13 December 20
No We Can’t Slash the Budget Any Further
“Can’t you make do with less.” Another astonishing reader comment. WE ARE MAKING DO WITH LESS! and it hasn’t been working. That’s the point.
We have been slashing the budget wherever possible for 2 years now. Enough.
Now we fight back.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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12 December 20
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Bill McKibben | Where We Stand on Climate
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "This month marks the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate summit."
’ve been writing this column for almost a year now, trying to shine a light on many of the climate crisis’s facets. Once in a while, it’s important to pull back and try to put it all in perspective. Now is such a time: this month marks the fifth anniversary of the Paris climate summit; we’ve more or less survived the Trump Administration, with an incoming Administration promising a new approach; and we’re less than a year away from what will be the next great global climate meeting, in Glasgow, Scotland. (On a personal note, I’m subsiding into emeritus status at 350.org, the climate campaign I helped found, and I turn sixty this week—since I started writing my first book about all this when I was twenty-seven, this milestone means that I’ve spent four-fifths of my adult life wrestling with the climate problem.) Where do we stand? Take a deep breath.
All discussions of the climate crisis start with science, and the science is grim. Despite a La Niña wave cooling the global temperature in 2020, this year will vie for the hottest on record. It’s already seen what could be the highest temperature ever reliably recorded (a hundred and thirty degrees, in California), and devastating wildfires in Australia, Siberia, the American West, and South America, where about a quarter of the Pantanal, the largest wetland on earth, burned. Thirty named storms formed in the Atlantic, leading to a record hurricane season.
But those dramatic moments obscure the more devastating and silent changes. The Australia-based climatologist Andrew Glikson recently catalogued some of them for Arctic News: over the past four decades, the globe’s tropical zones have expanded by about two degrees latitude. The “shift of climate zones toward the poles,” Glikson writes, “is changing the geography of the planet.” June saw the temperature top a hundred degrees in Verkhoyansk, Siberia, likely the highest ever recorded above the Arctic Circle. As northern sea ice melts, the jet stream weakens, allowing warm air masses to penetrate farther north; one result this year has been the fires in Siberia—which began burning the peatlands that hold huge stores of carbon. In Australia, the tropical zone of the north is pushing farther south, and the coastal population centers are ever hotter and drier. The implacable rise of the oceans is accelerating, and some of the most important physical systems on the planet seem at tipping points: in the Amazon, where deforestation is escalating under Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazilian government, researchers say that a twenty- to twenty-five-per-cent loss of forest cover could trigger large areas of the forest to become savannah; at the moment, the figure is about seventeen per cent.
People caused the climate crisis, of course, but the definition of which people gets more precise over time. Research indicates that the wealthiest ten per cent of the world’s population—those with net incomes above thirty-eight thousand dollars a year—account for more than half of all carbon emissions. The wealthiest one per cent produce more than twice the carbon that the poorest fifty per cent do. But the effects of climate change are unjustly reversed: the less you did to cause it, the sooner and harder you feel its effects. Last month, when Hurricanes Eta and Iota hit Central America, the damage was “beyond compare,” Admiral Craig Faller, of the U.S. Southern Command, which was helping relief efforts, told the Times. “There are some estimates of up to a decade just to recover,” he said. Before then, displaced Hondurans and Guatemalans may trek in large numbers to the southern border of the United States, the Times reports, presenting a test for a Biden Administration that “may find it politically difficult to welcome a surge of migrants.” Those migrants would only be, however, part of an advance guard; estimates for the number of climate migrants around the world by 2050 range between twenty-five million and a billion people.
To put it simply, the temperature is increasing steadily and at a pace scientists had predicted. (The latest figures from Columbia University’s James Hansen and other climate scientists suggest an acceleration of warming over the past few years.) “We have entered a new climate,” the meteorologist Jeff Masters, a contributor to Yale Climate Connections, said last week. “Heat is energy and when everything else comes together,” he added, “things are going to go bonkers.”
Given the pace of physical change, the question becomes how fast societies can move to counter it. So far, the signs are not encouraging: emissions of carbon dioxide and methane continued to rise through 2019. They dipped in 2020, during the pandemic shutdowns, but the curve is now back on the upswing. Still, we do seem to be approaching an inflection point—a peak in the burning of hydrocarbons—that the pandemic may have moved forward a little. For a decade, engineers have been steadily driving down the cost of solar and wind power and of the batteries required to store it. This is now the cheapest power in the world, which opens up possibilities that didn’t previously exist for rapid and mass-scale change; electric cars, to give one example, are quickly transitioning from expensive toys to cheaper, better consumer products. Joe Biden, in other words, has far more scope for decisive action than Barack Obama did, just four years ago, though a Senate left in Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hands would make acting on that opportunity difficult.
You can tell that something’s shifting, because a variety of leaders—in politics and business—have begun making new promises. “2050” has become a rallying cry, as in, “by 2050, we’ll be net zero” or “by 2050, we’ll be carbon-neutral.” China made such a pledge this fall and, though it chose 2060 as its deadline, that was nevertheless a huge change in policy. But both timelines are too slow. Since physics sets the terms of this debate, we need scientists, not politicians, to tell us the pace we need to hit, and here the numbers are stark. In Paris, in 2015, the world committed to trying to hold the increase in global temperature to as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Last week, the World Meteorological Organization said that the current rise stands at 1.2 degrees, with at least a one-in-five chance that we will see an annual average above 1.5 degrees before 2024.
Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that, to have any chance of meeting that Paris target, we’d need to see a “fundamental societal and systems transitions and transformations” of energy systems by 2030, which it defined as cutting emissions by half. 2030 is now nine years away. That’s thirty-six quarters of a business cycle, one-and-a-half Senate terms in Washington, or nearly two five-year plans for Beijing; new data show that to meet that target our fossil-fuel production has to drop at least six per cent a year. But our leverage over where the earth’s temperature will eventually settle dwindles with each passing year, because feedback loops beyond our control are starting to intervene. For example, America’s emissions from transportation fell sharply during the pandemic, but that entire decline has been erased by the carbon released in the brutal fires in the West.
So the right metaphor for where we are now is a race—one that we are losing. We can’t actually win it, in the sense that we’ve already done so much damage, and far more is locked in for the future. But, if we act with daring and haste in the decade ahead, we can still achieve a world in which the temperature rises by two degrees Celsius or less, instead of by three or four or more—and that could easily make the difference between a civilization that survives and one that collapses.
The key contestants in this race are the fossil-fuel industry and the movements that have arisen to stop it. The balance of power between them determines how bravely politicians will act and how fast investment will switch to renewable energy. There’s no doubt about the eventual outcome: economics will dictate a switch to renewable power. But waiting for economics to take its course guarantees that we will not make our deadlines. That’s precisely why activists have been fighting so many battles on so many fronts. Some of the most important, I think, include the fights to prevent new fossil-fuel infrastructure, such as pipelines. There was a win on that front last week, as Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York, joined other officials in opposing the North Brooklyn fracked-gas pipeline. And there was a setback, as the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission gave the go-ahead for the Canadian Line 3 tar-sands pipeline crossing the state; campaigners led by indigenous activists blockaded that work last Friday.
There are also crucial fights to cut off the financing to the fossil-fuel industry: Stop the Money Pipeline (a campaign that I helped launch) has had some initial success in pressuring big banks, asset managers, and insurance companies to cease underwriting coal and oil and gas. (Bank of America just became the last of the major U.S. banks to declare the Arctic off-limits for oil lending.) The fossil-fuel divestment campaign has seen some major victories, too: on Wednesday, the New York State comptroller announced plans to divest the state’s pension fund, one of the largest in the world. There are also campaigns for a “fossil-fuel non-proliferation treaty,” which just last week scored a success, when Denmark announced that it would not license any new drilling in the North Sea. And there are efforts to persuade ad agencies and public-relations firms to stop green-washing the industry. All these campaigns are most pointed in Europe, but they are spreading around the world.
Frontline communities and indigenous groups are in the lead, and the surge of youthful energy has defined this push: from the Sunrise Movement to the Fridays for Future student strikes, it is those whose future is fully on the line who have emerged as the most talented spokespeople—and the most demanding. (Greta Thunberg greeted Denmark’s news that it would forgo future North Sea oil wells by pointing out that the country is going to keep pumping the ones already in place; many of her colleagues issued a manifesto proclaiming, “World leaders have no right to speak about net-zero by 2050 targets as if this is the height of ambition. Limiting our ambition to net-zero by 2050 is a death sentence for many.”) This pressure aims, at heart, to do one thing: to shift the zeitgeist, so that the sense of what is normal and natural and obvious changes and, with it, the decisions of politicians and investors.
There are signs that it is working. This summer, BP said that it would cut its production of oil and gas by forty per cent over the next decade. That amount won’t be enough (and the announcement came with endless caveats), but the decision still represents a new outlook for an industry that had grown steadily since the first oil well was drilled, in the nineteenth century. Last week, Exxon announced that it will write down the value of its oil and gas fields by twenty billion dollars, essentially conceding that those fields will never be pumped. It also said that it would cut spending on fossil-fuel exploration each year through 2025: instead of the thirty billion dollars it planned to spend in 2021, it will budget sixteen to nineteen billion. As recently as 2013, Exxon was the largest company in the world; this year, its market cap was briefly topped by Next Era Energy, a Florida-based renewables company.
There are a thousand other battles under way, of course: from arcane fights about carbon-accounting rules to plans for helping farmers sequester more carbon in soils; from writing new building codes requiring energy efficiency to schemes for assisting coal miners and oilfield roustabouts in finding new jobs in renewable power. But the central battle, at least for the next few years, is between Big Oil and Big Hope and Anger. We’ll get a better read on the state of play next November, when nations gather in Glasgow. The pledges on the table will reflect, with unflinching accuracy, the balance of power between the fossil-fuel industry and the movements that challenge it.
Passing the Mic
Maria Lopez-Nuñez is the deputy director for organizing and advocacy at the Ironbound Community Corporation, working for local development in a working-class neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, and a leader in the successful fight to pass S232, the strongest environmental-justice measure in the United States. Signed by Governor Phil Murphy in September, the law protects overburdened communities by requiring the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to evaluate permits based on cumulative impacts of pollution. Lopez-Nuñez and her colleagues’ advocacy is also the subject of a new documentary, “The Sacrifice Zone.” (Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Describe what it was like growing up in your part of New Jersey. When did you realize that Newark was overburdened with polluting industries?
One day, at the Ironbound Community Corporation, we smelled something pungent. Wherever you pass over the Ironbound, the main sight will be smokestacks. My whole life, I had smelled this smell. It was nauseating if I stopped to think about it. My colleagues said we had to call it in to the Department of Environmental Protection. That was when I started realizing that I’ve known that smell my whole life but never thought of it as a problem. That smell made me realize the difference between neighborhoods like Newark and the suburbs, where there are all these trees and the air actually smells clean. Racial justice has always been a part of my life, but at that moment I realized how insidious environmental racism truly is.
It’s taken a long time to get this new law passed. What made it worth the fight?
The New Jersey environmental-justice law is the first such law with rejection powers built into it. If an industry is coming into a neighborhood that is already overburdened—as in the case of Newark’s Ironbound district, which has a sewage-treatment plant, a fat-rendering plant, two power plants, a garbage incinerator, and a Superfund site—the state rejects that permit. This law mandates that protection, which is what makes it groundbreaking. Giving the state the power to say no—and, by extension, our community the power to say no—to dirty industry is hope for a better future. Without it, we continue being sacrifice zones. We continue being dumping grounds for what privileged people will not accept in their own neighborhoods.
Do you think polluting industries will be located in wealthier, whiter communities, or do you suspect that industries will now figure out how to do their work with less pollution?
We don’t want to be in the position where toxic industry moves from our community to another. We never want to be hurting anyone else. We want to improve the whole system and improve the way that all industry operates, to reconcile the needs of the earth and the needs of people with business desires. We’re moving New Jersey and, hopefully, the whole country forward in phasing out toxic industries and transforming them into industries that are more renewable and sustainable. The goal of this bill is to make sure that we’re all protected, and it starts by protecting the most vulnerable first.
Climate School
Companies such as Amazon and Nike say that they’re serious about fighting climate change, but they remain part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is working hard to elect two Republicans to the U.S. Senate from Georgia—which, in turn, would guarantee that Mitch McConnell remains Majority Leader.
The Yale Center for Business and the Environment analyzed three “pollinator-friendly solar farms” in Minnesota, which plant native grasses and wildflowers amid rows of solar panels. The study found an array of benefits, including “higher energy output, from panel efficiency gains attributed to the cooler microclimate created by perennial plantings.”
Sophie Yeo has a well-researched piece in HuffPost that turns the conventional wisdom on its head—if you want really resilient sources of power during an emergency, renewables are probably better than more centralized generation.
We live in a new world in which subscribers underwrite the kind of great journalism that once depended mostly on ads. This newsletter is free, but a subscription to The New Yorker supports it—and gets you access to the finest periodical writing in the English language. (And it gets contactlessly delivered to your house, even when there’s no pandemic.)
Scoreboard
The number of low-income homes, mostly on the East Coast, that are susceptible to flooding will triple by 2050, owing to rising seas and heavier rains.
Student researchers from Cornell, the University of Chicago, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Cambridge spent the COVID summer and fall on a useful project—creating a database evaluating the climate-policy commitments of a hundred and ninety-three countries. It’s remarkably granular—and quite pointed. As they write, students have “fewer institutional constraints” than international organizations, which have to please member nations, so they so can more easily hold “large greenhouse gas emitters accountable through research.”
Southeast Alaska is always wet, but it’s never been this wet. There was record rainfall in Juneau and Haines, where a truly massive landslide wiped out homes.
A new analysis from Health Affairs makes clear that we’ve been dramatically underestimating—by perhaps forty per cent—the health-care costs associated with air pollution. Which means that stopping it makes even more economic sense than we thought.
A biomedic and a biologist work in a laboratory during the extraction of coronavirus genetic material. (photo: Pedro Vilela/Getty Images)
FDA Clears Pfizer Vaccine, and Millions of Doses Will Be Shipped Right Away
Thomas Tracy and Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News
Excerpt: "America will be getting a huge shot in the arm starting on Monday."
merica will be getting a huge shot in the arm starting on Monday.
Military leaders overseeing the massive effort to distribute hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines vowed to start shipping the Pfizer shots within hours of winning approval.
Gen. Gustave Perna invoked the spirit of World War II, calling Saturday “D-Day” for the effort to end the deadly coronavirus pandemic.
“D-Day was the beginning of the end ... and that’s where we are today,” the leader of Operation Warp Speed told reporters.
The first doses will roll out of a Pfizer facility in Kalamazoo, Mich. on Sunday and will arrive in roughly 150 designated centers on Monday. Another 400 or so centers across the nation will receive their first doses Tuesday.
The massive operation will continue for months as officials deliver vaccines to hundreds of millions of Americans in every corner of the nation.
Even as the death toll continues to soar towards 300,000 Americans, public health experts say the vaccine from Pfizer and other shots in the pipeline will eventually end the pandemic that has turned life upside down.
The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said earlier Saturday that he plans to take the COVID-19 vaccine that was authorized for emergency use on Friday — and claims he was never pressured to fast track the approval.
“I will absolutely take the COVID-19 vaccine. I have complete confidence in our staff evaluation,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a virtual press conference Saturday with FDA Biologics Director Peter Marks.
Hahn refuted the claim that he was pressured by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows into approving the Pfizer vaccine by the end of Friday or risk losing his job.
“The representations in the press that I was threatened to be fired if we didn’t get it done by a certain date is inaccurate,” he said Saturday. “Science and data guided the FDA’s decision. We worked quickly based on the urgency of this pandemic, not because of any other external pressure.”
The FDA was already planning on granting the vaccine the final OK on Saturday morning, but the alleged strong-arming prompted Hahn to move up the announcement to late Friday, two sources told The Washington Post, which first reported Meadows’ threat.
Hahn said his agency green-lit the the vaccine following a rapid but thorough review that would normally take months, but only took weeks for FDA evaluators who worked long hours and weekends.
“We did not cut corners in this regulatory process. There was a rigorous study in clinical trials,” Hahn said. “Efficiency does not need any cutting of corners.”
“We applied our high standers in reviewing this product so that Americans can trust and have confidence in its safety and effectiveness,” Hahn said. “The federal authorization of this vaccine is a significant milestone in battling the devastating pandemic that has affected so many families in the U.S. and around the world.”
Nursing home residents and health care workers are expected to be first in line for the shot produced by the pharmaceutical giant and a German company, BioNTech.
Tests showed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be “95% effective against COVID-19 beginning 28 days after the first dose,” Pfizer announced in November. People will need two doses of the vaccine to be inoculated against the disease, scientists say.
Not enough young children and pregnant women were in the study, so the FDA cannot approve use for those groups. Marks recommended pregnant women discuss the matter with their doctors.
Teens older than 16 are allowed to take the vaccine, Marks said.
The FDA will continue to review the vaccine to make sure it remains safe and effective, Hahn said.
Doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine are expected to be scarce in the coming weeks and months. Several other vaccines are in development, and one from Moderna Inc. could be approved by U.S. authorities in the next week.
One more federal government approval is needed before the Pfizer vaccine is distributed: A Centers for Disease Control panel is expected to OK the Pfizer vaccine on Sunday.
Sidney Powell. (photo: AP)
Sidney Powell's Secret 'Military Intelligence Expert,' Key to Fraud Claims in Election Lawsuits, Never Worked in Military Intelligence
Emma Brown, Aaron C. Davis and Alice Crites, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Powell describes Spyder in court filings as a former 'Military Intelligence expert,' and his testimony is offered to support one of her central claims."
he witness is code-named “Spyder.” Or sometimes “Spider.” His identity is so closely guarded that lawyer Sidney Powell has sought to keep it even from opposing counsel. And his account of vulnerability to international sabotage is a key part of Powell’s failing multistate effort to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Powell describes Spyder in court filings as a former “Military Intelligence expert,” and his testimony is offered to support one of her central claims. In a declaration filed in four states, Spyder alleges that publicly available data about server traffic shows that voting systems in the United States were “certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China.”
Spyder, it turns out, is Joshua Merritt, a 43-year-old information technology consultant in the Dallas area. Merritt confirmed his role as Powell’s secret witness in phone interviews this week with The Washington Post.
Records show that Merritt is an Army veteran and that he enrolled in a training program at the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, the unit he cites in his declaration. But he never completed the entry-level training course, according to Meredith Mingledorff, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, which includes the battalion.
“He kept washing out of courses,” said Mingledorff, citing his education records. “He’s not an intelligence analyst.”
In an interview, Merritt maintained that he graduated from the intelligence training program. But even by his own account, he was only a trainee with the 305th, at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and for just seven months more than 15 years ago.
His separation papers, which he provided to The Post, make no mention of intelligence training. They show that he spent the bulk of his decade in the Army as a wheeled vehicle mechanic. He deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he said he worked in security and route clearance. He held the rank of specialist when he was honorably discharged in 2013, having received several commendations.
Merritt acknowledged that the declaration’s description of his work as an “electronic intelligence analyst under 305th Military Intelligence” is misleading. He said it should have made clear that his time in the 305th was as a student, not as a working intelligence expert.
He blamed “clerks” for Powell’s legal team, who he said wrote the sentence. Merritt said he had not read it carefully before he signed his name swearing it was true.
“That was one thing I was trying to backtrack on,” he said on Thursday. “My original paperwork that I sent in didn’t say that.”
On Friday afternoon, as his name increasingly circulated on social media, Merritt said he had decided to remove himself from the legal effort altogether. He said he plans to close his business and relocate with his family.
Asked about Merritt’s limited experience in military intelligence, Powell said in a text to The Post: “I cannot confirm that Joshua Merritt is even Spider. Strongly encourage you not to print.”
Of her description of him as a military intelligence expert, she said, “If we made a mistake, we will correct it.”
Federal judges have in the past week rejected all four of the complaints Powell has filed seeking to overturn the presidential election — lawsuits popularly known as the “kraken” suits, after a mythical sea creature she has harnessed as a sort of mascot — ruling either that the challenges should have been filed in state courts or were meritless.
In Michigan, attorneys for the state argued that Powell's complaint was based on "fantastical conspiracy theories" that belong in the "fact-free outer reaches of the Internet." A federal judge ruled this week that the allegation that votes were changed for Biden relied on an "amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and speculation."
A federal judge in Arizona similarly tossed out a case Wednesday that relied in part on an affidavit from Merritt, writing that allegations “that find favor in the public sphere of gossip and innuendo cannot be a substitute for earnest pleadings and procedure in federal court” and “most certainly cannot be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.”
Powell is appealing all four of those losses.
Merritt told The Post that, because judges are dismissing the cases without giving the Powell team a chance to fully present evidence, “we’re just going to supply the evidence through other directions,” including to lawmakers and members of the intelligence community. He said Russell Ramsland, a former colleague and fellow witness for Powell, had asked him to brief Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), a leading proponent of fanciful claims about the 2020 election.
Gohmert did not respond to a request for comment.
The 305th Military Intelligence Battalion at Fort Huachuca has taken on a special significance among supporters of Powell’s lawsuits. Some popular conspiracy theories contend that the unit — rather than Merritt, a former member who was discharged years ago — has determined that China and Iran manipulated the U.S. vote. In late November, Thomas McInerney, a retired lieutenant general in the Air Force and a proponent of election fraud claims, said that President Trump and Powell have “got the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion working with them” and that “the Kraken is the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion.”
The battalion is an entry-level training unit. It has not had an operational mission since World War II. Mingledorff said soldiers there “do not collect, analyze or provide intelligence in any way.”
Army records provided by Merritt show that he enlisted in 2003. He first aimed to be a medic, but did not graduate from a training program at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, according to records in the Army Training Requirements and Resource System, Mingledorff said. He was “recycled,” or allowed to repeat the training course — but again did not graduate, she said, citing the records.
In 2004, Merritt transferred to the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, the records show. He had a spot reserved in an electronic intercept analyst course with the 305th, but records show he did not meet the prerequisites and was dropped from the program, Mingledorff said.
Merritt’s military separation papers show that he completed three education courses — two involving work on wheeled vehicles and one on leadership.
Merritt told The Post he completed the medic and intelligence trainings as well. He said that for both programs, the particular career path he was studying for changed by the time his training ended. He maintained that this pattern left him in a sort of military bureaucratic limbo, in the service but without a specific job until he became a wheeled vehicle mechanic in 2005.
He provided a document labeled “unofficial transcript” that he said showed that he completed the intelligence and medic courses. Mingledorff declined to comment on that document but said the records she examined were clear.
Army education records also show several distance-learning and in-person trainings over the course of his service, many of which were not completed, Mingledorff said.
He said he was unable to complete some online courses while serving overseas because of the demands of his job.
Merritt was honorably discharged from the Army in 2013, after a decade of service, including deployments to the wars in Iraq in 2005-2006 and Afghanistan in 2009-2010, according to his separation papers. His commendations included the Combat Action Badge, which is authorized for soldiers who are “present and actively engaging or being engaged by the enemy, and performing satisfactorily in accordance with prescribed rules of engagement.”
Merritt told The Post he left the military because he had had reached a “retention control point” and was unlikely to be promoted. Under Army rules, soldiers are only permitted to serve a certain number of years at a particular rank.
Merritt said cybersecurity was a hobby when he was in the Army, and it became a profession once he was out. He said he is neither a Republican nor a Democrat but a “Constitutionalist” who is just trying to do his part to ensure fair elections in the United States. “Right now you’re looking at two political parties that all they care about is power, they don’t care about people,” he said. “I swore my life to my Constitution and that’s what I keep it at.”
He used his GI Bill funds to study network security administration at ITT Tech in Arlington, Tex. He said he earned an associate degree from the school, part of a nationwide chain of for-profit colleges that shut down in 2016.
He went on to intern and work in several positions related to cybersecurity, he said. In 2017, he joined a small Dallas-area firm called Allied Special Operations Group, where Ramsland says he is part of the management team.
Merritt said it was there that he began to work on election security and came to believe the system was rife with vulnerabilities. Soon, he said, he was a frequent guest in right-wing videos, appearing under the pseudonym “Jekyll,” in shadow and with his voice disguised as he warned that the U.S. election system was vulnerable to being corrupted on a massive scale.
In 2018, he said, he helped investigate what he described as suspected fraud in races affecting five candidates, including former Kentucky governor Matt Bevin (R) and former Texas congressman Pete Sessions (R). Merritt said he found many elections-related companies plagued by vulnerabilities.
Bevin did not respond to a request for comment.
In a phone interview, Sessions described Merritt as a “top, top computer forensic expert.”
After two decades in Congress, Sessions’s 2018 loss to Democrat Colin Allred, a former professional football player, was viewed by some on election-conspiracy sites as implausible. Merritt said he worked behind the scenes, conducting election-fraud analysis. Sessions would not disclose Merritt’s precise work or whether he was paid, but said of Merritt: “He may have been involved in certain elements of that. It is true there were people who were aware of those things.”
Sessions won a comeback victory in November and will return to Congress next year. He said he was unswayed by the Army’s disclosure that Merritt had never completed electronic intelligence training.
“Get the best computer expert you know, have him call and query Josh. Josh will run circles around that person,” Sessions said.
No charges were brought in connection with these allegations, Merritt said.
Merritt formed his own firm, Cyberoptyx, in 2019. He said the company — which consists of himself and a handful of contractors — specializes in building “cyberinfrastructure” such as making websites and setting up servers. It also does 3-D printing.
Merritt said he became involved in the Powell litigation through Ramsland. Ramsland has also submitted affidavits as part of Powell’s lawsuits, including one that drew attention for mistakenly using voting data from Minnesota to allege evidence of voter fraud in Michigan.
Merritt said he provides information to Powell’s legal team through intermediaries he knows only by username. He said he is not being paid for his work on the case.
Ramsland did not respond to messages left at his home or on a cellphone registered in his name.
Merritt said he had sought to stay anonymous because he feared for the safety of his family if his name became known. Someone came up with his pseudonym based on the spider-like shape of the diagrams in his declaration, he said.
His name slipped into the court record, though little noticed, on Nov. 25. The Powell team filed a carefully redacted declaration from its secret witness, but a bookmark in the file uploaded to the court’s computer system was visible: “Declaration of JOSHUA MERRITT.”
“One jackwagon forgot to clear out the data. I was really pissed,” Merritt said. “The guy was like, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I was like, ‘Well, you know, that and a bag of chips will still leave me hungry.’ ”
On Wednesday night, after a Reuters reporter tweeted about that flub and drew widespread attention to his name, Merritt was bracing for what might come.
“This is not the 15 minutes I wanted,” he said.
An immigrant rights rally in Washington, D.C. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Progressives Are Getting Ready to Push Biden on Immigration Reform
Nicole Narea, Vox
Narea writes: "Progressive Democrats in Congress are calling for President-elect Joe Biden to dismantle the federal government's deportation machine."
“If they go back to Obama-era immigration policies, they will have failed.”
rogressive Democrats in Congress are calling for President-elect Joe Biden to dismantle the federal government’s deportation machine, broaden immigrants’ access to social safety net programs, and rely far less on detention to ensure that immigrants show up for court hearings.
During the Democratic primaries, progressive candidates pushed not just to undo some of President Donald Trump’s more draconian changes to the immigration system, but to rethink a system that had, with bipartisan consensus, “criminalize[d] desperation” of immigrants seeking a better life in the US, as former presidential candidate Julián Castro put it.
With Biden elected, immigrant advocates now see reform, which lawmakers have punted for more than a decade, as an imperative — and say they are ready to hold Biden to account on his promises to act.
Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, will introduce a resolution once the new Congress is seated outlining priorities for comprehensive immigration reform, covering everything from progressives’ vision for a humane immigration enforcement system to a plan for the federal government to better serve immigrant communities in the US.
The resolution — which she shared with Vox and is co-sponsored by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Yvette Clarke of New York, Judy Chu of California, Jesús García of Illinois, and Veronica Escobar of Texas — was drafted in collaboration with immigrant advocates, who want it to be the gold standard for measuring Biden’s actions.
“We will really push hard. I think we have had hard lessons in negotiating away too quickly,” said Roxana Norouzi, deputy director of OneAmerica Votes, who worked on the resolution. “Whatever proposal comes out of the Biden administration in the first 100 days, we will use this resolution to measure the gap.”
Biden told NBC News after the election that, within his first 100 days in office, he plans to send his own immigration reform bill to the Senate that would create a path to citizenship for the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the US.
But whether the Senate will consider such a proposal could hinge on the outcome of the Georgia Senate runoffs, which will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the chamber. Republican Sens. Susan Collins, John Cornyn, Thom Tillis, and Marco Rubio, who spoke at a recent summit on immigration reform, appeared willing to engage Democrats in conversations around the topic, but if Republicans keep Senate control, the fate of a bill would ultimately lie with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Jayapal and the immigrant advocates behind the resolution intend to lobby Biden to incorporate their policy proposals in that package. But they also acknowledge that change could come in many forms. It’s possible, for example, that Congress could build consensus around bills protecting specific groups of immigrants, such as undocumented essential workers and Dreamers who came to the US as children, while putting forward more systemic reforms in a separate bill.
“There are multiple pathways to winning relief and legalization for people,” said Lorella Praeli, president of Community Change Action, which helped develop the resolution. “This [resolution] is what it would look like if we were able to fully realize our vision for a just and humane system. ... It’s a call to action to go big, to be relentless and also to be nimble.”
The resolution’s boldest demands concern humane immigration enforcement and access to the social safety net
Biden’s own proposals already reflect many of the immigrant advocacy community’s priorities to make the immigration system more humane and effective for those seeking to come to the US and those already living in the country.
But the resolution demands that the federal government pursue more aggressive reforms. Under the current system, immigration judges can levy only one available penalty against those who commit civil immigration violations or who have been convicted of crimes: deportation. For many, deportation means uprooting their lives and being separated from their families in the US. But those dire consequences often don’t align with the severity of the violations or crimes an immigrant has committed.
The resolution argues that judges should instead be able to impose scalable penalties based on the severity of the offense, such as fines, community service, treatment programs, or probationary periods. Deportation should not be the consequence of minor offenses, such as shoplifting or a traffic violation, Jayapal said in an interview.
“We’re seeking to sort of disentangle this idea that all criminals should be deported,” she said.
The resolution also advocates for improving immigrants’ access to health care and housing and “eliminating barriers that deter immigrant communities from accessing crucial public services for which they are eligible.” Those barriers have become particularly visible amid the pandemic: Even legal immigrants who arrived in the US in the last five years remain ineligible for federally funded public insurance programs, and unauthorized immigrants, including those covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, were ineligible for stimulus checks in many states.
Jayapal said she is specifically considering changes to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The law made legal permanent residents ineligible for food stamps and Social Security income benefits and created a five-year waiting period before they became eligible for Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, despite the fact that they pay taxes and are on the road to citizenship.
She sees expanding the social safety net to immigrants as a critical missing piece of Biden’s plans.
“Frankly, it’s politically inconvenient,” she said. “There are a lot of people who still are worried about taking on the idea of immigrants draining our economy and contributing nothing, which are just myths — complete myths that Trump has been continuing to perpetuate.”
Jayapal also believes that it is time to fundamentally rethink the immigration detention system, just as there was a national reckoning around the criminal justice system, which led to the passage of a bipartisan bill in 2018 that took modest steps to reduce punitive prison sentences at the federal level. That bill was rooted in a realization that private jails and prisons carry a heavy price tag for the federal government and that investing in education, rehabilitation, and the social safety net would ultimately be cheaper.
She said it’s the same story with the immigration detention system, which holds around 50,000 people on any given day, costing taxpayers $208 per detainee daily.
Instead, the resolution asserts that the US should embrace a “presumption of liberty for all immigrants,” bringing an end to family detention and the controversial 287(g) program, under which local law enforcement can question people about their immigration status and detain them on immigration charges. Biden has not committed to either of those proposals so far but has suggested that he would “aggressively limit” 287(g) and focus enforcement resources on people who present threats to public safety and national security, rather than families.
The resolution also calls for ending for-profit detention and investing in community-based case management programs that are designed to ensure immigrants show up for their immigration appointments without putting them in detention, both proposals that Biden has already embraced.
“So many of those people do not need to be in detention,” Jayapal said. “It is an expensive, inhumane way to deal with immigration.”
There is overlap between the resolution and Biden’s agenda
The resolution does share common ground with what Biden has already proposed to accomplish legislatively.
It calls for better protections for the rights of immigrant workers. Biden, for his part, has pledged to support preexisting bills that would improve the rights of immigrants working in the agricultural and domestic care industries, many of whom are undocumented. That includes the Fairness for Farm Workers Act, which would allow farmworkers to be paid overtime for working more than 40 hours a week and improve their minimum wage protections, and the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, which would give domestic workers common workplace rights such as paid overtime and protection from harassment and discrimination.
The resolution advocates for facilitating cooperation with regional partners to address the underlying causes of migration. Biden has said that he would put forth a $4 billion foreign aid package for Central America that would be delivered over the course of four years, incentivizing governments to reduce gang- and gender-based violence, improve their legal and educational systems, and implement anti-corruption measures. Instability in Central America’s Northern Triangle countries — Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras — has driven many to seek refuge at the US southern border.
Biden also suggested in an interview with NBC News in June that he would push for legislation that would create a floor of 95,000 refugees admitted to the US annually (Trump has unilaterally slashed refugee admissions to just 18,000 this year, the lowest it has ever been) and seek to streamline the naturalization process.
Those proposals represent genuine progress, but advocates continue to question his commitment to making immigration a priority beyond merely undoing the worst of Trump’s policies. Biden claims that he would not simply return to the Obama-era status quo on immigration, which involved record-level deportations and an expansion of family detention.
“Even [former President Barack Obama] acknowledges we can’t go back to what it was,” he told NBC. “I have a program that is significantly different and builds upon where we left off and tries to undo the damage that Trump has done.”
But advocates are watching the president-elect’s next moves closely to see whether he will be as aggressive in advancing pro-immigrant policies as Trump and his senior adviser Stephen Miller were in pursuing a nativist agenda. Immigrant communities, who have been under siege for the last four years, deserve nothing less, Praeli said.
“If they go back to Obama-era immigration policies, they will have failed,” she said.
Supporters of Donald Trump rally in Washington, D.C. (photo: Guardian UK)
Trump's Coup Is Failing but American Democracy Is Still on the Critical List
David Smith, Guardian UK
Smith writes: "America is in the throes of a very Trumpian coup - desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical and, most importantly, doomed to failure."
The electoral college will confirm Joe Biden’s victory on Monday but Donald Trump’s fact-phobic hold on the Republican party holds firm
early four decades after the publication of A Very British Coup, a popular novel by member of parliament Chris Mullin, America is in the throes of a very Trumpian coup – desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical and, most importantly, doomed to failure.
But even as Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election result face a knockout blow when the electoral college meets on Monday, the president is winning in other ways that could cause profound collateral damage.
Trump has raised more than $170m since losing to Joe Biden by requesting donations for an “election defense fund”. He has reasserted his dominance of the Republican party, many of whose members have either advanced his lies about a rigged election or maintained a complicit silence.
And his war on democracy, amplified by rightwing media to millions of Americans, threatens to burn long after Joe Biden takes the oath of office on 20 January. There are already signs of a new grievance movement rising from the ashes of Trump’s defeat to shape the future of Republican politics. It is driven by disinformation, rage and the core premise that Biden is an illegitimate president.
“What was a fracture in our democratic process is now a break,” said Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project. “The Republican party has shown itself to be completely immune to facts, truth and common sense. There is not going to be a moment where it collectively decides, ‘Oh, my gosh, what have we been doing all this time?’
“There is not going to be a great epiphany. They are going to continue down this path of dismantling the country as we knew it because their ideology isn’t about an issue or a specific public policy. Their identity is only the pursuit of power and the means to try to hold on to it and get more of it.”
Trump was brazenly transparent about his plot against America. He spent months falsely claiming that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud and that he could only lose the election if it was stolen from him. Many Democrats argued that the best way to avoid a constitutional crisis was to turn out in such massive numbers that they put the result beyond dispute.
They were right. In the end, it was not even close. Biden is set to finish with 306 electoral college votes, a total that Trump called a landslide when he won the same in 2016. The Democrat has a lead of more than 7m in the popular vote, a margin of almost 4.5% – bigger than all but one presidential election since 2000.
No significant fraud or counting error has been established. Trump’s attempts to bully Republican officials in Georgia and Michigan into blocking results came to nought. His failing legal team’s efforts have been eviscerated by judges across the country, including by some he appointed. “This ship has sailed,” summed up US district judge Linda Parker in throwing out a lawsuit challenging Biden’s win in Michigan this week.
Even William Barr, the attorney general and Trump loyalist many liberals feared would take a sledgehammer to the constitution at the decisive moment, told the Associated Press last week that the justice department had uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome.
Biden’s victory was essentially guaranteed this week by the so-called safe harbour deadline for states to finish their certifications and resolve legal disputes. Votes will be cast by the electoral college on Monday, then sent to Congress for counting on 6 January. Despite historic pressures, from the coronavirus pandemic and Trump’s attempts to undermine the voters’ will, the system worked.
In the words of Susan Rice, a former national security adviser who was this week announced as the woman who will lead Biden’s domestic policy council, it was a “near death experience” for democracy. “It appears that our democracy dodged a bullet – or, more precisely, multiple concerted efforts by the president of the United States to torpedo its very foundations,” she wrote in the New York Times.
Bardella, a former spokesman for Republicans on the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, added: “It was an attempted coup: there is no other word for it. Donald Trump believed that, because some of these people are Republicans or some of these judges were appointed by him, they would do what he wanted because of the transactional way in which he views the world.
“Fortunately for democracy, that was not the case. Unlike virtually everybody else in the Republican party in Washington particularly, they would not circumvent democracy for political gain.”
Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Biden when he was vice-president, agreed: “There are some lines people are not going to cross in this democracy and I think that’s what we just saw. It failed because, fundamentally, the principles and the values of this country and our democracy are still in place.”
But even as the nation moves inexorably towards a transfer of power, America is not out of the woods. Trump, who has an existential fear and loathing of being branded a “loser”, still refuses to swallow his defeat; if anything, his denials are becoming more fervent and extreme. On Wednesday he insisted that he won the election and tweeted a single word about the results: “#OVERTURN.”
It is a futile exercise politically but not financially. Money is pouring into his “stop the steal” campaign but most of it will go to a Trump-founded political action committee called Save America. Bardella said: “What we have seen in the weeks since the election is Donald Trump using an attempted coup to fill his coffers with cash that will sustain his livelihood once he leaves the presidency.”
Many of the Republicans who enabled Trump in the White House are now enabling his anti-democratic impulses. Last week a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate found just 27 willing to acknowledge Biden’s victory. Some, including the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, still refuse to publicly describe Biden as “president-elect”.
Meanwhile 17 states and more than a hundred House Republicans backed a longshot lawsuit by Texas which sought to throw out the voting results in four states that Trump lost. That lawsuit was rejected by the supreme court on Friday.
There are also fears that the torrent of falsehoods calculated to rile up his most fervent followers could become dangerous.
Some election officials have received death threats. Armed Trump supporters gathered outside the home of Michigan’s secretary of state. The Arizona Republican party even appeared to ask supporters to consider dying to keep Trump in office: its official Twitter account retweeted conservative activist Ali Alexander’s pledge that he was “willing to give my life for this fight”, adding: “He is. Are you?”
Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, warned on Twitter: “The closer we get to Jan 20, the more likely it is that the heavily armed core of Trump’s base will see itself as imminently threatened with extinction and will lash out with violence. That’s the biggest imminent threat we all face as Americans.”
Although a small number of prominent Republicans have said it is time to move on, Trump continues to exercise an iron grip over the party. He has already floated the idea of running for president in 2024 – he would be only the second person to win back the White House after leaving it – with a possible campaign launch on Biden’s inauguration day in an attempt to steal his successor’s thunder.
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, said: “He wants to come back again in four years, which means that at this point it’s the most serious problem for the Republican party. They thought it was fine to humour Trump and enable him over the last four years because they thought it would benefit them politically and now they have hell to pay because he is doing to the Republican party what he did to the country. It may be too late for them to rescue their party. I assume it is.”
One of keys to understanding Trump’s enduring influence is conservative media, which every day for the past month have been dominated by narratives of election rigging and fraud. Fox News prime time opinion hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have doggedly sown distrust in the system.
But Fox News is facing new competition on its right flank from even more ardently pro-Trump upstarts such as Newsmax and the One America News Network. Talk radio and social media also contribute to these alternative reality bubbles where Biden’s victory is still in doubt. Now only one in four Republicans say they trust the results of the election, according to an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey.
Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, added: “That is the essential problem. A completely separate media system with its own propaganda reality has grown up around Donald Trump. The Republican party today is like a massive religious cult surrounding an organised crime family headed by a deranged narcissist. It’s very hard for the Republicans to disenthrall themselves from that warped epistemological system. It’s just a separate reality.”
Conservative media outlets deny such a characterisation and insist they are merely breaking from the liberal orthodoxy of leading networks. Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax, said: “We’re not saying that the election was stolen. We’re not saying that there was massive fraud.
“We are saying there’s a legal contest in at least six states by the president in states where the results were 1% or closer and that we should wait before we declare Biden the president-elect. Formally that doesn’t happen until the electoral college. We’ve openly said that we’re waiting for that and we will abide by the electoral college and respect the new president.”
Ruddy, a friend of Trump, rejects accusations that Newsmax would further entrench and enflame polarisation during a Biden presidency. “I didn’t create the divide and when you look at what MSNBC and CNN did to this president, it’s horrific. They spent years poaching on a phony conspiracy theory involving Russian collusion and then now they’re claiming that we should heal and unite? I mean, hello, give me a break!
“We’re going to be loyal opposition, much like you have in Britain. We have a point of view. We’re going to be asking tough questions. We’re not calling for Joe Biden’s impeachment. We’re not going to call him illegitimate. All the things that the left did with Trump – we have no plans of doing that.”
Biden, a political moderate, has pledged to heal the divisions, cooperate with Republicans and be a president of all Americans. With Trump still injecting poison into the system, it will be no easy task.
Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said: “Much rides on Joe Biden’s shoulders. He will need all of the skills of civility and conciliation that he learned in nearly five decades in national politics to try to take the edge off the divisions.
“Healing, I think, will be a stretch, especially in the short term. But it is reasonable to believe that if he defines the tone and substance of his administration in a manner that’s most conducive to narrowing the gaps and also persuading people who feel excluded from the Democratic party coalition for one reason or another, that it’s not a hostile plot to undermine their way of life, then could be in a better place in two years than we are now. But I can tell the story either way.”
The migrant refugees were detained by Honduran riot police. (photo: AP)
Honduran Refugee Caravan Denied at Guatemala Border
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Members of the group say that they are leaving their country due to lack of employment, violence and poverty."
Members of the group say that they are leaving their country due to lack of employment, violence and poverty.
he caravan of Honduran refugees which left the city of San Pedro Sula on Thursday, headed for the United States, has been prevented from crossing into Guatemala.
The migrant refugees were detained by Honduran riot police and told they were required to have a negative Covid-19 test and a passport to enter Guatemala.
Officials of the migration institute indicated that they would not allow the passage of migrants who do not meet the requirements requested by the immigration authorities.
Despite this, several people were able to enter Guatemala through unguarded points on the border.
On Friday, Guatemalan authorities arrested 67 Hondurans after they illegally entered in their attempt to reach the United States, among them are 21 minors. The group was located near the border of Agua Caliente, 250 kilometers southeast of Guatemala City.
Hundreds began the new US-bound caravan bound citing lack of employment following hurricanes Eta and Iota. Members of the group also claim that they are leaving their country due to violence and poverty, problems that have been exacerbated under the Covid-19 pandemic.
Apart from the failure to adequately respond to the devastation caused by the hurricanes, local groups site a number of growing social issues related to mining and the encroachment of multinationals, police and military violence, and crime.
The United States government has deepened cooperation with the government of Juan Orlando Hernandez in the areas of ‘drug-trafficking’, yet social organizations report a worsening human rights situation including forced disappearances and violence against environmentalists and social leaders.
Two of the beaked whales under the water. (photo: Sea Shepherd/CONANP)
Whale of a Find: Scientists Spot Beaked Whale Believed to Be a New Species
Elizabeth Claire Alberts, Mongabay
Alberts writes: "When a trio of beaked whales surfaced off Mexico's Pacific coast, researchers thought they'd found the elusive Perrin's beaked whale."
hen a trio of beaked whales surfaced off Mexico’s Pacific coast, researchers thought they’d found the elusive Perrin’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon perrini), an endangered species that’s never been officially sighted alive. But upon closer inspection, the researchers realized they may have stumbled upon something even rarer — a new species of beaked whale altogether.On November 17, the research team was sailing aboard the Martin Sheen, a vessel operated by conservation group Sea Shepherd, when they spotted the three beaked whales about 160 kilometers (100 miles) north of Mexico’s San Benito Islands. They managed to capture photos and video recordings of the animals, and also dropped a specialized microphone underwater to record the animals’ acoustic signals.
“The whales, amazingly, surfaced four or five times really close to the ship,” Elizabeth Henderson, a bioacoustics scientist at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific’s (NIWC PAC) whale acoustics reconnaissance program and one of the researchers on the expedition, told Mongabay in an interview. “They actually seemed to be circling us. We put in one of our acoustic recorders, and they kind of checked that out. For beaked whales, it was incredible, because beaked whales are typically so elusive when it comes to ships.”
Beaked whales communicate via echolocation clicks above the frequency of human hearing. But when Henderson and her colleagues analyzed the acoustical data, they found that these whales’ clicks were slightly different from those produced by Perrin’s beaked whales. The whales also appeared to have distinct physical characteristics.
“The Perrin’s beaked whale [has] teeth … right at the end of the rostrum, they’re right at the end of the jaw,” Henderson said. “And so when we started looking at the photos, we realized that the teeth are further back, so they couldn’t be Perrin’s. And then when we started to look at other characteristics, including different color patterns and its size …. it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Once we started putting all the pieces together, we realized that not only was it not Perrin’s, but it really didn’t seem to match any of the other characteristics of described beaked whales.”
While the scientists say they are “highly confident” they found a new species, they took water samples near the whales in order to analyze the environmental DNA, or eDNA, which Henderson says will help assess whether the beaked whales were definitely a new species.
“We’re literally taking water samples from where the whales dove, so right where they were,” Henderson said. “The hope is that there’s some genetic material left in the water, whether that’s sloughed skin, whether it’s some remnants of fecal matter.”
“We saw something new,” Jay Barlow, a senior scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and another one of the researchers on the expedition, said in a statement. “Something that was not expected in this area, something that doesn’t match, either visually or acoustically, anything that is known to exist. It just sends chills up and down my spine when I think that we might have accomplished what most people would say was truly impossible — finding a large mammal that exists on this earth that is totally unknown to science.”
Takashi Fritz Matsuishi, a professor at Hokkaido University’s School of Fisheries Sciences and co-author of a 2019 paper identifying another new species of beaked whale — the Sato’s beaked whale (Berardius minimus) — said it’s very possible that the researchers found a new species near the San Benito Islands. However, he said that a new species could not be accurately identified using only eDNA analysis, acoustics or visual observations.
“The external morphology and osteological descriptions are strictly required,” Matsuishi told Mongabay in an email, referring to the animal’s physical features and skeletal structure. “That is the reason that our Sato’s beaked whale [took] 6 years to be described as a new species since the publication of the paper showing the genetical difference in 2013.”
Matsuishi also said the “new” species might simply be a species already known to science, such as the pygmy beaked whale (Mesoplodon peruvianus) or even the Perrin’s beaked whale, which was the researchers’ initial assumption.
While Henderson and her colleagues are waiting on the results of their eDNA analysis, they are excited about their possible discovery. Henderson said the team is currently working on a paper to describe the species’ acoustics and the morphological characteristics, which they hope to release shortly.
“I just think it’s amazing that in this day and age, when we feel like we know everything, that something as large as a new species of beaked whale is potentially still out there,” she said. “I think that just goes to show that we don’t know as much as we think we do, and there is still so much more to be explored.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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