Killer Micro-Terrorists

Terrorists threaten to bomb, slice and shoot those who oppose them, hacking into their cyber-systems to disrupt the societies they challenge, recruiting disenfranchised citizens of offending nations to join in the kill and inflict disruption and doubt as widely as possible. The suspicions surrounding the very recent crash of EgyptAir flight MS804, killing 66 people on a routine commercial flight between Paris and Cairo, exemplifies the tensions that hover above all of us. Americans list terrorism and cyberattacks as their two greatest fears. But there may be another set of terrorists growing in numbers and power. Tiny but devastating.

When the Ebola virus slammed into Western African countries. In Sierra Leone, 3,590 people died and thousands of others were impaired for life. The pattern was repeated in surrounding countries, with experts noting that Ebola could have easily been contained if major research institutions, primarily in the United States, had simply continued their existing work to the next level. But government funding for such research has been plummeting for years. So we didn’t until it was too late. And while some of us may have snarled, “It’s their problem, those unsanitary primitives, and it isn’t relevant to here,” think again. Remember the avian flues of the past? SARS? Germs travel in a globally-linked world. Germs also evolve to survive treatments targeted against them (see below).

With global climate change, disease patterns and their carriers (mosquitos, birds, animals… and infected travelers) are spreading faster than ever. Third world infections, from dengue fever and the Zika virus, have made their way into the U.S. Especially susceptible: the southern reaches of our own shores, particularly in states where hot humidity (and getting hotter) prevails. As that heat and humidity continues to move north, so will the carriers and their diseases. And these areas are woefully under-prepared for that reality. Further, while these effects may be less visible, these new spreading diseases also seriously threaten our food supply, from plants to fish to livestock.

Congress, pressing its blind austerity priorities that have slammed education, infrastructure and research while pressing military expenditures to the fore (we spend 41% of this planet’s aggregated military budgets), is currently debating funding for a major assault on the Zika virus. The president has requested $1.9 billion, the House has offered $692 million and the Senate believes $1.1 billion is more appropriate. If Zika explodes into the United States and we are not prepared… well, a lot of folks will suffer lifelong impairments and increased mortality rates. The summer Olympics in Brazil may have the lowest attendance in the modern history of the games because of the outbreak of this disease, which causes microcephaly (small-brained babies) and additional brain damage in adults. But wait, there’s more!

Our overuse and incorrect usages of treatments, particularly antibiotics, have produced new and ever-evolving germs that have become totally or partially resistant to known medicines designed to treat the diseases they cause. For example, antibiotics, focused on eradication of nasty bacteria, are everywhere. The medical profession has joined with agribusiness to push easy antibiotic “solutions” to these bacterial threats. Livestock feed is often laced with preventative antibiotics (which find their way into human bodies), just as doctors tend to over-prescribe antibiotics for relatively minor ailments.

Some physicians are simply insuring against potential malpractice claims, while others make the call “just in case.” Patients exacerbate the problem, even when antibiotics are properly required, by not finishing the full trace of their prescriptions (because they feel better), allowing too many bacteria to survive with a newfound ability to live after the treatment.

We call these resistant germs “superbugs.” “Superbugs will kill someone every three seconds by 2050 unless the world acts now, a hugely influential report says [Review on Antimicrobial Resistance from the World Health Organization]. The global review sets out a plan for preventing medicine ‘being cast back into the dark ages’ that requires billions of dollars of investment… It also calls for a revolution in the way antibiotics are used and a massive campaign to educate people.

“The report has received a mixed response with some concerned that it does not go far enough… The battle against infections that are resistant to drugs is one the world is losing rapidly and has been described as ‘as big a risk as terrorism.’… The problem is that we are simply not developing enough new antibiotics and we are wasting the ones we have.

“Since the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance started in mid-2014, more than one million people have died from such infections… And in that time doctors also discovered bacteria that can shrug off the drug of last resort - colistin - leading to warnings that the world was teetering on the cusp of a ‘post-antibiotic era.’

“The review says the situation will get only worse with 10 million people predicted to die every year from resistant infections by 2050… The analysis was based on scenarios modelled by researchers Rand Europe and auditors KPMG… They found that drug resistant E. coli, malaria and tuberculosis (TB) would have the biggest impact.” BBC.com, May 19^th. The 2050 projected impacts of microbial fatalities are illustrated in the above chart, which it doesn’t provide numbers for those who do not die, but suffer greatly and carry resulting disabilities for the rest of their lives.

And no, this is not a problem relegated to the future that does not merit immediate focus. The above projection is based on an accelerating death rate, already very much in progress. We can slide towards a closing with this alarming report from the May 26^thWashington Post: “For the first time, researchers have found a person in the United States carrying a bacteria resistant to antibiotics of last resort, an alarming development that the top U.S. public health official says could mean ‘the end of the road’ for antibiotics.

“The antibiotic-resistant strain was found [in April] in the urine of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman. Department of Defense researchers determined that carried a strain of E. coli resistant to the antibiotic colistin, according to a study published [May 26^th] in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The authors wrote that the discovery ‘heralds the emergence of a truly pan-drug resistant bacteria.’

“Colistin is the antibiotic of last resort for particularly dangerous types of superbugs, including a family of bacteria known as CRE, which health officials have dubbed ‘nightmare bacteria.’ In some instances, these superbugs kill up to 50 percent of patients who become infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called CRE among the country's most urgent public health threats.” The nightmare has begun.

We can fund the required research, begin containing the misuse of medical treatments and understand the likely migration of disease patterns and germ-resistance-evolution based on climate change as well as normal infection patterns. Or lots of us will suffer… and die… unnecessarily.

I’m Peter Dekom, and, unless changed, the growing anti-science bias in too many Americans, the failure to understand the true governmental priorities and act on them, will inflict reams of unnecessary pain, suffering and premature death on so many of us.

The ISIS/Extremist Side Show May Be the Main Show

The greater the commitment to extreme interpretations of religious doctrine – “my way is the only true way” – the greater the probability of conflict. There some pretty clear exceptions. For extremist societies that simply close their doors and windows to the rest of the world, that proclivity to violence drops like a stone. For religions, like Judaism, where conversion is not a priority, violence rises generally as a measure of self-defense.

But for faiths founded on the premise that conversion is a divine mandate – be they the kinds of noblesse oblige efforts that early Christian missionaries (backed with modern military units from their home countries) deployed in past centuries among more primitive societies or Islamic warriors who embraced “conversion by the sword” that erupted almost immediately after that faith was founded – violence, laced with “lots of strings attached” charity, become vastly more probable.

Christian radicals in foreign hinterlands were often happy to use their militaries to expand their divine reach, but those battles were, for the most part, fought centuries ago. Islam enjoyed period of intellectual superiority (think modern mathematics as well as geography, the beginnings of medicine, etc.) during Europe’s Dark Ages, but internal rivalries and the rise of Western technology soon crushed that expansion. Many of the most significant armed struggles from Islamic lands are very much a product of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, when oil imbued the formerly primitive and powerless with the money to marry their religious zeal with modern weapons, communications tools and the ability to use funded education to spread their values (notably the infamous hate-mongering madrassa schools).  

Those Muslim nations with lesser divine mandates to convert – from Turkey to Indonesia – had (have?) embraced a more tolerant, modern view of Islam have been more reluctant to take on assault tactics to foster their faith. But even those nations are facing extrinsic fundamentalist forces that threaten to erode those tolerant values.

As ISIS holdings in Iraq and Syria have become the obvious focal point for Western and regional assaults, as ISIS is slowly losing territory from counter-offenses, that nefarious state (along with arch-rival al-Qaeda) has refocused its efforts towards a “stateless” infiltration of regions all over the earth, from Boko-Haram in Nigeria to major factions in Indonesia, the Philippines, Libya as well as to sleeper cells, local sympathizers and dedicated traveling fighters in Western nations. These “side shows” may define the future of the greater conflict, a “war” that we will face for a very long time.

Oil – and the world’s addiction to it – was the great “enabler.” Societies that once sat at the bottom of global sophistication were empowered, almost overnight, with the gobs of money that allowed them to pursue everything from the “ostentatious frivolous” to the spreading of their desert-based, Islamist-fundamentalist, divine conversion mandate. Some claim it was guilt money for the mega-rich hoping to purchase God’s grace. We’ve witnessed the resulting devastation for decades, but ISIS and al-Qaeda (and their ilk) are using those well-planted seeds of extremism to swell their ranks and increase their toxic reach.

Kosovo is one of the new nations carved out of what was once Yugoslavia. It also represents one of the European areas that was heavily conquered and controlled by powerful Islamic states (mostly recently, the Ottoman Empire), resulting in Islam’s currently being the designated faith for 95% of its people. Kosovo is a microcosm of Middle Eastern extremist money that has so radicalized more obvious countries like Pakistan or Afghanistan. It is also a signature example of the “Islamist investments” fomented by Middle Eastern Gulf nations awash in oil money.

“Every Friday [in the town of Pristina, Kosovo], just yards from a statue of Bill Clinton with arm aloft in a cheery wave, hundreds of young bearded men make a show of kneeling to pray on the sidewalk outside an improvised mosque in a former furniture store… The mosque is one of scores built here with Saudi government money and blamed for spreading Wahhabism — the conservative ideology dominant in Saudi Arabia — in the 17 years since an American-led intervention wrested tiny Kosovo from Serbian oppression.

“Since then — much of that time under the watch of American officials — Saudi money and influence have transformed this once-tolerant Muslim society at the hem of Europe into a font of Islamic extremism and a pipeline for jihadists.

“Kosovo now finds itself, like the rest of Europe, fending off the threat of radical Islam. Over the last two years, the police have identified 314 Kosovars — including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children — who have gone abroad to join the Islamic State, the highest number per capita in Europe.

“They were radicalized and recruited, Kosovo investigators say, by a corps of extremist clerics and secretive associations funded by Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab gulf states using an obscure, labyrinthine network of donations from charities, private individuals and government ministries.

“‘They promoted political Islam,’ said Fatos Makolli, the director of Kosovo’s counterterrorism police. ‘They spent a lot of money to promote it through different programs mainly with young, vulnerable people, and they brought in a lot of Wahhabi and Salafi literature. They brought these people closer to radical political Islam, which resulted in their radicalization.’

“After two years of investigations, the police have charged 67 people, arrested 14 imams and shut down 19 Muslim organizations for acting against the Constitution, inciting hatred and recruiting for terrorism. The most recent sentences, which included a 10-year prison term, were handed down on Friday.

“It is a stunning turnabout for a land of 1.8 million people that not long ago was among the most pro-American Muslim societies in the world. Americans were welcomed as liberators after leading months of NATO bombing in 1999 that spawned an independent Kosovo.” New York Times, May 21^st.

Indeed, it appears as if what was initially a whitewash of the possible Saudi responsibility for the financing of the 9/11/01 attackers – in a series of memos and summaries from 9/11 Commission staffers – actually contains a 28-page section that has yet to be declassified that seems to make the link between funding from prominent Saudis (in an out of government) and those whose commandeered the aircraft that inflicted horrific damage on that fateful day. Congress has passed a bill, against the Obama administration’s wishes, implementing that declassification.

“Administration officials have lobbied against the bill, a view that the White House spokesman Josh Earnest reiterated after the vote. And the Saudi government has warned that if the legislation passes, it might begin selling off up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they face a danger of being frozen by American courts. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the warning to lawmakers and the administration while in Washington in March.” NY Times, May 17^th.  The impact of such a sell-off would hit the value of the dollar particularly hard, but Congress may well be able to override a Presidential veto. Would they lose Saudi connections and insights within the region? Perhaps, but...

There’s a lot of anger over how much Saudi money may have inflicted serious harm around the world. The Saudi Wahhabi religious perspective, a form of conservatism that has fostered most of the Sunni extremism we have witnessed, is to push Islamic society backwards, into a strict and hierarchical past that rejects modernity and democracy; God will make the decisions and determine how society should be run. ISIS and its ilk have selected the most violent sections of the Qur’an (trust me, the Old Testament has its share as well) – carefully avoiding the kinder gentler provisions – as justification for their horrific cruelty.

Strangely, the very Saudi monarchist elite that is in ISIS sights appears to have been one of the most ardent supporters (cash and other support) of that extremist cause. Other Gulf States have joined with the Saudis in this financing effort. The battles based on Saudi’s commitments to extreme Sunnism have also escalated Saudi confrontation with the growing Shiite movement protected by Iran, most recently battles between Saudi forces and Iran’s Shiite surrogates (Houthis) in Yemen. To understand the difference between those two branches of Islam, please refer to my October 20, 2015 blog,Persians, Phoenicians and Arabs – Modern Consequences.

In the end, these oil rich nations – temporarily impaired with a down oil marketplace – must be held accountable, and the United States has to ask itself: 1. How much governmental disruption are we willing to tolerate from these malignant nations we call “allies”? and 2. How far are we willing to go to alienate ordinary Muslims with our own religious intolerance, convincing them that they must now defend their faith?

I’m Peter Dekom, and our own government, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, seems to have participated as the enabler of Saudi (and regional) guilt money through its blind tacit support of these nations as purported allies.

How China Really Laughs at America

As U.S. test scores (on globalized standard tests) from our 50 million public primary and secondary students, representing over 13,500 separate public school districts, fall, as public school (and public college/university) budgets either continue to be cut or fail to increase to keep up with new enrollees, lots of other public school systems outside the United States are going the other way. As each U.S. state and school district spends money to administer these massive bureaucracies, many still engaging in debates concerning the need to teach creationism vs. evolution, too many countries have simply prioritized teaching hard facts and necessary skills to their own children, with concomitant increases in their own test scores.

We know about stunning results in Finland, Switzerland, Singapore, etc., etc. But China is upgrading its schools, city-by-city, and where these new curricula are implemented, the results simply blow American test scores out of the water.  Shanghai, one of the People’s Republic’s largest cities (23 million residents), outshines the rest. It’s secret: a very special focus on the teachers themselves.

“Pupils in the Chinese city have been ranked in top place in international school tests, and the World Bank, which provides financial and technical assistance to developing countries, has published a report investigating Shanghai's academic success.

“It found the standard of teaching was the biggest advantage, including a system of constant teacher training and upgrading of skills… Teachers in Shanghai, on average, spend only a third of their time teaching - with most of their time being spent on training, preparation and working with mentors.

“There are ‘stringent’ requirements to get into teaching, which is seen as a prestigious job, and even though teachers can be dismissed, the study found that, in practice, this was rare… Instead, there was a system with a very strong emphasis on training and a career built on incentives for the best teachers.

“Teachers can receive as much as 30% of their pay in merit payments, decided at school level, on top of a basic salary… Head teachers are expected to carry on teaching and part of their pay is linked to their school's performance… There are incentives for teachers and head teachers to work in tougher underperforming and rural schools - such as helping their careers to advance more quickly… And there can be rotations of teachers working in the most disadvantaged schools…

“The most recent tests, run by the OECD, have put Shanghai in top place for maths, reading and science in a global league table of countries and regional school systems.

“Report author Xiaoyan Liang said: ‘One of the most impressive aspects of Shanghai's education system is the way it grooms, supports, and manages teachers, who are central to any effort to raise the education quality in schools.’… She said the high level of public respect for teachers in Shanghai was another reflection of ‘how well they teach. They are true professionals.’ ” BBC.com, May 18^th.  

There’s a popular American slogan, “those who can do, those who can’t teach” that infuriates me. Our public school mandate of teaching to the test, simply to make test scores look good without genuine concern for the children’s competency, is unsustainable. We can and must be better than that. We need to respect teachers, hold them in the highest esteem… which we don’t today. And somehow, the weight of too many school districts is not a “states’ rights/local” benefit anymore, it is an anchor around the neck of our ability to rise and achieve. It was easy to run this way when the rest of the world was struggling to revive following WWII, but in a modern world and given rising global educational practices, this wasteful system is neither efficient nor generating the necessary results.

While US teachers are “true professionals” as well, the above Shanghai system doesn’t sound like any American school district I know. On the American side, there is generally no internal systematic continuous training mechanism within any of our school districts. Upgrades here range from occasional teacher “conferences” to advanced degrees and certifications, often at the teacher’s expense, at local colleges and universities. Most of our teachers are dealing with crowded classrooms, generating massive out-of-classroom assignment preparation, paper review and test scoring. Upgrades occur mostly on the teacher’s off hours and not within the school district proper.

Shanghai standards are becoming the model for other Chinese cities and towns. The product of these enhanced educational processes are precisely the minds that American students are going to face in the head-to-head global competition market they must enter. Trade agreements, tariffs and economic sanctions are not enough to protect our young people from better-educated, better-skilled workers able to create, design and work for wages that remain lower than anywhere in the Western world. We need to be better, stronger and more educated than anyone else. The American “dream” is just that… without hard work and investment in our own future: education, infrastructure and research… it is merely a “dream” to return to a bygone era.

 I’m Peter Dekom, and we need to heed to wake-up call and not simply hit the expedient and distracting snooze button!

Fascinating to Watch, Scary to Live Through

The twenty-first century is hurtling through change. Implemented with the rapidity of an invading army, change is ripping through our lives with explosive force. We are seeing seismic shifts in technology – now beyond the Web, including driverless cars and hyperloops threatening to replace trains – as new armed insurrection and conquests morph into clashes between civilizations… redrawing boundaries, rebellion accelerated by massive and serious alterations global climate patterns, desertifying once fertile farms, flooding other lands into inhabitability. Superpowers struggle for supremacy, almost always accompanied by significant upgrades and expansions of military capacity… and a new willingness to use these, generally through surrogates.

In the West, there is this sinking feeling that economics for most of us will never return our nations to the glory days we enjoyed a few decades ago; as total societies, we do not expect to enjoy the true relative earning power our parents did. Whether it is generated by the Malthusian reality of too many people on this planet scrambling to access dwindling resources or a value shift from legacy practices weighing down older nations, the greatest losses in the West are suffered from the middle classes on down. Those in the West with wealth and super-earning power have more money than ever, enjoying off-shore income manipulations and the benefits of productive asset ownership. As the West falls, Asia rises.

Populism, from the left and right, are tearing at the seams of the European Union, challenging the viability of the open borders inherent in the EU Schengen Agreement and questioning the functionality of a single currency. As Britain contemplates Brexit, other EU countries question why they too do not have the ability to vote to opt out. In the United States, lashing out at incumbent and entrenched power players has torn through both major political parties. This has lead the Republicans to the edge of nominating a candidate who has challenged some of that party’s most basic elitist policies. Establishment Democrats feel the fierce bites of an unrelenting socialist bulldog, unwilling to accept the likely legacy candidate as their likely nominee.

Internal labor laws within some of the most powerful EU economic players – Germany and France at the fore in a world where firing a worker is close to impossible – illustrate the growing battles between social benefits and competitive economic realities. The French believe that having a job is a basic constitutional right. The near impossibility of discharging an employee has led too many potential employers to avoid hiring young-entering-the-job-market workers for fear of not being able to let them go should business go bad or such workers not proving themselves. While the overall jobless rate in France is an unacceptable 10%, that number really reflects a 24% unemployment rate among the youngest potential workers.

French employers often resort to questionable tactics (like moving an executive from a plush office to what the French call “le placard” – the closet) to force the unwanted to quit. It’s not pretty. “While many other European countries have revamped their workplace rules, France has barely budged. [A] new labor bill — weakened after long negotiations — wouldn’t alter the bifurcated system, in which workers either get a permanent contract called a ‘contrat à durée indéterminée,’ known as a C.D.I., or a short-term contract that can be renewed only once or twice. Almost all new jobs have the latter.

“And yet it isn’t just unions that oppose the bill. So do more than 60 percent of the population, who fear the bill would strip workers of protections without fixing the problem. Young people took to the streets to oppose it, demanding C.D.I.s, too… Why are the French so wedded to a failing system?... For starters, they believe that a job is a basic right — guaranteed in the preamble to their Constitution — and that making it easier to fire people is an affront to that. Without a C.D.I., you’re considered naked before the indifferent forces of capitalism.

“At one demonstration in Paris, young protesters held a banner warning that they were the ‘génération précaire.’ [precarious/insecure generation] They were agitating for the right to grow up. As Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow point out in their new book, ‘The Bonjour Effect,’ getting a permanent work contract is a rite of adulthood. Without one, it’s hard to get a mortgage or car loan, or rent an apartment.

“Mainstream economic arguments can’t compete. ‘Basic facts of economic science are completely dismissed,’ said Étienne Wasmer, a labor economist at Sciences Po. ‘People don’t see that if you let employers take risks, they’ll hire more people.’ Instead, many French people view the workplace as a zero-sum battle between workers and bosses… Economic debates are also framed as political showdowns.” New York Times, May 11^th. Folks are looking around them, sensing the new “middle class” insecurity and reacting with whatever tools they can find, usually political rebellion. Like the new populism developing everywhere in the West, most surprising to those of us in the “capitalism headquarters,” the United States of America

Democratic presidential-wannabee Bernie Sanders openly uses the word “socialism” – which would have sealed his fate a decade ago – and joins luminaries like Bill Gates and Elon Musk in fretting about what happens when artificial-intelligence-automation decimates the job market in the coming years. Indeed, as politicians promise to return manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores, the reality is that most of that re-imported manufacturing capacity has returned will return to highly automated plants where those who really make the big bucks are the owners of the machines and not the workers who have long-since lost their jobs. Just looking at what’s happening to the American middle class tells us that the United States is in for a very bumpy future as well, perhaps more violent and disruptive than even Europe.

“The great shrinking of the middle class that has captured the attention of the nation is not only playing out in troubled regions like the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the Deep South, but in just about every metropolitan area in America, according to a major new analysis by the Pew Research Center.

“Pew reported in December that a clear majority of American adults no longer live in the middle class, a demographic reality shaped by decades of widening inequality, declining industry and the erosion of financial stability and family-wage jobs. But while much of the attention has focused on communities hardest hit by economic declines, the new Pew data, based on metro-level income data since 2000, show that middle-class stagnation is a far broader phenomenon.

“The share of adults living in middle-income households has also dwindled in Washington, New York, San Francisco, Atlanta and Denver. It's fallen in smaller Midwestern metros where the middle class has long made up an overwhelming majority of the population. It's withering in coastal tech hubs, in military towns, in college communities, in Sun Belt cities.

“The decline of the American middle class is ‘a pervasive local phenomenon,’ according to Pew, which analyzed census and American Community Survey data in 229 metros across the country, encompassing about three-quarters of the U.S. population. In 203 of those metros, the share of adults in middle-income households fell from 2000 to 2014.” The Washington Post, May 11^th. The world obviously and continuously redefines itself, revolution and evolution. How we address the obvious dissatisfaction of the majority of “us” will determine which nations survive… and which find themselves relegated to the trash-heap of history.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as I said, these times are fascinating to watch but scary to live through.

Not Mine Any More

The coal industry has been flagging since the 1920s, fewer workers every year, declining demand for coal and a horrible reputation for the worst kind of pollution, tanking the atmosphere with every puff of sooty smoke. Particular emissions and CO₂abound, but with some serious “scrubbing,” even so-called “clean coal” still means that the effluents are simply pumped underground for future generations to deal with. And yet coal is still the primary fuel used to generate electricity worldwide. International climate change accords are pushing to stop coal-fired electrical power generation, and most of the developed and developing world seem to agree.

Here in the United States, despite the serial bankruptcies of coal producers, complaints of polluted drinking water and a recent conviction (last December, Massey Energy chief executive Don Blankenship was convicted for safety violations at a West Virginia mine where 29 workers were killed), putting coal miners back to work has become a Republican rallying cry. Unencumbered by environmental concerns, continuing to maintain that climate change is a hoax, Republicans are vowing to restore coal to its former glory, returning miners to an obsolete industry.

But this remains a hot button in West Virginia and a very important swing state, Pennsylvania, where coal mines have been important local industries. Hillary Clinton’s statement at a CNN Town Hall interview on March 13^th has grabbed headlines ever since: “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” is the line that her opponents like to quote, even though she tempered her response with a pledge to retrain miners for new jobs going forward, using federal funds to soften the economic blow to those miners burdened by the transition. Could Clinton lose the general election because she might just lose a major electoral vote state like Pennsylvania?

The backlash was immediate and widespread.  Perhaps this local response best sums up the reaction from Republicans across the board. “‘[Clinton’s] statement is an affront to the coal miners of the United States, and their families, as well as the up to 11 working families whose livelihoods depend on each of our direct mining jobs,’ said Murray Energy Corp. [West Virginia] CEO Robert E. Murray. ‘While such a threat to our lives from a presidential candidate is beyond strange, it does confirm what the national Democrat Party [sic] has been accomplishing for the past eight years.’.. Murray pointed out his company now employs about 5,300 people over six states - or almost 37 percent less than the 8,400 it employed as recently as May [2015].

“‘Nearly 200,000 of America's coal miners have lost their jobs, and 49 American coal companies have filed for bankruptcy, as a result of the policies of the Obama administration and the increased use of natural gas to generate electricity,’ Murray said. ‘Mrs. Clinton has now promised to further this destruction.’” The Wheeling Register, March 17^th. Nothing new, simply a trend that began almost a century ago. Clinton backtracked and apologized for the seeming callousness of her remark, but the damage was done. Donald Trump seized on her statement and promised coal miners full employment under his administration. But we all know that nothing is going to revive a moribund industry whose time is long, long past.

But even Clinton’s backtracking seem to fly in the face of the inevitable: “I don't know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context for what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time… It was a misstatement because what I was saying is the way things are going now, (coal miners) will continue to lose jobs. It didn't mean that we were going to do it. What I said is that is going to happen unless we take action to help and prevent it.”

Simply, we cannot afford to continue to support coal-fired power generation anywhere. The costs of letting this coal process continue are vastly higher than the losses that must be faced by the coal industry, workers and businesses. We actually can bridge the transition for coal miners and their local communities at a much lower cost than allowing this industry to continue and lying to ourselves that this economic sector has a remotely viable future anywhere.

John Sutter, writing for the May 6^th CNN.com, opines: Economics are part of the picture. The natural gas boom is part of the reason coal companies are going down the tubes. But the bigger story -- the one the candidates are less focused on -- is about public health and climate change.

Consider two sets of facts:

1. Coal does employ many thousands of people but the harm caused by burning coal affects billions. There were less than 75,000 coal miners in the United States in 2014, the most recent year numbers are available, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Meanwhile, pollution from coal power plants caused an estimated 13,200 premature deaths in the United States in 2010, according to a 2010 report from the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit dedicated to improving air quality. The group attributed an additional 9,700 hospitalizations and more than 20,000 heart attacks to coal power that year alone. Globally, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution kills an estimated 3 million per year -- and it could cause 6.6 million premature deaths per year by 2050.

2. Coal is a major driver of climate change. At least 175 countries, including the United States, recently signed the Paris Agreement on climate change. That international treaty aims to prevent catastrophic warming, which places an unfair burden on the world's poor and unborn generations. In order to do that, the agreement says the world needs to be carbon neutral by the end of the century. That basically means no fossil fuels, especially coal. An article published in the journal Nature says 88% of the world's coal reserves must be left in the ground if we're going to meet international climate targets. For the United States the proportion is higher: 95%.

On Tuesday, May 10^th, Bernie Sanders blew Hillary Clinton out of the West Virginia Democratic primary by well over 15 percentage points; she lost in every county. Denial is never pretty. Sorry coal miners, it your world is not coming back no matter what anyone might promise. Denying technological change, environmental consequences and changes in basic consumer supply and demand dynamics, trying to force a return to a clearly unrepeatable past, never works. Never. The sooner we deal with reality, the less expensive it will be for all concerned. There is absolutely nothing anyone can do to bring back “King coal.” That ship has long-since sailed.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we cannot change the world with slogans and meaningless gestures to return to a place it never will be again.

Water is the Next Oil

Fuel may drive electrical power generation, industrial growth and vehicular mobility, but water drives life itself. Irrigation, sanitation and simple drinking water to just about every land animal and plant on earth. We are polluting many natural water resources, just as others are simply disappearing with climate change and over-usage.  Elsewhere, freshwater flooding – seen most recently in our own Midwest and Texas – throws excess at systems built during an era of totally different climatic expectations.

Some countries, notably Israel and Chile, have learned to extract scarce water from limited resources and apply those precious drops precisely to the task at hand. Drip irrigation has been perfected by those long-used to living with unforgiving desert climates. The rest of the world needs to learn these lessons, but for the most populous nations on earth, these systems are mere palliatives to overwhelming water shortfalls.

It was no accident that the last Chinese administration (pre-Xi Jinping) was populated with water engineers. Eight of the nine members of the previous Politburo’s standing committee were engineers and a former president, Hu Jintao, was also a water engineer. Water is a very, very big problem in China. “China is dangerously short of water. While the south is a lush, lake-filled region, the north—which has half the population and most of the farmland—is more like a desert. The international definition of water stress is 1,000 cubic metres of usable water per person per year. The average northern Chinese has less than a fifth of that amount. China has 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its fresh water. A former prime minister, Wen Jiabao, once said water shortages threaten ‘the very survival of the Chinese nation.’…

“The shortage is worsening because China’s water is disappearing. In the 1950s the country had 50,000 rivers with catchment areas of 100 square kilometres or more. Now the number is down to 23,000. China has lost 27,000 rivers, mostly as a result of over-exploitation by farms or factories.

“Water shortages impose big costs. China is hoping for a shale-gas revolution but does not have enough water for it since most of the gas reserves are in the driest parts of the country [Oil/gas extraction from shale requires massive water supplies]. The World Bank puts the cost of China’s water problems—mostly damage to health—at 2.3% of a year’s GDP.” The Economist, October 12, 2013.

China’s answer is massive water diversion projects, starting with the ancient Grand Canal that runs north-south between Beijing and Hangzhou, building two thousand new canals, and diverting river water in one region to replenish dwindling water in another. Aside from the environmental risks of mingling incompatible ecosystems, many of the PRC’s other policy directives need to be addressed, according to The Economist: “Damming or diverting rivers tackles only supply—increasing available water by capturing more of what flows through rivers or by moving water from one river to another. The government would do better to focus on demand, reducing consumption of water in order to make better use of limited supplies. Water is too cheap in most cities, usually costing a tenth of prices in Europe. Such mispricing results in extravagance. Industry recycles too little water; agriculture wastes too much. Higher water prices would raise costs for farms and factories, but that would be better than spending billions on shipping water round the country.

“Development plans should also be rewritten with an eye to the shortage. China is building cities of a million people in the Gobi desert. That makes no sense. The government should stop boosting demand for water in places that have none.

“China should also fine polluters. According to the land ministry, more than half the groundwater in northern China is too dirty for people to wash in, let alone drink, and some is so poisonous it cannot even be used in the fields. Reducing pollution would not just improve Chinese people’s health, but would also do more than building any number of dams to increase available supplies of usable water.

“China’s engineers have performed amazing feats in the course of its development. But the water problem is best solved by its economists and environmental regulators.”  So much for China. What about the other most populous country in the world, one with a population that will soon eclipse even that of China? India.

The water issues in India are as severe as those in China, as its rivers dry up as well. “Following two consecutive bad monsoons, India is facing one of its worst droughts… Of its 29 states, nearly half were reported to have suffered from severe water crisis this dry season. The worst hit have been Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, among others… The federal government in Delhi has had to send trains carrying water to the worst affected places… India has faced a water crisis for years. Its ground waters have depleted to alarming levels, mainly because of unsustainable extraction for agriculture and industries.” BBC.com, May 16^th.

India’s solution appears to be badly conceived, and more based on generating short-term popular political support with a perceived quick fix than a real long-term, sustainable truth.  “India is set to divert water from its rivers to deal with a severe drought, a senior minister has told the BBC.

“Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti said transferring water, including from major rivers like the Brahmaputra and the Ganges, to drought-prone areas is now her government's top priority… At least 330 million people are affected by drought in India… The drought is taking place as a heat wave extends across much of India, with temperatures in excess of 40C [104 degrees Fahrenheit].

“The Inter Linking of Rivers (ILR) has 30 links planned for water-transfer, 14 of them fed by Himalayan glaciers in the north of the country and 16 in peninsular India… Environmentalists have opposed the project, arguing it will invite ecological disaster but the Supreme Court has ordered its implementation…

“‘It is even more impossible in the context of climate change as you don't know what will happen to the rivers' flows,’ says Himanshu Thakkar of the South Asia Network for Dams, Rivers and People… ‘The project is based on the idea of diverting water from where it is surplus to dry areas but there has been no scientific study yet on which places have more water and which ones less.’” BBC.com.

The United States also has severe long-term drought conditions in the West, particularly in California, America’s fruit and vegetable garden. Water rationing, attempting to realign legal rights to underground water and drilling down on the biggest wasters of this precious resource have only begun to address this dwindling of our own water resources, most of which is directly linked to climate change issues (as well as recurring weather cycles like Il Niño).

Between conservation, redesigning water usage and extraction processes and technology, we better start finding some long-term solutions or… yeah… we’re going to face a future of death and destruction dealing with this reality. Water wars? Some say that’s really what the explosions in the Middle East are already all about.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the word “next” in the title of this blog should probably be more like “now.”