The American government is trying to get rid of encryption services

Congress is working on a bipartisan bill called the EARN IT act that seems to be an attempt to use opposition to child sex trafficking and abuse as a back door to undermine end-to-end encryption in general

Though it seems wholly focused on reducing child exploitation, the EARN IT Act has definite implications for encryption. If it became law, companies might not be able to earn their liability exemption while offering end-to-end encrypted services. This would put them in the position of either having to accept liability, undermine the protection of end-to-end encryption by adding a backdoor for law enforcement access, or avoid end-to-end encryption altogether.

[…]

Riana Pfefferkorn, the associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, outlined fears about the privacy and security implications of an earlier leaked draft of the EARN IT Act in January. After a preliminary assessment of the version of the bill introduced on Thursday, she told WIRED that she sees well-meaning revisions aimed at reducing concerns that EARN IT could violate First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights related to speech, privacy, and lawful search. But she says the bill remains fundamentally problematic.

“I see this as being an attempt to cure procedural problems while throwing a bone somewhat to civil liberty, privacy, and security concerns,” she told WIRED. “But looking at the additional language it’s clear to me that this is still going to be a vehicle for the attorney general to wage his war on encryption. And it’s kind of a black box. One of my fears is if this were implemented, what’s to stop China from saying ‘in addition to monitoring for child sex abuse images, turn this on for Uighur freedom activists too.'”

The article contains quotes from Facebook saying they do fine without measures like EARN IT, but it shouldn’t shock the reader that I don’t put much stock in what they have to say. For all the ways Facebook is a massive corporation doing a huge amount of harm in the world, their opposition to this bill does not mean it’s a good thing. Unfortunately, there are many large, powerful entities at work in the world, and most of them don’t hold human life, freedom, and happiness as their core principles. From the blog “A Few Thoughts on Cryptography Engineering“

Over the past few years, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI have been pursuing an aggressive campaign to eliminate end-to-end encryption services. This is a category that includes text messaging systems like Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. Those services protect your data by encrypting it, and ensuring that the keys are only available to you and the person you’re communicating with. That means your provider, the person who hacks your provider, and (inadvertently) the FBI, are all left in the dark.

The government’s anti-encryption campaign has not been very successful. There are basically two reasons for this. First, people like communicating privately. If there’s anything we’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that the world is not a safe place for your private information. You don’t have to be worried about the NSA spying on you to be worried that some hacker will steal your messages or email. In fact, this kind of hack occurs so routinely that there’s a popular website you can use to check if your accounts have been compromised.

The world is a big, complicated place, and if we’re to have any hope of people having a meaningful right to self-determination, keeping a watch on those with power is a must. They have a history of turning good causes to evil purposes. With the rise in authoritarian politics around the world and the rise in efforts to decrease the power of corporations and oligarchs, I very much fear that the ability to hide communication and organizing from governments will be needed in the years ahead.

Thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

What a difference 10 days make: Italy’s warning to the world, Cuba’s response to the pandemic

“What is happening is much worse than you thought it was. You’ll realize that just being able to breathe air in your own house, it’s something that you should already be grateful for.”

“Stay at home.”

“Don’t fuck up.”

The COVID-19 death toll in Italy has passed China. China has 22 times more people than Italy. The Italians have been trying to sound the alarm to the rest of the world for days now, and while some countries have heeded those warnings, the United States and the United Kingdom have not.

 

In the meantime, health workers in the United States are sounding every alarm they can think of. A hospital in Georgia says they went through five months of supplies in six days, and a pediatric surgeon in New York City has taken to the New York Times to declare that “the sky is falling”, and to urgently call for more resources.

Our health care system is mired in situational uncertainty. The leadership of our hospital is working tirelessly — but doctors on the ground are pessimistic about our surge capacity.

Making my rounds at the children’s hospital earlier this week, I saw that the boxes of gloves and other personal protective equipment were dwindling. This is a crisis for our vulnerable patients and health care workers alike. Protective equipment is only one of the places where supplies are falling short. At our large, 4,000-bed New York City hospital, we have 500 ventilators and 250 on backup reserve. If we are on track to match the scale of Covid-19 infections in Italy, then we are likely to run out of ventilators in New York. The anti-viral “treatments” we have for Covid-19 are experimental and many of them are hard to even get approved. Let me repeat. The sky is falling.

I say this not to panic anyone but to mobilize you. We need more equipment and we need it now. Specifically gloves, masks, eye protection and more ventilators. We need our technology friends to be making and testing prototypes to rig the ventilators that we do have to support more than one patient at a time. We need our labs channeling all of their efforts into combating this bug — that means vaccine research and antiviral treatment research, quickly.

It’s not hard to see that a healthcare system built around annual profits would view the creation of a stockpile or production capacity to meet a massive crisis like this as “needless waste”. Nothing like this has happened since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and while it’s my hope that the death toll for COVID-19 will be less than that, it will be more than it needed to be, and it will be higher because of how we’ve designed both national and global production and supply chains.

It’s also not hard to see that in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, politics revolving around a religious faith in capitalism magically solving everything, plus open scorn for experts and expertise, has made the problem worse. In the US, a huge amount of blame is being placed on the notoriously irresponsible “spring break” crowd for continuing things like mass gatherings at beaches, but until just a few days ago, the White House, various Republicans, and Fox News were actively downplaying the danger of this outbreak, and all of their concern seemed to be for corporations, for the stock market, and for their own wealth.

That’s starting to change as the full scale of what’s facing us becomes clear, but as has been said many times, in a situation like this, delays cost lives. I posted a few days ago about how Vietnam was approaching their pandemic response, and I wanted to showcase another example that seems to be getting things right.

Cuba is often maligned in the United States, and while Barack Obama took steps to normalize relations between the two countries, Trump rolled that back. In the past few weeks, Cuba was brought up repeatedly to attack Bernie Sanders, because apparently it was bad of him to praise Castro’s successful literacy program, while condemning his authoritarian rule. During my very brief stay there in the summer of 2001, I did see a lot of things I didn’t like – people were very careful about what they said, and who they said it around, the authorities seemed to know more about our schedule than we did, and about 50% of the television programming available was a never-ending stream of long Castro speeches, patriotic songs, and cartoons about resisting the evil American empire. I have to say, the more I’ve learned about the United States and its foreign policy over the years, the more sympathetic I am toward that last line of thinking.

As much as they’ve been known as an authoritarian regime, however, Cuba has also become known for its medical system, and for its willingness to provide medical assistance to other countries. That pattern has continued with the COVID-19 pandemic as Alan Macleod reports on Mintpressnews.com:

While the United States government is complicating efforts to treat coronavirus across the world and is using the pandemic to increase pressure on countries already struggling under U.S. sanctions, including Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, the small island of Cuba, itself a target of Washington’s ire, is leading the fight against the spread of COVID-19.

And while the Trump administration slashes the Center for Disease Control’s budget amid an imminent pandemic, China appears to have gotten to grips with the coronavirus outbreak. Beijing reported only 16 new cases of the virus today, and there are now more total cases outside mainland China than inside it.

Integral to reducing the number of deaths is a Cuban antiviral drug, Interferon Alpha 2b. The drug, according to Cuban biotech specialist Dr. Luis Herrera Martinez, “prevents aggravation and complications in patients, reaching that stage that ultimately can result in death.” It has been produced in China since 2003 in a partnership with the state-owned Cuban pharmaceutical industry. Interferons are “signaling” proteins, explains Dr. Helen Yaffe of Glasgow University, an expert on Cuba. These proteins are produced and released by the body in response to infections and alert nearby cells to heighten their antiviral defenses. It is not a cure or a vaccine to COVID-19, but rather an antiviral that boosts the human immune system.

Cuba has used it to fight outbreaks of Dengue Fever, a common occurrence on the mosquito-plagued island. The Castro government was forced to develop a strong pharmaceutical industry because of the constant U.S. embargo. Cuba estimates the decades-long sanctions, continually declared illegal by the United Nations, have cost it over $750 billion.

Today, the Cuban government offered haven to the stranded cruise ship, MS Braemar. The ship has five confirmed COVID-19 cases on board and had been turned away by both Barbados and the Bahamas.

Despite confirming its own first cases, the island is continuing to export medical professionals to the rest of the world. Yesterday, Jamaican Health Minister Christopher Tufton announced that 21 nurses from its neighbor would arrive imminently, the first of more than 100, he hoped. But they have also sent doctors to more advanced nations, such as Italy.

 

I’ve said it before: this crisis, with all of its horrors, also presents us with opportunities to learn, to see how we could build a better world, and to come together to build that world. I think a foreign policy that puts so much emphasis on healing the sick and helping to uplift other countries is something we should aspire to for as long as our species is divided into different nations. The more we are able to work together towards common goals, rather than against each other in competition or outright hostility, the better we will be able to tackle massive challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic or climate change.

The World Health Organization (WHO) advised countries should check all potential cases. “You cannot fight a fire blindfolded. We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia. “This amazing spirit of human solidarity must become even more infectious than the coronavirus itself. Although we may have to be physically apart from each other for a while, we can come together in ways we never have before…We’re all in this together. And we can only succeed together,” he added. It is that ethos that has driven Cuba’s revolutionary healthcare system for 60 years.

As I mentioned in my last post, thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, layoffs have increased, job interviews have been indefinitely postponed, and many places aren’t hiring new workers. All of that means I really need help paying my bills and keeping a roof over my head. Patreon.com is a way for you to help with that, even if it’s just a little bit, and get some perks and extra content in return. You control how much you give, and how long you give it, and every little bit really does help. When lots of people pitch in, it can make a huge difference. Please help if you’re able, and share my work with others. Thank you!

A Call for Support

I’m writing today to ask for your financial support. I’ve been looking for a job for a while now, and it seemed like I was close to getting one when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. While the UK hasn’t gone into total lockdown, people are getting fired, and job interviews are being cancelled or indefinitely postponed for both myself, and my wife. Our funds are running out, and at this point it seems unlikely that we’ll be able to get wage labor to cover our expenses.

More importantly, it looks like it’ll be a couple months before anyone really tries to claim that the crisis is “over”, and a year before there’s a vaccine widely available. There’s an effective hiring freeze right now as people rightly practice social distancing, but that seems more than likely to turn into a long-term economic recession. We’re both working hard to find sources of income, and at this point this seems as viable as any other.

And so I’m asking for people to support me through Patreon.

For those who don’t know how it works, Patreon is a way for people like me to crowdsource funding for work we want to do. People who want to help me in making this blog can contribute a small amount per month, to support the content I make for free, and to get access to certain other perks, depending on how much you contribute. You control the monthly amount, and you can stop your contributions at any time if you feel you can’t afford them.

Beyond supporting my work, patrons get a few additional perks, depending on how much they give. These currently include things like links to additional news and resources I come across while researching my posts, extra articles written just for patrons, the ability to influence what topics I cover, and more.

If I hit 250 monthly patrons, I will write, record, and sing a parody of “Lady in Red” telling the story of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, accompanied by my wife on accordion. At that point in time I’ll work out what the reward for my next goal will be.

While I’d love for this to be a long-term gig, all I’m asking for right now is support to keep a roof over our heads until we have enough other income to keep us off the streets. When we get to that point, I’ll notify my patrons, and those who were just helping out of solidarity can re-assign their contribution elsewhere if they so desire.

Whether you can afford to patronize my work or not, it would help me a great deal if you could share this post – and other posts I write – with your respective networks, or send friends and family to www.patreon.com/oceanoxia

Times are tough right now, but with a little solidarity we can pull through and keep working to build a better world. Thank you all, and may you and yours live long and prosper.

NASA is delaying climate science missions due to the pandemic, and that’s a good thing

It should surprise no one that the folks at NASA pay attention to the advice of scientists, particularly after years of having their own advice on climate science ignored. Just for the sake of repeating it, here’s where we’re at on the pandemic response: Epidemiologists and the experience of places like Italy indicate that all of our efforts should be in the direction of reducing the speed at which the disease spreads through the population. The basic arithmetic is pretty straightforward – a certain percent of those infected require hospital beds and ventilators. As the number of people infected rises, hospitals run out of resources, and have to start letting people go untreated. When that happens, the death rate rises from somewhere around 1-3%, to something closer to 10-15%. This is why Iran, which is suffering both from a badly planned response to the virus, and decades of economic sanctions, is reportedly digging mass graves.

Our job, as people who aren’t actively involved in the treatment of this pandemic, is to do everything we can to avoid catching COVID-19, and to avoid spreading it. In the case of NASA, this means that three climate science missions have been cancelled, following the confirmation that one of the scientists connected to the missions has tested positive for the virus.

“In addition, due to the current uncertainty about the coronavirus situation in the United States and its potential impact on travel during the next few weeks, three NASA Earth Science airborne science campaigns slated to deploy across the country this spring have rescheduled their field activity until later in the year. The campaigns are DeltaX, Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere (DCOTTS), and Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE), which would include flights from Ames. The scientific returns of these projects are not expected to be impacted by this change of plans.

The image shows NASA's ER-2 plane in flight. It's a small, sleek, white jet with NASA's name on the tailfin. The photograph is from above, showing a patchwork of homes, roads, and trees on the ground far below.

NASA’s ER-2 approaching to land

This delay in research is unfortunate, but necessary. The whole point of trying to do something about man-made climate change is to reduce the death and suffering that will come with the various predicted upheavals. Grounding these flights to help slow the spread of COVID-19 is in keeping with those ideals. Looking through history, it’s not hard to find examples of science being pursued without regard for the health, rights, or humanity of various human individuals or populations. That’s not a pattern we should be following, any more than we should be continuing the massive, profit-driven environmental destruction that came with those abuses. In that regard, this is a good example of how to respect human life while pursuing science.

At the same time, this can serve as a sort of early warning. As the global climate continues to destabilize, there will be more disruptions that get in the way of doing things like climate research. Emergencies will arise (or be manufactured), and the cost of responding to them will be used to justify defunding research, along with a great many other things that are designed to improve human health and happiness. Just as the Trump administration, and various other authoritarian governments around the world, suppressed testing and public awareness of the COVID-19 outbreak, similar regimes will suppress public understanding of climate change and the harm it is doing. Indeed, they have already spent a great deal of effort doing that, and as with this pandemic, it has made the whole situation much, much worse.

With so many suffering and dying from this disease, it would be a waste for us not to take as many lessons as we can, or to put them to work building a better future.

The Doomsday mindset or: No room for doom and gloom

An article by a British professor that predicts the imminent collapse of society, as a result of climate change, has been downloaded over half a million times. Many mainstream climate scientists totally reject his claims, but his followers are already preparing for the worst.

I spent a short while indulging in this kind of thinking a couple years ago. It was easy to piece together bits of information to forecast total devastation within months.

I saw articles like this at the time, predicting mass famine, nuclear war, and successive nuclear power plant meltdowns by this time last year.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen, but while I was in the middle of it, it seemed inevitable. This kind of thinking is paralyzing and weirdly seductive. It’s like conspiracy theories that way. It’s also not much different from the various religious doomsday cults.

Every bit of negative news proves that the world is about to end, and no bit of positive news is enough to prove otherwise. If it doesn’t happen now, that just means you were off by a year, and then two years, and then 10 years, until you’ve spent a huge portion of your life living in a hellish “end times” world of your own making, and getting little, if anything, done.

 

Crisis, opportunity, change, and perception

With the COVID-19 pandemic, people all over the world have been changing how they conduct their affairs, in an effort to slow down the spread of the disease. Many of these changes are highlighting ways in which our lives could be different, but aren’t:

As a species, humans seem to be very good at adjusting to new circumstances. The term “the new normal” is used constantly to discuss everything from climate change to Trump’s disastrous presidency, and I think it’s easy to slip into feeling like things have always been -and will always be – the way they are now. This is one example of how our sense of the world is often inaccurate, and why the use of tools like science and critical thinking are so important to keep from lying to ourselves.

Ollie Thorn of the Youtube channel Philosophy Tube made a video in September of 2018 about the changes that followed 9/11 that discusses this tendency, and how changes to things like airport security that were initially claimed to be temporary seem to have become just… the way things are now:

 

In a recent article for Slate, Dan Kois writes about some of the changes to “fact of life” rules that have been happening in the last couple weeks, due to this virus outbreak:

The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that due to the coronavirus outbreak, they’re waiving the familiar four-ounce limit for liquids and gels—for hand sanitizer only. You may now bring a bottle of Purell as large as 12 ounces onto the plane to assist in your constant sanitizing of yourself, your family, your seat, your bag of peanuts, and everything else. All other liquids and gels, however, are still restricted to four ounces.

Among many shocks of the last week—school closures, Tom Hanks, the shuttering of one sports league after another—this rule change registers as major. The liquid restriction has been a key component of air travel ever since 2006. If people are now allowed to bring 12-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer onto planes, won’t the planes blow up?

The TSA can declare this rule change because the limit was always arbitrary, just one of the countless rituals of security theater to which air passengers are subjected every day. Flights are no more dangerous today, with the hand sanitizer, than yesterday, and if the TSA allowed you to bring 12 ounces of shampoo on a flight tomorrow, flights would be no more dangerous then. The limit was bullshit. The ease with which the TSA can toss it aside makes that clear.

There are a number of trite sayings about how times of crisis bring opportunity, and as with any persistent idea, there’s some truth to that. For all the horror that people are experiencing today, and that seems to be headed our way in the coming weeks due to inadequate resources and incompetent governments, this is an opportunity for everyone to think about what could be, rather than just what is. The case for universal healthcare has never been stronger, for example, and as the tweet earlier in this article said, we’re seeing that a lot of things we were told aren’t feasible, actually are.

Each day of this public health crisis brings a new example. People thrown in jail for minor offenses? San Antonio is one of many jurisdictions to announce that, to keep jails from being crowded with sick citizens, they’ll stop doing that. Why were they doing it in the first place?

The federal government charging interest on loans to attend college? Well, Donald Trump has  instructed government agencies who administer loans to waive interest accrual for the duration of the crisis. But why on earth is our government charging its own citizens interest anyway?

Broadband data caps and throttled internet? Those have been eliminated by AT&T and other ISPs, because of the coronavirus. But data caps and throttling were really just veiled price hikes that served no real technical purpose. Why did we put up with them?

Police helping landlords evict tenants in times of financial trouble? Due to the coronavirus, not anymore in New York, Miami, and New Orleans. But—and you see where this is going—why do the police aid evictions when tenants are stricken with other, non-coronavirus illnesses?

The city shutting off your water, or your power, as punishment for hardship? During this public health emergency, plenty of cities and companies have suddenly found a way to keep service turned on. “As long as COVID-19 remains a health concern,” said Detroit mayor Mike Duggan, “no Detroit resident should have concerns about whether their water service will be interrupted.” Why in the hell should any Detroit resident have concerns about their water service being interrupted, ever? Shouldn’t clean water be the absolute base level of service delivered by a city to its residents?

Sick employees forced to take unpaid leave or work while sick if they want to keep their jobs? Walmart recently announced it would provide up to two weeks of paid leave for any employee who contracts the coronavirus. And the House just passed a bill to address the problem, though as the New York Times editorial board notes, the House’s failure to make the bill universal “is an embarrassment that endangers the health of workers, consumers and the broader American public.” But why should any sick worker fear losing their pay or their job at any time? And why are the most vulnerable to punitive sick leave practices the workers making the lowest wages?

As Kois points out, when the crisis has passed, there will be a strong push to “return to normal”, but it’s important to remember that “normal”, for a lot of people, has been a really bad situation for a really long time, and we’ll have a chance to hold on to some of the changes that we’ve seen, and to compare them to what went before.

It’s also worth noting that as with 9/11, it’s very likely that this crisis will be used to further the global surge in far-right governance around the world. Those of us who value human life are not the only ones who see the opportunity to “make a better world”, but not everybody has the same idea of what that better world should look like.

Take care of yourselves and those you love. Talk to those who share your hopes and dreams for the future. Guard against those who would burn the world to rule the ashes. Work to hold on to progress, and to gain new ground.

And remember that how things are now is neither how they always were, nor how they must be.

An apology to Eunice Foote, the scientist and activist who first published on the role of CO2 in our atmosphere

Image shows two pages of Eunice Foote's article, "Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays", published in The American Journal of Science and Arts, November 1956. Full text can be found

If you want a text version of this article, and description of the tables in it, click here.

For some time now, I’ve had a basic history of climate science more or less memorized. It’s useful to know what we knew and when we knew it, particularly when talking to people who still believe long-debunked misinformation like the idea that the theory of man-made global warming was a post-hoc creation to explain observed warming.

For that entire time, I have been wrong about who first discovered the role that carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate.

My go-to narrative generally went from Fourier in the 1820s, to Tyndall in the 1850s and 1860s, to Arrhenius in the 1890s and early 1900s, to Keeling in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a decent map of key moments in our understanding of CO2 and the global climate, and an effective demonstration of the ways in which the theory was developed, and how it was -and is – a predictive theory that has been supported by a vast body of evidence since its inception.

With simplicity, however, comes inaccuracy. I do not subscribe to the Great Man theory of history – none of the men listed above made their achievements alone, and all of them built on the work of people who had gone before. They were part of communities of people working to understand the universe. The act of singling them out to create a simple, punchy narrative necessarily hides the work of countless other people that contributed to the publications that “history” chooses to single out.

My error, however, goes beyond this necessary over-simplification of history. The reality is that Tyndall, for all his many accomplishments, should not occupy that spot in the story. That place rightfully belongs to one Eunice Newton Foote, who published on the role of CO2 in our climate in 1856 – four years before Tyndall did. Whether through ignorance or malice, Tyndall did not reference her work when he published his own work on the subject. As my discussion of communication between scientists implies, and this linked abstract notes, “From a contemporary perspective, one might expect that Tyndall would have known of her findings.”, particularly since much of that communication is centered around such publications.

Beyond her work as a scientist, Foote was active in the movement for women’s suffrage in the United States, and was a signatory on the Declaration of Sentiments from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.

For a woman like Eunice Foote—who was also active in the women’s rights movement—it could not have been easy to be relegated to the audience of her own discovery. The Road to Seneca Falls by Judith Wellman shows that Foote signed the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention Declaration of Sentiments, and was appointed alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton herself to prepare the Convention proceedings for later publication. As with many women scientists forgotten by history, Foote’s story highlights the more subtle forms of discrimination that have kept women on the sidelines of science.

Foote’s role in history was uncovered by researcher Raymond Sorenson, who published a paper on her in 2011. The greatest service historians provide to us is in their work to sort through the various accounts and records of history, and dig up truths about our past which are so often buried under layers of ego, bigotry, and political power games. In a society founded on science, that lionizes those who first discover new facts about the world, it’s good to see recognition of a woman whose efforts were wrongly ignored for so long.

COVID-19, priorities, and “successful” communist countries.

In the midst of all the news about the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s understandable that not everything is being reported on. One thing that should be reported on, but that I’m having trouble finding articles about, is how the Marxist-Leninist government of Vietnam is handling the outbreak and quarantine.  As of March 6th, they were mass-producing testing kits, and claimed to have the capacity to export testing kits while meeting their own needs.

They’ve had people in isolation and quarantine, and have been making that easier by providing groceries to people in lockdown, for free.

The image shows a tweet with the caption text, and four different pictures. The top two pictures show packaged meals stacked up on tables. The bottom two show a woman in scrubs and a surgical mask covering mouth and nose, handing out meals to various Vietnamese citizens, also wearing masks.

“western media wont talk about this but the vietnamese government is helping citizens fight the coronavirus by offering free /proper/ meals for people in quarantine areas and free groceries/necessities for a whole neighborhood in lockdown”

 

Image shows a twitter thread with the captioned text, plus two pictures of pre-packaged meals including rice, vegetables, and other stuff I can't personally identify

“- here people will be placed in quarantine due to travel history, showing symptoms or recent contact with current patients – the neighborhood in lockdown is because the 17th patient, possibly a “super spreader”, resided there” ** “some korean travelers are also in quarantine so they were given korean meals because what if they aren’t used to vietnamese food” ** “i ran out of characters but this is also meant to poke fun at how the usa and some european nations respond to this outbreak, both their government and people. anw if you constantly think of countries in the global south with your shallow eurocentric bias then karma will get you.” ** “Muting this now reach me through DM if you need to! Appreciate all the good sentiments” ** “your gov may be shitty but extend your appreciation and support to doctors & healthcare workers on the frontline of this crisis! if you cant wear masks, wash hands often, avoid touching MEN (Mouth Eyes Nose), and avoid crowds (PLEASE). the system is in shambles so be proactive”

They’re taking steps to reduce stigma surrounding people who’ve fallen victim to the virus, to make quarantine economically feasible for those undergoing it, and to actively take care of the population. From what I can tell, their response to this crisis is putting capitalist countries to shame, and while I don’t want their precise form of government, or all of the restrictions on dissent they have, I think it would be a mistake to ignore the good things they have going as well. I’m less interested in political labels than I am in the wellbeing of humans as a whole, and there is no reason why we cannot have a system that can respond to a crisis the way the Vietnamese government is doing, while also having the freedoms that some in the West believe are somehow inextricably tied to capitalism.

We can have a better world,

 

“Green” hydrogen: Where are we at?

One of the biggest challenges in transitioning to renewable energy has been the usefulness of fossil products for fueling long-distance transportation. Cars, trucks, planes, and boats all generally rely on fossil fuels for power. Hydrogen is periodically proposed as an alternative, for those vehicles that can’t functionally be run from batteries, or tied to a grid like trains. The problem is that most hydrogen currently available also comes from processing of fossil fuels, which is why George W. Bush was so willing to promote it as an “alternative” to oil. Disingenuous greenwashing aside, however, hydrogen does work, and as with the power for electric cars, the question is more about where it comes from.

The idea of using renewable energy to produce hydrogen for fuel has been around for a long time, as have proposals to use nuclear power for the same purpose. In both cases the scale of production needed will be massive to make any real dent in the fossil fuel economy. Whether or not hydrogen from splitting water becomes a major part of fueling human society, it has the potential as a portable fuel source to replace oil or gas, and I think it’s good that it’s being explored. Japan’s efforts to rebuild and re-invent the Fukushima region are what drew my attention back to this. They’ve opened a solar powered electrolysis plant to act as a pilot project for later mass production.

The Fukushima Hydrogen Energy Research Field (FH2R) uses a 20MW solar array, backed up by renewable power from the grid, to run a 10MW electrolyser at the site in Namie Town, Fukushima Prefecture.

A consortium including Toshiba, Tohoku Electric Power and Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) said the project is the largest electrolyser yet to produce hydrogen from clean power sources. The FH2R system can produce up to 100kg of hydrogen an hour, said the partners.

The project will be used as a test bed for mass production of green H2, with initial output directed to fuel hydrogen cars and buses in Japan – including some to be used at the Tokyo Olympics later this year.

My rough calculation based on the numbers from this article indicates that that’s enough to fuel about an average week’s commute for 18 fuel cell-powered cars. That’s not a lot, but it’s not meant to be at this stage.

Shell is partnering with the Gasunie natural gas company, and the Groningen Port Authority in the Netherlands for a much larger installation powered by offshore wind turbines: 

The electricity would be brought onshore at Eemshaven where it would be used to produce hydrogen for northern European industry and distributed via Gasunie’s current network.

The factory will have capacity to produce 800,000 tonnes of hydrogen a year. ‘Green hydrogen, produced via renewable sources such as wind and solar power, is central in the Dutch climate agreement and in the European Green Deal,’ the three companies say.

Hydrogen is widely used in industry but is currently mainly produced with gas.

Last October, Groningen hosted a major conference on developing a hydrogen based economy.

Economic affairs minister Erik Wiebes said at the time the region has everything it needs, including infrastructure (gas pipelines, deep-sea port), the space and the knowledge to make the transition to a hydrogen economy a reality.

Households
The offshore wind farm will kick off with production of some three to four gigawatts by 2030, expanding to 10 gigawatts by 2040. This would be enough to supply 12.5 million households, or more than the total number of households in the Netherlands, the project group said.

This is encouraging news, if it holds up. The fact that it’s being run by fossil fuel corporations make me worry that it’s an attempt at greenwashing that will never amount to much. Fossil fuel corporations should have turned their vast resources to creating alternative energy sources decades ago, when the climate had not yet been destabilized, but better late than never, I suppose.

Another concern has been transport and storage of hydrogen. The Groningen project, and a plan to power LA with hydrogen both rely on existing natural gas infrastructure, and in the case of LA, on continued use of natural gas, at least in the short term. The potential of hydrogen should not be used as an excuse to increase use of natural gas, and I am worried that that’s what this is. On the surface that seems to be a matter of putting the matter into the hands of people who know how to handle volatile gasses, but the record of neglect and incompetence by gas companies, and the associated ruptures and leaks makes me worried about letting those corporations handle hydrogen, given the energy required to produce the stuff, and the amount that could be lost to their profit-driven corner-cutting.

A project in Australia is exploring a different method of storage: 

The 4.5MW Manilla Community Solar array will backed by a unique 2MW/17MWh storage system that takes green hydrogen — produced in electrolysers powered by the solar panels — and stores it in a salt-like substance call sodium borohydride (NaBH4).

This non-toxic solid material can absorb hydrogen like a sponge, store the gas until it is required, and then release the H2 with the application of heat. The released hydrogen is then run through a fuel cell to generate electricity.

This system allows hydrogen to be stored cheaply at high density and low pressure without the need for energy-intensive compression or liquefaction.

I don’t know if this would be a viable way to transport hydrogen – it seems more designed to use as a static “tank” – but I think there would be value in having options other than pipelines run by corporations who’ve already shown themselves incapable of responsible behavior.

It’s still unclear to me whether hydrogen will ever become more than a prop for the bogus argument that natural gas is a “bridge fuel”, but it seems like something that ought to be within the realm of possibility. If it happens, it will require a massive scale-up in renewable energy and/or nuclear power beyond what’s needed to power the grid. As always, that work needs to be happening faster.