Stephan: I'm not sure many people understand yet how deliberately and with such purpose the Republican Party is trying to gripple the substance of U.S. democracy while retaining the form. We, as a nation, are in serious trouble. The leverage point is going to be the 2022 election.
A volunteer holds signs during the Senate runoff elections on January 5, 2021, in Atlanta, Georgia. Credit: Virginie Kippelen / AFP/Getty
Over the past couple months, GOP legislators in several states have passed legislation purportedly intended to protect the integrity of the vote. In reality, these bills — which GOP governors in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Iowa, and elsewhere, have rushed to sign — contain poison pill provisions that make it harder for residents to vote. Less publicized is that they also contain a number provisions that make poll workers and other election officials legally liable for small, unintentional errors of process that could occur at the polls or in the distribution of ballots.
The laws are aimed at making the voting process more cumbersome, and at making the election process more manipulable for partisan advantage.
In Iowa, for example, a new law mandates that polls close at 8pm instead of 9pm, thus reducing the time that many people have to vote after work. There’s no good reason for that; it’s simply intended to make it harder to vote. The law also reduces the number […]
Stephan: This article describes the shadow side of electric vehicles, the worn-out battery. And it makes the point this trend is coming, and we need to prepare for it now, just as we are building a charging network across the country. Otherwise, there will be a terrific waste pollution crisis. This is not gpoing to be an easy problem to solve, as this article lays out.
ReCell recycled lithium-ion batteries Credit: ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY
The battery pack of a Tesla Model S is a feat of intricate engineering. Thousands of cylindrical cells with components sourced from around the world transform lithium and electrons into enough energy to propel the car hundreds of kilometers, again and again, without tailpipe emissions. But when the battery comes to the end of its life, its green benefits fade. If it ends up in a landfill, its cells can release problematic toxins, including heavy metals. And recycling the battery can be a hazardous business, warns materials scientist Dana Thompson of the University of Leicester. Cut too deep into a Tesla cell, or in the wrong place, and it can short-circuit, combust, and release toxic fumes.
That’s just one of the many problems confronting researchers, including Thompson, who are trying to tackle an emerging problem: how to recycle the millions of electric vehicle (EV) batteries that manufacturers expect to produce over the next few decades. Current EV batteries “are really not designed to be recycled,” says Thompson, a research fellow at the […]
Stephan: This is a very interesting look at one aspect of the trend out of the carbon energy era. It is going to transform the towns and cities along the North Sea.
Teesside Wind Farm, also known as Redcar Wind Farm, towers over the town of Redcar. Photograph: Bill Allsopp/Alamy
The UK’s half-century legacy as a leading offshore oil and gas hub will be eclipsed by the North Sea’s fast-growing green energy industry within the next decade, according to new research.
An academic study by the Robert Gordon University, based in the oil industry capital of Aberdeen in Scotland, has found that by 2030 most of the UK’s offshore energy jobs will be in the low carbon energy industry.
The research found that the number of green jobs off the UK’s coastlines is likely to climb from 20% of the country’s offshore energy sector to 65% by the end of the decade in a “significant change for the offshore energy industry”.
Almost half of the jobs in the UK’s offshore energy industry will be supported by the offshore wind sector, which is the largest in the world and could support up to 90,000 roles by 2030 under a new deal with the government to support a quadrupling of wind power capacity.
Damien Cave, Emma Bubola and Choe Sang-Hun, - The New York Times
Stephan: When I was part of a government futurist study group in the early 1970s, one of the big "hair on fire" issues, with which I did not agree, was a coming overpopulation that would bring the world into crisis. It turns out it hasn't worked out quite as those futurists predicted.
A family eating hotpot at a restaurant in Beijing. China’s population is projected to contract sharply this century. Credit: Gilles Sabrié/The New York Times
Fewer babies’ cries. More abandoned homes. Toward the middle of this century, as deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom.
All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.
Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.
Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
A planet with fewer people could ease pressure […]
Stephan: It's the new normal and, except for science journals and magazines, it gets little coverage. But whether it gets coverage or not, the earth's ecosystem is changing with increasing rapidity. And it is going to change your life fundamentally.
The humongous chunk of ice calved from the western side of the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Credit: ESA and Earth Observation
An enormous iceberg, a little bigger than the state of Rhode Island, has broken off of Antarctica.
The finger-shaped chunk of ice, which is roughly 105 miles (170 kilometers) long and 15 miles (25 kilometers) wide, was spotted by satellites as it calved from the western side of Antarctica’s Ronne Ice Shelf, according to the European Space Agency. The berg is now floating freely on the Weddell Sea, a large bay in the western Antarctic where explorer Ernest Shackleton once lost his ship, the Endurance, to pack ice.
The 1,667-square-mile (4,320 square kilometers) iceberg—which now the world’s biggest and has been called A-76, after the Antarctic quadrant where it was first spotted—was captured by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel, a two-satellite constellation that orbits Earth’s poles. The satellites confirmed an earlier observation made by the British Antarctic Survey, which was the first organization to notice the breakaway.
