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Andy Borowitz | George Santos Reveals That He Is an M1 Abrams Battle Tank
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "In a speech to the House of Representatives, George Santos disclosed that he is an M1 Abrams battle tank."
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
In a speech to the House of Representatives, George Santos disclosed that he is an M1 Abrams battle tank.
Representative Santos apologized for not previously including his battle-tank status on his résumé, calling the omission a “careless error.”
Describing his many outstanding features, Santos said that he is equipped with two six-barrel smoke-grenade launchers and an AN/VLQ-6 Missile Countermeasure Device.
“The Ukrainians have called battle tanks the punching fist of democracy,” Santos said. “I, George Santos, am that fist.”
In recognition of Santos’s career as an M1 Abrams battle tank, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy named him the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
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Demonstrators block traffic on Riverside Drive near the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge as they protest the killing of Tyre Nichols on Friday, Jan. 27, 2023, in Memphis, Tenn. (photo: Chris Day/Jackson Sun)
Calls to 'Demolish and Rebuild' Police as Memphis Mourns Tyre Nichols
Adam Gabbatt, Guardian UK
Gabbatt writes: "When Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to America's House of Representatives in 2020, she became one of the most visible of a wave of extremists to enter the Republican party whose often bizarre utterings stretched the bounds of what had previously been the norm of US politics."
ALSO SEE: 'We're Tired of Being Beaten':
Protesters Across US Call for Justice for Tyre Nichols
The death of the 29-year-old Black man after a traffic stop is not the first such fatality attributed to city law enforcement officers
As Nyliayh Stewart marched along Interstate 55 alongside protesters on Friday night, the moment of sorrow and anger felt familiar. Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, Stewart had been a teenager in Mississippi when she received word in the middle of the night that her cousin Darrius had been killed by a white Memphis police officer during a traffic stop while he was running away, according to witnesses at the time.
They had grown up like siblings. Stewart, now 24, heard the chants calling for justice for Tyre Nichols, the latest Black man killed by police in America, and felt the anger and anguish for his family. Unlike the five Black Memphis officers charged with Nichols’s killing, the cop who shot and killed Darrius, who retired from Memphis police, was never indicted.
“This should not have happened,” Stewart says. “This family should not have to bury him. My family should not have had to bury my cousin.”
Months after Stewart’s killing, amid the national outcry over police violence, Memphis police received body cameras. And now, as the city reels yet again from the beating death of a 29-year-old FedEx worker and skater, Tyre Nichols, at the hands of police, calls for further police reform have erupted again.
On Friday night, hours after city officials released video footage described by the police chief, Cerelyn “CJ” Davis, as “heinous, reckless and inhumane”, Memphis residents descended on the highway bridge that divided West Memphis, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, cutting off traffic for hours. In this historically Black city, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at a motel when he was in town supporting the strike of sanitation workers.
Nearly seven years earlier, more than 1,000 Memphis residents took over the same bridge in the largest act of civil disobedience in the city’s history following the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
Residents on Friday night described how the police “terrorized” citizens through their policing practices that target impoverished neighborhoods in the city.
Outside Martyrs Park, where protests first began, community organizers called for continued rallying in the coming days as city officials wrestle with how to move forward following charges against five Memphis officers and the relieving of duty of two Memphis firefighters, and in light of civil rights investigations.
Stewart says the police need to be “demolished and rebuilt” and reform their practices and training, as well as stop “unnecessary traffic stops”. That echoed what other community organizers who spoke to the Guardian demanded.
Amber Sherman, a community activist in Memphis, said that the city’s previous reform efforts, known as 8 Can Wait, a model taken by other police departments across the country, contributed to how swiftly the officers were fired but argued that more needed to be done.
She called for city officials to listen to the demands of Nichols’s family, which include the dismantling of the so-called Scorpion (Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods) unit, one of several specialized units launched in 2022 and dispatched to neighborhoods for “crime suppression”. The unit was involved in Nichols’s stop but it’s unclear how many.
Sherman described the units as there to “just torture and be violent toward citizens”. She decried the city’s investment in police while they refuse to “the actual causes of poverty” such as improving job opportunities and eliminating food deserts. “Instead of offering support, we offer more police and make more taskforces,” she says.
Sherman also called for releasing the names of all the people involved in Nichols’s death and an end to pretextual traffic stops such as for broken lights, tinted windows and loud music.
Community organizer Antonio Cathey, who grew up in Memphis, hoped that the city could work toward healing and rebuilding a broken trust in the police. Cathey, who started as an organizer for Fight for 15, described how police had harassed him and installed cameras outside his house. Community members needed to continue pressuring officials and reorganize. “There’s no trust right now,” he says. “We know that the police will put more resources into Black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods to oppress the oppressed.”
In Memphis, city data compiled by the TV station WREG showed that cops are seven times as likely to use force on Black men as white men in Memphis, a troubling yet consistent disparity seen throughout the US. In Nichols’s case, police claimed that Nichols had driven recklessly but the police chief said she couldn’t substantiate that cause based on the video footage.
For Stewart, it didn’t matter that the officers were Black, noting that they were part of a system with its roots in slave-catching patrols and were a “racist organization that needs to be demolished and rebuilt”. “Once you put that uniform on, you chose that,” she says.
“We got to stand up for what’s right,” she added. “We’re having kids now. And it’s like our kids could be next.”
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Service members of pro-Russian troops inspect streets during Ukraine-Russia conflict in the southern port city of Mariupol. (photo: Alexander Ermochenko)
"20 Days in Mariupol": Meet the Ukrainian Filmmaker Who Risked His Life Documenting Russian Siege
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Ukrainian Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov joins us for an in-depth interview about how he and others risked their lives to document the Russian invasion. He is the director of the new documentary, '20 Days in Mariupol,' which has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival."
Ukrainian Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov joins us for an in-depth interview about how he and others risked their lives to document the Russian invasion. He is the director of the new documentary, “20 Days in Mariupol,” which has just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of how Chernov and his colleagues documented the first three weeks of Russia’s siege of the strategic eastern port city of Mariupol, even after many international journalists had fled. “The whole city spiraled down into complete chaos. People were in shock, in panic. They didn’t know what to do,” says Chernov, whose team was helped by locals in evading Russian soldiers and later escaping the city with their footage. The film is a co-production by the Associated Press and PBS Frontline.
AMY GOODMAN: Ukraine has declared a nationwide air raid alert, as Russia has launched dozens of missile and drone attacks across the country. At least one person has died in the capital Kyiv today. The Russian strikes come one day after the United States and Germany announced they would both send tanks to Ukraine, in a major reversal of policy. With the war now in its 12th month, we look at the U.S. plans to send 31 Abrams tanks, and Germany will send 14 Leopard 2 tanks. Germany has also given approval to other European nations to send German-made tanks to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russia is intensifying its internal crackdown on domestic critics. On Wednesday, a Russian court ordered the closing of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia’s oldest human rights organization. And just before our broadcast, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office designated the independent Russian news outlet Meduza as a, quote, “illegal, undesirable organization.” In a statement, Russian authorities said the news outlet poses a, quote, “threat to the foundations of the Russian Federation’s constitutional order and national security.” We had already planned to speak with Alexey Kovalev, an investigative editor with Meduza, on today’s show, but he had to cancel minutes before we went to air due to this breaking news of Putin making his organization illegal.
We turn now to 20 Days in Mariupol, a new documentary about the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that’s just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Reporters from the Associated Press risked their lives to stay in Mariupol and document Russia’s attack, even after international journalists left. They were Ukrainian journalists. This is an excerpt from 20 Days in Mariupol, which was produced jointly by the Associated Press and PBS Frontline.
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER: [translated] Signal 112, over. Signal 112, over. Signal, by Hospital No. 2, there are tanks with the letter “Z.”
RADIO: [translated] Did you see it?
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER: [translated] I saw it myself, with my own eyes. I have a visual on it myself, by Hospital No. 2, opposite the church, where the buses are parked. Tanks have entered, with the letter “Z.” Film it.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: This is the first time I saw Z, the Russian sign of war. The hospital is surrounded. Dozens of doctors, hundreds of patients and us.
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER: [translated] Yes, I am with the journalists. Yes, I’m with the journalists.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: I have no illusions about what will happen to us if we are caught.
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER: [translated] They’re turning the cannons. Quickly. Quickly.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt from 20 Days in Mariupol. It’s just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. We’re joined now by the film’s director and cinematographer, Mstyslav Chernov. He’s an award-winning Associated Press journalist from Ukraine, also the president of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers. In addition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Chernov has covered the wars in Iraq, in Syria, in Nagorno-Karabakh and Afghanistan. He’s also author of the novel The Dreamtime, which draws heavily on his experience as a war correspondent.
It must be a strange experience for you, Mstyslav, sitting there in Salt Lake City today as you hear that Ukraine has declared a nationwide air raid alert, as Russia has launched dozens of missile and drone attacks across the country, and you presenting this film, at the very beginning of the war, almost a year ago, you and your Ukrainian colleagues, reporters, deciding to stay in Mariupol, when other international journalists left, to document the destruction of that city. If you can put what’s happening today in Ukraine together with your film?
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Hi. Yes, of course. And actually, that is what I usually say to the audience. There has been several screenings, very, very strong responses from the audiences. Very emotional, people get. People cry. People get angry. People ask what they can do. But, really, what I first say to the audiences is that the film is called 20 Days in Mariupol and describes first 20 days of the full-scale Russia’s invasion in Ukraine — although it has been almost nine years. But those 20 days is just a number. There is a day 21, 22 and 30 and 90, and right now we are almost a year in. And here is, you know, this morning, these raids, these attacks, these rocket launches on Ukraine, actually proves the point I am saying, that whatever they see, whatever the audience sees in the film, what destruction and suffering and pain of Ukrainians, it’s not over. It’s not something that’s just in the past. It’s something that is happening right now. And here we go. This morning, I’m calling my father in Kyiv and asking if he’s OK, if he’s alive. And all my friends are writing to me that they are in shelters, you know, hiding in the Metro stations as they just try to survive.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Mstyslav, as you may have heard, we announced earlier we were supposed to be joined by one of the editors of the independent Russian news site Meduza. He had to cancel because Russia has just designated the media outlet as an “illegal, undesirable organization.” Could you speak also, before we turn more at length to your documentary, about what you know of the crackdown within Russia on any kind of dissent or opposition to this war?
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Well, it has been going on for years, and since the Russian invasion, the full-scale Russian invasion, started, has been going on more and more. And the purpose of that is, obviously, to deprive people who are against this war, to deprive Russians who are against this war, of arguments, because having a second opinion, having an alternative opinion, having alternative media who shed light on crimes of Russia in Ukraine, giving people tools to argue with their government, and, therefore, I guess that is a tactic to deprive people of those arguments. But again, there are a lot of Russian journalists who are doing their work well.
I have to say that currently most of the international journalists working in Ukraine on the frontlines and, of course, Ukrainian journalists, who lost their homes, who put themselves in real life-threatening situations to keep covering the loss of civilian lives and the fighting on the frontlines, their problems are kind of more urgent, I would say.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mstyslav, take us back to the moment when you and your colleagues arrived in Mariupol. You arrived, in fact, just one day before the assault on the city began. So, explain why you went and how you knew that Mariupol would be one of the first places that would be hit.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Right. Actually, it was like one hour before the — before the bombs started to fall.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Oh, yes, forgive me, that’s right, one hour.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Yeah. Yeah, we’ve been — so, as I mentioned before, this invasion started nine years ago. So, throughout these nine years, we dedicated a lot of time reporting on the frontlines and trying to understand the dynamics of this war, of this invasion. And Mariupol was one of the — was always one of the key targets for Russia, as it is on the way, as on a land bridge, basically, to Crimea, to the occupied territory — another occupied Ukrainian territory by Russia. And Russia tried to take Mariupol in 2014. They failed.
And on the 23rd, it became more and more clear that the invasion is imminent. There were so many small pieces of the puzzle, which we just placed together, messages from our colleagues, journalists, who were just analyzing the Russian state media, who were preparing the ground for this assault. We concluded that the war is going to start next day, on the 24th. And it was the evening of the 23rd, and we just decided to go, not to wait and to go, because Mariupol is very close to Russian border, and we knew that it swiftly will get surrounded, so we needed to get there before that. So we did. And it happened, got surrounded just in a few days.
AMY GOODMAN: A lot of the film, you’re doing work in the hospital. And there’s this comparison between covering the dead, the dying, the wounded in the hospital and the sort of comparison to what’s happening to Mariupol. But I wanted to turn to another clip from your film, 20 Days in Mariupol, which is produced jointly by the Associated Press and PBS Frontline. This shows the aftermath of the March 9th bombing of a maternity hospital there.
MOTHER: [translated] Where should we go?
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER 1: [translated] Just go there.
MOTHER: [translated] Where?
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER 1: [translated] Here.
BOY: [translated] Oh my god. The cars are destroyed.
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER 1: [translated] Calm down. Shh, calm down. Your legs and arms are not injured? Everything is fine.
BOY: [translated] My mom.
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER 1: [translated] Where is your mom?
BOY: [translated] She is … inside.
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER 1: [translated] Go inside. Inside.
UNIDENTIFIED 1: [translated] Calm down. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Watch out. Go, go, go. Let’s go.
UNIDENTIFIED 2: [translated] Where?
UNIDENTIFIED 1: [translated] Go down. Don’t panic.
UKRAINIAN SOLDIER 2: [translated] Careful. Wait. Bring it higher. Higher.
AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from 20 Days in Mariupol. For our radio listeners, who are not watching on TV, the clip ends with a pregnant woman — this becomes a scene that is seen around the world — being brought out on a stretcher through the debris, her hands reaching towards her big, big belly, her expression frozen in shock. You would later learn her name is Irina, as the world would learn. And, Mstyslav, as you talk about this bombing of this maternity hospital, if you can also talk about what we struggle with every day in our newsroom, and that is showing the images? Because that is this film, from beginning to end. You yourself are Ukrainian. You have two daughters. Talk about this experience and what you chose to show, and how it was received in the world.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: It was a very hard choice. To find a right balance when we were editing the film, to find the right balance to show the audience the gravity of war, without holding back, but at the same time not push the audience away by the graphic images, that was the very big challenge, because it is a danger: If we don’t show enough, then people will kind of accept war for not — you know, because just images are not violent enough. They don’t see people suffering. And also producing a film out of this footage, which everybody saw but mostly without a context, helped us to show the scale of the destruction.
And obviously, it impacted me as a father. It impacted me as a Ukrainian, as a human, in many ways. And one of those ways were that Russians were claiming that all of these women are actresses, that this is all not true, it was all staged. That was painful, too.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about Irina. Talk about this woman. You didn’t know who she was at the time she is brought out. At the time, she’s alive.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And what you learn happened to her?
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: So, when she was brought out — the scene was already terrifying when we arrived. There were so many people crying. It was such a panic. And then, an airplane — you could see on the footage that the airplane flies over us one more time, and then they start carrying out the stretcher. And I’ve never seen anything like that before. We just keep filming. And they carry her across this destroyed yard of the hospital. And I see this image, and I understand — I keep filming, and I understand already that it will have a huge impact if we will be able to send these images, because there was no connection all across the city. I understand that if we will be able to send this footage, it will have a huge impact to how the world sees it.
So, they are bringing her to the ambulance, and they ride off. And for the rest of the day, we are searching for where to send this these images. And then, the next day, we tried to follow up with the story. We tried to find out where she went, what happened to her. So we go to the hospital. And unfortunately, we learned from the doctors who treated her that she and her baby have died. Unfortunately, they both died.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mstyslav, could you also — you spent a lot of time in a hospital with medics. Explain what you saw happening over the course of those 20 days as medical supplies diminished, as there were frequent cuts to the electricity, to gas, how doctors were operating under those conditions.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Yeah, so, the whole city — after it got surrounded, the whole city spiraled down into complete chaos. People were in shock, in panic. They didn’t know what to do. And some of them looted stores. Some of them have just been hiding. There was no gas, no electricity.
And the hospital was in a terrible condition, too, because, first of all, no cellphone connection means that if anyone in the city gets injured, if anyone in the city needs help for just different medical reasons, they can’t call an ambulance. They just can’t, because they can’t reach the ambulance. Therefore, they either had to carry their wounded or people who just feel sick to the hospital themselves or to walk. There were people whose relatives were dying. They didn’t know what to do with the bodies, so they were just bringing these bodies and leaving them in front of the hospital, because, well, what else would you do?
And there was — medical supplies were running out. There was really little painkillers and little antibiotics. So, doctors — by the day 15, doctors were just cutting off limbs. If you would get the injury, which in normal conditions would be treatable, the doctors would decide to cut off the limb, just to stop the sepsis, because that was the only way to ensure that the person would not die. That was kind of what was happening in the First World War, I know.
And we slept in the hospital. We slept among the patients right on the floor, because nobody slept near the windows in the wards. Everybody slept on the floor in the corridors. Nobody could sleep well, because there was a constant bombardment all around the hospital. And eventually, hospital got hit several times. Doctors were treating patients on the floor. There was really little food. And whenever we actually were not filming, we were just helping doctors to carry the gurneys or carry food to patients. Doctors never left the hospital. They were just staying there. They lived there with their families.
Eventually, the hospital that we were at got occupied. But before that, it got surrounded, and we thought we were going to be arrested. But, fortunately, we got rescued by Ukrainian army, that broke us out of this. And you see that story in the film. That is a pivotal moment in the film. And as we’re leaving the hospital behind, we know that it gets occupied by Russian forces.
AMY GOODMAN: At a certain point, city workers are bringing bodies from the street, putting them in mass graves, and soldiers shoot a nurse in front of the hospital. Talk about you filming all of this, and the kind of questions or your response to what you were filming. And also, of course, you are Ukrainian, on the ground. It doesn’t even matter if you were from any other place. You are a human being. What this meant? Before we talk about your decision to leave.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Yeah, I’ve never — honestly, throughout these nine years I’ve been working in the conflict zones, I have never experienced anything like that. I don’t mean that this war is necessarily the worst war in the world in the history of humankind, but, for me, personally, that is the worst and the most dangerous and most painful experience I have had, because — also because I am Ukrainian. This is very close to the chest. This is my home. I was born in eastern Ukraine. Our photographer is from the city which is a neighboring city to Mariupol and got quickly occupied. His parents were also in that city.
And the scenes we witnessed, these mass graves, where the children we witnessed — we witnessed doctors trying to save children which died from shelling, and they couldn’t save them. And those children were later buried in the mass graves, because relatives or social services just couldn’t go and bury them properly. The morgues were full. So, there were trucks that were taking bodies to the cemetery and burying them, under the constant shelling, as well. So, I don’t even — I don’t know. It’s just terrifying.
But again, we are Ukrainians. We are international journalists at the same time. We felt that this is our obligation to keep working, because that’s the sole purpose of why we stayed, why we decided to stay in the city that was getting surrounded.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mstyslav, as you say, you made these extraordinary efforts to stay in the city to document so the world would know what exactly the Russian invasion looked like. But despite that documentary footage, as you know, your work, the work of AP, as well as other journalists, has been subjected to an extraordinary campaign of disinformation and discrediting by the Russian state. You say, in fact, that as you were sending, in the documentary, images and dispatches from a satellite phone, that you and your colleagues were called information terrorists, that you received multiple threats. And even after all this footage was made available, the AP photographs, as well as the video footage, people called into question the veracity of the footage and said — some suggested that these were false flag operations and that the women in fact were actresses and not really the pregnant women whom you showed. How do you respond to those kinds of claims?
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: So, one of the purposes of this film, of the film 20 Days in Mariupol, was to give people, to give the audiences across the world — U.S., Europe, Ukraine, Russia, for that matter — the context, the necessary context, to see and to analyze, because it is very easy to target and put into question 30-second clips or one photo which you see on the news, but it’s much harder to interpret in a different way or to argue with an hour or 90 minutes of footage with enough context to analyze what is really happening. So, one of the purposes of this film is to give people enough context to judge for themselves.
That being said, of course, in a moment when we find out of this campaign, of this misinformation campaign that was happening against us or against AP, we were not surprised, in some way, because that was kind of expected because the similar thing happened to me in 2014, when I was one of the first international journalists who arrived at the scene of MH17 downing, which now we learned from the results of the court cases had been shot down by Russian forces that were in Ukraine at that time. And those images sparked a wave of the misinformation, too.
So, what I’m trying to say here is that our work is not really influenced by all this misinformation, by all this questioning, because regardless of whatever whoever says, we will just keep working. Our job is not to argue with anyone. Our job as AP journalists, or just people who do the work filming whatever they see, is to keep doing that, just keep filming whatever is in front of us, and send this to the international audience. And it’s up to the international audience to judge what they see.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Mstyslav, if you can talk about your decision to leave, how you were able to get out, and what happened immediately after, and your feelings about that?
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Yeah, right. I don’t want to give out much of the film. I really think it is quite interesting for the audience to see how events unfold. But I would say we were very lucky, because, at the time, we were surrounded at a hospital. We lost our car, and we had to escape without our car. So, we basically ended up by not having any means to continue our work. We could not move around the city. We did not have any place to charge our batteries, because the hospital was the main place where we could charge our batteries. So our cameras stopped working. We didn’t have our car, and we started searching for the way to leave the city.
And fortunately, we got this help of a person you will see in the film, of a person who risked his own life and the safety of his family to help us to get through these 15 Russian checkpoints, miles and miles of occupied territory. And the main point was not just get us across those checkpoints and the occupied territory, but to have all the hours and hours of unpublished footage, which ultimately resulted in producing this film, you know, hidden in a car to get those hard drives out. That was like a mission to us to do it. And we did it, fortunately.
AMY GOODMAN: And a Lithuanian journalist who also attempted to leave was not as lucky and was killed at a checkpoint.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Yes, yes. Unfortunately, there was a Lithuanian filmmaker, great Lithuanian filmmaker, who also tried to leave the city, and, unfortunately, he was killed. Yeah. So, that could happen to us, as well. We were just lucky enough to escape.
AMY GOODMAN: And the bombing of the theater the next day, which was, well, learned about around the world, with how many people inside? You had been there many times.
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Yeah. That is actually a very good example of what could happen if, for example, we decided to leave earlier. Because we left the city. We left feeling so guilty that we couldn’t keep working. And the next day, we learned about this bombing of the Mariupol drama theater. And we know that shelter. We know that hundreds of people are there. Almost a thousand people lived there, from all across the city. And there were no images at all, so we just couldn’t understand what had really happened. And it took us months to get to witnesses to try to reconstruct what happened. And we found out that actually up to 500 people died there. But this is a good example of what is — like, what could happen if no journalists are around. It’s just like a black hole of information, where we can’t really know about the potential war crimes. That is why it’s so crucially important for the journalists to be in the places of the conflict, of the places where there are potential war crimes happening.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mstyslav, just as we end, once the film festival comes to its end, where will you be going? Will you return to Ukraine?
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Yes, we are returning to Ukraine. We are returning to the frontlines. I can’t — for security reasons, I can’t tell specifically the place we’re planning to be. But what is happening right now is a good example of that Mariupol is not a standalone case of complete destruction of the city. Like 90% of all the buildings in Mariupol are destroyed, and they will be just demolished, because they are not subjected to reconstruction. But that is happening to every city the Russian Federation takes now. It happened to Popasna. It happens to Soledar, which was just recently occupied. But there’s nothing to occupy. It is just ruins. And that is what’s happening to Bakhmut right now. So, yes, unfortunately, that’s not — this Mariupol is not the only city. And we will just keep reporting.
AMY GOODMAN: Mstyslav Chernov, we want to thank you so much for being with us, director, producer —
MSTYSLAV CHERNOV: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: — cinematographer of the documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, which just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. He’s an award-winning Associated Press journalist and president of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers, speaking to us from Salt Lake City in Utah.
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Anti-death penalty activists rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to prevent Oklahoma's planned execution of Richard Glossip. (photo: Larry French/Getty Images)
Oklahoma Slows Down Frenzied Execution Spree and Launches Probe Into Richard Glossip Case
Liliana Segura, The Intercept
Segura writes: "Two weeks after Oklahoma carried out its first lethal injection of 2023, the new attorney general interrupted the state's killing spree, upending its execution calendar and launching an independent investigation into the case of Richard Glossip, who was next in line to die."
Attorney General Gentner Drummond upended the execution calendar and gave Glossip a new chance to prove his innocence.
Two weeks after Oklahoma carried out its first lethal injection of 2023, the new attorney general interrupted the state’s killing spree, upending its execution calendar and launching an independent investigation into the case of Richard Glossip, who was next in line to die. In a motion filed before the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals last week, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who witnessed the execution of Scott Eizember on January 12, wrote that “a reassessment of the current execution schedule is necessary to maintain confidence in the system.” Although he praised the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for its “work ethic, professionalism, and concern for the victims’ families,” it had become clear, he wrote, “that the current pace of executions is unsustainable in the long run, as it is unduly burdening the DOC and its personnel.”
On Tuesday, the court granted the motion, rescheduling seven executions and postponing 13 additional dates well into the future. Two days later, Drummond announced that he had appointed an independent prosecutor to reinvestigate Glossip’s case. For Glossip’s longtime attorney Don Knight, who has fought for years to save his client’s life, it was a banner week in a case that has become synonymous with the state’s dysfunctional death penalty system. “From the beginning of our work on this case, all we have asked for is a fair review of all the evidence,” Knight said in a statement. “The new evidence we have uncovered since 2015 shows conclusively … that no reasonable juror who viewed all the evidence would find Mr. Glossip guilty of murder for hire. We are confident that this new investigation will reach the same conclusion. Richard Glossip is innocent of this crime.”
Glossip, who was scheduled for execution on February 16, had already filled out the paperwork for witnesses and burial plans when news of the investigation arrived — a ritual he has undertaken multiple times. He is now set to die on May 18. Amid mounting pressure from Oklahoma lawmakers, however, it seems vanishingly unlikely that this new execution date — his ninth so far — will come to pass.
Drummond, who was sworn in on January 9, inherited Oklahoma’s execution spree from his predecessor, John O’Connor, who made executions a top priority during his short stint in office. Appointed in the summer of 2021 to finish the term of Michael Hunter, who was tasked with overhauling the state’s execution protocol before resigning amid a personal scandal, O’Connor immediately requested a slew of death warrants even as a lawsuit over the state’s new lethal injection protocol was pending in federal court. After the court upheld the protocol last June — despite evidence that the condemned have suffered when executed using the contested set of drugs — the state moved to set 25 execution dates.
Drummond’s intervention so soon after taking office caught many Oklahomans by surprise, including activists, attorneys, and people on death row. The previous schedule had set a pace of roughly one execution per month, which would have eliminated half the state’s condemned population within two years. The new schedule puts 60 days between each execution, reducing the number of remaining executions this year from 10 to four. Yet for those whose cases have not drawn the same public attention as Glossip’s, the order provides little more than temporary relief. One man whose execution will be postponed said that his date was not close enough to cause a lot of stress, although he had already begun to prepare psychologically for his execution. “There was the ‘ticking off of last things’ and that was a bummer — last World Series, last Thanksgiving, stuff like that,” he wrote. “Now, I have to begin anew.”
Unacceptable Risks
The news in Oklahoma came as other active death penalty states announced that they would halt executions altogether to reevaluate their killing protocols. In Tennessee, where the execution of Oscar Smith was called off at the last minute in April, an investigation recently revealed that prison officials had run afoul of their own protocol since executions resumed in the state in 2018. In Arizona, whose record of botched executions carried into 2022, newly elected Gov. Katie Hobbs announced plans to appoint a death penalty independent review commissioner “to review and provide transparency” into the state’s protocols. Arizona’s new attorney general vowed not to seek any execution dates while the review was underway.
Yet Oklahoma’s own recent history shows how tenuous and short-lived such de facto moratoriums can be. The state’s death chamber was inactive for six years following a series of disastrous executions that made national headlines. In 2015, Oklahoma nearly executed Glossip using the wrong drug, reversing course at the last minute and sparking a series of investigations that uncovered myriad problems with the way the state carried out capital punishment. In 2017, a bipartisan commission issued a nearly 300-page report critiquing every aspect of the state’s system. The report’s co-chairs expressed hope that the study would “foster an informed discussion among all Oklahomans about whether the death penalty in our state can be implemented in a way that eliminates the unacceptable risk of executing the innocent, as well as the unacceptable risks of inconsistent, discriminatory, and inhumane application of the death penalty.”
Yet virtually nothing changed. In the years following the review, the state remained mired in controversy as it moved to resume executions. John Grant, the first man put to death, convulsed and vomited on the gurney during his 2021 execution. Officials accused witnesses of exaggerating what they saw. Later that year, Julius Jones, a Black man sentenced to die by a nearly all-white jury compromised by racial bias, came within hours of execution despite an activist movement proclaiming his innocence. Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted his sentence to life. In other cases, issues like untreated mental illness, severe childhood trauma, and questionable convictions have been brushed aside in order to put people to death.
Nevertheless, due largely to Glossip’s case, even staunch supporters of the death penalty have begun to question Oklahoma’s system. Last fall, after the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals refused to consider new evidence pointing to Glossip’s innocence — including exculpatory evidence destroyed by police between his first and second trials — state Rep. Kevin McDugle wrote a scathing op-ed in The Oklahoman, warning that such a system posed a threat to anyone who might find themselves wrongfully accused. “Oklahoma has a sad history of pushing cases through the full judicial process and declaring them final and over, only to have many convicted men later exonerated when DNA evidence proved their innocence,” he wrote. “Undeniably, this system has failed before; we cannot insist everything is fine just because we went through the process. Who will take responsibility for this travesty?”
Indeed, while the same court granted the attorney general’s request to slow down executions, such willingness to intervene in carrying out the death penalty is an exception for the judges, not the rule. Judge Gary Lumpkin made clear that he was reluctant to go along with the order, grousing in a concurrence that the “major complaint in the application of the death penalty is the amount of time it takes to complete the carrying out of the sentence to provide finality for crime victims and their families.” Now the DOC was asking for even more time with “no more than a claim of inconvenience.”
The death penalty’s application has always hinged more on political will than a meaningful approach to crime, subject to the whims and priorities of whoever is in power at a given time. It’s no coincidence that the slowdown in executions comes not only at the hands of a new attorney general, but also at the behest of newly appointed Department of Corrections Director Steven Harpe, who worked as an executive for the governor’s mortgage company before joining his administration — and has no background in prisons or punishment. Nor is it any secret that executions take a toll on those who are tasked with carrying them out.
For activists who have fought the relentless tide of executions since 2021, the impact on prison personnel has become abundantly clear during visits to the state penitentiary in McAlester. Sue Hosch, the Oklahoma coordinator of Death Penalty Action, who regularly visits and corresponds with men on death row, said that guards who work at the prison are among the unseen individuals who are adversely impacted every time a human being is put to death. The men on death row “have a system of people they’re involved with — family, friends, loved ones, both inside and outside the prison,” Hosch said. “It hurts to see these people executed one after another like they’re meaningless people in the world, because they’re not.”
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Texas governor Greg Abbott. (photo: Jordan Vonderhaar/The Texas Tribune)
'Racist' Texas Bill Would Ban Citizens of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea From Owning Property
Ryan Chandler, NBC News
Chandler writes: "A bill filed in the Texas Senate aims to ban citizens of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran from purchasing real estate in Texas."
Abill filed in the Texas Senate aims to ban citizens of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran from purchasing real estate in Texas.
Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham) filed Senate Bill 147 amid concerns from some top Republican officials that foreign adversaries could endanger state interests by buying Texas land. Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller has been one of the most vocal statewide officials in favor of the ban.
“Why would we want our enemies to own our most productive farmland?,” Commissioner Miller said. “Just use a little ‘cowboy logic.’ If we can’t buy farmland in your country, you’re not buying any here.”
Foreign entities own more land in Texas than any other state, with more than 4.7 million acres of Texas land according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That amounts to just about 3% of all the privately-held land in the state.
Commissioner Miller points to an alleged threat from a business with a Chinese chairman that tried to purchase a wind farm in Val Verde County near Laughlin Air Force Base.
“I sure don’t want them right next to one of our military installations so they can use espionage,” Miller said. “We know they steal trade secrets in the corporate world, so I only can imagine what they would do if they had the opportunity.”
That company, GH America, is owned by a former Chinese Army officer named Sun Guangxin. It tried to purchase 140,000 acres to build a wind farm, but Texas blocked them. The company denies it posed any security risk and refuted the claims repeated by Commissioner Miller.
Democrats argue the bill is not only racist but unnecessary and counter to Texas’ economic interests.
“He should at least understand that if this bill passes, it could wreck Texas farmers,” State Rep. Gene Wu (D-Houston) said. “China is the third largest importer of Texas goods. Texas oil, Texas wheat, Texas corn, Texas soybeans — a lot of that is going to really, really damage farmers. Because if we pass this legislation, we could lose all these trade deals.”
Texas already passed a law in 2021 that banned companies connected to the same four countries from connecting into critical infrastructure.
Gov. Abbott signed into law Sen. Donna Campbell’s Senate Bill 2116, which cites “acts of aggression towards the United States, human rights abuses, intellectual property theft, [and] previous critical infrastructure attacks” among the reasons to ban the nations’ businesses from connecting to the power grid, water and chemical plants, communications, and cyber systems.
This session’s bill goes significantly further by banning individual citizens from buying any real estate at all.
“Many of them are trying to become United States citizens and are waiting in line. And we’re telling them, ‘you’re not welcome here, you can’t buy a home, you can’t start a business,’ Rep. Wu said. “If we’re saying that Texas is no longer friendly for business, that’s a really dangerous statement.”
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Armed forces patrol an area of state offices in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. (photo: Odelyn Joseph/AP)
As Democracy Fades in Port-au-Prince, Ottawa Is Backing Haiti's Repressive Police
Yves Engler, Jacobin
Engler writes: "As conditions worsen in Haiti, Ottawa remains steadfast in its provision of resources for the repressive Haitian National Police."
As conditions worsen in Haiti, Ottawa remains steadfast in its provision of resources for the repressive Haitian National Police. This stalwart aid stands in stark contrast with Ottawa’s miserliness when the social democratic Fanmi Lavalas party was in power.
In its dealings with Haiti, Canada says one thing and does the opposite. Justin Trudeau has said that Haitians must approve the solutions to their country’s crisis. But Canada’s direct involvement with repressive policing in the country is at odds with the prime minister’s glib platitude.
Earlier this month, a tweet from Labour Against the Arms Trade stated that “the last 10 remaining senators in Haiti’s parliament officially left office, leaving the country without a single democratically elected government official. On Wednesday, a Canadian military aircraft delivered armoured vehicles to the Haitian national police.”
It’s a useful, if somewhat too simple, juxtaposition. For years Haitian elections have had little legitimacy and in mid-2021 the US- and Canada-led Core Group appointed a leader with no constitutional or popular legitimacy. Ariel Henry’s rule has led to a boost in Canada’s assistance to the Haitian National Police (HNP). Ottawa put $42 million into the HNP in 2022. In October of last year, US and Canadian warplanes delivered an initial batch of Canadian-made armored personnel vehicles to the Haitian police and Ottawa has pushed to increase UN assistance to the HNP. Last week in Port-au-Prince, Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Mike Duheme signed “a new Memorandum of Understanding to facilitate cooperation between our two countries and to strengthen the capacity of the HNP.”
Faced with elected officials in Haiti abandoning the field, Canada has decided that its signal contribution at this moment of crisis should be police assistance. But this is hardly a change of direction in Canadian support for Haiti. After the United States, France, and Canada overthrew Haiti’s elected government in 2004, Canada ploughed significant resources, including trainers and diplomatic backing, into new police. Through the 2004–06 coup period a Canadian led the police component of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).
Following the 2004 coup, Canada spent tens of millions of dollars on the HNP. This largesse stands in stark contrast with Canadian stinginess in the wake of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party election win in 2000, which prompted the severing of almost all Canadian assistance to Haiti’s police and judicial institutions.
Militarizing the Haitian National Police
By aiding the post-Lavalas HNP, Canada helped the coup regime with its repression of political resistance. Hundreds of police officers suspected of loyalty to the ousted Lavalas government were fired and some killed. At the same time hundreds of former soldiers — from the military Aristide disbanded in 1995 due to human rights abuses — were integrated into the HNP. One year after the coup, Reuters reported, “only one of the top 12 police commanders in the Port-au-Prince area does not have a military background, and most regional police chiefs are also ex-soldiers.”
Though its mission was supposed to “professionalize” the HNP, the Canadian-led UN police force contributed to the militarization of the HNP and facilitated its abuses. Amidst the post-coup violence the International Crisis Group reported that the HNP “have taken over old [Army] practices, including military-style operations in the capital’s poor neighbourhoods with little regard for collateral damage to civilians. . . . It is common to observe routine HNP patrols in Port-au-Prince carrying weapons that seem better adapted to war than police work.” A Canadian commander of the UN Civilian Police Unit declared in fall 2004 that all he had done in Haiti was “engage in daily guerrilla warfare.”
Hundreds, maybe over one thousand, were killed in political violence by the HNP in the two years after the 2004 coup. On many occasions, the Associated Press, the Miami Herald, and Reuters reported on police killing peaceful demonstrators in Port-au-Prince who were calling for the return of democracy.
Canadian officials almost never publicly criticized police killings after the coup. But prior to Aristide’s overthrow, Canadian officials claimed that he politicized the force, which was one of the ways they undermined his legitimacy as part of a multifaceted campaign to destabilize Aristide’s democratically elected government.
Killing Protestors
Since 2004 Ottawa has provided hundreds of million dollars in what is officially described as Canadian “aid” to the HNP. Two years ago, the Trudeau government even tendered a $12.5 million contract in operational support to the HNP under its Feminist International Assistance Policy. Canadian funds have helped build or refurbish many prisons and a major police academy. Through various training initiatives Canada has helped increase the size of the HNP from five thousand in 2004 to fourteen thousand. Foreign donors provide as much as half of HNP funding.
Between 2004 and 2019 a Canadian was often at the head of the UN police contingent in Haiti and officers from this country staffed its upper echelons. In June 2019 Canada’s then ambassador André Frenette tweeted, “one of the best parts of my job is attending medal ceremonies for Canadian police officers who are known for their excellent work with the UN police contingent in Haiti.” At the time a few dozen Canadian police assisted their Haitian counterparts.
While Canadian ambassadors may paint a sunny portrait of Canadian assistance, acquiring hard data on the matter is a more difficult proposition. Kevin Walby and Jeffrey Monaghan have given an account of being denied documents in spite of Access to Information requests:
Exemptions are telling. First, these exemptions demonstrate how the issue of policing in Haiti is framed in terms of national defence as much as it is framed as international development. Second, these exemptions demonstrate how high-ranking government officials in Canada have vetted our requests and acted to deny information based on its sensitivity and political salience. Third, these exemptions demonstrate that securitization of Haiti is a long-term initiative on the part of multiple government agencies.
While Canadian diplomats regularly attend police ceremonies and praise the HNP, they have almost without fail stayed mum about the force’s abundant abuses. During the remarkable popular uprising against corruption and neoliberalism between July 2018 and November 2019 the police killed dozens, probably over one hundred. Videos of police beating protesters, violently arresting individuals, and firing live ammunition during protests circulated widely. Reporting on a monthlong general strike in the fall of 2019, Amnesty International noted that, “during six weeks of anti-government protests . . . at least 35 people were killed, with national police implicated in many of the deaths.”
Good for Business
In March 2020 the Canadian government put out an outrageous — yet correct — travel advisory, warning Canadians that Haitian “police have used tear gas and live ammunition to disperse crowds.” Although quick to notify Canadians, Ottawa failed to directly criticize the killing of demonstrators by a Canadian-funded and trained force. Even when asked directly by Le Nouveliste about an incident of police repression in July 2020, Canada’s ambassador Stuart Savage refused to answer. During large protests in the fall the HNP again killed many protesters and beat many others with no comment from Canadian officials.
Aside from the HNP’s hand in direct political repression, regular Haitians have identified the force as a leading threat to their safety. According to an October report from the Institute Karl Lévêque, 40 percent to 60 percent of Haitian police have connections with gangs.
In a related problem, Haitian prisons are full of poor individuals in pretrial limbo. After the UN police mission MINUJUSTH replaced the larger MINUSTAH military force in 2017, Regroupement des Haïtiens de Montréal contre l’occupation d’Haïti wrote that MINUJUSTH’s
. . . principal objective is to help the Haitian state develop and professionalize the existing National Police . . . which will actually translate into more repression of the Haitian people . . . The power to maintain order . . . is really the power to defend the status quo, the power to keep intact the dominant order . . . One cannot pretend to “reinforce” the rule of law when the state, by its nature and orientation, exists only to defend without compromise the interests of the dominant class and of a certain political class.
The HNP enforces a highly inequitable economic order. Canadian officials are on record arguing that strengthening the Haitian police was good for business. After meeting Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe in 2014, Canada’s international development minister, Christian Paradis, linked strengthening the HNP to “attracting private investment.” Paradis said, “we discussed the priority needs of the country as well as the increased size of the Haitian National Police, in order to create a climate to attract private investment.”
Canada’s aim with Haiti’s police operates at cross purposes. To smooth the way for foreign capitalists they seek a “professional” force capable of maintaining order largely free of corruption and egregious abuses. At the same time, they want a force willing to violently suppress protests against an illegitimate regime, and that may even be prepared to oust a popular government trying to the redress the country’s vast internal inequities and foreign dependence.
A similar tension exists in Canada’s broader policies toward the country. Haiti is attractive to investors because it has the lowest labor costs in the hemisphere. Impoverishment is good for sweatshop owners such as Canada’s Gildan, but the insecurity it breeds is not. Instability and insecurity have become a substantial obstacle to capitalist interests. Canada has contributed to Haiti’s descent into chaos by imposing the highly regressive Haitian Tèt Kale Party and Ariel Henry. Canada has supported “oligarchic gangsterism” in Haiti, as I’ve noted, to quell popular, sovereign-minded forces.
Today, reinforcing the police offers some potential reprieve from the insecurity caused by neighborhood-based gangs that control large swaths of the country. But the HNP also works to further entrench an illegitimate foreign-imposed government, which is an obstacle to overcoming Haiti’s most important problems — the absence of democracy and sovereignty. Canada has chosen to support authoritarian rule that benefits imperialism and a local elite over democracy.
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A wind farm. (photo: Jens Meyer/AP)
When Will We Hit Peak Fossil Fuels? Maybe We Already Have
Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News
Gearino writes: "The global energy transition has reached a pivot point in which fossil fuels have likely peaked in their use for producing electricity and are about to enter a period of decline."
Kingsmill Bond, energy analyst and author, describes the circumstances that hastened the transition of the electricity sector—plus four reasons he’s optimistic about our planet’s future.
The global energy transition has reached a pivot point in which fossil fuels have likely peaked in their use for producing electricity and are about to enter a period of decline.
This is the idea at the heart of a new report from RMI, a nonprofit that does research and advocacy about the transition. The lead author, energy analyst Kingsmill Bond, makes a case that wind and solar power are going through growth that looks almost exactly like the trend lines for the early stages of transformative products and industries, across technologies and eras, like automobiles and smartphones.
The growth begins slowly, with high costs, and shifts into high gear as costs shrink and efficiency rises.
The optimism in this outlook is almost jarring in its clarity, and in its contrast with the pessimism I see and feel every day as the threats of climate change become clearer.
The report argues that the fossil fuel demand has peaked in the electricity market in part because the annual growth in global electricity demand—which is about 700 terawatt-hours—is less than the electricity generated in 2022 by newly built power plants that have zero emissions, most of which were wind and solar plants. The report cites forecasts for a continuing increase in wind and solar development that will outpace the growth in electricity demand, a dynamic that will squeeze out the most expensive and dirtiest energy sources.
The use of fossil fuels for electricity shifted in 2018 from a long period of growth to a plateau in which there is no clear trend up or down as measured by the amount of electricity produced. The report says the plateau is likely to continue until about 2025, followed by a long-term decline.
The report acknowledges some big obstacles, like political resistance from fossil fuel industries and the challenges of running a grid that uses mostly intermittent resources. But it says the obstacles are surmountable, although I think this portion of the report feels insubstantial at points, with statements like “Innovation has solved most of the barriers to change.” (Bond acknowledged this is fair criticism, and said that the part of the report about obstacles is brief because he and his co-authors are working on a companion report that focuses on this subject in detail.)
The report isn’t an academic paper, but plenty of academic researchers have used similar concepts to come to similar conclusions. For example, I wrote last year about a paper from University of Oxford economists and mathematicians about the potential for vast cost savings from a rapid transition to renewable energy.
Bond, who is based in the United Kingdom, spent decades as an equity analyst and strategist for Deutsche Bank and Citibank, among others. He shifted a few years ago to focus exclusively on economic ramifications of the transition to clean energy, working for the U.K.-based Carbon Tracker Initiative and now RMI.
I spoke with him by video from his office, with follow-up via email. Here’s our discussion, edited for length and clarity:
A lot of what you’re talking about feels like techno optimism, this idea that we can all relax because progress is going to solve everything. And that’s an idea that gets a lot of criticism, especially from environmental advocates.
I hear what you’re saying that maybe we are understating the difficulties that we face. There’s nothing inevitable about change. We cannot relax for a moment. This is a battle between the forces trying to protect the fossil fuel status quo and those trying to change it. We have to go out there and drive the change we need. Change the policy, deploy the renewable technology, come up with solutions in the hard-to-solve sectors. There is nothing easy about this, but we still need hope and direction. As [Paul] Romer said, it’s the difference between complacent optimism and conditional optimism, the difference between a child wanting to be given toys and a child going and building a treehouse.
How has the Ukraine war affected the trajectory of the energy transition?
So the Ukraine war without any question has sped up change because it increased efficiency and sped up the deployment of renewables. The [International Energy Agency], for example, put out two reports at the end of 2022, and one of them said that after a number of years of slow gains in energy efficiency, efficiency has increased this year to 2 percent, which is exactly what you would expect in the face of a supply shock. And that, of course, is just the beginning. So it’s increased the efficiency of our use of energy. And of course, the other thing that it’s done is it’s massively increased the deployment of renewable energy. So the IEA, for example, increased their renewable energy deployment forecast for the next five years by 30 percent. Meanwhile, solar deployment in 2022 increased by 50 percent to 270 GW, according to [BloombergNEF], and EV sales rose by 60 percent. As so often, war has sped up change.
So if I’m Vladimir Putin, this is pretty counterproductive in terms of my long-term global interests.
As Talleyrand said, it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. The situation was similar in the 1970s, when OPEC tried to achieve its own geopolitical aims by cutting off oil supply, and ended up setting the scene for two decades of significantly lower oil prices, which ultimately had very profound consequences, including contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union. This time around, we see a similar story of petrostate overreach leading to a speeding up of change. It’s not an unreasonable framework for us to be thinking about the consequences of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, that it will actually achieve the exact opposite of what he wanted, that is to say, a speeding up of change.
Back to the idea of optimism: We live in a world where there’s a lot of justified pessimism about climate change. Are you optimistic about the world that our children and grandchildren will be living in?
The reason I’m very optimistic is because we can actually see right in front of our noses this pivot point where we go from constantly rising demand for fossil fuels, to a plateau, and then a decline.
Four factors underlie my optimism: learning curves, meaning the cost of renewables gets cheaper every year; exponential growth, meaning renewables get bigger every year; tipping points, because they are happening right now; and feedback loops, which make change happen faster once you get to the tipping point. That means that this is the decade of disruption, where the energy system starts its long process of change. And as the energy system changes, we can fight back against climate change.
One of the other reasons why I’m optimistic is if you look backwards 10 years, it really was incredibly bleak. And all these technologies were much more expensive. But here we are, and what will happen in another 10 years, how much more innovation and deployment can there be? So yeah, I guess that’s why I’m relatively optimistic. And I should also say I have two children who share this optimism; they’re going into this field, as engineers to build out this brave new world.
Other stories about the energy transition to take note of this week:
The Environmental Downsides of Electric Cars—and Ways to Counter Them: The transition to EVs in the United States could require three times as much lithium as is now produced for the global market—a demand that could cause water shortages, Indigenous land grabs and ecosystem destruction, according to a new report. The research from Climate and Community Project and University of California, Davis, also suggests ways to reduce the problems by making cities more walkable, investing in mass transit and improving battery recycling, as Nina Lakhani reports for The Guardian. Thea Riofrancos, associate professor of political science at Providence College and lead author of the report, said the energy transition “can be used as an opportunity to rethink our cities and the transportation sector so that it’s more environmentally and socially just, both in the U.S. and globally.”
Tesla Reports Record Sales Amid Price Cuts: Tesla reported fourth quarter financial results that exceeded analysts’ expectations on sales and profit. The electric carmaker has been cutting its vehicle prices, upsetting customers who recently bought new Teslas and triggering a decline in the prices of used Teslas, as Lora Kolodny reports for CNBC. The company acknowledged in its shareholder presentation on Wednesday that average sales prices have “generally been on a downward trajectory for many years,” and said “affordability” would be necessary for Tesla to grow.
What a Deal: The Biggest Winners From Biden’s Climate Law Are the Republicans Who Voted Against It: In the five months since the Inflation Reduction Act became law, companies have announced tens of billions of dollars in renewable energy, battery and electric vehicle projects that will benefit from the law. Roughly two-thirds of the major projects are in districts whose Republican lawmakers opposed the law, as Kelsey Tamborrino and Josh Siegel report for Politico. This dynamic has prompted a tricky balancing act for the GOP, whose members have touted the jobs and economic benefits coming to their states and districts, but not the bill that helped create them.
In a Big Milestone, a Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Gets US Approval: NuScale Power, a maker of small nuclear reactors, cleared a major U.S. regulatory hurdle last week when its reactor received certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The approval provides some hope for the long-heralded nuclear renaissance, as Eric Wesoff reports for Canary Media. The NRC certified the design of NuScale’s 50-megawatt power module, the first small module ever approved in the United States. NuScale and the Department of Energy spent more than a decade working to get through this step of the regulatory process. Nuclear power is an important source of zero-emissions electricity, but the country’s fleet of nuclear power plants are almost all close to retirement age. Supporters of nuclear power have long viewed small modular reactors as a technology that could lead to a new generation of power plants. But opponents have raised concerns that the new reactors are just a new way of presenting a kind of power plant that has serious problems with safety and high costs.
FERC Enters 2023 With a New Leader, a Vacant Seat and an Agenda Topped by Transmission and Grid Reliability: Willie Phillips, the Democrat who is new in the role of acting chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has said his priorities include grid reliability, transmission expansion, environmental justice and equity. The commission will be tackling this agenda with two Democrats, two Republicans and a vacant seat. Outside observers say that the commission should still be able to do its work, but that the Biden administration will have an easier time getting what it wants out of FERC once it can get someone confirmed for the open seat, as Ethan Howland reports for Utility Dive. FERC had become a political lightning rod because of an increased focus on the environmental costs of energy infrastructure projects, a shift that was part of the reason that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, refused to hold a hearing for the renomination of the previous chairman, Democrat Richard Glick, which is the reason for the vacant seat.
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