Out-of-staters vs. R.I. aquaculture
Oysters farmed in baskets on Prince Edward Island.
— Photo by Santryl
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
New Rhode Island state rules mandate that people who want to expand or start new aquaculture farms (mostly shellfish) must identify property owners within 1,000 feet of their projects’ boundaries. The Coastal Resources Management Council will then notify those abutters about the proposal so that they have plenty of time to fight it.
Many, and in some places most, of the abutters will be wealthy out-of-state summer people who like to eat oysters, and can afford to buy lots of them, but many don’t want aquaculture near them, though it’s good for the area’s economy. They’ll get high-fee lawyers to try to block the farms.
From Cuba to Somerville
“Manolete” (bullfighter) (woodcut), by Rafael Zara, in the show “Connections/Conexiones,’’ at Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville, Mass., through April 9.
The gallery explains:
The Brickbottom Gallery is showing original prints by contemporary Cuban artists, most of whom are living on the island. This is the first half of an international print exchange. In 2019, Janette Brossard Duharte, president of the Printmaking section of the Visual Artist Association of Cuba, approached The Boston Printmakers with an idea for an international print exchange. She invited members of The Boston Printmakers to exhibit in Havana and asked the organization to sponsor an exhibit of Cuban artists in the Boston area. The Boston Printmakers happily accepted and the Brickbottom Gallery agreed to exhibit the original prints, never shown here before….
“Brossard brought the work of 37 artists to the gallery from Havana in 2019. The subjects of the prints explore themes ranging from politics to religion to eroticism. The graphic styles run the gamut from realism to colorful abstraction to the printed book. The history of Cuban printmaking began with the necessity to promote Cuban cigars and developed … with the production of strong silkscreen prints to advertise films and to make political statements. Contemporary printmakers have expanded their output to include lithography, etching, woodcuts as well as silkscreen. All of these mediums are present in the Brickbottom Gallery exhibition.’’
Lindsay Owens: Firms use ‘inflation’ as cover for price-gouging and record profits
1904 cartoon warning attendees of the St. Louis World's Fair of hotel room price-gouging.
Via OtherWords.org
If you’ve been slammed lately by higher prices on everything from groceries to rental cars and gas prices, you’re probably wondering what on earth is behind these skyrocketing costs.
Corporations are quick to blame this new reality on the pandemic, but another major culprit is hiding in plain sight: their own profiteering.
Four times a year, corporations are required by law to update their investors on how they’re doing in terms of sales and profits. These are called “earnings reports,” and the companies will usually hold calls with the investors to walk them through the latest report.
My organization, Groundwork Collaborative, recently got our hands on the transcripts from hundreds of these earnings calls. And you won’t believe what CEOs are boasting about.
Knowing that the current inflation frenzy is a convenient scapegoat, these companies are charging customers even more to pad their profit margins. They are just admitting it — they’re openly bragging to investors about how well it’s working.
“I think we’ve done a great job with our pricing,” boasted the CFO of Hormel, a maker of popular grocery brands. “I think it’s been very effective.” As prices went up, the company improved its operating income by 19 percent in the first quarter of 2022 compared to 2021.
Constellation Brands, the parent company of popular beers Modelo and Corona, is also engaging in bald-faced profiteering. On its January call, Constellation’s CFO admitted that its consumer base “skews a bit more Hispanic” and the company wants to “take as much as [we] can” from them.
And now, the conflict in Ukraine is providing yet another opportunity for oil and gas companies to pad their bottom lines. “It’s tragic what’s going on in Eastern Europe,” said one oil executive in late February. “But if anything, these high prices, the volatility, drive even more energy security and long-term contracting.”
This pandemic profiteering is taking a massive toll on consumers, workers and small businesses.
Low-income Americans are pinching pennies to feed their families and pay their bills. And while mega-companies can use their market power to raise prices and generate record profits, small businesses and independent retailers are struggling to keep their doors open.
The appalling price-gouging and monopolistic behavior we’re monitoring comes on top of decades of disinvestment in our workers and supply chain, excessive corporate power and financial markets maximizing short-term profits. This broken system left us wholly unprepared to accommodate increases in demand.
But make no mistake: next time you experience sticker shock in the checkout line, it’s a safe bet that corporate executives and shareholders are reaping the rewards.
People are catching on: A new poll from Data for Progress and Groundwork finds that 63 percent of voters believe that “large corporations are taking advantage of the pandemic to raise prices unfairly on consumers and increase profits.”
Policy makers are taking notice, too. The New York state attorney general’s office just announced new price-gouging rules, paving the way for other states to follow suit.
And days after President Biden promised action on pandemic price-gouging, congressional oversight panels opened investigations into the three major ocean shipping alliances. These outfits control about 80 percent of seaborne cargo and have seen their profits increase seven-fold from the previous year.
Finally, a recently introduced bill, the COVID-19 Price Gouging Prevention Act, would help the Federal Trade Commission and State Attorneys General protect people across the country from pandemic profiteering.
Without competition and robust regulation to keep them in check, big corporations have gotten away with using the pandemic to push up prices and fatten their profit margins — and if they aren’t reined in, high prices could be here to stay.
Lindsay Owens is the executive director of Groundwork Collaborative.
Chris Powell: Making somone else pay for what you get
Egyptian peasants seized for non-payment of taxes at the time of the pharaohs.
From The Outline of History (1920), by H.G. Wells
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Liberal Democratic members of the Connecticut General Assembly again are pursuing what they call fairness in taxation, their euphemism for state government's raising and spending a lot more money. Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, opposes increasing taxes while state government has a lot of emergency federal cash on hand. But the governor may be glad of the tax- fairness clamor, since it emphasizes his moderation in his party as he seeks re-election in a campaign that increasingly seems competitive.
According to the tax-fairness clamor, the poorest people in Connecticut pay a bigger percentage of their income in taxes than the state's rich do. But then the poor also receive more in direct government benefits than nearly everyone else and cause far more problems than most other people. Poverty hasn't yet become a civic virtue, even if few people remember Teddy Roosevelt's contention that the first duty of the citizen is to pull his own weight.
That so many able-bodied people in Connecticut can't pull their own weight has not prompted the tribunes of liberalism to ask why, though some questions are elementary. How does the welfare system's depriving so many children of fathers help them grow up able to pull their own weight? How does social promotion in the schools incentivize them to learn what they need to pull their own weight?
Instead these government policies proletarianize children to grow up to be dependent on government.
The country's tax structure is set up to make state and municipal taxation less progressive -- to be much less geared to personal income. Federal income taxes are heavier than state and municipal income taxes and produce far more revenue. Since the federal income tax is so heavy, states and municipalities don't tax income as much, relying instead on sales and property taxes, which tend to be regressive.
But citizenship requires even the poor to feel some of the burden of government, and in its totality the tax system is more progressive than its seems at a glance. After all, states and municipalities receive, especially now, enormous amounts of financial aid from the federal government and the federal government finances the bulk of assistance to the poor through medical insurance, housing and food programs.
More progressive taxation on the state level is never advocated for progressivity's sake alone but always as a more tolerable mechanism for increasing government revenue and spending.
For state government easily could achieve more progressivity in taxation without raising taxes on anyone and without spending more -- just by reallocating appropriations.
For example, state government could end the priority given to government employee raises and benefits and use the savings to reduce the sales tax, a regressive tax. State government could use the savings to assume the full cost of “special education” in municipal schools, thereby enabling reduction of the municipal property tax, another regressive tax, especially damaging in the cities, where most of the poor live.
Indeed, if more progressive taxation is a matter of justice, why do Connecticut's liberal Democrats seek repeal of the $10,000 limit on the federal income tax deduction for state and municipal taxes? Nearly all the tax benefit of lifting the cap would go to wealthy people, but in high-tax states like Connecticut, many wealthy people are Democrats and major political donors.
Liberalism in Connecticut sees fairness in taxation as little more than compelling someone else to pay for what you get, with government employees taking a cut as the money is moved around.
xxx
Connecticut shouldn't be done with the issue of police accountability.
The recent legislation that appears to remove the “qualified immunity” enjoyed by police officers against damage lawsuits should be reconsidered, since no one is sure how it will be construed.
And a new legislative proposal should be enacted: to prohibit police departments from hiring officers who, after due process, have been fired for misconduct or malfeasance by other departments.
It's bad enough that Connecticut school systems trade teachers who have performed poorly or engaged in misconduct, a practice facilitated by the state law preventing disclosure of teacher evaluations.
But at least teachers don't carry guns at work.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
At Boston Museum of Science: ‘Change Climate Change’
The Museum of Science spans the length of the Charles River Dam, including a parking garage at far left. The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge is visible in the background.
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Boston’s Museum of Science is raising awareness of climate change through its new “Change Climate Change” initiative. Situated in the museum’s Green Wing, “Change Climate Change” consists of exhibits aimed to help visualize climate change and bring attention to the present and future of our planet.
Included in this exhibit is “Gaia,” a 23-foot-wide inflatable globe that includes high-definition NASA imagery. According to British artist Luke Jerram, this art installment aims to evoke the “Overview Effect,” a sensation that astronauts report feeling when they see the Earth from space.
"Also in the Green Wing, visitors can find a “New England Climate Stories” exhibit, which displays how the climate crisis is impacting the habitats and lives of plants and animals found in the New England region. Another part of this initiative is “Resilient Venice: Adapting to Climate Change,” an exhibit that displays how sea-level rise caused by climate change threatens Venice, which is mostly at sea level.
“When discussing the museum’s Change Climate Change initiative and how she hopes the exhibits will impact visitors, Julia Tate, project manager of touring exhibitions and exhibit production, stated that the museum ‘want[s] people to feel empowered about what they can do and what actions they can take.”’
These zones continue to change with global warming.
‘Luminescent isolation’
“I Come from a Place Where No One Has Ever Been’’ (oil on canvas), by Ann Young, at Catamount Arts center in St. Johnsbury, Vt. She lives in Barton, Vt., not far from St. Johnsbury, the cultural center of Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom’’.
The center says: Young’s outsize oil embodies a surreal luminescent isolation in both the background landscape and the foreground of a girl’s face. If you go in person, and linger, it may remind you of looking at “Girl with a Pearl Earring’’ (1665), by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.
St. Johnsbury hosts the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium which opened in 1891 as a gift of Franklin Fairbanks, a businessman, naturalist and philanthropist, to the community. His donated collections remain northern New England’s most extensive natural history display, and the National Register-listed building is a splendid example of the Richardsonian Romanesque style.
Aerial view of beautiful by remote Barton
— Photo by King of Hearts
Llewellyn King: Putin’s diabolical romanticism is sinking the global economy; deconstructing the NATO as threat myth
Face of evil: Vladimir Putin in the KGB in 1980
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The barbarity of the Russian assault on Ukraine is neither mitigated by the ineptitude of the Russian Army nor can hearts be uplifted by the bravery of the Ukrainians. Murder on a colossal scale is taking place in plain sight on television day after day.
At this writing, there are 3.5 million refugees and thousands of civilian casualties reported. This is killing, killing, killing without respite. The Russian economy is destroyed, and the consequence of this bloody slaughter is affecting the world economy.
Even pusillanimous nations like India and Brazil feel the hot breath of the crazed organ grinder Vladimir Putin and his Russian bear.
The invasion of Ukraine was folly and a criminal act, but its continuation has become pure and sustained evil.
Some in the U.S. commentariat have suggested with amazing thought gymnastics that all this is because of the expansion of NATO. But if NATO hadn’t expanded after the fall of the Berlin Wall, then Russia wouldn’t have felt threatened and wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. Nonsense. Russia has felt threatened in Europe since the days of the tsar. If NATO hadn’t expanded to include the Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, Russian troops would be billeted there right now.
Had Ukraine joined NATO, the United States wouldn’t be paying the price at the pump and Europe wouldn’t be shivering out the last days of winter, wondering how it will get through the coming months without enough fuel to produce electricity.
Security is the abiding fault line in Russia’s thinking about the West. Sure, St. Petersburg is close to the rest of Europe and could be overrun. And Moscow isn’t so far from European neighbors that it couldn’t be reached easily by an invader: Napoleon got there, and Hitler could have if he had been a better strategist. But most of Russia with its 11 time zones is geographically out of reach. That makes it hard to swallow the security argument.
Putin wants to restore Imperial Russia and the empire that reached even farther under communism -- which makes him a diabolical romanticist. He wants to restore Russian hegemony over its former states: Ukraine is the biggest.
Larry O’Donnell, the MSNBC host, correctly postulated that for NATO, or the United States alone, to intervene to help Ukraine, nuclear war could result; war not just in Europe, but also between the United States and Russia -- the very thing that dominated the world from 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union.
O’Donnell’s argument reveals the impotence that comes with nuclear weapons and sets up this question: Can we never challenge Russia, China or any other country with a substantial nuclear arsenal and the ability to deliver its weapons into the United States and our European and other democratic allies?
If that is so, does it inoculate Russia from invading the Baltic states?
We know the reality that lurks behind China’s ambitions for Taiwan. Is that more inevitable than ever? President George W. Bush said we would do “whatever it takes to defend Taiwan.” That is very unlikely now, if it ever was.
It isn’t that the reality of the international scene has changed so much as it has come into a clear and harsh light. However, one thing has changed: The slaughter, the unspeakable suffering in Ukraine will change the attitude of a generation to Russia in Europe. Russia will be a pariah, not a partner.
The United States fears war with Russia, but Russia, much weaker in every way, must fear war with NATO and the United States.
On a visit to Moscow, toward the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, I heard a four-star Russian general say, “Never again.” But the Ukraine invasion is again. Will Russia and other aggressors be deterred long after the last of the dead are buried in Ukraine, and long after the last body bag has gone back to Russia? Maybe for a generation, which is about how long it will take to rebuild the global economy after the Russian invasion of Ukraine has run its ghastly course.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Web site: whchronicle.com
Anxious gun fetishist in heavily armed Burrillville
Some of the firearms found in the basement of Ronald Armand Andruchuk's house in Burrillville.
— U.S. District Court of Rhode Island photo
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The arrest of far-right Republican and unsuccessful legislative candidate Ronald Andruchuk of (natch!) exurban, Trumpist and SUV-and-pickup-truck-heavy Burrillville, R.I., who had more than 200 guns and heaps of ammunition, raises a couple of issues.
First, why is it apparently so easy to create such perilously big arsenals, even considering that America is awash in guns and that the gun lobby and the GOP/QAnon have merged? Burrillville has many gun lovers.
Second, it seems that gun ownership has increasingly turned into a comforting fetish for men troubled by generalized anxiety and paranoia, as well as insecurity about their masculinity. I grew up in a towns where many of us (including me) had guns, most often .22 rifles, but I never heard of the sort of huge arsenals that turn up in the news these days. A triumph of marketing by gun makers!
Town offices in gun-dense Burrillville
Judith Graham: Patients sharply divided over Alzheimer’s drug
Self-portrait of American figurative artist William Utermohlen, created after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, in 1995. He experienced memory loss beginning in 1991. After his diagnosis he began creating self-portraits and continued it for another six years, until he made the final self-portraits in 2001. He died in 2007. In the years after the publication of his works in The Lancet in 2001, Utermohlen's self-portraits have been displayed in several exhibitions. His self-portraits inspired the 2019 short film Mémorable.
If you listen to the nation’s largest Alzheimer’s disease advocacy organizations, you might think everyone living with Alzheimer’s wants unfettered access to Aduhelm, a controversial new treatment produced by the Cambridge, Mass., biotech company Biogen.
But you’d be wrong.
Opinions about Aduhelm (also known as aducanumab) in the dementia community are diverse, ranging from “we want the government to cover this drug” to “we’re concerned about this medication and think it should be studied further.”
The Alzheimer’s Association and UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, the most influential advocacy organizations in the field, are in the former camp.
Both are pushing for Medicare to cover Aduhelm’s $28,000 annual per-patient cost and fiercely oppose the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ January proposal to restrict coverage only to people enrolled in clinical trials. Nearly 10,000 comments were received on that proposal, and a final decision is expected in April.
“With respect, we have no more time for debate or delay,” the Alzheimer’s Association national Early-Stage Advisory Group wrote in a Feb. 10 comment. “Every passing day without access to potential treatments subjects us to a future of irreversible decline.” For its part, UsAgainstAlzheimer’s called CMS’ proposal “anti-patient.”
Yet the scientific evidence behind Aduhelm is inconclusive, its efficacy in preventing the progression of Alzheimer’s remains unproved, and there are concerns about its safety. The FDA granted accelerated approval to the medication last June but ordered the drugmaker, Biogen, to conduct a new clinical trial to verify its benefit. And the agency’s decision came despite a 10-0 recommendation against doing so from its scientific advisory committee. (One committee member abstained, citing uncertainty.)
Other organizations representing people living with dementia are more cautious, calling for more research about Aduhelm’s effectiveness and potential side effects. More than 40 percent of people who take the medication have swelling or bleeding in the brain — complications that need to be carefully monitored.
The Dementia Action Alliance, which supports people living with dementia, is among them. In a statement forwarded to me by CEO Karen Love, the organization said, “DAA strongly supports CMS’s decision to limit access to aducanumab to people enrolled in qualifying clinical trials in order to better study aducanumab’s efficacy and adverse effects.”
Meanwhile, Dementia Alliance International — the world’s largest organization run by and for people with dementia, with more than 5,000 members — has not taken a position on Aduhelm. “We felt that coming out with a statement on one side or another would split our organization,” said Diana Blackwelder, its treasurer, who lives in Washington, D.C.
Blackwelder, 60, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2017, told me, “To say that millions of people afflicted with a disease are all up in arms against CMS’s proposal is just wrong. We’re all individuals, not a collective.”
“I understand the need for hope,” she said, expressing a personal opinion, “but people living with dementia need to be protected as well. This drug has very serious, frequent side effects. My concern is that whatever CMS decides, they at least put in some guardrails so that people taking this drug get proper workups and monitoring.”
The debate over Medicare’s decision on Aduhelm is crucial, since most people with Alzheimer’s are older or seriously disabled and covered by the government health program.
To learn more, I talked to several people living with dementia. Here’s some of what they told me:
Jay Reinstein, 60, is married and lives in Raleigh, N.C. He was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease three years ago and formerly served on the national board of directors of the Alzheimer’s Association.
“I understand [Aduhelm] is controversial, but to me it’s a risk I’m willing to take because there’s nothing else out there,” Reinstein said, noting that people he’s met through support groups have progressed in their disease very quickly. “Even if it’s a 10 percent chance of slowing [Alzheimer’s] down by six months, I am still willing to take it. While I am progressing slowly, I want more time.”
Laurie Scherrer of Albertville, Ala., was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia in 2013, at age 55.
Early on, she was prescribed Aricept (donepezil), one of a handful of medications that address Alzheimer’s symptoms. “I became totally confused and disoriented, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t concentrate,” she told me. After stopping the medication, those symptoms went away.
“I am not for CMS approving this drug, and I wouldn’t take it,” Scherrer said. At discussion groups on Aduhelm hosted by the Dementia Action Alliance (Scherrer is on the board), only two of 50 participants wanted the drug to be made widely available. The reason, she said: “They don’t think there are enough benefits to counteract the possible harms.”
Rebecca Chopp, 69, of Broomfield, Colo., was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in March 2019. She’s a former chancellor of the University of Denver.
Chopp is a member of a newly formed group of five people with dementia who meet regularly, “support one another,” and want to “tell the story of Alzheimer’s from our perspective,” she said.
Two people in the group have taken Aduhelm, and both report that it has improved their well-being. “I believe in science, and I am very respectful of the large number of scientists who feel that [Aduhelm] should not have been approved,” she told me. “But I’m equally compassionate toward those who are desperate and who feel this [drug] might help them.”
Chopp opposes CMS’s decision because “Aduhelm has been FDA-approved and I think it should be funded for those who choose to take it.”
Joanna Fix, 53, of Colorado Springs was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in October 2016. She, too, developed serious complications after taking Aricept and another dementia medication, Namenda (memantine).
“I would love it if tomorrow somebody said, ‘Here’s something that can cure you,’ but I don’t think we’re at that point with Aduhelm,” Fix told me. “We haven’t been looking at this [drug] long enough. It feels like this is just throwing something at the disease because there’s nothing else to do.”
“Please, please take it from someone living with this disease: There is more to life than taking a magic pill,” Fix continued. “All I care about is my quality of life. My marriage. Educating and helping other people living with dementia. And what I can still do day to day.”
Phil Gutis, 60, of Solebury, Penn., has participated in clinical trials and taken Aduhelm for 5½ years after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2016.
He’s convinced the medication has helped him. “I don’t know how to describe it other than to say my head feels so much clearer now,” he told me. “I feel much more capable of doing things now. It’s not like I’ve gained my memories back, but I certainly haven’t deteriorated.”
Gutis thinks CMS’s proposed restrictions on Aduhelm are misguided. “When the FDA approved it, there was this sense of excitement — oh, we’re getting somewhere. With the CMS decision, I feel we are setting the field back again. It’s this constant feeling that progress is being made and then — whack.”
Christine Thelker, 62, is a widow who lives alone in Vernon, British Columbia. She was diagnosed with vascular dementia seven years ago and is a board member for Dementia Advocacy Canada, which supports restrictions on Aduhelm’s availability.
“Most of us who live with dementia understand a cure is not likely: There are too many different types of dementia, and it’s just too complicated,” Thelker told me. “To think we’re just going to take a pill and be better is not realistic. Don’t give us false hope.”
What people with Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia need, instead, is “various types of rehabilitation and assistance that can improve our quality of life and help us maintain a sense of hope and purpose,” Thelker said.
Jim Taylor of New York City and Sherman, Conn., is a caregiver for his wife, Geri Taylor, 78, who has moderate Alzheimer’s. She joined a clinical trial for Aduhelm in 2015 and has been on the drug since, with the exception of about 12 months when Biogen temporarily stopped the clinical trial. “In that period, her short-term memory and communications skills noticeably declined,” Jim Taylor said.
“We’re convinced the medication is a good thing, though we know it’s not helpful for everybody,” Taylor continued. “It really boosts [Geri’s] spirits to think she’s part of research and doing everything she can.
“If it’s helpful for some and it can be monitored so that any side effects are caught in a timely way, then I think [Aduhelm] should be available. That decision should be left up to the person with the disease and their care partner.”
Judith Graham is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
Biogen headquarters in Cambridge, one of the world’s biotech centers.
Maybe we should leave some stuff behind
“What We Carry: Balance” (encaustic on panel), by Helene Farrar, who is based in Manchester, Maine, which is on the Kennebec River.
Her site says:
Hélène Farrar has taught and worked in the visual arts for 20 years while exhibiting in commercial, nonprofit and university galleries in New England, New York City, Pennsylvania, Italy and England. Farrar has a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of Maine and a Masters of Fine Art Degree in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College in Vermont. Hélène currently owns and operates her own private art school in Maine out of her “Farmhouse” studio, where she holds varied workshops and classes. Her paintings have most recently been accepted into curated exhibits at the Cape Cod Community College, Fuller Craft Museum, the Saco Museum, the University of New England Art Gallery and Twiggs Gallery.
Dark blue line is the Kennebec River.
Frank Carini: Working to reduce environmental impact of ocean racing sailboats
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
While the United States flails about trying to reduce its enormous share of world-altering climate pollution, one part of the transportation/recreational sector is routinely ignored: boating.
Yachting and sailing are steadily gaining in popularity, so an urgency to act is essential if greenhouse-gas emissions are to be significantly reduced.
Yes, sailing burns little fossil fuel, but the resources consumed to build some of these vessels is swelling.
For instance, over the past decade, the carbon footprint of 60-foot International Monohull Open Class Association (IMOCA) racing boats has grown by nearly two-thirds, from 340 to 550 tons — the equivalent of driving an average car 1.4 million miles, according to the 11th Hour Racing Team.
“This is an overall trend we see in pretty much any industry, driven by performance we have accelerated too fast in the wrong direction, and are only just waking up to reality,” according to Damian Foxall, sustainability program manager for the 11th Hour Racing Team. “The need to reduce our emissions in the marine industry is urgent — 50% by 2030, and that’s just eight years away. We are far away from that right now.”
The 11th Hour Racing Team is sponsored by 11th Hour Racing, a Newport, R.I.-based nonprofit that works with the sailing community and maritime industries to “advance solutions and practices that protect and restore the health of our ocean.”
Late last year the team published a report about the importance of building a more sustainable ocean racing boat and better understanding the industry’s environmental impact. It showed performance doesn’t need to be sacrificed to build a more environmentally friendly boat.
“Business as usual is no longer an option. While the performance sailing sector and much of the leisure marine industry is geographically centered in the global North and a few other well-off regions, we live in a fragile bubble of prosperity,” according to the report. “This alternative reality does not reflect either the reality for most of the world’s citizens, or the availability of the earth’s resources.
“Inherently tied to the ongoing growth of global economies, we would need 1.7 Earths each year just to maintain the situation for the average global citizen. Scaled to the typical lifestyles associated with the marine industry this is more like 5+ Earths each year: a growing annual debt,” the report says.
The 128-page report includes a detailed study of material life cycles and alternative composites, such as flax to replace ubiquitous virgin carbon fiber. About 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in a boat build are associated with the use of composite materials, most notably carbon fiber, which is perfect for racing because it is light and stiff. Reducing the use of this material and others would significantly lessen climate emissions tied to the building of a new racing boat, according to the 11th Hour Racing Team.
In fact, the 11th Hour Racing Team and its partners are advocating for radical change across the marine industry to transform the way boats are built. They believe that only by “prioritizing sustainability along with performance, can the marine industry take urgent action to fight climate change.”
Foxall recently told ecoRI News that sustainable sourcing and using as much renewable energy as possible are the two biggest things racing teams can do right now to lower their carbon footprints.
The 11th Hour Racing Team, for instance, now leases an electric support vessel during races, which has lowered climate emissions from both a transportation and manufacturing perspective.
Foxall said rule changes would require sailing teams to incorporate more sustainable materials into their design and build. He noted, for example, reused carbon fiber is mostly avoided because the virgin material makes for better performance. But if rules required every team to use recycled fiber, no team would have an advantage.
“In our sport, rules define what the boats are … as much as one team or a couple of teams or even an event might want to improve the footprints, that cannot happen until the rules incentivize it,” Foxall said. “And the rules for the longest time have incentivized performance, whether it is carrying more sacks of coal or corn from Australia to Europe or transporting more people from Europe to North America or now racing faster and going faster through the water. It’s all about performance.”
He added the sport can no longer “just make decisions based purely on performance. We need to be taking into account the direct and indirect impacts” on the environment.
The December report recommends establishing minimum standards on sourcing, energy, waste, and resource circularity; defining a threshold for carbon emissions based on life cycle assessment (LCA) data; incentivizing the marine industry to use its inherent capacity for innovation to focus on sustainability; and setting an internal price for carbon emissions.
Amy Munro, sustainability officer for the 11th Hour Racing Team, noted the building of a racing boat is a complex process involving a number of stakeholders, materials, and components.
“You need to break it down in detail to fully understand what are the major impacts,” according to Munro. “This is why we have meticulously measured the impact of every step in the design and build process of our new boat and conducted a life cycle analysis that helps to uncover underlying issues.”
Last month, Charlie Enright, 11th Hour Racing Team skipper, spoke at the U.N.-supported One Ocean Summit in Brest, France, to highlight key findings of the organization’s “Sustainable Design and Build Report,” notably the importance of industry-wide collaboration to push sustainable innovation to align with the Paris Agreement.
“Within our sport, for too long we have chased performance over a responsibility for the environment and people,” the Bristol, R.I., native told an audience of experts, politicians, activists, and decision-makers. “We must work together to reduce the impact of boat builds, adopt the use of alternative materials like bio-resins and recycled carbon, lobby for a change to class and event rules to reward sustainable innovations, and support races and events that are managed with a positive impact on our planet and people.”
Foxall noted about 50 percent of sailors are onboard when it comes to making their sport more sustainable. He said it is their responsibility to bring the others up to speed about the impacts of the climate crisis.
In an email to ecoRI News, Enright noted the sport’s awareness of climate and environmental issues is “definitely increasing.” He said big events such as The Ocean Race and the Transat Jacques Vabre have “strong sustainability policies” in place, including plastic-free race villages, onboard waste calculation initiatives, and efforts to educate teams and fans about these matters. “This is relatively new in our sport.”
The Ocean Race also runs an ocean science program in partnership with 11th Hour Racing, collecting data on water temperature, salinity, and other potential climate change impacts. The Transat Jacques Vabre uses the 11th Hour Racing Team’s Sustainability Toolbox, which, among other things, commits to efforts to limit waste, use renewable energy and reduce emissions wherever possible, as a framework for its own sustainability program.
“Of course there are those who need a bit more convincing on the importance of it,” Foxall said. “But, quite frankly … kids coming home from school today know what the issue is.”
In 2019, greenhouse-gas emissions from ships and boats in the United States alone totaled 40.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Globally, bulk carriers are the main source of shipping/boating climate emissions. Some 90 percent of world trade is carried across the world’s oceans by some 90,000 marine vessels. Carbon dioxide emissions from these vessels are largely unregulated.
Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did adopt exhaust emission standards for marine diesel engines installed in a variety of marine vessels, ranging in size and application from small recreational boats to large ocean-going ships.
While the shipping industry is responsible for a significant proportion of global climate emissions — if global shipping were a country, it would be the sixth-largest producer of greenhouse gases behind China, the U.S., Russia, India and Japan — the climate impacts of the recreational powerboat industry, most notably yachts, are considerable.
The propulsion systems on many yachts are arguably the least-efficient modes of transportation ever devised. The typical 40- to 50-foot yacht guzzles fuel.
U.S. recreational boaters spend about 500 million hours annually cruising fresh and salt waters. In 2010, more stringent EPA emissions standards for marine engines, both in-board and outboard, went into effect. But, unlike cars, private boats are not inspected. They can be checked by the Coast Guard or law enforcement, but there is no annual emissions check.
Many recreational boats and some jet-propelled watercraft have two-stroke engines. Conventional two-stroke engines produce about 14 times as much climate pollution as four-stroke engines.
Last year new U.S. powerboat sales surpassed 300,000 units for the second consecutive year, closing 2021 about 6 percent below record highs in 2020 and some 7 percent above the five-year sales average, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Association. In 2020, annual U.S. sales of boats, marine products and services totaled $49.3 billion, up 14 percent from 2019.
The oceans play an essential role in keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide in balance by absorbing about 30 percent of the CO2 that is released, from all sources. This blue carbon sink, however, has been working overtime since the Industrial Revolution began belching fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
The ocean, though, can only swallow so much of this colorless gas. When carbon dioxide is absorbed by seawater, chemical reactions occur that increase the acidity of the water through a process known as ocean acidification.
Acidifying marine waters are bad news for marine life with calcium carbonate in their shells or skeletons, such as oysters, corals, crabs, scallops, and mussels. Studies have found that more acidic salt waters make it more difficult for them to develop their hardened protection.
As of early last month, the recorded amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was a tick away from 418 parts per million (ppm) — well beyond the 350 ppm that climate scientists have deemed safe for humans, never mind most of the planet’s other living inhabitants.
“While the situation is extremely urgent and ‘business-as-usual’ is clearly no longer an option, it is still technically possible to close your eyes and look away,” Enright wrote. “This is why we have to act now and we have to create our own pressure. What we need is a radical change and one of the most important parts here is that the marine industry works together to achieve it.”
Frank Carini is co-founder and senior reporter of ecoRI News.
Azzam, at 592.5 feet, was the longest superyacht, as of 2020.
— Photo by ChrisKarsten
Paul Newman on character
“A man with no enemies is a man with no character.’’
— Paul Newman (1925-2008), movie star and philanthropist. He eschewed living in Southern California, instead living most of his adult life in Westport, Conn., an affluent New York suburb on Long Island Sound.
With writer A. E. Hotchner, Newman founded Newman's Own, a line of food products, in 1982. All proceeds after taxes are donated to charity.
Among other awards, Newman's Own co-sponsors the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award, a $25,000 reward designed to recognize those who protect the First Amendment.
Another beneficiary of his philanthropy is the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, a residential summer camp for seriously ill children in Ashford, Conn., which Newman co-founded in 1988. It is named after the gang in his film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and the real-life, historic Hole-in-the-Wall outlaw hangout in Wyoming. The original camp has grown to include Hole in the Wall Gang Camps in the U.S., Ireland, France and Israel.
The Westport Country Playhouse, which was heavily supported by Mr. Newman and his widow, movie star Joanne Woodward, for many years.
Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford in the off-season
Ashford in 1838
David Warsh: Squeezed between pushing democracy and fighting global warming
The Fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked a huge turning point in NATO's role in Europe. Here you can see section of the wall displayed outside NATO headquarters, in Brussels.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Which is the more pressing concern: advancing the cause of democracy in the face of opposition, or combatting global warming?
NATO enlargement has been the policy of the United States since Bill Clinton was first elected president, in 1992. The course of action he adopted was embraced and extended by successors George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Was it a good idea?
Anne Applebaum thinks so. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist has been among NATO expansion’s most ardent advocates since becoming a correspondent for The Economist, in 1988, and moving to Warsaw. In a panel podcast last week for The Atlantic, where she is now a contributing writer, she said,
I think that the expansion of NATO was the most successful, if not the only successful, piece of American foreign policy of the past thirty years. It created a zone of safety and security for sixty million people in part of the world that has been the source of two world wars…. We would be having this fight in East Germany now if we had not done it.
I have been on the other side of that argument for nearly twenty years, a thin voice in the back of a relatively small chorus of dissenters that included, in 1994, Defense Secretary Les Aspin, his deputy William Perry, and most senior American military commanders at the time; in 1996, diplomat George Kennan and a group of distinguished foreign-policy experts; and, that same year, Brent Scowcroft, a lone authority from the administration of George H. W. Bush.
In 2018, in Because They Could: The Harvard-Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-five Years, I wrote, “No aspect looms larger in these 25 years [of US-Russia relations] than the story of NATO enlargement.”
Now that Vladimir Putin has sent the Russian army to invade Ukraine, the reasoning behind NATO enlargement has become ripe for reassessment– not now, while people are fighting, dying and fleeing, but after the carnage has ended, And then only gradually, calmly, without rancor.
Who know what drove Putin crazy enough to invade Ukraine? That’s for analysts, biographers and historians to puzzle out. Certainly apprehension over NATO expansion was part of it. So was his experience as “a boy once bullied in the back streets of Leningrad.” Meanwhile, the costs of his war are already staggering. Not just the loss of Ukrainian sovereignty. Nor Russian civil society’s forty years’ of gains since the former Soviet Union began to come apart.
The opportunities that mattered most had lain ahead. Good-faith cooperation among nations to control emission, adapt habitats and reduce solar radiation will be harder to organize than it would have been otherwise.
Even if the fondest dreams of the NATO expansionists are realized – if Russian elites and everyday citizens combine to overthrow Putin – this disastrous war makes the steadily increasing pressure on Russia’s borders seem like a hell of a risk to have run.
The problem of Taiwan is next.
Grounds for rapprochement can be found in the years ahead, but the search will require policy-makers of more sober temperament and, even then, many years will be required to restore the trust and mutual respect that has been lost.
xxx
Bill Clinton made it official in1994: NATO expansion would take place “not whether but when.” Harvard historian Tim Colton wrote in his 2008 biography of Boris Yeltsin, “A ticking time bomb had been set.” It took four more U.S. presidencies – George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden – for it to explode.
Meanwhile, Vice President Al Gore in 1993 persuaded Clinton to formally commit the nation to the Rio de Janeiro targets for greenhouse gas emissions, but conservative politicians continued to scoff.
David Warsh is a veteran columnist and an economic historian. He’s also proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran.
Don Pesci: ‘Cheap tears’ about Putin’s rape of Ukraine
Result of Russian terror shelling of residential areas in the Chernihiv district of Ukraine.
"The Chateau" at St. Basil College Seminary in Stamford, Conn. It was originally a college dormitory and now houses the Ukrainian Museum and Library of Stamford.
VERNON, Conn.
People in the United States, some of them foreign-policy “experts,” were surprised, surprised when the Ukrainian military has pushed back against Putin’s merciless invasion of the country for many days on end. Ukrainians in Connecticut were not surprised. Neither will they be surprised at the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian resistance.
Nor will U.S. intelligence services or politicians in the United States sympathetic to Ukraine, the Alamo of Europe, be surprised. There have been no surprises, and there should in the near future be no surprises.
Putin’s 40-mile Russian convoy is approaching Kiev. The Russian military already is in possession of the largest nuclear plant in the world, having bombed it first. Not to worry, it appears that no one in NATO, putatively a defense corridor against Russian aggression, will be harmed by Chernobyl ll.
Putin is using cluster bombs, outlawed by virtually all Western nations years ago, to terrorize the civilian population of Ukraine which – no big surprise – will over the course of the coming days be efficiently and effectively bombed into submission. What we are witnessing on a global scale is a new “trail of tears,” and an Alamo defense by Ukrainians. The Alamo, it should be recalled, surrounded by Santa Ana’s superior Mexican army, was also given up as lost by the intelligence services of Davy Crockett’s day.
So, what’s next for Ukraine? There is not a single general in the Pentagon who does not know that the spoils of war will go to Putin.
Ukraine is being abducted, and the United States has already more or less written off the corpses and captives as NATO’s collateral damage. Moldova, which managed to struggle free of Stalin’s chains, is likely next on Putin’s checkoff list. Moldova, like Ukraine, is not affiliated with NATO, nor is Finland. And when it too falls, one may expect lots of bedroom slipper analysis (see Camus on Hungary here) and tears flowing like rivers from the reddened eyes of politicians in Congress empathetic to Ukraine.
Theologians sometimes speak of “cheap grace.” These are cheap tears.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose courage under fire has been widely praised by President Biden and the entire Connecticut U.S. congressional delegation, has repeatedly said he needed many more armor-piercing weapons to stop the 40- mile convoy of Russian tanks and missile launchers methodically preparing to overrun Kiev, not American boots on the ground or – Heaven forefend! – an effective boots on the ground resistance from cowed NATO countries.
The United States, still cursed by former President Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign-policy timidity, has followed – sort of – Britain’s lead in supplying Ukraine with minimal defensive munitions in an attempt to prevent Ukraine from toppling back into a Russian-controlled police state of the sort that Putin also wishes to reconstruct in the Baltic States that he falsely supposes threaten Russia’s sovereignty.
Apparently NATO is to be a new “red line” that Putin and his 40-mile long military convoy will not be permitted to cross with impunity — without an effective military response. In bygone days, the U.S. southern border sometimes was a red line that border-jumpers were not permitted to cross with impunity. But the red lines laid down by U.S. presidents in the have tended to be drawn with disappearing ink and resolve.
The copious congressional tears and nods of “solidarity” with Ukraine are little more than political bitcoins to purchase votes. There has been no shortage of empathy for Ukraine issuing from Connecticut’s congressional delegation.
One thinks of U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, whose veins are filled with tears rather than blood. Blumenthal, who has long accustomed himself to bleed tears from every political stump in Connecticut at the slightest provocation, has yet to explain to Connecticut Ukrainian-Americans he has visited in churches why U.S. intelligence services (see “US delays real-time intel to Ukraine, officials say”) have been reluctant to share with Ukrainian leaders information in their possession that would aid the country’s military in its defense of a civilian population against which Putin, not beloved of Democrats, has declared total war.
The news item cited above appeared on Saturday, March 5 in The Hartford Courant, a paper Blumenthal’s staff frequently consults. Blumenthal, accustomed to ventilating his domestic- and foreign-policy views wherever and whenever he wishes, is on the Senate Committee on Armed Services.
Though Zelenskyy has several times vividly portrayed Ukraine’s vulnerability to Russian assaults operating in airspace that remains open in the midst of pulverizing bomb and missile strikes, his multiple requests to close off the airspace have been turned aside by the United States and all other NATO countries on the grounds that acceding to the request would require the destruction of Russian aircraft violating closed air space. And this, it has been whispered by Russian invaders, could theoretically precipitate a declared war with nuclear-armed Russia.
If Putin is successful in occupying Ukraine, he will have achieved a tactical and strategic victory that will move the border of Russia west so that it will impinge on all the Baltic States, as well as Poland and Finland, NATO countries that had wrested their freedom from Russian domination when Eastern Bloc nations had cast off their chains starting in 1989. Putin’s nuclear blackmail would then apply not just to Ukraine but to all nations, NATO or not, facing a future 40-mile, menacing Russian caravan.
The nuclear blackmail that has intimidated Western free states from supplying intelligence and war material necessary for the survival of an independent Ukraine is a constant of Putin’s terrorist policy. Putin has no intention of disarming Russia of nuclear weapons. He now says that even sanctions are a declaration of war. The weapons remaining a live option, the threat will remain a live option, however many civilians Putin chooses to murder in Ukraine -- or in any other country he wishes to incorporate into his new visionary map of Europe.
Ukraine having been imprisoned behind a refabricated Iron Curtain, what will Blumenthal say to the congregants of Ukrainian churches in Connecticut with whom he has expressed “solidarity”? How solid is a solidarity that stands aside, watching in horror the methodical destruction of an independent democracy, twisting its fingers while bravely inveighing against “Son Of Stalin” Putin, bleeding tears, and churning with useless chatter, while Putin reassembles a new Eastern Bloc corridor of states subservient to terrorist Russia?
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.
World on fire
“Fruit of Silence, Panel #3,’’ by Entang Wiharso, an artist who lives in Rhode Island and Indonesia, in his show “Meta Landscape,’’ at the Jamestown (R.I.) Art Center, May 14-June 18.
The gallery says:
“{His} recent work focuses on the duality of cultures and experiences in his two homelands, building on ideas that connect spirituality and transcendence with national narratives about progress and destiny through a sustained exploration of landscape and geopolitical structures.’’
‘Vermonters fear no man’
From atop Mount Equinox.
“Vermont is a state I love.
“I could not look upon the peaks of Ascutney, Killington, Mansfield and Equinox without being moved in a way that no other scene could move me.
“It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride; here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our everlasting hills.
“I love Vermont because of her hills and valleys, her scenery and invigorating climate, but most of all, because of her indomitable people. They are a race of pioneers who have almost beggared themselves to serve others. If the spirit of liberty should vanish in other parts of the union and support of our institutions should languish, it could all be replenished from the generous store held by the people of this brave little state of Vermont.
“Vermont is my birthright. Here one gets close to nature, in the mountains, in the brooks, the waters which hurry to the sea; in the lakes, shining like silver in their green setting; fields tilled, not by machinery, but by the brain and hand of man. My folks are happy and contented. They belong to themselves, live within their incomes, and fear no man.’’
— President Calvin Coolidge (18720-1933) on Sept. 21, 1928. He grew up in Plymouth Notch, Vt., though he went to college (Amherst College), practiced law and rose to governor in Massachusetts.
Visit the Coolidge homestead. Hit this link.
At the Coolidge homestead, in Plymouth Notch, Vt. Calvin Coolidge was born in the rear of the general store in the foreground and the Coolidges’ still operative cheese company is in the distance.
— Photo by Swampyank
Wind-power sector gaining speed
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The offshore-wind sector is slowly paying economic dividends onshore. The latest example is that Prysmian Group, an Italian company, will buy 47 acres on Brayton Point, in Somerset, Mass., to put up a $200-million facility to make subsea transmission cables to bring power generated by offshore wind turbines to the New England grid. It’s nice symbolism because Brayton Point, on beautiful Mount Hope Bay, was the site of New England’s last big coal-fired power plant.
Just down Route 195, there’s a facility to support offshore wind in New Bedford, like the Somerset site in connection with wind-turbine arrays to go up south of New England. The Whaling City facility will handle assembly and deployment of the turbines. And a site in Salem, Mass., is eyed as a staging area for turbine assembly, including for arrays in the Gulf of Maine.
Problematic purchases
“Half of what they sell
Will kill you
The other half
Makes you go back for more.’’
— From “Grocery,’’ by Charles Simic (born 1938), Serbian-American poet and long-time teacher at the University of New Hampshire.
Thompson Hall (built in 1892), at the University of New Hampshire.