Stephan: More good news about the transition out of the carbon-energy era. You can see the trend picking up momentum in dozens of ways, batteries, streets that charge your batteries as you drive, thousands of new charging stations, and new battery technologies. It is happening around the world, as a new dominant trend emerges.
A breakthrough graphene aluminum-ion battery technology could blow lithium-ion away for power. Credit: Graphene Manufacturing Group
Range anxiety, recycling and fast-charging fears could all be consigned to electric-vehicle history with a nanotech-driven Australian battery invention.
The graphene aluminum-ion battery cells from the Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) are claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium-ion cells and hold three time the energy of the best aluminum-based cells.
They are also safer, with no upper Ampere limit to cause spontaneous overheating, more sustainable and easier to recycle, thanks to their stable base materials. Testing also shows the coin-cell validation batteries also last three times longer than lithium-ion versions.
GMG plans to bring graphene aluminum-ion coin cells to market late this year or early next year, with automotive pouch cells planned to roll out in early 2024.
Based on breakthrough technology from the University of Queensland’s (UQ) Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, the battery cells use nanotechnology to insert aluminum atoms inside tiny perforations in graphene planes.
Stephan: Next to climate change, but closely intertwined with it, my greatest concern, in the trends I see, is the possible collapse of American democracy. I think this is occurring for two reasons, two major trends that are shaping everything going on in the country. One is that we are well on the way to becoming a majority-minority nation and about a third of the Whites in the country find this unacceptable, even though it is inevitable. They are in a complete freakout. Second, Americans have lived in a democracy for so long most don't really recognize that the nation could be run on any other basis. And yet we have one political party, the former Republican Party, now the Trump Cult which, drawing energy from, and in service to the White fear trend, is actively trying to change America to a White christofascist authoritarian system which maintains the appearance and form of democracy while the substance is sabotaged and gone. This essay lays out the issues. If you live in a Red value state you can see it plainly happening in the gerrymandering and voter suppression all of which is designed to keep White christofascists in power
A protestor holds a sign reading “Stop the Steal” during a demonstration at the Nevada State Capitol on February 1, 2021, in Carson, Nevada. Credit: O’Neil/SOPA/Getty
Liz Cheney is not on my short list of politicians I admire or wish to see in Congress. But she has done the right thing in calling out the “big lie” and promising to do all she can to keep Donald Trump away from the White House, literally or in terms of his influence over a terribly broken party. She is a canary in the coal mine. Would that others had the courage to follow suit.
Most sentient beings on the planet breathed a huge sigh of relief last November when Joe Biden won the presidential election. We were even happier when he and his administration immediately began acting robustly on myriad issues. First came the well-chosen appointments, the flurry of executive orders reversing Trump’s perversities, then the big bills aimed at health care, infrastructure, economic recovery, climate change, income inequality, childcare and more — all of which made Republicans in Congress and their […]
Stephan: Why does the richest nation in the world have the worst healthcare. Why doesn’t the United States, like the rest of the developed world have a universal single-payer birthright system As I have pointed out countless times, all backed by factual data, the American illness profit system is an absurdly overpriced failure if the point of healthcare is to foster wellbeing. But, of course, that isn’t the point. Profit is the only priority in the American system. CVS, as this report, spells out is one of the evil corporations trying to stop any change to the system. I use the word evil very deliberately. And so I ask you to please, If you get your prescriptions there, change to another pharmacy. Never spend another nickel in a CVS pharmacy from this day forward. And tell all your friends and family to do the same. Citizen power is pocketbook power. If none of us buy anything at CVS watch how fast they change their tune.
CVS Pharmacy
Last year, as the United States was ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, CVS Health donated a staggering amount of money to a dark money group that advocated for limiting health care access.
The massive donation is considered the largest financial contribution on record although PAHCF is classified as a 501(c)(4) organization and not required to publicly disclose information about its donors. Reports about CVS Health’s donation come months after PAHCF embarked on a political sweep of voters in Democratic primary states as they urged voters to push back against the promotion of Medicare for All.
The group also targeted the states that are embracing the public health option. The publication notes that “the group hired local lobbyists and aired advertisements designed to discourage state legislators from voting for the plan.” Leading up to […]
Stephan: Here is another aspect of the pharmaceutical sector of the American illness profit system, showing the conscious choice by the industry to place profit above wellbeing. This industry is completely out of control, and in desperate need of being restructured so that wellbeing becomes the first priority.
The Pharmaceutical Industry is distributing talking points, organizing opposition, and even collecting congressional signatures in an attempt to reverse President Joe Biden’s support for worldwide access to generic Covid-19 vaccines.
The behind-the-scenes moves, revealed in documents obtained by The Intercept, come as the U.S. last week announced that it would support the World Trade Organization proposal, led by India and South Africa, to temporarily waive enforcement of intellectual property and patent rights on coronavirus vaccines. Without a radical expansion in vaccine manufacturing capacity, many developing countries will not achieve mass vaccination rates until 2023 or 2024.
The waiver request, which was unexpectedly endorsed by Biden’s administration on May 5, is designed to provide legal immunity for drug firms to copy the formulas of existing vaccines to supply low-cost vaccines to low-income countries, much of which are facing delays that could prolong the pandemic.
On Wednesday, Jared Michaud, a lobbyist with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade group that represents Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and other major drug firms, sent an email laying out the industry’s role in coaxing lawmakers to […]
Stephan: Just as history looks back and sees Madison, Mason, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Washington, as historically significant heroes, and Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Henry VIII as villains so, I think, history will look back on men like Lee Raymond and Lucio Noto as historical villains, which is different than just being a bad person. Yesterday I ran that piece on neuroscience's take on the psychopathology of sadism. It mentioned the notably high percentage of corporate heads who suffer from this, and I think Lee Raymond and Lurio Noto, are exemplars of the disorder. Their villainy? They knowingly and deliberately impeded the world's and particularly America's response to climate change. This report lays this out story, but more importantly, it explains how it was done, it speaks to the deeper process, the creation of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). This is all part of the disinformation trend that is devouring our culture.
Exxon Corporation Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lee Raymond (L) and Vice Chairman Lucio Noto, circa 01 December, 1999. Credit: Henny Ray Abrams/ Getty
In the summer of 1988, the United States experienced the worst heat waves and droughts since the Dust Bowl. Ominous images of burning forests, withering fields and sweltering cities filled the American press and elicited nervous suspicion: was this the work of the so-called greenhouse effect? Had the danger of which some scientists warned already arrived?
It was amid this tense national atmosphere climatologist James Hansen intervened with his testimony to the Senate, in which he forthrightly asserted that “we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.” The suspicions were sound: “It is already happening now.” Describing the extreme summer as a taste of things to come, the report in the New York Times also noted that the testifying scientists “said that planning must begin now for a sharp reduction in the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that […]
