From Moon of Alabama:
2010 Jul to 2012 Apr — Mykola Zlochevsky’s Burisma Holdings receives lucrative permits for its oil and gas companies while he heads Ukraine’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resource
2014 Feb 23 — US-supported coup drives out President Yanukovych
Mar — EU blocks Zlochevsky’s funds among others’
— UK blocks funds of Zlochevsky’s companies, opens investigation against him
Spring — Burisma hires Devon Archer and Hunter Biden (Rosemont Seneca investment firm) as board members (another principal, Christopher Heinz, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, will cut ties with Rosemont Seneca in 2015)
June — Petro Poroshenko becomes President
Dec — Zlochevsky leaves Ukraine after put on most-wanted list
2015 Jan — UK closes case against Zlochevsky and releases companies’ funds
Feb — Viktor Shokin appointed as Prosecutor General
Mar — EU releases Zlochevsky’s and others’ funds
— Hunter Biden meets with US Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken
Jul — Hunter Biden meets with US Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken
Sep — US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt publicly urges Ukrainian prosecutors to do more against corruption
Oct — US Asst Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland testifies in Congress that Prosecutor General’s office is corrupt
— Shokin announces joint investigation reopening Zlochevsky case
Dec — US Vice President Joe Biden in Kyiv announces $190 million to fight corruption but withholds announcement of $1 billion loan guarantee, says Prosecutor General’s office needs reform
— Shokin transfers one of the cases against Zlochevsky to US-supported National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU)
2016 Feb — Shokin confiscates several of Zlochevsky’s properties
Feb 12 — VP Biden speaks to Poroshenko by telephone, emphasizing the importance of rooting out corruption as obliged by loan guarantee [Biden seems to have conflated this conservation, and perhaps that of Mar 22, with his Dec visit to create his dramatic 6-hours-to-fire-Shokin story]
Feb 17 — Shokin goes on paid leave after being asked by Shokin to resign, which requires parliamentary approval
Feb 18 & 19 — More calls from VP Biden
2016 Mar 1 — Representing Burisma, Karen Tramontano secures meeting with US Undersecretary of State Catherine Novelli (overseeing international energy issues) after mentioning Hunter Biden, to discuss ending corruption investigations of Burisma
Mar 2 — Devon Archer (college roommate of Christopher Heinz) meets with John Kerry
Mar 3 — Shokin is back at work
Mar 22 — VP Biden calls Poroshenko
Mar 29 — Parliament approves dismissal of Shokin
May — Yuriy Lutsenko appointed as Prosecutor General
Sep — Ukraine closes case against Zlochevsky
2017 Jan — Case closed against Burisma for 180 million hryvnias (~$6.8 million)
Feb — Burisma hires “former” CIA agent, National Counterterrorism Center director, and Mitt Romney advisor Joseph Cofer Black as board member
Aug — NABU closes case against Zlochevsky
2019 May 14 — Lutsenko says case against Zlochevsky had been reopened some months before
May 20 — Volodymyr Zelensky becomes President
Sep 24 — US House begins hearings to impeach President Trump
February 2, 2020
Burisma Biden
November 1, 2019
The Kefahuchi Tract: three novels by M. John Harrison
This (Light, by M. John Harrison) is an amazing book. The writing is electric, with an authority and mastery I haven't seen since first reading Thomas Pynchon. Harrison is often quite lyrical as well as hep. The book is ultimately ecstatic and poignant both.
There are 3 threads increasing related, one in 1999, 2 in 2400. The latter world is a weird one indeed. The whole book is of a piece, like it all happens at once, all of it happening in every part, similarly but with different players or masks.
Moving on now to the next book in the series: Nova Swing. (main character Vic Serotonin, from Scienza Nuova)
«You sign up for the K-ships in sterile white rooms at even temperatures: nevertheless, whatever you do you can’t get warm. You mustn’t have eaten. They give you the emetics anyway. They give you the injection. They give you the tests, but to be honest that is only to pass the two or three days it takes the injection to work. By then your bloodstream is teaming with selected pathogens, artificial parasites and tailored enzymes. You present with the symptoms of MS, lupus and schizophrenia. They strap you down and give you a rubber gag to bite on. The way is cleared for the shadow operators, running on a nanomech substrate at the submicrometre level, which soon begin to take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces. They flush the rubbish out continually through the colon. They pump you sith a white paste of ten-micrometre-range factories which will farm exotic proteins and monitor your internal indicators. They core you at four points down the spine. You are conscious all the way through this process, except for the brief moment when they introduce you to the K-code itself. Many recruits, even now, don’t make it past that point. If you do, they seal you in the tank. By then they have broken most of your bones, and taken some of your organs out: you are blind and deaf, and all you are aware of is a kind of nauseous surf rolling through you forever. They have cut into your neocortex so that it will accept the software bridge known ironically as the ‘the Einstein Cross’ from the shape you see the first time you use it. You are no longer alone. You will soon be able to consciously process billions of billions of bits per second; but you will never walk again. You will never laugh or touch someone or be touched, fuck or be fucked. You will never do anything for yourself again. You will never even shit for yourself again. You have signed up. It comes to you for an instant that you were able to choose this but that you will never, ever, ever be able to unchoose it.» —Light, M. John Harrison, 2002
«Drawn by the radio and TV ads of the twentieth century, which had reached them as faltering wisps and cobwebs of communication (yet still full of a mysterious, alien vitality), the New Men had invaded Earth in the middle 2100s. They were bipedal, humanoid – if you stretched a point – and uniformly tall and white-skinned, each with a shock of flaming red hair. They were indistinguishable from some kinds of Irish junkies. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. They had a kind of pliable, etiolated feel about their limbs. To start with, they had great optimism and energy. Everything about Earth amazed them. They took over and, in an amiable, paternalistic way, misunderstood and mismanaged everything. It appeared to be an attempt to understand the human race in terms of a 1982 Coke ad. They produced food no one could eat, outlawed politics in favour of the kind of bureaucracy you find in the subsidised arts, and buried enormous machinery in the subcrust which eventually killed millions. After that, they seemed to fade away in embarrassment, taking to drugs, pop music and the twink-tank which was then an exciting if less that reliable new entertainment technology.
«Thereafter, they spread with mankind, like a kind of wrenched commentary on all that expansion and free trade. You often found them at the lower levels of organised crime. Their project was to fit in, but they were fatally retrospective. They were always saying:
«‘I really like this cornflakes thing you have, man. You know?’»
—Light, M. John Harrison, 2002
«Adstreams floated everywhere, their unbearable lightness of being – their simple promise – catching you up: until the crown of butterflies round your head morphed into a crown of thorns and you found you had surrendered your intimate data to some twink-farmer forty blocks away on Pierpoint Street.» —Nova Swing, M. John Harrison, 2006
«She found herself descending steep chalky ground into sweeps of water meadow and low-lying pasture dotted here and there with thistles, dog rose and spreading bramble, where willows lined a small river winding through. This composition was spoiled only by the house that stood to one side of the pasture.
«A four-bedroom new build in the 1990s, assembled from unremitting pale brick and still looking like an architectural drawing, it hadn’t weathered. Its profile was low, yet it was clearly not a bungalow. There was a patio like a hard standing for machinery. The white lattices of security grilles, which from a distance looked as if they had been taped on, divided every window. Sunshine glittered off the clutter of photovoltaic and hot water panels set into the shallowly-sloping roof. The only character it possessed lay at the end of its long asymmetric garden: a few trees inherited from some previous, more authentic dwelling on the site. Something resembling life would be lent it each spring by the energetic scraping conversations of the starlings that nested in its gutters. Otherwise, it reminded Anna of a cheap toy abandoned on a carpet; something unable to age because of the sheer purposive artificiality of the materials used to construct it. If it was familiar, she realised, that was because it was her own house.»
—Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012
Whereas “Light” was about lost memories, the 2nd book in M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract series, “Nova Swing”, was about the burden of memories, about trying to liberate oneself from their burden – not to forget, but to be free from serving them.
It’s not as mind-blowing as the 1st book, but great story-telling nonetheless, and it sets up the 3rd book, “Empty Space: A Haunting”, which is again (like the 1st book) set in both the early 21st and the late 25th centuries.
The passages in “Nova Swing” set in the “event zone” (overt nod to the Strugatsky brothers’ “Roadside Picnic” (on which Tarkhovsky’s “Stalker” was based)) are quite moving; the whole book before them seems all to have been for those passages.
«For the boys from Earth their arrival on the Beach was a game-changer. Anything could now happen. In the tidewrack of alien refuse, new universes awaited, furled up like tiny dimensions inside each abandoned technology. Back-engineering became the order of the day. Everyone could find something to work with, from a superconductor experiment the size of a planet to a gravity wave detector assembled from an entire solar system. Everything you found, you could find something bigger. At the other end of the scale: synthesised viruses, new proteins, nanoproducts all the way down to stable neutron-rich isotopes with non-spherical nuclei.
«Ten per cent of it was still functioning. Ten per cent of that, you could make a wild guess what it did. Why was it there? All of this effort suggested a five-million-year anxiety spree centred on the enigma of the Tract. Every form of intelligent life that came here had taken one look and lost its nerve. The boys from Earth didn’t care about that, not at the outset: to them, the Beach was an interregnum, a holiday from common sense, an exuberant celebration of the very large and the very small, of the very old and the very new, of the vast, extraordinary, panoramic instant they congratulated themselves on living in: the instant in which everything that went before somehow met and became confected with everything yet to be. It was the point where the known met the unknowable, the mirror of desire.
«It was, in short, a chance to make some money.»
—Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012
«Projected into the carefully deodorised air of Uptown Six’s human quarters, feeds from fifteen planets showed, in quick succession, all the signs of modern conflict: street demonstrations, agitated financial markets, rows of top-shelf EMC hardware hulking around in parking orbits up and down the Beach. Within an hour all sides were broadcasting atrocity-footage as fast as it could be manufactured. Psychodrama raged. Everyone claimed the minority position. Everyone described their grievances as longer-standing and more asymmetric than the enemy’s. Iconic buildings fell in towers of smoke. Sleeping genes, inserted into entire populations three or four generations in advance, expressed themselves as plagues of ideological change. Up and down the Beach, innocent CEOs, brand managers and celebrities found themselves kidnapped then subjected to sexual assault, at the hands of provocateurs who had no idea why they had begun to act to so illiberally. By noon, exhausted attack ads fluttered up and down the streets of every Halo capital. Gaines studies these indicators with a kind of appalled impatience. Away from the media war not a shot had been fired.» —Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012
«All across the Halo, alliances collapsed. Mounting crises in the Pentre De, Uswank and Fran-Portie systems broke into open conflict. Then war was everywhere and it was your war, to be accessed however it fitted best into your busy schedule. Seven second segments to three minute documentaries. Focused debate, embedded media. Twenty-four-hour live mano a mano between mixed assets in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, or a catch-up of the entire campaign – including interactive mapping of EMC’s feint towards Beta Carinae – from day one. In-depth views included: ‘How They Took the Pulsed-Gamma War to Cassiotone 9’; ‘The Ever-Present Threat of Gravity Wave Lasing’; and ‘We Ask You How You Would Have Done It Differently!’ People loved it. The simulacrum of war forced them fully into the present, where they could hone their life-anxieties and interpret them as excitement. Meanwhile, under cover of the coverage, the real war …» —Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012
«‘They’d be one thing when you lost them, another when you found them again. In circumstances like that, you have to understand that your perception is what’s fragmentary, not the space itself. At some level an organising principle exists, but you will never have any confirmation of it. It will always be unavailable to you. Then, just as everyone’s stopped trusting themselves, someone finds their way through a trap, the expedition gets a little further in.’» —Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012
«He stopped in front of what appeared to be a section of bas reliefs, which showed three modified diapsids wearing complex ritual clothing. One of them was strangling a fourth, who lay passively on what looked like a stone bier.
«‘These people were a million years ahead of us, but they were still trying to work out how to be rational. I don’t think they ever quite made it. …’
...
«Upper management loved itself at war. In the corporate enclaves – which constructed themselves as little market towns called Saulsignon, Burnham Overy or Brandett Hersham, featuring stone churches and water meadows under blue rainwashed skies, perfect windy weather and ponies on the green – war felt real and grown up, a contingency for which your values and education had prepared you. Although obviously some sacrifices would have to be made.»
—Empty Space: A Haunting, M. John Harrison, 2012
« What was the Beach, after all, but a repository of fading memories? »
I finished Empty Space: A Haunting last night – what an experience! It’s a complex novel that draws on the 2 previous novels in the series. Mind-bending, to say the least. A poetic epic exploration of the flux of self-creation and -destruction. The physics-confounding Kefahuchi Tract (around which the Beach systems float) is the mad force driving it all, drawing it all.
September 21, 2019
Climate Strike
There is so much that is frustrating about this movement, even for those who are sympathetic. Carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions are the least of our problems among the continuing environmental impacts of human life. And “green” alternatives only increase those adverse impacts.
They are all less efficient – diffuse – than “conventional” energy sources and therefore require more resource extraction and land use (industrializing vast swaths of the rural and wild) to provide the same power.
Furthermore, wind and solar are intermittent and variable, so they have to be overbuilt (more resources and land, as well as high-capacity powerlines) – and they still need backup: Natural gas–fired generators are ideal because they can respond quickly to balance the fluctuating power. But operating like that makes them less efficient as well, ie, they would emit more carbon as part of a grid with substantial (even as little as 5%) wind and solar than they would if the wind and solar weren’t there at all.
In short, more resource extraction (mining) and land use (habitat loss) and still dependent on fossil fuels, which would now emit more carbon than before. Brilliant.
Where else might this be leading?
Right now, there is only one energy source that is both more efficient and carbon-free: nuclear. The apocalyptic panic of Extinction Rebellion and Climate Strike seems to be doing all it can as useful idiots to revive nuclear as the only solution to their perception of a crisis caused by fossil fuels (ignoring all the other ways that humans trash the planet, or, eg, the mowing down of rainforests for biofuel plantations).
Convinced that they will not have long to live unless we utterly decarbonize (forget the fact that excess CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for centuries – in fact, current carbon levels may be mostly due to coal burning in the 19th century), this generation may usher in a world powered by nuclear. And the resulting pile-up of waste, leaks, and accidents (imagine hundreds, thousands, of Chernobyls and Fukushimas) are more likely to destroy the planet than everything they are protesting.
November 16, 2018
«The Christine Blasey Ford Episode: State Feminism, the Worthless “Left,” and Liberal Delusions» by Bill Martin
Bill Martin writes at Counterpunch (excerpts):
However well-intentioned and however much it is based on real grievances and oppressions, it seems to me that Identity Politics is a disaster for any real politics, for any real struggle for the general emancipation of humankind. There is a cynical side of Identity Politics, in that it has simply given up on the emancipatory project, and/or simply allowed itself to be assimilated to the existing circuits of power, albeit with certain twists that present themselves as something new.
Accordingly, Identity Politics appeals to those who have already had a taste of power, sometimes a substantial taste. To complete Plato’s version of what Buddhists call the “three poisons,” the appeal is especially to those who have also had a substantial taste of material wealth and have been able to pursue desires that are not in the reach of most people in the world. In and of itself there is nothing wrong with at least the latter two “poisons,” up to a point, but it is when everything is subordinated to power, money, and desire that the real problems come in. It should go without saying that the point here is not that privileged women should be oppressed; the point is what people do with their privileges. …
What is especially important here is the fact, if we are going to consider the question of whether “being a man” disqualifies one from saying anything that relates to (the many things that might present themselves as) feminism and “women’s issues” (here I am simply using a term that was put to me in criticism), or to anything at all (in my case I was told to stick to “brocialism” and “fantasy football,” as if I’d ever had anything to do with either of these things), then we also have to consider the question of “representation” in the case of, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who somehow gets a pass in supposedly being able to speak for women. … Having said all this, this is not really about women, per se; it’s about the horrible Democrats, and what and who they are willing to sacrifice for the privilege of serving globalist finance capital. …
Here’s a little test for what world one is in. Is there anyone who honestly believes that Hillary Clinton was speaking the truth when she said she was shocked and disappointed upon hearing the revelations about Harvey Weinstein? Should anyone this gullible really be trusted to be able to speak on any matter of importance? But, you see, this isn’t about truth, it’s about power, and it’s about interests and what team seems to work better for one’s interests. I doubt many women actually believed Hillary on this point, but hey, going along with it is just part of staying with your team. Never mind that this is a way of validating the things Harvey Weinstein did, or at least of letting oneself feel okay that the Democratic Party was fine with taking his large contributions—at least until after the elections. I imagine that Woody Allen did not make such large contributions, so (and on no real evidence) to hell with him. …
The women who find Christine Blasey Ford to be credible and even heroic, however, are not gullible. Instead, they have been provoked, “triggered” (in the current parlance), and even forced to relive terrible experiences from their lives. … The underlying premise of this effort is that the situation of girls and boys and women and men in this society is so deeply broken and unjust that it can be likened to a state of war; therefore, such niceties of bourgeois-democratic society as legal procedures, real evidence, credibility of witnesses, and judgments rendered by more than a single, ideologically-driven, all-powerful authority (in Title IX, this is called the “single-adjudicator system”) have to go by the wayside. … These questions have to remain on the table, as part of the big picture, not necessarily because they are based on a completely realistic picture of life as it has been lived by women and men, or because a world of gender separatism is likely to come about, but because everyone of good will needs to confront the injustices of patriarchy and to ask what can be done to create the conditions wherein the lives of women do not have to be mediated through the lives of men. What the Christine Blasey Ford part of the Kavanaugh episode has to do with, however, is something else again. …
The Democratic Party’s commitment to Identity Politics is not a commitment to the real issues and questions that are the basis for Identity Politics, it is a commitment to marshalling people’s energy around these issues and questions to the imperatives of finance capital globalism and American imperialism. It’s not an accident that the heroes of this Democratic Party/Identity Politics “feminism,” such as Hillary Clinton and Rachel Maddow, are so open and bloodthirsty about their militarism. … Without any hesitation, I will say that I sincerely hope the Democrats will go down in flames. As for all my liberal and supposed leftist friends out there, I love you, I care about you; you may hate me, but I don’t hate you. I hope you will find your minds and stop letting the Democrats use your trauma, and whatever good intentions toward humanity that you have, for their nefarious and ignoble ends.
We are at a point where the “conventional wisdom” of the Left is just as hackneyed and dogmatic as that of the “Right,” if not more so. And neither political category is of much use in the present moment, this moment of what I call the “Trump Clarification.” Obviously, we are in a different moment when Tucker Carlson has more interesting things to say about the State and the ruling class and class in general than most who are bogged down in received categories that needed a radical overhaul already a generation or more ago, if not indeed much longer.
[Philosophical footnote:]
In [Alain] Badiou’s work, there are four “conditions of philosophy,” domains of human activity in which truth may emerge: art, science, politics, and love. Yes, in all cases, there is the criteria that something new emerges, such as when two people fall in love, and one way we know that something new has emerged is that the previous “situation” is “evacuated,” and the previous terms of things are recast. So, when two people fall in love, there is a new situation, and pre-existing relationships with other people are recast.
Since the late ’60s and early ’70s, everyone has gotten used to saying and thinking that “everything is political.” There is much to be said about this, and it is not entirely a simple question, but I think, following the distinctions that Badiou makes, we people of good political will need to rethink this idea and basically reject it. This idea has led us into a big mess. …
Now, let’s remember that a clear distinction should be made regarding the term “politics.” The ordinary use of the term has to do primarily with the pursuit of power. I call this “anti-politics.” The exceptional use of the term, in both discourse and practical matters, has to do with the pursuit of the good society, and here “good” is meant in the sense that we see in Plato and Aristotle: that which encourages a general and mutual human flourishing. …
In the reduction in which “everything is political,” you end up, by and by, and regardless of intentions, with the power-oriented, anti-political view. This is what we see coming to complete fruition in recent years, [in] the idea that the core and limit of “politics” today is the “struggle against Trump.” This is the model of “politics,” easily intermixed with Identity Politics, that reduces everything to “power vs counter-power.” In other words, this is a “politics” in which, by design, the emergence of the new truth that we need, does not stand a chance. This is why Badiou says that, from the standpoint of the existing situation, the change we need is impossible and illegal, and the change will also seem irrational. …
To simplify greatly (everything that is in my “footnote”), there is a kind of reduction, that the philosopher Alain Badiou is worried about, whereby the “everything is political”-claim reduces all of our attempts at finding or pursuing (or “inventing,” “constructing”) truth into a matter of the play of “political” power. In this way, “everything” (that is supposedly “political”) becomes assimilated to the workings of power. … The other kind of reduction that Badiou is concerned with can be seen in the reduction of art to entertainment, science to technology, love to sexuality (or possibly to “a kind of friendship”), and politics to power. These, in other words, are reductions of quality to quantity, but they also point out the problem of thinking that the emergence of something new can be accounted for by a magic trick called the transformation of quantity into quality. …
Another way to put this is that the basis in capitalism, in which the dominant “understanding” of “politics” is instead an “anti-politics” of mere power-manipulation, is also the basis in which reductionism in general occurs. The kind of “feminism” I am criticizing here indeed seeks to work within and does nothing, absolutely nothing, to challenge the capitalist (and American imperialist) framework; on the contrary, instead, it actively seeks to work within the system, and indeed to “work the system.”
This is a win-win proposition for this kind of “feminism”: either more power is gained for those whose conception of “politics” is nothing but power, those who are already established in this world of power (or a few clever opportunists who hope to become established), or, in the case of the failure to secure more power in any given sortie, there is a “win” in being able to call all those who oppose this bullshit-parody of feminism “misogynists,” “ignorant and stupid,” “deplorable, chauvinist pigs,” “straight, white, cis-men,” “cis-women” (and even “cis-feminists”), etc.
That many and perhaps most people are on to this bullshit constantly eludes the Democrats. Or perhaps it is more that the Democrats have nowhere else to go, and nothing else to offer, than their power-plays dressed up in “social justice” rhetoric. This is certainly the case in reality, but it seems that the Democratic leadership and even Hillary Clinton, no matter how deluded they are, must know this on some level. Still, what choice do they have but to dig into their narrative deeper and deeper? …
The larger liberal/anti-Trump narrative, in which truth is fully-defined within the narrative and the narrative is what must therefore be defended, come what may, is the context in which the Blasey Ford stunt took place. …
Part of what I’m trying to say is that the politics of simply “anti-Trump,” based overwhelmingly on hatred for an individual (which, I suppose, does confirm that he is not really a figure of either establishment party), is leading us down a very bad path. And it’s not that the opportunism of the leadership of the Democratic Party is a case of passions having overcome reason—Hillary is a great example of a consummate politician who knows how to serve power, through the employment of a purely instrumental reason—it is that they are inflaming passions, including hatred (which is simply poisonous, especially when aimed at people rather than institutions), it’s that these passions are being opportunistically deployed in the service of “political” ends that have nothing to do with addressing patriarchy or any of the other oppressive institutions of our capitalist society. …
Trump is not a “fascist.” The people who support the idea that he is, and that a fascist regime is solidifying under Trump, are way off the mark. What the Democrats tried to do with their Blasey Ford-stunt was closer to “fascism,” in the attempt to further eliminate basic principles of bourgeois-democratic legal procedures and to more broadly ensconce the idea that, at least for a certain range of offenses, the accusation is the “evidence,” and therefore the accusation is the “case.” (In this mix it can also be quite unclear how the “accusation” is generated in the first place.) Everyone should be relieved that the Democrats did not get away with this, at least for now.
[digression on the North American Sartre Society:] [W]e need them [Simone Beauvoir and Simone Weil] for the kind of feminism and radical struggle that comes from a universalist perspective, as opposed to the anti-universalism of Identity Politics.
Trump … is especially good at taking things that have needed to be addressed for years, and pushing them another step (at least rhetorically) toward crisis—and what the existing structure is showing is that, whether Democrat or Republican, the system has no solution to these things, at least not without a major shake-up and, what’s more important, without loss of power by those who are entrenched in power. Those who have committed themselves to a “solution” to any major problem within the system, and therefore those who accept “#votebluenomatterwho,” have committed themselves to the complete elimination of any thinking that attempts to go beyond the existing system. This is a confirmation of instrumental reason that no fascism or “totalitarianism” has ever achieved, but the leading elements of postmodern capitalism, such as the Clintons, seem close to doing it. … Except most people don’t believe the Democratic Party’s bullshit, and, in terms of a “politics” confined entirely to the non-idea of “pursuing interests,” these people have not only interests as well, but also real needs that are not being met by a Democratic Party that not only does not really represent the working class (it never did, but at least it tied itself to the idea that it did), but even straightforwardly dismisses working people as “deplorable.” This is the Democratic Party that has been created by the Clintons, Al Gore, and others since the Reagan/Bush period. It is purely a liberal delusion to think there is anything to support there. …
Whatever Trump is, and whatever the Republican Party is or is becoming, I truly hope the Democratic Party crashes and burns.
In this series:
The Christine Blasey Ford Episode: State Feminism, the Worthless “Left,” and Liberal Delusions
The Trump Experiment: Liberals and Leftists Unhinged and Around the Bend
The Fourth Hypothesis: the Present Juncture of the Trump Clarification and the Watershed Moment on the Washington Mall
Watershed Moment on the Mall
May 1, 2018
Renewable energy undermine
National Wind Watch @windwatchorg answered:
The unfortunate fact is that renewable energy does not meaningfully replace fossil and nuclear fuels.
And such diffuse (low-density) sources as wind and solar require massive plants to capture even enough to make selling virtue-signaling green tags profitable.
That means wind and solar on an industrial scale necessarily have adverse effects of their own, particularly as they need huge tracts of previously undeveloped rural and wild land, including mountain ridge lines.
And being intermittent and, in the case of wind, highly variable, they still require backup, which is forced to run much less efficiently (ie, with more carbon emissions) than it could without having to contend with wind's erratic generation.
So for such utter lack of actual benefit coupled with substantial harm, no, we do not support wind and work to protect the environment from its depredations.
We advocate conservation, which reduces fossil and nuclear fuel use much more than wind and solar do.
Jeff Rice replied: I notice that you haven't answered my question...
National Wind Watch answered: That's a separate issue from National Wind Watch's mission to educate people about wind's shortcomings and harm. We do not take a position for any over any other except to note that wind is not a solution.
Jeff Rice: Campaign organisations have long recognised the need to promote solutions to the problems they campaign against. Your anti #WindPower campaign lacks substance and comes across as NIMBYism. It also looks like you are apologists for the #FossilFuels industry. #NIMBY
National Wind Watch:
That is of course a risk we take. On the other hand, there are plenty of groups already proposing solutions, and those who question wind power represent people of very different views, from off-grid deep green to pronuclear free marketers.
Our role is to provide a resource for all of them on the issue of industrial-scale wind power. If people see that as being apologists for fossil fuels or giving comfort to climate skeptics or NIMBYism, that is a failure of imagination on their part.
It is a failure of environmentalists, driven by the "need to promote solutions", that they have forgot their role is to challenge and question solutions, especially those promoted by government and industry and banking in collusion.
Jeff Rice: Various forms of #RenewableEnergy are the solution! Although, do you think that we don't need to tackle #ClimateChange or air pollution? And as for renewables being supported by the establishment - what utter nonsense. Governments are very much wedded to #FossilsFuels!
National Wind Watch:
Wind and solar would be great if their benefits far outweighed their harm, but, as already noted, on a large scale their harm far outweighs their benefits, because they do very little to alleviate carbon emissions, pollution or fossil fuel dependency.
As to government support for wind, it is hardly a secret that subsidies, regulatory favoritism and special market structures are necessary for wind development.
Jeff Rice: Why do you think wind and solar DON'T reduce carbon emissions? A gross inaccuracy on your part.
National Wind Watch: How much have carbon emissions decreased with the massive industrialization of rural and wild places with wind turbines around the world since the 1990s? It's madness to continue.
Jeff Rice: Why you are wrong: It's a myth that wind turbines don't reduce carbon emissions
National Wind Watch: Goodall and Lynas point to a passing reduction of electricity generation from CCGT plants, not to any actual reduction of fuel use or carbon emissions.
March 10, 2018
Wind power does not reduce CO₂ emissions.
“In a wind-thermal system, production variations from the intermittent character of wind power results in an increase in system costs and a decrease in the efficiency of wind power as a means to reduce CO₂-emissions from the system. This effect gets increasingly pronounced with increased levels of wind power grid penetration and is due to the adjustment in production pattern of the thermal units to the variations in wind power production. As wind power grid penetration increases, the conventional units will run more at part load and experience more frequent starts and stops. Also, wind power may need to be curtailed in situations where the costs to stop and restart thermal units are higher than the difference in running costs of wind power and the thermal units. Thus, variations in wind power reduce the possibility of the power system to lower CO₂-emissions by adding wind power capacity to the system.”
—“Large scale integration of wind power: moderating thermal power plant cycling” by Lisa Göransson and Filip Johnsson, Wind Energy 2011; 14:91–105
Olaf Errwigge (Facebook) —
There is no argument that burning fossil fuel to generate electricity releases CO₂ into the atmosphere, or that using the wind to generate electricity does not. But it does not follow that adding wind to the grid reduces CO₂ emissions from other sources: Where there is little hydropower (no CO₂ emissions) to balance the highly variable wind, fossil fuel–fired generators are forced to work less efficiently, ie, with more emissions per unit of electricity generated. Furthermore, the best “balancing” plants for wind are open-cycle natural gas–fired turbines (OCGT), which can respond quickly enough to compensate for the continual changes of wind generation. But combined-cycle natural gas–fired turbines (CCGT) are substantially more efficient efficient, such that wind + OCGT may not represent lower emissions than CCGT alone. Thus, wind power’s manufacture, transport, and maintenance would indeed contribute to increased CO₂ emissions. And there is no benefit at all to weigh against its other adverse impacts on the environment, wildlife, and human neighbors.
Result: Wind + fossil fuel generation does not necessarily mean lower CO₂ emissions, particularly in the comparison of wind + open-cycle gas (necessary to quickly respond to wind’s continually variable generation) vs. the much more efficient combined-cycle gas alone.
And, of course, where there’s hydro, that’s the preferred source to ramp back as the wind rises: no CO₂ involved at all.
With virtually no benefits, wind power’s many adverse impacts – on the environment, wildlife, and human neighbors – not to mention its financial cost and the carbon and materials footprint of its manufacture, transport, and maintenance – are impossible to justify.
Also see: “Why wind power does not substantially reduce emissions”
January 18, 2018
Shortsighted and dangerous
Bosworth’s earnest appeal first requires that his premises be examined. Is wind energy actually “economically efficient” or “acutely needed”? Is the price actually just “some soil disturbance, some bird mortality”? Does it actually bring “significant benefits”?
Wind is a diffuse, intermittent, and highly variable resource, so there is no way that it can be economically efficient or have only moderate adverse impacts, because massive machines over vast (rural and wild) areas are required to collect any meaningful amount. The Windham Regional Commission Energy Plan clearly notes the unavoidable habitat destruction and fragmentation as well as many other environmental impacts:
“Wind turbine placement can be difficult and controversial because of natural resource impacts, aesthetics, noise, and the need for placement at elevations of 2,500-3,300 feet, locations in Vermont that tend to be sensitive with thin soils and steep slopes. The windiest areas in the region are most often on the higher-elevation ridgelines that are sensitive habitats for plants and wildlife, and are the source of the region’s most pristine headwaters. In areas where road access does not exist, new permanent roads must be built to service the wind facility. Other potentially negative environmental impacts include bird and bat mortality, habitat disruption and fragmentation, erosion, pollution from facility maintenance, turbine noise, and visual flicker.And benefits? Its intermittency and high variability require that wind be 100% backed up by other sources. Wind serves as only a feel-good add-on to an electrical system that has to be able to work without it anyway, ready to kick in when the wind drops, and standing by to continuously balance its erratic feed. Those other sources do so at a cost to their own efficiency.
“Given the nature of utility-scale wind development, which involves considerable blasting, road building, and other permanent alterations of the landscape and surface hydrology, it is deemed to be incompatible with the two aforementioned land use designations [ie, Resource Lands and Productive Rural Lands].”
In short, the benefits of large-scale wind power are virtually nil, and the adverse impacts are substantial. It is certainly not "shortsighted and dangerous" to recognize that reality and to discourage such a destructive and unhelpful form of energy development.
January 3, 2018
Old forests are essential to sequestering carbon, logging doubles release
From The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, ch. 16:
In a very simple, widely circulated image of natural cycles, trees are poster children for a balanced system. As the photosynthesize, they produce hydrocarbons, which fuel their growth, and over the course of their lives, they store up to 22 tons of carbon dioxide in their trunks, branches, and root systems. When they die, the same exact quantity of greenhouse gases is released a s fungi and bacteria break down the wood, process the carbon dioxide, and breath it out again. The assertion that burning wood is climate neutral is based on this concept. After all, it makes no difference if it’s small organisms reducing pieces of wood to their gaseous components or if the home hearth takes on this task, right? But how a forest works is way more complicated than that. The forest is really a gigantic carbon dioxide vacuum that constantly filters out and stores this component of the air.
It’s true that some of this carbon dioxide does indeed return to the atmosphere after a tree’s death, but most of it remains locked in the ecosystem forever. The crumbling trunk is gradually gnawed nad munched into smaller and smaller pieces and worked, by fractions of inches, more deeply into the soil. The rain takes care of whatever is left, as it flushes organic remnants down into the soil. The farther underground, the cooler it is. And as the temperature falls, life slows down, until it comes almost to a standstill. Adn so it is that carbon dioxide finds its final resting place in the form of humus, which continues to become more concentrated as it ages. ...
Today, ... forests are constantly being cleared, thanks to modern forest management practices (aka logging). As a result, warming rays of sunlight reach the ground and help the species living there kick into high gear. This means they consume humus layers even deep down into the soil, releasing the carbon they contain into the atmosphere as gas. The total quantity of climate-changing gases that escapes is roughly equivalent to the amount of timber that has been felled. For every log you burn in your fire at home, a similar amount of carbon dioxide is being released from the forest floor outside. And so carbon stores in the ground below trees in our latitudes are being depleted as fast as they are being formed. ...
Where is the end of the road for our forests? Will they go on storing carbon until someday there isn’t any left in the air? This, by the way, is no longer a question in search of an answer, thanks to our consumer society, for we have already reversed the trend as we happily empty out the earth’s carbon reservoirs. We are burning oil, gas, and coal as heating materials and fuel, and spewing their carbon reserves out into the air. In terms of climate change, could it perhaps be a blessing that we are liberating greenhouse gases from their underground prisons and setting them free once again? Ah, not so fast. True, there has been a measurable fertilizing effect as the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen. The latest forest inventories document that trees are growing more quickly than they used to. The spreadsheets that estimate lumber production need to be adjusted now that one third more biomass is accruing than a few decades ago. But what was that again? If you are a tree, slow growth is the key to growing old. ... And so the tried and tested rule holds true: less (carbon dioxide) is more (life-span).
When I was a student of forestry, I learned that young trees are more vigorous and grow more quickly than old ones. The doctrine holds to this day, with the result that forests are constantly being rejuvenated. Rejuvenated? That simply means that all the old trees are felled and replaced with newly planted little trees. Only then, according to the current pronouncements of associations of forest owners and representatives of commercial forestry, are forests stable enough to produce adequate amounts of timber to capture carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it. Depending on what tree you are talking about, energy for growth begins to wane from 60 to 120 years of age, and that means it is time to roll out the harvesting machines. Has the ideal of eternal youth, which leads to heated discussions in human society, simply been transferred to the forest? It certainly looks that way, for at 120 years of age, a tree, considered from a human perspective, has barely outgrown its school days.
In fact, past scientific assumptions in this area appear to have gotten ahold of the completely wrong end of the stick, as suggested by a study undertaken by an international team of scientists. The researchers looked at about 700,000 trees on every continent around the world. The surprising result: the older the tree, the more quickly it grows. Trees with trunks 3 feet in diameter generated three times as much biomass as trees that were only half as wide. So, in the case of trees, being old doesn’t mean being weak, bowed, and fragile. Quite the opposite, it means being full of energy and highly productive. This means elders are markedly more productive than young whippersnappers, and when it comes to climate change, they are important allies for human beings. Since the publication of this study, the exhortation to rejuvenate forests to revitalize them should at the very least be flagged as misleading. The most that can be said is that as far as marketable lumber is concerned, trees become less valuable after a certain age. In older trees, fungi can lead to rot inside the trunk, but this doesn’t slow future growth one little bit. If we want to use forests as a weapon in the fight against climate change, then we must allow them to grow old ....
November 11, 2017
Seven megatrends for global warming ‘hope’ – five of which are bunk
At The Guardian on 8 November, Damien Carrington wrote “The seven megatrends that could beat global warming: ‘There is reason for hope’”
1. Methane: getting to the meat
2. Renewable energy: time to shine
3. King coal: dead or dying
4. Electric cars: in the fast lane
5. Batteries: lots in store
6. Efficiency: negawatts over megawatts
7. Forests: seeing the wood
#1: Methane not only has >20 times the greenhouse effect of CO₂, it persists in the atmosphere only ~10 years, whereas CO₂ persists for hundreds, ie, the emissions from coal burning in the 19th century are still out there and those from coal and oil in the 20th century and today will not diminish for hundreds of years.
Alas, besides #1, and except for #6 (using less energy), the other points are bunk.
#2: Intermittent and variable renewable energy (wind and solar) do not significantly reduce emissions, because backup sources are required. And such diffuse energy sources require massive amounts of land and materials to collect any meaningful amount: real adverse effects being the cost of theoretical-only benefits.
#3: Coal use is not diminishing, only slowing in growth. Where it has decreased, it is being replaced by cheap natural gas (half the CO₂ emissions but lots of methane leakage at the wells; also most practical backup for wind, except that forces the generators to operate at about half the efficiency they are otherwise capable of).
#4: Electric cars are only as "green" as the grid they get their power from (and see #5).
#5: Batteries reduce efficiency (see #6). For example, an internal combustion engine is a lot more efficient that burning fuel to make electricity (with two-thirds of the energy lost as heat) to charge batteries to then move a car. And like electric cars, they are an environmental disaster on a large scale.
#6: There is a shortcoming here, though, in that demand for energy continues to grow with increasing population and wider technological prosperity (i.e., more of the world living like the richest), offsetting increased conservation and efficiency.
#7: The article calls for rather than cites ending deforestation. It does not mention that much of it is driven by animal agriculture (another, besides #1, of its contributions to climate change). It mentions palm oil plantations, but doesn't mention that those are for "green" biofuel. It doesn't mention the cutting driven by demand for wood as a "green" source of electricity and heat.
Cf: “Wind and Solar Power Advance, but Carbon Refuses to Retreat” By Eduardo Porter, New York Times, Nov. 7, 2017
August 13, 2017
The (dishonest) madness of George Harvey
Harvey maintains a blog, cohosts a community television show, and writes for Green Energy Times, and the first piece referred to here was reprinted in The (Windsor County, Vermont) Commons newspaper from the Clean Technica web site. In fact it was reprinted also in the issue of Green Energy Times (in which issue 13 articles were penned by Harvey) that this writer picked up for another headline (see next two paragraphs). Thus the central example here is unlikely to be unusual.
The headline that caught our eye was “Hanover [N.H.] Pledges to Go 100% Renewable: How Are They Going to Do It?” by Rick Wackernagel. It is not a short article, yet it does not describe how “they are going to do it”. The few plans mentioned are, besides throwing up solar panels everywhere, mostly installing heat pumps, thus switching from fossil fuel burned efficiently on site to electricity (fossil fuel burned inefficiently off site). The one specific plan is that Dartmouth College will replace diesel in its steam heating system with “biofuel”, possibly from Dartmouth’s forests in the White Mountains in the ridiculous accounting by which mowing down forests is credited as “green”. Even this very issue of Green Energy Times mentions (in a book review) the importance of forest protection in reversing climate change and (in a rant against noise regulations for giant wind turbines) the contribution of deforestation to global warming. (The latter writer apparently exempts turning forested mountain ridgelines into energy plants.)
Nowhere is there mention of cutting the town off from the regional grid, so the fact is that they will still get the same electricity as everyone else in New England. Commendably, they plan to use less of it – along with less of other fuels – but “100%” will doubt rely mostly on buying the Enron-invented scam of “green tags”.
Back to George Harvey, ... actually, we have already said all that needs to be said about the piece of his originally mentioned, titled “The Sound of Wind Turbines and the Horror of Genocide”: He sets up a straw man from which he launches an ad hominem dismissal of all dissent and proceeds to change the subject with non sequitur pabulum.
There is, however, another piece by Harvey in the same issue that is actually informative. It is about research to reduce methane emissions from ruminant – particularly cows’ – digestion by adding seaweed to their diet. The results are reported to be quite dramatic, even to the claim of eliminating 99% of the methane.
Yet Harvey neglects to mention that the methane from cows is only part of the climate change contribution and environmental destruction of animal agriculture, which is the leading cause also of deforestation, species loss, water depletion, and ocean dead zones – none of which are due to their flatulence. The subtitle of Harvey’s article invokes helping to save the planet, but it is only about reducing one source of methane emissions, not at all about actually saving the planet. It is about “greenwashing” one of the planet’s primary destroyers.
July 22, 2017
Two excerpts from Deep South by Paul Theroux (2015)
Hot Springs — Pleasures and Miseries
My afternoon drive from Monticello to Hot Springs was a long panning shot of sad towns and beat-up villages, Warren to Edinburg, which was poor and small and lifeless, and Fordyce, which I’d heard about in Alabama as the birthplace of the beloved coach “Bear” Bryant, a town where every store was shut or abandoned or turned into a thrift shop. At the crossroads on Fordyce’s Main Street, the faded signs and empty premises were a testament that there was no call for Benton Hardware, Farm Implements, a dress shop, or a soda fountain in the Walmart era. Then tiny Tulip, and Malvern, which had some vitality that radiated from Hot Springs, farther along the road.
In a sudden, rocky, high-sided vale of the Ouachita Mountains, with two tall Soviet-looking buildings, one the VA hospital, the other the Arlington Hotel, Hot Springs was a surprise, a spa town with a claim to architectural splendor and the gamy smell of an old circus. The thermal-spa buildings that lined Bath Row were Art Deco marvels well restored, and narrow buildings lined steeply sloping streets on the cliffsides. Half the place was painted, decked out, yet with a residue of its vicious past existence; the other half was blandly residential. The town looked carved from rock in the mountain gap, one of the most dramatic physical settings in any Southern town.
Many signs on the main streets extolled its raffish atmosphere, its criminal history — allusions to the visits of gangsters, gloating mentions of crime, brothels, and sensational murders. “It’s hard to imagine the city as a hotbed for organized crime, such as gambling, prostitution and bootlegging,” said the Hot Springs promotional brochure, piling it on (it was subtitled “The Past Is Where the Fun Is”). “But from the late-1800s through the mid-1900s, especially in the 1930s, Hot Springs was a popular hangout for Al Capone, Frank Costello, Bugs Moran, Lucky Luciano, and other infamous mobsters. The safe, secluded scenic location of Hot Springs made it the ideal hideout.”
Of the many houses of prostitution, the busiest was “The Mansion,” owned by the celebrated Hot Springs madam Maxine Temple Jones, who catered to the rich and powerful, criminals and politicians. For decades resisting the mob, whom she ratted on in return for a pardon, she stayed in business into the mid-1960s and later wrote a book about her life and times.
“Honey, I like an old-fashioned whorehouse that has respect and dignity,” she told the Arkansas Times in 1982. “And my girls were always very proper. I always taught them what my daddy taught me: to walk tall and always remember that it’s not what you do, but how you do it.”
The gangster era came to an end in the late 1960s and is luridly depicted in the Gangster Museum of America on Central Avenue (“where you won’t be gambling on a good time, but betting on a sure thing!”). Because of its pleasant climate and sleaze, the town had been a destination for spring training for Northern baseball teams from the 1880s to 1940 — a wild era too, when players routinely binged and whored.
That was Hot Springs’s colorful past, but it was the recent past. No place to raise a child, is what you’d say — dangerous, wild, full of malign influences, opportunists, career criminals, tarts, cheats, trimmers, and schemers. Yet that’s what the newly married Virginia Clinton did, accompanying her second husband, Roger, there, her seven-year-old Billy in tow.
Bill Clinton was born in the small, sweetly named town of Hope, in southwestern Arkansas, in 1946, as the often-told story has it in the mythology of the man. But the banal truth is that he grew up — was formed, educated, became a man — in raw, reckless Hot Springs, a hundred miles north, amid its miseries and splendors. His father, William Blythe, was killed in a car crash before he was born. His mother studied nursing, so that she could provide for the boy. In 1950, his mother met and married Roger Clinton, and three years later they moved from Hope to Hot Springs, Roger’s hometown.
“While Bill Clinton’s writings about his boyhood in Hope in the late 1940s acknowledge the racial separation of the town of 7,500 people, his memories are mostly sepia-toned and nostalgic, like those of his Pawpaw’s grocery store,” the Arkansas writer Jay Jennings explains in Carry the Rock (2010). “But in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when cotton was king and Jim Crow was unwritten law, Hope was the site of enough racial murder that it was sometimes called the lynching capital of the South.”
In Hot Springs, Roger Clinton was known as a shiftless drunk. In a town of degenerates, being a boozer was no shame, but Roger proved to be a wife-beater as well as a demented alcoholic, and when young Bill was old enough (he says he was fifteen), he defied his stepfather’s wrath and defended his mother. The marriage ended. Virginia continued working as a nurse anesthetist, but in an expression of hope over experience, she remarried the same pathetic man a year later.
Meanwhile, young Bill studied, learned to play the tenor saxophone, excelled academically at Hot Springs High School, attended church at Park Place Baptist, bought chili cheeseburgers at the Polar Bar (now Baily’s Dairy Treat), ribs at McClard’s Bar-B-Q, apple pie at Club Café, and ice cream at Cook’s Dairy, and went to movies (Elvis movies, biblical epics) at the Paramount and Mako theaters. He tells us this in his autobiography, My Life, displaying great affection for the town and an extraordinary memory for detail.
But he does not say that the theaters’ balconies and back entrances were for blacks, that the motels and restaurants were segregated, and that the black part of Hot Springs was miserably poor and decrepit. Speaking of the time of Governor Orval Faubus’s racist intransigence and of the federal marshals forcing the integration of Little Rock’s Central High, all he says is “Most of my friends were either against integration or unconcerned. I didn’t say too much about it, probably because my family was not especially political, but I hated what Faubus did.” He is equally disengaged when describing segregation in Hot Springs: “It bothered me that Hot Springs’ schools weren’t integrated. The black kids still went to Langston High School.”
One afternoon in Hot Springs, I made a point of driving over to Langston, the neighborhood on the opposite side of town from where Clinton lived. I found broken streets, run-down houses, a wholly black area around the school, Southern impoverishment, the other side of the tracks. Still a disgrace fifty years after Clinton lived in town, still poor and obviously neglected, Langston looked like a black “location” in South Africa, ripe for uplift from an NGO (though none was in sight), the very sort of place that should have been a target for improvement by the Clinton Global Initiative, but wasn’t.
While Clinton was a teenager (and from his account he roamed freely in Hot Springs), gambling was rife, murders were common, gangsters were part of the scene, Maxine Jones’s brothel and many others were thriving, and the town, run by a crooked political machine, was alight with roisterers, whores, and high rollers. You’re bound to wonder what effect that ingrained culture of vice might have had on an impressionable schoolboy.
Contemplating Hot Springs, it is difficult to imagine a more unpromising origin for a president, one so likely to warp a mind or corrupt a soul. Yet the defining characteristics of a president are worldliness and guile. The world in all its bizarre forms had come to Hot Springs, and Clinton was buoyant in it; the town was clearly the making of the man. In My Life, Clinton repeats the tedious Hot Springs boast of larger-than-life visitors — “outlaws, mobsters, military heroes, actors, and a host of baseball greats” — and describes his upbringing: the abusive stepfather, the hardworking and loving mother (who was also a drinker, gambler, chain smoker, and harmless flirt — an Auntie Mame type, adored by her son), his love of the tenor sax, his visits to relatives, his after-school job at the small grocery, his classes as a math whiz, his dabbling in student politics, his earnest posturing that successfully masked a troubled home life.
The pain of being hard-up and frugal in such a flashy, freewheeling place; the necessity to succeed, to achieve something and get out, to prove himself worthy of his mother, and to redeem her belief in him — these aspects formed him. It’s an American story, but in Hot Springs it is gaudier than most. Clinton was transformed by his upbringing, yet he was, like many white Southerners, a late convert to vocally demanding integration. In My Life he extols the diversity of the Hot Springs population — Jews, Greeks, Arabs, Italians — but the black side of town, the Langston neighborhood, is not mentioned; black life does not exist for him; he apparently has no black friends.
In his autobiography, Clinton continually makes the point that he was a keeper of secrets, leading a double life, never letting on in school of the turmoil at home. The succession of houses he grew up in (now all privately owned and unwelcoming) were in modest but respectable white neighborhoods. But a visit to Hot Springs is convincing proof that throughout his early life, as a young boy, as an older student, Clinton was performing a balancing act, keeping his head up while tiptoeing through a mud-puddle sludge of human weakness and greed, crookedness and carnality (the survival strategy of many politicians).
His relief at leaving Hot Springs is palpable in his telling. He had chosen Georgetown University because “I wanted to be in Washington.” Yet after Georgetown, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and Yale Law School, he did what many might regard as the unthinkable: he returned to Arkansas. It was a calculated move. He was still in his twenties, it was a state he knew well, and he was implausible anywhere else. Perhaps he had a long-term plan — he doesn’t say in his book, but you can see he is driven: the desperate, do-anything-to-win drive of the man from nowhere, who seems to be hiding something (wounds, fantasies, transgressions, family secrets). He taught law for a year at Fayetteville, then ran for Congress in 1974, and lost. He became state attorney general in 1976 and governor in 1978, at the age of thirty-two — “the boy governor,” as he was known.
To his supporters, Bill Clinton was a man of immense charm who improved health care and education in Arkansas, at the same time mastering the art of consensus building, while retaining his amorous disposition. To his enemies, he was the fiddler and liar who turned the governor’s mansion into a fornicarium. He served multiple terms, totaling almost twelve years, and, still only forty-six, became president.
It was a breathless run, and he kept on running, for a second term, and afterward — he has never lived away from the public eye, has an obvious, perhaps pathological aversion to solitude, has always sought attention — for the role of world statesman, global humanist, and reformer; but also plotter in the shadows, conniver in schemes, and double-talker, in a mold described by Thoreau in a skeptical essay, “Now, if anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions ... if he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents, what does he do? He sets about reforming the world.”
Hot Springs had two distinct sides, so did the Clinton household, so evidently does Clinton himself. This conflict could have made him a criminal, or disillusioned him, turned him cynical; instead it made him ambitious, adaptable, eager to please, charming, charismatic, sympathetic, and hardworking. But it also made him covert, adept at role-playing and posturing, with a hint of the huckster in everything he proposed, a teller of half-truths, and a master of secrets. Clinton’s drive to succeed was unstoppable, and it continues: his passion to lead, to be in charge, to relieve the planet’s ills, to be an explainer, a crowd pleaser, friend to the great and good (Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama), emotionally immature, and hungry for the world’s affection. “He seemed like the hungriest man I’d ever met,” a writer friend told me after accompanying the candidate on the campaign in 1992. In his autobiography, Clinton continually interrupts the narrative ·of his early life by flashing forward and describing how he learned a lesson or atoned for one lapse or another. America knows him as the great atoner, the fixer, the compromiser. The bird-dogger of chicks is also, inevitably, the most fervent sermonizer at the prayer breakfast.
Hot Springs has tried to reinvent itself as a family-friendly holiday town and destination for conventioneers. It has a look of solidity and criminal elegance, a big-city gloom and density, rare in a Southern town — the shadowy aura of a place in which many dramas have occurred, the rub of history, where a great deal of money has been spent to tempt the visitor to linger.
Horse racing and some low-level gaming persisted, as moronic pastimes rather than vices, but the present was simply seedy, college kids barhopping and late-summer tourists traipsing the streets, darting in and out of the gift shops and bars, shabbily dressed, pushing baby carriages, screaming at their children, hunting for fun in a place that seemed chilly and bleak. The barbecue joints and the occasional pageant or festival could not compete with the shootouts and the orgies of the past.
Now Hot Springs is a place wholly itself: the decaying abandoned buildings and vacant hotels on the main drag, funky motels, tacky shops, a whiff of damp motor courts on the outskirts — Southern neglect combined with Southern casualness and vulgarity, and redeemed by hospitality and self-parody. Part of the town’s good fortune is that it is just a gap in rocky cliffs, minutes from.the deep woods and lovely hills.
There is something joyless in a place advertising itself as joyful, a note of desperation in the hype. Faded glory, faded hope, faded hilarity, the weird junk shops, the air of desperation, the stink like an alcoholic’s breath or a carnival sideshow, the shallowness and obvious scheming that is part of every gambling town on earth. And, like every other boomtown, doomed to failure.
But Hot Springs had once been a vortex of energy, and it is a characteristic of the power of such libidinized places to make their residents morally blind — you could say the same about the White House. Hot Springs, destination of murderers, cheaters, and whores, produced a president, a peculiar one, morally blind on many occasions — as in 1992 when Governor Clinton rushed back to Arkansas to sign the death sentence of drooling, brain-damaged Ricky Ray Rector, sending him gaga to the electric chair, so that candidate Clinton would win votes as a crime fighter. Complex and contradictory, the public man seeking redemption, mock humble in manner but lusting for glory, perpetually enlisting big companies to help him expand his brand, Clinton is the quintessential Southern huckster who does not know when to stop, and Hot Springs, the corrupted town, which advertised its waywardness, was itself Clintonesque.
Farmers on a Rainy Day
On a wet day in Fargo, just north of Brinkley, I made my way under a gray sky along muddy fields — some of them silvery with puddles and others lightly flooded — past the turnoff to the derelict town of Cotton Plant, to meet Dr. Calvin King again. As he promised, Dr. King had invited some black farmers to meet me — early risers, they had arrived before me, and some had come many miles for this meeting. We gathered around a table in a room at Dr. King’s Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation, a low brick building on a Fargo dirt road. Black Angus cattle grazed where the road abruptly ended at a fenced field; they were stock from the experimental ranch, chewing at bales of damp, darkened straw.
The farmers were men in overalls and feed caps, the oldest in his late seventies, the youngest twenty-three. A woman sat at a side table, appearing to take notes. Two other women, both of them farmers, had been invited, but at the last minute had other obligations. They were silent, watchful, patient men, somewhat ill at ease among the bare tables and many spare chairs in the conference room. Farmers are not a sedentary lot, and these men seemed restless and out of place.
“I’m a stranger,” I said, to introduce myself. “I’ve traveled and written about many foreign countries, but I realized I hadn’t spent much time in the Southern states, where many of the problems are the same as in the so-called Third World.”
I went on in this vein, explaining that I was traveling through the Deep South, trying to understand what I saw. I thanked Dr. King for arranging this session and said I was grateful to these workingmen for meeting me on a weekday morning, a helpful turnout.
“It’s the weather,” one of them said. “It’s too wet to do anything on the farm. If this had been a sunny day, you wouldn’t have seen any of us. Our fields is flooded.”
“And we already done our chores this morning,” another said, and laughed with the others.
They were resigned to the realities of Mother Nature and human nature, but they were anything but passive and fatalistic. As I was to find, their willingness to work, to plant, to harvest, to repay loans, made them self-sufficient and gave them dignity.
They laughed again and introduced themselves. The first man who had spoken was Andre Peer, who was forty-two and had been farming for twelve years. He now had four thousand acres under cultivation, near where he lived, about forty miles away, outside Lexa, in Phillips County. He was a stocky, well-built man of medium height, forthright in gesture and word, who looked me in the eye and spoke his mind. The best educated of this group, Andre had earned a degree in agriculture in 1995 from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He grew wheat, corn, grain sorghum, and soybeans. I later learned that he had made such a success of his farm, he and his wife and son had been named Phillips County Young Farming Family of the Year in 2013, with a profile in the Helena World.
“But it’s always a struggle,” Andre said, and placed his muscular farmer’s hands against his head and squeezed hard. “You got to hear about the banking.”
“That’s a mighty big subject,” Ernest Cox said. He was a slender, mild-mannered, and sinewy man in his late sixties, weather-beaten from a life of farming — he’d worked in the fields since boyhood, on his father’s acres. He had an attractive and disarming habit of smiling and nodding even when he was speaking about something unpleasant, such as debt or financial obstacles or the hurdles at the loan office. He ran a large third-generation farming business with his brothers, Herschel and Earmer, on five thousand acres. This family farm — soybeans, wheat, and the grain sorghum known as milo — was just outside the small town of Marvell, also in Phillips County.
All these men — family farmers — lived and raised their crops in the Arkansas Delta, in communities ten miles or less from the Mississippi River, and near the river town of Helena, where their crops were loaded, to be barged downriver. Talking to them, I remembered Reverend Lyles in Alabama telling me how his father had been advised by a white man not to sell any of his land to a white person. “Sell to blacks,” he’d said, because that was the only way a black man could get a foothold in a rural area.
“I’ve got views on the banking,” Samuel Ross said. In his late seventies, he was the oldest of the group. “But I’m retired. I’ll let the others speak.” And that was all he said for an hour, though he was an attentive listener.
“Me, I’ve just started, sort of,” Roger Smith said. He was twenty-three, yet was in his fourth season farming. He’d begun as a smallholder at the age of nineteen, leased a few hundred more acres each succeeding year, and now had seven hundred acres in rice and milo. He was soft-spoken and shy, with a drawl so heavy and such a sideways reflex of talking that many times I had to ask him to repeat himself, and even then had to mentally translate what he said.
“And that’s Rickey Bone,” Dr. King said, introducing another older man. “He’s the only one here not planting row crops.”
“My wife and I are growing produce,” Rickey Bone said. “She’s really the one who should be here. Mary’s a ball of fire.”
“For these men the problem is access to capital,” Dr. King said. He was a farmer too, as he had told me before. And although he had an authoritative, almost scholarly way of speaking, he was fluent in enumerating the issues. He ran the Arkansas Land and Farm organization, so he was used to conferences and workshops and committees. “It’s imbalance,” he went on, “and it’s the problem of expanding impoverishment. Listen, I had a friend said she was going to South Africa. I asked why. She told me about the need. I said to her, ‘You don’t have to go to South Africa to find the need: She was from Little Rock. I said, ‘What about our need?’ She said, ‘I don’t think it’s the same. In South Africa it’s water quality issues: I said, ‘I can tell you about water quality issues right here!’”
I said, “I started traveling in the South for that very reason, because I saw so many outsiders committed to solving Africa’s problems. They were the same problems that exist here — poor housing, poor access to health care and education. Child hunger. Illiteracy.”
“And the banking,” Andre Peer said, tapping his thick fingers on the table. His tapping was insistent, but he also had a way of widening his eyes to express impatience.
“Banking is a white monopoly in Arkansas — it’s white controlled,” Dr. King said. “Traditional banks lend on the basis of a hundred and twenty percent credit security. Think of that. And there are serious problems of imbalance at the USDA.”
“We need operating loans,” Ernest Cox said. “Every year we have to go to the bank. We’re doing all right — I’m farming with my brothers. But we’re at the mercy of the merchants.”
“Thing you got to understand,” Andre said, and thought a moment before he proceeded. “Bankers give other farmers more.”
“What other farmers?” I asked.
Andre widened his eyes and blew out his cheeks but said nothing.
“You can speak plainly to Mr. Paul,” Dr. King said.
“By ‘other’ I mean white,” Andre said. He told a story about a loan he had sought.
It was then that I realized what these men were up against, because the loans — for machinery, for seed, for infrastructure — were considerable, in the many hundreds of thousands.
“She let me have $442,000,” Andre was saying. “It was a bad, disastrous year — 2006 into 2007 — drought and excessive heat. My harvest was poor. I asked her not to turn me in to the USDA to file a loss claim. I didn’t want to be in default. I knew I could make good on it. I know how to work. I wanted to pay what I owed. I needed time. And I did pay — every dollar.” He thought a moment, then said, “White folks say we lazy. All we want is opportunity. We willing to work.”
“These guys are surviving against the odds,” Dr. King said.
“If you’re in a bind, in serious default, white farmers want to buy your land,” Andre said. “They’re just waiting for you to fail. They’re on one side, bankers on the other. My bankers are all right, but I have to explain a lot to them to get them to understand my situation. There are no black loan officers. It’s not talked about, it’s not written about. There’s none.”
“Loan officers,” Ernest Cox said in a knowing voice, smiling, nodding, adjusting his cap.
“Another loan officer,” Andre said. “We just talking, talking about people. I said, ‘Would you give that man a loan?’ He says, ‘No.’ I say, ‘But you don’t know him.’ He says, ‘How can he buy all that equipment? Must be selling drugs.’ He thinking, ‘How he able to do that, ’cause black people don’t do that.’ The same ones talking like that are the ones sitting on the banking boards.”
“Arkansas is not like other places,” Roger Smith said in his drawl, and turned aside, as though he’d surprised himself by offering an opinion. He was shy and oblique, but he was not timid.
“The Klan don’t wear sheets,” Andre said, and looked around at his fellow farmers. “They sitting behind the desks in the banks. Uh-huh!”
“The South gives indications of being afraid of the Negro. I do not mean physical fear,” Frank Tannenbaum wrote ninety years ago in Darker Phases of the South. “It is not a matter of cowardice or bravery; it is something deeper and more fundamental. It is a fear of losing grip upon the world. It is an unconscious fear of changing status.”
Roger said, “Harrison. That town — it’s a Klan hotbed.”
It was not by chance that this remark was dropped into the conversation. Allusions to the Klan, to the past, to the insecurity that Southern blacks face especially in rural areas, I found to be common, for the Klan was the historical nightmare, the arch-destroyer, relentless and reckless, with connections in high places. Harrison is an Ozark community, the seat of Boone County, in the center of the northern edge of the state, where it lies flat against Missouri. Its decent citizens, of whom there were presumably many, hadn’t made any headlines, but its cranks were infamous.
Roger said, “Harrison has a big billboard advertising the Klan.”
“Oh, God, Harrison” was a murmur in the room.
The farmers talked generally about the miseries and abuses of Harrison, and then Ernest said, “You don’t have to go all the way to Harrison to find this business. Moro does not have a black family.”
Moro was a crossroads in nearby Lee County, with fewer than three hundred people.
“A black family moved in some years ago,” Andre said. “But they bought him out.”
“So many inequities here.” The speaker was the woman taking notes, Ramona Anderson, whom I had taken to be a recorder of the remarks in the meeting. But she was a staff member of the Arkansas Land and Farm Development Corporation, and up to now had been sitting quietly over her notebook.
She told a story about the strange history of Cotton Plant, a town just north of Brinkley. “A man came in the 1960s and saw a bird — not the ivory-bill woodpecker that everyone talks about, but another rare one. He was the only man who saw it. The result was that town authorities set aside many acres for that bird. They used eminent domain to get black farmers off the land around Cotton Plant.”
“This was done maliciously,” Dr. King said. “No one wants to talk about inequities in race around here. Brinkley has a majority black population but has never had a black mayor. This is not talked about.”
“Cotton Plant was once an important town,” Ramona said. “It’s now small and poor.”
“The big landowners don’t want schools and hospitals,” Dr. King said. “Marianna Hospital closed in 1980. It has never reopened. DeWitt is just the same size, but it has a hospital. DeWitt is majority white. They don’t want educated blacks, they want blacks driving their tractors.”
This again put me in mind of the white farmer James Agee mentioned in his survey Cotton Tenants in 1937: “I don’t object to nigrah education, not up through foath a fift grade maybe, but not furdern dat.” Rural Lee County, where Dr. King lived and farmed, had one of the highest rates of illiteracy in Arkansas (and the nation).
“Public education continues to deteriorate,” Dr. King said.
“Economic development has no color,” Ramona Anderson said. “But they manipulated the minorities. Instead of a Delta-wide initiative, they control each portion by dividing them. A true community development plan would benefit the poor, and that’s not something they want.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked.
“The powers that be,” she said. “Instead of a big hospital, they put in a clinic. You think that’s all right? But in a true community development plan it would be a big hospital rather than a clinic here and a clinic there.”
“People have forgotten about the farmer,” Andre said. “We are producing food for people to eat. We are creating exports. How about rice? Our rice is exported. It’s seven dollars a bushel — the price is up. Our production is increasing.” All true, I found. The National Farmers Union reported a massive increase in rice growing in the United States, and that exports were going to China, Africa, and the Middle East. Andre went on, “But all the while it’s a struggle. We’re fighting the good ole boy.” He clutched his head again and said, “Keep Pigford in mind and class action.”
“Pigford” was a word I heard from other black farmers. It was shorthand for a court case that related to some of what these men were telling me about the racial inequities in the farming business. Pigford vs. Glickman was a class action lawsuit brought in 1997 by Timothy Pigford, a black farmer from North Carolina, and four hundred others, against the Department of Agriculture (and its secretary, Dan Glickman), seeking redress for the routine denial of loans to black farmers, whom the USDA had discriminated against, thus leading to a sharp reduction in their numbers.
Although a settlement was approved in 1999, and more than a billion dollars had been paid so far by the government (under both the Bush and Obama administrations), serious allegations of fraudulent claims have been made, and there was proof of connivance by profiteering lawyers and politicians, scammers and “race hustlers.” If you look into the details of this tangled case, it is obvious that a trough was provided for the benefit of many worthy farmers (successful claimants got $50,000 apiece) as well as for the snouts of many opportunists. Yet black land loss was reversed, and after years of decline, the number of black farmers and black landowners had grown in the South and elsewhere.
“But we’re still struggling with the banks,” Andre said. “We’re still struggling with the good ole boys. After all these years we still have to prove ourselves.”
I said, “Bill Clinton spends a lot of time in Africa and India. Couldn’t he do something here to help?”
“If Clinton came here,” Andre said, “the good ole boys would say, ‘Why you coming here? Why you want to change things?’” He looked around the room for approval, and got the nods he expected. “That’s why he doesn’t do it.”
All this time, in all this talk, I could sense the men were restless. As farmers, habituated to digging, to fetching and carrying, loading trucks, repairing machines, tramping the margins of their fields, they were unused to sitting indoors for such a length of time. They were too polite to object but still seemed uncomfortable, hitching forward, clasping their hands, squirming on the plastic chair seats.
I went on asking them about their farming operations, until finally, one of them — probably Andre, because he was the most frank of the group — stood up and said, “You won’t learn much here from us talking. We have to show you, if you have the time.”
I said, “I have all the time in the world. I’d love to see your farms.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Dr. King said, as he’d said to me before. Then he took me aside and said, “When you look at the Delta, do you see businesses owned by blacks, operated by blacks? In manufacturing? In retail?” He smiled, because the obvious answer was: very few. He went on, “Compare that to the black farmers here, who are part of a multibillion-dollar business.”
May 31, 2017
Rare earths and wind turbines: Yes, it’s a problem
Despite wind industry lobbyists and apologists asserting otherwise, rare earth metals, particularly neodymium, are indeed extensively used in wind turbine magnets. (And then there’s lithium for the batteries in electric vehicles and grid storage facilities.*)
‘Permanent magnet machines feature higher efficiencies than machines with excitation windings (absence of field winding losses), less weight and the advantage of having no slip-rings and brushes. Machines above kilowatt range (and most below) employ high-specific energy density PM material, preferably of neodymium-iron-boron (Nd-Fe-B).’ —Wind Energy Systems for Electric Power Generation, by Manfred Stiebler, Springer, 2008
‘The data suggest that, with the possible exception of rare-earth elements, there should not be a shortage of the principal materials required for electricity generation from wind energy. ... Sintered ceramic magnets and rare-earth magnets are the two types of permanent magnets used in wind turbines. Sintered ceramic magnets, comprising iron oxide (ferrite) and barium or strontium carbonate, have a lower cost but generate a lower energy product than do rare-earth permanent magnets comprising neodymium, iron, and boron (Nd-Fe-B). The energy-conversion efficiency of sintered Nd-Fe-B is roughly 10 times that of sintered ferrite ... As global requirements for rare-earth elements continue to grow, any sustained increase in demand for neodymium oxide from the wind resource sector would have to be met by increased supply through expansion of existing production or the development of new mines. ... An assessment of available data suggests that wind turbines that use rare earth permanent magnets comprising neodymium, iron, and boron require about 216 kg [476 lb] of neodymium per megawatt of capacity, or about 251 kg [553 lb] of neodymium oxide (Nd₂O₃) per megawatt of capacity.’ —Wind Energy in the United States and Materials Required for the Land-Based Wind Turbine Industry From 2010 Through 2030, by U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of the Interior, Scientific Investigations Report 2011–5036
‘Five rare earth elements (REEs)—dysprosium, terbium, europium, neodymium and yttrium—were found to be critical in the short term (present–2015). These five REEs are used in magnets for wind turbines and electric vehicles or phosphors in energy-efficient lighting. ... Permanent magnets (PMs) containing neodymium and dysprosium are used in wind turbine generators and electric vehicle (EV) motors. These REEs have highly valued magnetic and thermal properties. Manufacturers of both technologies are currently making decisions on future system design, trading off the performance benefits of neodymium and dysprosium against vulnerability to potential supply shortages. For example, wind turbine manufacturers are deciding among gear-driven, hybrid and direct-drive systems, with varying levels of rare earth content. ... Neodymium-iron-boron rare earth PMs are used in wind turbines and traction (i.e., propulsion) motors for EVs. ... the use of rare earth PMs in these applications is growing due to the significant performance benefits PMs provide ... Larger turbines are more likely to use rare earth PMs, which can dramatically reduce the size and weight of the generator compared to non-PM designs such as induction or synchronous generators. ... Despite their advantages, slow-speed turbines require larger PMs for a given power rating, translating into greater rare earth content. Arnold Magnetics estimates that direct-drive turbines require 600 kg [1,323 lb] of PM material per megawatt, which translates to several hundred kilograms of rare earth content per megawatt.’ — Critical Materials Strategy, by U.S. Department of Energy, December 2011
‘In the broader literature ..., concerns have been raised about future shortage of supply of neodymium, a metal belonging to the group of rare-earth elements that is increasingly employed in permanent magnets in wind turbine generators.’ —Assessing the life cycle environmental impacts of wind power: a review of present knowledge and research needs, by Anders Arvesen and Edgar G. Hertwich, 2012, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 16(8): 5994-6006.
‘A single 3MW [direct-drive] wind turbine needs ... 2 tons of rare earth elements.’ —Northwest Mining Association
Also see:
- Rare earths, minerals used in windpower technology, could fall into short supply, Windpower Engineering & Development, June 4, 2013
- Wind turbine & generator magnets, First4Magnets (‘In every wind turbine and generator you will find one or more incredibly strong magnets. Simplified, the rotating shaft of a wind turbine is connected to one or more strong magnets, usually neodymium magnets, these magnets turn relative to an assembly of coiled wire, generating voltage in the coil.’)
- Neodymium magnets in wind turbines & generators, Stanford Magnets
- Clean energy's dirty little secret, The Atlantic, May 2009
- Are rare earth minerals too costly for environment?, PBS News Hour, December 14, 2009
- In China, the true cost of Britain's clean, green wind power experiment: Pollution on a disastrous scale, Daily Mail, January 26, 2011
- Rare-earth mining in China comes at a heavy cost for local villages, The Guardian, August 7, 2012
- Rare earth mining in China: the bleak social and environmental costs, The Guardian, March 20, 2014
- Rare earths: Elemental needs of the clean-energy economy, Scientific American, October 13, 2010 (‘A massive wind turbine—capable of turning the breeze into two million watts of power—has 40-meter-long blades made from fiberglass, towers 90 meters above the ground, weighs hundreds of metric tons, and fundamentally relies on roughly 300 kilograms of a soft, silvery metal known as neodymium—a so-called rare earth. This element forms the basis for the magnets used in the turbines. "Large permanent magnets make the generators feasible," explains materials scientist Alex King, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory in Iowa, which started making rare earth magnets in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project. The stronger the magnets are, the more powerful the generator—and rare earth elements such as neodymium form the basis for the most powerful permanent magnets around.’)
- The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust, BBC, April 2, 2015
- The dark side of renewable energy, Earth Journalism Network, August 25, 2016
- Poison wind, Today Tonight Adelaide, March 1, 2017 (‘Clarification: This story contains details of toxic pollution associated with the use of rare earths in the production of wind turbines, cars and household electronic items. We wish to clarify that the wind industry estimates one in five turbines in South Australia use rare earths. South Australia has approximately 40 wind farms operating or seeking approval, with almost 700 individual turbines. Using the industry’s figures, South Australia has in excess of 100 turbines which use rare earths, which is a very significant number.’)
- The big eco dilemma: How rare earth metals have become a thorn in the side of the green agenda, RT, July 31, 2021
- New evidence shows massive and rapid expansion of illicit rare earths industry in Myanmar, fuelling human rights abuses, environmental destruction and funding military-linked militias, Global Witness, August 9, 2022
*Lithium: “Industry experts expect demand for lithium from U.S. car manufacturers to increase tenfold by 2030. By then, they predict the U.S. will need 300,000 metric tons of lithium per year to make green vehicles and a wealth of electronic appliances. … But environmentalists note that it would create hundreds of millions of cubic yards of rock waste, and that next to the pit would be an “acid plant” using sulfuric acid — 5,800 tons daily — to process lithium. According to an environmental impact statement from the federal Bureau of Land Management, the mine would be an open pit 2.3 miles long, a mile wide and almost 400 feet deep … the mine would use about 3,000 gallons of water per minute.” —The cost of green energy: The nation’s biggest lithium mine may be going up on a site sacred to Native Americans, NBC News, August 11, 2022