Category Archives: Springer

The New York Times and the super-wicked problem of climate change

This weekend, the New York Times’ print subscribers will get something kind of crazy in the mail: A 66-page magazine with only a single article — and it’s on climate change. The long-form piece, written by Nathaniel Rich and titled “Losing Earth,” is online now and makes for fascinating, if sometimes depressing, reading. Between 1979 and 1989, Rich writes, humanity almost solved the problem of global warming.

The piece follows climate scientist James Hansen and environmental lobbyist Rafe Pomerance as they try to get pretty much anyone — politicians, the media, energy companies — to engage and act on the issue of climate change. But while they managed to move global warming onto the public stage, the opportunity for binding international action came and went with the 1989 U.N. climate conference in the Netherlands. The U.S. delegation, led by a recalcitrant Reagan appointee, balked when faced with an actual agreement.

“Why didn’t we act?” Rich asks, almost plaintively, in his prologue. He argues that the primary barriers to inaction today — widespread climate denial and propagandizing by far-right groups and fossil fuel companies — had not emerged by the mid-1980s. “Almost nothing stood in our way — except ourselves,” he writes.

Rich has already come under fire for this perspective. Many writers have complained that he is letting fossil fuel companies and Republicans off the hook. But is it true? Is human nature itself to blame for inaction?

A fair number of scholars agree — to a point. For a long time, climate change has been called a “wicked problem” or even a “super-wicked problem” by behavioral economists and policy experts. As political scientist Steve Rayner has written, climate change has no simple solution, no silver bullet. It is scientifically complex and comes with deep uncertainties about the future. It cuts across boundaries, both disciplinary and national. Its worst effects will occur in the future, not in the here and now. And it requires large-scale, systemic changes to society.

Unfortunately, humans suck at dealing with wicked problems, like poverty and nuclear weapons. Economist Richard Thaler’s work shows that we are only rational some of the time; and, when we are rational, we’re also pretty selfish. We think about ourselves more than others, and we think about the present more than future generations. “We worry about the future,” Rich writes. “But how much, exactly? The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little.”

This idea — that the long timescale of climate change has made it difficult for us to act on it — is the theoretical underpinning of “Losing Earth.” It’s no one’s fault that we didn’t act in the 1980s. But at the same time it’s everyone’s fault.

Rich isn’t wrong that the timescale makes a difference, and that humans struggle with an issue as global and complex as climate change. But his sweeping vision of human nature at times takes on a tinge of inevitability. It reminds me, in a way, of Garrett Hardin’s 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons” — another dark theory on collective irrationality. Hardin argued that, as a species, we would always tend towards overuse of shared resources and overpopulation. His thesis was hugely influential, and continues to be a staple in environmental research.

The thing is: Hardin was wrong. Forty years after his paper debuted in Science, economist Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing that communities around the world do successfully manage and share resources — even over many generations. They do it through cooperation, communication, and small-scale local institutions. She was famous for showing that environmental problems can be solved from the bottom-up.

And that’s what Rich misses, in his otherwise fascinating and in-depth piece for the Times. It’s hard to say what would have happened if the United States had signed the 1989 agreement. As Robinson Meyer notes in the Atlantic: “There are too many counterfactuals to consider.”

But climate change, as a super-wicked problem lasting generations, could never have been “solved” in one fell swoop. The decade of climate action that Rich traces is only a small window into a fairly high level of decision-making: climate policy at the federal level. And, according to experts like Rayner, wicked problems need to also be addressed at the levels of states, cities, and provinces — not just by governments and nation-states.

The good news: That’s already happening. States, municipalities, neighborhoods, and community groups are already working to address climate change to the best of their ability. Many have redoubled their efforts in the Trump era. In 2006, Rayner predicted that states would file lawsuits against the federal government — 12 years later, climate lawsuits are common, and are even brought by children.

So did we really “lose Earth” in 1989? Of course not. But it is a sobering reminder of how much work we have left. “Human nature has brought us to this place,” Rich writes. “Perhaps human nature will one day bring us through.”

Read More – 

The New York Times and the super-wicked problem of climate change

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, Springer, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The New York Times and the super-wicked problem of climate change

Physics of the Future – Michio Kaku

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Physics of the Future
How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
Michio Kaku

Genre: Physics

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: March 15, 2011

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Imagine, if you can, the world in the year 2100. In Physics of the Future , Michio Kaku—the New York Times bestselling author of Physics of the Impossible —gives us a stunning, provocative, and exhilarating vision of the coming century based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists who are already inventing the future in their labs. The result is the most authoritative and scientifically accurate description of the revolutionary developments taking place in medicine, computers, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, energy production, and astronautics. In all likelihood, by 2100 we will control computers via tiny brain sensors and, like magicians, move objects around with the power of our minds. Artificial intelligence will be dispersed throughout the environment, and Internet-enabled contact lenses will allow us to access the world’s information base or conjure up any image we desire in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile, cars will drive themselves using GPS, and if room-temperature superconductors are discovered, vehicles will effortlessly fly on a cushion of air, coasting on powerful magnetic fields and ushering in the age of magnetism. Using molecular medicine, scientists will be able to grow almost every organ of the body and cure genetic diseases. Millions of tiny DNA sensors and nanoparticles patrolling our blood cells will silently scan our bodies for the first sign of illness, while rapid advances in genetic research will enable us to slow down or maybe even reverse the aging process, allowing human life spans to increase dramatically. In space, radically new ships—needle-sized vessels using laser propulsion—could replace the expensive chemical rockets of today and perhaps visit nearby stars. Advances in nanotechnology may lead to the fabled space elevator, which would propel humans hundreds of miles above the earth’s atmosphere at the push of a button. But these astonishing revelations are only the tip of the iceberg . Kaku also discusses emotional robots, antimatter rockets, X-ray vision, and the ability to create new life-forms, and he considers the development of the world economy. He addresses the key questions: Who are the winner and losers of the future? Who will have jobs, and which nations will prosper? All the while, Kaku illuminates the rigorous scientific principles, examining the rate at which certain technologies are likely to mature, how far they can advance, and what their ultimate limitations and hazards are. Synthesizing a vast amount of information to construct an exciting look at the years leading up to 2100, Physics of the Future is a thrilling, wondrous ride through the next 100 years of breathtaking scientific revolution. From the Hardcover edition.

See the original article here:  

Physics of the Future – Michio Kaku

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, Knopf, ONA, PUR, Ringer, Springer, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Physics of the Future – Michio Kaku

A brief history of fake climate news in the mainstream media

Source:  

A brief history of fake climate news in the mainstream media

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Hagen, LAI, Landmark, ONA, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on A brief history of fake climate news in the mainstream media

The Deliciously Fishy Case of the "Codfather"

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The fake Russians met the Codfather on June 3, 2015, at an inconspicuous warehouse on South Front Street in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The Codfather’s lair is a green and white building with a peaked roof, fishing gear strewn across a fenced-in backyard, and the words “Carlos Seafood” stamped above the door. The distant gray line of the Atlantic Ocean is visible behind a towering garbage heap. In the 19th century, New Bedford’s sons voyaged aboard triple-masted ships in pursuit of sperm whales; now they chase cod, haddock, and scallops. Every year, more than $350 million worth of seafood passes through this waterfront, a significant slice of which is controlled by the Codfather, the most powerful fisherman in America’s most valuable seafood port.

“The Codfather” is the local media’s nickname for Carlos Rafael, a stocky mogul with drooping jowls, a smooth pate, and a backstory co-scripted by Horatio Alger and Machiavelli. He was born in the Azores, a chain of Portuguese islands scattered in the Atlantic. As a teenager in 1968, he emigrated to New Bedford, where he later took a job in a fish-processing plant. (More than a third of New Bedford’s residents have Portuguese ancestors; many can trace their heritage back to the days when Yankee whalers picked up crew members from the Azores during trans-Atlantic voyages.) Rafael rose to foreman at a seafood distribution facility and later founded his own company. He bought his first boat in 1981, and then another and another, until he owned more than 40 vessels, many christened with Hellenic names—the Athena, the Poseidon, the Hera. Local newspapers hung on his pronouncements, dubbing him the “Waterfront Wizard” and the “Oracle of the Ocean.”

Carlos Seafood, owned by fishing mogul Carlos Rafael, in New Bedford, Massachusetts

The Codfather also ran afoul of the law. In the 1980s he was sentenced to six months in prison for tax evasion, and in 1994 he was indicted—and acquitted—for price-fixing. In 2011, federal agents confiscated an 881-pound tuna that had been illegally netted aboard his Apollo. “I am a pirate,” he once told regulators. “It’s your job to catch me.” Law-abiding rivals resented him and grudgingly admired him. “He has no compunction about telling you how he’s screwing you,” says one ex-fisherman.

By 2015, though, Rafael was 63 years old, with assets worth tens of millions of dollars, and he was ready to cash out. According to court documents, that January he let slip that he was selling his boats and dealership; five months later, three men appeared at his warehouse to negotiate. It was an unsavory trio: two members of a Russian crime syndicate and their broker. That was fine by Rafael, who swiftly divulged his business’ fraudulent underpinnings. Carlos Seafood, he said, was worth $175 million—more than eight times what he’d claimed to the IRS. To prove it, Rafael reached under his desk and procured an envelope labeled “Cash.” Each year, he boasted, he sold thousands of pounds of under-the-table fish to a New York dealer named Michael, who gave Rafael a “bag of jingles”—cash—for the contraband. “You’ll never find a better laundromat than this motherfucker,” the Codfather bragged.

Rafael’s fraud, which he termed “the dance,” was a triumph of vertical integration. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requires fishing boats to report the species and weight of their catch, among other information, each time they return from sea. Seafood dealers, meanwhile, have to submit their own reports detailing what they purchase from incoming vessels, which NOAA uses to verify fishermen’s accounts. Rafael, though, was exploiting a gaping loophole: Because he owned both boats and a dealership, he could instruct his captains to misreport their catch, and then he could falsify the dealer reports to corroborate the lie. A corrupt sheriff’s deputy named Antonio Freitas allegedly helped him smuggle the cash to Portugal through Boston’s Logan International Airport. (Freitas now faces charges for his role in the operation.)

As the Codfather described his fraud to his new acquaintances with glee, he seemed to catch occasional glimpses of his own carelessness. “You could be the IRS in here. This could be a clusterfuck. So I’m trusting you,” he said. Then again, he rationalized, the IRS wouldn’t be clever enough to use Russians as rats. “Fuck me,” he said. “That would be some bad luck!”

A view of New Bedford, Massachusetts

Indeed. The man posing as the Russians’ broker was Ronald Mullett, an undercover IRS agent. Over the next eight months, Mullett’s team built its case, repeatedly meeting with Rafael and the mysterious Michael in New York City. (According to the affidavit, that was Michael Perretti, a Fulton Fish Market dealer once busted for peddling bass illegally taken from polluted waters­—though he hasn’t been charged for his connection to Rafael.) On February 26, 2016, federal agents arrested Rafael in a raid on his South Front Street warehouse, and in May he was indicted on 27 counts of fraud and other charges covering more than 800,000 pounds of fish. It appeared that the Cod­father’s kingdom had come crashing down.

The Bizarre and Inspiring Story of Iowa’s Fish Farmers

From Point Judith, Rhode Island, to Penobscot, Maine, Mullett’s affidavit received Zapruderlike scrutiny from industry observers. How could the Codfather have master­minded such a massive, undetected scam under the waterfront’s collective nose? New Bedfordians speculated about Rafael’s political connections, while environmentalists blamed neutered enforcement. To many fishermen, though, the crime’s roots ran even deeper, to a system that benefited empire builders like Rafael at the expense of small boats. Like farming, banking, and a host of other industries, commercial fishing has always been subject to consolidation and concentration, the accumulation of power and capital in the hands of a few at the expense of many. In some places, regulations have forestalled the process; in others, they’ve accelerated it. New England falls in the latter category: In 1996, about 1,200 boats harvested groundfish—that’s cod, haddock, flounder, and a suite of other white, flaky bottom-dwellers—from Connecticut to Maine. By 2013, that number had dwindled to 327. “Most of the boats just rusted to the dock, like looking at a graveyard,” says Jim Kendall, a seafood consultant and ex-fisherman. “More than anyone else, Carlos was big enough to survive.”

For centuries, unchecked overfishing had devastated the schools of cod that once teemed in the northwest Atlantic, and various rules had failed to stem the crisis. So in 2009, desperate officials voted to instate a new form of regulation, called catch shares. Under catch-share systems, biologists determine the “total allowable catch,” an inviolable limit to how many pounds of, say, flounder can be extracted annually from New England waters. Managers then divvy up slices of that pie to local fishermen, who are typically free to catch their slice—or sell it or rent it out to competitors—whenever they see fit. (Think cap and trade for fish.) When each fisherman owns a stake, the rationale goes, he has an incentive to conserve: The more fish in the sea, the bigger the pie and its slices.

Catch shares can make a notoriously risky industry safer and more profitable by letting fishermen capture their share when markets and weather conditions are most favorable. After catch shares came to the West Coast sablefish industry, captains cut down on fishing during perilously windy days. Research by Tim Essington, a marine scientist at the University of Washington, suggests that while the system doesn’t always create bigger fish stocks, it produces more stable populations and catch rates. “By ending the race to fish, that may allow our monitoring and science to keep up,” Essington says.

David Goethel, front, and Justin MacLean, of Dover, New Hampshire, unload their day’s catch.

Today, catch shares cover about two-thirds of the fish caught in US waters, from red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico to king crab, the industry immortalized by Deadliest Catch, in Alaska. Catch-share programs have proliferated overseas, too, in developed countries like 27 percent of the pie.

That consolidation isn’t all bad—after all, the presence of too many boats is often what caused overfishing in the first place. Still, most catch-share programs have rules to prevent concentration. No halibut fisherman in southeast Alaska, for instance, can own more than 0.5 percent of the pie. Other fisheries reserve slices for local communities. Still others require boat owners to go to sea with their vessels, preventing armchair fishermen from stockpiling shares.

David Goethel pulls his boat into the Yankee Fishermen’s Coop in Seabrook, New Hampshire, one of the few places to access local seafood from local fishermen.

But when the New England Fishery Management Council voted for catch shares in June 2009, such safeguards weren’t part of the plan. The program already promised to be a headache—it proposed to organize fishermen into groups, called sectors, that would split their cumulative groundfish shares among members. Sectors whose members had caught more in the past would receive larger slices, an arrangement that malcontents called “rewarding the pigs.”

The council had to sort out the details in a hurry: The 2007 reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, a sort of maritime Farm Bill, mandated that all American fisheries establish catch limits by the end of 2011, and the Obama administration, a big catch-share booster, offered $16 million to help New England nail down a system. Setting accumulation limits would gum up the works: How many pounds of fish should one boat owner be allowed to acquire, how could the system prevent families from sidestepping the rules, and how should it handle fishermen whose holdings exceeded the bar? “Any kind of catch-share program should’ve come with meaningful consolidation caps, but the council punted that ball,” says David Goethel, a New Hampshire fisherman who sat on the council. “They had so much pressure to get this program done.”

The Yankee Fishermen’s Coop in Seabrook, New Hampshire

Other catch-share programs have taken pains to dilute fishing power: When the West Coast groundfish industry, long dominated by a giant company called Pacific Seafood Group, transitioned to catch shares in 2010, no boat was allowed to hold more than 2.7 percent of the total catch. After the program began, fishermen who exceeded that limit had to divest by 2015. But in insular New England, similar controls would have required busting up the Northeast’s most powerful fishing enterprise: Carlos Seafood Inc., the Codfather’s company. “He didn’t influence the process in an outward way,” says Goethel, the council’s sole dissenting vote. “But his corporation loomed over everything.”

When New England instituted its catch-share system, the Codfather was the big winner. Rafael’s initial slice was more than 12 million pounds, about 9 percent of New England’s total. Many small fishermen soon sold or leased him even more—some were eager to cash out, while others hadn’t received enough groundfish to make a living. By 2013, three years after the program began, the Codfather was raking in more than a full quarter of New England’s groundfish revenue. When a reporter from Vice visited the South Front Street warehouse that year, he found that Rafael had adorned his office with pictures of Tony Montana, the cocaine kingpin from Scarface. His aggrieved small-boat competitors, the Codfather said, were “mosquitoes on the balls of an elephant.”

And anyway, the new system, along with the disappearance of cod, took many of those small competitors out of the equation. In 2010, the first year of catch shares, more than 440 boats were catching groundfish in New England; by 2013, about 120 of those vessels had left the game. Although stringent catch limits aimed at rehabilitating cod stocks downsized the entire industry, small boats dropped out at around twice the rate of larger ones, according to federal reports. The poster child for disaster was Sector 10, a cluster of small-scale fishermen scattered along the coast south of Boston who received only a tiny slice of the pie. The collective’s groundfish revenue fell by more than half during the program’s first year. Some guys switched to other species, like lobster and squid, that weren’t subject to quotas; others dropped out. Some lost their homes. “Now there are some days when I’m the only boat out there fishing,” says Ed Barrett, a fisherman based in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and Sector 10’s former president. “It’s like, where the fuck is everyone?”

Ed Barrett, a member of the Massachusetts fishermen’s association

To be clear, the catch-share system didn’t create inequity—Rafael began swatting the mosquitoes decades before it came into play. But it drove the gap into “hyper­speed,” Barrett says. And while the Codfather’s scheme may well have predated catch shares—Rafael told Mullett he’d been conducting the dance for 30 years—consolidation can expand the scope of existing fraud, by dragging once-independent fishermen, and fishing access, into the orbit of a deep-pocketed cheater. In 2014, American Seafoods Company, the biggest player in Alaskan pollock, paid $1.75 million for skewing its scales to fool the feds. “Any industry is susceptible to corruption, and the lack of controls against consolidation is the Achilles heel of the groundfish quota system,” wrote the magazine National Fisherman after Rafael’s arrest.

And the program’s structure produced a new incentive to cheat. As you’d expect, fishermen are allowed to catch more of comparatively common species than rare ones. That can quickly become a problem: You might own a big slice of the haddock pie, but if your net happens to catch flounder, you must either stop fishing or rent more flounder quota from your peers. Rafael simply mislabeled the other kinds of groundfish as haddock, an abundant species for which he owned millions of pounds. “This is the shit we painted all week,” he told the IRS, pointing to his cooked ledgers. “See? Seven hundred…We call these haddock.”

New England’s lax enforcement created still more opportunity. While all West Coast groundfish boats carry government-­paid observers whenever they leave port, just 14 percent of groundfish trips in New England are similarly monitored. The Nature Conserv­ancy and others are experimenting with onboard electronic monitoring systems—cameras with GPS and sensors—that would supplant human overseers, but they’re years from implementation. And while the catch-share program originally called for dockside agents to prevent fraud, NOAA curtailed its efforts in 2010 after an inspector general report rebuked the agency for overzealous policing. The lack of enforcement frustrates Joshua Wiersma, the Northeast fisheries manager for the Environ­mental Defense Fund. “Unless we have effective monitoring, the odds that something like Carlos is going to happen again are pretty good,” he says.

In fact, something like Carlos is already happening again—and it’s still Carlos. In August 2016, with Rafael out of prison on a $1 million bond, his Lady Patricia was boarded by the Coast Guard for illegal fishing, according to an incident report. He’s also continued to acquire vessels. Because the Codfather has stashed control of his boats within a warren of companies all listed at the same address, it’s difficult to know exactly what he owns—but in June, his wife, Conceicao, purchased a new boat under the auspices of yet another company. The company’s name seemed to raise a middle finger at critics: Nemesis LLC.

Carlos Rafael’s arrest has, by most measures, upended New England’s fishing industry. To account for years of unreported catch, NOAA will likely recalibrate its population estimates, which could lead to further cuts to quotas. “The biggest victims are the fishermen themselves, the honest operations that are trying to make a living,” says Peter Shelley, the Massachusetts senior counsel at the Conservation Law Foundation. But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that Rafael’s arrest offers a giant reset button for a beleaguered fishery, an opportunity to redistribute the catch in a more equitable way.

On a steel-gray November morning, I drove down South Front Street, not far from the Codfather’s green warehouse, to meet a fisherman with a different approach to business.

I found Armando Estudante by his 120-foot boat, the Endurance. Estudante is a bowling ball of a man, with hands and wrists swollen by years of labor and a brushy gray mustache dangling over his upper lip. He moved to Massachusetts from Portugal in 1978 and purchased his first boat in the early ’80s.

John Tomac

These days, the Endurance fishes for scallops, shellfish that are managed by a different system. Estudante still owns a groundfish quota, but he leases it to other fishermen, often at below-market rates. “To have someone profit by staying at home while someone else goes fishing, to me, is a disgrace,” he said. “You remove the incentive for new blood to come into the fishery. That’s what you’re seeing here in the Northeast—who the fuck wants to go fishing? Because you have to pay rent to people that don’t go.”

Far better, Estudante said, to have a “boots on deck” rule that forces boat owners to run their own vessels. You don’t have to look far for an example, he added. Maine’s lobster industry is governed by such a provision and is famously self-regulating and sustainable. “It’s not such a radical idea,” Estudante insisted.

Fishy Story: Our Faux Fish Problem

For some fishermen, though, transferable catch shares evoke Winston Churchill’s quip about demo­cracy: They’re the worst form of fisheries management, except for everything else that’s been tried. Making the existing system more equitable—as some regions already have done—has long been the crusade of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, a Gloucester, Massachusetts-based group that advocates on behalf of small-scale fishermen and local seafood. NAMA’s efforts are spearheaded by Brett Tolley, a lanky, bearded descendant of four generations of Cape Cod fishermen. Tolley has spent years campaigning for systemic reforms that, among other measures to protect small boats, would include consolidation limits. In October 2015, he organized a protest in which dozens of irate fishermen stormed out of a meeting of the New England Fishery Management Council. But when the council finally published the long-awaited safeguards last year, it capped ownership at 15.5 percent of the total quota—far higher than many other fisheries, and too high to rein in even the Codfather. And while the new rules limit the amount of quota that fishermen can own, there’s no constraint on how many pounds they can rent from their peers. “To us, that’s a complete failure to deal with the problem,” Tolley says.

For all the angst that catch shares have caused, New England’s fishermen have bigger concerns. Cod, the fish that launched a thousand boats, hover at catastrophically low levels—5 percent of the target in the Gulf of Maine, and climate change is thwarting their recovery. Off-brand species like dogfish and black sea bass have flourished in New England’s warm new world, but they’ve struggled to find a niche in markets saturated with farmed salmon, shrimp, and tilapia. Resourceful small-scale fishermen have begun vending their catch through community-­supported fisheries, launching co-ops, and peddling their wares directly to restaurants—approaches that have lighter environmental impacts than industrial fishing. Yet none of this has slowed the industry’s erosion. A Trump administration proposal to slash NOAA’s budget by 17 percent—including a 5 percent cut to its subdivision, the National Marine Fisheries Service—could make fishermen’s lives more difficult by impairing the agency’s ability to provide satellite weather forecasts and reliable fish population assessments. “You see small pockets of fishing boats here and there that make great backgrounds for postcards, but this business is collapsing, piece by piece,” says Scott Lang, New Bedford’s former mayor.

Brett Tolley, a community organizer with Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, an organization that promotes the symbiosis between a healthy environment and local fishing economies

Although Rafael faced up to 25 years in prison and $500,000 in fines if convicted, no one expected the case to reach trial—and, sure enough, Rafael will plead guilty before a federal judge in Boston on Thursday, March 16. Yet many New England fishermen are less concerned with the Codfather’s fate than with the fate of his property. According to the indictment, Rafael may be forced to surrender the boats he used to commit his fraud—and the fishing permit and quota attached to each vessel. The disbursement of those forfeited assets will be contentious. Jon Mitchell, New Bedford’s mayor, has lobbied NOAA to keep the Codfather’s shares in his home port, arguing that innocent fishermen’s “livelihoods depend on the continuation of the business,” according to a local newspaper. In other places, environmental groups have swooped in to snatch up fishing shares and remove them from circulation.

Neither option sits particularly well with Brett Tolley, who advocates making the Codfather’s property available to the fishermen who have been most disadvantaged by regulations—small boats, for instance, or young people who weren’t grandfathered into the catch-share system. There’s precedent for such a “permit bank” concept: The Penobscot East Resource Center, an organization devoted to the rehabilitation of Maine’s flagging fisheries, owns two permits and leases out access to fishermen. Several states run banks, too. From the ashes of the Codfather’s empire could rise a more equitable distribution of the catch. “How do we protect fleet diversity? How do we prevent excessive consolidation? How do we ensure multiple generations of fishermen get access?” Tolley demands. “All communities have a stake in how this turns out.”

This article was produced in collaboration with FERN, the Food and Environment Reporting Network.

Credit – 

The Deliciously Fishy Case of the "Codfather"

Posted in alo, aquaculture, Bragg, Casio, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, OXO, PUR, Ringer, Safer, Springer, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Deliciously Fishy Case of the "Codfather"

Heading to D.C. this week? There’s a climate-themed protest for you.

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

Read More: 

Heading to D.C. this week? There’s a climate-themed protest for you.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Heading to D.C. this week? There’s a climate-themed protest for you.

Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

See original article here:  

Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

Americans want the EPA to do its job, even if Trump and Pruitt don’t.

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

Read More – 

Americans want the EPA to do its job, even if Trump and Pruitt don’t.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Americans want the EPA to do its job, even if Trump and Pruitt don’t.

Dr. Orange: The Scientist Who Insists Agent Orange Isn’t Hurting America’s Veterans

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story originally appeared on ProPublica and the Virginian-Pilot.

A few years ago, retired Maj. Wes Carter was picking his way through a stack of internal Air Force memos, searching for clues that might help explain his recent heart attack and prostate cancer diagnosis. His eyes caught on several recommendations spelled out in all capital letters:

“NO ADDITIONAL SAMPLING…”

“DESTROY ALL…”

“IMMEDIATE DESTRUCTION…”

A Pentagon consultant was recommending that Air Force officials quickly and discreetly chop up and melt down a fleet of C-123 aircraft that had once sprayed the toxic herbicide Agent Orange across Vietnam. The consultant also suggested how to downplay the risk if journalists started asking questions: “The longer this issue remains unresolved, the greater the likelihood of outside press reporting on yet another ‘Agent Orange Controversy.'”

The Air Force, Carter saw in the records, had followed those suggestions.

Carter, now 70, had received the 2009 memos in response to public records requests he filed after recalling the chemical stench in a C-123 he crewed on as an Air Force reservist in the years after the Vietnam War. He’d soon discovered that others he’d served with had gotten sick, too. Now it seemed he’d uncovered a government-sanctioned plan to destroy evidence of any connection between the aircraft, Agent Orange and their illnesses. And the cover-up looked like it had been set in motion by one man: Alvin L. Young.

Carter had gotten his first glimpse of “Dr. Orange.”

Young had drawn the nickname decades earlier as an Air Force expert on herbicides used to destroy enemy-shielding jungle in Vietnam. Since then—largely behind the scenes—the scientist, more than anyone else, has guided the stance of the military and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on Agent Orange and whether it has harmed service members.

Young tested the weed killer for the Air Force during the war, helped develop a plan to destroy it at sea a decade later—a waste of good herbicides, he’d said—then played a leading role in crafting the government’s response to veterans who believed the chemicals have made them sick. For a while, he even kept a vial of Agent Orange by his desk.

Throughout, as an officer and later as the government’s go-to consultant, Young’s fervent defense hasn’t wavered: Few veterans were exposed to Agent Orange, which contained the toxic chemical dioxin. And even if they were, it was in doses too small to harm them. Some vets, he wrote in a 2011 email, were simply “freeloaders,” making up ailments to “cash in” on the VA’s compensation system.

Over the years, the VA has repeatedly cited Young’s work to deny disability compensation to vets, saving the government millions of dollars.

Along the way, his influence has spawned a chorus of frustrated critics, including vets, respected scientists and top government officials. They argue that Young’s self-labeled “investigations” are compromised by inaccuracies, inconsistencies or omissions of key facts, and rely heavily on his previous work, some of which was funded by Monsanto Co. and Dow Chemical Co., the makers of Agent Orange. Young also served as an expert for the chemical companies in 2004 when Vietnam vets sued them.

Alvin Young, the government’s oft-used Agent Orange consultant, speaks to the Armed Forces Pest Management Board in 2014. Armed Forces Pest Management Board/Flickr

“Most of the stuff he talks about is in no way accurate,” said Linda S. Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, and a prominent expert on dioxin. “He’s been paid a hell of a lot of money by the VA over the years, and I think they don’t want to admit that maybe he isn’t the end all and be all.”

Birnbaum, whose agency studies how environmental factors affect health, questions how Young’s training in herbicide science qualifies him to draw some conclusions. “He is not an expert when it comes to the human health effects,” she said.

Others complain that Young spent years using his government authority to discount or resist new research, then later pointed to a lack of research to undercut vets’ health claims.

“For really almost 40 years, there has been a studious, concerted, planned effort to keep any study from being done and to discredit any study that has been done,” said Jeanne M. Stellman, an emeritus professor at Columbia University. Stellman, a widely published Agent Orange researcher, has repeatedly clashed with Young and the VA.

There’s a reason. In an era in which the military and the VA are facing a barrage of claims from vets alleging damaging chemical exposures, from burn pits in Afghanistan to hidden munitions in Iraq, Stellman said Young provides a reliable response when it comes to Agent Orange: No.

Anyone who set foot in Vietnam during the war is eligible for compensation if they become ill with one of 14 cancers or other ailments linked to Agent Orange. But vets with an array of other illnesses where the connection is less well established continue to push for benefits. And those vets who believe they were exposed while serving elsewhere must prove it—often finding themselves stymied.

It’s not just the vets. Some of their children now contend their parents’ exposure has led to their own health problems, and they, too, are filing claims.

In recent years, Young, 74, has been a consultant for the Department of Defense and the VA, as well as an expert witness for the U.S. Department of Justice on matters related to dioxin exposure. By his own estimate, he’s been paid “a few million” dollars over that time.

“He’s an outstanding scientist,” said Brad Flohr, a VA senior advisor for compensation, defending the agency’s decision to hire Young in spite of the controversy surrounding his work. “He’s done almost everything there is. He’s an excellent researcher into all things, not necessarily just Agent Orange.”

In an interview and emails, Young defended his role. To date, he said, there’s no conclusive evidence showing Agent Orange directly caused any health problems, only studies showing a statistical association. It’s an important distinction, he says.

“I’ve been blamed for a lot of things,” Young said. He likened the criticism he faces to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s smearing of “Crooked Hillary” Clinton after 30 years of public service: “They say, ‘Crooked Young.'”

Young said he believes most sick vets are simply suffering from the effects of old age, or perhaps war itself, rather than Agent Orange. It’s a point even critics say has some validity as vets have grown older during the benefits battle. His critics, he said, are as biased against the herbicide as he is accused of being for it. “Who’s an impartial expert? Name one for me, by all means.”

When Carter came across Young’s name, he knew nothing of the controversy that surrounded him. He also had no need for benefits related to Agent Orange: He was already receiving full disability compensation from the VA for a back injury suffered during the first Gulf War.

Reading the memos after his 2011 cancer diagnosis, it seemed clear there was a link between Agent Orange and illnesses plaguing those who’d flown aboard C-123s.

But to get answers—and to help others get benefits—he’d have to take on Dr. Orange.

In the summer of 1977, a VA claims worker in Chicago took a call from the sobbing wife of a veteran claiming “chemicals in Vietnam” had caused his cancer. The woman mentioned a mist sprayed from above to kill plants on the ground. The claims specialist, Maude DeVictor, called the Pentagon and was transferred to Capt. Alvin Young, who knew more about the chemicals used in Vietnam than perhaps anyone.

By then, Young, who’d gained an appreciation for herbicides on his family’s farm, had a doctorate in herbicide physiology and environmental toxicology and had spent nearly a decade studying defoliants for the Air Force. In 1961, the U.S. began spraying millions of gallons of herbicides across Vietnam’s thick jungles. Then, in 1971, it halted the effort after the South Vietnamese media reported a surge in birth defects in areas where the chemicals had been used—a political decision, according to Young, who didn’t believe the claims.

DeVictor peppered Young with questions on the phone that day. Within weeks, she’d identified more than two dozen other vets who believed their contact with Agent Orange had made them sick. DeVictor prepared a memo on what she had learned and shared her findings with a reporter, spurring national media attention on Agent Orange for the first time.

“Dr. Young was very helpful. Without him, I wouldn’t have known anything,” said DeVictor. She was later fired by the VA; she claimed for speaking out about the herbicide.

Young publicly refuted many of the comments attributed to him—especially those suggesting Agent Orange might have harmed vets—and criticized media reports that he felt sensationalized the risks. But the episode was a turning point, moving Young from the Air Force’s internal herbicide expert to public defender of Agent Orange.

Over the next decade, as concern grew about the effects of Agent Orange, Young was repeatedly promoted to positions of increasing influence, despite public clashes with prominent politicians and some federal health experts. In 1980, an exasperated Rep. Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, who later became the Senate’s Majority Leader, challenged Young’s testimony before a House subcommittee by rattling off recent studies and media reports that suggested vets had suffered because of Agent Orange. “I really find it somewhat interesting,” Daschle said, “that they are all wrong and he is correct.”

Moments earlier, Young had said he didn’t doubt the competency of other authors, they just couldn’t match his 12 years of analyzing records. “It is a very complex issue,” he said.

Young’s genial, almost folksy style belied a resolute confidence that while his listeners’ opinions might differ, no one knew Agent Orange as well as he did.

In a 1981 Air Force research paper titled “Agent Orange at the Crossroads of Science and Social Concern,” Young questioned whether some vets were using Agent Orange “to seek public recognition for their sacrifices in Vietnam” and “to acquire financial compensation during economically depressed times.” The paper earned him an Outstanding Research Award from the Air Force’s staff college.

The same year, the Air Force assigned Young to serve as director of the VA’s new Agent Orange Projects Office, in charge of planning and overseeing initial research into emerging health claims. Here, too, he attracted congressional ire. Sen. Alan Cranston, R-California, warned the VA’s chief medical director in 1983 that Young’s dismissive comments about possible health risks might cause the public to doubt the “sincerity of the VA’s effort.”

Soon after that, the White House tapped Young to serve as a senior policy analyst for its Office of Science and Technology Policy, giving him broad influence over the nation’s policy on dioxin. Over the next several years, the Reagan administration was accused of obstructing, stalling and minimizing research into Agent Orange.

In 1986, another House committee faulted Young for undermining a planned study of chemical company workers exposed to dioxin. Young maintained that previous studies conducted by Monsanto and Dow of their workers “might have been enough,” the panel’s report said.

Young recently denied interfering with that research but took credit for helping to shut down a major Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of Vietnam vets in 1987 that sought definitive evidence of a link between health issues and Agent Orange. Young said data on who had been exposed wasn’t reliable enough, though others argued that military records on spray missions and troop movements would have sufficed.

In the end, answering the question of who was exposed was taken out of the hands of the scientists. Under pressure from vets and their families, Congress passed the Agent Orange Act. Signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, it presumed that all vets were exposed if they set foot in Vietnam during the war or traveled in boats on its rivers. And it provided compensation for them if they had certain conditions linked to exposure.

In Young’s view, the vets won; the science lost. By his final years at the White House, he was tiring of the battle. Young said emotions had risen so high he began “receiving threats to my family, threats to me.”

Carter didn’t serve in Vietnam and thus wasn’t covered by the Agent Orange Act. His connection to the herbicide began in 1974, when for six years he served as a crew member on a C-123 as part of his reserve duty at Westover Air Reserve Base in Massachusetts.

During the war, C-123s criss-crossed southeast Asia, mostly ferrying troops and supplies. A few dozen were modified for spraying herbicides and insecticide. Back home, most were stripped of the spray gear, cleaned and put into service with the Air Force reserves.

For Carter, the planes were an exhilarating break from his civilian marketing gig—even though when they flew through rain clouds, water seeped into the cabins and they were always too hot or too cold. He often flew on a C-123 that had been nicknamed “Patches” because it was hit almost 600 times by enemy bullets in Vietnam—then patched up with metal. Over the years, he served as an aeromedical evacuation technician, flight instructor and flight examiner.

Even then, Patches’ former duties in Vietnam worried Carter and other reservists, who complained about the overpowering odor coming from it. But after an inspection, he said, “the wing commander assured us that the aircraft was as safe as humanly possible.”

Patches was sent in 1980 to the National Museum of the Air Force near Dayton, Ohio, where it was displayed outside because of its chemical odor. Then, in 1994, during a restoration attempt, Air Force staff toxicologists said samples from the plane showed it was “heavily contaminated” with the dioxin TCDD, an unfortunate byproduct of manufacturing Agent Orange. Later, other planes were also found to be contaminated.

But no one alerted Carter or any of the 1,500 to 2,100 reservists who’d flown them at least two weekends a month plus two weeks a year, often for years. Instead, most of the contaminated planes were quarantined in Arizona at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, a sprawling airplane graveyard nicknamed “the Boneyard.” In 2010, at Young’s recommendation, they were destroyed.

One year later, when Carter learned he had prostate cancer, his best friend from the reserves found out he did, too. With a few phone calls, Carter quickly tallied five from his old squadron with prostate cancer. The sixth he called had died. His squadron commanders and others tied to the planes also had Agent Orange-related illnesses.

“Nearly two months into this project,” Carter wrote on a blog he kept, “it seems I have trouble finding crewmembers who don’t have AO-illnesses!”

Decades after the last of the military’s Agent Orange was supposedly incinerated aboard a ship in the Pacific Ocean, Army vet Steve House went public in 2011 with a surprising claim: He and five others had been ordered in 1978 to dig a large ditch at a U.S. base in South Korea and dump leaky 55-gallon drums, some labeled “Compound Orange,” in it. One broke open, splashing him with its contents. More than three decades later, House was suffering from diabetes and nerve damage in his hands and feet—ailments that researchers have associated with dioxin exposure.

Around the same time House came forward, other ailing vets recounted that they, too, had been exposed to Agent Orange on military bases in Okinawa, Japan.

The Pentagon turned to a familiar ally.

“I just heard back from Korea and the situation has ‘re-heated’ and they do want to get Dr. Young on contract,” one defense department official wrote to others in June 2011, according to internal correspondence obtained by ProPublica and The Virginian-Pilot through the Freedom of Information Act.

By then, Young had established a second career. From his home in Cheyenne, Wyoming, he and his son ran a sort of Agent Orange crisis management firm. His clients: the federal government and the herbicide’s makers—both worried about a new wave of claims.

In 2006, under contract for the Defense Department, Young had produced an 81-page historical report listing everywhere Agent Orange had been used and stored outside of Vietnam, and emphasizing that even in those places, “individuals who entered a sprayed area one day after application … received essentially no ‘meaningful exposure.'” Among the scholarly references cited were several of his own papers, including a 2004 journal article he co-authored with funding from Monsanto and Dow. That conflict of interest was not acknowledged in the Defense Department report.

In an interview, Young said the companies’ financial support essentially paid the cost of publishing, but did not influence his findings. He and his co-authors, he said, “made it very clear” in the journal that Dow and Monsanto had funded the article. “That doesn’t mean that we took the position of the companies.”

The Pentagon also hired Young to write a book documenting its history with herbicides. Published in 2009, the book made Young Agent Orange’s official biographer.

In 2011, facing the new claims involving South Korea and Okinawa, the Defense Department asked Young and his son to search historical records and assess the evidence. In both cases, they concluded that whatever the vets thought they’d seen or handled, it wasn’t Agent Orange. Young’s son did not respond to a request for comment.

Alvin Young dismissed the claims of House and other vets from Korea, saying he found no paperwork that showed the herbicide had been moved to their base. “Groundless,” Young told the Korea Times newspaper in 2011.

In Okinawa, Young was similarly dismissive, even after dozens of barrels, some labelled Dow Chemical Co., were found buried under a soccer field. The barrels were later found to contain high levels of dioxin. But Young told the Stars and Stripes newspaper, they were likely filled with discarded solvents and waste.

Young never spoke to the vets in either case.

“Why would I want to interview the veterans, I know what they’re going to say,” Young told ProPublica, saying he focused on what the records showed. “They were going to give the allegation. What we had to do is go and find out what really happened.”

In 2012, Young’s firm was hired again, this time by the VA, in part to assess the claims of other groups who believed they’d been sickened by their exposure to Agent Orange. One was led by Carter, a man whose determination appeared to match Young’s.

“Mr. Carter,” Young recalled recently, “was a man on a mission.”

From almost the moment Carter came upon Young’s name in the Air Force documents, he’d been consumed by the scientist’s pivotal role. He began documenting Young’s influence on a blog he’d set up to keep fellow C-123 reservists informed. “Memo after memo from him showed exquisite sensitivity to unnecessary public awareness … what he calls ‘misinformation’ about Agent Orange. Best to keep things mum, from his perspective,” Carter wrote in a July 2011 post.

An Agent Orange activist who heard about Carter’s efforts sent him an email exchange between Young and a veteran named Lou Krieger. Krieger had been corresponding with Young about herbicide test sites in the United States and had mentioned that he believed the controversy over the C-123 aircraft represented “another piece of the puzzle.”

In a flash of anger, Young had written back, “The only reason these men prepared such a story is that they are hoping they can cash in on ‘tax free money’ for health issues that originate from lifestyles and aging. There was no exposure to Agent Orange or the dioxin, but that does not stop them from concocting exposure stories about Agent Orange hoping that some Congressional member will feel sorry for them and encourage the VA to pay them off.

“I can respect the men who flew those aircraft in combat and who made the sacrifices, many losing their lives, and almost all of them receiving Purple Hearts,” Young wrote, “but these men who subsequently flew them as ‘trash haulers,’ I have no respect for such freeloaders. If not freeloading, what is their motive?”

Young’s response offended Carter. He pressed his Freedom of Information Act campaign with renewed vigor, requesting a slew of new records from the Air Force and the VA. He later filed lawsuits, with the help of pro-bono lawyers, against the agencies for withholding documents. The government eventually gave him the records and paid his lawyers’ fees.

Carter worked the non-military world as well, soliciting letters from doctors, researchers and government officials who had expertise with toxic chemicals, some of whom had clashed with Young in the past. Several responded with letters supporting his cause, even a few who worked for federal agencies.

The head of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a part of the CDC, wrote in March 2013 that based on the available information, “aircrew operating in this, and similar, environments were exposed to TCDD dioxin.”

And a senior medical officer at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences wrote, “it is my opinion that the scientific evidence is clear” that exposure to dioxin is not only possible through the skin but has been associated with a number of health conditions, including cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

Carter also found support in Congress from Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, who began writing the VA regularly to advance Carter’s cause.

He sent missive after missive filled with his findings and the letters of support he’d received to the prestigious Institute of Medicine, a congressionally chartered research organization hired by the VA to assess the science behind the claims of Carter and other C-123 vets. If the VA was going to grant them benefits, Carter realized, he had to first convince this group of researchers that he was right.

“It didn’t take long to realize that the VA had a lot of resources working against us and we found none working for us,” he said.

One of those resources was Young, whom the agency had given a $600,000 no-bid contract to write research reports on Agent Orange.

Young had approached the VA in 2012, offering to assess vets’ claims that they’d been exposed to herbicides outside of Vietnam and weren’t covered by the Agent Orange Act.

Over the next two years, Young and his son wrote about two-dozen reports examining issues such as whether vets who served in Thailand, Guam or aboard Navy ships off the coast of Vietnam could have been exposed. In most cases, they concluded exposure was unlikely. The reports buttressed the VA’s rejection of claims by members of those groups, just as Young’s Pentagon reports were cited to deny those of individual vets.

In November 2012, Young turned in the first of several reports discounting the claims of Carter and his group. “All the analytical and scientific studies suggested that if they were exposed, that exposure was negligible,” he wrote. Although some samples taken from the C-123s showed minimal traces of dioxin, it was nothing to be concerned about, Young wrote, since dioxin sticks to surfaces and was unlikely to affect anyone who came in contact with the planes.

Though Young dismissed the vets’ claims, Carter’s campaign clearly bothered him. In a June 2013 email to a VA staffer, Young criticized the Air Force for releasing all of his correspondence to Carter.

A couple months later he wrote: “You and I knew that the preparations of these investigative reports were going to show that in most cases the allegations are without any evidence. We can expect much more media interest as more and more veteran claims are rejected on the basis of the historical records and science.”

Young’s contract with the VA and emails were later disclosed to Carter as a result of his FOIA requests and a lawsuit against the VA. The emails showed that Young had also discounted the opinions of other experts, including the VA’s own researchers when they linked Agent Orange to prostate cancer.

“It is clear the VA researchers do not understand what really occurred in Vietnam,” he wrote in May 2013 to several VA leaders, “and that the likelihood of exposure to Agent Orange was essentially negligible.”

For three years, Carter and Young had circled each other. Carter in his blog and in at least one intemperate email; Young in dismissive reports and notes to the VA. Finally in June 2014, they were face to face in Washington D.C. where an Institute of Medicine panel would weigh the evidence to determine which man was right.

They lived just 45 minutes apart—Young in Wyoming and Carter in Colorado—but had never met. Now they sat next to each other to deliver testimony.

Carter, who was now in a wheelchair, told panel members that their task should be straight-forward: Did the evidence show—more likely than not—that he and his crewmates had been exposed? “I’m probably the only bachelor’s degree person in this room, but I know the airplane,” he said.

Young, who followed him, gave a rundown on the planes’ uses during the Vietnam War and their return to this country. He then defended the destruction of the planes, leaving out his role as the consultant who told the military to do it.

“Those aircraft had been out there for almost 25 years. How long do you maintain an aircraft?” he said, adding later, “Those aircraft had a stigma.”

Young had been at odds with the IOM before. An earlier panel had embraced a method to estimate troop exposure to Agent Orange, angering Young and his allies who didn’t believe it was possible.

But the hours-long hearing on C-123s, in which an array of experts spoke, ended with no hint of which way the panel was leaning. As the months wore on without a decision, Carter began to wonder if he had wasted the past few years of his life. “I wasn’t a grandpa or a retiree or a hobbyist or a churchman, the things that usually follow in retirement,” he said. “I was ill and I was tired. It’s a lot of money. Every time I went back to Washington, there goes another fifteen hundred bucks.”

Finally, on a crisp January morning in 2015, the IOM was ready to announce its decision. Carter and his wife Joan had flown in and now they sat holding hands in a conference room. Joining them were VA and Air Force officials, members of the IOM staff and journalists. Four lawyers who had helped him showed up too, as well as supportive congressional aides. Young, the man who’d fueled his quest, wasn’t there.

At the front of the room, Emory University’s nursing school dean began to deliver the results of the institute’s report. Carter heard the words “could have been exposed,” and knew he’d won. “That was the moment that I really understood.” Carter and his wife squeezed hands, then hugged with happiness and relief when the meeting ended.

The committee had rejected Young’s position that the dioxin residue found on interior surfaces of the C-123s would only have come off with a chemical wipe, dismissing that claim as “conjecture and not evidence-based.” His argument that dioxin wouldn’t be absorbed through a crew member’s skin was also wrong, the committee determined, and appeared to be based on an irrelevant Dow-funded study of contaminated soil. Further, Young’s overall description of the chemical properties and behavior of TCDD, a dioxin contaminant, were “inaccurate.”

Joan Carter said it was her husband’s most meaningful mission, “a kind of a legacy of some good work, some definitive good work that he could leave behind.” It allowed him to help “a far greater circle of fellow veterans, most of whom he never met.”

Within weeks, Young protested to the IOM that it had “ignored important historical and scientific information … some material was misinterpreted, and there was a failure to focus on the science instead of who or what agency provided the information.”

The IOM stood by its findings, and several months later, the VA approved disability benefits for the ailing C-123 veterans. In a statement, VA Secretary Robert McDonald called it “the right thing to do.”

In an interview, Young said the IOM panelists got it wrong—a retort he’s used for decades whenever his findings have been challenged.

“Unfortunately,” he said, they “did not have a good handle on the science.”

The IOM’s dismissal of Young’s findings has not dampened the military’s reliance on him.

The Pentagon once again has signed Young on as a consultant, this time to track where herbicides were used at bases in the United States.

Pentagon officials declined to answer detailed questions about Young’s work, including how much he’s been paid. Spokesman Lt. Col. James B. Brindle would only say that Young is the “most knowledgeable subject matter expert” on Agent Orange and that his personal views “are not relevant to the historical research he was contracted to perform.”

While the VA didn’t renew Young’s contract when it expired in 2014, a VA official said the department wouldn’t hesitate to hire him again if he was the most qualified person. Flohr, the VA senior advisor, said Young was chosen for his expertise—not his position on the vets’ exposure. “It was purely scientific, the research he did,” he said, “no bias either way on his part or our part.”

In a subsequent statement, the VA said it makes decisions on Agent Orange “only after careful and exhaustive reviews of all the medical/scientific evidence. … Our obligation remains to the veterans we serve.”

Young’s continued work for the government comes as a surprise to those who squared off against him a generation ago. “As a physician, as a dioxin scientist, as an Agent Orange researcher, as a Vietnam-era veteran, I’m just appalled by that personally,” said Dr. Arnold Schecter, who has written a major textbook on dioxin and who has feuded with Young.

Today, despite his loss to Carter, Young is unwavering in his belief that his research is “great.” Among his few regrets: Putting controversial opinions—such as calling C-123 reservists freeloaders—in emails that could be obtained through public records requests.

Young said he, too, was exposed to Agent Orange while testing the chemicals over the years, and in that way has a deeply personal interest in the research.

“Give me some credit,” Young said. “Hell, I’ve got 40 years working out there on these issues. I have a great deal of experience. … Am I wrong? I could be wrong. I’ve always said I don’t understand it all.”

Source:  

Dr. Orange: The Scientist Who Insists Agent Orange Isn’t Hurting America’s Veterans

Posted in alo, ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Prepara, ProPublica, PUR, Radius, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dr. Orange: The Scientist Who Insists Agent Orange Isn’t Hurting America’s Veterans

The Warriors’ Steve Kerr Lets Fly on Trump

Mother Jones

At a press conference before Wednesday night’s win over the Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr offered a candid assessment of the mood the day after Donald Trump was declared the next president of the United States. “Maybe we should have seen it coming over the last 10 years,” he said.

“You look at society, look at what’s popular, people are getting paid millions of dollars to go on TV and scream at each other, whether it’s in sports or politics or entertainment,” Kerr told reporters. “I guess it was only a matter of time before it spilled into politics but, all of a sudden you’re faced with a reality.” He spoke of the “decorum, respect and dignity” that accompanies the presidency, yet “it all went out the window.” He wished President-elect Trump well and hoped he would be a good president. But he also wondered about his daughter and wife, “who have basically been insulted by his comments,” and his players of color, many of whom, as people of color, endured insults as well. “The whole process has left all of us feeling disgusted and disappointed,” Kerr said. “I thought we were better than this. I thought the Jerry Springer Show was the Jerry Springer show.”

You can read Kerr’s full statement below. h/t @SherwoodStrauss

Original link: 

The Warriors’ Steve Kerr Lets Fly on Trump

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Ringer, Springer, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Warriors’ Steve Kerr Lets Fly on Trump

We fact-checked Donald Trump’s latest comments on renewable energy.

According to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), renewable energy, mostly solar and wind, accounted for more than half of all new electric capacity added in the world last year, a 15 percent jump from 2014. Globally, there is now more renewable power capacity than coal power capacity.

Clean energy growth was especially high in China, which was responsible for about 40 percent of all new clean energy capacity. Get this: In China in 2015, two wind turbines were installed every hour.

This surge in renewables, according to the IEA, can be attributed to policy changes, lowered costs, and improvements in technology.

So renewable energy hit some big milestones last year, but it’s still just the beginning: The IEA — which has been accused of underestimating the growth of renewables — expects 28 percent of electricity to come from renewables by 2021, up from 23 percent today.

“I am pleased to see that last year was one of records for renewables and that our projections for growth over the next five years are more optimistic,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “However, even these higher expectations remain modest compared with the huge untapped potential of renewables.”

So let’s keep this moving, folks.

Read More:

We fact-checked Donald Trump’s latest comments on renewable energy.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, solar, solar panels, solar power, Springer, Uncategorized, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We fact-checked Donald Trump’s latest comments on renewable energy.