The fossil fuel industry is pouring methane into the sky

A little while back, I shared the good news that the so-called “clathrate gun” was apparently no longer a serious cause for concern. I remain happy about that, but unfortunately there are other big sources of methane – all tied to fossil fuel extraction – that are contributing to climate change in a major way.

More than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites gushed the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the Guardian can reveal, mostly from oil and gas facilities. The worst single leak spewed the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67m running cars.

This is why the focus on individual lifestyle choices has always been a massive red herring, and why I focus more on systemic/societal change. I haven’t owned a car since late 2009, and any decrease in humanity’s emissions from that choice was more than wiped out by the methane coming from any one of those facilities. Do what you can on the individual level, but if we don’t chance society, that won’t end up mattering. That’s doubly true, because fossil fuel corporations fully intend to extract every drop they can, no matter the harm done to everyone else:

Separate data also reveals 55 “methane bombs” around the world – fossil fuel extraction sites where gas leaks alone from future production would release levels of methane equivalent to 30 years of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

I guarantee you that there are more than 55 places around the world where new extraction is planned, and from which a horrifying amount of methane will leak. These 55 are just the really exceptional ones. Regardless, these findings support the long-standing view that we need to act a lot faster than we have been. The upside is that eliminating or dramatically reducing these emissions should, technically, be pretty easy:

Methane emissions cause 25% of global heating today and there has been a “scary” surge since 2007, according to scientists. This acceleration may be the biggest threat to keeping below 1.5C of global heating and seriously risks triggering catastrophic climate tipping points, researchers say.

The two new datasets identify the sites most critical to preventing methane-driven disaster, as tackling leaks from fossil fuel sites is the fastest and cheapest way to slash methane emissions. Some leaks are deliberate, venting the unwanted gas released from underground while drilling for oil into the air, and some are accidental, from badly maintained or poorly regulated equipment.

Fast action would dramatically slow global heating as methane is short-lived in the atmosphere. An emissions cut of 45% by 2030, which the UN says is possible, would prevent 0.3C of temperature rise. Methane emissions therefore present both a grave threat to humanity, but also a golden opportunity to decisively act on the climate crisis.

“The current rise in methane looks very scary indeed,” said Prof Euan Nisbet, at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK. “Methane acceleration is perhaps the largest factor challenging our Paris agreement goals. So removing the super-emitters is a no-brainer to slow the rise – you get a lot of bang for your buck.”

“Methane emissions are still far too high, especially as methane cuts are among the cheapest options to limit near-term global warming,” said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency. “There is just no excuse.”

I believe the excuse is that solving these problems might slightly slow the rate at which fossil fuel executives keep getting richer. The world has been blessed with a great abundance of “low-hanging fruit” with regard to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and for the most part, those have been ignored. I full believe that this will also be ignored, unless there is real, scary pressure from the bottom.

It may be that as a movement rises, rooted in collective power, direct action, and the common good, the capitalists will begin making more dramatic changes in an effort to appease the masses, head off real change, and hold on to their power. I’ll celebrate those changes when they come, but given the past behavior of these people, I think it’s safe to say that they will not be enough. Not for dealing with the climate, and not for the goal of freedom, self-governance, and justice.

Methane leakage from the fossil fuel industry is not a new problem, and it’s already a crime against humanity that it hasn’t been dealt with. The longer this is allowed to continue, the more harm it does to all of us, and to future generations. They’ve shown that they will not voluntarily cease their campaign of destruction so they must be made to stop.

Edit: Someone on Mastodon pointed out that when methane reaches the end of its “life” in the atmosphere, it doesn’t just disappear – it largely turns into carbon dioxide, and keeps warming the earth that way.

 

Wildfire CO2 emissions are rising with the temperature

It’s hard to decide what aspect of climate change is the most frightening, amplifying feedbacks – effects of warming that themselves cause more warming – have to be near the top of the list. A few days ago, I wrote about research indicating that they may be worse than we know, and today’s research is about the progression of one of those feedback  mechanisms. Wildfires have been increasing with higher global temperatures, increasing output of CO2. Unfortunately, it turns out that 2021 saw a huge spike in wildfire emissions:

Nearly half a gigaton of carbon (or 1.76 billion tons of CO2) was released from burning boreal forests in North America and Eurasia in 2021, 150 percent higher than annual mean CO2 emissions between 2000 and 2020, the scientists reported in a paper in Science.

“According to our measurements, boreal fires in 2021 shattered previous records,” said senior co-author Steven Davis, UCI professor of Earth system science. “These fires are two decades of rapid warming and extreme drought in Northern Canada and Siberia coming to roost, and unfortunately even this new record may not stand for long.”

The researchers said that the worsening fires are part of a climate-fire feedback in which carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet, creating conditions that lead to more fires and more emissions.

“The escalation of wildfires in the boreal region is anticipated to accelerate the release of the large carbon storage in the permafrost soil layer, as well as contribute to the northward expansion of shrubs,” said co-author Yang Chen, a UCI research scientist in Earth system science. “These factors could potentially lead to further warming and create a more favorable climate for the occurrence of wildfires.”

Davis added, “Boreal fires released nearly twice as much CO2 as global aviation in 2021. If this scale of emissions from unmanaged lands becomes a new normal, stabilizing Earth’s climate will be even more challenging than we thought.”

This is why I focus not just on ending fossil fuel use, but also on making changes now, to help us deal with the warming that we know we will be unable to avoid. The climate shift that we’re currently experiencing has a great deal of momentum – enough that it could conceivably keep warming for centuries, even if we do get our emissions under control in the next 20 years. It would be much slower, and potentially easier to adapt to, or even reverse, but the ball may already be rolling fast enough that it no longer needs our help. The longer we delay action, the higher the odds that that’s our situation.

That’s also why it’s important that we actually deliberately phase out fossil fuel use, rather than trying to tweak the market and hope that works. That means big increases in renewable energy, and big increases in nuclear power, as we also work to reshape our infrastructure for a more hostile world.

The upside is that CO2 emissions from wildfires are a little bit like sea ice – they “recover” a bit every year. The net effect is still more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but the fact that, according to the researchers, 80% of the CO2 released is re-captured by new growth following the fire, is important to note. I think it also increases the need for various forms of rewilding – turning areas currently being used by us in the conventional sense, into either fully wild ecosystems, or managed ecosystems that would provide some more direct benefits to humanity, like food.

I don’t expect news in the coming years to be particularly uplifting, but it’s important to remember that we do have ways to make things better.

Video: New Zealand’s ground-hunting bat

If bats are known for anything, it’s for being the only mammals to evolve flight. Some eat fruit, nectar from flowers, or even fish, but a great many make a living snatching bugs out of the air. It turns out, however, that even with the ability to fly, sometimes it’s easier to just walk. Met the pekapeka – the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat. It’s the only bat I’m aware of that hunts on the ground, scuttling around on the forest floor looking for insects and other things to eat. The males also apparently sing to attract mates.

They’ve had a rough time of it, but apparently conservation efforts are ongoing, and there may be cause for cautious optimism. This video is a couple years old, but they little critters seem to be holding on:

Three Arrows on Prager U’s lies about the Iraq War

Growing up, my parents had a great many books from the newspaper comic Doonesbury. For those who’re unfamiliar, the comic started in 1970 following the lives of a group of college kids, mostly centered around the experiences of one Mike Doonesbury. When B.D., the jock who never removed his football helmet, volunteered to go to Vietnam, the readers went along with him, and got a darkly humorous take on that conflict. When George Bush Sr. invaded Iraq in 1990, B.D. was there, too, along with Duke, the Hunter S. Thompson parody, who went to profiteer.

I think it’s fair to say that, along with listening to NPR in the car, Doonesbury was a pretty big part of my childhood political education. During the Gulf War era, the theme of greed was woven through the comics. Mr. Butts, a mascot for the tobacco industry, was handing out free cigarettes to B.D. and his fellow soldiers. Duke ran a sleazy club, which he opened to profit off of soldiers, officers, and the various dignitaries and oilmen drawn to the war and its profits.

The second part of my political education came from my involvement in The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which instilled in me a religious opposition to war, and was a huge part of my social life, growing up. The third part was my high school, High Mowing Waldorf School, which regularly brought in speakers on a variety of topics, including SOA Watch, and an organization called Voices in the Wilderness, which talked about sanctions.

See, the Gulf War was pretty short by modern standards. It only lasted from 1990, to 1991, though it was a brutal affair. If you ever have any questions about whether Bush Sr. was less horrible than W, look into that war, maybe starting with The Highway of Death. The war destroyed a lot of Iraq’s infrastructure, and the sanctions regime that followed made repairing it nearly impossible. I’ve mentioned before that I view sanctions as a form of siege, using modern power and politics to blockade an entire nation, rather than just a city or fortress. The sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis between 1991, and the 2003 invasion by W’s administration, and most of those “excess deaths” were children.

After being “bombed back to the stone age”, people died. A big part of that was because the war’s destruction included sewage and water systems. That meant that clean water was hard to get, and disease was everywhere, while medicine was hard to get. It’s not clear if anyone literally starved to death but there was malnutrition, which makes people more vulnerable toinfection of every kind. On top of that, the U.S. used the U.N. to block necessary supplies, like the resources to repair the infrastructure and purify water. The sanction that angered me the most, in my teens, was on new blood bags for transfusions, on the grounds that they could, in theory, be used to make chemical weapons.

This was a continuation of the gross hypocrisy that always surrounded the U.S. relationship with Saddam Hussein. There’s no question that the man was a horrible person, responsible for incredible amounts of death and suffering, but the U.S. does not care about that. At various points, the U.S. government actively supported those atrocities, just as it supported Saudi Arabia’s ongoing genocide in Yemen, along with countless other crimes against humanity all around the world.

So that was my background when Bush got elected, and most of the people I knew who talked about the issue, fully expected W to try to finish what his daddy started, and get Saddam Hussein. When 9/11 happened, it was immediately assumed that Bush would use it as an excuse to attack Iraq. Not long after, I started attending a weekly peace vigil in a town near where I lived, and I continued demonstrating and protesting through the propaganda campaign that led to the invasion.

I encountered people who sincerely believed that Iraq was involved with 9/11, despite all evidence to the contrary. They screamed in my face about it, in fact. They also screamed about WMDs, even though Iraq had been under inspection for years, and there was no sign that they had anything. I watched my government lie to me, as I had known they would, and I watched the justification for the war shift, and become more vague as each lie was debunked.

I saw how it didn’t matter. The protests didn’t matter, the facts didn’t matter, the opposition from allied nations didn’t matter – none of it mattered. France opposed the invasion, so we had to deal with “Freedom Fries”, and wine stores poured out their French wines. I also saw the rise of Fox News, and its unwavering commitment to making the world worse, and to lying about fucking everything, no matter how pointless.

I’m going through all of this, so that you’d have some idea of my views and memories surrounding the Iraq war and the George W Bush administration. With that as context, imagine my feelings when considering the effort by Prager “University” to rewrite that history. For those unfamiliar, PragerU is a YouTube propaganda mill helmed by an obnoxious and creepy conservative radio host named Dennis Prager. It was originally funded by fracking billionaires, and I believe it has since been bought by The Daily Wire.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that PragerU lies even more than Fox News, and you do not, for any reason, gotta hand it to Fox.

Prager’s primary project seems to be creating an alternative history where everything that ever happened in the world both supports all the opinions of U.S. Christian fascists, and in which the United States always has been, and always will be The Greatest Country In The History Of The World. You know how there’s currently a push to prevent children from learning about LGBTQIA issues, or any accurate telling of U.S. history? Prager U is what they want to have instead.

It’s not shocking that conservatives are trying to rewrite history. That’s all they’ve ever done, really, and it’s part of how they claim moral supremacy for the United States. From cherry trees to WMDs, they just make up a history they like the feel of, and attack anyone who tells the truth as un-patriotic. Fortunately, I’m no patriot, and while I don’t know much about Dan from Three Arrows, if he is a patriot, it’s not for the U.S. (how’s that for a segue?), who just put out this video picking apart Prager’s lies about Iraq and the second Bush administration:

I think it’s helpful to have a perspective from outside the U.S., but more than that, I just appreciate anyone who’s able to dig into videos like this and the people behind them, and put out a solid debunking video on the topic. Conservatives are not going to stop trying to erase and re-write history to suit their agenda, so I think it’s extremely valuable for us to have content like this to push back against their lies.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!

The problem isn’t the industry buying our blood, it’s everything else around it.

Every once in a while, you come across some aspect of USian life that really underscores just how parasitical the ruling class really is. There are a lot of things like that, but they’re rarely as on-the-nose as the blood plasma industry. For those who are blissfully unaware, the United States is one of those rare “industrialized” nations that allows people to sell their plasma to supplement their income. This is the point at which a conservative would probably make like George W. Bush and say that that’s just an example of wonderful American Opportunity, but to me it’s a gross failure of society.

I suppose there are differences of opinion on what societies are for, but I generally hold the view that their purpose is to ensure a better standard of living for all, than any of us could hope to achieve working alone. Obviously, this is not a popular opinion among the USian ruling class. That means that rather than ensuring peoples needs are met, it’s considered “better” to let economic desperation drive people to selling parts of themselves to survive.

As these things go, selling blood plasma is probably the least harmful option, after selling hair for wigs. They take your blood, run it through a machine to filter out stuff like blood cells, and pump that back into you, while taking the fluid – plasma – that’s left over. You lose more than just water, but far less than you would from a whole blood donation.

I know a bit about this off the top of my head because, back in 2009, I sold blood plasma to help make ends meet for a while. I think the price has gone up since then, but at the time, in Madison, Wisconsin, I think the most I got was around $350 for my first month of donations, and less after that. I could be mistaken, but that’s what I remember. Rent was a lot lower back then, so that went a bit further than it would today. Unfortunately, it meant getting holes poked in my veins a lot more than I was used to, and, of course, sometimes they’d accidently poke through a vein, rather than just into it.

I started to worry about the long-term consequences of that repeated damage, and because I wasn’t in any real danger of not being able to eat or make rent, I decided to stop. It turns out that while I was probably better off than most people who sell plasma regularly, I was closer to the norm than I realized:

“What I found instead was a lot of people who, say, 25 years ago would have been middle class, and they just don’t make enough money for that lifestyle any more. I get the sense that one of the biggest demographics is college students. We’re talking about like big public universities where there are a lot of students who don’t come from wealthy backgrounds; I’ve talked to people who use this money to buy books, to pay to go out for a night, for ‘beer money’.

“You will also find people in communities like Flint, Michigan, where I spent a lot of time, who used to be able to expect to have this very normal American middle-class lifestyle and wages and benefits no longer keep pace with that. There are people doing it to buy groceries and to pay for housing. There are also people who are selling plasma to take a vacation.

“It’s these places where people are economically fragile, not necessarily desperately poor. The kind of fragility that we didn’t have 25 or 30 years ago when there were more social-safety protections.”

Yep, that’s me. I went to a decent college, and got a bachelor’s in biology with the expectation, based on everything I’d been told from all sides at that point, that I’d be able to find reliable work, have a career with benefits and a prospect of a decent retirement, and all that jazz. My partner at the time was a chemist, and had enough work to keep us afloat, but it was close to impossible for me to find a job “in my field”. I got some canvassing work around the 2008 election, but those jobs left as soon as the election was over (even though it wasn’t canvassing about the election).

I eventually got contract work from the Wisconsin DNR, as I’ve mentioned before, by volunteering for them for a bit, till they found some money for contractors on the side. Basically, I had to do free labor because I cared about the work, in order to get a job. Then-governor Jim Doyle had imposed a hiring freeze for the state government, which meant I couldn’t be hired with a salary, benefits, or anything like that. I got $15 per hour, and had to pay self-employment tax on it, because the Democratic governor thought that austerity was a good idea. That was back when people in the Democratic party believed – or pretended to believe – that Republicans actually cared about “fiscal responsibility” and the national debt.

I don’t think that effort to appeal to conservative voters did anything but help Scott Walker when he came along a short while later.

The article I quoted above is about a book by one Kathleen Mclaughlin, a journalist who depends on blood plasma to survive – someone at the other end of the supply chain that started in my bone marrow. I think it’s a good perspective to have for writing something like this. Selling plasma did feel a bit like having a “good” job. I got paid, and I made the world better for someone else, and being reminded of that someone else does make me feel better about it in hindsight. My problem was the safety of the work itself, though I think it’s possible I was more worried than I needed to be.

McLaughlin did not find significant evidence that giving blood frequently has negative health effects in the long term. “A lot of people get extremely tired. There is a lot of fatigue. A lot of people I talked to didn’t notice anything at all and they’re totally fine with it. It seems like it’s a very personal, individual thing.”

But she does point out that when people donate blood to the nonprofit Red Cross, they are limited to once every 28 days, which works out at 13 times per year. Those who sell to a for-profit centre can do it 104 times a year. “The disparity between those two limits is shocking.”

Honestly, I think I’m going to look into donating blood. I haven’t done that in a long time, and since it’s never caused me any problems, I really ought to. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need and all that.

One thing I found interesting was Mclaughlin’s discussion of stigma:

And whereas donating blood for free is lauded, donating it for money is stigmatised. “If you think about blood donation, it’s something that we consider quite heroic. If you go to the Red Cross and donate blood, you’re saving a life, you’re not getting paid for it.

“But somehow this practice of donating plasma for pay comes with a pretty heavy stigma. A lot of the people I interviewed who do sell plasma had not told their families that they do it because they were afraid of what their families would think: there would be some kind of judgment or their families would be worried about their health or concerned that they don’t have enough money.

‘The stigma is entirely linked to the fact that we stigmatise poverty in the United States. We look down on it. We don’t respect people who aren’t wealthy in the same way that we respect wealthy people. It’s been interesting for me to see the way that people view selling plasma as being somehow problematic and that’s definitely contributed to the fact that this industry is kind of hidden.”

I think she’s spot on about stigmatization of poverty in the United States, but I honestly don’t remember feeling it about selling plasma. I don’t remember if I told my family what I was doing at the time. If I didn’t, it certainly wasn’t because I was afraid they’d judge me – they’re not like that – but more that I didn’t want to worry them. I don’t think I thought about stigma at all, really, but I also was far less aware of class and power dynamics back then. I’m glad I missed that particular worry, but it’s not like poverty lets you get away with no worries at all. This was also the period where my health insurance didn’t cover any emergency rooms in something like a ten mile radius – an easy and effective way for the insurance company to avoid having to pay for my healthcare.

At the end of the article, Mclaughlin is quoted on the ethics of the blood industry, and again, I think she’s spot on. She focuses not on the industry paying for plasma, but on the economic system that, as I’ve said in the past, is designed to use economic desperation to force people to accept things they otherwise wouldn’t. The industry itself isn’t particularly parasitical, other than the obvious direct parallel; it only becomes so in a society set up to constantly feed an already-bloated aristocracy.

Donating blood and plasma is good. I’m even fine with paying people to do it, since they did the work to produce that blood. It’s a huge part of how modern medicine saves and improves lives, and rewarding people for doing it makes sense to me. The problem isn’t that particular financial incentive, so much as everything about the system surrounding it. It’s not “you get paid if you do this good thing”, it’s “if you don’t do this, you might not get to eat today”. That’s about capitalism, and the policies designed to keep certain segment of the population poor and desperate, while treating poverty as a moral failing. It sounds like an interesting book, and I appreciate having insights the industry.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!

Some More News: Bad things we only have because of lobbying

Hey – didja know that the United States is incredibly corrupt? I know, shocking.

Honestly, there was a time when I believe corruption was a thing that happened in poor countries, and that it wasn’t a problem in the United States, but sometimes I just have to take a moment and marvel at just how corrupt my home country is. Today’s edition of “and here I thought they couldn’t get any lower” was the requirement that lead paint be used in public housing projects – expected to mostly house minorities. Like – I knew lead paint had been everywhere thanks to lobbying, and it was worse in redlined neighborhoods, but I didn’t know that the lead lobbyists actually got it required.

Reparations can’t happen soon enough.

There’s more in the video, of course, I just had to vent about that particular bit of shitfuckery.

Air pollution from plants is getting worse (and we should do universal healthcare about it)

If I had to pick my top two topics of the last year, they would probably be air pollution, and covering our cities with plants. With that as context, please understand that todays post is difficult for me, because it’s time I came clean about something. It’s not just us – plants also cause air pollution. The reality is that this little biosphere of ours is a messy place, and was messy well before we started getting clever with things like fire and pressure. I think it’s pretty clear that air pollution from traffic and industry is a bigger problem than air pollution from plants, but that doesn’t mean that plants are just nature’s perfect air filtering machines. It’s not just pollen either – plants emit all sorts of interesting stuff:

All plants produce chemicals called biogenic volatile organic compounds, or BVOCs. “The smell of a just-mowed lawn, or the sweetness of a ripe strawberry, those are BVOCs. Plants are constantly emitting them,” Gomez said.

On their own, BVOCs are benign. However, once they react with oxygen, they produce organic aerosols. As they’re inhaled, these aerosols can cause infant mortality and childhood asthma, as well as heart disease and lung cancer in adults.

Put in stark terms like that, it can be pretty alarming, and as I said, I absolutely think that we should be accounting for this stuff. It also doesn’t remove the various benefits to having plants around that I’ve discussed in the past, it just complicates the story a little. Unfortunately, as with the air pollution we humans make, air pollution from plants is getting worse, not just from the rising temperature, but also from the rising CO2 levels:

There are two reasons plants increase BVOC production: increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and increases in temperatures. Both of these factors are projected to continue increasing.

To be clear, growing plants is a net positive for the environment. They reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which helps control global warming. BVOCs from small gardens will not harm people.

“Your lawn, for example, won’t produce enough BVOCs to make you sick,” Gomez explained. “It’s the large-scale increase in carbon dioxide that contributes to the biosphere increasing BVOCs, and then organic aerosols.”

See, increasing plant life as we decrease our own pollution will not only make our lives better, it will also create something of a feedback loop. By reducing CO2 levels, we will also be reducing both of the things causing air pollution from plants to get worse. Even so, the temperature’s going to keep rising for a while to come, so it’s good to be aware of this aspect of that problem.

The other thing this paper mentions is dust. I talked the other day about the danger of toxic dust from the drying Great Salt Lake, but these researchers were taking more of a global perspective, and at that scale, it’s the Sahara that has them worried:

The second-largest contributor to future air pollution is likely to be dust from the Saharan desert. “In our models, an increase in winds is projected to loft more dust into the atmosphere,” said Robert Allen, associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UCR and co-author of the study.

As the climate warms, increased Saharan dust is likely to get blown around the globe, with higher levels of dust in Africa, the eastern U.S., and the Caribbean. Dust over Northern Africa, including the Sahel and the Sahara, is likely to increase due to more intense West African monsoons.

Both organic aerosols and dust, as well as sea salt, black carbon, and sulfate, fall into a category of airborne pollutants known as PM2.5, because they have a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less. The increase in naturally sourced PM2.5 pollution increased, in this study, in direct proportion to CO2 levels.

“The more we increase CO2, the more PM2.5 we see being put into the atmosphere, and the inverse is also true. The more we reduce, the better the air quality gets,” Gomez said.

For example, if the climate warms only 2 degrees Celsius, the study found only a 7% increase in PM2.5. All of these results only apply to changes found in air quality over land, as the study is focused on human health impacts.

The researchers hope the potential to improve air quality will inspire swift and decisive action to decrease CO2 emissions. Without it, temperatures may increase 4 degrees C by the end of this century, though it’s possible for the increase to happen sooner.

Gomez warns that CO2 emissions will have to decrease sharply to have a positive effect on future air quality.

“The results of this experiment may even be a bit conservative because we did not include climate-dependent changes in wildfire emissions as a factor,” Gomez said. “In the future, make sure you get an air purifier.”

 Though be careful about what kind of purifier you get, since the good ol’ profit motive has done anything but clear the air on what makes for a good product.

I think I should mention – the particles we’re discussing here are not just the ultrafine particles I’ve discussed in the past. A lot of them are much bigger, which means that masks are going to be much more effective than they would be for freeway and airport pollution. That said, none of us are getting out of this life alive, and air pollution has played a role in that throughout our species’ existence.

That’s why it’s so important to have universal healthcare as part of our response to global warming.

The grim reality is that as temperatures continue to rise, the world will become more dangerous in a number of ways, and under a private healthcare system (or a public one that has been deliberately under-funded to discredit it), that will inevitably translate to shorter lives, with more suffering and disease. As much as I enjoy cyberpunk as a genre, I’m not thrilled about the part of it where all of us cyberserfs are constantly ill because of pollution and poverty. Kinda seems like the workers of the world oughta unite…

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name character in that series!

Some musings and a John Oliver video on AI technology

I think I’m probably not alone in having mixed feelings about current “AI” tech. It clearly has a lot of great potential, but I think everyone can see the dangers presented by things like the ability to convincingly fake a high-resolution video of pretty much anyone. That one thing, by itself, is a frighteningly powerful tool for social control, both for its ability to let the powerful attack dissidents of all kinds, and for the way it will let politicians and their ilk claim that any video evidence against them is fake.

I honestly don’t know how that will affect things in the near future, but it sure seems like it’s gonna be bad.

But I don’t know that. I have a reflexive distrust of the technology, I think, that largely stems from how I’ve seen technology used to make life worse over the last few decades, and from looking at recent history. Consider how much the police rely on getting confessions from people, and how much they lie about evidence to do that. Do we really think they’ll stop short of using AI to help with that? Of course not. They’ve been using and abusing AI tech all through its development.

Malcolm X’s family is suing over government involvement in his assassination. The government famously tried to get MLK Jr. to commit suicide, and there’s certainly suspicion around his assassination. We’ve seen over, and over, and over again how the powerful will tell any lie, and go to any lengths to keep their power, so of course they’re going to do the same shit with this.

But maybe that abuse will lead to people relying more on direct personal connection and knowledge. Maybe this will somehow turn out to be a powerful weapon for a revolution that brings about real equality, autonomy, and self-governance. Maybe it will lead to advances in research that solve problems like climate change and chemical pollution.

Maybe.

But for now, it worries me a great deal.

As usual, I like John Oliver’s video on the subject.

Edit: I should say – Oliver goes into more depth about the ways in which bias can develop in unexpected ways based on inputs, AI hiring tech, and other stuff like that – the video isn’t particularly about the same stuff as my blog post.

 

Solidarity Sunday: HarperCollins Union Victory

HarperCollins is a multibillion dollar publishing company – the second largest in the United States – owned by none other than Rupert Murdoch. As my main source for this post puts it, you have read books from this publisher. As one might expect from such a large and profitable corporation, with such an infamous owner, they haven’t been treating their workers especially well, so at the end of 2022, they went on strike.

Stephanie Guerdan started working in the children’s book department of HarperCollins Publishers six years ago. It was a dream job – just not a dream paycheck. The $33,500-a-year (£28,750) salary was well below a livable wage in New York City, but Guerdan didn’t ask for more. “I was terrified that I was not going to get that job if I negotiated,” they said. “Publishing is very much an industry where they tell you, ‘If you don’t want this, there are 500 people in line behind you who do.’”

Publishing has for decades has been known for its low pay and overwhelmingly white staff. But workers at HarperCollins, the only member of the “big four” publishing houses to have a union, have had enough and authorized an indefinite strike. Work stopped at the downtown Manhattan offices on the sunny morning of 10 November. Employees like Guerdan, who is a shop steward at the union, spilled on to the streets to picket.

“We want to create a workplace that is more financially sustainable for employees and accessible to people from a variety of backgrounds,” said Olga Brudastova, president of Local 2110 United Auto Workers, the union that HarperCollins workers are part of.

More than 250 HarperCollins employees are unionized, including workers in the editorial, sales, publicity, design, legal and marketing departments. The strike was authorized by a vote of 95.1% last month. It comes after 11 months of negotiations with HarperCollins management over a new contract, and a one-day strike that occurred on 20 July.

According to the union, the average salary at the company is $55,000 annually, and the majority of employees are women. HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, reported record profits in 2021.

“We’re willing to stay out as long as it takes,” Guerdan said. “After about a week, the company is really going to feel the loss of all our essential labor. I’ve talked to friends who are not in the union, and their assessment of it has been, ‘I don’t think the company knows what’s going to hit them.’”

It’s easy to look at the history of workers’ rights over the last half century, and become cynical. Even discounting Biden’s decision to deny rail workers their right to strike, we’ve seen plenty of attempted labor actions end in disappointment. This is not one of those cases. Guerdan, it turns out, was right. The company may have started to hurt after about a week, but the union workers held the strike for three months, and they wore down the greedy fuckers at the top. The new contract, while far from the worker ownership I’d personally like to see, is a big upgrade, and proof that collective action works:

The union tweeted out a full summation of their agreement with HarperCollins here, but the highlights are as follows:

  • Minimum wage increase, immediately to $47,500 with a ramp-up to $50,000 by 2025.
  • A $1,500 bonus for all union members, presumably to partially offset the costs of being left without a paycheck by their company since November
  • Guaranteed annual raises for all marked satisfactory or above
  • Union letter and membership card included in new-hire packets
  • Joint Labor/Management committee to meet monthly
  • Time on aforementioned committee and/or all company-sponsored DEI activities will be seen as and paid as work time (as opposed to the free labor junior employees were expected to contribute previously)
  • Juneteenth and Presidents’ Day added as permanent paid holidays (as opposed to, you know, a one-time publicity stunt a la June 2020)
  • Return-to-office not mandated for union employees until July 1 (currently, Harper expects employees to live and work in NYC)

The above are just the guaranteed, contractually mandated changes that will be implemented at Harper. This does not include the ripple effects that have already begun in the rest of the industry.

Collective action works.

Note that second bullet point. I’ve described strikes as sieges before, and I mean that very literally. The way our society is set up, if you don’t have money, the government will use force to prevent you from having the means to survive, because those means “belong” to someone else, like a landlord, or a grocery store that throws out large amounts of food every day. The default is that you don’t have a right to life or liberty, and a right to “pursuit of happiness” only really exists if you define that as spending the majority of your waking life further enriching the worst people in the world.

How many of you, dear readers, could go without a paycheck for three months? It’s my understanding is that for most people in the U.S., that would be a rough time. That’s part of why the pathetic government response to the mass joblessness caused by the pandemic was so unconscionable. The main point of society is that through working together, we can guarantee a minimum standard of living, and some basic degree of safety. The primary project of neoliberalism has been to remove all of that, and to leave us all at the whims of capitalists. The last few years have given us a good look at how well that “works”.

In many ways, a union is an effort to re-form that part of society that capitalism destroyed in its creation. Because we lost the commons, and with them the option to survive outside of the capitalist system, we’ve been forced to accept the terms of capitalists, and encouraged to compete with each other for the scraps they give. Working together to survive and thrive has always been at the core of the human experience, and it feels as though we’ve been living through an effort to cut out that reflexive solidarity. Unions bring that back, and give us a way to re-contextualize our struggle for survival, and actually make progress, rather than simply hoping that we’re one of the lucky ones uplifted by our rulers.

That’s why they hate unions so much.

When I was younger, I often encountered what I think of as “The Henry Ford Argument”. You’ve probably heard this myth – Henry Ford, benevolent business genius that he was, knew that if he paid his workers well, they would, in turn, have enough to buy his cars, and the net effect would be beneficial to everyone. In this story, that’s the origin of the good jobs in the auto industry that were a centerpiece of mid-20th century U.S. life. In reality, Ford was a fascist who ended up caving to United Auto Workers, and as with so many other “leaders”, his story was re-written to make him look better from a modern perspective:

Seventy-five years ago today, in 1941, workers at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, launched a successful strike for union recognition. The Rouge was the largest industrial complex in the world, created as an impregnable anti-union fortress. The company’s Service Department spied on and committed violent acts against workers and trade union advocates who approached the factory gates.

The Rouge gates were the site of two of the most notorious anti-union episodes in U.S. labor history. In the 1932 Ford Hunger March, Ford service members and Dearborn police opened fire on unemployed demonstrators, killing four immediately. In the 1937 Battle of the Overpass, Ford service members beat UAW officials Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen and a dozen union supporters, mostly women, seeking to pass out flyers.

The company’s violent proclivities were made especially dangerous by the media-savvy popularity of the company’s founder and principal owner, Henry Ford.  The iconic billionaire was the recipient of millions of dollars of free publicity for his advocacy of a high-wage, high-productivity, high-consumption society. His philosophy also included opposition to unions, to the New Deal, and to women working outside the home. Most disturbing was his publication and distribution of the anti-Semitic forgery, The International Jew, and his acceptance of a medal in 1938 from the Nazi regime of Adolph Hitler.

Ford was one of the most well-known individuals in the world in 1941. Opposed by unionists, liberals, and leftists, he nevertheless was viewed by many as a “friend of labor.” The majority of Ford workers at the Rouge complex thought otherwise. They overcame not only violence and the Ford media halo but also the company’s attempt to break their strike by dividing them along racial lines and charging their strike was a Communist plot.

In the capitalist fairy tale, we live in a world full of win-win exchanges, where the best option is always naturally chosen by “market forces”. In that world, it’s only natural for capitalists to want their workers to be happy and healthy, so they’ll enjoy their lives, and not cause problems. It’s one of those things that works in theory, but ignores the reality of who has always been empowered by capitalism. When they see workers enjoying life, they get jealous, and angry that all that money and time isn’t going to them. They can’t help themselves – they have to take more. That’s why, in the words of one of my favorite labor songs, a strong and healthy working class is the thing that they most fear. People who are physically weak, sick, and desperate are far, far less likely to be able to last through a siege. They do most of their work ahead of time by trying to ensure that their enemy – the workers who enrich them – are already under a sort of minor siege, just from day to day life. I’m talking about capitalists in pretty absolutist and unsympathetic terms, but as the Ford example shows, this is always how it goes. This is what capitalism does.

The HarperCollins union is continuing the noble human tradition of working together for the common good. As mentioned earlier, this win will ripple out through the industry, as some companies raise wages to prevent unionization in their workforce, as other companies see their own strikes, and a new industry standard wage is set. That’s a huge change, especially when you remember that it came from less than 300 people, plus however many supported them through the strike.

When you look at a labor win like this, you can see, very faintly, the foundations of a new kind of society. Ford used the same playbook that modern capitalists use, and in a way, they’re not wrong about strikes being a “communist plot”. Leaving aside the natural prevalence of socialists and communists in unions, that kind of organization makes it very clear that rulers are rarely needed, if ever. Bosses usually cave to a well-organized strike, because they know that the alternative – trying to impose more authoritarian rule over the workers – could lead to them losing everything.

That’s the thing about organizing that inspires and uplifts me. It shows a way that we can start building a different world whether or not our current rulers want us to. That’s not to say that victory is guaranteed, or that the way forward is safe. I fully expect that if we start actually threatening the power of the aristocracy, they will try to crush us, and they will not balk at using lethal force. The effort to use poverty to keep us in line is already lethal to countless people, and they absolutely use violence to enforce that poverty.

But the problem with a harsh crackdown is that it tends to drive recruitment for the underdogs. It rubs people’s faces in the reality of their situation, and inspires those who want something better to actually do something. The capitalist class has vast, terrifying power, and they wield it without mercy all over the world, every day. It’s right to be afraid of them, but it’s also important to notice that they are afraid of us. We are not powerless. We have the same ancient might that made humanity what it is today, and we can access that power by working together.