Open Thread August 31, 2023 Mixed News Topics
Not Everything We Call Cancer Should Be Called Cancer, rsn.org.
The NYPD Denied Our Request for Body Camera Footage of a “Friendly Fire” Killing. Here’s How We Got It Anyway, ProPublica, Mike Hayes.
Clarence Thomas officially discloses private jet trips on GOP donor Harlan Crow’s plane, CNN Politics, Ariane de Vogue and Devan Cole.
Stay away from Arizona. That’s what Canada essentially is telling its people, msn.com, Phil Boas.
Arizona groundwater is in trouble. But how much longer does it have? azcentral.com, Joanna Allhands.
Biden administration picks 10 Medicaid drugs for negotiations, qz.com, Ananya Bhattacharya. Two years later, wow!
US applications for jobless claims inch back down as companies hold on to their employees, qz.com, Matt Ott.
US economic growth for last quarter is revised down to a 2.1% annual rate, qz.com, Paul Wiseman.
Open Thread August 23, 2013 – Starting Aug. 1, the sale of energy inefficient lightbulbs was banned in the U.S., Angry Bear.
Humanity’s Ancestors Nearly Died Out, Genetic Study Suggests
NY Times – August 31
The population crashed following climate change about 930,000 years ago, scientists concluded. Other experts aren’t convinced by the analysis.
Genomic inference of a human super bottleneck in Mid-Pleistocene transition
24 rabbits were introduced in Australia in 1859.
Energy Dept. Announces $12 Billion to Help Factories Convert to Electric Cars
NY Times – August 31
The grants and loans, provided under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, are meant to keep autoworkers’ jobs in their communities.
Been thinking; we (Biden anyway) are willing to step up and get in a big war with China, defending Taiwan.
Meantime, the president of Syria, Assad, is systematically carpet bombing his country into submission — block by block. We could have stopped that without any major war. Assad needed Russian help to hold on to (what’s left of) his country. We could have shot down a couple of Russian fighter bombers — with fair warning. In my time the Russians knowingly shot down two Korean airliners that bumbled unknowingly into their precious airspace — the most recent with a 747 with a US Congressman on board. Make a lot of noise about their military earth scorchers as they go about bombing hospitals and schools, trying to cause maximum civilian damage — while harking back to their treatment of civilian airliners — and that should help the Russians with any loss of face forcing them to start a big war.
Then, we leave half the population of Afghanistan — 20 million females — living under house arrest. We could go back into Afghan on the basis of you-don’t-shoot-at-us-we-won’t-shoot-at you — there is absolutely nothing they could do about it. We could set up areas where rebels and women to move about safely — again, there is absolutely nothing they could do about it — and let the chips fall where they may.
But, Syria and Afghanistan are third-world poor — and Taiwan is rich like us — and we don’t feel any compulsion to save poor peoples at minimal cost — while we are ready to take on the biggest fight of all for our fellow middle classers.
It’s all about who we identify with apparently.
Do the google on this and you get almost nothing but items from the past several years about how US and China are willing to go to war over Taiwan, even though no’formal treaty’ exists between US & Taiwan. Go figue,
In prior years, as far back as JFK vs Dick Nixon in 1960, defense of Taiwan by US was an issue. It pretty much became one after (as the GOP said) ‘Truman lost China to Mao & the Commies’ and never let up on that POV.
FWIW, here’s a piece from the Hoover Institute, a conservative think-tank at Stanford that reviews the history.
Will America Defend Taiwan? Here’s What History Says
Xi Jinping (Wikipedia)
Since Xi came to power in China in 2013, reclaiming Taiwan has always been a priority.
BBC: China sees self-ruled Taiwan as a breakaway province that will eventually be under Beijing’s control.
@Denis,
Much as it pains me to admit it, Trump was right to take us out of Afghanistan. We went in to get bin Laden, and he’s long gone, so that rationale doesn’t exist. The Taliban were never an existential threat to the US, unless you consider opium growing a threat. For 20 years, American lives and treasure were poured into Afghanistan to prop up a failed regime. Afghanistan has been called the graveyard of empires because of its role in the decline of the British Empire and the USSR. Instead of pretending to be nation-building, we needed long ago to leave Afghanistan to the Afghanis.
In Afghanistan, the US was the foreign state that invaded and occupied. If the PRC invades and attempts to occupy Taiwan, they, not the US, will be the invader. Drawing comparisons between American interests in Afghanistan and Taiwan is, at best, risky and to me seems specious.
Denis:
With all the issues with Covid, it is good to see the old timers come around Angry Bear such as you and Little John. I hope all is well by you.
Factories May Be Leaving China, but Trade Ties Are Stronger Than They Seem
NY Times – August 29
The United States is trying to lessen its dependence on Chinese goods, but research is showing how tough it is to truly alter global supply chains.
Global Supply Chains: The Looming “Great Reallocation”
Laura Alfaro, Harvard Business School and Davin Chor, Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth documented a decrease in the share of US imports from China and a corresponding increase in the share of US imports from Vietnam and Mexico between 2017 and 2022.
my update on Covid for my weekly environmental news emailed newsletter:
@rjs,
“how can one virus suddenly wake up one morning and find it had mutated 30 times overnight? and that all 30 of its mutations were viable? ..it’s difficult for me to understand how such a major change could have possibly occurred as part of what should naturally be a slow-moving evolutionary process…”
Part of the answer to your question is that this didn’t happen instantaneously in a single virus, but is the result of accumulation of mutations in a very large population of viruses over a period of time. The thinking is that it most likely happens in a chronically infected host that harbors an ongoing infection for a long time. Of course, lots of other mutations also appeared and were selected against because, e.g., they impair infectivity and/or are more immunogenic.
It looks like this variant is actually less problematic:
“Two independent labs have basically shown that BA.2.86 essentially is not a further immune escape compared with current variants,” Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and leader of one of the labs, told CNN.
Their results align with earlier experiments by labs in China and Sweden. Taken together, the data suggests that BA.2.86 will not be as troublesome as experts had feared. In short, this one seems to be a “scariant.”
“>https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/03/health/covid-new-variant-pirola-early-lab-results/index.html
China’s Economic Pain Is a Test of Xi’s Fixation With Control
NY Times – September 6
The slowdown is posing perhaps the most sustained challenge to President Xi Jinping’s agenda in over a decade in power. He now faces a tangle of difficult choices.
(Tucked away here where few will ever find it.)
In Xi Jinping’s strategy for securing China’s rise, the Communist Party keeps a firm grip on the economy, steering it out of an old era dependent on real estate and smokestack industries to a new one driven by innovation and consumer spending.
But he may have to relinquish some of that control, as that strategy comes under pressure.
Consumers are gloomy. Private investment is sluggish. A big property firm is near collapse. Local governments face crippling debt. Youth unemployment has continued to rise. The economic setbacks are eroding Mr. Xi’s image of imperious command, and emerging as perhaps the most sustained and thorny challenge to his agenda in over a decade in power. …
i’ve brought up the failure of US energy and climate policy under Biden to consider full life cycle impacts of their so-called green projects before…here’s another particularly egregious case:
DOE’s error-ridden analysis on coal CCS project threatens climate and engagement goals —
by Emily Grubert, an associate professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame and a former deputy assistant secretary of carbon management at the U.S. Department of Energy.
The U.S. is preparing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to deploy technologies that could help us reach climate goals — both through grants under 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and subsidies under 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act. But whether that spending will actually reduce climate pollution is unclear in some cases, notably for carbon capture and storage, or CCS, 45Q tax credits and for hydrogen 45V tax credits.
A recent environmental assessment, or EA, issued by the U.S. Department of Energy for a CCS project at a coal-fired power plant in North Dakota, Project Tundra at the Milton R. Young station, includes numerous egregious errors that call into question the department’s ability to figure this out — which could have major implications for the success of much bigger programs.
The core issue is this: if we emit GHGs while doing something to reduce GHGs, we need to make sure that the reductions outweigh the new emissions — preferably by a lot. We’d also typically like to know if we’re creating new problems with our new activity — think slave labor in mineral supply chains, or water contamination from chemical use.
One common way to evaluate these issues is to use life cycle assessment, or LCA, and related methods, which seek to look at all the different kinds of impacts that an activity might cause, over the entire value chain, or life cycle – sometimes called “cradle to grave.” (When we only look at one issue, like GHGs, we sometimes call this “life cycle analysis.”)
In the case of GHGs, these evaluations are exceptionally important for processes that use a lot of energy, especially fossil energy. And the inputs aren’t always straightforward to identify, or estimate. For example, if you make hydrogen from electricity and increase overall demand, which is partly served by fossil fuels, how do you decide which electricity emissions belong to the hydrogen? If a carbon capture unit is added to a power plant and the investment allows the plant to keep operating for another 20 years, how should you think about emissions from the plant that would not have happened if the plant had closed instead?
As a life cycle assessment scholar and the former deputy assistant secretary of carbon management at DOE, where I dealt with hydrogen and carbon capture, I know how nuanced these questions are. They’re difficult even for LCA experts, particularly when they involve questions about what would have happened otherwise, which is fundamentally speculative. And they matter — one of my recent analyses suggests that doing carbon capture poorly could lead to $4 trillion in taxpayer expenditures on subsidies that increase GHG emissions.
In other Economic News…
G20 Summit Leaders Meet Under Long Shadow of Ukraine War
NY Times – Just In
India, the host, hoped to advance an economic agenda to aid poorer nations even as the Russian and Chinese leaders skipped the gathering.