be blunt, unless the process can be run on excess renewable or nuclear power (more on that below), converting carbon dioxide into ethanol would actually worsen net carbon dioxide emissions. Now the researchers involved certainly know this. They actually acknowledged in the paper that the process is unlikely to be economically viable. To my knowledge they haven’t intentionally misled anyone. But the public has been misled in the retelling of the story. I have heard this research presented as “an efficient way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.” No, that’s not at all what the researchers claimed. They claimed a Faradaic efficiency in the process of 63%. In other words, 63% of the electricity used in process was utilized in the reaction. They further said that 84% of what was produced was ethanol. That’s the “high-selectivity” part of the title. But that says nothing at all about the energy consumption required to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so it can participate in this reaction. That is an enormous energy cost because carbon dioxide exists at only 400 parts per million in the atmosphere. Or in the case of passive removal (which is what plants do by means of photosynthesis), the process is very slow. The high Faradaic efficiency and selectivity also provide little information about the overall energy requirements to turn purified carbon dioxide into purified ethanol, but we already know that it’s more than the energy contained in the ethanol. And it could be a lot more, and that could result in a lot more carbon dioxide emissions. There is a way that a process like this that is an energy sink could be viable, and that would be if you had cheap, surplus energy that might otherwise be wasted. For example, if a wind farm or nuclear plant produced far more electricity than the grid could handle, you could envision dumping the excess power into such a process. That could in theory reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but there are a lot of caveats that would warrant a longer discussion. Such an intermittent process brings up its own set of issues, and then there’s the question of whether that would really be the best use of the surplus energy. The bottom line here is if someone presents a scheme for turning air, water, or carbon dioxide into fuel, it is necessarily consumes more energy than it produces. It is an energy sink. Now, I need to get back to processing ocean water, just as soon as I finish writing this grant proposal for the process. Link to Original Article: Ethanol From Carbon Dioxide Is Still A Losing Proposition Follow Robert Rapier on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or at Forbes. 27 Oct

environmentalresearchweb: News

Are reindeer combating climate change? - Herbivores reduce shrub height and abundance, boosting summer albedo and cooling local climate21 Dec

Global warming already causing local extinctions - Almost half of plant and animal species have experienced local extinctions due to climate change, research reveals, with the tropics suffering the most pronounced loss21 Dec

Warming has little effect on maize yields - Drought, not high temperatures, are cause of reported low crop yields20 Dec

The Rhine is world’s most thermally polluted river basin - Power plants along Mississippi heat greatest volume of river water19 Dec

Heroic explorers aid Antarctic science - Observations of Antarctic ice pack from expeditions a century ago are helping modern scientists to understand the impacts of climate change16 Dec

Corn and soy production high on list for expiring US Conservation Reserve Program areas - Almost 30% of previously enrolled land reverted to intensive agriculture across midwestern US from 2010 to 2013, study finds14 Dec

How would bioenergy with carbon capture and storage affect the economy? - Cost of mitigating climate change could be reduced but questions remain over the feasibility of rolling out solutions on a large scale13 Dec

Central parts of Svalbard likely to lose all glaciers by 2100 - Islands in high Arctic could lose more than 7000 sq. km of ice coverage under RCP 8.5 scenario12 Dec

Africa’s dust is a priceless export - Scientists show how different the world would be without a sprinkling of the wind-borne African dust that fertilises oceans and forests 9 Dec

Which bring a worse surge – hurricanes or extratropical cyclones? - Coastal areas need to be prepared regardless of storm type, according to analysis of surge data 7 Dec

eQuipping for eMinistry

Our Lives, Our Worship, and the Incarnation of Christ - This year, eQuipping for eMinistry is hosting a Cru blogger on each of the Sundays of Advent. Thank you for following along with this Advent series and for encouraging (and following) Cru staff on their blogs. Today’s final post is from eQuipping for eMinistry webmaster, Sus Schmitt, an is originally published on her evangelistic blog, The Sovereign. (All posts in the series are listed at the end of this post.) The Incarnation of Christ Have you ever meditated on the incarnation of Christ? Other than His divine conception, God entered into our world in the normal human way, in utero, through birth, and into childhood. The eternal Word’s first words were just as any other infant’s. He lived as we live. He knew discomfort and delight, loss and love. God entering humanity in this way has also elevated humanity, you and me. God created us as His image-bearers and then He Himself took on human flesh in the incarnation. You are of great worth to God. He came into this world for you. Our Lives and the Incarnation of Christ God took on a body. Do you honor God in the way you treat your body and in how you present yourself? All we are and what we do with the life we’ve been given are of value to God. Do we honor Him in every area of our lives? Our affections, our talents, our relationships, our work, our culture, our imagination and creativity? We now see Him in the Body of Christ, the believers down through the ages, who are built together into a living Temple. Are you regularly fellowshipping with the family of God? Do you value and seek out the wisdom of God through reading His Word and through the faith of fellow believers? We can be blinded by our own self-centeredness and by our culture so we need to see life through other believers’ eyes, those you fellowship with locally, and those fellow travelers who’ve walked life’s road before you, even centuries ago. Do you reflect the compassion of the incarnate Christ? Do you see the people around you and their needs? Are you moved to action on their part? Chris Armstrong in his book, Medieval Wisdom (see NOTES), presents an interesting observation of our humanness and the needs of others: By seeing our ethical lives in the light of our bodily limitations, illuminated further by God’s own assumption and elevation of human nature, we are released from the pressure of perfection. We are released not to sin but rather from aspiring to the impossible: a life lived as if we do not have bodies ourselves–a perfectly godlike life. This is the mistake some make: to expect superhuman, super-spiritual exploits on the part of ourselves and other Christian people. This sort of super-spiritualization leads away from, rather than toward, a healthy and godly attention to the needs of others and the responsibilities of our relationships. (page 212) Our Worship and the Incarnation of Christ Being physical creatures, not just spiritual ones, what do you do to add to your worship experiences? Do you set aside times to just reflect on the Creator in a peaceful, natural setting or even in a bustling urban setting, surrounded by people rushing into eternity? Do you set aside time occasionally for an afternoon in an art museum? Look for artists’ creative expressions of people, nature, biblical subjects. Are you creative? Set aside some time to create something to God’s glory. For the past few years, I see my need for worshipful expression in architecture and “symphonic concerts”. If your weekly worship setting is not majestic, set aside times throughout the year to find a place to worship God in an awe-inspiring way (see NOTES for Central Florida suggestions). Do you have a beautiful, old church in your area that you could even sit in a pew for a time of prayer, taking in the worshipful atmosphere? What else appeals to your senses for your morning devotions? Candles? Sitting near a fireplace or by a lighted Christmas tree? Do you sing or play worshipful music? Do you reflect on the lyrics and not just mouth them? Do you allow the Holy Spirit to work in your heart to respond with joy or sorrow? For any choices you make in growing in devotion to your Lord, whether the practices you’re comfortable with over long use or in exploring long-held traditions, make sure both are theologically-informed. Does the practice follow sound doctrine and lead you to God? NOTES: Part of the Nicene Creed helps us understand the incarnation: “I believe… in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for us men for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man…” Providentially, I was reading Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis by Chris R. Armstrong in November. Through this book, I learned the incarnation was foundational to Medieval believers. The thoughts in this post are mainly in response to what I read. I used the author’s thoughts from pages 210 – 214 (“What a Difference the Incarnation Makes”) as an outline for this post. I hope to write a review of this fascinating book in 2017. I highly recommend this quote by C. S. Lewis, opening our eyes to the wonder of the incarnation, written as only Lewis can. Again, providentially, I read Kelly Kapic’s A Little Book for New Theologians this summer (see my review). Dr. Kapic also explained the value of learning from earlier believers. To add to those who you might wish to learn from, I recommend reading or listening to Brother Andrew, Kay Arthur, Alistair Begg, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Elisabeth Elliot, Charles Finney, Tim Keller, C. S. Lewis, Andrew Murray, C. H. Spurgeon, Joni Eareckson Tada, and numerous others. For myself, I realize I need to increase the variety of voices that speak into my life. To start learning from believers of other ages, I’m planning to read a Puritan devotional, The Valley of Vision, in 2017. Free museum admission for Bank of America customers for every first full weekend of every month. For Central Florida, attend these annual events: Handel’s Messiah and EPCOT’s Candlelight Processional. Check out the beautiful churches in downtown Orlando or St. Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford for evening concerts. Find a music event at these beautiful chapels: Rollins College’s Knowles Chapel or Stetson University’s Elizabeth Hall (their annual Christmas Candlelight Concert sells out every year). The 2016 Advent Series The Advent Advent: The Real Promise Keeper When Sorrow Collides with Joy Advent: Waiting with Anticipation Our Lives, Our Worship, and the Incarnation of Christ The photo depicting the infant Christ is copyrighted by the LUMO project (Big Book Media) and distributed for free download, under license exclusively by FreeBibleimagesfor teaching purposes only. All rights reserved. Our Lives, Our Worship, and the Incarnation of Christ by Sus Schmitt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.Filed under: biblical perspective, blog tour Tagged: Cru blogs 11:33

Advent: Waiting with Anticipation (Guest Post) - This year, eQuipping for eMinistry is hosting a Cru blogger on each of the Sundays of Advent. Thank you for following along with this Advent series and for encouraging (and following) Cru staff on their blogs. Today’s blogger, Mick Haupt, shares thoughtful posts with his original photography on Wandering 40 Days. (All posts in the series are listed at the end of this post.) The idea of ‘wonder’ has long intrigued me. There is something maddeningly elusive about wonder. But what I know is how intrinsically tied to hope and longing it is. For some reason I tend to always feel that sense of wonder more acutely in December. I don’t entirely know why. So this post is partly for me to explore my own fascination. December is synonymous with Christmas in my mind. Since I’ve never lived in a truly cold climate, December has never held that shroud of bleak winter for me. Growing up, December meant freedom from school and the long wait for Christmas presents. About the age of 17 my perspective changed. In high school I wrestled with belonging and acceptance. When I heard about God’s love for me and His invitation to become His child, I was captivated. An offer of perfect acceptance and belonging. I couldn’t resist. It was a longing fulfilled. But it also changed how I looked at longing and waiting. Waiting no longer equaled hindrance to longing fulfilled. It began to mean enduring with hope. Hope wasn’t something I was comfortable allowing myself to feel. I am the youngest of three kids, and growing up what I wanted and hoped for seemed elusive wishes. I was more used to disappointment, so I stopped hoping. But something was starting to thaw in my heart. Hope began to make an appearance. Advent in it’s simplest terms means “A coming into view” or “arrival.” My 17th year marked the first time Christmas held a deeper meaning. The birth of Christ, the arrival of this baby boy, came into my view as more important than gifts and a full stocking. That arrival suddenly became synonymous with my new standing in God’s family…a beloved and fully accepted child. It was the dawn of longing fulfilled in my heart. Wonder began to make an appearance. It was as if the growing chill in the air each winter also marked the growing feeling of wonder at how God could love and accept me. The life and death of Jesus accomplished this. His birth was the advent. I love the feeling of wonder. To me it is linked to anticipation. Hope that anything can happen. Not a hope that I will receive the gift that I want or magical vacation days lay ahead. But a hope for peace both external and internal. Shalom means the world as it was meant to be. Shalom is a peace meant to be experienced both externally and internally. Our world was intended to be that way. But as all of us can see it isn’t so peaceful. There is a lot out there that breaks the shalom of our world. So, there is a 24/7/365 onslaught of the peace we were meant to experience. And it’s a daily battle to try and recover it, if not for the whole world, at least for us personally. How do we recover that peace? How do we regain our sense of wonder? This is precisely why the Advent of the Prince of Peace is so remarkable. The Pax Romana (the Peace of Rome) supposedly ruled over the Roman Empire, but it was a shadowboxer. Every few years Caesar Augustus would call for a census. Much more than a counting of people, a census was an intrusive inquisition by force to get the information Rome wanted to elicit taxes and control and rule by fear. There was no pax…it was rule by terror. The fabric of Christ’s arrival was that He would be the Prince of Peace forever, reigning with righteousness. Israel had been waiting and wondering for 400 years for a deliverer. They longed for peace, and freedom from tyranny. They waited for shalom to be restored. Wondering whether God cared or listened. It was a battle to hold on to hope. It was difficult to cling to the promises God had offered through prophets of the past. The fabric of their worldview—waiting, wondering, clinging to a longing unfulfilled. Is it so different from us now? We are all waiting for something, are we not? We are all hoping for something different or better. We all want shalom…for the world and for ourselves. For myself, when I encountered this Prince of Peace personally, it fundamentally changed how I hoped. It no longer was a hope untethered to something that can’t tangibly answer. But my hope became integrally attached to someone who can answer. My hope is no longer waiting on something, anything to happen. But my hope is an anticipation something could happen because my Father God loves and cares for me. His answer to my longing could be “wait!” But He loves me still. He could answer my prayers immediately. But He loves me no less, or more, if I have to wait. There is a sacredness in waiting. It crystallizes where our trust is. Will we turn to our own resources? Or will we wait, patiently, trusting God’s goodness even though we don’t see an answer? Because my hope is attached to the person of Christ, I can live in anticipation that an answer could be any day. Wonder carries that same vein of anticipation. Anything can happen. But that hope is attached to a loving Father, who showed His love and provision of peace through the arrival of Jesus Christ. It’s hard to hold on to this sacred wonder when busyness, parties, present buying, responsibilities, family, expectations are all crowding for our attention. How do we recover it? Give yourself the gift of margin. Take a few moments each day to ponder God’s greatest gift…the Advent of Jesus. Remind yourself that there is a sacredness in waiting. It helps us find where our trust resides. Try to see God is good even if we have to wait for a longing to be fulfilled. Also, try to step back and picture the Prince of Peace giving you peace in the midst of the waiting. I think why I love feeling this sense of wonder is that it fills me with hope. I am most filled with hope when I am most filled with love, and remember that I am loved. And I am most reminded that I am loved because of the Advent of Christ. I guess that is why December is my most wonder-filled month of the year. I hope that you can regain a sense of wonder this Advent season. Guest Post by Mick Haupt Mick has been on staff with Cru for 25 years. He served with the Campus Ministry for four years, The Jesus Film Project for 11 years and with the Global Leadership Office for the past 10 years. He is passionate about photography and about the stories his photos tell. But graphic design is how he spends the majority of his time. He’d love to be a food critic but doesn’t have the time. He lives in Orlando with his wife Clarice, and two rambunctious boys. The 2016 Advent Series The Advent Advent: The Real Promise Keeper When Sorrow Collides with Joy Advent: Waiting with Anticipation Our Lives, Our Worship, and the Incarnation of Christ Advent: Waiting with Anticipation by Mick Haupt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Source: The Wait is an oil painting in the public domain and is available on Wikimedia Commons. The artist, Santeri Salokivi (1886 – 1940) was a Finnish painter and graphic artist.Filed under: biblical perspective, blog tour, guest post, photography Tagged: Cru blogs 18 Dec

Creative Ideas on How to Get People to Read Your Blog - You love writing, but have you ever struggled with how to get people to read your blog? Most bloggers do. For this last post in the 2016 byte-size series, I’ll present some creative and easy ideas for getting people to read your blog. I’m not including all the standard advice given to bloggers, so you should also check out the two articles in the NOTES to learn the best practices every blogger should know (write often, use photos, et cetera). I’m writing instead in this post on some less obvious, and creative, ideas for you. How to Get People to Read Your Blog Check Your Stats Take a look at your stats and ask yourself what you might learn from them. The above screenshot from 2016 stats for eQuipping for eMinistry (e4e) shows me: Over 10,000 of this year’s 17,000 visitors (to-date) were from the United States. Most of my top countries are predominately English-speaking. More than half of those visiting the site came in from Google searches, almost 9,000. My top posts were “how-to” posts (the top post this year being How to Open Apple’s “Pages” Documents on Your PC with 2,625 views). Because it seems a lot of my visitors are coming in from “how to” searches on Google, I should make sure that any posts of that nature have “how to” in the title and in the first sentence of the post, at minimum. I should also pay regular attention to the types of Google searches that are bringing people to my site. What Search Terms Bring Visitors to Your Blog? To investigate what search phrases brought visitors to your site, use the stats in WordPress, click on “years” to the right of the “insights” tab. Click on this current year. Under the map, you’ll also see a box for search terms. Click on “view all.” This brings up the top searches for the year, which would look similar to my list (above). For this past year, the top search on e4e was “where is the print screen button” at 13 searches, but if you also add the variations on that, like “print screen button on laptop” then the number is actually almost 50. These searches took visitors to a post of mine, Screenshots, from June of 2011. This old and simple post has been read almost every day, totaling over 2,900 visits! Knowing that people are finding eQuipping for eMinistry with “how to” searches, a better title for Screenshots might be How to Use Your Print Screen Button, which uses words from the 50 searches. I just tried a Google search and that phrase brought up 8.5 million hits. “How to make a screenshot” has 13 million hits, which is more, but no one used that phrase to find my post. You and I have the problem, of course, of our post being one of millions, so in addition to matching your title to searches coming into your blog, you need to take other steps, too, such as: Matching the title of your blog post to your URL, Restate that title in the first sentence of the blog, Restate it in the first heading, And other recommendations for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It’ll be worthwhile for me to re-write and replace this old post soon and see if I can bring in more visitors through what I’ve learned. I’ll take the same steps I just recommended to you and also re-write the new post with a “how to” title. The post will likely get more hits with a more recent post date as well. I’ll also include an alt-tag for the image (learn more about photo tags from Yoast). This is a new step for me to begin doing for my photos. I’ll learn about this in the next few months and write more next year. You will always want to match the title of your post to your URL in every case, but I realize the steps I suggested may not work as well with a devotional or inspirational post, so some of these next ideas in this article may be more suited for your writing style. Last year, I explained how to create foreign language tags for your posts to draw visitors from other countries who don’t have English characters on their keyboards. This tip may bring in visitors from other countries. (The image at the top of this post shows the countries of the visitors to my The Sovereign blog where I use this idea extensively.) If you look at your stats, what do you learn and what would you do differently next year? Try these ideas with some of your older posts that still get a lot of visitors. Put out a Welcome Mat for Your Visitors Now that visitors have come to your site, do you have any content, or links to content, to help them spiritually? Linking out from your post increases your SEO, so why not also make these links of eternal value to your visitors? (Links coming in help as well, but you can’t control that). Add Hyperlinks to Your Content You don’t know what the most popular posts will be at the time you write them, obviously, so, for example, after I knew our photo of a Space Shuttle launch on our family site, MikeandSus.org, was very popular, I went back and added a link in the post to a testimony of two Christian rocket scientists. (This post had 3,600 visitors at the time.) On another popular post with a photo of a butterfly, I added a link to why butterflies could not have evolved. All three of my blogs have evangelistic and pre-evangelistic links sprinkled throughout, so, hopefully, even the most random visitor could find a gospel presentation. Since I have a lot of links to Bible verses in my blogs, I’m praying that visitors will even find their way to a Bible translation in their language by visiting the site. (Bible Gateway has over fifty languages available.) It’s still amazing to me that I have visitors from every continent to my three blogs. One of my popular blogs, The Sovereign, is written for post-Rapture readers and has had over 107,000 visitors since February of 2007. This blog averages roughly 10,000 visitors annually for six years now. Also, eQuipping for eMinistry has had over 157,000 visitors, averaging 20,000 visitors annually for six years. Together, that’s 30,000 people annually, more than half the size of my hometown! Consider using stats to find out about your blogs’ visitors and then to tailor hyperlinks to share the gospel with them. NOTES: If you’re serious about blogging, you will need to start incorporating these tips: 20 Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog Getting More Views and Traffic Why not check out more posts in the 2016 Byte-size series for some easy-to-do tech ideas for ministry? The Byte-size Series: Each byte-size series post is meant to be easy for you to do. Priority Inbox for Gmail and using lists in Facebook Your web presence and your online MO Email subject lines Google Apps and search tips You could afford a tablet 5 Easy Tech Ideas You Didn’t Know You Needed Saving Facebook Posts… for Bloggers, Too Painting a Bigger Picture for Your Ministry Partners Easy Tips for Cropping Photos with Paint.net Your eTools for Your Myers-Briggs Type Facebook Live Is an Easy Ministry Tool Creative Ideas on How to Get People to Read Your Blog Filed under: blogging, communication, eMinistry, evangelism, eZ tips, pre-evangelism, tutorial, web & blog design, Your ministry Tagged: SEO, stats & trends, videos, Win-Build-Send 15 Dec

When Sorrow Collides With Joy - This year, eQuipping for eMinistry is hosting a Cru blogger on each of the Sundays of Advent. Thank you for following along with this Advent series and for encouraging (and following) Cru staff on their blogs. Lindsey Dennis is featured today in the Advent series, sharing her journey to adoption. (All posts in the series are listed at the end of this post.) Joy. It’s the candle we light today. The 3rd advent candle. But what is this joy really? A word we put on chalkboards and hang on pennants inspired by Pinterest and see on storefronts and all over Christmas décor. J.O.Y. And what is it to have joy when there is so much sorrow and ache that often encompasses these holidays? The missing of a loved one lost, the ache of loneliness, broken relationships and shattered dreams fill so many of our stories and seem to be so much more poignant at Christmas. Christmas holds so much wonder, and ache. And it should. For think of our Savior, about to humble Himself and become obedient to death “for the joy set before Him.” His journey into our skin was truly one of wonder and ache. And think of the thousands of years before Christ, those waiting in wonder and ache. And the thousands of years after Christ, us the waiting people, waiting in wonder and ache. A wonder at all we have seen God do and an ache for all that has yet to be redeemed. Three years ago, I entered the Christmas season having just buried my firstborn daughter a few months earlier. My heart was filled with sorrow and pain. Words of that old hymn, Oh Holy Night resonating with my soul in fresh ways. “The weary world rejoices.” Yes, the weary, weary world. I was so very weary. And yes, the rejoicing world, for Christ came into our world to conquer sin and death forever and never in my life had that meant more to me then after losing my daughter. The rejoicing holds greater joy for the one who sees joy break into their weariness. But I was still struggling to fully embrace that, for my prayer for the following year was that it would be one of joy, joy with a disclaimer; “Only joy please Lord, no pain”. What I did not yet know was that true joy is not the absence of pain but the very transformation of it. The joy that I was longing for was the kind that transcends darkness, throws back the curtains of pain and shouts to a broken world “Behold, I am making ALL things new.” (Revelation 21:5) It was the kind of joy found not in my circumstances but in the presence of the One who makes all things new. That year, the joy that I was praying for would at first seem to me a prayer God did not hear as we would find out that we would also have to bury our 2nd born daughter. And it would be in the dark night of the soul that I would discover that truly it is His presence where there is fullness of Joy (Psalm 16:11) His words holding true to their promise, never returning void but accomplishing what they are meant to do. And they were breathing life and hope, transformation and worship into this heart of mine as I began to discover a Savior who didn’t show up like I expected Him to but would show up in ways I could have never imagined, much like the men and women awaiting His arrival over 2000 years ago. 400 years of silence, of waiting for the promised one to break through and conquer and then He came. But He didn’t come like they thought he would, and he didn’t conquer how they thought He would, and He wasn’t supposed to die such a horrific death. He couldn’t possibly be the one we have waited for? Yet for the ones who knew, it was the juxtaposition of the life of Jesus, next to the death of Jesus, next to the resurrection of Jesus, next to the now waiting for His coming again that brought the kind of joy that led them to radical, faithful living. J. R. R. Tolkien coined a term for this. Eucatastrophe: A good destruction. He writes in his essay on fairy stories “The resurrection was the greatest eucatastrophe possible in the greatest fairy story and produces that essential element: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where joy and sorrow are at one, reconciled as selfishness and altruism are lost in love.” You cannot have true joy until you know great sorrow. This sorrow is discovered as we more fully grasp the reality of our sin and the weight of what Christ bore on the cross. It is discovered in the ache our hearts feel for the brokenness all around us, and it is discovered in the midst of the sorrows that invade our lives. It is in the knowing of great sorrow that we more fully realize the joy that is coming, the joy that has come. And that wonderful promise “Behold, I am making all things new” begins to grip the heart of the weary as we find joy in the presence of our Savior and joy in the wonder and hope of His promise to redeem it all. Today, my husband and I sang “Joy to the World” with our son, born into our family through adoption earlier this year. And tears filled my eyes, for joy has been greater than weariness this Christmas season. And our story has looked so different then what I thought it would. My heart still filled with wonder and ache, for wonder at all God has done, ache at what is still lost and a steady growing awareness that though joy fills our home in fresh ways, it is a joy more firmly rooted in His presence not our circumstances. Tolkien goes on to say “All tales may come true and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as man, finally redeemed will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.” This story of ours, this story of yours, this story of our world will be redeemed. These stories ARE being redeemed and have great purpose in the greatest story ever told, makes sense in the cosmic ordering of all God is ordaining. Joy will erupt, can erupt now, will erupt fully. For when you know the King, then you know the Joy. And just as thousands of years ago, people waited for the coming of the King, so we know today He came. And we sit in our Advent season waiting for the King to come again. For the King IS coming. “Therefore you too have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.” John 16:22 “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” – J. R. R. Tolkien Guest Post by Lindsey Dennis Lindsey lives in Orlando, Florida, where she and her husband, Kevin, serve on the Missional Team at Walt Disney World (WDW), reaching college students who are part of the year-round internship program at WDW. She has served with Cru for 15 years and takes great joy in getting to invest her life in students around the world! Lindsey also writes and speaks of what God has done to bring hope and healing in her life through the life and death of her first two daughters. Kevin and Lindsey have been married for five years. They have three children , Sophie and Dasah, who now live with Jesus, and Jaden, who came into their lives this year through adoption. You can follow Lindsey’s journey and writings on her blog, Vapor and Mist. The 2016 Advent Series The Advent Advent: The Real Promise Keeper When Sorrow Collides with Joy Source: The photo of the third advent candle is available from SkyD on Flickr.com. Some rights reserved.Filed under: biblical perspective, blog tour, guest post Tagged: Cru blogs 11 Dec

Advent: The Real Promise Keeper (Guest Post) - This year, eQuipping for eMinistry is hosting a Cru blogger on each of the Sundays of Advent. Thank you for following along with this Advent series and for encouraging (and following) Cru staff on their blogs. Judy Douglass is featured today in the Advent series. (All posts in the series are listed at the end of this post.) A favorite Advent reflection for me is meditating on the many ways Jesus comes to us: He comes as the Living Word and the Living Water, as the Way, the Truth and the Life, as the Bread of Life and the Light of the World. And so much more. One of my favorite ways that Jesus comes is as the real Promise Keeper. As I have joined with others in going through advent with the Deeply Loved devotional by Keri Wyatt Kent, I loved stopping at day 11 to “Meditate on the Promises of God. “ And oh what promises our God has made to us: forgiveness, a relationship with God, abundant life and eternal life, peace, comfort, hope…. And one more that I love: He hears and answers prayer. Another Advent devotional I am reading through is Enuma Okoro’s Silence—and Other Surprising Invitations of Advent. It gives a different twist to those days preceding the coming of Jesus—it is written from the perspective of Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist. And there I was reminded of a wonderful promise of answered prayer. How many times have you cried out, “How long, O Lord!?!”: “… How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1) I know I have said those words. I imagine you have as well. We yearn, we despair, we hope, we weep, we believe—waiting on the answer to our prayers. There is another who surely asked that question, for seemingly unanswered prayer, for longing and waiting. His name is Zechariah. He and Elizabeth had pleaded and waited for a child for decades. On Day 4 of Advent, this verse jumped out at me: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard.” (Luke 1:13a) This message was delivered by a heavenly messenger, assuring Zechariah that he had nothing to fear—and that his decades of prayer for a child had not fallen on deaf ears. God had heard. And now was the right time for God’s answer. His son, John the Baptist, would prepare the way for the coming Christ. And that was the message God gave to me. My emotions—in “how long, o Lord?” times—cause these kinds of thoughts and questions: Are you listening, Lord? Do you care? What about the promises? Can I believe you? Fear reigns—fear for the future of my loved one. Will he ever really change? So is there sin in my life that blocks my prayers? Or am I just not effective at all at praying? Will hope ever be fulfilled, or will hope always be disappointed? I could go on. I’m sure you have asked these and other questions. But the right answer to these questions is not in things turning out the way I want, in my pain leaving, in the answer to prayer I desire. The answer is in God, in who He is, in what He is like. I never understand what He is doing or how He is working. But I do know that He does all things well, that He is good and is always looking for ways to do good to us, that His promises are true and can be trusted. And I can know, with Zechariah, that my prayers have been heard. So, in this time of good news and celebration that is often full of bad news and disappointment for those of us who wait for an answer, may you know that God has heard your prayers and His answers will be right and at the right time. What about you? What prayer are you waiting to see answered? Guest Post by Judy Douglass Judy Douglass is genuine and passionate about encouraging God’s children—especially His daughters—to become all they were created to be and accomplish all they were created to do. In her forty-plus years with Campus Crusade for Christ, this U of Texas journalism graduate does this through writing and speaking worldwide and in leading alongside her husband, Steve Douglass, president of Campus Crusade. Judy is a founding board member of Synergy Women’s Network. Follow Judy on Facebook, Twitter, and on her blog, Kindling, on JudyDouglass.com.Advent: The Real Promise Keeper by Judy Douglass is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. It was copyrighted by Judy in 2012. The photo depicting Zechariah entering the Temple (and about to hear the answer to his prayers) is copyrighted by the LUMO project (Big Book Media) and distributed for free download, under license exclusively by FreeBibleimages for teaching purposes only. All rights reserved. The 2016 Advent Series The Advent Advent: The Real Promise Keeper Filed under: biblical perspective, blog tour, guest post Tagged: Cru blogs 4 Dec

The Advent (Guest Post) - This year, eQuipping for eMinistry is hosting a Cru blogger on each of the Sundays of Advent. Thank you for following along with this Advent series and for encouraging (and following) Cru staff on their blogs. Stephanie Reeves opens our Advent series. Sometimes I feel like what I have to say isn’t something anyone wants to hear, so I stop talking. Discouragement comes easily as I look at my blog, try to teach my 6th grade students or talk to my children and wonder if my words mean anything to anybody. The thought runs through my head, “Is anybody out there?” For 400 years, the people of Israel thought God was silent. There had been no prophets speaking His words. Thing was, though they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—hear Him, He was still at work. The stage was being set for the ultimate Word that would be shared with the world. If you’re like me, when you’re reading your Bible, you skip over all those names in the genealogies, but they represent the behind-the-scenes work that was being done in preparation for the Word becoming flesh. Adam to David to Mary, the mother of Jesus, the Word of God who came and dwelt among us. When I’m silent, it doesn’t mean I have nothing to say, it means that I’m not taking the time to think and listen and write. Most of the time when I’m silent, it means I’m too busy, or I’m not engaged with what needs to be heard. When God is silent, it’s like the darkness before the dawn. There is movement, we just can’t see it. Or maybe we could if we studied the sky in the east. Maybe the problem is we’re just not looking in the right place. We’re not quiet enough to hear. Stop. Listen. Do you hear the sounds of His coming? He’s coming. NOTE: This post is adapted from Stephanie’s original post, The Advent. Guest Post by Stephanie Reeves I have been on staff for 31 years, most of it with Worldwide Challenge as a writer, editor, production manager and copy editor. I am married to JESUS Film Project staff member David Reeves and have three children. Writing, helping others communicate better and mentoring 20-something women are my ministry passions! I’m also an avid Mac user and can’t survive without my Macbook Pro, iPad and iPhone. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter as stephcreeves, on Facebook as Stephanie Allan Reeves and read my blog, Compelled, at http://www.stephreeves.wordpress.com.Source: The Claude Monet oil painting of a sunrise is in the public domain and is available on Wikimedia Commons.Filed under: biblical perspective, guest post Tagged: Cru blogs 27 Nov

Is It Really Worth Saying? (Guest Post) - Words. The means of communication. Tools of expression. The building blocks of understanding one another. I have lots of words–I’ve been told I have a knack for filling air space with words. Words can be useful, encouraging, uplifting, soothing and helpful. They can also be hurtful, spiteful, hateful, disruptive, accusing and shaming. Words can build up, and words can tear down. Equally well. I’ve had experiences where I’ve quite capably done both Not a lot to be proud of there. We’re living in a time of increased technology where we are able to communicate with one another immediately. Where our words can be out there before we think twice about them. We can tweet, text and generally litter the web with our sound bites. But is it all worth saying? And if we were to be face to face with an individual, would we say the things we say when we’re two-finger typing? And an even more telling issue–do we have what it takes to say things well to someone when we are face to face? I’ve become quite appalled by my own lack of thinking when I’m communicating, whether it’s in talking or texting. Am I really thinking about the other person as I speak, or am I saying things I want to get out there because, well, it’s what I want to do. I look at Facebook and see comments written by people that probably were not well thought through when they were sent out to be on the world wide web . Words becoming weapons. This was brought home by my grandkids as they were in the midst of a verbal skirmish. Kids understand early that words can be used to hurt back. These four have been told not to call each other names. One name in particular seems to be hurtful. Baby. Not one I would have thought a problem, but for these kids, it’s like a kick in the pants. I walked in on a yelling match between the three oldest, and they were throwing these little “b” bombs at each other right and left. Until one of them had enough and yelled, “Mom, he called me a baby!” The expectation was that Mom would swoop in and dispense pain to the culprit. They were all culprits. I know I too often speak–or write–without thinking. I’ve been hurt by words that were thoughtlessly thrown out. Sometimes those words sink below the surface and hurt for a long time. It’s always the ugly words, the hurtful words, that do the most damage, like little barbs to the soul. They always overshadow the good things said. I don’t want to do that to others I don’t want it done to me. “Don’t use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them.” Ephesians 4:29. Snide, catty, sarcastic. Those words hurt as well. I don’t want to regret what I’ve said. I don’t want the last thing someone hears from me–verbally or written–to be hurtful. My words are the foundation of how I’ll be remembered by someone. Is it really worth saying?Guest Post by: Dayle Rogers is on Cru staff as a ministry coach for Lake Hart Stint. She is wife to John and Mom and Nana to a growing brood. Read more from Dayle on her blog, Tip of My Iceberg. You’ll love her view of the bigger (eternal) picture of life, with all its twists and turns, drama and joy, chaos and fun. Is It Really Worth Saying? by Dayle Rogers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. NOTE: The image is available with this creative commons license from Jimmy Jack Kane’s photostream on Flickr.Filed under: biblical perspective, communication, email, for women, guest post, messaging, texting Tagged: Cru blogs 21 Nov

Facebook Live Is an Easy Ministry Tool - Facebook Live Is Easy to Use For the eleventh post in the 2016 byte-size series, I’m encouraging you to try Facebook Live. This post should provide everything you’ll need to get started. I’m sure you’re aware of how popular videos are on social media and that Facebook Live has become a common way to share them. One reason Facebook Live is recommended to use is because if you share the video from a Facebook page, everyone who has liked the page will get the video in their feed. Normally, your broadcast would be for only people recently active on your page. I’ve tried Facebook Live a few times last month, so I’ll share what I’ve learned. Get Ready to Go Live Announce: As I did a little online research, the common advice is to announce your live event. I haven’t found anything about whether it’s better to announce hours or days ahead. Nancy Wilson announced her first Facebook Live event “exactly” one week ahead and had several hundred watching at the time we filmed. Within 24 hours she had 900 views. She’s only had 500 views for the videos she hasn’t announced. Your Equipment: Turn on your camera. Are your battery and wi-fi connection good-to-go? Look through your lens. How do the framing and the lighting look for the video? (I recommend horizontal, not vertical, videos.) Do you have the front- or back-facing camera on? If using a phone, put it into Airplane Mode to prevent an incoming call from disrupting your video. I recommend a tripod or some way to stabilize. For Nancy, I propped my elbows on a bench. For a group event, I had a tripod with an attached mic. Moving further away lowered the audio quality, plus the mic picked up the noises of repositioning the tripod. The Setting: Look around. Is it noisy? Will a pole appear to be sticking out of your head or will lots of distracting action be happening in the background? Outdoor settings often provide nice, natural lighting. Security / Privacy: You share your location publicly when you add a location to a public broadcast or include your location publicly on your profile or Facebook page. Your live video would appear on the Facebook Live Map if you’ve made it public. You’re on the Air It’s so easy to use, I’m not going to even explain how to “go live,” but if you need the steps, here’s Facebook’s instructions. Before the countdown to go live, choose your audience. You’ll also be asked to type in a headline. Think of something that grabs attention and explains your topic. It’s possible to edit this later if you’re drawing a blank. State at the beginning who you are and why you’re filming. If possible, verbally acknowledge those who are joining in. If you have a videographer and you’re the presenter, your helper may be able to type in some responses for you during filming. You’ll be able to comment later as well. Try asking and responding to questions while recording for increased engagement. Broadcast for a longer time to give people a chance to join in. As you experiment, you’ll find the best length of time for your viewers. Your minimum call-to-action might be to mention the follow button below the video (only seen when on the air, apparently). If you have any call-to-action, you have multiple options: State it Write it in the comments or in the video description Add it in captions later Hit the “finish” button. I lost my Internet connection while live once and the video posted anyway without my tapping the “finish” or the “post” buttons. Normally, though, you would post, download, or delete when you’re done filming. Two Must-Do Tips for Post-Production Most importantly, go through the comments and reply. Share and upload your video to different social media sites. One way to get the URL to share for your video is to find your page of videos (see the arrow below). Open the video. Right click on the video itself. Click on “Show video URL.” Copy the URL in the little window that opens. If needed, use Buffer, bit.ly, or another URL shortener. Long URLs will be hard for your friends to share. Editing There’s a lot in this section. Don’t let it overwhelm you. You could skip parts of it, but I would definitely do steps #2, 3, 6, 9, and 10. If you find that Facebook Live is working for your ministry, come back to this post every time you’re ready to go live to learn a new skill for your next event. Ready to edit? You’ve found your page of videos (image above). Now click on the “Your videos” tab and then the “Edit or Remove” pencil icon in the upper right corner of the video you want to edit. I’ll go through the numbered steps found in the next two images. Some of this editing will increase the engagement on your video, so it’s worth it. Tag people in the video. You might need to ask permission in some cases. Create a title. Pick one of the ten thumbnails. Enter the location. Enter the date. Write a good description. I included my call-to-action. See Captions below. See Captions below. Select a category. Choose your privacy setting (which you should have done before filming, ideally). Try Some More Options Add Captions I almost passed over the option to upload an SRT file, a basic format for subtitles, but I found it easy to do, so I’m including some instructions. These are Steps #8 and 9. Before starting, however, I have a bit.ly account with a short URL for my blog’s MailChimp subscription sign-up (see the underline below). If you’re a blogger, I recommend creating one of these links to use for situations like this. I needed a short invitation to subscribe to my blog, eQuipping for eMinistry. In hindsight, I probably could have made it a clickable link in the caption. Write the code: Opening Microsoft Notepad, I wrote the code for two captions. TextEdit is the Apple text editor. (One of these is free on your laptop.) Here’s the code for two captions for this video. Watch the video if you’d like to see how the captions look when added to a video. The first one starts at 27 seconds, ending at 57 seconds. The second at one minute, ending 13 seconds later. You could copy and paste my code (below) for your own use, just modifying the numbers for the times and the wording for the captions. 1 00:00:27,000 –> 00:00:57,000 Get help from eQuipping for eMinistry at http://bit.ly/e4esubscribe. 2 00:01:00,000 –> 00:01:13,000 Thank you. Start with “1” and create as many captions as you need. Leave a space between captions. Don’t overlap times. Save your file, using “save as” and… Use this format: filename.en_US.srt (This is for English in the USA. For other countries, find your language and country in Facebook’s Help Center) Save as type: All Files Encoding: UTF-8 Make sure your captions are what you want. I tried to get back in to change them after uploading, but received an error message. It might be doable, but I recommend just taking the time to type your captions correctly the first time around. Going back to the ten steps under “Editing”: Fill out the Captions window for Step #7, which probably brings up the naming convention for your country for the next step. Upload your SRT File for Step #8. I made some mistakes with Facebook Live, but that’s part of becoming acquainted with any technology, so don’t be afraid to jump in. Delete the video at any time if you need to. Share a link to your Facebook Live video in the comments! NOTES: The images on this post are cropped from the Facebook Live event of Nancy Wilson and from my Facebook profile. For more help, I recommend these articles: Facebook Live: What Marketers Need to Know (Social Media Examiner) has “5 Ways to Use Facebook Live” at the end of their post that should spark some ideas for you. How to Download a Facebook Live Video by Kim Garst at Boom! Social. How to Make Your Own Subtitles with Any Text Editor & Aegisub (MakeUseOf.com) has more detailed instructions for captions and also explains how to make different fonts and colors with the free app, Aegisub. If you’re going to do Facebook Live “productions,” check out this amazing Mevo camera! Read a review of the Mevo camera by USA Today. The Byte-size series photo is of a 28-pin integrated circuit, CP2102 (USB to Serial chip). Why not check out more posts in the 2016 Byte-size series for some easy-to-do tech ideas for ministry? The Byte-size Series: Each byte-size series post is meant to be easy for you to do. Priority Inbox for Gmail and using lists in Facebook Your web presence and your online MO Email subject lines Google Apps and search tips You could afford a tablet 5 Easy Tech Ideas You Didn’t Know You Needed Saving Facebook Posts… for Bloggers, Too Painting a Bigger Picture for Your Ministry Partners Easy Tips for Cropping Photos with Paint.net Your eTools for Your Myers-Briggs Type Facebook Live Is an Easy Ministry Tool Filed under: communication, eMinistry, eQuipping, essentials, eZ tips, social media, tech tips, Your ministry Tagged: apps, Facebook, ministry, mobile, recommended, stats & trends, videos 11 Nov

FYI: eQuipping for eMinistry’s Posting Plan for 2017 - eQuipping for eMinistry’s Posting Plan I’m tied up all week with a theology class on God, the Holy Spirit, and the Bible, so today I thought I’d give you a quick glance at my 2017 posting plans for eQuipping for eMinistry (e4e). I now try to write once per week with some solid content. I aim for posting on Monday or Tuesday. Most posts will be over 800 words and solidly researched. The monthly plan breaks down like this: First week: an eMinistry post – using technology for ministry (evangelism, discipleship, MPD,…) Second week: an eQuipping post – a how-to or tutorial, including help with MailChimp Third week: a social media post – focusing on using social media Fourth week: a blogging post – help and encouragement for Cru bloggers, including help with photography Every six weeks I’ll “change it up” by alternating a guest post, a biblical perspective post, or a podcast post. (The links take you to some examples.) Did you notice? A podcast? I haven’t done this yet and would like to make some time to put together podcasts with how-to’s on blogging. I’d appreciate prayers that I could get that started. If you haven’t already, sign up for the monthly email from e4e so you’ll have the content you’re interested in. The email goes out on the 15th. I also offer a weekly email. Continued Features / Events I’m thinking of doing an advent series written by Cru guest bloggers this year instead of the Christmas blog tour. I’ll be looking for some good advent devotionals from our Cru bloggers to share with e4e readers. I always host a spring blog tour of Cru blogs. Next summer, I plan to put on BAM17, the Bloggers and Authors Meetup at Staff Training. Social Media and eQuipping for eMinistry I hope to be sharing related content more consistently on e4e’s social media channels. I also promote and advocate for Cru staff. Thanks for following: Facebook – I hope to start posting Facebook Live videos here. Google+ Instagram My personal accounts with e4e content are: LinkedIn Twitter On my Pinerest account, follow an eQuipping for eMinistry board and / or read great posts from Cru bloggers on Inspirational Blog Posts . I also publish a weekly paper based on tweets from selected Cru staff at e4e: Best of #CruTweets. Just writing all this makes me wonder if I can keep up, but I’ll give it a good try! (Any volunteers out there?) I have other ideas, too, but these are the “essentials” to start with next year for the eQuipping for eMinistry blog. If you have any suggestions for this plan, please give me some feedback! Guest bloggers are welcome! Contact me with your post idea by writing e4e at cru dot org. The photos are from Salzburg, Austria, and were taken by myself and my husband, Mike. I chose these images because of the contrast… in today’s world, our phone lets us know the time and the weather. These clocks, sundial, and weather station were sprinkled throughout the city.Filed under: blogging, discipleship, eMinistry, eQuipping, evangelism, MPD, photography, tech tips, videos Tagged: #Cru17, Cru blogs, Facebook, Google+, instagram, ministry, mobile, recommended, Twitter 31 Oct

First Bloggers’ Conference at The Cove (Interview) - About a week ago, two of eQuipping for eMinistry’s readers attended the Christian Writers Gathering at The Cove, The Billy Graham Training Center in North Carolina. Approximately thirty bloggers met for a two-hour meetup, the first-of-its-kind for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA). Let’s hear from Debby and Yvonne about their time at the meetup. Debby Thompson is on staff with AIA, having served with Cru 42 years. Yvonne Bibby was on staff for 30 years and has published a book, Wake Up! Return to God: A Call to Personal Revival. See their full bios and links to their blogs at the end of our interview. e4e: What was the conference? What was their goal? Yvonne: The Cove Christian Blogger Meetup was designed to give information about blogging to new and existing bloggers. It was a way for new bloggers to connect with other Christians who perhaps had more years blogging and knew more. The Cove social media director, Jill, and two communications specialists from BGEA lead the meetup. After the event, most women, and the one guy who attended, took the initiative to give out our business cards and connect. Some agreed to “barter” their time to help others. e4e: What were your one or two takeaways that really encouraged you? Debby: Spiritually, personally, the very real stewardship of blogging – God has called me to do this; I’m not pursuing a casual addition to my life. Practically, time management hacks specific to the life of a writer. Yvonne: Be consistent in writing. But there is grace as in every ministry if time has gone by without writing. Also, although there are many bloggers out there, remember “there is enough content for everyone”, meaning there are enough readers who will take something away from any blogger. Every blogger is important. e4e: What do you think would be particularly helpful for other Cru bloggers to know? Debby: The opportunity to meet bloggers from other ministries and other organizations, other spiritual journeys, is valuable. Yvonne: There are many Christian bloggers out there but few write clearly about the gospel, discipleship, and training. Cru writers have the training to write about these things. Some of the women I met were writing about “good” things but not these things particularly. We’re privileged as staff to pass on these important topics now through the Internet. Many older staff have years of wisdom to share with younger Christians. e4e: What took you by surprise? Yvonne: Some women who do so much in blogging it takes over their whole life. Blogging should come from experiencing the Lord. People get caught up in the number of followers instead of good content. How much money was spent on doing everything for one’s blog! e4e: What tech help did you learn about? (This is an important question because of the nature of my blog, e4e). Debby: Questions were only answered on a case-by-case basis. Going forward, my observation is this could be an entire section in and of itself. Bloggers really do need tech help. It is wrong to assume that writers are tech experts, yet writers in today’s world must develop some measure of tech skills. Yvonne: The importance of using other social media for your blog – Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram and even podcasts. Using Canva for graphics and Wordswag or Instaquotes for adding text (for Android and iPhones). Adding podcasts and videos to your blog. And how to guest post on someone else’s blog and them on your blog. Also, the importance of Akismet for spam. Make sure there is a tool that watches out for spam. e4e: Tell me a bit about your time with people you met. Debby: The entire group was delightful! I wish I could have coffee with each person I met. I felt like a sponge soaking up other people’s experience and expertise. Several people blog for their organizations, but most in attendance blog on a personal basis. Yvonne: I talked with four people who mainly write a blog for a specific subject (organ donors) or mostly encouraging words for those who are depressed, struggling with specific issues in life, or a “how to”. One woman came up to me to talk and told me it was hard for her to promote herself in blogging because she wanted to promote God, not herself. I told her it was hard for me to do the same and then shared how we wanted to reach people for Christ. We then took each other’s hand and prayed for each other and for our blogs to be glorifying to God. She said she heard someone say “that we must be humble but not hidden”. This is a good reminder of why to write. e4e: What aspects of ministry were emphasized? What biblical perspectives were shared? (This also is an important question because of the nature of my blog). Debby:This was not done in depth. Yet it was the leading point made. Yvonne: Jill reminded us that we are lights set on a hill. If God has given us the gift of writing we should not hide our lights under a bushel but let others be blessed by God’s word and our words. Other than encouragement to write for the Lord there was no emphasis on evangelism or discipleship. I wish this had been emphasized. Jill did talk about the importance of praying before we write and praying after we post for those reading our blogs. e4e: What are you doing right? Debby: Blogging with consistency. Yvonne: This next week I’m meeting with a photographer to get an updated personal photo for my blog. e4e: What will you do differently right away? Debby: Get in touch with ladies I met to schedule guest bloggers for my own blog. Yvonne: Write! I took a break because of a wedding and family issues, but I need to post something every week even if it is small. Manage my schedule with other ministry people to be able to write more. Learn more about Pinterest and Instagram. Ask two friends to hold me accountable to write every week. And not be afraid of promoting myself and the book I wrote. e4e: What long-term changes will you do now? Later? Debby: A personal goal is to annually attend a gathering of this type, even if not this exact one. I need to always be growing, always learning, putting myself in an environment to allow God to develop His new calling within me. Yvonne: Learn more about WordPress for my blog and consider another template if needed. Publish / create a “lead magnet”, a freebie about prayer or my book, for those who sign up for my blog e4e: Anything else? Debby: Networking was a highlight, for sure. I am so (!) glad I attended. Yvonne: Thanks, Sus, for all you do for God’s work in supporting us who blog. e4e: You’re welcome! Thank you for helping Cru bloggers today to pick up some good advice from BGEA’s conference. Our Interviewees Debby Thompson has served on the staff of Cru for 42 years, 33 years living abroad, 8 of those years spent behind the “Iron Curtain,” covertly in Poland. Debby’s love for Jesus keeps her passionate about helping to fulfill His Great Commission. She is a grandmother of five, a global ambassador to women, a writer, and speaker. Currently, the Thompsons live in Cincinnati and serve with Athletes in Action (AIA), where Larry is Vice President of International Ministry. Follow Debby’s blog, GPS for the Woman of Purpose, at DebbyThompson.com. Her desire for her readers is that they would experience intimacy with Jesus, authenticity with others, a passion for their calling, and a purpose for their influence. Yvonne Bibby is passionate about prayer and revival. She often tells others, “In my 33 years of ministry, I have seen more happen for the cause of the Gospel and God’s kingdom through prayer more than anything else.” Yvonne worked for Cru for 30 years in campus ministry and overseas with her husband, Lowe, in East Asia and Taiwan. As one of the first staff with Bridges International, she and her husband, Lowe, continued with Bridges in North Carolina ministering to Chinese and Indian students. She’s spoken on campuses to students, to Taiwan Cru staff, at churches and retreats. She is the author of Wake Up! Return to God: A Call to Personal Revival which has also been used as a Bible study. She’s also a volunteer voice for Voice of the Martyrs. While in Texas, she memorized John 15. Her desire for her blog, Ten Fresh Fruits, is to share what she’s continually learning about the Fresh Fruit Jesus produces in the life of a believer and how it actually impacts the world around us. Yvonne and Lowe live in the mountains of North Carolina and have two grown children, Ruth and Haydn, whom she home-schooled while in full-time ministry.Filed under: blogging, eMinistry, events, tech tips, Your ministry Tagged: Cru blogs, ministry, recommended, Wordpress 25 Oct

Extremetech

Apple’s new MacBook Pro is the first MacBook Consumer Reports won’t recommend - Apple's latest laptop is the first MacBook Pro to fail to earn a Consumer Reports recommendation. The culprit? Incredibly terrible and wildly varying battery life. Apple can claim its hardware is performing as designed all it wants, but end-users are clearly seeing something different. The post Apple’s new MacBook Pro is the first MacBook Consumer Reports won’t recommend appeared first on ExtremeTech.23 Dec

Microsoft finally admits that its malware-style Get Windows 10 upgrade campaign went too far - Microsoft has finally acknowledged that its "Get Windows 10" campaign made a significant mistake by pushing a malware-style update that changed how the GWX.exe application functioned. The company's explanation of how it 'learned things' from the process, however, still rings false. The post Microsoft finally admits that its malware-style Get Windows 10 upgrade campaign went too far appeared first on ExtremeTech.23 Dec

NORAD tracks Santa, and everyone else has orbital ambitions: this week in space - Japan launched a new science satellite, the Electron is ready to fly, and the ESA wants to build a village on the moon. Not bad for the lull before Christmas. The post NORAD tracks Santa, and everyone else has orbital ambitions: this week in space appeared first on ExtremeTech.23 Dec

Honda may team up with Waymo to make self-driving cars - Google and Honda are chatting about building a self-driving car, which could go into production around 2020. The post Honda may team up with Waymo to make self-driving cars appeared first on ExtremeTech.23 Dec

Could Nintendo’s Switch pack 1080p or 1440p support after all? - Nintendo might have a different set of specs in store for the Switch than what we've been led to expect. The post Could Nintendo’s Switch pack 1080p or 1440p support after all? appeared first on ExtremeTech.23 Dec

The supervolcano that may have killed off Europe’s Neanderthals is stirring again - The ancient supervolcano known as the Phlegraean Fields (Italian: Campi Flegrei) could be preparing to erupt. If it does, the near-term impact could be catastrophic. The post The supervolcano that may have killed off Europe’s Neanderthals is stirring again appeared first on ExtremeTech.22 Dec

The 6 best Android phones of 2016 - This last year had a ton of great devices, and I've used them all -- here are the six best Android phones from 2016. The post The 6 best Android phones of 2016 appeared first on ExtremeTech.22 Dec

Should you buy a 4K UHD TV for the PS4 Pro? - Let's check out a few games and video services on the PS4 Pro, and see how they hold up on a 4K TV. And while we're at it, we'll look ahead to a handful of upcoming titles that will make your wallet quiver in fear. The post Should you buy a 4K UHD TV for the PS4 Pro? appeared first on ExtremeTech.22 Dec

This app gives every last corner of Earth an address - It's up to the task of getting mail to the nomads on the Mongolian steppes. What do you want to bet Santa has this app on his phone? The post This app gives every last corner of Earth an address appeared first on ExtremeTech.22 Dec

Asheron’s Call, Asheron’s Call 2 both set to close next month as Turbine says goodbye to its 17-year odyssey - After 17 years, MMO Asheron's Call will go offline on January 31, 2017. Asheron's Call 2, the defunct sequel that was revived in 2012 will also depart the mortal coil at the same time. The post Asheron’s Call, Asheron’s Call 2 both set to close next month as Turbine says goodbye to its 17-year odyssey appeared first on ExtremeTech.22 Dec

Sunday, December 25, 2016

25 December - Netvibes 3 ( 1 of 2 )

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