Lily Salter's Blog, page 220

Time reveals its Person of the Year shortlist and, yeah, Trump is on it

(Credit: Getty/Eric Baradat)

Ahead of the the full announcement of its selection for its 2017 Person of the Year honor, Time magazine has made public its shortlist of worthy people and groups vying for the distinction. Given the title’s recent wrangling with President Donald Trump, it was perhaps somewhat of a surprise to see his name included on it.

Last month, the president claimed via Twitter that, “Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named ‘Man (Person) of the Year,’ like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!”

Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017

The publication subsequently responded with its own tweet, suggesting not only did the president not have his facts straight, but that the Person (not “Man”) of the Year process didn’t actually work that way at all. “The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year,” it wrote. “TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6.”

The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year. TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6.

— TIME (@TIME) November 25, 2017

Despite this back and forth, the president does appear on the shortlist, giving him at least a shot at taking the honor two years in a row, a feat heretofore only achieved by President Richard Nixon.

This would be a good time to remind you that Time doesn’t just award Person of the Year to the good and noble among humanity, but to the most influential figure of the last 12 months. Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin and Ruhollah Khomeini all won once, while George W. Bush and Joseph Stalin won twice. Indeed, saber-rattling supreme leader of North Korea Kim Jong Un joins Trump on this year’s shortlist.

In addition to those two leaders, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and Chinese president Xi Jinping are also among the finalist. Both have spent much of 2017 consolidating their power, arguably autocratic developments that have been cheered by the American commander in chief.

The rest of the list is filled out by less demonstrably horrible or aspiringly totalitarian figures. Erstwhile quarterback and full-time social-justice activist Colin Kaepernick is, presumedly much to the president’s chagrin, among the finalists as is another Trump bête noire, special prosecutor Robert Muller. “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins makes an appearance, as does Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is apparently in the running for his second POTY nod (he won in 1999).

Time, as it often does, also included two groups of people or movements in the shortlist. Dreamers, that is children who immigrated to this country illegally and remain under threat by the Trump administration, are noted, as is the general #MeToo movement that gained steam after several prominent men were accused of sexual misconduct.

This year’s honoree for Person of the Year will be announced this Wednesday. Place your bets.

Netflix executive tells Danny Masterson rape accuser that the company doesn’t believe her allegation

Danny Masterson (Credit: Getty/Anna Webber)

Four women have accused Netflix’s “The Ranch” actor Danny Masterson of rape, but the company has yet to punish the actor or conduct an investigation. This weekend, one of Masterson’s accusers was told by Andy Yeatman, Neflix’s director of global kids content, that Netflix does not believe the allegations, reported HuffPost.

The exchange reportedly happened at a kids’ soccer game, where the woman, who is identified only as “Victim B,” approached Yeatman to ask him if he worked at Netflix. When he confirmed that he did, the woman asked why Netflix hadn’t done anything about the rape allegations against Masterson, to which Yeatman responded, “We don’t believe them,” according to HuffPost.

After the woman identified herself as one of Masterson’s accusers, the conversation reportedly came to an abrupt end. About an hour later, Yeatman went back to the woman to tell her he didn’t know she was one of the accusers and that “he can’t decide whether Netflix takes action against Masterson,” reported HuffPost.

Netflix responded to HuffPost with a statement that confirmed Yeatman made the remarks but separated the company from the executive’s point of view:

While he was coaching a youth soccer match today, Mr. Yeatman ― a Netflix kids’ programming executive ― was approached by a stranger who did not identify herself or explain her connection to Danny Masterson. Mr. Yeatman’s comments were careless, uninformed and do not represent the views of the company. Further, he would have no insights into decision making on ‘The Ranch.’ We are aware of the allegations against Danny Masterson and we are following the current investigation, and will respond if developments occur.

The accusations, which date back to the early 2000s, were reportedly under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) long before the bombshell reports of sexual assault and harassment leading to the downfalls of celebrities like Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and Matt Lauer appeared

HuffPost reported that one police report was filed in 2004 and that the LAPD began conducting interviews with the accusers in 2016. In April 2017, the case was reportedly referred to the district attorney and one law enforcement source told HuffPost that the evidence against Masterson was “overwhelming.”

Netflix’s inaction here stands in stark contrast to their response to Kevin Spacey’s allegations that were reported by Buzzfeed in October. Netflix has confirmed that Spacey will not return for the sixth season of “House of Cards,” meanwhile, plans are still in place to release part 4 of “The Ranch” this month.

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In a certain light, Donald Trump doesn’t seem so bad

(Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

Don’t look away. I mean it! Keep on staring just like you’ve been doing, just like we’ve all been doing since he rode down that escalator into the presidential race in June 2015 and, while you have your eyes on him, I’ll tell you exactly why you shouldn’t stop.

To begin with, it’s time to think of Donald J. Trump in a different light. After all, isn’t he really our own UnFounding Father? While the Founding Fathers were responsible for two crucial documents, the Declaration of Independence (1,458 words) and the Constitution (4,543 words), our twenty-first century UnFounding Father only writes passages of 140 characters or less. (Sad!) Other people have authored “his” books. (“I put lipstick on a pig,” said one of his ghostwriters.) He reportedly doesn’t often read books himself (though according to ex-wife Ivana, he once had a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside). He’s never seen a magazine cover he didn’t want to be on (or at least that he didn’t want to claim, however spuriously, he had decided not to be on). He recently indicated that he thought the Constitution had at least one extra article, “Article XII,” which he promised to “protect,” even though it didn’t exist. (My best guess: he believed it said, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved neither to the States respectively, nor to the people, but to Trump and his heirs and there will be no inheritance tax on them.”)

None of this should be surprising since, for him, the Constitution is undoubtedly a hearsay document, as is much of the rest of life. Still, at 71, who could doubt that he himself has the constitution of an ox, thanks perhaps to those Big Macs he reportedly adores, the Trump Steaks he tried to peddle, and the taco bowls (“I love Hispanics!”) that he once swore he gobbles down. As someone capable of changing his mind on almost anything (other than himself), his attention span tends to be short. So briefing him on the state of the world, if you happen to be in the U.S. Intelligence Community, is evidently a challenging task. You reportedly want to keep it, well, brief — no more than a page per topic, three topics per visit, lots of visuals. And don’t forget to skip the “nuance,” as well as any dissenting or conflicting views (especially on him, since that’s the rare subject he truly cares about).

His daily briefings reportedly have only a quarter of the information President Obama’s had, perhaps because the world’s gotten simpler since those godforsaken days. Thank you, Rocket Man! And to give him credit where it’s due, he’s done a remarkably thorough job of turning the Oval Office into a business venture for himself and his kids. (Hey, if you happen to be a foreign diplomat, lobbyist, industry group of any sort, cabinet member, or White House adviser who wants anything from the Oval Office, let me recommend the new Trump International Hotel just down the block on Pennsylvania Avenue for a meal or an event! There’s no better way to curry favor, even if you happen to be an Indian businessman and there’s no curry on the menu. Don’t miss those $24 chocolate cigars!) For the rest of us, we’ve gained immeasurably from his business ventures since his election. Otherwise, how would we know what the once-obscure word “emoluments” actually meant.

Thank you, big guy!

He’s Da Man!

Keep in mind, though, that none of this makes him any less historic. As a start, it’s indisputable that no one has ever gotten the day-after-day media coverage he has. Not another president, general, politician, movie star, not even O.J. after the car chase. He’s Da Man!

Since that escalator ride, he’s been in the news (and in all our faces) in a way once unimaginable. Cable news talking heads and talk-show hosts can’t stop gabbling about him. It’s the sort of 24/7 attention that normally accompanies terrorist attacks in the United States or Europe, presidential assassinations, or major hurricanes. But with him, we’re talking about more or less every hour of every day for almost two-and-a-half years without a break. It’s been no different on newspaper front pages. No one’s ever stormed the headlines more regularly. And I haven’t even mentioned the social media universe. There, he has, if anything, an even more obsessional audience of tens of millions for his daily tweets, which instantly become The News and then, of course, the fodder for those yakking cableheads and talk-show hosts. Think of him not so much as a him at all but as a perpetual motion machine of breaking headlines.

Part of that’s certainly attributable to the fact that no presidential candidate or president has ever had his knack for attracting the cameras and gluing eyeballs. Give him credit for a media version of horse sense that’s remarkable. It’s a talent of a special sort fit for a special moment. What catnip is for cats, he is for TV cameras. He was the Kardashian candidate and now he’s the Kardashian president.

But that’s the lesser part of the tale. To grasp why we can’t help staring at him, why we essentially have no choice but to do so, you need to understand something else: this sort of attention hasn’t been a fluke. It doesn’t represent a Trumpian black hole in time or an anomaly in our history, and neither does he. Of course, he’s Donald J. Trump in all his … well, not glory, but [you fill in the word here].  However, he’s also a symptom. He didn’t create this particular media moment or this American world of ours either. He just grasped how it worked at some intuitive level and rode it (or perhaps it rode him) all the way to the White House.

He’s gotten so much attention in part because he rose in (or, in his case, descended into) a changed media landscape that most of us hadn’t even begun to grasp. He didn’t, however, create that landscape either. If anything, it created him. What he did was make himself the essence of it. He was what a news media in crisis needed, as staffs were being decimated and finances challenged by the online world, and reporters were disappearing. He came on the scene, politically speaking, just when a once-upon-a-time sense of the “news” was morphing into so many focus groups on what would glue eyeballs, while coverage was increasingly being recalibrated for a series of designated 24/7 events, each generally filled with horror, fear, and plenty of weeping people. Think: terror attacks, mass killings, and anything involving “extreme weather” with all its photogenic damage.

By the time The Donald set foot on that escalator, our world of news was already devolving into a set of 24/7 zombie apocalypse events. Otherwise, he and his rants, his red face and strange orange comb-over wouldn’t have made much sense at all. He would have been an unimaginable candidate before the media went into crisis, experienced what might be thought of as its own news inequality gap, and began refocusing on a few singular events of particularly resonant horror. These, in turn, regularly wiped away most of the rest of what was actually happening on this planet, while giving media units with smaller staffs and fewer resources the opportunity to put all their attention and energy into a set of eye-gluing, funds- and staff-preserving spectacles. As CBS Chairman Les Moonves put it bluntly during the 2016 presidential campaign, speaking of the focus on Trump’s candidacy and antics, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS … I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”

In the end, it wasn’t Trump who brought it on; it was the media. And all of this took place in the midst of the rise of a social media scene in which “fake news” was becoming the order of the day and millions of eyeballs could be reached directly by any conspiracy nut or, for that matter, presidential candidate with the moxie to do it.

It was, in other words, the perfect moment for a billionaire salesman-cum-conman-cum-reality-TV-sensation to descend that escalator.  Donald Trump was neither a media mistake, nor an out-of-space-and-time experience. He was a man made for our unfounding media moment.

The president as chameleon

And this same way of thinking about him is applicable to so much else. As our UnFounding Father, he’s inconceivable without an American world that was already experiencing various kinds of incipient unfounding.

Whatever he might now be fathering, he himself was the child, for instance, of a distinctly plutocratic moment. If we have our first billionaire in the White House, it’s only because by 2015 this country’s democratic politics had devolved (with a little helping hand from the Supreme Court) into a set of 1%, or perhaps even .01%, elections.

An American inequality gap that first began to almost imperceptibly widen in the 1970s has, by now, reached Grand Canyon proportions.  Before it hits its ultimate moment, it may make the nineteenth-century version of a Gilded Age look like an era of moderation. Since 1980, stunningly enough, the share of national income of the richest 1% has doubled.  If all that American wealth hadn’t gushed upward, if it hadn’t produced a raft of billionaires, as well as hordes of multi-millionaires and millionaires, with so many interests to protect, we would never have experienced such prodigious top-down funding of elections; the building of a 1% democracy, that is, would have been inconceivable. If the Republican Party hadn’t been sold to the Koch brothers and the Democratic Party hadn’t gone all neoliberal on us, can you really imagine working class voters putting their faith in a billionaire to make America great again for them? I doubt it.

Similarly, if this country hadn’t been pursuing its never-ending war on terror so assiduously and unsuccessfully these last 16 years, while Washington was being transformed into a war capital, the national security state was rising to prominence as a kind of shadow government, and the funding of the U.S. military hadn’t become the only truly bipartisan issue in Congress, Trumpism would never have been conceivable. In our American world, The Donald’s tendency toward authoritarianism is often treated as if it were a unique attribute of his. To believe that, however, you would have to overlook the growth in this century of a distinctly authoritarian spirit in Washington.  You would have to ignore what it meant for the national security state to be ever more embedded in our ruling city. You would have to forget about the American intelligence community’s development of an historically unprecedented surveillance machinery aimed not just at the world but at American citizens as well.

The Donald’s surprising decision to surround himself with “my generals” in a fashion never before seen in Washington, even in wartime, was treated in a similarly anomalous fashion. And yet, given the Washington he entered, it was anything but. During the election campaign, candidate Trump referred to those same generals as “rubble,” while deriding the losing wars they had been fighting for so long. He seemed in some way to grasp that this was a country and a citizenry increasingly being unmade by war.

Still, it took him next to no time as president to tack to where Washington had been heading since 9/11. As I’ve argued elsewhere, he might better be thought of as our chameleon president: a Democrat who became a fervent Republican, a billionaire businessman who somehow convinced rural white working class voters that he was their man, a former globalizer who’s taken off like a bat out of hell after globalizing trade pacts of every sort. He’s a man ready to alter his positions to fit the moment when it comes to everything except himself.

The dumbfounding father of twenty-first century America

Let me mention just one more aspect of this Trumpian moment: climate-change denial. At a time of such planetary stress, in his fervent promotion of a fossil-fuelized America — of coal mining, pipelines, and fracking, among other things — in his essential rejection of the very idea of climate change, in his appointment of one climate-change denier after another to key positions in his administration, in his decision to make the United States the only country on the planet not to take part in the Paris climate agreement, he seems like an almost inexplicable manifestation of anti-scientific frenzy. And yet think back. He’s now the head of the party that, in recent years, sold itself to Big Energy, lock, stock, and barrel. This, at the very moment when the oil giants were suppressing their own research on climate change and pouring money into organizations that would promote climate-change-denial disinformation campaigns. By default, he has now become the head of what can only be called the party of climate-change denial. In that sense, he couldn’t be more in the spirit of his times.

Okay, it’s true. He’s presidentially bizarre in ways no one expects a leader to be (other than, perhaps, some strange autocratic ruler in Central Asia). And he’s certainly potentially dangerous. But he’s something else, too: just what late twentieth and twenty-first century America prepared us for (even though we didn’t know it). He’s the essence of where this country now is and seems to be headed.

So don’t imagine that he’s getting too much attention in the land of the rich and home of the craven. Instead, look at him carefully. Now, stare at him again. And keep looking. If you don’t take him in, you won’t understand what this moment actually is. Yes, he’s the Dumbfounding Father of twenty-first century America and that’s distracting, but he’s also the ultimate symptom of the unfounding of this nation, of the moment when — to slightly adapt a Cole Porter line — Plymouth Rock finally landed on us.

Truly, don’t look away from the unbelievable figure now in the White House because how else will you know where we are? And until we grasp that, until we understand that he isn’t an aberration but the zeitgeist and that simply removing him from the Oval Office won’t solve our problems, we aren’t anywhere at all.

There’s a tax increase that’s proven to save lives

(Credit: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Lung cancer remains the world’s largest cancer killer, but the world is not doing all it can to curb it.

Tobacco use is the largest risk factor for lung cancer. It is also a risk factor for at least 11 other cancers, and the reason that a mind-numbing 1.5 million tobacco-related cancer deaths occur every year worldwide.

This is much more than a health crisis. The global estimate of health costs and lost productivity from smoking-related illnesses was enormous in 2016, estimated at 1.8 percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product.

Without urgent action, scholars predict there will be a billion tobacco-related deaths this century. The costs of treating smoking-related diseases will become an increasingly significant economic burden in many low- and middle-income countries over the next 20 years.

Currently, these countries account for about 40 percent of the overall global costs of tobacco and a growing share of global smoking prevalence. Economic growth in these countries coupled with aggressive marketing by tobacco companies is making things worse. These dynamics represent a clear threat to health and development.

We spend our lives studying, teaching about and promoting cancer control, and we can report there are proven tools at our disposal that can help the world avoid this catastrophe. Arguably, the single most effective tool, both in terms of cost and population-level effects, is tobacco taxation.

Tax — one of public health’s best tools

A large body of evidence demonstrates that applying excise taxes on tobacco products on a sustained basis so that people cannot afford them is currently the most effective policy instrument to discourage smoking. Effective taxes deter people and especially youth from starting to use tobacco and encourage current tobacco users to cut down or quit.

In fact, raising cigarette excise tax in each country by one international dollar — an international dollar in a particular country has the same purchasing power as a U.S. dollar in the U.S. — per 20-cigarette pack would lead to a decrease in daily smoking prevalence from 14.1 percent to 12.9 percent and 66 million fewer smokers in one year. This also translates into 15 million fewer smoking-related deaths among adults over time.

Most of the world’s governments have signed the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world’s first public health treaty under the WHO’s auspices. Most use the WHO’s associated MPOWER framework to help them translate this commitment into effective, actionable public health policies. Both recommend that raising the price of tobacco through higher taxes is an essential tool to reduce tobacco use.

But the 2017 WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic revealed that tobacco taxation is the least well-implemented major tobacco control measure. Only 10 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where tobacco taxes are sufficiently high to have a preventive impact on tobacco use.

In many countries, the tobacco industry and its surrogates have been spreading inaccurate data and specious arguments to discourage governments from increasing tobacco taxes. The companies have, for example, overinflated the threat of illicit trade in tobacco products.

In reality, many of the countries with the highest tobacco taxes also have the lowest levels of illicit trade. Experience across many countries demonstrates that straightforward steps, such as programs that track and trace tobacco products and even modest law enforcement efforts to find and punish those trafficking in illicit trade, greatly mitigate any such challenges.

Success depends on support

As with many interventions, success depends upon visible and vocal support from a wide variety of actors, including health and political stakeholders. While some in the tobacco control community have advocated for tobacco taxation, many natural allies have remained relatively quiet.

Momentum is now growing and new coalitions are forming to promote tobacco taxation. For example, Prevent20 is a community of cancer organizations from around the world that supports and promotes the use of tobacco taxes as a key cancer prevention strategy. The coalition’s name reflects the grim statistic that 20 percent of all cancer deaths globally are caused by tobacco use.

In September, the Prevent20 Coalition signed an open letter to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the new WHO director general, acknowledging and supporting his existing commitment to fighting the tobacco epidemic and encouraging him to redouble WHO efforts on global health and, specifically, on raising tobacco taxes.

It was particularly important for the health community to raise the issue of tobacco taxes while Dr. Tedros was attending the United Nations General Assembly meeting, where delegates debated and passed resolutions on issues including development, financing for development and health.

Under the Sustainable Development Goals, governments have committed to fully implement and enforce the WHO FCTC. They have also committed (in Target 3.4) to reduce premature mortality from noncommunicable diseases by one-third by 2030.

It is impossible to meet this target without serious reductions in tobacco use, a major risk factor for the four main noncommunicable diseases: cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease and diabetes, as well as cancer.

WHO itself has called for a 30 percent relative reduction in adult smoking prevalence by 2025. If taxes were implemented adequately around the world to meet the target, governments could generate up to US$800 billion annually.

From a health and political perspective, there could be significant co-benefits — governments could reinvest revenue in priorities such as improving health systems as well as disease prevention and treatment. This would thereby deliver significant savings in future health care costs. Some countries already have turned tobacco taxes toward improving care, such as Costa Rica and the Philippines, where tobacco excise taxes are paying to extend health care to millions more people.

In global meetings, this potential for revenue generation has led governments to conclude that tobacco taxes should be leveraged as a domestic source of development financing — a strategy explicitly set out in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. But politicians need to demonstrate the will to translate intent into action.

Cancer organizations are beginning to raise their voices to share accurate information about tobacco taxes and health, to debunk tobacco industry misinformation, encourage governments and their constituents to support higher tobacco taxes, and make it easier for governments to adopt and implement them.

Progress is not possible if we let the tobacco industry shape health policy, so the wider health and development community must join the cancer community in being visible and vocal advocates for high tobacco taxes.

Jeffrey Drope, Professor in Residence of Global Health, Marquette University and Otis W. Brawley, Professor, Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology, Emory University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A killer cop is using Jeff Sessions’ lies as criminal defense

Jeff Sessions (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik)

The execution of Walter Scott by South Carolina police officer Michael Slager was an unambiguous example of racist police abuse. Cell phone footage clearly shows Slager, who is white, pumping eight bullets into the retreating figure of Scott, who was black, as he fled from the officer. The distance between the two at the moment Slager began firing on the unarmed Scott appears to be anywhere from 18 to 20 feet, much too far for Scott to have been any kind of credible danger to the officer. Yet Slager falsely reported that Scott ran at him and attempted to wrestle away his Taser, causing the officer to feel “threatened” and necessitating use of lethal force.

Thanks to the emergence of bystander video proving Slager’s story of self-defense was a lie, federal prosecutors have charged the ex-officer with obstruction of justice, which Slager is attempting to beat by relying on the case of another well-known liar: Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Slager’s defense team is pointing to Sessions’ constantly shifting and contradictory congressional testimony to show that their client suffers from the same condition that makes it so hard for the Trump administration official to remember the truth.

The absurd defense is explained in court papers recently filed by attorneys for Slager, who pleaded guilty to federal charges of violating Scott’s civil rights in May. This is basically a last-ditch effort by federal officials to get any jail time for Slager, whom a South Carolina jury refused to convict on charges of murder last year despite an abundance of evidence. The new tack being taken by his legal team is to insist that Slager’s falsified description of his encounter with Scott — which is directly contradicted by cell phone video — wasn’t motivated by self-interest or his desire to avoid jail time. Instead, Slager’s lawyers argue, those seeming falsehoods are a natural consequence of the pressure the officer was under. “A Swiss cheese memory is a symptom of stress,” Slager’s lawyers wrote in court papers, “not an indicator of lying.”

They go on to compare Slager’s truthiness problem with that of Sessions, who over multiple congressional hearings used the phrase “I don’t recall” more than 85 times in response to questions. The attorney general has also backtracked on answers he previously provided under oath, miraculously and quite suddenly remembering details, specifically those that potentially absolve him of guilt, when presented with evidence. After multiple tweaks to his story about Trump campaign officials’ contact with Russian operatives, including denials about taking part in a meeting where campaign aide George Papadopoulos had suggested brokering a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin, Sessions newly recalled that he had, in fact, been involved in the meeting after his memory was rejiggered by “news reports.”

“I do now recall the March 2016 meeting at Trump Hotel that Mr. Papadopoulos attended, but I have no clear recollection of the details of what he said at that meeting,” Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee in November. “After reading his account, and to the best of my recollection, I believe that I wanted to make clear to him that he was not authorized to represent the campaign with the Russian government, or any other foreign government, for that matter.”

It’s curious that Sessions, as writer Eric Levitz notes, “has no clear memory of the meeting, but has a vivid recollection of behaving admirably during it.” Despite the sheer unbelievability of his ever-changing testimony, the attorney general insisted his new insights weren’t straight-up textbook perjury, but an honest failure to retain information, which seems like a problematic issue for a man who heads a department dedicated to getting the facts straight.

“I will not accept and reject accusations that I have ever lied,” Session explained during a November hearing, chalking at least some of his forgetfulness up to the hectic pace of the Trump campaign, “a form of chaos every day from day one.” Sessions added that his “story has never changed. I’ve always told the truth. And I’ve answered every question to the best of my recollection and I will continue to do so today.”

Slager’s lawyers are now seizing on that claim for their own client, essentially stating that if Sessions wants us to believe the nonstop speed of the campaign trail served as a mind eraser, murdering a man in cold blood would be at least as hard on one’s ability to remember events with clarity. His defense team wrote:

“Unlike Slager, who had been in what he perceived as a life and death struggle before he made his statements, Sessions had time to prepare for his congressional testimony, yet still often got it wrong. Why? According to Sessions, he was working in chaotic conditions created by the Trump campaign. This was undoubtedly stressful, though not as stressful as having shot a man to death, or dealing with the aftermath of that, or facing the death penalty or life in prison. As Sessions made clear in his statement, a failure to recall, or an inaccurate recollection, does not a liar make.”

America’s criminal justice system has always been something of a joke for black folks, who are consistently denied a presumption of innocence, fairness in sentencing or equal treatment under the law. Black victims of crime rarely receive justice, and when those crimes — including unjustifiable murder — are committed by cops, punitive action is the exception to the rule. But in Slager’s “Sessions defense,” we see the consequence of having a division charged with pursuing truth be led by a liar whose dishonesty is so transparent he serves as fodder for late-night talk show monologues and comedy skits.

Michelle Mark, writing at Business Insider, notes that Slager’s defense is “somewhat of a taunt to the Justice Department” tasked with handling his prosecution. Each time DOJ officials “call Slager a liar, they could risk appearing to call Sessions, the head of their department, a liar.”

While the Trump administration simultaneously talks out of one side of its mouth about its commitment to “law and order,” it’s become so renowned for its baldfaced lies that criminals can now almost dare it to challenge their own made-up stories. A top-down system of liars, led by a president who spews deception anytime his lips are moving, creates an environment where the very concept of truth is murky and elusive. It’s horrifying enough that the DOJ is being transformed by Sessions et al. to achieve his own anti-black and brown political and ideological agenda. The Trump campaign’s dedication to establishing its own alternative truth holds genuinely terrifying implications for the future, and even less hope of justice, particularly for the already marginalized.

“Like Sessions, Slager never lied or misled anyone,” defense attorneys note in court files. “Like Sessions, he answered the questions that were asked. When he had his memory refreshed, he added the refreshed recollection to his testimony. When he failed to remember certain items, it can be attributed to the stress or chaos of the event during which the memory should have been formed.”

The documents include examples from Sessions’ sworn testimony of moments when his memory supposedly failed him. Those citations, defense lawyers indicate, show just how much Slager and Sessions have in common. They’re basically — I’m paraphrasing here — two lying, racist peas in a pod. “The text…[is] particularly apropos to describe memory’s imperfections,” the court papers note, “and, in fact, could have been spoken by Slager himself.”

Can a tech company build a city? Ask Google

(Credit: AP/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation startup owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, has announced a partnership with the City of Toronto to develop a new waterfront precinct. Time to ask Google: can you build a city?

The Quayside precinct, dubbed “Sidewalk Toronto”, is to become a 500-hectare sandpit for testing a suite of new tech products. The aim is to radically re-imagine the way a city is made.

Even if only a fraction of the ideas being touted work, Sidewalk Labs will be expanding the possibilities of tech-enabled urbanism to far loftier heights than many run-of-the-mill smart city strategies.

Best take note. Any city mildly interested in using technology smarts to improve cities should be paying very close attention.

Learning from smart city failures

Sidewalk Toronto plans to grow phoenix-like out of the ashes of failed smart cities.

Smart cities are based on the idea that cities can be made more liveable, sustainable and efficient by making better use of information and communications technologies. This idea promises a lot, but so far has failed to deliver much.

The biggest failures in the 20-year history of smart cities – notably China’s Dongtan and South Korea’s Songdo – are testament to the hard-boiled truth that good cities can’t be built out of a technology mainframe. Even if they have tech smarts, they haven’t been places people have learned to call home.

And, as companies like IBM, Cisco and Microsoft have learnt, it’s not easy to redeploy the large-scale operating systems used by big organisations into complex urban environments.

Cities are messy places. They’re a heady mix of privatised utilities, legacy infrastructures, resource-constrained public authorities and opinionated voting publics. These ingredients have made it hard to sell a data platform that can operate at the scale needed to produce any real efficiency benefits.

Instead, what has so far been delivered are cities abounding in prototypes of smart parking and smart lights. More were announced last week under the Australian government’s A$50 million Smart Cities and Suburbs Program.

Cities Plus Data illustration by Elin Matilda Andersen for the Platform Urbanism project

Re-imagining cities from the internet up

We have seen very little of the “game-changing” disruption spruiked at smart city conferences worldwide. This is also why Sidewalk Labs matters.

Led by CEO Dan Doctoroff, who was deputy mayor of New York under Michael Bloomberg, the company is on a mission to “re-imagine cities from the internet up”. Crucially, this is Google’s version of the internet – the one you’re most likely occupying most of your waking hours.

Instead of trying to sell a clunky operating system that fits legacy infrastructure with new data points, Sidewalk Labs is building products it thinks will change how citizens use the city. And let’s not forget it will own and monetise the data created when people use these products.

Rather than upgrading what we have already, the thinking behind Sidewalk Labs is more focused on the core of how people behave in cities.

For instance, its parking app, Flow, isn’t just about helping you find an empty park, as many smart parking systems do. It introduces a new pricing model that lowers the cost of parking for people who have had to travel further. And it penalises those who really should have walked.

The point of using sensors to monitor air quality and temperature isn’t just to generate real-time data, which governments may or may not use. It proposes to use the data to create optimised environments that reduce the need for restrictive zoning, allowing for “radical mixed use” zoning.

City Block Health, another startup spun out of Sidewalk Labs, is a personalised health system in the US for Medicaid or Medicare members. Presumably, though it’s a bit hard to tell, this will allow these people to be supported across many different (data-driven) interactions as they shop, commute and go about their daily lives.

This is human-centred product design for an era of not just digitally-enabled but “Google-powered” citizens.

The solutions offered here take in the full span of city regulation, pricing, planning, building and human interaction. This is not just tinkering at the edges of urban systems with new technology; this is redesigning the system with the technology at the core.

Of course, the scope to experiment with and ultimately reshape Google-powered urban behaviour is only possible when Sidewalk Labs owns and operates the city space where it can trial its products. This is the premise of Sidewalk Toronto.

Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff loves Toronto as part of an ‘elite class’ of American cities it plans to expand its products into.

No longer ‘us and them’

Sidewalk Toronto is being built as a beacon for other cities to follow.

The way Sidewalk Labs sees it, the idea that technologists and urbanists can’t get along has to change. The company is integrating urbanists and technologists into its product planning. It’s including residents and workers in beta testing, with a city government giving it social licence to operate.

Instead of a cartel of architects, urban planners, consultants, developers and regulators mapping out the future of the city behind closed doors using the standard master planning process, the company will spend US$50 million over the next year to support an open conversation between citizens, governments, universities and others about what Sidewalk Toronto should be.

Sidewalk Labs hosted a community town hall meeting on November 1, inviting Torontonians to join the conversation.

Sidewalk Labs is building offices across the US. It’s recruiting a cavalcade of new product managers, partnership and business development managers, machine-learning specialists and forward-thinking urbanists.

If its aggressive recruitment strategy is anything to go by, Sidewalk Labs is aiming for its tech products – focused on urban disruption, powered by the data it hoovers up from our daily lives – to raise the bar for city-making around the world. Doctoroff describes his desire to expand to other cities as “insatiable”.

No doubt there will be lots of ideas that go nowhere. But one thing is clear: Sidewalk Labs is thinking about cities like no other technology company has done before it.

Whether it succeeds in actually building one is everybody’s business.

# # #

Sarah Barns, Engaged Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

There is a promising movement afoot in perilous times

Immigration rally in Portland, Ore., Monday, Feb. 27, 2017 (Credit: AP Photo/Don Ryan)

“The system is rigged!” is now an angry, bipartisan cry, intensifying as Trump bows to big-donor interests and deepens distrust of government.

But here’s the worst part. Not only has big-donor influence blocked lifesaving public actions from worker safety to climate change, but in recent decades political donors have gotten savvier. They’ve been able not only to bend policy for their own benefit, but increasingly, to remake the rules of democracy itself to serve their interests.

Here’s a taste of what we mean.

Since 2010, when a big-money-empowered Tea Party swept Republicans into Congress and statehouses, 23 states have enacted laws making it harder to vote. To solidify gains, they’ve gerrymandered state and congressional districts so thoroughly that in many state and congressional races, competition for office — the heart of democracy — is effectively dead. Democracy shrinks further as those elected by relying on huge sums from the top 1 percent form a political class with little need to respond to the real concerns of most Americans.

Citizens, however, are not sitting idly watching our democracy go under. A citizens movement, what we call the Democracy Movement, is pursuing all angles to fight back and to take our democracy forward.

In Wisconsin, teacher-turned-lawyer Wendy Sue Johnson and 11 other Wisconsin citizens became plaintiffs in a case now before the Supreme Court that could spell the end of partisan gerrymandering. The practice, said Johnson, allows “elected officials to choose their voters instead of the other way around.” Legal challenges in other states are targeting voter identification laws, proven to lower voter participation in vulnerable communities.

Increasingly, it’s dawning on Americans that issues they once thought of as wonky or dry touch the heart of it all: whose voice can be heard on the biggest questions of our time.

The Democracy Movement is realizing real success — success that may have been missed by those shaken after Election Day 2016. On that day, unknown to most Americans, 14 of 17 state and local pro-democracy ballot initiatives passed, from public financing in South Dakota to ranked-choice voting in Maine. True, some face legal and legislative challenges, but they prove that citizens are stepping up for democracy with new vigor.

One of the most significant of the Democracy Movement’s legislative advances is automatic voter registration. Sound wonky? AVR just means that any time citizens interact with specific governmental agencies, like the Department of Motor Vehicles, they get registered. It’s simple, less error-prone, and saves a lot of money.

And if you think it is just small-potatoes reform, think again. In 2015, Oregon became the first state to adopt automatic voter registration, and in 2016, almost 272,000 Oregonians registered for the first time, two-thirds through the new automatic process. And of the newly registered, 33 percent voted — an incredible success. In all, between 2012 and 2016, turnout in Oregon grew more than in any other state.

Now 10 states plus the District of Columbia have jumped on board. Moreover, in Nevada, an AVR ballot initiative is underway and in Massachusetts a legislative campaign is gaining momentum.

The successes of a rising Democracy Movement are happening because more and more Americans get it: No matter what our specific issue passion, we now see that we can’t move it forward without fixing the rules of our democracy itself.

On this point, Josh Silver, founder of Represent.Us, an organization working to get big money out of politics, once chided us: “You don’t have to abandon your issue in order to work for democracy. You can, you know, love two children at once.” In other words, we can stay loyal to the issue closest to our heart — whether advancing racial justice, defending the environment, or ensuring a livable wage — while also acting on the underlying crisis weakening our democracy.

With this liberating insight, Silver, along with millions of Americans, is part of a bipartisan, multi-generational, and culturally diverse groundswell — the first such broad yet focused citizen movement in living memory.

The Democracy Movement broke new ground in 2013, when some of the biggest social-cause players in America, from the NAACP, Common Cause, and Sierra Club to the Communications Workers of America and Greenpeace, had their own “two-child” aha-moment. Together, they joined hands and took the leap, forming a unique organization-coalition blend, the Democracy Initiative, committed to a common democracy-reform agenda.

In uniting such diverse groups, Sierra Club president Mike Brune told us he saw the chance to “create a really powerful coalition and counter-balance all these billions of dollars coming from the Koch brothers and other oil and coal executives.”

Four short years later, the Democracy Initiative is now a full-blown organization-coalition of more than 60 organizations devoted to a vast array of causes, all pledging to engage also in democracy-reform campaigns. Led by former labor leader Wendy Fields, it now represents 30 million Americans.

Democracy Initiative creates a network of relationships so that groups know they’ve got each other’s back; confident they can count on each other to rally together in critical moments, regardless of each member’s central focus.

Two of its newest members highlight Democracy Initiative’s breadth. They are New York’s Working Families Party and Corporate Accountability International, a leading watchdog organization that has challenged corporate power for decades. A “lasting victory on issue areas like reining in corporate power, tackling climate change, and advancing racial justice depends on a thriving democracy,” Executive director Patti Lynn explained. “The cross-movement unity that the Democracy Initiative is building has the power to transform politics as we know it, restore the promise of democracy, and help us all win more, faster.”

Recently, our own Small Planet Institute joined the Democracy Initiative as well.

Another significant shift in this growing movement is that veterans in the democracy-reform trenches and newcomers alike are taking solidarity on democracy reforms to a deeper level. Some groups specialize in restoring and protecting voting rights, while others tackle money in politics. But both now increasingly see their unity: that getting big money out of politics means little if the right to vote is not guaranteed, and vice versa.

In all this ferment, we see the Democracy Movement becoming a true “movement of movements.” Under a common canopy of hope, groups are simultaneously tackling voting rights, money in politics, gerrymandering reform, ballot access, and election security.

From the April 2016 Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening mobilizations in which an historic 1,300 were arrested on the Capitol steps to the March on Harrisburg‘s valiant fight for a simple gift ban for Pennsylvania legislators, to countless new organizations such as the Franchise Project and Access Democracy—the momentum builds.

So in this moment of unprecedented threat to our democracy, a rising Democracy Movement embodies hope in action, rewarding all those jumping in with the thrill of knowing their action is upholding the most noble of American values, democracy itself.

Frances Moore Lappé is the co-founder of Food First and the author of the three-million copy Diet For a Small Planet. Her latest book is EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want (Nation Books, 2013).

Adam Eichen is a member of the Democracy Matters Board of Directors and a Maguire Fellow at the French research institute Sciences Po, doing research on comparative campaign finance policy. He is also a Democracy Fellow at the Small Planet Institute.

Jet fuel from sugarcane? It’s not a flight of fancy

(Credit: AP Photo/Michael Probst, File)

The aviation industry produces 2 percent of global human-induced carbon dioxide emissions. This share may seem relatively small – for perspective, electricity generation and home heating account for more than 40 percent – but aviation is one of the world’s fastest-growing greenhouse gas sources. Demand for air travel is projected to double in the next 20 years.

Airlines are under pressure to reduce their carbon emissions, and are highly vulnerable to global oil price fluctuations. These challenges have spurred strong interest in biomass-derived jet fuels. Bio-jet fuel can be produced from various plant materials, including oil crops, sugar crops, starchy plants and lignocellulosic biomass, through various chemical and biological routes. However, the technologies to convert oil to jet fuel are at a more advanced stage of development and yield higher energy efficiency than other sources.

We are engineering sugarcane, the most productive plant in the world, to produce oil that can be turned into bio-jet fuel. In a recent study, we found that use of this engineered sugarcane could yield more than 2,500 liters of bio-jet fuel per acre of land. In simple terms, this means that a Boeing 747 could fly for 10 hours on bio-jet fuel produced on just 54 acres of land. Compared to two competing plant sources, soybeans and jatropha, lipidcane would produce about 15 and 13 times as much jet fuel per unit of land, respectively.

Creating dual-purpose sugarcane

Bio-jet fuels derived from oil-rich feedstocks, such as camelina and algae, have been successfully tested in proof of concept flights. ASTM International, a global standards development organization, has approved a 50:50 blend of petroleum-based jet fuel and hydroprocessed renewable jet fuel for commercial and military flights.

However, even after significant research and commercialization efforts, current production volumes of bio-jet fuel are very small. Making these products on a larger scale will require further technology improvements and abundant low-cost feedstocks (crops used to make the fuel).

Sugarcane is a well-known biofuel source: Brazil has been fermenting sugarcane juice to make alcohol-based fuel for decades. Ethanol from sugarcane yields 25 percent more energy than the amount used during the production process, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent compared to fossil fuels.

We wondered whether we could increase the plant’s natural oil production and use the oil to produce biodiesel, which provides even greater environmental benefits. Biodiesel yields 93 percent more energy than is required to make it and reduces emissions by 41 percent compared to fossil fuels. Ethanol and biodiesel can both be used in bio-jet fuel, but the technologies to convert plant-derived oil to jet fuel are at an advanced stage of development, yield high energy efficiency and are ready for large-scale deployment.

When we first proposed engineering sugarcane to produce more oil, some of our colleagues thought we were crazy. Sugarcane plants contain just 0.05 percent oil, which is far too little to convert to biodiesel. Many plant scientists theorized that increasing the amount of oil to 1 percent would be toxic to the plant, but our computer models predicted that we could increase oil production to 20 percent.

With support from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, we launched a research project called Plants Engineered to Replace Oil in Sugarcane and Sorghum, or PETROSS, in 2012. Since then, through genetic engineering we’ve increased production of oil and fatty acids to achieve 12 percent oil in the leaves of sugarcane.

Now we are working to achieve 20 percent oil – the theoretical limit, according to our computer models – and targeting this oil accumulation to the stem of the plant, where it is more accessible than in the leaves. Our preliminary research has shown that even as the engineered plants produce more oil, they continue to produce sugar. We call these engineered plants lipidcane.

Multiple products from lipidcane

Lipidcane offers many advantages for farmers and the environment. We calculate that growing lipidcane containing 20 percent oil would be five times more profitable per acre than soybeans, the main feedstock currently used to make biodiesel in the United States, and twice as profitable per acre as corn.

To be sustainable, bio-jet fuel must also be economical to process and have high production yields that minimize use of arable land. We estimate that compared to soybeans, lipidcane containing 5 percent oil could produce four times more jet fuel per acre of land. Lipidcane with 20 percent oil could produce more than 15 times more jet fuel per acre.

And lipidcane offers other energy benefits. The plant parts left over after juice extraction, known as bagasse, can be burned to produce steam and electricity. According to our analysis, this would generate more than enough electricity to power the biorefinery, so surplus power could be sold back to the grid, displacing electricity produced from fossil fuels – a practice already used in some plants in Brazil to produce ethanol from sugarcane.

A potential US bioenergy crop

Sugarcane thrives on marginal land that is not suited to many food crops. Currently it is grown mainly in Brazil, India and China. We are also engineering lipidcane to be more cold-tolerant so that it can be raised more widely, particularly in the southeastern United States on underutilized land.

If we devoted 23 million acres in the southeastern United States to lipidcane with 20 percent oil, we estimate that this crop could produce 65 percent of the U.S. jet fuel supply. Presently, in current dollars, that fuel would cost airlines US$5.31 per gallon, which is less than bio-jet fuel produced from algae or other oil crops such as soybeans, canola or palm oil.

Lipidcane could also be grown in Brazil and other tropical areas. As we recently reported in Nature Climate Change, significantly expanding sugarcane or lipidcane production in Brazil could reduce current global carbon dioxide emissions by up to 5.6 percent. This could be accomplished without impinging on areas that the Brazilian government has designated as environmentally sensitive, such as rainforest.

In pursuit of ‘energycane’

Our lipidcane research also includes genetically engineering the plant to make it photosynthesize more efficiently, which translates into more growth. In a 2016 article in Science, one of us (Stephen Long) and colleagues at other institutions demonstrated that improving the efficiency of photosynthesis in lipidcane increased its growth by 20 percent. Preliminary research and side-by-side field trials suggest that we have improved the photosynthetic efficiency of sugarcane by 20 percent, and by nearly 70 percent in cool conditions.

Now our team is beginning work to engineer a higher-yielding variety of sugarcane that we call “energycane” to achieve more oil production per acre. We have more ground to cover before it can be commercialized, but developing a viable plant with enough oil to economically produce biodiesel and bio-jet fuel is a major first step.

Life after coal for in Germany

(Credit: AP)

It’s a sunny October day on the outskirts of the west German town of Bottrop. A quiet, two-lane road leads me through farm pasture to a cluster of anonymous, low-lying buildings set among the trees. The highway hums in the distance. Looming above everything else is a green A-frame structure with four great pulley wheels to carry men and equipment into a mine shaft. It’s the only visible sign that, almost three quarters of a mile below, Germany’s last hard coal lies beneath this spot.

Bottrop sits in the Ruhr Valley, a dense stretch of towns and suburbs home to 5.5 million people. Some 500,000 miners once worked in the region’s nearly 200 mines, producing as much as 124 million tons of coal every year.

Next year, that era will come to an end when this mine closes. The Ruhr Valley is in the midst of a remarkable transformation. Coal and steel plants have fallen quiet, one by one, over the course of the last half-century. Wind turbines have sprung up among old shaft towers and coking plants as Germany strives to hit its renewable energy goals.

But the path from dirty coal to clean energy isn’t an easy one. Bottrop’s Prosper-Haniel coal mine is a symbol of the challenges and opportunities facing Germany — and coal-producing states everywhere.

Around the world, as governments shift away from the coal that fueled two ages of industrial revolution, more and more mines are falling silent. If there’s an afterlife for retired coal mines, one that could put them to work for the next revolution in energy, it will have to come soon.

* * *

The elevator that carries Germany’s last coal miners on their daily commute down the mine shaft travels at about 40 feet a second, nearly 30 miles an hour. “Like a motorcycle in a city,” says Christof Beicke, the public affairs officer for the Ruhr mining consortium, as the door rattles shut. It’s not a comforting analogy.

The brakes release and, for a moment, we bob gently on the end of the mile-and-a-half long cable, like a boat in dock. Then we drop. After an initial flutter in my stomach, the long minutes of the ride are marked only by a strong breeze through the elevator grilles and the loud rush of the shaft going by.

When the elevator finally stops, on the seventh and deepest level of the mine, we file into a high-ceilinged room that looks like a subway platform. One of the men who built this tunnel, Hamazan Atli, leads our small group of visitors through the hall. Standing in the fluorescent light and crisp, engineered breeze, I have the uncanny sense of walking into an environment that humans have designed down to the last detail, like a space station or a submarine.

A monorail train takes us the rest of the way to the coal seam. After about half an hour, we clamber out of the cars and clip our headlamps into the brackets on our hard hats. It is noticeably warmer here. There is a sulfurous smell that grows stronger as we walk down the slight incline toward the deepest point of our day, more than 4,000 feet below the surface, and duck under the first of the hydraulic presses that keep the ceiling from collapsing on us.

Because this seam is only about five feet high, we have to hunch as we move through the tunnel of presses, stepping through deep pools of water that swallow our boots. The coal-cutting machine is stalled today, otherwise it would be chewing its way along the 310-yard-long seam, mouthparts clamped to the coal like a snail to aquarium glass. The coal would be sluiced away on a conveyor belt to the surface, and the hydraulic presses would inch forward, maintaining space for the miners to work.

Instead, the mine is eerily quiet. Two miners, their faces black, squeeze past us. As we sit, sweating and cramped under the hydraulic presses, the bare ceiling above the coal seam gives up an occasional gasp of rock, showering down dust and debris.

Later, in a brightly lit room back on the surface, Beicke from the mining consortium asks me what I thought of the mine. I tell him that it seems like an extreme environment for humans. “Yes,” he nods, “it is like an old world.”

* * *

A few days earlier, Beicke and I had trekked to the top of a hill outside the long-shuttered Ewald Mine in Herten, a half-hour drive from Bottrop. We climbed a set of stairs to a platform with a view over the whole region, the fenced-off or leased-out buildings of the old mine sitting below us.

The Ruhr Valley encompasses 53 cities of Germany’s once-formidable industrial heartland, including Essen, Bochum, and Oberhausen. The whole region was once low-lying riverland, but these days large hills rear above the landscape. These are the heaps of rock removed from the mines, tons of slag excavated with the coal and piled up. It’s a stark visual reminder of what’s been emptied out from underneath.

As the mines have closed down, most of these heaps have been covered with grass, and many have been crowned with a statue or other landmark. On one hill outside Essen, there’s a 50-foot steel slab by the sculptor Richard Serra; on another, atop other heaps, wind turbines stand like giant mechanical daisies.

Germany has been hailed as a leader in the global shift to clean energy, putting aside its industrial past for a renewable future faster than most of the industrialized world. The country has spent more than $200 billion on renewable energy subsidies since 2000 (compare that to the United States, which spends an estimated $20 billion to subsidize fossil fuel production every year).

In 2011, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government announced the beginning of a policy of “energiewende” to wean Germany off fossil fuels and nuclear power. Last year, wind, solar, and other renewables supplied nearly 30 percent of the country’s electricity. The goal now is to hit 40 percent in the next 10 years, while slashing carbon emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

That transition has happened alongside attempts to restore the Ruhr Valley’s landscape. For every hill raised above ground level, there is an accompanying depression where the land subsided as coal seams were emptied out. The land here sank as the coal seams closest to the surface were emptied out. Overall, the region has sunk about 80 feet.

Streams that enter the Ruhr Valley are no longer able to flow out the other side, Beicke explains, and now water pools in places it never used to. The mining company is responsible for pumping that water away, as well as pumping groundwater across the region, to keep the water table below the level of the existing mines. Any contaminated water in the old mines must be removed and treated to keep it from polluting the groundwater.

These are just a few of the mining company’s “ewigkeitsaufgaben” — literally, eternity tasks.

“As long as 5 or 6 million people want to live in this area, we will have to do that,” Beicke tells me, of the expensive water management. “Maybe 2,000 years in the future that will change, but until that happens, well.” He shrugs.

The government gives the mining consortium 220 million euros a year in subsidies to deal with all the consequences of coal mining. Unlike in the United States, where aging coal companies often sell off their assets or declare bankruptcy to dodge clean up bills, here the mining company will be pumping and treating water long after it has stopped being a mining company at all.

Despite a national commitment to a broad energy transition, many now think that Germany will fall short of its renewable energy targets, thanks to a number of confounding economic and social factors, including the continued use of a coal alternative called lignite, also known as “brown coal.” Germans have the highest electricity costs in Europe, and the rise of the country’s extreme right-wing party in the last election has been pinned, in part, on those high bills.

If Germany does continue to progress toward its climate goals, much of the new energy is sure to come from wind power. Germany has more wind turbines than any other country in Europe, many of them installed in the last six or seven years. But wind doesn’t blow consistently, so this shift has been a challenge for the electrical grid. Even slight disruptions in the power supply can have wide-ranging consequences.

As more wind turbines are turned on, and more coal plants are retired, this problem will only get bigger, and the challenge of storing all that intermittent energy will be even more important. Here’s where the country’s retired coal mines might prove useful again — as giant batteries for clean energy.

 

* * *

To turn a coal mine into a battery, all you need is gravity.

OK, you also need a lot of money (more about that later), but the basic principle is gravitational. When you lift a heavy object, it stores the power used to lift it as potential energy until it’s released and falls to the ground.

Let’s say the heavy object you’re lifting is water. When you want to store energy, you just have to pump the water uphill, into a reservoir. When you want to use that energy, you let the water flow back down through a series of turbines that turn the gravitational rush into electricity.

This is the basic plan André Niemann and Ulrich Schreiber conceived when they were dreaming up new ways to use old mines. It seemed intuitive to the two professors at the University of Essen-Duisburg: The bigger the distance between your upper and lower reservoirs, the more energy you can store, and what’s deeper than a coal mine?

Schreiber, a geologist, realized it was theoretically possible to fit a pumped storage reservoir into a mine, but it had never been done before. Niemann, a hydraulic engineer, thought the proposal was worth pursuing. He drummed up some research money, then spent a few years conducting feasibility studies, looking for a likely site in the Ruhr Valley and running the numbers on costs and benefits.

After studying the region’s web of fault lines and stratigraphic layers, Niemann’s team settled on the closing Prosper-Haniel mine. Their underground reservoir would be built like a massive highway tunnel, a reinforced concrete ring nine miles around and nearly 100 feet high, with a few feet difference in height from one side of the ring to the other to allow the water to flow, Niemann explains.

At max storage, the turbines could run for four hours, providing 800 megawatt-hours of reserve energy, enough to power 200,000 homes.

The appeal of pumped storage is obvious for Germany. Wind and sun are fickle energy sources — “intermittent” by industry lingo — and energy storage can help smooth out the dramatic spikes. When the wind gusts, you can stash that extra power in a battery. When a cloud moves over the sun, you can pull power back out. It’s simple and, as the grid handles more and more renewable energy, increasingly needed.

The only problem: It’s expensive.

As wind turbine and solar technologies have become cheaper, energy storage costs have stayed high. Pumped hydro, especially, requires a big investment up front. Niemann estimates it would cost between 10,000 and 25,000 euros per meter of tunnel just to build the reservoir, and around 500 million euros for the whole thing. Right now, neither the government nor the energy companies in the Ruhr Valley are willing to make that kind of investment.

“It’s not a business, it’s a bet, to be honest,” Niemann says with a shrug.

In spite of the increasing unlikelihood of the proposal becoming reality, delegations from the United States, China, Poland, France, South Africa, and Slovakia, among others, have visited Niemann and Schreiber in Essen to learn about mine pumped-storage. Virginia’s Dominion Energy has been studying the idea with the support of a Republican state senator, and a group from Virginia Tech paid a visit the week after I did.

Here’s where any attempt to draw comparisons across the Atlantic gets complicated. In the United States, the federal government has been relatively hands-off in helping coal-dependent regions move on from the industries that fueled their way of life. In Germany, by contrast, there’s a broad agreement about the need to shift to renewable sources of energy. And yet, even with all that social, political, and economic foresight, important and necessary innovations remain stalled for lack of investment.

The Ruhr Valley is not Appalachia. And yet the two regions share key similarities that offer some important lessons about the a path to a cleaner, more sustainable future.

* * *

Dying industries take more than jobs with them. Towns built around a single industry, like coal mining, develop a shared identity. For many workers and their families, it’s not as simple as picking up and finding a new line of work when the mine closes. Mining is seen as a calling, an inheritance, and people want their way of life back.

That’s how residents of the Ruhr responded when coal jobs started to decline.

“For a long time, people thought the old times would come back, the old days would return,” says Kai van de Loo, an energy and economics expert for a German coal association in Essen. “But they can never come back.”

In the United States, of course, calls to bring back the old days often works wonders as a political sales pitch. Donald Trump campaigned for president on promises to stop the “war on coal” and revive the dying industry, and mining towns across the Rust Belt supported him.

In Pennsylvania’s Mon River Valley, home to a once-thriving underground mining complex bigger than Manhattan, mining continues to exert an oversized influence. Some 8,000 people work in coal in the state, a portion of the 50,000 coal jobs left in the United States. That’s a far cry from the 180,000 people who worked in the industry 30 years ago. worked in or around coal mines only 30 years ago.

And the legacy of coal mining on the landscape is hard to miss. Bare slag heaps rise above the trees, dwarfing the towns beside them. Maryann Kubacki, supervisor of East Bethlehem in Washington County, says that during rainy spells the township has to shovel the gritty, black runoff from their storm sewers.

But without the federal government leading the way with financial support as it has in Germany, getting these former coal towns on a new track is a daunting task. Veronica Coptis, director of the Center for Coalfield Justice in Pennsylvania, says that organizing people to put pressure on mining companies is a delicate matter. People don’t want to hear that coal is bad, or that its legacy is poisoned. “We want an end to mining,” she says, “but we know it can’t happen abruptly.”

Back in Germany, the mayor of Bottrop, Bernd Tischler, has been thinking about how to kick coal since at least the early 2000s, long before the federal government put an end date on the country’s mining. An urban planner by training, Tischler has a knack for long-range strategy. After he took office in 2009, Tischler thought Bottrop could reinvent itself as a hub of renewable energy and energy efficiency. He devised heating plants that run off methane collected from the coal mine, and made Bottrop the first town in the Ruhr with a planned zone for wind energy.

In 2010, Bottrop won the title of “Innovation City,” a model for what the Ruhr Valley cities could become. Bottrop now gets 40 percent of its energy from renewables, Tischler said, 10 percentage points above the national average.

Describing this transformation, Tischler makes it almost sound easy. I explain that the issue of coal seems to track larger divisions in the United States, and so discussions inevitably turn heated, emotional.

“In Bottrop, the people of course feared for the process of the end of the coal mining,” he said. But Tischler believes mining towns have an advantage that can help them adapt to change: They’re more cohesive. In the mines, people are used to working together and looking out for each other. Distrust is dangerous, even deadly.

The Ruhr cities absorbed waves of Polish, Italian, and Turkish laborers over the years. And they’ve managed to get along well, knitting a strong social fabric, Tischler said. In the past few years, Bottrop, a town of 117,000 people, has resettled thousands of Syrian refugees in new housing.

A strong social fabric isn’t enough to survive the loss of a major industry, of course. Some promising industry — technology and renewables in Bottrop’s case — has to be found to replace it.

“I think the responsibility of the mayors and the politicians is to change the fear into a new vision, a new way,” he says. “You can’t do it against your people; you have to convince your people. You have to work together with institutions and stakeholders that don’t normally work together, [so that] we are sitting in the same boat and we are rowing in the same direction.”

 

Reporting for this story was supported in part by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Foundation.