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"title": "Is There Life in the Clouds Above Venus?",
"headTitle": "Is There Life in the Clouds Above Venus? | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In an era of deep space exploration, a tantalizing and surprising discovery has raised the possibility of life on Earth’s nearest, scorching-hot planetary neighbor \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/venus/overview/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Venus\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Scientists observing with the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.eaobservatory.org/jcmt/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">James Clerk Maxwell Telescope\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in Hawaii \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2009/2009.06499.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">detected the spectroscopic signature\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of the chemical compound \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">phosphine\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in the Venusian clouds, about 35 miles above the surface. Follow-up observations with the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/home/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in Chile confirmed the discovery.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Phosphine, or PH3, a molecule composed of one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms, is a “\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://astrobiology.com/2019/10/phosphine-as-a-biosignature-gas-in-exoplanet-atmospheres.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">biomarker\u003c/span>\u003c/a>“\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> chemical that scientists hope to find in the atmospheres of distant Earth-like extrasolar planets to indicate possible biological activity.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On Earth, besides human industrial activity, the only known generator of phosphine is anaerobic life (which does not require oxygen to grow), either from microbial organisms or the decomposition of organic matter. And though there are nonbiological processes that produce phosphine deep in the hydrogen atmospheres of giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, those conditions are not found on small rocky worlds like Earth and Venus.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Follow the Phosphine?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/about/history-of-astrobiology/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Astrobiologists \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">have focused their search for extraterrestrial life on places that harbor liquid water. NASA’s life-seeking motto is “Follow the water,” since life as we understand it on Earth requires water to thrive, let alone originate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Orbital spacecraft like NASA’s \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/odyssey/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mars Odyssey \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and rovers like \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Spirit, Opportunity\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Curiosity\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, have raked the dry surface of Mars to find and analyze mineral residues from its extinct seas. Soon, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perseverance \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">will dig for signs of past Martian life that may have thrived in those waters. The Galileo spacecraft and Hubble Space Telescope have revealed \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://europa.nasa.gov/europa/ocean/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">signs of an ocean\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> hidden under the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the Cassini probe sampled plumes of mineral-laden water erupting from Saturn’s moon \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/science/enceladus/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Enceladus\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, believed to originate from a subsurface sea.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969691\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1969691 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA-800x780.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"780\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA-800x780.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA-160x156.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA-768x749.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An infrared image of the cloud structure on the night side of Venus (right half) captured by Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft. The image shows a surprising amount of atmospheric structure in the nighttime clouds of Venus, whose hot, thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and clouds of sulfuric acid create an environment not thought to support life. Measurements of the biomarker molecule phosphine are making scientists reconsider the possibility of a more life friendly environment high in Venus’ atmosphere. \u003ccite>(JAXA/Akatsuki)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But one thing we have learned about life on Earth is that it keeps showing up in places where we least expect to find it. “\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/extremophile.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Extremophiles\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">,” earthly organisms that thrive in some of the hottest, coldest and most toxic watery environments on our planet, have been found deep within frigid Antarctic and alpine lakes, around superheated hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and at the fringes of toxic geothermal hot springs. These highly resilient and adaptable life forms give us hope of finding signs of life in the waters of completely alien worlds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With very little water vapor in its atmosphere, Venus is not a place where scientists expect to find signs of life, but the discovery of the biomarker phosphine is fueling \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/life-on-venus-breakthrough-initiatives-funds-study-of-possible-biosignature/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">further investigation\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and possible \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-goddard-team-selected-to-design-concept-for-probe-of-mysterious-venus-atmosphere\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">future missions to Venus\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to explore the question.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>If This Is Life, Where Did It Come From?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If the phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere is produced by non-oxygen-using microbial life and not abiotic chemical processes (processes not derived from living organisms) that we simply don’t yet understand, where did the critters come from? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On Venus’ surface, temperatures soar to around 900 degrees Fahrenheit, and the atmospheric pressure is 90 times greater than sea level on Earth, equivalent to the water pressure half a mile deep in Earth’s oceans. It is challenging to imagine even a hardy form of Venusian life existing there. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969695\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1969695 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-800x460.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"460\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-800x460.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-1020x587.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-160x92.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-768x442.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu.jpg 1440w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An image taken on the surface of Venus by the Soviet Union’s Venera 13 spacecraft in 1982. The Venera landings are the only missions to have captured images on Venus’ surface. \u003ccite>(USSR Academy of Sciences / Brown University)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But at the altitude where Venus’ phosphine was detected, between 30 and 40 miles above the surface, the atmospheric pressure and temperature are similar to Earth’s surface, though the chemistry is very different, dominated by carbon dioxide gas and liquid droplets of sulfuric acid. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some scientists believe that conditions on Venus were very different in the past, and that billions of years ago \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-climate-modeling-suggests-venus-may-have-been-habitable\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Venus might have had a surface ocean\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of water and atmospheric conditions closer to that of the young Earth. And if life could arise in Earth’s primordial oceans and atmosphere, why not on Venus?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As the environment on Venus’ surface changed from more clement conditions to the hellish planetary pressure cooker it is today, some theorize that extremophile life forms could have fled skyward to survive, adapting to a less harsh environmental niche at higher altitude.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>What’s Next in the Hunt for Life on Venus?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Researchers stress that the detection of phosphine in the clouds above Venus \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/so-astronomers-may-have-found-evidence-of-life-on-venus\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">does not mean the certain presence\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of life there, and that there may be a nonbiological explanation that we have yet to understand.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969694\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1969694 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/pia00104-640-NASA.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"350\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/pia00104-640-NASA.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/pia00104-640-NASA-160x88.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A radar map of the surface of the planet Venus, created from data acquired by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s. Venus’ thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and dense sulfuric acid clouds make visible-light observations of Venus’ surface impossible, but radar does penetrate the clouds, letting us view the global topography of Earth’s “sister planet.” \u003ccite>(NASA)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Further telescopic observations will be made to learn more, but verifying what’s going on in Venus’ atmosphere will require sending a spacecraft to investigate. NASA is currently \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-17/nasa-considering-venus-mission-after-gas-discovery/12672078\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">considering mission proposals\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to do just that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If there is life thriving in Venus’ clouds, it raises even more questions: Did life begin independently on Earth and Venus, and if so, which came first? Or could life on both planets share a common origin? And, if life sprung up readily on both sister planets, and possibly on neighboring Mars as well, what does that say about how common life may be in the universe?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Personally, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a future robotic probe floating through the Venusian atmosphere will send us evidence of microscopic life floating in the clouds of our closest neighboring planet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Scientists' surprise discovery of the biomarker molecule phosphine in the clouds of Venus might be an indication of some form of life there. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In an era of deep space exploration, a tantalizing and surprising discovery has raised the possibility of life on Earth’s nearest, scorching-hot planetary neighbor \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/venus/overview/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Venus\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Scientists observing with the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.eaobservatory.org/jcmt/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">James Clerk Maxwell Telescope\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in Hawaii \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2009/2009.06499.pdf\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">detected the spectroscopic signature\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of the chemical compound \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">phosphine\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in the Venusian clouds, about 35 miles above the surface. Follow-up observations with the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.almaobservatory.org/en/home/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in Chile confirmed the discovery.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Phosphine, or PH3, a molecule composed of one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms, is a “\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://astrobiology.com/2019/10/phosphine-as-a-biosignature-gas-in-exoplanet-atmospheres.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">biomarker\u003c/span>\u003c/a>“\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> chemical that scientists hope to find in the atmospheres of distant Earth-like extrasolar planets to indicate possible biological activity.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On Earth, besides human industrial activity, the only known generator of phosphine is anaerobic life (which does not require oxygen to grow), either from microbial organisms or the decomposition of organic matter. And though there are nonbiological processes that produce phosphine deep in the hydrogen atmospheres of giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, those conditions are not found on small rocky worlds like Earth and Venus.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Follow the Phosphine?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/about/history-of-astrobiology/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Astrobiologists \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">have focused their search for extraterrestrial life on places that harbor liquid water. NASA’s life-seeking motto is “Follow the water,” since life as we understand it on Earth requires water to thrive, let alone originate.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Orbital spacecraft like NASA’s \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/odyssey/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mars Odyssey \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, and rovers like \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Spirit, Opportunity\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Curiosity\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, have raked the dry surface of Mars to find and analyze mineral residues from its extinct seas. Soon, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perseverance \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">will dig for signs of past Martian life that may have thrived in those waters. The Galileo spacecraft and Hubble Space Telescope have revealed \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://europa.nasa.gov/europa/ocean/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">signs of an ocean\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> hidden under the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and the Cassini probe sampled plumes of mineral-laden water erupting from Saturn’s moon \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/science/enceladus/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Enceladus\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, believed to originate from a subsurface sea.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969691\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1969691 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA-800x780.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"780\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA-800x780.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA-160x156.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA-768x749.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/470_a_NightonVenus-ISAS-JAXA.jpg 960w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An infrared image of the cloud structure on the night side of Venus (right half) captured by Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft. The image shows a surprising amount of atmospheric structure in the nighttime clouds of Venus, whose hot, thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and clouds of sulfuric acid create an environment not thought to support life. Measurements of the biomarker molecule phosphine are making scientists reconsider the possibility of a more life friendly environment high in Venus’ atmosphere. \u003ccite>(JAXA/Akatsuki)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But one thing we have learned about life on Earth is that it keeps showing up in places where we least expect to find it. “\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/extremophile.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Extremophiles\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">,” earthly organisms that thrive in some of the hottest, coldest and most toxic watery environments on our planet, have been found deep within frigid Antarctic and alpine lakes, around superheated hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, and at the fringes of toxic geothermal hot springs. These highly resilient and adaptable life forms give us hope of finding signs of life in the waters of completely alien worlds.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With very little water vapor in its atmosphere, Venus is not a place where scientists expect to find signs of life, but the discovery of the biomarker phosphine is fueling \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/life-on-venus-breakthrough-initiatives-funds-study-of-possible-biosignature/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">further investigation\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and possible \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-goddard-team-selected-to-design-concept-for-probe-of-mysterious-venus-atmosphere\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">future missions to Venus\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to explore the question.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>If This Is Life, Where Did It Come From?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If the phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere is produced by non-oxygen-using microbial life and not abiotic chemical processes (processes not derived from living organisms) that we simply don’t yet understand, where did the critters come from? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On Venus’ surface, temperatures soar to around 900 degrees Fahrenheit, and the atmospheric pressure is 90 times greater than sea level on Earth, equivalent to the water pressure half a mile deep in Earth’s oceans. It is challenging to imagine even a hardy form of Venusian life existing there. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969695\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1969695 size-medium\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-800x460.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"460\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-800x460.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-1020x587.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-160x92.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu-768x442.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/WEB12184-2011_640-Venera13-USSRAcademyOfSciences-BrownUniversityu.jpg 1440w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An image taken on the surface of Venus by the Soviet Union’s Venera 13 spacecraft in 1982. The Venera landings are the only missions to have captured images on Venus’ surface. \u003ccite>(USSR Academy of Sciences / Brown University)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But at the altitude where Venus’ phosphine was detected, between 30 and 40 miles above the surface, the atmospheric pressure and temperature are similar to Earth’s surface, though the chemistry is very different, dominated by carbon dioxide gas and liquid droplets of sulfuric acid. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some scientists believe that conditions on Venus were very different in the past, and that billions of years ago \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-climate-modeling-suggests-venus-may-have-been-habitable\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Venus might have had a surface ocean\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of water and atmospheric conditions closer to that of the young Earth. And if life could arise in Earth’s primordial oceans and atmosphere, why not on Venus?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As the environment on Venus’ surface changed from more clement conditions to the hellish planetary pressure cooker it is today, some theorize that extremophile life forms could have fled skyward to survive, adapting to a less harsh environmental niche at higher altitude.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>What’s Next in the Hunt for Life on Venus?\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Researchers stress that the detection of phosphine in the clouds above Venus \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/so-astronomers-may-have-found-evidence-of-life-on-venus\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">does not mean the certain presence\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of life there, and that there may be a nonbiological explanation that we have yet to understand.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969694\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 640px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1969694 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/pia00104-640-NASA.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"350\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/pia00104-640-NASA.jpg 640w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/pia00104-640-NASA-160x88.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A radar map of the surface of the planet Venus, created from data acquired by NASA’s Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s. Venus’ thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and dense sulfuric acid clouds make visible-light observations of Venus’ surface impossible, but radar does penetrate the clouds, letting us view the global topography of Earth’s “sister planet.” \u003ccite>(NASA)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Further telescopic observations will be made to learn more, but verifying what’s going on in Venus’ atmosphere will require sending a spacecraft to investigate. NASA is currently \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-17/nasa-considering-venus-mission-after-gas-discovery/12672078\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">considering mission proposals\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to do just that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If there is life thriving in Venus’ clouds, it raises even more questions: Did life begin independently on Earth and Venus, and if so, which came first? Or could life on both planets share a common origin? And, if life sprung up readily on both sister planets, and possibly on neighboring Mars as well, what does that say about how common life may be in the universe?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Personally, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a future robotic probe floating through the Venusian atmosphere will send us evidence of microscopic life floating in the clouds of our closest neighboring planet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Smoke From California's Record Wildfires Is Its Own Disaster",
"headTitle": "Smoke From California’s Record Wildfires Is Its Own Disaster | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp class=\"p1\">Hundreds of wildfires have scorched over 3 million acres in California this year. That’s the most burned land for any year on record in the state, and we’re still only about halfway through the fire season.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Smoke from those fires \u003c/span>polluted the air in the Bay Area for 30 straight days in August and September, prompting the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to issue the longest consecutive string of “Spare the Air” alerts in its history, more than doubling the previous record of 14, set during the Camp Fire in November 2018. Within the recent period of smoke inundation came the six worst air quality days in the Bay Area in 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“Smoke is everywhere,” Wayne Kino, a pollution control officer with the regional air district, told the agency’s board last week. “Smoke generated at the fires, smoke lingering out at the ocean, is coming in. It’s some of the worst air quality we’ve experienced.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p5\">Emergency room doctors at Sutter’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland have begun to see patients sickened by\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>the smoke, reporting a flare-up in asthma and emphysema-related admissions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re starting to see a cumulative effect,” said Ronn Berrol, medical director of Alta Bates’ emergency department. “Our numbers are going up — respiratory, throat irritation, coughing, chest pain, heart palpitations. A real gamut of things; the uptick is definitely noticeable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p5\">In the South Bay, Dr. Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at Stanford’s allergy and asthma research center, analyzed hospital records during the fires and found admissions of patients with asthma attacks up 10%. For people with stroke-like symptoms, the increase was 23%, including 43% for seniors.\u003cbr>\n\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003cbr>\n“This is the first time the Bay Area has ever really experienced something like this,” Prunicki said, about the persistently degraded air quality, which she described as “remarkably bad.”\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cb>A Choking Fog of Particulate Matter\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">While officials have been focused on the severe damage caused by the fires, the profusion of smoke is a disastrous event on its own, touching the lives of nearly every person breathing on the West Coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">At times the “smokestorm” was so thick, it obscured and filtered the sunlight, bathing the Bay Area in an orange hue reminiscent of one of the bleak sci-fi landscapes in\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>“Blade Runner 2049.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p5\">Plumes of wildfire smoke blanketed the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego and beyond. Last week, an early-season storm blew the smoke clouds east across the continental U.S., shrouding the sun in faraway states like \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSNewYorkNY/status/1305666259141312514?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1305666259141312514%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fworld-54173615\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">New York\u003c/span>\u003c/a> and giving the Bay Area a much needed breather, literally, from the dirty air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/WMO/status/1307990230696431617?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At a time when the coronavirus pandemic has prevented much indoor socializing, the wildfire smoke inhibited Californians’ already restricted access to the outdoors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">The smokestorm could make the worst public health crisis in a century even worse, \u003cspan class=\"s5\">Prunicki says. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Exposure to smoke pollution will make you more susceptible to viruses,” she said. “And studies have shown that higher COVID-19 rates are associated with increased air pollution.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some research has also found exposure to wildfire smoke associated with \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440113/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">slightly lower birth weights\u003c/a> and a greater risk of \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6801422/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">preterm birth\u003c/a>. An ongoing UC Davis \u003ca href=\"https://environmentalhealth.ucdavis.edu/wildfire-pregnancy-research-B-SAFE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">study\u003c/a> is looking at wildfire smoke’s effect on the health of pregnant women and their babies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Fall Wildfire Outlook Does Not Look Good\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The full consequences of the terrible air quality won’t be known until the fires — already existing and yet to come — stop burning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">The table was set for this year’s record-breaking wildfires by a century of fire suppression that allowed vegetation to build up and feed the recent conflagrations, and a\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/CAgovernor/status/1305591609434796032?s=20\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\"> three-degree climb\u003c/span>\u003c/a> over two decades in California’s average summer temperatures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">The warming temperatures, driven by climate change, exacerbated drought conditions and primed Sierra and North Coast forests to burn. When thunderstorms swept across the hillsides in August, thousands of dry lightning strikes sparked hundreds of fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">In recent years, Northern California’s biggest fires — like last year’s Kincade Fire in Sonoma County — occurred when Diablo winds ripped across dried-out hillsides full of tinder in the fall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During a NOAA climate assessment briefing last week, federal meteorologist Brad Pugh said Northern California faces a worse-than-average autumn wildfire outlook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“With expanding drought and above-normal temperatures during October, November, December, that elevates the chances for continued wildfire risk,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NOAA estimates the total cost of California’s August wildfires at a billion dollars, minimum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jon Brooks contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p1\">Hundreds of wildfires have scorched over 3 million acres in California this year. That’s the most burned land for any year on record in the state, and we’re still only about halfway through the fire season.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Smoke from those fires \u003c/span>polluted the air in the Bay Area for 30 straight days in August and September, prompting the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to issue the longest consecutive string of “Spare the Air” alerts in its history, more than doubling the previous record of 14, set during the Camp Fire in November 2018. Within the recent period of smoke inundation came the six worst air quality days in the Bay Area in 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“Smoke is everywhere,” Wayne Kino, a pollution control officer with the regional air district, told the agency’s board last week. “Smoke generated at the fires, smoke lingering out at the ocean, is coming in. It’s some of the worst air quality we’ve experienced.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p5\">Emergency room doctors at Sutter’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland have begun to see patients sickened by\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>the smoke, reporting a flare-up in asthma and emphysema-related admissions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re starting to see a cumulative effect,” said Ronn Berrol, medical director of Alta Bates’ emergency department. “Our numbers are going up — respiratory, throat irritation, coughing, chest pain, heart palpitations. A real gamut of things; the uptick is definitely noticeable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p5\">In the South Bay, Dr. Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at Stanford’s allergy and asthma research center, analyzed hospital records during the fires and found admissions of patients with asthma attacks up 10%. For people with stroke-like symptoms, the increase was 23%, including 43% for seniors.\u003cbr>\n\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003cbr>\n“This is the first time the Bay Area has ever really experienced something like this,” Prunicki said, about the persistently degraded air quality, which she described as “remarkably bad.”\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">\u003cb>A Choking Fog of Particulate Matter\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">While officials have been focused on the severe damage caused by the fires, the profusion of smoke is a disastrous event on its own, touching the lives of nearly every person breathing on the West Coast.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">At times the “smokestorm” was so thick, it obscured and filtered the sunlight, bathing the Bay Area in an orange hue reminiscent of one of the bleak sci-fi landscapes in\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>“Blade Runner 2049.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p5\">Plumes of wildfire smoke blanketed the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego and beyond. Last week, an early-season storm blew the smoke clouds east across the continental U.S., shrouding the sun in faraway states like \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/NWSNewYorkNY/status/1305666259141312514?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1305666259141312514%7Ctwgr%5Eshare_3&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fworld-54173615\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">New York\u003c/span>\u003c/a> and giving the Bay Area a much needed breather, literally, from the dirty air.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>At a time when the coronavirus pandemic has prevented much indoor socializing, the wildfire smoke inhibited Californians’ already restricted access to the outdoors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">The smokestorm could make the worst public health crisis in a century even worse, \u003cspan class=\"s5\">Prunicki says. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Exposure to smoke pollution will make you more susceptible to viruses,” she said. “And studies have shown that higher COVID-19 rates are associated with increased air pollution.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some research has also found exposure to wildfire smoke associated with \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440113/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">slightly lower birth weights\u003c/a> and a greater risk of \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6801422/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">preterm birth\u003c/a>. An ongoing UC Davis \u003ca href=\"https://environmentalhealth.ucdavis.edu/wildfire-pregnancy-research-B-SAFE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">study\u003c/a> is looking at wildfire smoke’s effect on the health of pregnant women and their babies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Fall Wildfire Outlook Does Not Look Good\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The full consequences of the terrible air quality won’t be known until the fires — already existing and yet to come — stop burning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">The table was set for this year’s record-breaking wildfires by a century of fire suppression that allowed vegetation to build up and feed the recent conflagrations, and a\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/CAgovernor/status/1305591609434796032?s=20\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\"> three-degree climb\u003c/span>\u003c/a> over two decades in California’s average summer temperatures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">The warming temperatures, driven by climate change, exacerbated drought conditions and primed Sierra and North Coast forests to burn. When thunderstorms swept across the hillsides in August, thousands of dry lightning strikes sparked hundreds of fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">In recent years, Northern California’s biggest fires — like last year’s Kincade Fire in Sonoma County — occurred when Diablo winds ripped across dried-out hillsides full of tinder in the fall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During a NOAA climate assessment briefing last week, federal meteorologist Brad Pugh said Northern California faces a worse-than-average autumn wildfire outlook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“With expanding drought and above-normal temperatures during October, November, December, that elevates the chances for continued wildfire risk,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NOAA estimates the total cost of California’s August wildfires at a billion dollars, minimum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jon Brooks contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "CDC Publishes — Then Withdraws — Guidance on Aerosol Spread of Coronavirus",
"headTitle": "CDC Publishes — Then Withdraws — Guidance on Aerosol Spread of Coronavirus | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted guidance last Friday evening saying that aerosol transmission might be one of the “most common” ways the coronavirus is spreading — and then took the guidance down on Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The now-deleted updates were notable because so far the CDC has stopped short of saying that the virus is airborne.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency says the guidance was a draft version of proposed changes that was posted in error to its website. The CDC says that it is updating its recommendations regarding airborne transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 and that it will post updated language once that process is complete.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the weekend, the CDC page “\u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/how-covid-spreads.html\">How COVID-19 Spreads\u003c/a>” included among the most common modes of transmission “respiratory droplets or small particles, such as those in aerosols, produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, sings, talks, or breathes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It continued: “These particles can be inhaled into the nose, mouth, airways, and lungs and cause infection. This is thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” The guidance also stated that these particles might travel farther than 6 feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For a few days, researchers who have suspected aerosol transmission for months \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1307787446948511744\">cheered \u003c/a>the update as a long-overdue acknowledgment of accumulating evidence for how the virus transmits, particularly in indoor spaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now the page has reverted to what it said before — that the virus spreads between people in close contact through respiratory droplets. The page makes no mention of aerosol transmission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In July, the World Health Organization updated its guidance on aerosols after \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/887925721/scientists-urge-who-to-update-guidance-on-airborne-transmission-of-the-coronavir\">more than 200 scientists urged it\u003c/a> to do so. WHO’s guidance now \u003ca href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-how-is-covid-19-transmitted\">states\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“There have been reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in some closed settings, such as restaurants, nightclubs, places of worship or places of work where people may be shouting, talking, or singing. In these outbreaks, aerosol transmission, particularly in these indoor locations where there are crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces where infected persons spend long periods of time with others, cannot be ruled out. More studies are urgently needed to investigate such instances and assess their significance for transmission of COVID-19.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>What’s the difference between respiratory droplets and aerosol particles?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Respiratory droplets are larger and fall to the ground quickly — hence the 6-feet rule that’s generally considered safe for social distancing amid the pandemic. Aerosol particles are smaller and can linger in the air, moving with air currents from which they can be inhaled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An airborne virus is considered to be a virus that spreads in exhaled particles that are small enough to linger in the air and move with air currents, from which they can be breathed in by passersby who then get sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Linsey Marr is a professor of civil and environmental engineering who researches airborne transmission at Virginia Tech. She was excited to see the CDC’s changes on Friday, though she was also surprised at how strongly the new guidance was written — particularly in that it stated plainly that SARS-CoV-2 is an \u003cem>airborne virus\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such a classification could require additional precautions in health care settings, she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marr says that the changes mistakenly posted by the CDC could be significant if they are implemented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It means that nationally we need to do something about [transmission] beyond 6 feet, which means masks and ventilation and filtration,” she says. “And if we do that, I think we can get a better control on the spread of the virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The posted and withdrawn transmission guidelines are just the latest in public reversals and controversy at the CDC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Friday, the agency \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/914519545/cdc-reverses-controversial-guidelines-regarding-coronavirus-testing\">reversed its new guidance on testing\u003c/a>, published in August, that suggested people who have possibly been exposed to the coronavirus don’t necessarily need to get tested for infection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also last week, Michael Caputo, the top spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced he was \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913684013/hhs-spokesperson-takes-leave-of-absence-after-disparaging-government-scientists\">taking a leave of absence\u003c/a> after a social media tirade in which he falsely accused government scientists of engaging in “sedition.” He had also come under criticism after reports that he and scientific adviser Paul Alexander sought to edit and delay public health reports from the CDC. Alexander is leaving the agency permanently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These episodes, among others, have raised questions about the agency’s consistency and credibility during the coronavirus pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Howard Koh is a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who served as assistant secretary for health during the Obama administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The consistent inconsistency in this administration’s guidance on COVID-19 has severely compromised the nation’s trust in our public health agencies,” Koh said in a statement Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“During the greatest public health emergency in a century, trust in public health is essential — without it, this pandemic could go on indefinitely. To rectify the latest challenge, the CDC must acknowledge that growing scientific evidence indicates the importance of airborne transmission through aerosols, making mask wearing even more critical as we head into the difficult fall and winter season.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=CDC+Publishes+%E2%80%94+Then+Withdraws+%E2%80%94+Guidance+On+Aerosol+Spread+Of+Coronavirus&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted guidance last Friday evening saying that aerosol transmission might be one of the “most common” ways the coronavirus is spreading — and then took the guidance down on Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The now-deleted updates were notable because so far the CDC has stopped short of saying that the virus is airborne.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The agency says the guidance was a draft version of proposed changes that was posted in error to its website. The CDC says that it is updating its recommendations regarding airborne transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19 and that it will post updated language once that process is complete.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the weekend, the CDC page “\u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/how-covid-spreads.html\">How COVID-19 Spreads\u003c/a>” included among the most common modes of transmission “respiratory droplets or small particles, such as those in aerosols, produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, sings, talks, or breathes.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It continued: “These particles can be inhaled into the nose, mouth, airways, and lungs and cause infection. This is thought to be the main way the virus spreads.” The guidance also stated that these particles might travel farther than 6 feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For a few days, researchers who have suspected aerosol transmission for months \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/jljcolorado/status/1307787446948511744\">cheered \u003c/a>the update as a long-overdue acknowledgment of accumulating evidence for how the virus transmits, particularly in indoor spaces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now the page has reverted to what it said before — that the virus spreads between people in close contact through respiratory droplets. The page makes no mention of aerosol transmission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In July, the World Health Organization updated its guidance on aerosols after \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/07/06/887925721/scientists-urge-who-to-update-guidance-on-airborne-transmission-of-the-coronavir\">more than 200 scientists urged it\u003c/a> to do so. WHO’s guidance now \u003ca href=\"https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-how-is-covid-19-transmitted\">states\u003c/a>:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\u003cp>“There have been reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in some closed settings, such as restaurants, nightclubs, places of worship or places of work where people may be shouting, talking, or singing. In these outbreaks, aerosol transmission, particularly in these indoor locations where there are crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces where infected persons spend long periods of time with others, cannot be ruled out. More studies are urgently needed to investigate such instances and assess their significance for transmission of COVID-19.”\u003c/p>\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>What’s the difference between respiratory droplets and aerosol particles?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Respiratory droplets are larger and fall to the ground quickly — hence the 6-feet rule that’s generally considered safe for social distancing amid the pandemic. Aerosol particles are smaller and can linger in the air, moving with air currents from which they can be inhaled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An airborne virus is considered to be a virus that spreads in exhaled particles that are small enough to linger in the air and move with air currents, from which they can be breathed in by passersby who then get sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Linsey Marr is a professor of civil and environmental engineering who researches airborne transmission at Virginia Tech. She was excited to see the CDC’s changes on Friday, though she was also surprised at how strongly the new guidance was written — particularly in that it stated plainly that SARS-CoV-2 is an \u003cem>airborne virus\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such a classification could require additional precautions in health care settings, she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Marr says that the changes mistakenly posted by the CDC could be significant if they are implemented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It means that nationally we need to do something about [transmission] beyond 6 feet, which means masks and ventilation and filtration,” she says. “And if we do that, I think we can get a better control on the spread of the virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The posted and withdrawn transmission guidelines are just the latest in public reversals and controversy at the CDC.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Friday, the agency \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/914519545/cdc-reverses-controversial-guidelines-regarding-coronavirus-testing\">reversed its new guidance on testing\u003c/a>, published in August, that suggested people who have possibly been exposed to the coronavirus don’t necessarily need to get tested for infection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also last week, Michael Caputo, the top spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced he was \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913684013/hhs-spokesperson-takes-leave-of-absence-after-disparaging-government-scientists\">taking a leave of absence\u003c/a> after a social media tirade in which he falsely accused government scientists of engaging in “sedition.” He had also come under criticism after reports that he and scientific adviser Paul Alexander sought to edit and delay public health reports from the CDC. Alexander is leaving the agency permanently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These episodes, among others, have raised questions about the agency’s consistency and credibility during the coronavirus pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Howard Koh is a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who served as assistant secretary for health during the Obama administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The consistent inconsistency in this administration’s guidance on COVID-19 has severely compromised the nation’s trust in our public health agencies,” Koh said in a statement Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“During the greatest public health emergency in a century, trust in public health is essential — without it, this pandemic could go on indefinitely. To rectify the latest challenge, the CDC must acknowledge that growing scientific evidence indicates the importance of airborne transmission through aerosols, making mask wearing even more critical as we head into the difficult fall and winter season.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=CDC+Publishes+%E2%80%94+Then+Withdraws+%E2%80%94+Guidance+On+Aerosol+Spread+Of+Coronavirus&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "California's Deadly Spring Suggests COVID-19 Deaths Are Undercounted",
"headTitle": "California’s Deadly Spring Suggests COVID-19 Deaths Are Undercounted | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The first five months of the COVID-19 pandemic in California rank among the deadliest in state history, deadlier than any other consecutive five-month period in at least 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the grim milestone encompasses thousands of “excess” deaths not accounted for in the state’s official COVID death tally: a loss of life concentrated among Blacks, Asians and Latinos, afflicting people who experts say likely didn’t get preventive medical care amid the far-reaching shutdowns or who were wrongly excluded from the coronavirus death count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Excess Deaths in California, By County\" aria-label=\"Map\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-WmugB\" src=\"https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/WmugB/8/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border: none;\" width=\"600\" height=\"814\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About 125,000 Californians died from March through July, up by 14,200, or 13%, from the average for the same five months during the prior three years, according to a review of \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CHSI/Pages/Statistical-Reports.aspx\">data\u003c/a> from the state Department of Public Health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the end of July, California had logged about 9,200 deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 in county death records. That left about 5,000 “excess” deaths for those months — meaning deaths above the norm not attributed to COVID-19. Deaths tend to increase from year to year as the population grows, but typically not by that much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A closer look at California’s excess deaths during the period reveals a disturbing racial and ethnic variance: All the excess deaths not officially linked to COVID infection were concentrated in minority communities. Latinos make up the vast majority, accounting for 3,350 of those excess deaths, followed by Asians (1,150), Blacks (860) and other Californians of color (350).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote]All the excess deaths not officially linked to COVID-19 infection were concentrated in minority communities.[/pullquote]The overall number of excess deaths across all races and ethnicities was ultimately tempered because, compared with the three prior years, there were actually 383 fewer deaths among white Californians than would be expected in the absence of COVID-19. In addition, California Healthline adjusted the overall numbers to reflect more than 320 COVID deaths that could not be categorized by race or ethnicity because that information was missing from state records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several epidemiologists interviewed said they believe a sizable portion of the excess deaths among people of color did, in fact, stem from COVID infections but went undetected for a variety of reasons. Among them: a shortage of coronavirus tests in the early months of the pandemic; an uneven strategy for how and when to administer those tests, which persists; and inadequate access to health care providers in many low-income and immigrant communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://profiles.ucsf.edu/kirsten.bibbins-domingo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo\u003c/a>, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the UC San Francisco, is among those who suspect the excess deaths reflect a COVID undercount in minority communities. She noted that several chronic health conditions that disproportionately affect Blacks and Latinos — including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease — also place them at higher risk for severe complications from COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition, Bibbins-Domingo said, the prolonged shutdown of medical offices in the early months of the pandemic — and with them non-urgent surgeries and routine medical care — likely accelerated death among people with those chronic conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Shutdowns always come at a cost,” she said. “It is our most marginalized communities that experience the cost of a shutdown.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to state Department of Public Health data, deaths in California attributed to diabetes rose 12% from March through July when compared with the average for the same period over the past three years. In addition, deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s disease rose 11%.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Dementia is also a disease where we have racial, ethnic minorities already at greater risk,” said \u003ca href=\"https://andreapolonijo.com/about\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Andrea Polonijo\u003c/a>, a medical sociologist at the UC Riverside. “Now that we have the pandemic, they’re more socially isolated. Social isolation we know can cause deeper cognitive decline.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to determine whether a death is due to COVID-19 if the victim never sought medical care, said \u003ca href=\"http://www.lchc.org/who-we-are/staff/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Jeffrey Reynoso\u003c/a>, executive director of the nonprofit Latino Coalition for a Healthy California. Latinos in California are less likely to have health insurance, he said. They may face language barriers if their medical provider — or contact tracer — does not speak Spanish. Latino immigrants working in the U.S. without authorization may hesitate to visit the doctor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Immigration is definitely a driver in creating a fear and a mistrust of systems, and that includes our health care system,” Reynoso said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Polonijo said the fact that Latinos make up the bulk of the excess deaths correlates with their dominant role in farming, meat processing, manufacturing and food service, jobs all deemed essential during the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This population is also more likely to live in more crowded conditions,” she said. “So not only are they exposed at work, but they are bringing disease home and with it the possibility of spreading it to their family, bringing it to the community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bibbins-Domingo noted that, while a major portion of COVID deaths overall have occurred among seniors and nursing home residents, a disproportionate number of the state’s excess deaths are of working-age adults.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The excess deaths that we’re seeing in communities of color and in low-income communities are deaths that are occurring at younger ages,” she said. “These are deaths that are occurring in these ages from 20 to 60, generally speaking — the ages when people would be out working.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.apiahf.org/leadership/kathy-ko-chin/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kathy Ko Chin\u003c/a>, president of the Oakland-based Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, said Asian Americans also tend to be overrepresented in essential worker occupations, noting that a large proportion of the state’s nurses are Filipino. In addition, she said, government officials have not done enough to translate COVID educational materials into the many languages spoken by California’s Asian Americans. The Trump administration’s rhetoric on immigration during the past four years, she added, has had a “chilling effect” that has kept many foreign-born Asian Americans from visiting a doctor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were really, really scared,” Chin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Counties in Southern California and the largely rural Central Valley — places with a high proportion of Latino residents — tended to have high rates of excess deaths from March to July. Among counties with at least 100,000 people, Kings County, an arid expanse north of Los Angeles that is home to industrial-scale agriculture, had the highest rate of excess deaths per capita.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Officials at the Kings County Department of Public Health did not return a message seeking comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bibbins-Domingo and others said it is important for state and county health officials to take a hard look at their excess death numbers. Excess deaths matter, she said, because they expose shortcomings in health care delivery. In addition, local and state responses to COVID-19 are grounded in data; if that data is inaccurate, the responses may be misguided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Deaths are important because they also help us to understand how much severe COVID is there in the community that we have to worry about,” Bibbins-Domingo said. “I think when we undercount that, we both fly blind for the overall pandemic management, and we might fly particularly blind in understanding the impact of the pandemic in particular communities.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Phillip Reese is a data reporting specialist and an assistant professor of journalism at California State University, Sacramento.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This \u003ca href=\"https://khn.org\">KHN\u003c/a> story first published on \u003ca href=\"http://www.californiahealthline.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">California Healthline\u003c/a>, a service of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.chcf.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">California Health Care Foundation\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kaiser Health News\u003c/a> (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.kff.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation\u003c/a> which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ssl.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=event&ec=Republish&tid=UA-53070700-2&z=1600720483034&cid=6a21b6bd-c27b-40cb-a4a3-f69c9cb4e27b&ea=https%3A%2F%2Fkhn.org%2Fnews%2Fcalifornias-deadliest-spring-in-20-years-suggests-covid-undercount%2F&el=California%E2%80%99s%20Deadliest%20Spring%20in%2020%20Years%20Suggests%20COVID%20Undercount\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The first five months of the COVID-19 pandemic in California rank among the deadliest in state history, deadlier than any other consecutive five-month period in at least 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the grim milestone encompasses thousands of “excess” deaths not accounted for in the state’s official COVID death tally: a loss of life concentrated among Blacks, Asians and Latinos, afflicting people who experts say likely didn’t get preventive medical care amid the far-reaching shutdowns or who were wrongly excluded from the coronavirus death count.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Excess Deaths in California, By County\" aria-label=\"Map\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-WmugB\" src=\"https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/WmugB/8/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border: none;\" width=\"600\" height=\"814\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About 125,000 Californians died from March through July, up by 14,200, or 13%, from the average for the same five months during the prior three years, according to a review of \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CHSI/Pages/Statistical-Reports.aspx\">data\u003c/a> from the state Department of Public Health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By the end of July, California had logged about 9,200 deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 in county death records. That left about 5,000 “excess” deaths for those months — meaning deaths above the norm not attributed to COVID-19. Deaths tend to increase from year to year as the population grows, but typically not by that much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A closer look at California’s excess deaths during the period reveals a disturbing racial and ethnic variance: All the excess deaths not officially linked to COVID infection were concentrated in minority communities. Latinos make up the vast majority, accounting for 3,350 of those excess deaths, followed by Asians (1,150), Blacks (860) and other Californians of color (350).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The overall number of excess deaths across all races and ethnicities was ultimately tempered because, compared with the three prior years, there were actually 383 fewer deaths among white Californians than would be expected in the absence of COVID-19. In addition, California Healthline adjusted the overall numbers to reflect more than 320 COVID deaths that could not be categorized by race or ethnicity because that information was missing from state records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several epidemiologists interviewed said they believe a sizable portion of the excess deaths among people of color did, in fact, stem from COVID infections but went undetected for a variety of reasons. Among them: a shortage of coronavirus tests in the early months of the pandemic; an uneven strategy for how and when to administer those tests, which persists; and inadequate access to health care providers in many low-income and immigrant communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://profiles.ucsf.edu/kirsten.bibbins-domingo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo\u003c/a>, chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the UC San Francisco, is among those who suspect the excess deaths reflect a COVID undercount in minority communities. She noted that several chronic health conditions that disproportionately affect Blacks and Latinos — including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease — also place them at higher risk for severe complications from COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition, Bibbins-Domingo said, the prolonged shutdown of medical offices in the early months of the pandemic — and with them non-urgent surgeries and routine medical care — likely accelerated death among people with those chronic conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Shutdowns always come at a cost,” she said. “It is our most marginalized communities that experience the cost of a shutdown.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to state Department of Public Health data, deaths in California attributed to diabetes rose 12% from March through July when compared with the average for the same period over the past three years. In addition, deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s disease rose 11%.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Dementia is also a disease where we have racial, ethnic minorities already at greater risk,” said \u003ca href=\"https://andreapolonijo.com/about\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Andrea Polonijo\u003c/a>, a medical sociologist at the UC Riverside. “Now that we have the pandemic, they’re more socially isolated. Social isolation we know can cause deeper cognitive decline.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hard to determine whether a death is due to COVID-19 if the victim never sought medical care, said \u003ca href=\"http://www.lchc.org/who-we-are/staff/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Jeffrey Reynoso\u003c/a>, executive director of the nonprofit Latino Coalition for a Healthy California. Latinos in California are less likely to have health insurance, he said. They may face language barriers if their medical provider — or contact tracer — does not speak Spanish. Latino immigrants working in the U.S. without authorization may hesitate to visit the doctor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Immigration is definitely a driver in creating a fear and a mistrust of systems, and that includes our health care system,” Reynoso said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Polonijo said the fact that Latinos make up the bulk of the excess deaths correlates with their dominant role in farming, meat processing, manufacturing and food service, jobs all deemed essential during the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This population is also more likely to live in more crowded conditions,” she said. “So not only are they exposed at work, but they are bringing disease home and with it the possibility of spreading it to their family, bringing it to the community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bibbins-Domingo noted that, while a major portion of COVID deaths overall have occurred among seniors and nursing home residents, a disproportionate number of the state’s excess deaths are of working-age adults.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The excess deaths that we’re seeing in communities of color and in low-income communities are deaths that are occurring at younger ages,” she said. “These are deaths that are occurring in these ages from 20 to 60, generally speaking — the ages when people would be out working.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.apiahf.org/leadership/kathy-ko-chin/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kathy Ko Chin\u003c/a>, president of the Oakland-based Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum, said Asian Americans also tend to be overrepresented in essential worker occupations, noting that a large proportion of the state’s nurses are Filipino. In addition, she said, government officials have not done enough to translate COVID educational materials into the many languages spoken by California’s Asian Americans. The Trump administration’s rhetoric on immigration during the past four years, she added, has had a “chilling effect” that has kept many foreign-born Asian Americans from visiting a doctor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People were really, really scared,” Chin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Counties in Southern California and the largely rural Central Valley — places with a high proportion of Latino residents — tended to have high rates of excess deaths from March to July. Among counties with at least 100,000 people, Kings County, an arid expanse north of Los Angeles that is home to industrial-scale agriculture, had the highest rate of excess deaths per capita.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Officials at the Kings County Department of Public Health did not return a message seeking comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bibbins-Domingo and others said it is important for state and county health officials to take a hard look at their excess death numbers. Excess deaths matter, she said, because they expose shortcomings in health care delivery. In addition, local and state responses to COVID-19 are grounded in data; if that data is inaccurate, the responses may be misguided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Deaths are important because they also help us to understand how much severe COVID is there in the community that we have to worry about,” Bibbins-Domingo said. “I think when we undercount that, we both fly blind for the overall pandemic management, and we might fly particularly blind in understanding the impact of the pandemic in particular communities.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Phillip Reese is a data reporting specialist and an assistant professor of journalism at California State University, Sacramento.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This \u003ca href=\"https://khn.org\">KHN\u003c/a> story first published on \u003ca href=\"http://www.californiahealthline.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">California Healthline\u003c/a>, a service of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.chcf.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">California Health Care Foundation\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Kaiser Health News\u003c/a> (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.kff.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation\u003c/a> which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ssl.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&t=event&ec=Republish&tid=UA-53070700-2&z=1600720483034&cid=6a21b6bd-c27b-40cb-a4a3-f69c9cb4e27b&ea=https%3A%2F%2Fkhn.org%2Fnews%2Fcalifornias-deadliest-spring-in-20-years-suggests-covid-undercount%2F&el=California%E2%80%99s%20Deadliest%20Spring%20in%2020%20Years%20Suggests%20COVID%20Undercount\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "To Prevent California Wildfires, We Need to Have Some Uncomfortable Conversations",
"headTitle": "To Prevent California Wildfires, We Need to Have Some Uncomfortable Conversations | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The alarming wildfires across the West have got people thinking, once again, how to prevent or at least minimize the catastrophic fire seasons we’ve been experiencing. KQED science reporters\u003cstrong> Danielle Venton\u003c/strong> and \u003cstrong>Molly Peterson\u003c/strong> talked with KQED radio host Brian Watt last week about what the state is and isn’t doing to lower fire risk and minimize the destruction caused by large fires. \u003c/span>The following has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cstrong>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">You have been reporting for a while on some of the possible solutions to California’s wildfire problem, like prescribed burns …\u003c/span>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Molly Peterson\u003c/strong>: Right, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-help-solve-californias-fire-problem-so-why-arent-there-more-of-them\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">idea\u003c/a> that we plan to put fire on the land safely [with the intent of burning up in advance the vegetation wildfires use for fuel.] I have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1942299/onetime-enemies-over-logging-are-now-a-community-to-prevent-wildfire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">reported\u003c/a> from Trinity County about people who want to do that, but they run into bureaucratic obstacles, and I’ve reported about the technical and safety reasons these burns get delayed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Danielle Venton:\u003c/strong> We have also talked about how to make buildings \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1941685/this-california-neighborhood-was-built-to-survive-a-wildfire-and-it-worked\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">less flammable\u003c/a>, and about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943058/whos-checking-homes-for-flammable-brush-in-some-high-risk-areas-maybe-no-one\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">clearing space\u003c/a> around them to slow an advancing fire.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>But you’ve talked about these things for years, and it feels like not as much of it’s getting done as we need.\u003c/strong>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: That’s exactly the problem. One example: In the early 2000s, up until 2017, an average of just 13,000 acres were intentionally burned in the state every year. In 2018, new laws were passed to try to make prescribed burns easier, and 87,000 acres were burned that year. But scientists believe we need to increase that amount by at least five times. So there’s a long way to go. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: Another example: In 2008, lawmakers passed this transformative set of requirements that has saved houses from big fires in Santa Rosa and Paradise. But 12 years later, houses built before that law still sit in the path of these monster fires, and we’re still not doing for fires what we do for earthquake risk, which is expand requirements and spend money on retrofitting. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: Overall, we do see the state spending more money on fires, but experts say it’s not enough to do what they recommend. And it’s a sign that we’re not changing our mindset about fires dramatically enough.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cstrong>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">So what \u003cem>is\u003c/em> the state doing?\u003c/span>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: The ideas for legislation have fallen into a few categories. One big one is tightening requirements on new buildings and raising money for fixing old ones, and another is improving how we estimate and plan for risk in wildfire zones. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: Several bills worth mentioning have arrived on the governor’s desk in the past week. One requires ember-resistant zones around homes in high fire-risk areas. Another requires Cal Fire to develop a model to better estimate the wildfire risk for communities in the wildland-urban interface. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: Laws to tighten accountability for planning are also on the agenda. On the governor’s desk right now is a bill from Santa Barbara state Sen. Hannah Beth-Jackson, \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB182\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SB182\u003c/a>. If it becomes law, it would limit how local government can approve development in very-high-risk fire zones, depending on how fire risk is managed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“Too many lives have been lost,” Jackson has said. “Too many communities have been left behind by these deadly wildfires to allow us to continue with business as usual in California.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">She says a lot of communities are making decisions on their own right now, and what she’s advocating for are consistent statewide standards.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">While that bill’s on the governor’s desk, overall it seems like the state of California is still deciding whose responsibility it is to be ready for fire. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Let’s talk about what’s \u003cem>not\u003c/em> being talked about. What’s missing from the conversation?\u003c/strong>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: I think what’s missing is we get hung up on talking about these really specific details, and we often don’t talk about the whole picture, the causes and the solutions. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: Something I’ve been frustrated by is this polarization of whether it’s climate change or forest management that’s causing these catastrophic fires. It’s both, of course, and more. Focusing on this debate means that we’re not doing the important things, like adapting to climate change and finding a way to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/livingwithwildfire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">live with fire\u003c/a>.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: I’m a fourth-generation Californian, but I used to live in Louisiana, after Katrina. After that, I can’t help but wonder whether we should talk about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943266/one-potential-solution-to-fires-in-the-wilderness-dont-build-there\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">not living\u003c/a> in some places. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Even if we do everything that the scientists advise us to \u003ci>— \u003c/i>like UC Santa Barbara’s Max Moritz talks about putting firebreaks and vegetation around communities and the wildland urban areas, and spending all this money to harden homes \u003ci>—\u003c/i> are there places in the state that we shouldn’t live, for our own safety? I don’t know the answer to that. Even asking the question is something you’re not supposed to do. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: And I think we really need to reconsider the balance of responsibility in this state. A huge weight is put on local authorities, who are often asked to do more and more by the state and by the public without additional funding. Local authorities then sometimes say it’s got to be neighbors helping neighbors during rough times, and some people, especially the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1968076/even-after-care-homes-abandoned-residents-california-still-isnt-ready-for-wildfires\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">vulnerable\u003c/a>, get left out. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: Everyone in California has property rights. To really understand property rights, though, we also have to report on how much it costs to defend property and how much it costs to insure it and how some of those costs are shared by the public. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: In the end, this is all about compromise and trade-offs. To give a specific example, people frequently complain about smoke in the air due to managed burns, but we know that this smoke is less intense, less toxic and easier to manage than out-of-control fires, like the ones we’ve been seeing in the Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: I think the biggest thing we don’t talk about is giving up local control. Wildfires are effectively a statewide problem, and often that requires statewide solutions, like the ones we’ve adopted for earthquake risk. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: And when we don’t talk publicly about whether to do things locally or at the state level, those decisions are getting made in private markets by insurers. So not talking about the decision is still basically making a decision.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\n\u003c/p>\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "KQED Science reporters Danielle Venton and Molly Peterson discuss what the state is and, maybe more importantly, isn't doing to lower fire risk and minimize the destruction caused by large fires.",
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"description": "KQED Science reporters Danielle Venton and Molly Peterson discuss what the state is and, maybe more importantly, isn't doing to lower fire risk and minimize the destruction caused by large fires.",
"title": "To Prevent California Wildfires, We Need to Have Some Uncomfortable Conversations | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The alarming wildfires across the West have got people thinking, once again, how to prevent or at least minimize the catastrophic fire seasons we’ve been experiencing. KQED science reporters\u003cstrong> Danielle Venton\u003c/strong> and \u003cstrong>Molly Peterson\u003c/strong> talked with KQED radio host Brian Watt last week about what the state is and isn’t doing to lower fire risk and minimize the destruction caused by large fires. \u003c/span>The following has been edited for length and clarity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cstrong>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">You have been reporting for a while on some of the possible solutions to California’s wildfire problem, like prescribed burns …\u003c/span>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Molly Peterson\u003c/strong>: Right, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1927354/controlled-burns-can-help-solve-californias-fire-problem-so-why-arent-there-more-of-them\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">idea\u003c/a> that we plan to put fire on the land safely [with the intent of burning up in advance the vegetation wildfires use for fuel.] I have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1942299/onetime-enemies-over-logging-are-now-a-community-to-prevent-wildfire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">reported\u003c/a> from Trinity County about people who want to do that, but they run into bureaucratic obstacles, and I’ve reported about the technical and safety reasons these burns get delayed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Danielle Venton:\u003c/strong> We have also talked about how to make buildings \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1941685/this-california-neighborhood-was-built-to-survive-a-wildfire-and-it-worked\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">less flammable\u003c/a>, and about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943058/whos-checking-homes-for-flammable-brush-in-some-high-risk-areas-maybe-no-one\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">clearing space\u003c/a> around them to slow an advancing fire.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>But you’ve talked about these things for years, and it feels like not as much of it’s getting done as we need.\u003c/strong>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: That’s exactly the problem. One example: In the early 2000s, up until 2017, an average of just 13,000 acres were intentionally burned in the state every year. In 2018, new laws were passed to try to make prescribed burns easier, and 87,000 acres were burned that year. But scientists believe we need to increase that amount by at least five times. So there’s a long way to go. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: Another example: In 2008, lawmakers passed this transformative set of requirements that has saved houses from big fires in Santa Rosa and Paradise. But 12 years later, houses built before that law still sit in the path of these monster fires, and we’re still not doing for fires what we do for earthquake risk, which is expand requirements and spend money on retrofitting. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: Overall, we do see the state spending more money on fires, but experts say it’s not enough to do what they recommend. And it’s a sign that we’re not changing our mindset about fires dramatically enough.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cstrong>\u003cspan class=\"s1\">So what \u003cem>is\u003c/em> the state doing?\u003c/span>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: The ideas for legislation have fallen into a few categories. One big one is tightening requirements on new buildings and raising money for fixing old ones, and another is improving how we estimate and plan for risk in wildfire zones. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: Several bills worth mentioning have arrived on the governor’s desk in the past week. One requires ember-resistant zones around homes in high fire-risk areas. Another requires Cal Fire to develop a model to better estimate the wildfire risk for communities in the wildland-urban interface. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: Laws to tighten accountability for planning are also on the agenda. On the governor’s desk right now is a bill from Santa Barbara state Sen. Hannah Beth-Jackson, \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB182\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">SB182\u003c/a>. If it becomes law, it would limit how local government can approve development in very-high-risk fire zones, depending on how fire risk is managed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">“Too many lives have been lost,” Jackson has said. “Too many communities have been left behind by these deadly wildfires to allow us to continue with business as usual in California.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">She says a lot of communities are making decisions on their own right now, and what she’s advocating for are consistent statewide standards.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">While that bill’s on the governor’s desk, overall it seems like the state of California is still deciding whose responsibility it is to be ready for fire. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Let’s talk about what’s \u003cem>not\u003c/em> being talked about. What’s missing from the conversation?\u003c/strong>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: I think what’s missing is we get hung up on talking about these really specific details, and we often don’t talk about the whole picture, the causes and the solutions. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: Something I’ve been frustrated by is this polarization of whether it’s climate change or forest management that’s causing these catastrophic fires. It’s both, of course, and more. Focusing on this debate means that we’re not doing the important things, like adapting to climate change and finding a way to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/livingwithwildfire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">live with fire\u003c/a>.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: I’m a fourth-generation Californian, but I used to live in Louisiana, after Katrina. After that, I can’t help but wonder whether we should talk about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943266/one-potential-solution-to-fires-in-the-wilderness-dont-build-there\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">not living\u003c/a> in some places. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Even if we do everything that the scientists advise us to \u003ci>— \u003c/i>like UC Santa Barbara’s Max Moritz talks about putting firebreaks and vegetation around communities and the wildland urban areas, and spending all this money to harden homes \u003ci>—\u003c/i> are there places in the state that we shouldn’t live, for our own safety? I don’t know the answer to that. Even asking the question is something you’re not supposed to do. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: And I think we really need to reconsider the balance of responsibility in this state. A huge weight is put on local authorities, who are often asked to do more and more by the state and by the public without additional funding. Local authorities then sometimes say it’s got to be neighbors helping neighbors during rough times, and some people, especially the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1968076/even-after-care-homes-abandoned-residents-california-still-isnt-ready-for-wildfires\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">vulnerable\u003c/a>, get left out. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: Everyone in California has property rights. To really understand property rights, though, we also have to report on how much it costs to defend property and how much it costs to insure it and how some of those costs are shared by the public. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: In the end, this is all about compromise and trade-offs. To give a specific example, people frequently complain about smoke in the air due to managed burns, but we know that this smoke is less intense, less toxic and easier to manage than out-of-control fires, like the ones we’ve been seeing in the Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Venton\u003c/strong>: I think the biggest thing we don’t talk about is giving up local control. Wildfires are effectively a statewide problem, and often that requires statewide solutions, like the ones we’ve adopted for earthquake risk. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cstrong>Peterson\u003c/strong>: And when we don’t talk publicly about whether to do things locally or at the state level, those decisions are getting made in private markets by insurers. So not talking about the decision is still basically making a decision.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\n\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>[dl_subscribe]Next time you see a big spider sitting in the middle of its web, before you scream, run away or squash it, maybe pause and consider for a moment all of the wondrous things it can do with that itsy-bitsy brain. Most spiders have a brain no larger than a poppy seed, but with this modest cerebral endowment, they not only construct intricate insect traps, they expertly expand their senses far beyond the limits of their bodies, using their webs as a physical extension of their perceptual abilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Imagine if you were able to extend microphones out, radiating from your ears, extending the capability of your hearing,” said Francis Windram, a Ph.D. candidate and expert in spider foraging at Imperial College London.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The more than 48,000 spider species have done well for themselves, evolutionarily speaking. They create a wide variety of web styles, though some — like jumping spiders — don’t spin webs at all. There are over 4,000 different species of orb weaver spiders alone; these are the eight-legged spinners that create the famous spiral-shaped webs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969756\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969756\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_juvenile_cross_orb_weaver.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A juvenile cross orb weaver. Even though they are extremely small, orb weavers are born with the ability to spin intricate, spiral-shaped webs. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Anyone who’s watched orb weavers in action has seen them use their exquisite creations to deftly ensnare flying insects. Impressive as this, the webs function as much more than deadly traps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mostly nocturnal, orb weavers also happen to be almost completely blind. These species are only able to see light, dark and a little movement, but they are somehow able to quickly navigate their webs, pinpointing their unlucky victims and binding them in silk, a meal saved for later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Webs play an integral role in everything an orb weaver does. Many species every day eat their silk, recycle it inside their body, and reconstruct the web overnight. When spiders are hungry, they can tighten the web’s strands and even adjust its size and shape, depending on what size of prey they’re in the mood for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing that beetles and moths use pheromones to communicate, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Ashley Adams wondered whether spiders could use chemical cues to distinguish the webs of their own species from those of other types of spiders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make sure they weren’t just checking the web by feel, she soaked cotton threads in solutions made from extracts of webs spun by different species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The male long-jawed orb weaver spiders in her lab consistently chose the threads treated with extracts from their own species, avoiding those doused with web extracts from other kinds of spiders, suggesting they do sense chemicals with their legs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969753\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1969753\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1920x1080.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An adult cross orb weaver spider lying in wait at the center of its web. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Adams’ soon-to-be-published study adds to the already impressive list of complex behaviors for these tiny-brained animals. We know that many mammals and birds seem to be able to construct a mental representation of space, but it’s rare for invertebrates (bees, octopuses and cuttlefish are exceptions). Orb weavers can do so much with their miniscule brains, some researchers ask the question: Is a spider’s web an extension of its mind?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adams agrees that “at least from a neurological perspective, [the web] is this extremely effective extension of their senses that has helped them succeed in the environment and become so prevalent.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But others, like biologist Hilton Japyassú of the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, takes this idea a step further, suggesting that orb weavers use their webs as a form of extended cognition, outsourcing advanced mental tasks like problem-solving and memory. For example, once they have killed and wrapped their prey, a spider can store the prey for later, then easily find it again. The way they relocate the insects they have killed looks an awful lot like they are remembering, Japyassú says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, he and his colleagues set up an experiment in which they manipulated the web and removed prey the spider had wrapped up in silk to see how the spider reacted. By limiting the way the animals sensed the world around them, the scientists were able to directly test the “thinking web” idea. They found that when the webs were manipulated, the spiders changed their behavior. For one, they searched for the prey taken by the researchers. Also, if their webs were altered, or they encountered different-sized prey, they could adjust their foraging behavior by changing their capturing technique.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers concluded that this two-way connection between the web and the spider’s behavior suggests that the web is indeed a way for the spider to process information\u003cb>, \u003c/b>reserving precious brain power for other necessary and complex tasks like the actual capture of prey. For tasks that are more memory-intensive, like navigating or relocating prey, they don’t need to remember every single thread they have spun — just a few previous steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969758\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969758\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver_prey_capture2.gif\" alt=\"Cross orb weaver prey capture\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A cross orb weaver spider quickly wraps its prey after paralyzing it with a dose of venom. Orb weavers are mostly blind, but they use their webs to help remember where they keep their wrapped-up food. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The idea of extended cognition — that tools like writing, computers, or phones are extensions of our thought processes — is not new to philosophers or scientists. But if you start defining cognition in the traditional sense, “there is no possibility to expand [it] to anywhere else outside of human experience,” Japyassú said. “I prefer to define it in a very simple way; that … cognition helps you to survive, and it’s related to information processing.” By this definition, the web is an extension of the spider’s thought processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers don’t all fully agree that the webs actually are a part of a spider’s thinking. How do you tell that the spider has an actual plan, or if it is just exhibiting instinctual behavior when it builds its web? With current technology, we can’t see inside the tiny working brain of the orb weaver, so we are left with what behavioral observation can tell us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although some philosophers have a problem with the idea that an animal has a mind at all, Japyassú says scientists researching animal cognition “are more open-minded because they can observe such different ways of thinking in other animals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spider researchers, said Japyassú, “see these spiders doing things that would seem impossible for a tiny animal.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, he says, the logical place to look for where all that thinking is happening is in the web.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969757\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969757\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_orb_web_sunlight.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The signature spiral-shaped webs of the orb weaver extend the senses of a spider far beyond the limits of its body. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Most spiders have a brain no larger than a poppy seed, but with this modest cerebral endowment, they not only construct intricate insect traps, they expertly expand their senses far beyond the limits of their bodies.",
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"description": "Orb weaver spiders build exquisite spiral webs not only to catch insects, but to extend their senses. Once they shrink-wrap their prey with silk, the nearly blind spiders can store them for later, and read their web's silky strands as a kind of memory map to guide them back.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Next time you see a big spider sitting in the middle of its web, before you scream, run away or squash it, maybe pause and consider for a moment all of the wondrous things it can do with that itsy-bitsy brain. Most spiders have a brain no larger than a poppy seed, but with this modest cerebral endowment, they not only construct intricate insect traps, they expertly expand their senses far beyond the limits of their bodies, using their webs as a physical extension of their perceptual abilities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Imagine if you were able to extend microphones out, radiating from your ears, extending the capability of your hearing,” said Francis Windram, a Ph.D. candidate and expert in spider foraging at Imperial College London.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The more than 48,000 spider species have done well for themselves, evolutionarily speaking. They create a wide variety of web styles, though some — like jumping spiders — don’t spin webs at all. There are over 4,000 different species of orb weaver spiders alone; these are the eight-legged spinners that create the famous spiral-shaped webs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969756\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969756\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_juvenile_cross_orb_weaver.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A juvenile cross orb weaver. Even though they are extremely small, orb weavers are born with the ability to spin intricate, spiral-shaped webs. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Anyone who’s watched orb weavers in action has seen them use their exquisite creations to deftly ensnare flying insects. Impressive as this, the webs function as much more than deadly traps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mostly nocturnal, orb weavers also happen to be almost completely blind. These species are only able to see light, dark and a little movement, but they are somehow able to quickly navigate their webs, pinpointing their unlucky victims and binding them in silk, a meal saved for later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Webs play an integral role in everything an orb weaver does. Many species every day eat their silk, recycle it inside their body, and reconstruct the web overnight. When spiders are hungry, they can tighten the web’s strands and even adjust its size and shape, depending on what size of prey they’re in the mood for.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing that beetles and moths use pheromones to communicate, UC Berkeley Ph.D. candidate Ashley Adams wondered whether spiders could use chemical cues to distinguish the webs of their own species from those of other types of spiders.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To make sure they weren’t just checking the web by feel, she soaked cotton threads in solutions made from extracts of webs spun by different species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The male long-jawed orb weaver spiders in her lab consistently chose the threads treated with extracts from their own species, avoiding those doused with web extracts from other kinds of spiders, suggesting they do sense chemicals with their legs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969753\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1969753\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1020x574.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-768x432.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver5-1920x1080.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An adult cross orb weaver spider lying in wait at the center of its web. \u003ccite>(Josh Cassidy/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Adams’ soon-to-be-published study adds to the already impressive list of complex behaviors for these tiny-brained animals. We know that many mammals and birds seem to be able to construct a mental representation of space, but it’s rare for invertebrates (bees, octopuses and cuttlefish are exceptions). Orb weavers can do so much with their miniscule brains, some researchers ask the question: Is a spider’s web an extension of its mind?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Adams agrees that “at least from a neurological perspective, [the web] is this extremely effective extension of their senses that has helped them succeed in the environment and become so prevalent.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But others, like biologist Hilton Japyassú of the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, takes this idea a step further, suggesting that orb weavers use their webs as a form of extended cognition, outsourcing advanced mental tasks like problem-solving and memory. For example, once they have killed and wrapped their prey, a spider can store the prey for later, then easily find it again. The way they relocate the insects they have killed looks an awful lot like they are remembering, Japyassú says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, he and his colleagues set up an experiment in which they manipulated the web and removed prey the spider had wrapped up in silk to see how the spider reacted. By limiting the way the animals sensed the world around them, the scientists were able to directly test the “thinking web” idea. They found that when the webs were manipulated, the spiders changed their behavior. For one, they searched for the prey taken by the researchers. Also, if their webs were altered, or they encountered different-sized prey, they could adjust their foraging behavior by changing their capturing technique.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers concluded that this two-way connection between the web and the spider’s behavior suggests that the web is indeed a way for the spider to process information\u003cb>, \u003c/b>reserving precious brain power for other necessary and complex tasks like the actual capture of prey. For tasks that are more memory-intensive, like navigating or relocating prey, they don’t need to remember every single thread they have spun — just a few previous steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969758\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969758\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_cross_orb_weaver_prey_capture2.gif\" alt=\"Cross orb weaver prey capture\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A cross orb weaver spider quickly wraps its prey after paralyzing it with a dose of venom. Orb weavers are mostly blind, but they use their webs to help remember where they keep their wrapped-up food. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The idea of extended cognition — that tools like writing, computers, or phones are extensions of our thought processes — is not new to philosophers or scientists. But if you start defining cognition in the traditional sense, “there is no possibility to expand [it] to anywhere else outside of human experience,” Japyassú said. “I prefer to define it in a very simple way; that … cognition helps you to survive, and it’s related to information processing.” By this definition, the web is an extension of the spider’s thought processes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers don’t all fully agree that the webs actually are a part of a spider’s thinking. How do you tell that the spider has an actual plan, or if it is just exhibiting instinctual behavior when it builds its web? With current technology, we can’t see inside the tiny working brain of the orb weaver, so we are left with what behavioral observation can tell us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although some philosophers have a problem with the idea that an animal has a mind at all, Japyassú says scientists researching animal cognition “are more open-minded because they can observe such different ways of thinking in other animals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Spider researchers, said Japyassú, “see these spiders doing things that would seem impossible for a tiny animal.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, he says, the logical place to look for where all that thinking is happening is in the web.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969757\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 590px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969757\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/DL716_orb_web_sunlight.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"590\" height=\"331\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The signature spiral-shaped webs of the orb weaver extend the senses of a spider far beyond the limits of its body. \u003ccite>(Mike Seely/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "A COVID-19 Vaccine May Be Only 50% Effective. Is That Good Enough?",
"headTitle": "A COVID-19 Vaccine May Be Only 50% Effective. Is That Good Enough? | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>As we get closer to a COVID-19 vaccine, it’s exciting to imagine a day when the virus is gone. But a vaccine will not be a magic bullet. In fact, it may be only about 50% effective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief of the National Institute of Health and Infectious Disease, has\u003ca href=\"https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-health/fauci\"> tried to set realistic expectations\u003c/a> when discussing the importance of a vaccine. “We don’t know yet what the efficacy might be. We don’t know if it will be 50% or 60%,” Fauci said during a Brown University event in August.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’d like it to be 75% or more,” Fauci said, but he acknowledged that may not be realistic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Food and Drug Administration has said that once a vaccine is shown to be safe and at least 50% effective, it could be approved for use in the U.S.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>So What Does 50% Efficacy Mean?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we talk ‘vaccine effectiveness,’ what we’re talking about is, ‘How effective was the vaccine at preventing actual disease?’ ” explains scientist\u003ca href=\"https://www.immunize.org/aboutus/litjen_tan_bio.asp\"> L.J. Tan\u003c/a>, chief strategistof the nonprofit Immunization Action Coalition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other words, Tan says, “If you vaccinate 100 people, 50 people will not get [the] disease.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This may not sound like an impressive rate of infection prevention, but there are other potential benefits to individuals and the community from getting vaccinated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s possible that the [COVID-19] vaccine will reduce the severity of disease” in the other 50% who do get sick, says physician\u003ca href=\"https://cph.osu.edu/people/wmiller\"> Bill Miller\u003c/a> of The Ohio State University College of Public Health. “It may mean that people are less likely to be hospitalized, require ICU care or die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s certainly the case with the influenza vaccine,” Miller adds. “People who get the vaccine may still get the flu, but, for the most part, their disease is milder than if they hadn’t had the vaccine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/faculty-profiles/az/profile.html?xid=16506\">Michael Ison\u003c/a>, an infectious disease physician at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, echoes that sentiment. While it’s true that 50 out of 100 people who get the vaccine could still end up getting infected with the coronavirus, “hopefully, the majority will have milder disease,” Ison says. But he cautions there’s a lot to learn in that regard, given that the studies of COVID-19 vaccine candidates are still very much underway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We really need to get some information from the trials that are ongoing to best understand what the impact will be,” he says. Ison is a member of the research team at Northwestern that is conducting studies on COVID-19 and on influenza vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And here’s the next reality check: The extent to which any vaccine that emerges will help halt the COVID-19 pandemic depends on how many people get the immunization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In order to put this pandemic in the rearview mirror, a large percentage of the population needs to either be vaccinated or gain immunity via an infection with the virus (a much riskier route that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/24/894148860/without-a-vaccine-researchers-say-herd-immunity-may-never-be-achieved\">would include many more deaths\u003c/a>).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a large portion of the population has immunity to the virus because of this sort of \u003ca href=\"https://apic.org/monthly_alerts/herd-immunity/\">“herd immunity,”\u003c/a> it’s unlikely to keep spreading. Even people who haven’t been vaccinated (such as very young babies and those with compromised immune systems) are protected once this level of immunity in a population is achieved, because the illness has little opportunity to spread within the community — most people who run into the virus in this scenario are immune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the coronavirus, Ison says, “‘herd immunity’ is seen when we have somewhere between 60% to 70% of the population having some degree of protection.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So — here’s a little math — if 20% of the U.S. population ends up getting exposed to the virus and developing an infection before we have a vaccine (as is \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html#:~:text=About%2021%20percent%20of%20people,what%20is%20the%20infection%20rate.\">estimated to be the level of immunity in the New York City metro area right now),\u003c/a> then we would still need an additional 40% of the population to gain protection via a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in order to get 40% of a population immune through vaccination — if you have a vaccine with 50% efficacy — “you’re going to have to vaccinate 80% of the population,” says \u003ca href=\"https://vaccines.emory.edu/faculty-evc/primary-faculty/del_rio_carlos.html\">Carlos del Rio\u003c/a>, an infectious disease expert at Emory University. “So it’s not going to happen right away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For starters, Ison says, there are logistical challenges to getting everyone vaccinated, given the mammoth undertaking of manufacturing and distributing a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s going to take us months to get the entire population vaccinated if they are willing to get vaccinated,” he says — which is \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/09/09/911188375/how-vaccine-skepticism-may-affect-efforts-to-combat-the-coronavirus-pandemic\">another big “if.”\u003c/a> An NPR/PBS/Marist poll in August found that\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/08/14/902265017/poll-biden-expands-lead-a-third-of-country-says-it-wont-get-vaccinated\"> more than a third of Americans — 35% — say they won’t get vaccinated\u003c/a> when a vaccine comes available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, most of the candidate vaccines now being tested would require two separate doses to trigger their most effective protection, Ison says. So at a minimum, he notes, you’ve got a full month between the two doses of vaccine and a short period of time after the second dose before someone who was been vaccinated would be protected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also still not known how long the immunity gained through any of the current COVID-19 vaccine candidates will last or to what extent the virus might mutate or change in a way that makes that vaccine less effective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we will only know once we have the vaccine [approved and rolled out] is how effective it is, how long lasting the protection is and how much pressure it applies to the virus to change, to escape the pressures of the vaccine,” Ison says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite all these remaining unknowns, it is safe to say that any such vaccine against the coronavirus could play a significant role in reducing the spread of the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a vaccine is 50% effective, that’s still good,” Miller says. That means that you have a good possibility of being protected. He says we should think about its effectiveness the way we do about the benefits of cancer treatments, for example.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In some severe cancers, we’d be pretty happy to get a drug that gets us to 50% effectiveness,” he notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Do We Need to Test a Proposed Vaccine in So Many People?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For now, it’s important to see the experimental trials of each vaccine candidate through to the end, Miller says. The phase 3 trials will tell us a lot about the safety of a vaccine as well as its effectiveness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The large studies now underway are being conducted as double-blind, placebo-controlled trials, which is considered the gold standard in scientific research. This means half the participants get the real vaccine and “half the patients get a placebo — a water shot,” Ison says. And nobody — not the researchers nor the participants — will know until after the study is complete who got the placebo and who got the real vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we would like to see is that there’s a difference in the rate of COVID-19 — with a much lower rate in patients who get the vaccine than in the patients who get the placebo,” Ison says. But it takes time and a lot of people to see that sort of effect and to answer questions about safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The vaccine makers are aiming to enroll about 30,000 people in each trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Side effects of vaccines [can be] very rare, so you need a lot of people to see if the vaccine causes any unexpected problems,” Miller explains. “These side effects must also be monitored carefully post-marketing to ensure that every important problem is identified.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ison notes that there’s another benefit to a large study — it helps researchers know how strong the immune response to a vaccine needs to be to be protective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Will the Vaccine Protect Older People? And What If I’m Heavy?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With age, the immune system often mounts a lesser response to vaccination; that’s why, for example, adults 65 and older can opt for a high-dose flu shot — that’s thought to help bolster their protection. And scientists also know from prior research that the flu vaccine is \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/11/24/782079520/excess-weight-can-weaken-the-flu-shot\">less effective in people who carry a lot of extra weight\u003c/a>. Ison says it’s too soon to know if obesity or age will be a factor in the immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine candidates now being considered for use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In research results so far, he says, “the small, phase 1 data shows that you can generate antibody responses even in older adults, but it’ll be these larger studies that will tell us [whether] we need to use higher doses or more doses of the vaccine in certain cases.” Results from phase 3 trials of safety and effectiveness are expected in the coming months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+COVID-19+Vaccine+May+Be+Only+50%25+Effective.+Is+That+Good+Enough%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Scientists are racing to develop a vaccine that proves 'safe and effective.' It may not prevent infection in everyone who gets it, but it still could eventually stop the pandemic. Here's how.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As we get closer to a COVID-19 vaccine, it’s exciting to imagine a day when the virus is gone. But a vaccine will not be a magic bullet. In fact, it may be only about 50% effective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief of the National Institute of Health and Infectious Disease, has\u003ca href=\"https://www.brown.edu/academics/public-health/fauci\"> tried to set realistic expectations\u003c/a> when discussing the importance of a vaccine. “We don’t know yet what the efficacy might be. We don’t know if it will be 50% or 60%,” Fauci said during a Brown University event in August.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’d like it to be 75% or more,” Fauci said, but he acknowledged that may not be realistic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Food and Drug Administration has said that once a vaccine is shown to be safe and at least 50% effective, it could be approved for use in the U.S.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>So What Does 50% Efficacy Mean?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“When we talk ‘vaccine effectiveness,’ what we’re talking about is, ‘How effective was the vaccine at preventing actual disease?’ ” explains scientist\u003ca href=\"https://www.immunize.org/aboutus/litjen_tan_bio.asp\"> L.J. Tan\u003c/a>, chief strategistof the nonprofit Immunization Action Coalition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other words, Tan says, “If you vaccinate 100 people, 50 people will not get [the] disease.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This may not sound like an impressive rate of infection prevention, but there are other potential benefits to individuals and the community from getting vaccinated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s possible that the [COVID-19] vaccine will reduce the severity of disease” in the other 50% who do get sick, says physician\u003ca href=\"https://cph.osu.edu/people/wmiller\"> Bill Miller\u003c/a> of The Ohio State University College of Public Health. “It may mean that people are less likely to be hospitalized, require ICU care or die.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s certainly the case with the influenza vaccine,” Miller adds. “People who get the vaccine may still get the flu, but, for the most part, their disease is milder than if they hadn’t had the vaccine.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/faculty-profiles/az/profile.html?xid=16506\">Michael Ison\u003c/a>, an infectious disease physician at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, echoes that sentiment. While it’s true that 50 out of 100 people who get the vaccine could still end up getting infected with the coronavirus, “hopefully, the majority will have milder disease,” Ison says. But he cautions there’s a lot to learn in that regard, given that the studies of COVID-19 vaccine candidates are still very much underway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We really need to get some information from the trials that are ongoing to best understand what the impact will be,” he says. Ison is a member of the research team at Northwestern that is conducting studies on COVID-19 and on influenza vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And here’s the next reality check: The extent to which any vaccine that emerges will help halt the COVID-19 pandemic depends on how many people get the immunization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In order to put this pandemic in the rearview mirror, a large percentage of the population needs to either be vaccinated or gain immunity via an infection with the virus (a much riskier route that \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/07/24/894148860/without-a-vaccine-researchers-say-herd-immunity-may-never-be-achieved\">would include many more deaths\u003c/a>).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When a large portion of the population has immunity to the virus because of this sort of \u003ca href=\"https://apic.org/monthly_alerts/herd-immunity/\">“herd immunity,”\u003c/a> it’s unlikely to keep spreading. Even people who haven’t been vaccinated (such as very young babies and those with compromised immune systems) are protected once this level of immunity in a population is achieved, because the illness has little opportunity to spread within the community — most people who run into the virus in this scenario are immune.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the coronavirus, Ison says, “‘herd immunity’ is seen when we have somewhere between 60% to 70% of the population having some degree of protection.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So — here’s a little math — if 20% of the U.S. population ends up getting exposed to the virus and developing an infection before we have a vaccine (as is \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york-update.html#:~:text=About%2021%20percent%20of%20people,what%20is%20the%20infection%20rate.\">estimated to be the level of immunity in the New York City metro area right now),\u003c/a> then we would still need an additional 40% of the population to gain protection via a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in order to get 40% of a population immune through vaccination — if you have a vaccine with 50% efficacy — “you’re going to have to vaccinate 80% of the population,” says \u003ca href=\"https://vaccines.emory.edu/faculty-evc/primary-faculty/del_rio_carlos.html\">Carlos del Rio\u003c/a>, an infectious disease expert at Emory University. “So it’s not going to happen right away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For starters, Ison says, there are logistical challenges to getting everyone vaccinated, given the mammoth undertaking of manufacturing and distributing a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s going to take us months to get the entire population vaccinated if they are willing to get vaccinated,” he says — which is \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/09/09/911188375/how-vaccine-skepticism-may-affect-efforts-to-combat-the-coronavirus-pandemic\">another big “if.”\u003c/a> An NPR/PBS/Marist poll in August found that\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/08/14/902265017/poll-biden-expands-lead-a-third-of-country-says-it-wont-get-vaccinated\"> more than a third of Americans — 35% — say they won’t get vaccinated\u003c/a> when a vaccine comes available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, most of the candidate vaccines now being tested would require two separate doses to trigger their most effective protection, Ison says. So at a minimum, he notes, you’ve got a full month between the two doses of vaccine and a short period of time after the second dose before someone who was been vaccinated would be protected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also still not known how long the immunity gained through any of the current COVID-19 vaccine candidates will last or to what extent the virus might mutate or change in a way that makes that vaccine less effective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we will only know once we have the vaccine [approved and rolled out] is how effective it is, how long lasting the protection is and how much pressure it applies to the virus to change, to escape the pressures of the vaccine,” Ison says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite all these remaining unknowns, it is safe to say that any such vaccine against the coronavirus could play a significant role in reducing the spread of the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a vaccine is 50% effective, that’s still good,” Miller says. That means that you have a good possibility of being protected. He says we should think about its effectiveness the way we do about the benefits of cancer treatments, for example.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In some severe cancers, we’d be pretty happy to get a drug that gets us to 50% effectiveness,” he notes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Do We Need to Test a Proposed Vaccine in So Many People?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For now, it’s important to see the experimental trials of each vaccine candidate through to the end, Miller says. The phase 3 trials will tell us a lot about the safety of a vaccine as well as its effectiveness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The large studies now underway are being conducted as double-blind, placebo-controlled trials, which is considered the gold standard in scientific research. This means half the participants get the real vaccine and “half the patients get a placebo — a water shot,” Ison says. And nobody — not the researchers nor the participants — will know until after the study is complete who got the placebo and who got the real vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we would like to see is that there’s a difference in the rate of COVID-19 — with a much lower rate in patients who get the vaccine than in the patients who get the placebo,” Ison says. But it takes time and a lot of people to see that sort of effect and to answer questions about safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The vaccine makers are aiming to enroll about 30,000 people in each trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Side effects of vaccines [can be] very rare, so you need a lot of people to see if the vaccine causes any unexpected problems,” Miller explains. “These side effects must also be monitored carefully post-marketing to ensure that every important problem is identified.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ison notes that there’s another benefit to a large study — it helps researchers know how strong the immune response to a vaccine needs to be to be protective.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Will the Vaccine Protect Older People? And What If I’m Heavy?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With age, the immune system often mounts a lesser response to vaccination; that’s why, for example, adults 65 and older can opt for a high-dose flu shot — that’s thought to help bolster their protection. And scientists also know from prior research that the flu vaccine is \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/11/24/782079520/excess-weight-can-weaken-the-flu-shot\">less effective in people who carry a lot of extra weight\u003c/a>. Ison says it’s too soon to know if obesity or age will be a factor in the immune response to the COVID-19 vaccine candidates now being considered for use.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In research results so far, he says, “the small, phase 1 data shows that you can generate antibody responses even in older adults, but it’ll be these larger studies that will tell us [whether] we need to use higher doses or more doses of the vaccine in certain cases.” Results from phase 3 trials of safety and effectiveness are expected in the coming months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+COVID-19+Vaccine+May+Be+Only+50%25+Effective.+Is+That+Good+Enough%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Why Can't America Make Enough N95 Masks? 6 Months Into Pandemic, Shortages Persist",
"headTitle": "Why Can’t America Make Enough N95 Masks? 6 Months Into Pandemic, Shortages Persist | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there were lots of stories about scrappy manufacturers promising to revamp their factories to start making personal protective equipment in the U.S.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in the spring, fuel-cell maker Adaptive Energy retooled part of its factory in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to make plastic face shields. Now, 100,000 finished shields are piling up in cardboard boxes on the factory floor — unsold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We jumped in head first,” said Ranvir Gujral, the company’s principal owner. He added ruefully: “We weren’t the only ones with a brilliant idea of getting our folks back to work and trying to help and manufacture PPE.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the coronavirus pandemic began, President Trump and industry officials have talked a lot about the need to ramp up domestic manufacturing of critical protective gear. But six months on, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903612006/yep-masks-and-protective-gear-are-still-hard-get-especially-for-small-buyers\">there are still shortages of all kinds of PPE,\u003c/a> like N95 respirator masks, while face shields are easy to find.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lack of a Coherent National Plan\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disconnect can be traced, in part, to the lack of a coherent national plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Gujral and other domestic manufacturers saw an opportunity to help protect front-line workers — and to keep their own employees working, many of them shifted gears to make face shields and hand sanitizer, which are relatively simple to produce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But fewer shifted to making N95 masks, which are far more complicated, and they’re in short supply. Nurses and doctors are reusing masks over and over again. Some small medical practices can’t even find supplies they can afford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Trump consistently ignores that reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve opened up factories. We’ve had tremendous success with face masks and with shields,” Trump said during a press briefing at the White House last week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The market is, in fact, glutted with face shields. But the U.S. is still far short of the 3.5 billion masks that public health officials say are needed this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The White House narrative is that the pandemic revealed the danger of relying too much on Chinese suppliers, and that the U.S. has ramped up domestic production significantly, making those early shortages a thing of the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are taking our business out of China. We are bringing it home. We want our business to come home,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in reality, U.S. manufacturers worry the administration is fumbling a chance to bring the PPE industry back home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not seeing that happen. In fact, we’re behind in manufacturing jobs. We’re importing more PPEs than ever,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘This Administration Has Really Had a Big Firm Focus’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The White House worked with some big companies, including 3M and Honeywell, to ramp up domestic production of respirator masks. But that was relatively easy for them:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>3M developed the first N95 mask, so it already has factories and established customers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even so, 3M and Honeywell haven’t been able to make enough masks as the pandemic wore on and demand only increased.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not tens of millions of masks short. We’re hundreds of millions of masks short of where we need to be,” Paul said. “It would make complete sense to want to scale up some small and midsized manufacturers to help fill in this massive gap.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the federal government has no plan to help small- and midsized manufacturers move into PPE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This administration has really had a big firm focus,” said Gary Gereffi, a professor at Duke University and the founding director of the Duke Global Value Chains Center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve never really fully dealt with the ongoing demand for the basic items — the face masks and the gloves and the gowns,” Gereffi said, partly because the administration has been more focused on discovering a vaccine that could bring the coronavirus outbreak under control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a result, Gereffi said: “We didn’t have any agency in the government that knew which companies were producing these different products.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That leaves manufacturers like Ranvir Gujral, the factory owner in Michigan, to figure it out on their own. Gujral still wants to help in the pandemic. He’s thinking about retooling his factory in Michigan again, this time to make N95 masks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have the machines lined up. We have the raw materials lined up. We have the capital lined up,” Gujral said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What he’s missing is some certainty that his investment will pay off. Gujral’s factory wouldn’t be ready to start cranking out masks until the spring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Are we going to still have demand? Are these customers still going to come to us?,” he asked. “We don’t want to be left holding the bag.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gujral says he can’t risk repeating his face shield experience with N95 masks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a big enough move to put us out of business if it doesn’t go well,” he said. “It’s a bet-the-company move.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s the same conundrum facing all sorts of industries. Things are made more cheaply overseas, especially in China. So are customers willing to pay a little more for masks that are made in the USA? Or other scarce items, like protective gloves or gowns?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I hear that from across my industry,” said Kimberly Glas, the president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, an industry trade association in Washington. “People aren’t going to make an investment realizing that there’s not a customer at the other end.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even as the Trump administration downplays the PPE shortages, it has taken steps to try to shore up U.S. manufacturing of drugs and medical supplies. The president signed an executive order last month requiring federal agencies to buy American-made when possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a good step, said Glas, who worked at the U.S. Commerce Department during the Obama administration. But she says it will take more than that — a real strategic federal plan, or tax incentives — to convince domestic manufacturers to invest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My fear is a year from now, we will see these supply chains that were heavily dominated in China go back to China fully,” Glas said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the U.S. will have squandered a chance to bring jobs back onshore, and make America self-sufficient when it comes to protecting against the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Why+Can%27t+America+Make+Enough+N95+Masks%3F+6+Months+Into+Pandemic%2C+Shortages+Persist&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "There's just not enough PPE to satisfy demand. Medics are re-using masks and small practices can't even find supplies they can afford. Some domestic manufacturers could help, but it's a risky move.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there were lots of stories about scrappy manufacturers promising to revamp their factories to start making personal protective equipment in the U.S.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back in the spring, fuel-cell maker Adaptive Energy retooled part of its factory in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to make plastic face shields. Now, 100,000 finished shields are piling up in cardboard boxes on the factory floor — unsold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We jumped in head first,” said Ranvir Gujral, the company’s principal owner. He added ruefully: “We weren’t the only ones with a brilliant idea of getting our folks back to work and trying to help and manufacture PPE.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the coronavirus pandemic began, President Trump and industry officials have talked a lot about the need to ramp up domestic manufacturing of critical protective gear. But six months on, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903612006/yep-masks-and-protective-gear-are-still-hard-get-especially-for-small-buyers\">there are still shortages of all kinds of PPE,\u003c/a> like N95 respirator masks, while face shields are easy to find.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lack of a Coherent National Plan\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disconnect can be traced, in part, to the lack of a coherent national plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When Gujral and other domestic manufacturers saw an opportunity to help protect front-line workers — and to keep their own employees working, many of them shifted gears to make face shields and hand sanitizer, which are relatively simple to produce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But fewer shifted to making N95 masks, which are far more complicated, and they’re in short supply. Nurses and doctors are reusing masks over and over again. Some small medical practices can’t even find supplies they can afford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Trump consistently ignores that reality.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve opened up factories. We’ve had tremendous success with face masks and with shields,” Trump said during a press briefing at the White House last week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The market is, in fact, glutted with face shields. But the U.S. is still far short of the 3.5 billion masks that public health officials say are needed this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The White House narrative is that the pandemic revealed the danger of relying too much on Chinese suppliers, and that the U.S. has ramped up domestic production significantly, making those early shortages a thing of the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are taking our business out of China. We are bringing it home. We want our business to come home,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in reality, U.S. manufacturers worry the administration is fumbling a chance to bring the PPE industry back home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not seeing that happen. In fact, we’re behind in manufacturing jobs. We’re importing more PPEs than ever,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>‘This Administration Has Really Had a Big Firm Focus’\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The White House worked with some big companies, including 3M and Honeywell, to ramp up domestic production of respirator masks. But that was relatively easy for them:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>3M developed the first N95 mask, so it already has factories and established customers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even so, 3M and Honeywell haven’t been able to make enough masks as the pandemic wore on and demand only increased.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not tens of millions of masks short. We’re hundreds of millions of masks short of where we need to be,” Paul said. “It would make complete sense to want to scale up some small and midsized manufacturers to help fill in this massive gap.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the federal government has no plan to help small- and midsized manufacturers move into PPE.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This administration has really had a big firm focus,” said Gary Gereffi, a professor at Duke University and the founding director of the Duke Global Value Chains Center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve never really fully dealt with the ongoing demand for the basic items — the face masks and the gloves and the gowns,” Gereffi said, partly because the administration has been more focused on discovering a vaccine that could bring the coronavirus outbreak under control.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a result, Gereffi said: “We didn’t have any agency in the government that knew which companies were producing these different products.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That leaves manufacturers like Ranvir Gujral, the factory owner in Michigan, to figure it out on their own. Gujral still wants to help in the pandemic. He’s thinking about retooling his factory in Michigan again, this time to make N95 masks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have the machines lined up. We have the raw materials lined up. We have the capital lined up,” Gujral said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What he’s missing is some certainty that his investment will pay off. Gujral’s factory wouldn’t be ready to start cranking out masks until the spring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Are we going to still have demand? Are these customers still going to come to us?,” he asked. “We don’t want to be left holding the bag.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gujral says he can’t risk repeating his face shield experience with N95 masks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a big enough move to put us out of business if it doesn’t go well,” he said. “It’s a bet-the-company move.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s the same conundrum facing all sorts of industries. Things are made more cheaply overseas, especially in China. So are customers willing to pay a little more for masks that are made in the USA? Or other scarce items, like protective gloves or gowns?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I hear that from across my industry,” said Kimberly Glas, the president of the National Council of Textile Organizations, an industry trade association in Washington. “People aren’t going to make an investment realizing that there’s not a customer at the other end.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even as the Trump administration downplays the PPE shortages, it has taken steps to try to shore up U.S. manufacturing of drugs and medical supplies. The president signed an executive order last month requiring federal agencies to buy American-made when possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a good step, said Glas, who worked at the U.S. Commerce Department during the Obama administration. But she says it will take more than that — a real strategic federal plan, or tax incentives — to convince domestic manufacturers to invest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My fear is a year from now, we will see these supply chains that were heavily dominated in China go back to China fully,” Glas said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the U.S. will have squandered a chance to bring jobs back onshore, and make America self-sufficient when it comes to protecting against the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Why+Can%27t+America+Make+Enough+N95+Masks%3F+6+Months+Into+Pandemic%2C+Shortages+Persist&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "How the Oil Industry Misled the Public Into Thinking Plastic Would be Recycled",
"headTitle": "How the Oil Industry Misled the Public Into Thinking Plastic Would be Recycled | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR’s Planet Money. \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Listen to the episode here. \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust,” she said. “I had been lying to people … unwittingly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn’t want to hear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage,” she says, “and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You’re lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It’s gold. This is valuable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s not valuable, and it never has been. And what’s more, the makers of plastic — the nation’s largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR and \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/\">PBS\u003cem> Frontline\u003c/em>\u003c/a> spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn’t work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The industry’s awareness that recycling wouldn’t keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program’s earliest days, we found. “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn’t true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry’s most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now,” Russell said. “I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn’t happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can’t be reused more than once or twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It’s made from oil and gas, and it’s almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than \u003ca href=\"https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data\">10% of plastic\u003c/a> has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It could be because that’s not what they were told.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The bottle may look empty, yet it’s anything but trash,” says \u003ca href=\"https://digital.hagley.org/VID_1995300_B01_ID02?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=0578c06f357879ed7125&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=0\">one ad from 1990\u003c/a> showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. “It’s full of potential. … We’ve pioneered the country’s largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It may have sounded like an environmentalist’s message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the industry’s old documents are housed in libraries, such as the one on the grounds of the first DuPont family home in Delaware. Others are with universities, where former industry leaders sent their records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for top industry executives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is no recovery from obsolete products,” it says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A degradation of resin properties and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through aging, and in any reclamation process,” the report told executives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recycling plastic is “costly,” it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is “infeasible.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry’s most powerful trade group. “The costs of separating plastics … are high,” he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste “can’t yet be justified economically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, worked side by side with top oil and plastics executives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s retired now, on the coast of Florida where he likes to bike, and feels conflicted about the time he worked with the plastics industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I did what the industry wanted me to do, that’s for sure,” he says. “But my personal views didn’t always jibe with the views I had to take as part of my job.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. There was too much plastic trash. The public was getting upset.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969576\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2048px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1969576 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1535\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-1536x1151.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-1920x1439.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon, where paper and metals still have markets but most plastic is thrown away. All plastic must first go through a recycling facility like this one, but only a fraction of the plastic produced actually winds up getting recycled. \u003ccite>(Laura Sullivan/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In one document from 1989, Thomas calls executives at Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others to a private meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate,” he wrote. “We are approaching a point of no return.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He told the executives they needed to act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The “viability of the industry and the profitability of your company” are at stake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thomas remembers now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire — we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this time, Thomas had a co-worker named Lew Freeman. He was a vice president of the lobbying group. He remembers many of the meetings like the one in Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The basic question on the table was, You guys as our trade association in the plastics industry aren’t doing enough — we need to do more,” Freeman says. “I remember this is one of those exchanges that sticks with me 35 years later or however long it’s been … and it was what we need to do is … advertise our way out of it. That was the idea thrown out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So began the plastics industry’s $50 million-a-year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Presenting the possibilities of plastic!” one iconic ad blared, showing kids in bike helmets and plastic bags floating in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This advertising was motivated first and foremost by legislation and other initiatives that were being introduced in state legislatures and sometimes in Congress,” Freeman says, “to ban or curb the use of plastics because of its performance in the waste stream.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-good projects, telling the public to recycle plastic. It funded sorting machines, recycling centers, nonprofits, even expensive benches outside grocery stores made out of plastic bags.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Few of these projects actually turned much plastic into new things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed by the mid-1990s. Mobil’s Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for example. Amoco’s project to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Dow and Huntsman’s highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in national parks made it to seven out of 419 parks before the companies cut funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>None of them was able to get past the economics: Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was a lot of discussion about how difficult it was to recycle,” Thomas remembers. “They knew that the infrastructure wasn’t there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even as the ads played and the projects got underway, Thomas and Freeman say industry officials wanted to get recycling plastic into people’s homes and outside on their curbs with blue bins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The industry created a special group called the Council for Solid Waste Solutions and brought a man from DuPont, Ron Liesemer, over to run it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Liesemer’s job was to at least try to make recycling work — because there was some hope, he said, however unlikely, that maybe if they could get recycling started, somehow the economics of it all would work itself out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had no staff, but I had money,” Liesemer says. “Millions of dollars.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Liesemer took those millions out to Minnesota and other places to start local plastic recycling programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then he ran into the same problem all the industry documents found. Recycling plastic wasn’t making economic sense: There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can’t be melted down together. They have to be sorted out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes, it can be done,” Liesemer says, “but who’s going to pay for it? Because it goes into too many applications, it goes into too many structures that just would not be practical to recycle.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Liesemer says he started as many programs as he could and hoped for the best.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They were trying to keep their products on the shelves,” Liesemer says. “That’s what they were focused on. They weren’t thinking what lesson should we learn for the next 20 years. No. Solve today’s problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Thomas, who led the trade group, says all of these efforts started to have an effect: The message that plastic could be recycled was sinking in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can only say that after a while, the atmosphere seemed to change,” he says. “I don’t know whether it was because people thought recycling had solved the problem or whether they were so in love with plastic products that they were willing to overlook the environmental concerns that were mounting up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as the industry pushed those public strategies to get past the crisis, officials were also quietly launching a broader plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early 1990s, at a small recycling facility near San Diego, a man named Coy Smith was one of the first to see the industry’s new initiative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back then, Smith ran a recycling business. His customers were watching the ads and wanted to recycle plastic. So Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then, one day, almost overnight, his customers started putting all kinds of plastic in their bins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The symbols start showing up on the containers,” he explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith went out to the piles of plastic and started flipping over the containers. All of them were now stamped with the triangle of arrows — known as the international recycling symbol — with a number in the middle. He knew right away what was happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of a sudden, the consumer is looking at what’s on their soda bottle and they’re looking at what’s on their yogurt tub, and they say, ‘Oh well, they both have a symbol. Oh well, I guess they both go in,'” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969577\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2048px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969577\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1365\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Unwanted used plastic sits outside Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon. \u003ccite>(Laura Sullivan/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The bins were now full of trash he couldn’t sell. He called colleagues at recycling facilities all across the country. They reported having the same problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The consumers were confused,” Smith says. “It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what we knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith’s community too. A report given to top officials at the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The code is being misused,” it says bluntly. “Companies are using it as a ‘green’ marketing tool.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The code is creating “unrealistic expectations” about how much plastic can actually be recycled, it told them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith and his colleagues launched a national protest, started a working group and fought the industry for years to get the symbol removed or changed. They lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We don’t have manpower to compete with this,” Smith says. “We just don’t. Even though we were all dedicated, it still was like, can we keep fighting a battle like this on and on and on from this massive industry that clearly has no end in sight of what they’re able to do and willing to do to keep their image the image they want.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s pure manipulation of the consumer,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response, industry officials told NPR that the code was only ever meant to help recycling facilities sort plastic and was not intended to create any confusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without question, plastic has been critical to the country’s success. It’s cheap and durable, and it’s a chemical marvel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also hugely profitable. The oil industry makes more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.plasticsindustry.org/sites/default/files/SizeAndImpactReport_Summary.pdf\">$400 billion a year\u003c/a> making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And if there was a sign of this future, it’s a brand-new chemical plant that rises from the flat skyline outside Sweeny, Texas. It’s so new that it’s still shiny, and inside the facility, the concrete is free from stains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969578\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1536px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969578\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1536\" height=\"1152\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1536px) 100vw, 1536px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chevron Phillips Chemical’s new $6 billion plastic manufacturing plant rises from the skyline in Sweeny, Texas. Company officials say they see a bright future for their products as demand for plastic continues to rise. \u003ccite>(Laura Sullivan/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This plant is Chevron Phillips Chemical’s $6 billion investment in new plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We see a very bright future for our products,” says Jim Becker, the vice president of sustainability for Chevron Phillips, inside a pristine new warehouse next to the plant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are products the world needs and continues to need,” he says. “We’re very optimistic about future growth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With that growth, though, comes ever more plastic trash. But Becker says Chevron Phillips has a plan: It will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes by 2040.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becker seems earnest. He tells a story about vacationing with his wife and being devastated by the plastic trash they saw. When asked how Chevron Phillips will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes, he doesn’t hesitate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Recycling has to get more efficient, more economic,” he says. “We’ve got to do a better job, collecting the waste, sorting it. That’s going to be a huge effort.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fix recycling is the industry’s message too, says Steve Russell, the industry’s recent spokesman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Fixing recycling is an imperative, and we’ve got to get it right,” he says. “I understand there is doubt and cynicism. That’s going to exist. But check back in. We’re there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the first plastic crisis by getting people to believe something the industry knew then wasn’t true: That most plastic could be and would be recycled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Russell says this time will be different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It didn’t get recycled because the system wasn’t up to par,” he says. “We hadn’t invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn’t been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But plastic today is harder to sort than ever: There are more kinds of plastic, it’s cheaper to make plastic out of oil than plastic trash and there is exponentially more of it than 30 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And during those 30 years, oil and plastic companies made billions of dollars in profit as the public consumed ever more quantities of plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Russell doesn’t dispute that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And during that time, our members have invested in developing the technologies that have brought us where we are today,” he says. “We are going to be able to make all of our new plastic out of existing municipal solid waste in plastic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, an industry advocacy group funded by the nation’s largest oil and plastic companies launched its most expensive effort yet to promote recycling and cleanup of plastic waste. There’s even a \u003ca href=\"https://endplasticwaste.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/The-World-We-Know.mp4\">new ad\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969579\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2048px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969579\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1365\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">New plastic bottles come off the line at a plastic manufacturing facility in Maryland. Plastic production is expected to triple by 2050. \u003ccite>(Laura Sullivan/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“We have the people that can change the world,” it says to soaring music as people pick up plastic trash and as bottles get sorted in a recycling center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Freeman, the former industry official, recently watched the ad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Déjà vu all over again,” he says as the ad finishes. “This is the same kind of thinking that ran in the ’90s. I don’t think this kind of advertising is, is helpful at all.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Larry Thomas said the same.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think anything has changed,” Thomas says. “Sounds exactly the same.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These days as Thomas bikes down by the beach, he says he spends a lot of time thinking about the oceans and what will happen to them in 20 or 50 years, long after he is gone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And as he thinks back to those years he spent in conference rooms with top executives from oil and plastic companies, what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should have been obvious all along.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says what he saw was an industry that didn’t want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,” Thomas says. “Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material — that’s their business.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And they are. Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=How+Big+Oil+Misled+The+Public+Into+Believing+Plastic+Would+Be+Recycled&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "An NPR and PBS \"Frontline\" investigation reveals how the oil and gas industry used the promise of recycling to sell more plastic, even when they knew it would never work on a large scale.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR’s Planet Money. \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Listen to the episode here. \u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust,” she said. “I had been lying to people … unwittingly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn’t want to hear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage,” she says, “and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You’re lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It’s gold. This is valuable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it’s not valuable, and it never has been. And what’s more, the makers of plastic — the nation’s largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR and \u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/\">PBS\u003cem> Frontline\u003c/em>\u003c/a> spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn’t work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The industry’s awareness that recycling wouldn’t keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program’s earliest days, we found. “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,” one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn’t true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry’s most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now,” Russell said. “I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn’t happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here’s the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can’t be reused more than once or twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It’s made from oil and gas, and it’s almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than \u003ca href=\"https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data\">10% of plastic\u003c/a> has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It could be because that’s not what they were told.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The bottle may look empty, yet it’s anything but trash,” says \u003ca href=\"https://digital.hagley.org/VID_1995300_B01_ID02?solr_nav%5Bid%5D=0578c06f357879ed7125&solr_nav%5Bpage%5D=0&solr_nav%5Boffset%5D=0\">one ad from 1990\u003c/a> showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. “It’s full of potential. … We’ve pioneered the country’s largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It may have sounded like an environmentalist’s message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the industry’s old documents are housed in libraries, such as the one on the grounds of the first DuPont family home in Delaware. Others are with universities, where former industry leaders sent their records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for top industry executives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is no recovery from obsolete products,” it says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A degradation of resin properties and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through aging, and in any reclamation process,” the report told executives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recycling plastic is “costly,” it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is “infeasible.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry’s most powerful trade group. “The costs of separating plastics … are high,” he tells colleagues, before noting that the cost of using oil to make plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste “can’t yet be justified economically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, worked side by side with top oil and plastics executives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s retired now, on the coast of Florida where he likes to bike, and feels conflicted about the time he worked with the plastics industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I did what the industry wanted me to do, that’s for sure,” he says. “But my personal views didn’t always jibe with the views I had to take as part of my job.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. There was too much plastic trash. The public was getting upset.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969576\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2048px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1969576 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1535\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-1536x1151.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6962_custom-53de701bffc6e83c4273e386c22726fbf363bdcd-1920x1439.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon, where paper and metals still have markets but most plastic is thrown away. All plastic must first go through a recycling facility like this one, but only a fraction of the plastic produced actually winds up getting recycled. \u003ccite>(Laura Sullivan/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In one document from 1989, Thomas calls executives at Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others to a private meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate,” he wrote. “We are approaching a point of no return.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He told the executives they needed to act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The “viability of the industry and the profitability of your company” are at stake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thomas remembers now.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire — we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this time, Thomas had a co-worker named Lew Freeman. He was a vice president of the lobbying group. He remembers many of the meetings like the one in Washington.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The basic question on the table was, You guys as our trade association in the plastics industry aren’t doing enough — we need to do more,” Freeman says. “I remember this is one of those exchanges that sticks with me 35 years later or however long it’s been … and it was what we need to do is … advertise our way out of it. That was the idea thrown out.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So began the plastics industry’s $50 million-a-year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Presenting the possibilities of plastic!” one iconic ad blared, showing kids in bike helmets and plastic bags floating in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This advertising was motivated first and foremost by legislation and other initiatives that were being introduced in state legislatures and sometimes in Congress,” Freeman says, “to ban or curb the use of plastics because of its performance in the waste stream.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-good projects, telling the public to recycle plastic. It funded sorting machines, recycling centers, nonprofits, even expensive benches outside grocery stores made out of plastic bags.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Few of these projects actually turned much plastic into new things.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed by the mid-1990s. Mobil’s Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for example. Amoco’s project to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Dow and Huntsman’s highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in national parks made it to seven out of 419 parks before the companies cut funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>None of them was able to get past the economics: Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was a lot of discussion about how difficult it was to recycle,” Thomas remembers. “They knew that the infrastructure wasn’t there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even as the ads played and the projects got underway, Thomas and Freeman say industry officials wanted to get recycling plastic into people’s homes and outside on their curbs with blue bins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The industry created a special group called the Council for Solid Waste Solutions and brought a man from DuPont, Ron Liesemer, over to run it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Liesemer’s job was to at least try to make recycling work — because there was some hope, he said, however unlikely, that maybe if they could get recycling started, somehow the economics of it all would work itself out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I had no staff, but I had money,” Liesemer says. “Millions of dollars.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Liesemer took those millions out to Minnesota and other places to start local plastic recycling programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then he ran into the same problem all the industry documents found. Recycling plastic wasn’t making economic sense: There were too many different kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can’t be melted down together. They have to be sorted out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Yes, it can be done,” Liesemer says, “but who’s going to pay for it? Because it goes into too many applications, it goes into too many structures that just would not be practical to recycle.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Liesemer says he started as many programs as he could and hoped for the best.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They were trying to keep their products on the shelves,” Liesemer says. “That’s what they were focused on. They weren’t thinking what lesson should we learn for the next 20 years. No. Solve today’s problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And Thomas, who led the trade group, says all of these efforts started to have an effect: The message that plastic could be recycled was sinking in.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I can only say that after a while, the atmosphere seemed to change,” he says. “I don’t know whether it was because people thought recycling had solved the problem or whether they were so in love with plastic products that they were willing to overlook the environmental concerns that were mounting up.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as the industry pushed those public strategies to get past the crisis, officials were also quietly launching a broader plan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early 1990s, at a small recycling facility near San Diego, a man named Coy Smith was one of the first to see the industry’s new initiative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back then, Smith ran a recycling business. His customers were watching the ads and wanted to recycle plastic. So Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business helped offset the costs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then, one day, almost overnight, his customers started putting all kinds of plastic in their bins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The symbols start showing up on the containers,” he explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith went out to the piles of plastic and started flipping over the containers. All of them were now stamped with the triangle of arrows — known as the international recycling symbol — with a number in the middle. He knew right away what was happening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All of a sudden, the consumer is looking at what’s on their soda bottle and they’re looking at what’s on their yogurt tub, and they say, ‘Oh well, they both have a symbol. Oh well, I guess they both go in,'” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969577\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2048px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969577\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1365\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_6948_slide-0cfb37ad629b646bd74852187b68b6f1ac98e82f-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Unwanted used plastic sits outside Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon. \u003ccite>(Laura Sullivan/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The bins were now full of trash he couldn’t sell. He called colleagues at recycling facilities all across the country. They reported having the same problem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking it would help separate plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith said what it did was make all plastic look recyclable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The consumers were confused,” Smith says. “It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what we knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith’s community too. A report given to top officials at the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The code is being misused,” it says bluntly. “Companies are using it as a ‘green’ marketing tool.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The code is creating “unrealistic expectations” about how much plastic can actually be recycled, it told them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smith and his colleagues launched a national protest, started a working group and fought the industry for years to get the symbol removed or changed. They lost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We don’t have manpower to compete with this,” Smith says. “We just don’t. Even though we were all dedicated, it still was like, can we keep fighting a battle like this on and on and on from this massive industry that clearly has no end in sight of what they’re able to do and willing to do to keep their image the image they want.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s pure manipulation of the consumer,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In response, industry officials told NPR that the code was only ever meant to help recycling facilities sort plastic and was not intended to create any confusion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without question, plastic has been critical to the country’s success. It’s cheap and durable, and it’s a chemical marvel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also hugely profitable. The oil industry makes more than \u003ca href=\"https://www.plasticsindustry.org/sites/default/files/SizeAndImpactReport_Summary.pdf\">$400 billion a year\u003c/a> making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And if there was a sign of this future, it’s a brand-new chemical plant that rises from the flat skyline outside Sweeny, Texas. It’s so new that it’s still shiny, and inside the facility, the concrete is free from stains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969578\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1536px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969578\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1536\" height=\"1152\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_7522-0748d6ba7ae89aee8d80e3a91946b29cf2cb519a-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1536px) 100vw, 1536px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chevron Phillips Chemical’s new $6 billion plastic manufacturing plant rises from the skyline in Sweeny, Texas. Company officials say they see a bright future for their products as demand for plastic continues to rise. \u003ccite>(Laura Sullivan/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>This plant is Chevron Phillips Chemical’s $6 billion investment in new plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We see a very bright future for our products,” says Jim Becker, the vice president of sustainability for Chevron Phillips, inside a pristine new warehouse next to the plant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are products the world needs and continues to need,” he says. “We’re very optimistic about future growth.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With that growth, though, comes ever more plastic trash. But Becker says Chevron Phillips has a plan: It will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes by 2040.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becker seems earnest. He tells a story about vacationing with his wife and being devastated by the plastic trash they saw. When asked how Chevron Phillips will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes, he doesn’t hesitate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Recycling has to get more efficient, more economic,” he says. “We’ve got to do a better job, collecting the waste, sorting it. That’s going to be a huge effort.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fix recycling is the industry’s message too, says Steve Russell, the industry’s recent spokesman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Fixing recycling is an imperative, and we’ve got to get it right,” he says. “I understand there is doubt and cynicism. That’s going to exist. But check back in. We’re there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the first plastic crisis by getting people to believe something the industry knew then wasn’t true: That most plastic could be and would be recycled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Russell says this time will be different.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It didn’t get recycled because the system wasn’t up to par,” he says. “We hadn’t invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn’t been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But plastic today is harder to sort than ever: There are more kinds of plastic, it’s cheaper to make plastic out of oil than plastic trash and there is exponentially more of it than 30 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And during those 30 years, oil and plastic companies made billions of dollars in profit as the public consumed ever more quantities of plastic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Russell doesn’t dispute that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And during that time, our members have invested in developing the technologies that have brought us where we are today,” he says. “We are going to be able to make all of our new plastic out of existing municipal solid waste in plastic.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Recently, an industry advocacy group funded by the nation’s largest oil and plastic companies launched its most expensive effort yet to promote recycling and cleanup of plastic waste. There’s even a \u003ca href=\"https://endplasticwaste.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/The-World-We-Know.mp4\">new ad\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1969579\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2048px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1969579\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1365\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/09/img_8725_slide-6bcbd5de006f7554e5b5cdf1a752dc702159c20c-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">New plastic bottles come off the line at a plastic manufacturing facility in Maryland. Plastic production is expected to triple by 2050. \u003ccite>(Laura Sullivan/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“We have the people that can change the world,” it says to soaring music as people pick up plastic trash and as bottles get sorted in a recycling center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Freeman, the former industry official, recently watched the ad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Déjà vu all over again,” he says as the ad finishes. “This is the same kind of thinking that ran in the ’90s. I don’t think this kind of advertising is, is helpful at all.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Larry Thomas said the same.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think anything has changed,” Thomas says. “Sounds exactly the same.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These days as Thomas bikes down by the beach, he says he spends a lot of time thinking about the oceans and what will happen to them in 20 or 50 years, long after he is gone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And as he thinks back to those years he spent in conference rooms with top executives from oil and plastic companies, what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should have been obvious all along.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says what he saw was an industry that didn’t want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,” Thomas says. “Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material — that’s their business.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And they are. Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=How+Big+Oil+Misled+The+Public+Into+Believing+Plastic+Would+Be+Recycled&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp class=\"p1\">Millions of Bay Area residents have been living under hazy skies, breathing dense, smoky and frequently hazardous air. Now, the “smokestorm,” as some weather experts have \u003ca href=\"https://weatherwest.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">dubbed\u003c/span>\u003c/a> the choking fog of particulate matter blanketing the region this past week, could be coming to an end.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">Or at least a much needed intermission.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The air in the Bay Area is starting to gradually improve after ranging from “unhealthy for sensitive groups” to “hazardous” across the region. Despite the clearer conditions, a Bay Area Air Quality Management District Spare the Air Alert will run through Wednesday, marking a record 30 consecutive days of poor to terrible air quality. The conditions have made outdoor activity potentially dangerous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">On Tuesday, for the first time in almost a week, air district monitors displayed readings in the moderate, or yellow, range, and satellite images showed visibly lower smoke concentrations for large portions of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“The winds have cleared out some of the lingering smoke,” said Ralph Borrmann, a spokesman for the air district. “Air quality is showing some improvements faster than we anticipated, but there’s still smoke off the ocean, and that’s lingering there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/NWSBayArea/status/1305941692210581505?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s4\">“We anticipate continuing unhealthy conditions in parts of the Bay Area today,” he said. “Although Sonoma and Marin counties, they are going to enjoy some of the cleanest air quality.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s4\">The National Weather Service \u003ca href=\"https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/total_forecast/getprod.php?afos=afdmtr&wfo=mtr&new\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">forecasts\u003c/span>\u003c/a> a “gradual decrease” in smoke throughout the day as winds pick up from a low pressure system churning in the eastern Pacific. \u003c/span>\u003cbr>\n\u003cspan class=\"s5\">\u003cbr>\nCindy Palmer, a \u003c/span>meteorologist with the service, says winds from the early-season storm could push wildfire smoke out of the region by Thursday night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“There is still smoke out over the Pacific,” she said. “But we are coming — I don’t want to say quite to the back edge of it yet, because I can still see smoke out there — but it is definitely less in concentration from at least the appearance from satellite.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">The reprieve may be short-lived, however, as the winds could kick up the August Complex and North Complex fires burning in Northern California, and a high pressure system could bring more smoke over the weekend, Palmer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/ezraromero/status/1305662218135109633?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p1\">Millions of Bay Area residents have been living under hazy skies, breathing dense, smoky and frequently hazardous air. Now, the “smokestorm,” as some weather experts have \u003ca href=\"https://weatherwest.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">dubbed\u003c/span>\u003c/a> the choking fog of particulate matter blanketing the region this past week, could be coming to an end.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">\u003cspan class=\"s2\">Or at least a much needed intermission.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The air in the Bay Area is starting to gradually improve after ranging from “unhealthy for sensitive groups” to “hazardous” across the region. Despite the clearer conditions, a Bay Area Air Quality Management District Spare the Air Alert will run through Wednesday, marking a record 30 consecutive days of poor to terrible air quality. The conditions have made outdoor activity potentially dangerous.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">On Tuesday, for the first time in almost a week, air district monitors displayed readings in the moderate, or yellow, range, and satellite images showed visibly lower smoke concentrations for large portions of the Bay Area.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“The winds have cleared out some of the lingering smoke,” said Ralph Borrmann, a spokesman for the air district. “Air quality is showing some improvements faster than we anticipated, but there’s still smoke off the ocean, and that’s lingering there.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s4\">“We anticipate continuing unhealthy conditions in parts of the Bay Area today,” he said. “Although Sonoma and Marin counties, they are going to enjoy some of the cleanest air quality.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"s4\">The National Weather Service \u003ca href=\"https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/total_forecast/getprod.php?afos=afdmtr&wfo=mtr&new\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">forecasts\u003c/span>\u003c/a> a “gradual decrease” in smoke throughout the day as winds pick up from a low pressure system churning in the eastern Pacific. \u003c/span>\u003cbr>\n\u003cspan class=\"s5\">\u003cbr>\nCindy Palmer, a \u003c/span>meteorologist with the service, says winds from the early-season storm could push wildfire smoke out of the region by Thursday night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“There is still smoke out over the Pacific,” she said. “But we are coming — I don’t want to say quite to the back edge of it yet, because I can still see smoke out there — but it is definitely less in concentration from at least the appearance from satellite.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p2\">The reprieve may be short-lived, however, as the winds could kick up the August Complex and North Complex fires burning in Northern California, and a high pressure system could bring more smoke over the weekend, Palmer said.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Biden Says California's Devastating Wildfires Show the 'Fury of Climate Change'",
"headTitle": "Biden Says California’s Devastating Wildfires Show the ‘Fury of Climate Change’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HReBiqgDfQ\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">The fires burning California forests, the storms battering the coast of Florida and the droughts damaging wheat fields across the Midwest show the “fury of climate change everywhere, all this year and right now,” said Joe Biden on Monday in wide-ranging remarks on the climate crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a livestreamed speech from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden detailed how California’s record wildfire year is the latest example of extreme weather events touching all regions of the country driven by global heating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The last 10 years were the hottest decade ever recorded,” he said. “The arctic is literally melting. Parks are actually on fire. And what we are seeing in America and in our communities is connected to this.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Biden tied this message to his central critique of President Donald Trump, saying his administration has abdicated leadership on climate change — just as he charged Trump did with the worst pandemic in a century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“These interlocking crises of our time require action, not denial, require leadership, not scapegoating,” Biden said. “It requires the president to meet the threshold duty of the office, to care for everyone, to defend us from every attack seen and unseen, always and without exception.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Here’s the deal,” he continued. “Hurricanes don’t swerve to avoid red states and blue states, wildfires don’t skip towns that voted a certain way. The impacts of climate change don’t pick and choose. That’s because it’s not a partisan phenomenon. It’s science.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But like with our federal response to COVID-19, the lack of a national strategy on climate change overall leaves us with a patchwork of solutions,” Biden said. “Matter of fact, it’s been made worse by the changes this administration has made.”\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cbr>\nBiden made his remarks a short time before Trump landed at Sacramento McClellan Airport to receive a briefing from Gov. Gavin Newsom. California wildfires have burned more than 3.2 million acres, 4,200 buildings and homes and took the lives of 24 people this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Currently, 28 major wildfires are still burning across the state, and the air quality in the Bay Area has been dirtied by wildfire smoke for four straight weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Speaking to reporters in front of Air Force One, Trump deflected a question from \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/1KatieOrr/status/1305638334639857664?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">KQED’s Katie Orr\u003c/a> about the role climate change has played in California’s fires, repeating his well-worn assertion that all California needs to do is manage its forest lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>There has to be good, strong forest management, which I’ve been talking about for three years with the state,” Trump said. “So, hopefully they’ll start doing that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Trump did not mention that the U.S Forest Service and other federal authorities manage 57% of California’s forests. Trump refuses to acknowledge that climate change exists and has rolled back policies meant to combat warming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">It’s true that big fires in California have been stoked by a century of fire suppression that has loaded the state’s forests with fuel. But that vegetation is baking in arid, dry temperatures driven by climate change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Many of California’s largest wildfires in recorded history have occurred in the last decade, with five of the state’s 20 largest fires burning this year, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/daily-wildfire-report/\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">Cal Fire\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During an introductory session of UC Berkeley’s fall fire science seminar \u003ca href=\"https://frg.berkeley.edu/california-fire-science-seminar-series/\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">series\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at UC Merced, detailed the many different ways that climate change has exacerbated wildfire conditions in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“It is the incident of drought,” she said, during remarks last week. “It is associated with some of the beetles that are also contributing to vegetation mortality. And then, of course, what we’ve seen this year — and other recent years where we’ve had large events and fatal events — is extreme fire weather.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“The frequency of those things and the magnitude of those things has all been pretty clearly and demonstrably linked to anthropogenic climate change,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Summer forest fires are pushing up the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1944993/study-climate-change-a-leading-driver-of-californias-wildfires\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">annual burn rates \u003c/span>\u003c/a>across the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California has seen a five-fold increase in areas that burn in any given year, with an eight-fold increase in summer forest fires, according to research conducted last year by scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">That \u003ca href=\"https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EF001210\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">research\u003c/span>\u003c/a> suggests hot weather is drying out forests along the North Coast and Sierra Nevada, and the warming temperatures are leading to a steep rise in acres burned every year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Millions of Californians have moved into forested areas in recent years. These people — and the power lines and infrastructure that support their communities — are igniting an increasing number of fires.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/2HReBiqgDfQ'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/2HReBiqgDfQ'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp class=\"p1\">The fires burning California forests, the storms battering the coast of Florida and the droughts damaging wheat fields across the Midwest show the “fury of climate change everywhere, all this year and right now,” said Joe Biden on Monday in wide-ranging remarks on the climate crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a livestreamed speech from Wilmington, Delaware, Biden detailed how California’s record wildfire year is the latest example of extreme weather events touching all regions of the country driven by global heating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“\u003cspan class=\"s1\">The last 10 years were the hottest decade ever recorded,” he said. “The arctic is literally melting. Parks are actually on fire. And what we are seeing in America and in our communities is connected to this.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Biden tied this message to his central critique of President Donald Trump, saying his administration has abdicated leadership on climate change — just as he charged Trump did with the worst pandemic in a century.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“These interlocking crises of our time require action, not denial, require leadership, not scapegoating,” Biden said. “It requires the president to meet the threshold duty of the office, to care for everyone, to defend us from every attack seen and unseen, always and without exception.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Here’s the deal,” he continued. “Hurricanes don’t swerve to avoid red states and blue states, wildfires don’t skip towns that voted a certain way. The impacts of climate change don’t pick and choose. That’s because it’s not a partisan phenomenon. It’s science.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But like with our federal response to COVID-19, the lack of a national strategy on climate change overall leaves us with a patchwork of solutions,” Biden said. “Matter of fact, it’s been made worse by the changes this administration has made.”\u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cbr>\nBiden made his remarks a short time before Trump landed at Sacramento McClellan Airport to receive a briefing from Gov. Gavin Newsom. California wildfires have burned more than 3.2 million acres, 4,200 buildings and homes and took the lives of 24 people this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Currently, 28 major wildfires are still burning across the state, and the air quality in the Bay Area has been dirtied by wildfire smoke for four straight weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Speaking to reporters in front of Air Force One, Trump deflected a question from \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/1KatieOrr/status/1305638334639857664?s=20\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">KQED’s Katie Orr\u003c/a> about the role climate change has played in California’s fires, repeating his well-worn assertion that all California needs to do is manage its forest lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>There has to be good, strong forest management, which I’ve been talking about for three years with the state,” Trump said. “So, hopefully they’ll start doing that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Trump did not mention that the U.S Forest Service and other federal authorities manage 57% of California’s forests. Trump refuses to acknowledge that climate change exists and has rolled back policies meant to combat warming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">It’s true that big fires in California have been stoked by a century of fire suppression that has loaded the state’s forests with fuel. But that vegetation is baking in arid, dry temperatures driven by climate change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Many of California’s largest wildfires in recorded history have occurred in the last decade, with five of the state’s 20 largest fires burning this year, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.fire.ca.gov/daily-wildfire-report/\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">Cal Fire\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During an introductory session of UC Berkeley’s fall fire science seminar \u003ca href=\"https://frg.berkeley.edu/california-fire-science-seminar-series/\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">series\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at UC Merced, detailed the many different ways that climate change has exacerbated wildfire conditions in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“It is the incident of drought,” she said, during remarks last week. “It is associated with some of the beetles that are also contributing to vegetation mortality. And then, of course, what we’ve seen this year — and other recent years where we’ve had large events and fatal events — is extreme fire weather.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“The frequency of those things and the magnitude of those things has all been pretty clearly and demonstrably linked to anthropogenic climate change,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Summer forest fires are pushing up the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1944993/study-climate-change-a-leading-driver-of-californias-wildfires\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">annual burn rates \u003c/span>\u003c/a>across the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California has seen a five-fold increase in areas that burn in any given year, with an eight-fold increase in summer forest fires, according to research conducted last year by scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">That \u003ca href=\"https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EF001210\">\u003cspan class=\"s3\">research\u003c/span>\u003c/a> suggests hot weather is drying out forests along the North Coast and Sierra Nevada, and the warming temperatures are leading to a steep rise in acres burned every year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">Millions of Californians have moved into forested areas in recent years. These people — and the power lines and infrastructure that support their communities — are igniting an increasing number of fires.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Signs of Life Seem to Emerge in Yellow, Hazy Clouds of Venus",
"headTitle": "Signs of Life Seem to Emerge in Yellow, Hazy Clouds of Venus | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Scientists say they’ve detected a gas in the clouds of Venus that, on Earth, is produced by microbial life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers have racked their brains trying to understand why this toxic gas, phosphine, is there in such quantities, but they can’t think of any geologic or chemical explanation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The mystery raises the astonishing possibility that Venus, the planet that comes closest to Earth as it whizzes around the sun, might have some kind of life flourishing more than 30 miles up in its yellow, hazy clouds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nothing could live on what passes for land on Venus; its smooth volcanic plains are a scorching hellscape hot enough to melt lead, where the temperatures exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit. High in the clouds, however, the pressures and temperatures and acidity levels would be less intense — though still vile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The clouds are far more acidic than any environments where microbes make their home on Earth. And instead of water, the clouds on Venus contain droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid; the atmosphere is so bereft of water that it’s many times drier than the driest desert on Earth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All in all, it seems like an unlikely place for life. Nonetheless, the new \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4\">report\u003c/a> in the journal \u003cem>Nature Astronomy\u003c/em> has astrobiologists and planetary scientists talking. Two different telescopes, at two different times, looked at Venus and saw the chemical signature that is unique to phosphine. If this gas is really there, Venus has either got some kind of geologic or chemical activity going on that no one understands, or alien life might be living right next door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many ways, Venus is similar to Earth. “Before its quite dramatic, runaway greenhouse effect, the surface was pretty habitable,” said \u003ca href=\"https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/cssilva\">Clara Sousa-Silva\u003c/a> at MIT, who explains that there has long been a theory out there that Venus might have once been inhabited and that life could have retained a stronghold in the clouds. Even Carl Sagan entertained this \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/2151259a0\">idea\u003c/a> back in the 1960s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s why she was so intrigued when \u003ca href=\"https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/913804-greaves-jane\">Jane Greaves\u003c/a> of Cardiff University contacted her. Greaves shared that she and some colleagues had recently found an estimated abundance of 20 parts per billion of phosphine in Venus’ clouds. Sousa-Silva had been studying phosphine as a possible biosignature that could indicate the potential for life being present on planets that orbit distant stars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first glance, phosphine might seem like a funny molecule to associate with life, given that it’s a “highly flammable, extremely toxic, outrageously foul-smelling molecule,” said Sousa-Silva. “It’s an extremely dangerous molecule that kills in a variety of imaginative ways, all of which are very final and macabre.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s used widely as a fumigant and it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the first world war,” she says, noting that the colorless gas can burn with a green and blue light.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for its odor, well, “apparently it smells basically like death,” says Sousa-Silva. “It just smells horrific. We once, I think, found a report of someone saying it smelled like the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because phosphine interferes with oxygen metabolism, it’s toxic for the majority of life on Earth. Still, says Sousa-Silva, “there’s plenty of life, mostly in the shadows, that doesn’t particularly enjoy oxygen and doesn’t rely on oxygen. And these anaerobic ecosystems on Earth happily produce phosphine in reasonably large quantities.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Life that makes phosphine on Earth is found in swamps and sewage plants and the bottoms of lakes, she says, as well as in the intestines of animals — that’s why phosphine can be detected in their flatulence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is not life that we would find pleasant,” said Sousa-Silva. “Then again, they probably find us disgusting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Phosphine is so chemically reactive that it breaks down quickly, however, so how was it accumulating in the clouds of Venus? The researchers considered possible sources on the surface of Venus, as well as delivery by meteorites, creation by lightning, or obscure chemical reactions in the atmosphere. Nothing they dreamed up could do the trick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That left the possibility of life. On Earth, any microbes in the clouds circulate up and down from the surface, but that wouldn’t be possible on Venus because the surface is so deadly, says \u003ca href=\"https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/jjpetkow\">Janusz Petkowski\u003c/a> of MIT. Any life in the clouds of Venus, he says, would have to somehow survive in highly concentrated sulfuric acid that’s around a billion times worse than any acidic environment on Earth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s very difficult to imagine, says Petkowski. “But is it impossible? I would say that it is not impossible.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To find out what’s really going on, he says, scientists might end up having to just send a mission to Venus that could sample the cloud chemistry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Calls for a new look at Venus have already been growing, even before this new discovery. A mission that would send a spherical probe plunging through the atmosphere of Venus down to its surface, for example, is one of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-four-possible-missions-to-study-the-secrets-of-the-solar-system\">proposals\u003c/a> that NASA is currently considering for future solar system exploration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Venus is like a giant unknown,” said \u003ca href=\"https://sese.asu.edu/node/1261\">Hilairy Hartnett\u003c/a> of Arizona State University. “It’s one of the planets that we almost know the least about in our own solar system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NASA astrobiologist \u003ca href=\"https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/giada.n.arney\">Giada Arney\u003c/a> agrees. “If there’s life in the Venus clouds, that would be extraordinary, but there’s still much we don’t understand about the Venus environment,” she says. While the research team that produced this new study clearly has done a lot of thinking about what non-living processes might produce phosphine on Venus, “there is much about Venus we still don’t understand, or that we understand poorly. It’ll take the combined work of the Venus and astrobiology communities to answer this important question fully.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Venus was the first planet ever \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167211913/50-years-after-first-interplanetary-probe-nasa-looks-to-future\">visited\u003c/a> by a spacecraft, when NASA’s Mariner 2 flew by in 1962. Before that mission, scientists could only peer at its shroud of clouds and wonder what lay beneath them. Mariner 2 showed that the surface of Venus was an inhospitable furnace, so it couldn’t be the kind of primordial jungle that some had imagined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Conditions on the surface are so extreme that it’s hard to send a probe that can survive. In 1982, the Soviet spacecraft \u003ca href=\"https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/venera-13/in-depth/\">Venera 13\u003c/a> lasted only a couple of hours after landing, sending home photos of orange-brown rocks before it succumbed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Venus wasn’t always this way; it used to be much more cozy. New climate models show that Venus could have sustained liquid water on its surface as recently as a billion years ago, says \u003ca href=\"http://stephenkane.net/\">Stephen Kane\u003c/a> of UC Riverside.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If the phosphine find represents “the remnants of some past ecosystem, that means it probably would have had to have sustained its presence in the clouds for about a billion years,” says Kane, calling that “an extremely difficult problem” to solve.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We do need to seriously consider that there is a much more natural geological explanation that we just haven’t figured out yet,” said Kane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He notes that frequently when scientists talk about finding “biosignatures” that could indicate the possible presence of life, they focus on far-off planets around stars other than our sun. Those planets, notes Kane, are so remote that they’re basically unreachable in human lifetimes, but Venus is close at hand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a test for us because in this case, we can go to Venus,” says Kane. “This is really an incredibly important test for the whole concept of biosignatures.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just the presence of phosphorus in Venus’ atmosphere is fascinating, even if it doesn’t turn out to be linked to life on Venus, says Hartnett. She points out that on Earth, phosphorus is the backbone of the genetic code and the energy currency of cells, yet scientists know little about how phosphorus is distributed in planets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The phosphine detection is exciting,” agrees \u003ca href=\"https://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/bethany-l-ehlmann\">Bethany Ehlmann\u003c/a>, a planetary scientist at Caltech. “Of course, you know, the big tantalizing aspect is that it could be life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, echoing Carl Sagan, she says, ” ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ Put phosphine on Venus in the list of mysteries, big mysteries, in the solar system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+Possible+Sign+Of+Life+Right+Next+Door+To+Earth%2C+On+Venus&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Scientists say they’ve detected a gas in the clouds of Venus that, on Earth, is produced by microbial life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers have racked their brains trying to understand why this toxic gas, phosphine, is there in such quantities, but they can’t think of any geologic or chemical explanation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The mystery raises the astonishing possibility that Venus, the planet that comes closest to Earth as it whizzes around the sun, might have some kind of life flourishing more than 30 miles up in its yellow, hazy clouds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nothing could live on what passes for land on Venus; its smooth volcanic plains are a scorching hellscape hot enough to melt lead, where the temperatures exceed 800 degrees Fahrenheit. High in the clouds, however, the pressures and temperatures and acidity levels would be less intense — though still vile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The clouds are far more acidic than any environments where microbes make their home on Earth. And instead of water, the clouds on Venus contain droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid; the atmosphere is so bereft of water that it’s many times drier than the driest desert on Earth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All in all, it seems like an unlikely place for life. Nonetheless, the new \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4\">report\u003c/a> in the journal \u003cem>Nature Astronomy\u003c/em> has astrobiologists and planetary scientists talking. Two different telescopes, at two different times, looked at Venus and saw the chemical signature that is unique to phosphine. If this gas is really there, Venus has either got some kind of geologic or chemical activity going on that no one understands, or alien life might be living right next door.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many ways, Venus is similar to Earth. “Before its quite dramatic, runaway greenhouse effect, the surface was pretty habitable,” said \u003ca href=\"https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/cssilva\">Clara Sousa-Silva\u003c/a> at MIT, who explains that there has long been a theory out there that Venus might have once been inhabited and that life could have retained a stronghold in the clouds. Even Carl Sagan entertained this \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/2151259a0\">idea\u003c/a> back in the 1960s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s why she was so intrigued when \u003ca href=\"https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/913804-greaves-jane\">Jane Greaves\u003c/a> of Cardiff University contacted her. Greaves shared that she and some colleagues had recently found an estimated abundance of 20 parts per billion of phosphine in Venus’ clouds. Sousa-Silva had been studying phosphine as a possible biosignature that could indicate the potential for life being present on planets that orbit distant stars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first glance, phosphine might seem like a funny molecule to associate with life, given that it’s a “highly flammable, extremely toxic, outrageously foul-smelling molecule,” said Sousa-Silva. “It’s an extremely dangerous molecule that kills in a variety of imaginative ways, all of which are very final and macabre.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s used widely as a fumigant and it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the first world war,” she says, noting that the colorless gas can burn with a green and blue light.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for its odor, well, “apparently it smells basically like death,” says Sousa-Silva. “It just smells horrific. We once, I think, found a report of someone saying it smelled like the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because phosphine interferes with oxygen metabolism, it’s toxic for the majority of life on Earth. Still, says Sousa-Silva, “there’s plenty of life, mostly in the shadows, that doesn’t particularly enjoy oxygen and doesn’t rely on oxygen. And these anaerobic ecosystems on Earth happily produce phosphine in reasonably large quantities.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Life that makes phosphine on Earth is found in swamps and sewage plants and the bottoms of lakes, she says, as well as in the intestines of animals — that’s why phosphine can be detected in their flatulence.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is not life that we would find pleasant,” said Sousa-Silva. “Then again, they probably find us disgusting.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Phosphine is so chemically reactive that it breaks down quickly, however, so how was it accumulating in the clouds of Venus? The researchers considered possible sources on the surface of Venus, as well as delivery by meteorites, creation by lightning, or obscure chemical reactions in the atmosphere. Nothing they dreamed up could do the trick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That left the possibility of life. On Earth, any microbes in the clouds circulate up and down from the surface, but that wouldn’t be possible on Venus because the surface is so deadly, says \u003ca href=\"https://eapsweb.mit.edu/people/jjpetkow\">Janusz Petkowski\u003c/a> of MIT. Any life in the clouds of Venus, he says, would have to somehow survive in highly concentrated sulfuric acid that’s around a billion times worse than any acidic environment on Earth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s very difficult to imagine, says Petkowski. “But is it impossible? I would say that it is not impossible.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To find out what’s really going on, he says, scientists might end up having to just send a mission to Venus that could sample the cloud chemistry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Calls for a new look at Venus have already been growing, even before this new discovery. A mission that would send a spherical probe plunging through the atmosphere of Venus down to its surface, for example, is one of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-four-possible-missions-to-study-the-secrets-of-the-solar-system\">proposals\u003c/a> that NASA is currently considering for future solar system exploration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Venus is like a giant unknown,” said \u003ca href=\"https://sese.asu.edu/node/1261\">Hilairy Hartnett\u003c/a> of Arizona State University. “It’s one of the planets that we almost know the least about in our own solar system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NASA astrobiologist \u003ca href=\"https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sed/bio/giada.n.arney\">Giada Arney\u003c/a> agrees. “If there’s life in the Venus clouds, that would be extraordinary, but there’s still much we don’t understand about the Venus environment,” she says. While the research team that produced this new study clearly has done a lot of thinking about what non-living processes might produce phosphine on Venus, “there is much about Venus we still don’t understand, or that we understand poorly. It’ll take the combined work of the Venus and astrobiology communities to answer this important question fully.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Venus was the first planet ever \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167211913/50-years-after-first-interplanetary-probe-nasa-looks-to-future\">visited\u003c/a> by a spacecraft, when NASA’s Mariner 2 flew by in 1962. Before that mission, scientists could only peer at its shroud of clouds and wonder what lay beneath them. Mariner 2 showed that the surface of Venus was an inhospitable furnace, so it couldn’t be the kind of primordial jungle that some had imagined.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Conditions on the surface are so extreme that it’s hard to send a probe that can survive. In 1982, the Soviet spacecraft \u003ca href=\"https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/venera-13/in-depth/\">Venera 13\u003c/a> lasted only a couple of hours after landing, sending home photos of orange-brown rocks before it succumbed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Venus wasn’t always this way; it used to be much more cozy. New climate models show that Venus could have sustained liquid water on its surface as recently as a billion years ago, says \u003ca href=\"http://stephenkane.net/\">Stephen Kane\u003c/a> of UC Riverside.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If the phosphine find represents “the remnants of some past ecosystem, that means it probably would have had to have sustained its presence in the clouds for about a billion years,” says Kane, calling that “an extremely difficult problem” to solve.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We do need to seriously consider that there is a much more natural geological explanation that we just haven’t figured out yet,” said Kane.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He notes that frequently when scientists talk about finding “biosignatures” that could indicate the possible presence of life, they focus on far-off planets around stars other than our sun. Those planets, notes Kane, are so remote that they’re basically unreachable in human lifetimes, but Venus is close at hand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a test for us because in this case, we can go to Venus,” says Kane. “This is really an incredibly important test for the whole concept of biosignatures.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just the presence of phosphorus in Venus’ atmosphere is fascinating, even if it doesn’t turn out to be linked to life on Venus, says Hartnett. She points out that on Earth, phosphorus is the backbone of the genetic code and the energy currency of cells, yet scientists know little about how phosphorus is distributed in planets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The phosphine detection is exciting,” agrees \u003ca href=\"https://www.gps.caltech.edu/people/bethany-l-ehlmann\">Bethany Ehlmann\u003c/a>, a planetary scientist at Caltech. “Of course, you know, the big tantalizing aspect is that it could be life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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"info": "The TED Radio Hour is a journey through fascinating ideas, astonishing inventions, fresh approaches to old problems, and new ways to think and create.",
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