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This story was co-published with Popular Science.

Electric vehicles are becoming more and more commonplace on the nation’s roadways.

The federal government wants nearly two-thirds of all cars in the United States to be EVs within the next decade. All the while, EVs are breaking sales records, and manufacturers are building charging stations and production plants to incentivize a shift away from fossil fuels in the transportation sector.

With EVs taking the streets by storm, an unlikely industry now wants a piece of the pie.

Trade associations, fuel producers, and bipartisan lawmakers are pushing for biogas, fuel made from animal and food waste, to start receiving federal credits meant for powering electric vehicles.

The push for biogas-powered EVs would be a boon for the energy sector, according to biogas industry leaders. Environmental groups and researchers, however, say the fuel has yet to prove itself as a truly clean energy source. Biogas created from agriculture has been linked to an increase in waterway pollution and public health concerns that have disproportionately exposed low-income communities and communities of color to toxic byproducts of animal waste.

With the nation needing more ways to power fleets of Teslas and Chevy Bolts, the use of livestock manure to power EVs is still in limbo.

For biogas, there are, broadly speaking, three sources of waste from which to produce fuel: human waste, animal waste, and food waste. The source of this fuel input can be found at wastewater treatment plants, farms, and landfills.

At these locations, organic waste is deprived of oxygen, and a natural process known as anaerobic digestion occurs. Bacteria consume the waste products and eventually release methane, the main ingredient of natural gas. The gas is then captured, piped to a utility, turned into electricity, and distributed to customers.

Fuel created from animal waste isn’t a new concept. Farms around the country have been cashing in on biogas for decades, with a boom in production facilities known as anaerobic digesters expected after funding for their construction made it into the Inflation Reduction Act.

At the end of June, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized its Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS, which outlines how much renewable fuels — products like corn-based ethanol, manure-based biogas, and wood pellets — are used to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reduce the use of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil, or jet fuel.

Under this program, petroleum-based fuels must blend renewable fuels into their supply. For example, each time the RFS is updated, a new goal for how much corn-based ethanol is mixed into the nation’s fuel supply is set. This prediction is based on gas and renewable-fuel-industry market projections.

These gas companies and refineries purchase credits from renewable-fuel makers to comply with the mandated amount of renewable fuel that needs to be mixed into their supply.

A currency system tracks which renewable fuels are being produced and where they end up under the RFS. This system uses credits known as RINs, or Renewable Identification Numbers. According to the EPA, a single RIN is the energy equivalent of one gallon of ethanol, and the prices of the credits will fluctuate over time, just as gas prices do.

Oil companies and refineries purchase credits from renewable-fuel makers to comply with the mandated amount of renewable fuel that needs to be mixed into their supply. The unique RIN credit proves that an oil seller has purchased, blended, and sold renewable fuel.

Currently, the biogas industry can only use its RIN credits when the fuel source is blended with ethanol or a particular type of diesel fuel. Outside of the federal program, biogas producers have been cashing in on low-carbon fuel programs in both California and Oregon.

With the boom in demand for renewable electricity, biogas producers want more opportunities to sell their waste-based fuels. EVs might get them there.

During recent RFS negotiations, the biogas industry urged the EPA to create a pathway for a new type of credit known as eRINs, or electric RINs. This pathway would allow the biogas and biomass industry to power the nation’s EVs directly. While the industry applauded the recent expansion of mandatory volumes of renewable fuels, the EPA did not decide on finalizing eRIN credits.

Patrick Serfass is the executive director of the American Biogas Council. He said the EPA could approve projects that would support eRINs for years, but has yet to approve the pathway for biogas-fuel producers.

“It doesn’t matter which administration,” Serfass said. “The Obama administration didn’t do it. The Trump administration didn’t do it. The Biden administration so far hasn’t done it. EPA, do your job.”

Late last year, the EPA initially included approval of eRINs in the RFS proposal. Republican members of Congress who sit on the Energy & Commerce Committee sent a letter to the EPA, saying that the RFS is not meant to be a tool to electrify transportation.

“Our goal is to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable, available, reliable, and secure energy,” the committee members wrote. “The final design of the eRINs program under the RFS inserts uncertainty into the transportation fuels market.”

The RFS has traditionally supported liquid fuels that the EPA considers renewable, the main of which is ethanol. Stakeholders in ethanol production see the inclusion of eRINs as an overstep.

In May, Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa, introduced legislation that would outlaw EVs from getting credits from the renewable-fuels program. Grassley has been a longtime supporter of the ethanol industry; Iowa alone makes up nearly a third of the nation’s ethanol production, according to the economic growth organization Iowa Area Development Group.

Serfass said biogas is a way to offset the nation’s waste and make small and midsize farms economically sustainable, as well as local governments operating waste treatment plants and landfills. When it comes to animal waste, he said the eRIN program would allow farmers to make money off their waste by selling captured biogas to the grid to power EVs.

“There’s a lot of folks that don’t like large farms, and the reason that large farms exist is that as a society, we’re not always willing to pay $6 to $9 for a gallon of milk,” Serfass said. “You have farm consolidation so that farmers can just make a living.”

Initially, digesters were thought of as a climate solution and an economic boon for farmers, but in recent years, farms have stopped digester operations because of the hefty price tag to run them and their modest revenue. Biogas digesters are still operated by large operations, often with the help of fossil fuel companies, such as BP.

In addition to farms, Serfass said biogas production from food waste and municipal wastewater treatment plants would also be able to cash in on the eRIN program.

Dodge City, Kansas, a city of 30,000 in the western part of the state, is an example of a local government using biogas as a source of revenue. In 2018, the city began capturing methane from its sewage treatment and has since been able to generate an estimated $3 million a year by selling the fuel to the transportation sector.

Serfass said the city would be able to sell the fuel to power the nation’s EV charging grid if the eRIN program was approved.

The EPA’s decision-making will direct the next three years of renewable-fuel production in the country. The program is often a battleground for different industry groups, from biogas producers to ethanol refineries, as they fight over their fuel’s market share.

Of note, the biomass industry, which creates fuel from wood pellets, forestry waste, and other detritus of the nation’s lumber supply and forests, also wants to be approved for future eRIN opportunities.

This fuel source has a questionable track record of being a climate solution: The industry has been linked to deforestation in the American South, and has falsely claimed they don’t use whole trees to produce electricity, according to a industry whistleblower.

The EPA did not answer questions from Grist as to why eRINs were not approved in its recent announcement.

“The EPA will continue to work on potential paths forward for the eRIN program, while further reviewing the comments received on the proposal and seeking additional input from stakeholders to inform potential next steps on the eRIN program,” the agency wrote in a statement.

Ben Lilliston is the director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. He said he supported the EPA’s decision to not approve biogas-created electricity for EVs.

“I think the jury is still out around biogas from large-scale animal operations about how effective they are,” Lilliston said.

He wants more independent studies to determine what a growing biogas sector under the eRIN program would mean for the rural areas and communities of color that surround these facilities.

Predominantly Black and low-income communities in southeastern North Carolina have been exposed to decades of polluted waters and increased respiratory and heart disease rates related to the state’s hog industry, which has recently cashed in on the biogas sector.

In Delaware, residents of the largely rural Delmarva peninsula have become accustomed to the stench of the region’s massive poultry farms. These operations now want to cash in on their waste with the implementation of more biogas systems in a community where many residents are Black or immigrants from Haiti and Latin America who speak limited English, according to the Guardian.

“I think that our concern, and many others’, is that this is actually going to increase emissions and waste and pollution,” Lilliston said.

Aaron Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, said electricity produced from biogas could be a red herring when it comes to cheap, clean energy.

“There’s often a tendency to say, ‘We have this pollutant like methane gas that escapes from a landfill or a dairy manure lagoon, and if we can capture that and stop it from escaping into the atmosphere, that’s a win for the climate,'” Smith said. “But once we’ve captured it, should we do something useful with it? And the answer is maybe, but sometimes it’s more expensive to do something useful with it than it would be to go and generate that energy from a different source.”

Smith’s past research has found that the revenue procured by digesters has not been equal to the amount of methane captured by these systems. In a blog post earlier this year, Smith wrote that taxpayers and consumers are overpaying for the price of methane reduction. He found that the gasoline producers have essentially subsidized digester operations by way of the state’s low-carbon transportation standards. To pay for this, the gasoline industry offloads its increased costs by raising the price of gas for consumers.

“I think we do need to be wary about over-incentivizing these very expensive sources of electricity generation under the guise of climate games,” Smith told Grist.

In a region where communities of color are most impacted by flooding, RainReady is bringing together community members to create flood mitigation plans.

This story was originally published by Borderless.

The day before Independence Day, the summer sun beat down on dozens of clothes and shoes strewn across the backyard and fence of the Cicero, Illinois, home where Delia and Ramon Vasquez have lived for over 20 years.

A nearly nine-inch deluge of rain that fell on Chicago and its suburbs the night before had flooded their basement where the items were stored in plastic bins. Among the casualties of the flood were their washer, dryer, water heater and basement cable setup. The rain left them with a basement’s worth of things to dry, appliances and keepsakes to trash, and mounting bills.

The July flood was one of the worst storms the Chicago region has seen in recent years and over a month later many families like the Vasquezes are still scrambling for solutions. Without immediate access to flood insurance, the couple was left on their own to deal with the costs of repairing the damage and subsequent mold, Delia said. The costs of the recent flood come as the Vasquez family is still repaying an $8,000 loan they got to cover damages to their house from a flood in 2009.

Aggravated by climate change, flooding problems are intensifying in the Chicago region because of aging infrastructure, increased rainfall and rising lake levels. An analysis by Borderless Magazine found that in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, extreme weather events and heavy rainfall disproportionately affect people of color and those from immigrant backgrounds. These same communities often face barriers to receiving funding for flood damage or prevention due to their immigration status – many undocumented people cannot get FEMA assistance – as well as language or political barriers.

“You feel hopeless because you think the government is going to help you, and they don’t,” Delia said. “You’re on your own.”

The lack of a political voice and access to public services has been a common complaint in Cicero, a western suburb of Chicago where Latinos account for more than four out of five residents, the highest such percentage among Illinois communities.

One potential solution for communities like Cicero could come from Cook County and the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) in the form of their RainReady program, which links community input with funding for flood prevention. The program has already been tried out in a handful of suburbs and is now being implemented in the Calumet region, a historically industrial area connected by the Little Calumet River on the southern end of Cook County. The RainReady Calumet Corridor project would provide towns with customized programs and resources to avoid flooding. Like previous RainReady projects, it relies on nature-based solutions, such as planting flora and using soil to hold water better.

CNT received $6 million from Cook County as part of the county’s $100 million investment in sustainability efforts and climate change mitigation. Once launched, six Illinois communities — Blue Island, Calumet City, Calumet Park, Dolton, Riverdale and Robbins — would establish the RainReady Calumet Corridor.

At least three of the six communities are holding steering committee meetings as part of the ongoing RainReady Calumet process that will continue through 2026. Some participants hope it could be a solution for residents experiencing chronic flooding issues who have been left out of past discussions about flooding.

“We really need this stuff done and the infrastructure is crumbling,” longtime Dolton resident Sherry Hatcher-Britton said after the town’s first RainReady steering committee meeting. “It’s almost like our village will be going underwater because nobody is even thinking about it. They might say it in a campaign but nobody is putting any effort into it. So I feel anything to slow [the flooding] — when you’re working with very limited funds — that’s just what you have to do.”

In Cicero and other low-income and minority communities in the Chicago region where floods prevail, the key problem is a lack of flood prevention resources, experts and community activists say.

Amalia Nieto-Gomez, executive director of Alliance of the Southeast, a multicultural activist coalition that serves Chicago’s Southeast Side — another area with flooding woes — laments the disparity between the places where flooding is most devastating and the funds the communities receive to deal with it.

“Looking at this with a racial equity lens … the solutions to climate change have not been located in minority communities,” Nieto-Gomez said.

CNT’s Flood Equity Map, which shows racial disparities in flooding by Chicago ZIP codes, found that 87 percent of flood damage insurance claims were paid in communities of color from 2007 to 2016. Additionally, three-fourths of flood damage claims in Chicago during that time came from only 13 ZIP codes, areas where more than nine out of 10 residents are people of color.

Despite the money flowing to these communities through insurance payouts, community members living in impacted regions say they are not seeing enough of that funding. Flood insurance may be in the name of landlords who may not pass payouts on to tenants, for example, explains Debra Kutska of the Cook County Department of Environment and Sustainability, which is partnering with CNT on the RainReady effort.

Those who do receive money often get it in the form of loans that require repayment and don’t always cover the total damages, aggravating their post-flood financial difficulties. More than half of the households in flood-impacted communities had an income of less than $50,000 and more than a quarter were below the poverty line, according to CNT.

CNT and Cook County are looking at ways to make the region’s flooding mitigation efforts more targeted by using demographic and flood data on the communities to understand what projects would be most accessible and suitable for them. At the same time, they are trying to engage often-overlooked community voices in creating plans to address the flooding, by using community input to inform the building of rain gardens, bioswales, natural detention basins, green alleys and permeable pavers.

Midlothian, a southwestern suburb of Chicago whose Hispanic and Latino residents make up a third of its population, adopted the country’s first RainReady plan in 2016. The plan became the precursor to Midlothian’s Stormwater Management Capital Plan that the town is now using to address its flooding issues.

One improvement that came out of the RainReady plan was the town’s Natalie Creek Flood Control Project to reduce overbank flooding by widening the channel and creating a new stormwater storage basin. Midlothian also installed a rain garden and parking lot with permeable pavers not far from its Veterans of Foreign Wars building, and is working to address drainage issues at Kostner Park.

Kathy Caveney, a Midlothian village trustee, said the RainReady project is important to the town’s ongoing efforts to manage its flood-prone creeks and waterways. Such management, she says, helps “people to stop losing personal effects, and furnaces, and water heaters and freezers full of food every time it rains.”

Like in the Midlothian project, CNT is working with residents in the Calumet region through steering committees that collect information on the flood solutions community members prefer, said Brandon Evans, an outreach and engagement associate at CNT. As a result, much of the green infrastructure CNT hopes to establish throughout the Calumet Corridor was recommended by its own community members, he said.

“We’ve got recommendations from the plans, and a part of the conversation with those residents and committee members is input on what are the issues that you guys see, and then how does that, in turn, turn into what you guys want in the community,” Evans said.

The progress of the RainReady Calumet Corridor project varies across the six communities involved, but final implementation for each area is expected to begin between fall 2023 and spring 2025, Evans said. If the plan is successful, CNT hopes to replicate it in other parts of Cook County and nationwide, he said.

Despite efforts like these, Kevin Fitzpatrick of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District argues that the scale of the flooding problem in the Chicago region is so large that a foolproof solution would be “prohibitively expensive.” Instead, communities should work toward flood mitigation with the understanding that the region will continue to flood for years to come with climate change. And because mitigation efforts will need to be different in each community, community members should be the ones who decide what’s best for them, says Fitzpatrick.

In communities like Cicero, which has yet to see a RainReady project, local groups have often filled in the gaps left by the government. Cicero community groups like the Cicero Community Collaborative, for example, have started their own flood relief fund for residents impacted by the early July storm, through a gift from the Healthy Communities Foundation.

Meanwhile, the Vasquez family will seek financial assistance from the town of Cicero, which was declared a disaster area by town president Larry Dominick and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker after the July storm. The governor’s declaration enables Cicero to request assistance for affected families from FEMA.

But the flooding dangers persist.

The day after her home flooded, a neighbor suggested to Delia Vasquez that she move to a flood-free area. Despite loving her house, she has had such a thought. But like many neighbors, she also knows she can’t afford to move. She worries about where she can go.

“If water comes in here,” Vasquez said, “what tells me that if I move somewhere else, it’s not going to be the same, right?”

Efrain Soriano contributed reporting to this story.

This piece is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless, Ensia, Grist, Planet Detroit, Sahan Journal and Wisconsin Watch, as well as the Guardian and Inside Climate News. The project was supported by the Joyce Foundation.

Garments that can be packed with ice or equipped with fans are becoming increasingly popular among workers exposed to high heat.

It’s not the disease-carrying mosquitoes, the scorpions, or the 22-kilogram tanks full of pesticide strapped to his back that Wendell Van Pelt fears. It’s the heat. This summer, while spraying insect-killing chemicals in the gardens of the rich in Greater Scottsdale, Arizona, Van Pelt has endured temperatures well in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Stepping past velvety green lawns and lagoon-like pools on his rounds, the field training manager at Mosquito Squad, a pest control service, has at times felt like he's “living in an oven.”

But Van Pelt has had respite from the scorching conditions: a cloak of cooling power wrapped around his torso—a vest filled with ice. “I love it,” he says, describing how his backpack filled with pesticide or natural repellent seems to amplify the effect: “That backpack is almost pressing the cold into your back. It just feels fantastic.”

Van Pelt knows that heat stress can be very dangerous. Everyone should be mindful of the risks, he emphasizes. And due to climate change and multiple recent heat waves, awareness of those risks is growing around the world. Millions of workers who toil outside, or in indoor spaces where temperatures can climb to unbearable levels, are increasingly adopting special strategies to cope. Cooling garments—vests, hats, and scarves—are among them.

It was only last year that Mosquito Squad rolled out cooling vests to employees in Greater Scottsdale. Many other firms are taking the same step, from power companies to real estate management businesses. Cooling vests have actually been around for decades, but in recent years their popularity, and variety, has exploded. Choosing the right one could potentially make the difference between going home after a good day’s work or heading to the ER. Over the past decade, hundreds of workers have died from environmental heat exposure in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For Van Pelt, activating the cooling properties of his vest means stuffing it with flat, flexible packs of water ice straight from the freezer. These gradually melt as he works, but they can keep him cool for hours, he explains. There are many other technologies available.

Some use packs that contain fluids other than water—known as “phase change materials,” or PCMs. As these materials transition from solid or semisolid to liquid, they soak up heat, because this phase change requires energy. Non-water PCMs can be concocted in such a way as to remain flexible when cold or have higher melting points, which helps them last longer while maintaining a constant comfortable temperature. Other vests have tubes through which water is pumped around the wearer’s torso, or you might choose one with built-in fans that blow air directly onto your body. Finally, some vests are simply made with highly breathable fabric. Depending on the design and accessories, a top-of-the-range cooling vest could set you back close to $400.

“Demand this year has been so strong that just a few customers consumed 100 percent of our manufacturing capacity for months,” says Justin Li, cofounder and CEO of Qore Performance, a Tennessee-based firm that makes panel-like containers that you fill with 1.5 liters of water, freeze, and then sling against your chest, back, or both. A pair costs $148, and you can drink the water in them, via a tube, as it melts. Li got the idea, he explains, after talking to a soldier serving in Afghanistan, who told him how he and his comrades would put a frozen water bottle inside their body armour to try and stay cool while out on patrol. “We just reshaped it,” says Li.

Qore Performance has sold tens of thousands of the special water bottles, called IcePlates, to military personnel, Li estimates, but he has lots of commercial customers too. The surge in orders this year was largely driven by companies buying the devices for employees as heat waves erupted in the US and Europe. Known users of the IcePlate include factory staff, schoolyard supervisors, and fast-food workers, he says.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, EZ Cooldown has found clients for its cooling vests among roofers, cargo loaders, and TV production staff. But that’s not how things started. “The cosplay community and the fur-suit community was the group that I targeted first,” says Pepeyn Langedijk, founder and co-owner, who is himself a furry—someone who enjoys socializing while dressed in an animal-like furry suit.

Such suits are very hot, but they’re designed to look sleek—no one wants to wear a bulky cooling vest underneath them, even if the effect feels pleasant. Langedijk has a solution: a highly contoured, slimline vest, into the lining of which you can slip packs filled with a frozen, vegetable-oil-based fluid. “We have packs made to our specifications,” he says. “That product is something I created myself.”

Depending on how hot the user is at the time, EZ Cooldown’s packs might provide cooling for up to several hours. Once melted and no longer cool, they can be swapped out for a fresh set of packs straight from the fridge or freezer. Like Li, Langedijk says demand is booming—sales are up 35 percent this year, and he’s noticed rising interest from places like Scandinavia, where, he suggests, people are less adapted to the heat waves that are becoming more common there.

A lot of the vests require the user to swap out expired cooling components for fresh ones. Once the cooling substance has done what it can and has warmed up, the vest might in theory make things worse, since the wearer is then left with an unnecessary additional layer of clothing, notes Sarah Davey, an assistant professor at Coventry University in the UK who researches work and exercise in extreme environmental conditions, and who has studied cooling vests.

“They can help. However, we’ve seen that the effectiveness varies,” adds Andreas Flouris, an associate professor in the Department of Exercise Science at the University of Thessaly in Greece. “It varies based on the system that you use, and it also depends on the environmental conditions.”

Flouris has studied the use of cooling vests by a variety of workers—including those who helped to build stadiums for last year’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar. He has also observed trials involving grape pickers in a Cypriot vineyard. In that scenario, vests with built-in fans proved problematic. They kept sucking vegetation against the workers’ clothing, and the vests were very cumbersome to wear. Garments containing phase-change materials are almost always the best option, he says.

A particularly effective technique isn’t to wear a body vest at all, but to instead cool down a person’s head and neck before physical exertion, Flouris says. In one study, adolescent tennis players wore a cooling cap for 45 minutes until their core temperature dropped by half a degree Celsius. Flouris and colleagues measured this by asking the players to swallow a capsule that could record their core body temperature and broadcast it to a nearby receiving device. “The cooling effect is tremendous,” says Flouris. He explains that cooling the blood vessels in your head helps chill the rest of your body relatively quickly. In the study, when players used the cooling cap pregame, they had lower skin temperature throughout and felt, on average, 14 percent more comfortable than when they didn’t use it. There were also some small improvements in player performance too.

There may be resistance in some quarters from those unwilling to admit that they need help to survive blistering heat. Workers who spoke to WIRED confirmed that such attitudes are common. But the threat is real, stresses Tom Votel, president and CEO of Ergodyne, which makes a range of cooling garments. Workers who embrace such tools are no less tough than their colleagues—they’re just savvier, he argues. Research in the US suggests that heat stress results in thousands of workplace injuries annually.

By and large, employers aren’t yet protecting workers enough from excessive heat, says Juley Fulcher, worker health and safety advocate at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. There are many cheaper alternatives to cooling gadgets too. It’s important to provide employees with water, fans, breaks in cool locations, or the option to adjust their schedules when temperatures rise, she suggests. “If you can keep them from experiencing heat stress, you’re going to get a lot more productivity out of them,” says Fulcher, noting the benefit to businesses.

Rutger Standaart, an account manager at Bertschat in the Netherlands, which sells cooling and heating garments, recently visited a company that uses welding machines. In the summer, temperatures by the machines can rise above 50 degrees Celsius, meaning that working for longer than 20 minutes at a time is unbearable. “With our cooling vests, they can work for an hour,” he says.

Fulcher says that cooling garments work best if they can be made lightweight and ergonomic. As the technology improves, she says, such devices could provide an alternative to energy-hungry air-conditioning in some situations—since AC is accelerating the climate crisis: “You’re going to see a lot more of these cooling vests used as an option around the world,” she says.

archive : https://ghostarchive.org/archive/NLeTL

Coming from the Congo, I knew where the essential ingredient for the atomic bombs was mined, even if everyone else seemed to ignore it.

Papà, my dad, told me a story long ago about the uranium that powered the first nuclear bombs. The ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the bombs you saw being built in this summer’s dramatic film, Oppenheimer. Papà, you see, was born in the Belgian Congo.

Earlier this summer, I was invited to a screening of the blockbuster. The film’s director, Christopher Nolan, was there too. In a recurring scene, meant to symbolize the inching along of the scientists’ efforts, Oppenheimer fills an empty glass bowl with marbles—first one at a time, then in handfuls. The marbles represent the amount of uranium that has been successfully mined and refined to power the nuclear reaction. The outcome of World War II, and the future of humanity, hinges on who can create that monster first—the Axis or the Allies. The closer we get to the bomb’s completion, the more marbles go into the bowl. But there’s no mention in the film of where two-thirds of that uranium came from: a mine 24 stories deep, now in Congo’s Katanga, a mineral-rich area in the southeast.

As the marbles steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.

Papà was born in 1946 at Mission Ngi, a tiny Belgian missionary outpost. He told us how, growing up, the Belgians taught the Congolese to worship God; how the Belgians addressed Congolese adults with the informal French tu, not the formal vous; how the Belgians said eating with your hands, as Papà did at home, was uncivilized. The Congolese were backward and ancillary to modern life, Papà learned in school. So did I. And yet, Papà said, the Congolese were the essential ingredient, the sine qua non, of arguably the most consequential creation in modern history.

In 1885, when King Leopold II of Belgium first claimed ownership of this massive stretch of land sitting on the world’s deepest river, smack in the center of Africa, he called it Congo Free State. Of course, life for the roughly 10 to 20 million inhabitants meant surviving violence and a terror state run by the king. Throughout the territory, which was converted into a series of cotton and rubber plantations, the king’s soldiers amputated the forearms of Congolese people who didn’t meet harvesting quotas. King Leopold’s policies drove famine and disease. Millions didn’t make it.

In 1908, when the Belgian government snatched the territory from the king, “Congo Free State” became the “Belgian Congo.” At that point, writes historian Susan Williams, author of Spies in the Congo, the private sector replaced the king as the extractor of Congo’s natural resources. The violence remained. What’s more, while the Belgian officials let Christian missionaries begin formally educating kids, they were worried that literate Congolese would overturn the colony. Papà told me how schooling beyond the fifth grade was illegal for most Congolese kids. Papà, to the delight of his own father, would chance into one of the colony’s exceptions—education for those who would become priests—an opportunity even some of Papà’s elder siblings wouldn’t have.

As the marbles steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand.

The colonial system built workers—or borderline enslaved people—not scholars. An American officer who traveled to the Belgian Congo described a scene he saw on his first day: A Congolese man in ragged shorts knelt on the ground, a Belgian officer towering over him with a chicote, a leather whip tipped with metal ends. “The whip whistled … Every lash was followed by a scream of agony … The black’s skin from neck to waist was a mass of blood with ribs shining through.” This, the American reported, was punishment for stealing a pack of cigarettes from a Belgian. “Welcome to the Congo,” the American was told.

The largest company in the Belgian Congo was the mining company Union-Minière du Haut-Katanga. The colonial government had granted it the rights to an area spanning nearly 8,000 square miles, over half the size of Belgium. One of the mines there, Shinkolobwe, was rich with uranium. In fact, it was filled with uranium that the Congolese had already excavated and placed aboveground. Initially, uranium was just a waste byproduct of digging for the more valuable radium, which Nobel-prize winner Marie Curie had helped discover could treat cancer. In 1938, using uranium, the physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch worked out the calculations that defined nuclear fission. If enough nuclei were split, scientists realized, massive amounts of energy could be emitted. Uranium was now coveted.

In 1939, just before the start of World War II, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a muted warning: “The element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future … It is conceivable … that extremely powerful bombs of this type may thus be constructed.” Einstein’s letter mentioned four known uranium sources: the United States, which “has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities”; Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, where “there is some good ore”; and Congo—“the most important source of uranium.” According to Jean Bele, a Congolese nuclear physicist at MIT, 100 kilograms of Congolese uranium ore could yield about 1 kilogram of refined uranium. The same amount of ore from the other locations would yield only 2 or 3 grams of the refined uranium necessary for such a weapon.

The mining company typically built fenced-in compounds that resembled prison camps for the workers and their families; the company initially gave each family about 43 square feet—the size of a small garage—and weekly food rations. At work, miners sorted uranium ore by hand. One person described a piece of Shinkolobwe uranium as a block “as big as a pig.” It was “black and gold and looked as if it were covered with a green scum or moss.” He called them “flamboyant stones.”

The director of Union-Minière du Haut-Katanga was Edgar Sengier, a pale Belgian man with a sharply cut mustache. Having seen Germany invade Belgium in World War I, Sengier was unsure about what Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 foretold. Would Belgium—or even the African colonies—be next? So in October, he fled Belgium for New York City and transferred the mining company’s business operations there. However, before he had set up shop, a British chemist and the Nobel Prize–winning scientist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, son-in-law of Marie Curie, tipped off Sengier that the uranium in Congo might become essential in the war. The next fall, Sengier ordered that it be shipped to New York.

So Congolese workers carried and loaded the ore. It was sent by train to Port Francqui (now Ilebo), then by boat down the Kasai and Congo Rivers to the capital, Leopoldville (now Kinshasa). At the port of Matadi, the uranium began its trek across the Atlantic Ocean, past German U-boats, to a warehouse on Staten Island. Sengier stored more than 2.6 million pounds of ore in the States. About 6.6 million pounds remained in Shinkolobwe.

In May 1940, Hitler invaded France and Belgium. The Belgian government fled to London, and the Third Reich installed a pro-Nazi government in Belgium. The governor-general of the Belgian Congo, however, declared that the colony would support the Allies. He drafted troops, offered up Congolese laborers, and created production quotas to supply the Allies with necessary war materials. And so, during the war, many Congolese returned to the very forests where their parents and grandparents had had their hands amputated, ordered to cull rubber again, this time for hundreds of thousands of military tires. As the war ramped up, Congolese miners also dug for minerals like copper in around-the-clock shifts.

In Sengier’s mining towns, as elsewhere, the Congolese were unable to move freely without permits. Or to vote. Workers had to be home by 9 pm, lest they suffer harsh consequences. Pay was terrible. But by 1941, though “natives” were excluded from unions, Black workers at several of Sengier’s mines began organizing for higher wages and better labor conditions.

December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor Day, was not only a pivotal day in the course of the war, but also in the lives of the Congolese mine workers. That day, Sengier’s Black employees organized a massive mining strike across Katanga. In Elisabethville, 500 workers refused to start their shifts. Soon, freshly off-duty miners joined them and assembled in front of management’s offices, demanding a raise. They won an agreement that they could come bargain the next day.

The next morning, the mine workers showed up to the local soccer stadium to negotiate with Sengier’s company and the colonial governor of Katanga. According to conflicting reports, between 800 and 2,000 strikers attended. The company offered a verbal agreement to raise wages. One historian describes it as the “first open expression of open protest in the social history of the Congo.” But when a Congolese worker named Léonard Mpoyi demanded written confirmation of the wage raise, the colonial governor insisted the crowd go home.

“I refuse,” Mpoyi said. “You must give us some proof that the company has agreed to raise our salaries.”

“I have already demanded that you go to the office to check,” replied the governor, Amour Marron. He then pulled a gun from his pocket and shot Mpoyi, point blank. Soldiers opened fire “from all directions.” The mine workers poured out of the stadium. Roughly 70 people died. About 100 were injured.

The next morning, a company loudspeaker summoned everyone back to work.

About a year after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt assigned General Leslie Groves to head the Manhattan Project. On his first day, in September 1942, Groves and his deputy, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, talked about how to procure the necessary uranium for the massive project. Nichols told Groves about Sengier, and his uranium. The next morning, Nichols met Sengier in his New York office, and by the end of the meeting they struck a deal on a yellow legal pad. “I want to start hauling the uranium away tomorrow,” Nichols declared. Less than a month later, Groves hired J. Robert Oppenheimer to build the bomb.

Over the next couple years, the Congo became a hotbed for American spies—under the cover of “consulate officer,” “Texaco employee,” a “buyer of silks,” and “live gorilla collector”—there to secure the flow of uranium. General Groves insisted that the US gain complete control of Shinkolobwe and recommended to President Roosevelt that the mine be reopened. The Army Corps of Engineers was sent to the Congo to start up mining operations anew. The mine’s location was scrubbed from maps. Spies were told to eliminate the word “uranium” from their conversations; rather, advisers added, use words like “diamonds.” The company’s miners also began mining for other war-necessary minerals, toiling in sweat by day, and with immense furnaces by night, swarmed by the sound of trains or planes from America. By then, thanks to the mining strike, worker salaries had risen by 30 to 50 percent. Still, some men were forcibly required to mine. From 1938 to 1944, fatal accidents at the company’s plants almost doubled. To avoid rubber quotas, people fled the rural areas for cities like Elisabethville, whose African population swelled from 26,000 in 1940 to 65,000 in 1945.

Spies were told to eliminate the word “uranium” from their conversations; rather, advisers added, use words like “diamonds.”

The US government was also worried about Nazi spies. One American spy was tasked with figuring out if Nazis were smuggling Shinkolobwe uranium. Among Sengier’s many shipments of ore, one was intercepted and sunk by the Nazis.

When they arrived in the US, the flamboyant stones were refined in places like Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and then shipped to Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It took nearly three years for Oppenheimer and his team to develop the bombs. Even though the Germans surrendered in May 1945 (and it became clear they were not close to completing a nuclear bomb), the war in the Pacific still raged. Ultimately, in August 1945, the US dropped two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki filled with—like Papà said—Congolese uranium.

Jean Bele, the Congolese nuclear physicist, tells me radioactive isotopes are still in the ground near Shinkolobwe today. “Radioactive solids enter the water, the crops, the trees, the soil, the animals, and they get to the humans,” he said. We don’t know the extent of the radiation. We do know that in Oak Ridge there is increased cancer mortality. And near St. Louis, Missouri, where remains of the Congolese ore were dumped, contamination poses risks to workers for the next 1,000 years.

After the screening of Oppenheimer, like a fanboy, I approached Nolan in the lobby. I was able to ask him about the marbles, about why he chose them and what creative issue they solved. He acquiesced with a courtly nod: “I needed a way to demonstrate how long it would have taken to refine all that ore.” Then he added, “The number of marbles was actually mathematically accurate to represent the amount that they needed.”

Of course, without Congo, obtaining all that ore would have been impossible. In a race to build the bomb, both sides wanted the Congolese ore. The Shinkolobwe mine was “a freak occurrence in nature,” according to Colonel Nichols. “Nothing like it has ever again been found.” And that, of course, means that without Congo’s Black workers—terrorized and chicote-d into submission, digging essential war minerals 24 hours a day—the outcome of arguably the most consequential project in human history would have been very different.

In 1946, Sengier became the first non-American to receive the president’s Medal for Merit—“for the performance of an exceptionally meritorious or courageous act” that sealed the Allies’ victory. In a photo from the ceremony, you might see something else: a man with something to hide. Intelligence during the war revealed that Sengier’s company also sold about 1.5 million pounds of Congolese uranium to the Nazis. In 1948, a radioactive mineral was named in Sengier’s honor: sengierite.

At the same time, the Congolese, the people I come from, set about tearing down the colonial systems meant to eclipse their power; they finally won their independence in 1960. Papà was 13 years old then, and though it would take years for him to learn about the uranium miners, he always knew that Congolese people matter to history.

Subscription users of X, formerly Twitter, will need to send a selfie and copy of ID to an Israeli verification company.

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, will now require X Blue users to submit a selfie alongside a photo of a government-issued ID, according to a report by PC Magazine.

The user’s personal information required by the verification process will be handled by Israeli company AU10TIX software which will store the information for up to 30 days.

said the data collected from a user’s profile will be used “for the purpose of safety and security, including preventing impersonation”.

Many X users were unhappy with the choice of the company to store user data, pointing out its employees’ links to Israeli intelligence. Others expressed their discomfort with giving a company their data when so many data breaches have been reported in the past.

AU10TIX helped to create the identity verification systems for airports and border controls in the 1980s and 90s before expanding, with the growth of the internet, into what it describes as “digital spaces” in 2002. It now boasts several high-profile clients such as Uber, PayPal and Google.

Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter in October 2022, appeared to have completed ID verification on August 1, suggesting that the ID verification system is already operational and could therefore appear publicly soon.

Verification was then extended to any account with a verified phone number and an active subscription to an eligible Twitter Blue plan.

On April 1, Twitter announced it would begin removing its legacy verification programme and removing legacy verified checkmarks.

These changes led to fears that impersonation would be easier on the platform and hand false credibility to accounts that spread misinformation.

In response, the platform, introduced gold and grey checkmarks, used by verified organisations and government-affiliated accounts, respectively.

In July 2023, Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded as X.

The latest X verification process, which requires a selfie and a government-issued ID, is part of a drive to add an additional layer of security against impersonation and fraud.

Sunday’s vote makes Ecuador the first country to restrict fossil fuel extraction through the citizen referendum process.

Ecuadorians voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to reject oil drilling in a section of Yasuní National Park, the most biodiverse area of the imperiled Amazon rainforest.

Nearly 60% of Ecuadorian voters backed a binding referendum opposing oil exploration in Block 43 of the national park, which is home to uncontacted Indigenous tribes as well as hundreds of bird species and more than 1,000 tree species.

The Associated Press reported that “the outcome represents a significant blow to Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, who advocated for oil drilling, asserting that its revenues are crucial to the country’s economy. As a result of the vote, state oil company Petroecuador will be required to dismantle its operations in the coming months.”

Yasunidos, the civil society group behind the referendum, celebrated the vote as “a historic victory for Ecuador and for the planet.” Drilling operations in Block 43, which began in 2016, currently produce more than 55,000 barrels of oil per day.

Most of Ecuador’s oil is located under the Amazon rainforest, whose role as a critical carbon sink has been badly diminished in recent years due to deforestation and relentless corporate plunder.

Sunday’s win was decades in the making. As The New York Times reported ahead of the vote, the referendum is “the culmination of a groundbreaking proposal suggested almost two decades ago when Rafael Correa, who was president of Ecuador at the time, tried to persuade wealthy nations to pay his country to keep the same oil field in Yasuní untouched. He asked for $3.6 billion, or half of the estimated value of the oil reserves.”

“Mr. Correa spent six years in a campaign to advance the proposal but never managed to persuade wealthy nations to pay,” the Times noted. “Many young Ecuadoreans, though, were persuaded. When Mr. Correa announced that the proposal had failed and that drilling would begin, many started protesting.”

Yasunidos ultimately collected around 757,000 signatures for the proposed ban on oil exploration in Yasuní — nearly 200,000 more than required to bring a referendum to a vote in Ecuador.

“The uncontacted Tagaeri, Dugakaeri, and Taromenane have for years seen their lands invaded, firstly by evangelical missionaries, then by oil companies,” said Sarah Shenker, head of the Survival International’s Uncontacted Tribes campaign, following the vote. “Now, at last, they have some hope of living in peace once more. We hope this prompts greater recognition that all uncontacted peoples must have their territories protected if they’re to survive, and thrive.”

Sunday’s vote makes Ecuador the first country to restrict fossil fuel extraction through the citizen referendum process, according to Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani leader.

“Yasuní, an area of one million hectares, is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth,” Nenquimo wrote in a recent op-ed for The Guardian. “There are more tree species in a single hectare of Yasuní than across Canada and the United States combined. Yasuní is also the home of the Tagaeri and Taromenane communities: the last two Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in Ecuador.”

“Can you imagine the immense size of one million hectares?” Nenquimo added. “The recent fires in Quebec burned a million hectares of forest. And so the oil industry hopes to burn Yasuní. It has already begun in fact, with the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil project on the eastern edge of the park.”

Ecuadorians’ decision to reject oil drilling in the precious ecosystem drew applause from around the world.

“Historic and wonderful,” responded the climate group Extinction Rebellion Global. “Thank you and congratulations to the people of Ecuador for protecting their people, land, nature, future, and those of the rest of the world, too.

The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative — a global campaign that works to accelerate the transition to renewable energy — added that “the historic vote sets a remarkable example for other countries in democratizing climate politics.”

This story has been updated to include a statement from Survival International.

Rickets – a disease associated with Victorian-era slums – is on the rise in Scotland, while other conditions linked to poverty and malnutrition are also increasing across the UK. On the rise: rickets and other diseases

Rickets is a skeletal disease caused by a sustained lack of Vitamin D. It can lead to skeletal deformities such as bowed legs or knock knees. Research has linked rickets to a lack of exposure to sunlight and Vitamin D, which is found in foods like oily fish and eggs. It largely disappeared from Britain more than half a century ago. This was after government and health service efforts to improve the public’s diet and exposure to sunlight. However, it’s now on the rise again.

In Scotland, a total of 442 cases of rickets were recorded in 2022, compared to 354 in 2018 – a 25% increase. Most of the cases were recorded in the Greater Glasgow and Clyde area, with 356 diagnoses.

Glasgow is one of the most deprived local authority areas in Scotland. 32% of all children in the city were estimated to be living in poverty in 2021-2022. According to the latest data from 2019, men living in the most deprived areas of the city on average live 15.4 years less than those in the most affluent parts. For women, the gap has increased from 8.6 to 11.6 years in recent times.

Some 482 cases of rickets were also found across England. Back in Scotland, and data collated by the Times showed 112 cases of tuberculosis in 2022, another disease which historically had been got under control. There was a sharp rise in scarlet fever diagnosis, with 223 cases in 2022 compared with 39 the year before. Meanwhile, in England there were 171 cases of scurvy in 2022, with three recorded in Scotland. This is a disease linked to Vitamin C deficiency.

People are poor in the UK – poverty has increased, and it set to continue to do so. With think tank the Resolution Foundation forecasting that child poverty is set to reach its highest levels since since 1998/88 in 2027/28, it’s likely that without action, the increase in Victorian-era diseases will only continue.

A new study suggests children near oil and gas wells are 5-7 times more likely to develop lymphoma.

After dozens of childhood cancer cases surfaced in Southwestern Pennsylvania in 2019, state health officials embarked on a multi-study project to determine whether the region’s boom in oil and gas extraction might be to blame. This week, the results of that work are in: Epidemiologists at the University of Pittsburgh, which was contracted to do the research, found evidence that minors living close to fracking sites are over 5 times more likely to develop a rare type of childhood cancer. They also found a greatly increased risk of asthma attacks and lowered birth weights.

The eight counties that make up Southwestern Pennsylvania comprise one of the nation’s most important fossil fuel-producing regions. Much of the state’s natural gas is buried thousands of feet beneath the earth, under sheets of fine-grained rock known as shale. These once-inaccessible fuel reserves were unlocked in the early 2000s with the widespread adoption of fracking, a method of fuel extraction that involves injecting huge volumes of water and other chemicals underground to shatter bedrock and free up oil and gas reserves. The number of fracking wells has increased more than tenfold over the last two decades, and Pennsylvania is second only to Texas in the number of wells it contains.

While previous research has identified numerous chemicals used in fracking as capable of causing cancer — among them formaldehyde, hexavalent chromium, benzene, and ethylene oxide — the science that actually links fracking directly to adverse public health outcomes is still coming into view. This week’s studies helped to fill this gap by using existing medical records from the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

The authors analyzed cancer incidence data from 2010 through 2019, which included 498 total cases in children born and diagnosed in the eight-county study area. Of the four types of cancer analyzed, they found significant evidence that children living within five miles of an active oil and gas well were 5 to 7 times more likely to develop lymphoma. They did not find evidence that the other three childhood cancers — leukemia, brain tumors, and bone cancers — were associated with proximity to oil and gas development.

However, James Fabisiak, an author on all three studies that were released this week, said that doesn’t mean a connection to those cancers can be ruled out. A separate state-wide study from Yale University last year found a link between fracking and a subtype of leukemia in children aged 2 to 7.

“In any scientific study like this, you always have some uncertainty about the negative result,” Fabisiak told Grist. “If I had more patients, if I had more sample size, might I find a statistically significant difference?”

The researchers wanted to understand how each phase of the fracking process affects the health of nearby residents. Before workers start injecting fluid into the earth, they often have to clear sites, build roads, and drill deep crevices in the ground. The subsequent fracking phase of the process is typically short, lasting only about three to five days, while the production phase, when fuel is actually extracted from the ground, takes much longer — from a few weeks to decades.

The studies analyzed records of more than 46,000 patients, aged 5 through 90, over the past two years, and found that people with asthma are 4 to 5 times more likely to have an asthma attack if they live near a fracking well during production. The researchers also connected this phase of the fracking process to lower birth weights. On average, babies born to people living near oil wells during the production process were 1 ounce smaller at birth. (The researchers noted that such a difference does not usually pose a significant health risk.)

Fabisiak said that he found the findings of the asthma study to be most troubling, given how widespread the condition is — more than 25 million Americans have asthma.

“I have a son who grew up with asthma, and I know the burden of what that particular disease has on an individual in a family,” he said.

The studies were not able to identify what particular hazard connected with fracking caused the adverse health effects that they observed in Southwestern Pennsylvania, but it builds on research documenting the relationship between fossil fuel development and asthma and birth defects in other parts of the world. It’s well-known that flaring, a practice that involves burning off unwanted gas, can generate substantial air pollution, and that the chemicals used in fracking, if not properly extracted and disposed of, can leak into the soil and groundwater, exposing nearby residents for prolonged periods. Fabisiak said that drawing a direct link between those hazards and poor health outcomes should be the work of future studies.

Replace the word stop with keep whenever applicable

The future is here, robots are out here parking our cars, cleaning our floors, and now delivery food and groceries to communities across America. But if we’re to succeed in this new robot-run world, we need to learn to live with our autonomous friends, and not keep robbing the little delivery robots.

Because that’s what’s happening in some communities that have started rolling out delivery robots to carry out grocery runs and drop off takeout orders. According to Autoweek, businesses in Los Angeles and Greenville, NC, have reported thefts from their delivery bots.

The LA delivery robots operate across West Hollywood and were built by a company called Serve Robotics. So far, operators in the area have reported the theft of goods from these robots, such as food. As Autoweek reports:

Early on delivery robot developers have tried to allay commercial customers’ concerns over the potential for theft from robots, showcasing locked compartments and plenty of surveillance tech on the robots themselves, in addition to loud sirens. After a honeymoon period of sorts early on in the pandemic where robots were generally left alone, this is no longer the case, and sirens aren’t stopping acts of theft and vandalism in all cases.

The robberies aren’t limited to California, and reports have also emerged of vandalism affecting GrubHub robots operating on the East Carolina University campus in Greenville, NC. There, robots have been found flipped upside down and have even been discovered in a creek.

In order to protect the bots, they are equipped with all manner of surveillance tech. But actually prosecuting people for stealing from these machines is proving much trickier than it is for people who shoplift from a physical store.

Despite the crimes falling under the same legislation for theft and vandalism, Autoweek reports that the low priority for police forces investigating such incidents means prosecution for these crimes remains unlikely.

Still, while the spate of robberies appears to be spreading, robot operators across the country say their little worker bots are still managing to hit a 99.9% delivery completion rate.

A year after the far-right Mises Caucus took over the Libertarian Party, its membership and financial numbers are down. Some state parties, including New Mexico, Virginia and Massachusetts, have splintered or disaffiliated from the national party. Leaked documents Hatewatch obtained show the Libertarian National Committee is squabbling and worried that their takeover is “turning into a disaster.”

Members of the national Libertarian Party (LP) leadership board for months have squabbled and aired concerns about the LP’s challenges under the leadership of the far-right Mises Caucus (MC), according to a cache of leaked documents Hatewatch obtained.

The leak contains hundreds of pages of text messages, group chats and confidential memos between members of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC). Hatewatch received the leak from John Hudak, a libertarian critic of the MC.

Members of the LNC, which steers the national party, have acknowledged the leak in publicly available communications.

The leak appears to come from Miguel Duque, an MC-affiliated LNC representative from Washington state. In a document titled, “START HERE The Takeover has failed by Miguel and Anna Johnson Duque,” Duque’s wife appears to detail their reasons for leaking the documents. Metadata suggests the Duques created the document on Aug. 13. The departure of Lainie Huston, the former interim executive director of the LP, who announced she was leaving her position on July 31 after internal conflicts, appears to have motivated the couple in part. The documents include memos, Discord group chats and text messages between the Duques and LNC members.

The Duques blamed the LNC’s failures on a “lack of vision, which leads back to” LNC chair Angela McArdle. Miguel Duque is still on the LNC, and the documents suggest he and his wife are concerned with staffing issues and a slow response to challenges the LP has faced over fundraising and membership. The Duques claimed these challenges are made worse by the LNC’s inability to obtain “functional data” through software “tools.” The documents detail concerns about CiviCRM, a nonprofit donor fundraising software and internal conflicts between LNC members.

The MC won control of the LP’s national governing body at its national convention held in Reno, Nevada, in 2022. McArdle won the position of chair of the LNC with over 69% of the vote that year. MC candidates won two-thirds of LNC positions at the convention. MC members considered the victory a “takeover” and called it the “Reno Reset.”

“We believe the massive opportunity of the Takeover / Reno Reset has thus far been utterly squandered, that this Party is being severely injured by the avoidable mistakes by leadership outlined here,” the Duque’s document states.

McArdle and others lauded their victory as a turn from what they viewed as left-wing management by the LP’s former LNC. The new leaders stripped the LP’s platform of its pro-abortion rights plank and began posting pro-secession rhetoric. They also stripped the platform of its plank that condemned bigotry as “irrational and repugnant.”

After Hatewatch published an article about the MC’s far-right rhetoric and ties, members of the newly formed LNC attempted to pass a resolution condemning the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as “irrational and repugnant.” The resolution failed.

When asked for comment, Miguel Duque responded that he condemns the SPLC “as irrational and repugnant,” referencing the failed resolution. However, in a text message to McArdle contained in the leak, Anna Johnson Duque said she was “secretly thrilled” the resolution failed due to internal LNC politics.

McArdle and others thought the turn to far-right rhetoric and the MC’s management would appeal to Libertarians, who McArdle believed were “far more right leaning” than the MC. McArdle said during a debate for the position of LNC chair that the MC would “make this [party] functional and not embarrassing for you.”

The leaked documents show McArdle has waning confidence in the Reno Reset. “The takeover is turning into a disaster,” McArdle said in a confidential memo from May that the leak contains. “Members have asked me what we are doing. We spend lots of time in executive session, dealing with lawsuits and personnel issues,” she wrote in the memo, titled “LNC Dysfunction - Is There A Realistic Path Forward?”

The memo does not explicitly state the nature of the lawsuits. The LNC has filed one lawsuit against the eight Michigan Libertarian candidates over their use of the LP trademark after a leadership dispute in that state. The candidates ran separately from the LP.

The LP has further lost state affiliates. New Mexico and Virginia both disaffiliated, though the LP organized new parties in both states. Massachusetts has two Libertarian parties: One controlled by the MC and another that splintered over concerns about the MC’s far-right rhetoric. Pennsylvania has the Keystone Party, which libertarians formed after they saw the LP as “veering too hard to the right.”

McArdle also aired concerns over the LP’s finances. Publicly available monthly reports that LNC officials prepare have showed that membership and financials have taken a sustained a steady fall since the MC took over. According to the June 2023 membership report, the LP’s “sustaining members” – those who have donated at least $25 in the 12 preceding months, according to the LP’s bylaws – have dropped to slightly over 14,000. This was a 6.5% drop from the preceding month, and a drop of nearly 3,000 since Dec. 2022.

“In the face of financial challenges, we have lost the purpose and vision of what we set out to do and are thrashing around like a drowning person. It is very hard to save someone who is thrashing about,” McArdle wrote in the document.

McArdle echoed the Duques and said the LP’s staff say their “main fundraising tool and data are a disaster.”

When asked for comment about the leak and her remarks in the memo, McArdle said: “We’re in an excellent place right now, we’re going to kick ass in 2024, and prove wrong the depraved vultures who pay attention to this sort of gossip.”

The Duques wrote, “Fundraising and membership are down for various reasons, and the data is so wrecked that it’s very difficult to objectively pinpoint the real reasons or the severity.”

Hatewatch asked Holly Ward, the former chair of the Virginia Libertarian Party that disaffiliated, what she believed to be the reason for the drop in funds and members.

After seeing portions of the leaked material, Ward told Hatewatch it “is clear that even the Mises Caucus knows that what they set out to accomplish has failed, as any movement built on hatred and division is destined to fail.”

She concluded: “They have, for a time, been able to lie to their supporters about this fact, but their internal conversations make clear they are no longer able to lie to themselves.”

China is the world’s biggest manufacturer of renewable energy equipment and is making plans for how to dispose of it once it stops working

China, the world’s biggest renewable equipment manufacturer, will set up a recycling system for ageing wind turbines and solar panels as it tries to tackle the growing volumes of waste generated by the industry, the state planner said.

China has ramped up its wind and solar manufacturing capabilities in a bid to decarbonise its economy and ease its dependence on coal, and it is now on track to meet its goal to bring total wind and solar capacity to 1,200 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, up from 758 GW at the end of last year.

But as older projects are replaced and decommissioned, waste volumes are set to soar, with large amounts of capacity already approaching retirement age, posing big environmental risks.

To cope with the challenge, China will draw up new industrial standards and rules detailing the proper ways to decommission, dismantle and recycle wind and solar facilities, the National Development and Reform Commission, said on Wednesday.

The state planning agency said that China would have a “basically mature” full-process recycling system for wind turbines and solar panels by the end of the decade.

Photovoltaic (PV) panels have a lifespan of around 25 years, and many of China’s projects are already showing significant signs of wear and tear, China’s official Science and Technology Daily newspaper said in June.

The paper cited experts as saying that China would need to recycle 1.5 million metric tons of PV modules by 2030, rising to around 20 million tons in 2050.

The problem of waste from the renewable energy sector has become a growing global concern. Total waste from solar projects alone could reach 212 million tons a year by 2050, according to one scenario drawn up by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) last year.

Despite Beijing’s sponge city project, the capital was overwhelmed by recent floods with dozens dying and a new “sponge airport” shut down

Recent devastating floods in Beijing have put China’s drive to create “sponge cities” which can handle extreme rain to the test.

Since 2013, China has been trying to make cities like Beijing more flood-proof by replacing roads, pavements and rooftops with natural materials like soil that soak up water and by giving more space to water bodies like lakes to absorb stormwater.

But despite these measures, massive amounts of rainfall in recent weeks caused floods which killed at least 33 people, destroyed tens of thousands of homes and shut down the Chinese capital’s second busiest airport.

Experts told Climate Home the flooding shows the limited progress China has made on its plan to invest $1 trillion into sponge cities by 2030 – with the city still largely concrete. Sponge airport overwhelmed

Even new infrastructure, build with the sponge city concept in mind, could not cope with the rains.

Daxing airport opened a few months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Its builders described it as a “sponge airport” as it was equipped with plants on its roof, a huge wetland and an artificial lake the size of over 1,000 Olympic swimming pools.

Despite these measures, the runways flooded on July 30 and it had to cancel over 50 flights.

Waters diverted

The government tried to collect the rain in 155 reservoirs in the Hai River Basin, but the measure proved ineffective in controlling the deluge.

About 50 years ago, the basin –a natural sponge–was locked with embankments and reservoirs to manage the water flow.

In recent years though, these structures have made flooding worse as climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall. These structures lead to overflow, collapse and the authorities have blown them up to ease flooding.

Reuters reported that flood waters locked in reservoirs were diverted to low-lying populated land in Zhuozhuo, a small city around 80km from Beijing, to flush out the stormwater from the country’s national capital.

Residents of Zhuozhou were angry at the government’s response, Reuters reported. The government reacted by shutting down criticism on social media. More work needed

Experts argued that these problems show that, rather than abandoning the sponge city project, China and Beijing need to double down and make them better.

Kongjian Yu is the founder of Turenscape, a company involved in the project. He said that just “maybe 1% or 10%” of the city has been converted to a sponge city.

The government’s target is 20% by 2030. “We have a long way to go,” he said.

Yu added that sponge cities are worth doing not just because they control floods but for managing droughts and refilling groundwater supplies too.

Tony Wong, professor of sustainable development at Monash University, said that progress was always going to be slow as “it takes a long time and a lot of money” to convert a city like Beijing, with lots of people and concrete buildings crammed into a small area, into a sponge city.

More work is needed, says Wong, because Beijing and many other cities lack effective urban planning, and there is no provision for a safe channeling of extreme floodwater.

“What the city needs is the inclusion of green corridors, just like Singapore – another high-density city- has done to transport excess stormwater into low-lying areas to prevent loss of lives and property.”

If China pulls this off it could become an example for many developing countries with high-density cities struggling to control urban flooding, added Wong.