March 2022 – Page 23

How biological detective work can reveal who engineered a virus

Posted on March 23, 2022December 2, 2024 by bamdj

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has made our future vulnerability to biological pathogens — and what we can learn to help prevent the next pandemic — a salient concern. We don’t have much evidence one way or the other whether Covid’s emergence into the world was the result of a lab accident or a natural jump from animal to human. And while the US intelligence community’s current best guess is that the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,” the theory has been the subject of much debate and has not been definitively ruled out.

The many unknowns we confront underscore the need for a much bigger toolkit to deal with pathogenic threats than we currently have — which is why a recent paper about a new advance in tracing genetic editing is particularly exciting.

Bioengineering often leaves traces — characteristic patterns in the RNA or DNA of an engineered organism that are a product of a plethora of design decisions that go into synthetic biology. That fact about bioengineered genomes raises an interesting question: What if those traces that gene editing leaves behind were more like fingerprints? That is, what if it’s possible not just to tell if something was engineered but precisely where it was engineered?

That’s the idea behind genetic engineering attribution: the effort to develop tools that let us look at a genetically engineered sequence and determine which lab developed it. A big international contest among researchers earlier this year demonstrates that the technology is within our reach — though it’ll take lots of refining to move from impressive contest results to tools we can reliably use for bio detective work.

The contest, the Genetic Engineering Attribution Challenge, was sponsored by some of the leading bioresearch labs in the world. The idea was to challenge teams to develop techniques in genetic engineering attribution. The most successful entrants in the competition could predict, using machine-learning algorithms, which lab produced a certain genetic sequence with more than 80 percent accuracy, according to a new preprint summing up the results of the contest.

This may seem technical, but it could actually be fairly consequential in the effort to make the world safe from a type of threat we should all be more attuned to post-pandemic: bioengineered weapons and leaks of bioengineered viruses.

One of the challenges of preventing bioweapon research and deployment is that perpetrators can remain hidden — it’s difficult to find the source of a killer virus and hold them accountable.

But if it’s widely known that bioweapons can immediately and verifiably be traced right back to a bad actor, that could be a valuable deterrent.

It’s also extremely important for biosafety more broadly. If an engineered virus is accidentally leaked, tools like these would allow us to identify where they leaked from and know what labs are doing genetic engineering work with inadequate safety procedures.

The fingerprint of a virus

Hundreds of design choices go into genetic engineering: “what genes you use, what enzymes you use to connect them together, what software you use to make those decisions for you,” computational immunologist Will Bradshaw, a co-author on the paper, told me.

“The enzymes that people use to cut up the DNA cut in different patterns and have different error profiles,” Bradshaw says. “You can do that in the same way that you can recognize handwriting.”

Because different researchers with different training and different equipment have their own distinctive “tells,” it’s possible to look at a genetically engineered organism and guess who made it — at least if you’re using machine-learning algorithms.

To be clear, this work, called genetic engineering attribution, is very different from genetic engineering detection: it’s not about determining whether a sequence is engineered, but looking at sequences already known to be engineered and figuring out who built them.

The algorithms that are trained to do this work are fed data on more than 60,000 genetic sequences different labs produced. The idea is that, when fed an unfamiliar sequence, the algorithms are able to predict which of the labs they’ve encountered (if any) likely produced it.

A year ago, researchers at altLabs, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and other top bioresearch programs collaborated on the challenge, organizing a competition to find the best approaches to this biological forensics problem. The contest attracted intense interest from academics, industry professionals, and citizen scientists — one member of a winning team was a kindergarten teacher. Nearly 300 teams from all over the world submitted at least one machine-learning system for identifying the lab of origin of different sequences.

In that preprint paper (which is still undergoing peer review), the challenge’s organizers summarize the results: The competitors collectively took a big step forward on this problem. “Winning teams achieved dramatically better results than any previous attempt at genetic engineering attribution, with the top-scoring team and all-winners ensemble both beating the previous state-of-the-art by over 10 percentage points,” the paper notes.

The big picture is that researchers, aided by machine-learning systems, are getting really good at finding the lab that built a given plasmid, or a specific DNA strand used in gene manipulation.

The top-performing teams had 95 percent accuracy at naming a plasmid’s creator by one metric called “top 10 accuracy” — meaning if the algorithm identifies 10 candidate labs, the true lab is one of them. They had 82 percent top 1 accuracy — that is, 82 percent of the time, the lab they identified as the likely designer of that bioengineered plasmid was, in fact, the lab that designed it.

Top 1 accuracy is showy, but for biological detective work, top 10 accuracy is nearly as good: If you can narrow down the search for culprits to a small number of labs, you can then use other approaches to identify the exact lab.

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There’s still a lot of work to do. The competition looked at only simple engineered plasmids; ideally, we’d have approaches that work for fully engineered viruses and bacteria. And the competition didn’t look at adversarial examples, where researchers deliberately try to conceal the fingerprints of their lab on their work.

How genetic fingerprinting can help keep the world safer

Knowing which lab produced a bioweapon can protect us in three ways, biosecurity researchers argued in Nature Communications last year.

First, “knowledge of who was responsible can inform response efforts by shedding light on motives and capabilities, and so mitigate the event’s consequences.” That is, figuring out who built something will also give us clues about the goals they might have had and the risk we might be facing.

Second, obviously, it allows the world to sanction and stop any lab or government that is producing bioweapons in violation of international law.

And third, the article argues, hopefully, if these capabilities are widely known, they make the use of bioweapons much less appealing in the first place.

But the techniques have more mundane uses as well.

Bradshaw told me he envisions applications of the technology could be used to find accidental lab leaks, identify plagiarism in academic papers, and protect biological intellectual property — and those applications will validate and extend the tools for the really critical uses.

The past year and a half should have us all thinking about how devastating pandemic disease can be — and about whether the precautions being taken by research labs and governments are really adequate to prevent the next pandemic.

The answer, to my mind, is that we’re not doing enough, but more sophisticated biological forensics could certainly help. Genetic engineering attribution is still a new field. With more effort, it’ll likely be possible to one day make attribution possible on a much larger scale and to do it for viruses and bacteria. That could make for a much safer future.

Correction, October 25, 9:50 am: A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input)

What the oil industry still won’t tell us

Posted on March 23, 2022 by bamdj

Four executives from Big Oil — “the richest, most powerful industry in human history,” according to environmentalist Bill McKibben — testified before Congress on Thursday at a hearing meant to reveal how the oil business has undermined government action on climate change.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform questioned the CEOs of ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, and Shell, alongside the presidents of two powerful lobbying groups, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the US Chamber of Commerce. The Democratic lawmakers who control the committee interrogated the executives about how their institutions misled the public and funded misinformation campaigns that questioned the severity of climate change.

But the executives, testifying virtually, were evasive. “As science has evolved and developed, our understanding has evolved and developed,” said ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, answering a question about why his company rejected climate science throughout the 2000s, when scientists already agreed that global warming was an urgent threat. Republican lawmakers argued the hearing was a farce, a distraction from other issues, and a veiled attempt to ban oil production.

Big Oil’s big secrets about its climate change activities may begin to unravel in any paperwork committee staff can get their hands on. For 40 years, the oil industry has worked to delay and obstruct policies that would hurt the profitability of its products, even when their own scientists warned that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change. Thousands of pages of documents in the public record — obtained through lawsuits, leaks, and undercover videos — patch together a portrait of how the oil industry has fostered climate change denial.

The Oversight committee requested additional documents dating back to 2015, but so far witnesses “have failed to adequately comply with the Committee’s request,” according to a statement by Democratic lawmakers. When reached for comment, an API spokesperson countered that the group has been actively working to comply “and has already produced thousands of pages responsive to their request.”

After nearly five hours of questioning, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) closed the hearing by announcing she would issue subpoenas for the documents the committee did not receive, saying it had received only financial reports, social media posts, and press releases that were already publicly available. Maloney called for detailed funding information, board memos, and senior executive communications to help the committee “understand their payments to shadow groups and to over 150 public relations companies and advertisements on social media, payments that today’s witnesses seem intent on continuing.”

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“I do not take this step lightly,” Maloney added, saying that the committee’s goal is to “get to the bottom of the oil industry’s disinformation campaign, and with these subpoenas we will.”

Climate activists hope that this moment could be an inflection point for accountability in the oil industry, similar to when Congress investigated other industries that have profited from misleading the public, including tobacco, asbestos, and lead companies. “There’s ongoing pressure to get these companies to fess up in one way or the other, or pay up,” said Kert Davies, founder and director of the advocacy research group Climate Investigations Center, who has collected his own database of oil documents. “How and when that comes, and how much they can do to blunt that, is the drama that’s playing out this week.”

What secrets are oil companies still keeping from the public? There are at least five key areas Congress can dig into to discover the truth about Big Oil’s activities on climate change. The documents Democrats are after could also paint a fuller, more recent picture of the oil industry’s own climate change goals. Some purport to aim for net-zero emissions in the coming decades, but they could turn out to be hot air.

How much has the oil industry spent trying to undermine climate legislation?

In the words of one ExxonMobil lobbyist, the company has worked with “shadow groups” against early efforts to regulate the fossil fuel industry.

In June, the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace published a video of then-lobbyist Keith McCoy speaking on what he thought was a recruiting call. “Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes,” McCoy said. “Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these ‘shadow groups’ to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.” McCoy no longer works for ExxonMobil.

Similarly candid admissions about oil’s attitude toward climate action may lurk in their internal records.

Oil companies are finally promising to change, but how much of their climate commitments are just greenwashing?

According to McCoy, the ExxonMobil lobbyist in Greenpeace’s exposé, the company had also been feigning support for a carbon tax, a policy that would increase the cost of fossil fuels to reduce demand.

“Nobody is going to propose a tax on all Americans, and the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point that we can say, ‘Well, what is ExxonMobil for? Well, we’re for a carbon tax,’” McCoy said.

There are other ways oil companies have inflated their records on climate, a tactic known as greenwashing. As of December 2019, the world’s five biggest oil companies had spent a combined $3.6 billion in advertising over the previous 30 years. One of Exxon’s recent marketing pushes has been in promoting its investments in research for using algae for car fuel. Someone who watches these ads might assume Exxon spends a significant portion of its budget on algae, when it accounted for 0.2 percent of its refining capacity.

Despite the rhetoric, the oil industry seems likely to stay true to its core products. As BP America CEO David Lawler said in the hearing, “This doesn’t mean BP is getting out of the oil and gas business.”

Who is calling the shots for the politicians and groups that deny climate change?

Astroturfing is the “practice of creating an illusion of public support for a cause,” according to the environmental news outlet Grist. Instead of expressing skepticism of climate science or promoting controversial policies directly, oil companies and their allies have spent big sums on other organizations that promote its priorities.

One example is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has received more than $1.7 million from Exxon and its affiliates before the company left the council in 2018. ALEC has helped reverse renewable portfolio standards and plastic bag bans by pushing model legislation in states. Between 1998 and 2014, Exxon also led corporate donors in giving almost $31 million to special interest groups that promote climate change denial.

This is only a small glimpse into the grants Big Oil has given to third-party groups. The public doesn’t yet know what, exactly, the grants were for.

How much current polarization on climate change can be traced back to early disinformation campaigns by the industry?

In 2015, the LA Times and Inside Climate News published separate investigations showing that scientists in the oil industry had urged companies to consider how its products were fueling global warming via internal memos dating all the way back to the 1960s. Instead of heeding these calls, Exxon worked with other top oil companies to form a coalition that would sink a binding global climate agreement in 1998, according to documents.

From the LA Times:

How did one of the world’s largest oil companies, a leader in climate research, become one of its biggest public skeptics?

The answer, gleaned from a trove of archived company documents and the recollections of former employees, is that Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil, feared a growing public consensus would lead to financially burdensome policies.

What are the end goals of Big Oil’s enormous marketing push?

One of the mysteries of the oil industry is the type of work it contracts out to consulting and public relations groups, which have helped Big Oil craft a benevolent public image.

Davies, of the Climate Investigations Center, wonders what the oil industry deems a PR “success.” “Who’s measuring the success of these ads? You’re spending millions of dollars on these ads, how do you measure the win?” he added.

Shedding light on the PR world’s activities could pressure the biggest firms to consider severing their ties with oil giants.

The efforts of oil companies to market themselves also loom large in a growing number of lawsuits alleging malfeasance. Rep. Ro Khanna said Thursday’s hearing is likely just the first part of a series getting to the bottom of oil industry campaigns, with a second focused on the PR industry’s role working with oil companies.

“We have a huge amount of documentation going back 40 years,” said Harvard history of science professor Naomi Oreskes ahead of the hearing, during a call with the progressive group Our Revolution.

On Thursday, the company executives claimed their position reflects the overwhelming scientific consensus that fossil fuels cause climate change. But the industry has not focused on climate-friendly policy in its lobbying.

The four oil companies present at the hearing, along with API, have spent nearly $453 million combined to lobby the federal government in the past decade, according to an analysis released Thursday by Democrats on the House Oversight committee. The analysis suggests the industry has been far more concerned with protecting tax breaks for fossil fuels than it has protecting the planet.

For example, the industry has publicly said it supports the Paris climate agreement, but in the halls of Congress, it lobbied on the matter only eight times out of 4,597 lobbying examples in the analysis. The industry devoted more than half its time lobbying on tax-related issues.

“I don’t think we really need more research … on what these companies have done, and the way they have misrepresented the truth, the facts, and continue to propagate dangerous practices,” Oreskes said on the Our Revolution call. But she thinks the hearing can help the public realize this. “We’ve been lied to … we have work to do to really get that message out.”

Are “net-zero” climate targets just hot air?

Posted on March 23, 2022 by bamdj

Corporations and countries around the world are promising to eliminate their contributions to climate change. But many of their targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are prefaced by a slippery phrase: “net-zero.”

More than 130 countries have set or are considering net-zero emissions goals, and many are stepping up as they prepare for next week’s COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. The United States, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Japan, and Argentina all aim to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. The European Union aims to be “climate-neutral,” another way of framing net-zero. Even Russia and Saudi Arabia (the world’s top oil exporter) now have net-zero emissions targets.

Private companies are getting into the game, too. At least 20 percent of the 2,000 largest companies have set net-zero emissions targets, including giants like Apple, Ford, and Microsoft.

But “net-zero” is different from zero emissions, and this nebulous term can obscure a lot of important differences in how countries and companies actually plan to limit their contributions to climate change.

There are no standards that govern what activities actually count as net-zero. “The ‘net’ is always there in front of the ‘zero,’ but the ‘net’ part is a bit vague, especially with country-level commitments,” Derik Broekhoff, a senior scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told Vox.

When a country aims for net-zero emissions — as opposed to simply zero emissions — it’s essentially promising to balance out its climate pollution, so that overall, it doesn’t harm the global climate.

For example, if a factory owner can’t figure out how to eliminate their emissions with current technologies, they can pay to restore a mangrove swamp that will absorb an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. If the mangrove absorbs roughly what the factory pollutes, the factory theoretically won’t contribute to warming. (The idea of net-zero sometimes goes beyond carbon dioxide and accounts for other heat-trapping gases, like methane.)

In principle, the idea of net-zero offers countries and companies flexibility in meeting climate goals. But in practice, critics say that net-zero pledges delay meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases and provide cover to those unwilling to take immediate steps to limit emissions.

“On the road to COP26, corporations are using ‘net-zero’ to block effective climate policy and greenwash their image while maintaining business-as-usual,” according to a report from the nonprofit group Corporate Accountability.

Not all net-zero commitments are equal. So the question is: How seriously should we take a given net-zero target? And how do we separate the good ones from the bad ones? If bad net-zero targets take root, they could shield the worst emitters from scrutiny and allow greenhouse gases to continue to rise, even as the window for averting climate catastrophe slams shut.

What makes a good net-zero emissions target

To stop the planet from warming further, all of humanity will need to achieve a version of net-zero emissions. Any greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere will need to be sucked out again, whether by trees, microorganisms, or carbon-scrubbing machines.

That’s because carbon dioxide, the main human-produced greenhouse gas, can linger in the atmosphere for centuries. Even if CO2 emissions slow to a trickle, they will still accumulate and continue warming the planet, albeit at a slower rate.

The Paris climate agreement, for instance, set a goal for limiting warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, with a more optimistic goalpost of staying below 1.5°C (compared to global average temperatures before the industrial revolution). Reaching either of these objectives would require humanity to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions, but on different timelines. The longer it takes, the worse the warming.

In the context of climate change, the atmosphere doesn’t care where the emissions are coming from or where they go, just the overall quantity that makes it into the sky. So in theory, matching greenhouse gas outputs with withdrawals can eliminate impacts on the climate.

However, it takes a lot of work to truly counter the damage of emissions. “I think just saying, ‘I’m going to be net-zero,’ with no concrete plans to achieve that goal, is not legitimate,” said Kelley Kizzier, vice president for global climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. “We have to understand what that company or country is going to do to make that a reality.”

Here are questions to ask about net-zero commitments.

Is the country or company making actual reductions in emissions?

There is no substitute for reducing overall emissions. Preventing greenhouse gases from spewing into the sky in the first place is the most meaningful and straightforward way to curb humanity’s impact on the climate. That means phasing out fossil fuels like oil and gas as completely as possible, as quickly as possible.

This also has positive effects beyond mitigating climate change. A smokestack can pollute its neighborhood and make people sick, even if a forest is counteracting its CO2 emissions, for example. Compared to net emissions reductions, “The marginal benefits of [total] emissions reductions and avoided emissions are far higher,” according to Broekhoff.

Another concern is that there are only so many options out there for balancing emissions. If too many companies and governments try to buy their way to net-zero emissions without making their own reductions, there won’t be enough carbon-absorbing tactics to go around. The largest burden of reducing emissions may then end up falling on the people with the fewest means to do so.

A strong net-zero emissions plan should therefore have large and immediate reductions in absolute emissions at its core.

Are they setting interim targets?

Many countries and companies have set their net-zero finish line in 2050. That’s less than 30 years away — 2050 is closer to us than 1990. And meeting the 1.5°C goal of the Paris agreement requires action on an even shorter time frame. Hitting this target would require halving global emissions as soon as 2030, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018.

That’s why emissions reductions have to begin now. A credible net-zero plan should have concrete benchmarks between now and the middle of the century. Milestones also provide opportunities for observers like citizens and investors to gauge progress and hold institutions accountable. For instance, in April, the US set a goal of cutting 42 percent of its current greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

How much money is being invested, and where?

There are few better ways to show you’re serious than by spending money. How much a business or government is willing to spend on reducing emissions and the clean-energy transition reflects the strength of their commitment.

But where that money is spent matters too. Deploying zero-emissions energy to displace fossil fuels, capturing leaking methane, and phasing out hydrofluorocarbons yield immense climate benefits over the near term. Funding research and development could lead to breakthroughs that mitigate climate change over decades.

Paying to offset emissions could yield climate benefits too, but if that’s the only pillar of a net-zero plan, it could just end up as a way for wealthy corporations and countries to buy their way out of their climate obligations.

Are the offsets measurable and lasting?

The transition to clean energy isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s also going to be more difficult for some places, like developing countries that need cheap fuel and remote regions with few renewable energy options.

Even for countries and companies that can aggressively ratchet down their emissions, the last mile of greenhouse-gas production may prove especially difficult to eliminate. That includes activities like steel, cement, and chemicals manufacturing. Sectors like international aviation are particularly difficult to decarbonize because cleaner alternatives are not yet available on large scales.

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“We know that all emissions won’t be driven to zero, and we need to address those emissions through removals,” said Kizzier.

In these instances, countries and companies will have little choice but to pay others to reduce emissions on their behalf. This is the most contentious aspect of net-zero. There are a lot of ways to compensate for emissions, but some have serious drawbacks. Restoring forests that have been degraded is one popular mechanism. As trees and vegetation grow, they can take in vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the air, but the accounting has proven tricky. Many of these projects have failed to deliver the promised reductions and some have even backfired, leading to more emissions.

There are other strategies to balance out emissions. An emitter can finance clean energy sources and use them to drive coal, oil, and natural gas off the market, zeroing out their own emissions. They can also install carbon capture and storage systems on fossil-fuel power plants. There are even companies building machines that can suck carbon dioxide straight out of the air. Of course, many of these measures are expensive, technologically immature, and could run into the same accounting issues as nature-based offsets.

Despite these challenges, some experts say it is possible to create viable offsets with proper measurement and verification. And given the amount that humans have already polluted, it may soon be necessary not just to zero out human impacts on the climate but to achieve net negative emissions — that is, withdraw more CO2 from the air than goes in.

Every scenario for stabilizing the global climate around 1.5°C of warming involves net-negative emissions after the middle of the century, the IPCC reported in 2018. Its low-end estimate was that humanity would have to withdraw 100 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the air by 2100, roughly double the amount that humanity produces in a year today. The high-end estimate was 1,000 gigatons.

So the work needed to limit climate change won’t end in 2050 and can’t stop at net-zero.

Will net-zero pledges build a more just future?

The US is the world’s largest cumulative emitter of greenhouse gases and currently the second-largest emitter, behind China and ahead of India.

Many of the countries that have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases have become some of the world’s wealthiest. Yet the countries that have historically emitted the least greenhouse gases, like island countries, stand to suffer the most from climate change.

A national net-zero target should therefore be evaluated on how well it addresses this discrepancy. “You could easily argue that the wealthy countries of the global north and companies operating in those countries should go well beyond net-zero to effectively net negative emissions,” said Broekhoff. “They need to reduce their emissions as much as possible, and they need to help the rest of the world get to net-zero.” And many environmental activists argue that 2050 is too late as a target.

Wealthier countries also have to ensure that they don’t hinder vital activities like food production or development in other countries. And again, offsets have to complement overall emissions reductions, not substitute them. Otherwise, rich nations and corporations could simply pay others to fulfill their obligations to reduce emissions.

Many net-zero climate targets have a dirty loophole: exports

The net-zero plans that countries are putting out ahead of the COP26 meeting provide an opportunity to test out these principles. At this meeting, countries are expected to come to the negotiating table with stronger climate change commitments than they presented when the Paris agreement was assembled in 2015.

But many of the newer commitments are inward-looking, focused solely on emissions within national borders and ignoring their exports of fossil fuels.

Australia, for example, published a proposal for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 that relies heavily on investments in low-emissions technologies. But its interim target for 2030 hasn’t budged. And while Australia’s government expects domestic greenhouse gas emissions to fall, it remains the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter and will continue selling coal and natural gas abroad. “Australia’s coal and gas export industries will continue through to 2050 and beyond, supporting jobs and regional communities,” according to the plan.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia is aiming for net-zero emissions by 2060 and is investing $186 billion in cutting its emissions, but it expects to continue exporting oil in the meantime. Even the US has urged countries like Saudi Arabia to boost oil production to stimulate the global economy.

Norway, which is aiming to cut its domestic emissions by 55 percent by 2030, is also aiming to expand its oil and gas industry. As long as these countries are extracting fossil fuels and inviting other countries to burn them, they’ll never be able to credibly claim that they are having zero impact on the global climate. In fact, they’re profiting from this destruction.

While countries are only taking responsibility for the emissions within their borders, mitigating climate change requires looking beyond them. Getting these countries to reduce exports of dirty fuels looms as one of the biggest challenges of the upcoming climate talks.

Despite all the caveats and drawbacks, net-zero targets could still benefit the global climate. It will be hard to make progress without them. But these promises, and the steps countries and companies take to try to fulfill them, deserve intense scrutiny to ensure that they deliver.

The fate of the planet will be negotiated in Glasgow, Scotland

Posted on March 23, 2022 by bamdj

Almost every country in the world signed the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a monumental accord that aimed to limit global warming. But it was forged on a contradiction: Every signatory agreed that everyone must do something to address the urgent threat of climate change, but no one at the time pledged to do enough.

In the years since the agreement, the emissions that trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere have continued to rise. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by humans, reached a record high of 419 parts per million in the atmosphere this year.

The Paris agreement aimed to limit global warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, compared to temperatures before the Industrial Revolution, with a more optimistic goal of staying below 1.5°C. Both of these goals would require rapid and radical shifts away from fossil fuels — and eventually, zeroing out emissions of greenhouse gases entirely.

Signatories did agree that they would set more ambitious targets for themselves over time and eventually get on track to meet global climate goals. Whether they will actually do so is about to be tested over the next two weeks at COP26, the most important international climate conference in years.

“This is definitely the biggest [climate meeting] since Paris, and it has to be a turning point if we’re going to be successful,” said Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute.

The COP26 meeting will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, between October 31 and November 12. More than 100 world leaders, including US President Joe Biden, are expected to attend a portion of the conference.

The world has already failed to meet many earlier targets, drawing the ire of climate activists. “Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said in September. “Words that sound great but so far have not led to action.”

Some thorny issues that derailed past meetings, such as payments for developing countries that are living through climate disasters, remain unresolved. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic, which delayed COP26 from its original dates in November 2020, is still claiming thousands of lives per day, leading to national lockdowns and disrupting trade. Even after a year of devastating hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires, climate change may not be every country’s top priority.

But there’s no time to lose: The window for meeting the goals of the Paris agreement is closing. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018 that staying below 1.5°C of warming required the world to roughly halve emissions from current levels by 2030. This year, the IPCC reported that the world is poised to miss this target even in the most optimistic scenarios they studied.

“Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade,” Biden said in April. “This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.”

Some countries, seeing the brightening spotlight of COP26, have begun to announce more aggressive climate goals in the runup to the meeting. This week, the UK put out its road map for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century. But the most scrutiny will fall on the world’s largest emitters — China, the US, and India — and whether they will take tangible steps to curb their pollution. Biden and the US delegation are now counting on Congress to pass a suite of climate policies to strengthen their hand at the negotiating table.

What’s on the agenda for COP26?

The Paris climate agreement aims to solve a global crisis, but its bureaucratic constraints have frustrated the process.

Joining the accord is voluntary, which means any signatory can leave if they want to, as the US did briefly last year. And even the countries that stay in have the freedom to set their own goals for cutting greenhouse gases. If they miss their targets, there is no penalty.

It may seem odd that an agreement to save the world from itself would have so few firm rules. However, the Paris agreement was the culmination of two decades of stalled diplomacy, and many countries shot down stronger language around binding greenhouse emissions targets, oversight, and punishments.

The Paris agreement is thus a delicate balancing act, accomplishing its goals mainly with nudges and incentives. It aims to steer everyone — developing countries, oil economies, regional rivals, island states threatened by sea level rise — toward a common objective, and that’s a very tall order.

Here are some of the key items on the agenda for COP26 (officially known as the 26th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).

Getting countries to do more: Under the Paris agreement, every country is required to publish a climate change target and a route for getting there, or what’s called a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). The first round of NDCs put forward in 2015 were clearly inadequate, putting the world on course for roughly 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century.

Climate leaders hoped that in the runup to COP26, countries would roll out new commitments for the coming decade, as well as long-term strategies for eliminating emissions by the middle of the century. As of October 21, 114 countries and the European Union have submitted new NDCs. Some major emitters like the US, United Kingdom, and China have proposed or submitted stronger targets. But others, like Russia, Brazil, and Australia, did not meaningfully ramp up their goals. Still others like India have yet to submit a new NDC.

The leaders at COP26 will try to create carrots and sticks to motivate the laggards and holdouts to take more aggressive action. Many countries are now adamant that the limit for warming this century should be 1.5°C, now that many countries have already suffered the tolls of disasters worsened by climate change — a sign that 2°C of warming would be far worse.

According to the IPCC, the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C includes 2 extra inches of sea level rise, putting an extra 10 million people at risk of coastal flooding and related problems. Two degrees of warming would double the number of people exposed to extreme heat at least once every five years. This extra warming would also lead to greater declines in fisheries, crop production, and habitats for vital species like insect pollinators.

“Because of that new science, I think certainly in the climate community, 1.5°C de facto is now what everyone is talking about,” Mountford said.

Technology for cutting carbon out of the economy, like renewable energy, has also improved since the Paris agreement was signed. Some countries and many activists argue that a tougher target is essential to taking advantage of these improvements and that mitigation needs to begin right away.

This conference has to signal a “shift from making commitments to actually taking action,” said Marcene Mitchell, senior vice president of climate change at the World Wildlife Fund. Countries not only need to make bigger promises, Mitchell added, they need to match them with actual policies.

International carbon markets: One of the ways countries are aiming to meet their climate change goals is by pricing carbon dioxide emissions and creating accounting mechanisms for reducing them. That can take the form of credits or offsets that are traded with other countries. Under Article 6 of the Paris agreement, wealthier countries can compensate for their higher emissions by financing clean energy in developing countries or helping restore carbon-absorbing ecosystems like rainforests.

The trouble is that if these markets are not designed well, they may simply end up as a way for wealthier countries to buy their way out of reducing their own emissions. Without proper verification, the credits may not deliver the carbon reductions they promised. In past climate meetings, countries like the US, Australia, and Brazil pushed for language in these rules that would grant them more flexibility. However, most other countries found these provisions unacceptable because they would weaken the program. This issue forced several previous meetings to go over their allotted times. It remains unresolved and may not be settled at COP26.

Loss and damage: The core injustice of climate change is that the people who contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most. Though not strictly part of the Paris agreement, a key part of the discussion at COP26 will be around how to compensate countries facing the impacts of climate change today, from rising sea levels eroding shores to more devastating extreme weather.

Securing this funding is a huge priority for many countries, particularly island countries and those with small economies. However, wealthier countries that have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases have resisted language that would force them to chip in and instead advocated softer language that would make these wealth transfers voluntary. And so far, countries have not made much progress in closing the gap. “It’s a contentious issue, it’s a big issue, it’s a complicated issue,” said Mitchell. “This is my own personal view: I don’t think that will get resolved here at this COP.”

Climate finance: It’s expensive to build resilience to climate change and shift from fossil fuels toward clean energy, particularly for developing countries. The UNFCCC created the Green Climate Fund in 2010 to finance these projects around the world with grants and loans. It includes programs like developing sustainable agriculture in Thailand and building cooling facilities for residents in countries like Bangladesh facing extreme heat.

Governments meeting at COP26 set a target of deploying $100 billion a year in international climate financing through programs like the Green Climate Fund by 2020. But so far, countries haven’t contributed enough to meet the target, falling short by $20 billion in 2018, the most recent estimate available.

More international climate financing would help drive down greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries and motivate them to set more ambitious goals. However, some countries now say that even $100 billion isn’t enough. A negotiator representing African countries, for example, told Reuters that international climate financing should be scaled up to $1.3 trillion by 2030.

All eyes are on the United States

The US has the dubious distinction of being the only country to complete a 360-degree turn on the Paris agreement. It helped convene the accord in 2015, yet former President Trump withdrew the US in 2020. President Biden signed an executive order in January to rejoin and the US was formally back in the Paris accord in February.

Since the US is the wealthiest country in the world and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, it plays a prominent role in climate negotiations and has an even greater obligation to act on the crisis. At COP26, the US not only has to make up for lost time, it also has to rebuild trust with other countries and show that it’s willing to be more ambitious.

“There is this sense of exhaustion about how long is it going to take for one of the biggest emitters in the world to do its fair share,” Rachel Cleetus, the clean energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Vox’s Rebecca Leber earlier this month.

In April, Biden announced that the US was adopting a new climate goal: cutting emissions within the decade by 50 to 52 percent, compared to the US emissions peak in 2005. That’s a big step up from the previous target, which aimed for 26 to 28 percent reductions by 2025. US emissions have been declining since 2005, with a precipitous drop in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, greenhouse gases are already starting to rebound.

President Biden has already used some of his executive power to drive actions on climate change, like setting targets for electric vehicle production, limiting new oil and gas production on public lands, and pushing financial institutions to incorporate climate risk into their assessments.

But the fate of the largest parts of Biden’s climate agenda is in the hands of Congress, not the White House.

Democrats in Congress have been hurrying to put these plans into action with the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act. These bills, as originally written, could reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent over the next decade. With midterm elections looming next year, Democrats may not get another chance for years to advance major climate change legislation.

But the US delegation is arriving in Glasgow with a weaker hand than they had hoped for because the legislation is already being whittled down as Democrats are forced to compromise in the Senate.

The latest version of the budget resolution has been eroded from the $3.5 trillion initial scope to $1.75 trillion. It includes $555 billion in measures to address climate change, like tax breaks for clean energy and electric vehicles. However, it was stripped of programs like a fee on emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The Clean Electricity Payment Program, which would have paid power providers to meet clean energy standards, was removed as well.

The negotiations are still ongoing, so even these climate change measures are not guaranteed to go through. So while the US has enhanced its commitment to curb emissions, it has yet to match it with enough concrete action.

“For [the US] to have credibility and leadership, we need to not just come with a statement and commitment, but actually the money to pay for it,” Mitchell said.

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What happens now, first in Congress and then in Glasgow, will help shape the ambitions of countries around the world as they meet the challenge of climate change. It’s not a stretch to say that the future of our planet as we know it is at stake.

Update October 29, 11 am: Updated to include the latest figures on measures addressing climate change in Democrats’ budget bill.

Biden’s $27 billion bet on forests

Posted on March 23, 2022 by bamdj

As the White House revealed Thursday, President Joe Biden has stripped a lot from his Build Back Better framework to placate moderate Democrats. Free community college is out, as is Medicare coverage of dental and vision services, among several other priorities.

But there is one surprising area that’s so far survived the congressional gauntlet as part of a big climate spending proposal: forest management and conservation. The bill — which Democrats are trying to pass with a simple Senate majority using the reconciliation process — allocates roughly $27 billion for spending related to federal, state, and tribal forests.

While that’s just a sliver of the roughly $1.75 trillion spending package, it’s an enormous and historic number, said Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s the most significant investment ever in our national forests,” O’Mara told Vox. “It’s an astonishingly big deal.”

A large chunk of those funds would go toward preventing wildfires — which release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and have devastated Western towns — and toward more equitable access to green spaces. The bill would also set aside billions of dollars for ecosystem restoration and more environmentally friendly farming practices.

Biden’s framework reveals that conserving forests and biodiversity is a core component of the nation’s plan to tackle climate change, as many scientists say it should be: Trees and soil are a natural sink for carbon dioxide, making forests a key solution for cutting climate pollution. Yet for decades, biodiversity conservation and climate change have largely been considered separate issues. The bill also shows that the US government has recognized the growing threat of climate-fueled wildfires and is willing to fund the Forest Service to do something about it.

But a few big questions remain, including whether the bill will pass. And some forest advocates fear that the boost in spending could actually increase commercial logging — which, in turn, fuels climate change.

The bulk of the money would go toward preventing wildfires

More than half of the $27 billion for forests would go toward reducing the risk of wildfires, such as through prescribed burns, largely within the wildland-urban interface. That’s where forests meet human developments and wildfires tend to do the most damage.

Putting billions into fire prevention isn’t a huge surprise. Climate change is making forest fires worse, and they spew a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the air. This summer, for example, fires in the American West belched 130 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere — that’s equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 28 million passenger cars.

The past decade — and especially this past year — has made the risk of wildfires hard for Congress to ignore, O’Mara said. “There are so many members of the Senate that have been affected by these massive fires,” he said. “The lack of care and restoration [of forests] has had devastating consequences.”

In the past, the US Forest Service’s wildfire budget hasn’t matched the challenges posed by climate change. Biden’s framework would dramatically boost spending, according to Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy organization. “It’s a huge investment,” he said.

It also allocates $2.5 billion for urban forestry projects that seek to provide more equal access to forests and parks — roughly six times more than the government spends on those projects today, according to Joel Pannell, the vice president of urban forest policy at the nonprofit American Forests. “We’ve never seen this sort of investment in urban and community forestry,” Pannell said.

But while many conservation groups have responded positively, key questions remain about whether the Forest Service will spend the money for fire prevention effectively, Hartl said. The growing threat of wildfires is linked to both climate change and years of mismanagement of the nation’s forests, he said. Historically, the Forest Service has tried to manage forests and reduce wildlife risk partly through commercial logging, he added, which environmental advocates say increases carbon emissions.

According to Dominick DellaSala, the chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a forest advocacy organization, the Forest Service often uses fire prevention as an excuse to sell timber. “By putting more logging on the landscape, you are not going to reduce fire intensity,” he said.

The Forest Service told Vox it does not comment on pending legislation. A spokesperson for the agency said it “is committed to the thoughtful stewardship of our national forests and their carbon storage potential.” The spokesperson continued, “Our nation faces a forest health crisis due, in part, to the effects of a changing climate, including drought, unprecedented wildfires, and other stresses and disturbances.”

If the bill passes, the agency should instead direct that money toward hiring and training a new generation of forest stewards who will focus on restoring public land with ecological and climate goals in mind, Hartl said. (The bill does include funding for the Civilian Climate Corps, which would hire young workers for restoration, among other conservation activities.)

“It’s promising, but I think Congress has to have a laser-like focus on the implementation of this money in the years to come,” Hartl said. “It’s an enormous investment in these public lands. One would hope that there are no more excuses for doing a bad job.”

A lifeline for threatened plants and animals

President Biden’s framework would also provide billions of dollars for conserving biodiversity. The bill allocates $50 million for protecting old-growth trees and another $50 million for conserving and restoring habitats for threatened species in public forests. It would put another $50 million toward reducing human-wildlife conflict on these lands, such as between ranchers and wolves.

Remarkably, the framework also includes a huge and historic sum for conservation activities on US farmland, O’Mara said — another $27 billion or so. “We think it’s the biggest investment in climate-smart agricultural practices ever,” O’Mara said (meaning, farming practices that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions or make crops more resilient to climate change).

It includes $9 billion for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which helps farmers make their land more sustainable, such as by improving soil health, and $4 billion for the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), the largest conservation program in the US, according to the government. The CSP helps farmers make habitats for wildlife, reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, and make their crops more resilient to extreme weather.

“This support can increase a farm’s adaptive capacity in the face of extreme weather events and other climate-related impacts,” the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition said in a statement Thursday.

Efforts like these to make working lands including farms more sustainable are part of Biden’s push to conserve at least 30 percent of US land by 2030. The administration will have a hard time hitting that figure without including sustainably run farms and ranches.

The bill also includes several provisions that directly target the conservation of wildlife. It would allocate roughly $200 million for the Endangered Species Act — largely considered the most important law for wildlife in the US — and another $250 million for wildlife refuges and state wildlife management areas, according to the US nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife. It even provides some money for conserving and managing wildlife corridors.

“We were worried that a diminished bill might cut imperative funding for endangered species recovery, but we are thrilled to see these provisions and many more have made it through,” Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement on Thursday. “This bill, as it stands now, would be a historic investment.”

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Covid-19 vaccines for young kids are a big step toward a new normal

Posted on March 23, 2022 by bamdj

More than 28 million children across the US are now eligible to receive Covid-19 vaccinations, a step that could relieve anxiety for families, bring more kids back to schools, and slow the spread of the disease.

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for kids between the ages of 5 and 11 after an advisory committee voted 14-0 to recommend the shots. The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration last week granted an emergency use authorization to the vaccine, concluding that its benefits outweigh the risks in young kids.

Distribution of these vaccines has already begun, and the CDC expects to reach “full capacity” for pediatric vaccines by the week of November 8.

Immunizing young children against Covid-19 would make it more difficult for the coronavirus to spread and protect kids from falling ill. It’s big news for parents and kids, in part because the vaccine could ease the return to in-person schooling. “Vaccinating younger children against Covid-19 will bring us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy,” said acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, in a statement.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine currently has full FDA approval for people ages 16 and older and a separate emergency use authorization for adolescents between 12 and 16. The emergency-use designation allows health workers to administer new vaccines during a public health emergency based on data from clinical trials. Full approval requires more clinical data and allows manufacturers to market vaccines and continue selling them after the public health emergency ends.

While children are generally at much lower risk of severe illness from Covid-19 than older adults, at least 690 children from birth to the age of 18 have died from the disease in the US so far. About 8,300 5- to 11-year-olds have been hospitalized for Covid-19, and at least 146 have died. Vaccines will drastically lower the chances of that happening, while also whittling down the risk that children will pass on the virus to others.

Although vaccines are the most effective tool for containing Covid-19, the experiences of older adults show that they’re not always enough. Infections after vaccination, known as breakthrough infections, are usually mild, but they have sickened and killed some people. The protection offered by vaccines can also wane over time. Changes in the virus itself have created variants like delta, which spreads more readily and can evade immune protection. That’s why health officials have recommended that vaccinated people continue to wear masks and maintain social distance in high-risk situations, like crowded indoor environments.

It’s not clear yet how much longer such measures will remain in place in schools, but as more kids get their shots, the odds rise that students can go to class without masks.

Why Covid-19 vaccines for kids took so long to be approved

In the early days of the pandemic, doctors reported that adults were most vulnerable to severe illness from Covid-19, particularly older adults and those with preexisting health conditions like high blood pressure and other heart conditions. That trend has continued, and unvaccinated adults continue to experience the largest number of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease.

By contrast, children appeared to be at far lower risk of contracting the disease and seemed to have less severe outcomes, so young people became a lower priority for vaccinations than adults. However, as the vaccines rolled out and more adults gained immune protection, the relatively small number of infections in children started making up a larger proportion of Covid-19 cases.

“The focus was to get a vaccine for adults first,” said Kawsar Talaat, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who led a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trial in children. “Once the trial in adults was finished, then it started going down in age.”

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The initial clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, also known by the brand name Comirnaty, included participants aged 16 and up. Then the companies conducted further trials with the same vaccine formulation in kids as young as 12, which led experimenters to reconsider what dose of the vaccine was needed in young children.

“The incredibly robust immune response in the 12 to 15-year-olds made them think that maybe they didn’t need that high of a dose,” Talaat said. “There was a new study that started to look at the vaccine specifically in kids under 12, and we decided to test different doses.”

Researchers repeated the clinical trials in 5- to 11-year-olds, but with about one-third of the dose of vaccine that’s used in adults. The lower dose aims to minimize side effects and account for the fact that young children are both physically smaller and tend to have more robust immune systems than adults.

“Kids are not just little adults,” said Jennifer Nayak, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “Their size is different, but their immune systems are also different.”

Children who received the low-dose Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, 10 micrograms, experienced an immune response comparable to adults who got the higher dose, according to the Pfizer/BioNTech trial. After the second injection, the trial showed, the vaccine was 90.7 percent effective at preventing symptomatic cases of Covid-19.

The trials, however, included just 4,600 children, compared to the trial in adults that included 44,000 participants. The pool of children in the trial was smaller because the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has already been administered to hundreds of millions of people around the world with a strong safety record.

However, some complications did emerge. For instance, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is not recommended for people who are severely allergic to any vaccine ingredient, or who had an allergic reaction to the first dose. Researchers have also found that some recipients of mRNA vaccines, like the one from Pfizer/BioNTech, may be linked to rare cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle.

The trials in children showed no serious side effects, but some reported symptoms like pain at the injection site, redness, swelling, chills, and fever, with more side effects reported after the second dose.

While the wait for Covid-19 vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds has been agonizing for kids and adults alike, this is still a record-breaking pace for vaccine approval. The previous record for a pediatric vaccine was held by the mumps shot, which took four years to develop.

Only 18 months have passed since the World Health Organization declared the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 11 months have passed since the FDA granted its first emergency use authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine.

What vaccinating children means for the US epidemic

It’s clear that children have suffered greatly from the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the kids who have been sickened and killed by the disease, millions more have lost caregivers and family members or struggled to keep up with their education as schools shifted to remote learning. The pandemic has also taken an enormous toll on mental health.

And though almost all children survive coronavirus infections, they can still infect others who are more vulnerable to some degree. That not only threatens to make other people sick, but also increases the chances that the virus will acquire dangerous mutations. So vaccinating children is likely important not just to protect them individually, but to limit the further spread of Covid-19.

Yet the current stage of the US epidemic is different from when Covid-19 vaccines began distribution to adults in December 2020. At that time, there were critical limitations on US supplies of the vaccine, so health officials debated exactly who should be at the front of the line.

Now, the US has stockpiled lots of Covid-19 vaccines, and some adults have become eligible for booster doses. Young children do remain at a lower risk of severe Covid-19 than adults, so health officials recommend that children receive their first injections at doctor’s offices rather than mass-vaccination sites.

“As a mom, I encourage parents with questions to talk to their pediatrician, school nurse or local pharmacist to learn more about the vaccine and the importance of getting their children vaccinated,” said CDC director Rochelle Walensky in a statement.

One concern, however, is that families will decide whether to vaccinate their children, likely along the same fault lines that have defined Covid-19 vaccinations for adults. Age, income, ethnicity, and political beliefs are key variables shaping whether Americans get vaccinated, and some families seem especially hesitant about vaccinating young kids. (Having only an emergency-use vaccine authorization for young kids may contribute to hesitancy, despite safety data backing it.) School districts around the US will also come to different conclusions about whether to mandate, encourage, or remain indifferent about children getting their shots.

“I imagine there is going to be a huge amount of geographic variability on this,” said Nayak.

So far, vaccination rates are highest in older people and lowest in younger people, and if the pattern holds, it’s likely that 5- to 11-year-old children will have some of the lowest rates of vaccine uptake. Getting those numbers up will take time.

Another hurdle is that not every child has good access to medical professionals and can easily get to a doctor to receive a shot. Misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, like the myth that they cause reproductive harm, could interfere with the rollout as well, according to Nayak.

Still, the more people who are vaccinated against Covid-19, the harder it is for the virus to spread. As more children head back to schools in person and more people gather indoors, having 5- to 11-year-olds vaccinated could blunt another winter spike in infections across the whole population. “We’re seeing that in places with high vaccination rates, transmission is lower than in places with low vaccination rates,” Talaat said. “I’m really excited about vaccinating my 10-year-old.”

Researchers are still planning to keep an eye on the children who participated in clinical trials for more than two years, to keep track of their level of protection and to monitor for any potential long-term complications. Some fraction of vaccinated children are also likely to experience breakthrough infections, and over time, protection from the vaccine may wane.

There are also Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials underway in children as young as 6 months old, so even more kids in the future may be eligible to get these shots. But again, even if they gain approval, the vaccines will only make a big difference if kids actually get them.

The curious case of the ancient whale bones

Posted on March 23, 2022 by bamdj

Every year, thousands of whales strand — meaning that they wind up trapped on beaches or in shallow waters — and it’s really hard to figure out why.

It’s not for lack of trying. Teams of forensic researchers investigate stranded whales, studying organs, analyzing body parts with CT scanners, digging through stomach contents, and checking skin for scarring. But these meticulous whale detectives still often don’t find any answers.

“We can only about 50 percent of the time, if that much, give you a solid answer of why that animal died and why it’s stranded,” says Darlene Ketten, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who refers to her work as “CSI: The Beach.”

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One reason it’s hard to figure out how whales die is that scientists don’t know that much about how they live, Ketten explains on the latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about mysteries in science. They range widely across the planet and dive deeply. There are many things about their complicated bodies we don’t yet understand. And these researchers are often working with whale carcasses that have been decaying for days, which can distort the evidence left behind.

Some beached whales are even more difficult to study because they’re really, really old. In 2011, Nick Pyenson, the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, took on a cold case that had gone unsolved for a long time — seven to nine million years, to be precise.

Pyenson, who is also the author of Spying on Whales, was on a research trip in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a beautiful expanse of rock and sand that’s flecked with orange, beige, and purple because of the presence of iron and other minerals. He was there to research the origins of a nearby ocean current — but along the way, he got distracted.

“There’s all these whale skeletons by the side of this hill,” Pyenson says one of his colleagues, Mario Suarez, told him one day. “You need to check it out! It’s amazing!”

The hill was known locally as “Cerro Ballena,” or “Whale Hill,” because fossilized whale bones had been found there in the past. Bulldozers had just come through to cut a path for a new highway, and they exposed more skeletons. When Pyenson went to look, he was completely overwhelmed.

“It was whale skeleton after whale skeleton after whale skeleton, complete from nose to tail. Some of them stretched out almost like snow angels the kids make,” Pyenson recalls. “It’s as if they had died and their skeletons were not disturbed.”

This was almost unheard of: full, beautifully preserved skeletons, stretching out for 40 feet in every direction. “In the field, you spend a lot of time searching, and often times you just find a boulder with a few bits of bone — and that is a good day,” Pyenson says. “A really good day is finding more than just a few bits of bone, or a partial skeleton. If you find a head with that skeleton, that’s a home run.”

Once he’d processed what he was seeing, Pyenson realized that he was going to have to start a whole new research project to figure out what exactly had happened to these whales. It seemed like an ancient stranding — possibly one of the best-preserved ones — but it wasn’t going to be easy to solve. There were no tissues to study, so he couldn’t analyze organs or skin, as Ketten and her fellow researchers do with modern whales. Fossilization also changes the minerals in the bones, and rock layers compress them into new shapes, so the bones were somewhat unreliable witnesses.

Pyenson and his colleagues used 3D-scanning technology to make models of the whale skeletons to study them back home. They carefully analyzed the soil and layout of the surrounding area, and finally landed on three big clues.

First, the skeletons were entangled in each other and almost entirely unscavenged, which suggested that these animals had died suddenly. Second, there were many species at this ancient graveyard — whales, but also other adult and juvenile animals, which told Pyenson that the die-off was not limited to whales.

The third big clue came from a close study of the local geology, which suggested these creatures had died in four separate events over the course of around 10,000 years. So whatever was killing the whales had happened several times. That essentially ruled out an infrequent natural disaster like a volcanic eruption.

Pyenson began thinking about cyclical changes to the ocean that could kill off lots of different animals, and fast. “I started moving towards the idea of harmful algal blooms being a cause,” he says. Algal blooms, or red tides, are troublesome to this day. They occur when populations of microorganisms explode in a body of water — sometimes when agricultural runoff floods a lake or ocean with nutrients like nitrogen. These tiny organisms can produce toxins that can prove very deadly, very quickly.

Pyenson theorized that runoff from mineral-rich surrounding areas — minerals that still lend the sands of the Atacama their vibrant colors — could have periodically caused algal blooms in the ocean that once covered this area. But he wanted evidence that would hold up in the court of scientific opinion.

If this were a fresh crime scene, he could have rooted around in the whale’s guts, found a bunch of toxins, and caught the red tide red-handed. But because his crime scene was millions of years old, he could only study his photographic models instead. Those kept showing that the whale skeletons were surrounded by rings of orange sediment — mats of iron oxide, which Pyenson interprets as possible algae in the fossil record. “I kept on wondering, is this the algae of death?” Pyenson says with a laugh.

His team brought samples of this orange sediment back to the US and examined them under an electron microscope. The images included tiny spheres that were the right size to be an algae of death, Pyenson says, but all their distinguishing features had been wiped away by millions of years.

“We are so close to a smoking gun,” he says. “It’s tantalizing. But that’s how a lot of historical science goes. You struggle with it and you want to get at the answer. But sometimes the evidence you’re able to find to answer your questions is not entirely satisfying.”

Jeremy Goldbogen, a marine biologist at Stanford University, read Pyenson’s paper in 2014 and told the journal Science that the positions of the various skeletons seemed consistent with a stranding.

David Caron, who has researched algal blooms at the University of Southern California, was also asked about Pyenson’s research in 2014 and told National Geographic that present-day algal blooms also wipe out a wide range of marine animals. “There’s certainly thousands of sea lion deaths, dozens to hundreds of dolphins, untold hundreds of pelicans that all have been wiped out with the same toxic event,” he told the magazine.

According to Pyenson, these parallels between the past and the present flow in both directions. “I find studying past worlds to be a kind of time travel,” he says. “You get to go these past worlds that almost seem like alien worlds.”

Even if he’s never able to definitively pinpoint what happened at Cerro Ballena, Pyenson says the site suggests that whale strandings were occurring millions of years before modern humans evolved. That’s helpful context for researchers who are trying to prevent strandings in the present day.

For example, a large proportion of the fossils come from baleen whales, even though baleen whales make up only a small fraction of whale strandings today. So what’s changed between then and now? For one thing, centuries of whaling have decimated populations of baleen whales, Pyenson says.

These strandings have been happening “ever since there were whales,” says Ketten. But humans are now contributing to the problem, whether through whaling, plastic pollution, or climate change. “What we have to be responsible for is actions that we take in the ocean that may be … causing animals to become less fit, to be less healthy, to be less able to reproduce, to mate, to find food.”

Whale fossils like the ones Pyenson studied in the Atacama Desert can serve as a sort of snapshot or baseline, revealing how whale strandings looked before humans ever came along. And more researchers can establish about the distant past, the more they may know about the effects that humans are having on these majestic mammals.

The case against the concept of biodiversity

Posted on March 23, 2022 by bamdj

In 2017, an evolutionary biologist named R. Alexander Pyron ignited controversy with a Washington Post commentary titled “We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.” He wrote: “Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.”

Pyron’s take challenged the decades-old idea that biodiversity is a good thing — that humans should strive to preserve all forms of life on Earth and their interconnectedness across ecosystems. It prompted scientist and writer Carl Safina to mount a passionate defense of biodiversity, calling Pyron’s stance “conceptually confused” and containing “jarring assertions.” Safina’s most cutting rebuke was that belittling biodiversity derails environmental conversations. “It’s like answering ‘Black lives matter’ with ‘All lives matter,’” he wrote. “It’s a way of intentionally missing the point.”

Nobel Prize winners co-signed more rebuttals. Professors blogged long meditations on why endangered species need to be saved. There were scientists who had previously questioned a hyperfocus on saving species, to be sure, though none had done so in such a public and broad-sweeping manner as Pyron. Josh Schimel, an ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, wrote: “Remember, you are a scientist — it is not your job to be right. It is your job to be thoughtful, careful, and analytical.” Pyron declined a request for comment for this story.

Ginger Allington, a landscape ecologist and professor at George Washington University who tracks the scientific debate around “biodiversity,” says this scientific back-and-forth reflects increasing conflict about the importance of biodiversity and species loss.

The most common way to measure biodiversity is to count the number of species in a certain place, also known as “species richness.” But critics question the usefulness of this number and argue that the concept has always been fuzzy, even to scientists, akin to a “new linguistic bottle for the wine of old ideas.”

A handful of scientists want to do away with the term biodiversity altogether — and have been trying to do so since the late 1990s. The concept, they say, is hard to quantify, hard to track globally over time, and actually isn’t an indication of what people commonly picture as a “healthy” ecosystem. (Scientists are generally reluctant to describe ecosystems in terms of “healthy” or “unhealthy,” which are value judgments.)

Last year, the United Nations reported that the world has failed to reach even one of the major biodiversity conservation targets it had set for itself in 2010. In the face of accelerating species and habitat loss, countries are now committing to protecting 30 percent of land and water by 2030. This fall, 193 nations are set to attend the virtual Convention on Biological Diversity to hash out a plan to stop biodiversity loss. (A draft of that plan was published last month.) In the US, the Biden administration has proposed its own game-changing approach to nature conservation. Meanwhile, a coronavirus pandemic that may have begun in animals reminds us that we are fundamentally linked to the animals in these critical habitats.

Against this backdrop, a new generation of scientists is taking up the debate about what to do about “biodiversity” itself — the scientific concept, its popular understanding, and indeed the very word. As Allington told Vox: “There’s just a lot of drama.”

The backstory of biodiversity

Before there was biodiversity, there was BioDiversity. A key moment in the evolution of the word came at the National Forum on BioDiversity, held at the Smithsonian Institution and National Academy of Sciences, in 1986. Speakers included Jared Diamond, who later authored Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the biologist E.O. Wilson, who most recently popularized the idea of protecting half the planet.

Diamond and Wilson — along with seven other white male scientists in attendance — dubbed themselves the “Club of Earth” and held a press conference, telling reporters that biodiversity loss was the second-biggest “threat to civilization.” The first? Thermonuclear war.

Few women scientists or non-Western experts were featured. And not everyone felt comfortable crowning biodiversity as a scientific silver bullet, for that matter. One news report from the time quoted biologist Dan Janzen, who said at the forum that “one shouldn’t use the number of species as the only criterion for earmarking an area for conservation.” Janzen would later call the forum “an explicit political event” and said that the word biodiversity got “punched into that system at that point [in time] deliberately.”

Still, the forum drew 14,000 in-person attendees. Another 10,000 watched a live “teleconference” of key panelists beamed around the world. “BioDiversity: The Videotape,” a campy VHS recording of the teleconference spliced with wildlife footage, sold out. The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Time all covered the event, marking “the first time that biological diversity … had received such a broad public airing,” a December 1986 article in the journal BioScience noted. The forum not only streamlined the term — thanks to a suggestion by biologist Walter Rosen — but brought the buzzword to the forefront, as the growing rate of global species extinctions was given both a name and an urgency. “The biodiversity crisis,” Wilson said at the forum, “is a real crisis.”

Against the odds, the idea of biodiversity spread outside of science and around the world. “I’d compare the market penetration of ‘biodiversity’ to Madonna,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University.

Pimm witnessed the word’s use rise suddenly in the 1980s as a young associate professor. Before then, Pimm had no simple name for the kind of research he was doing — now called conservation biology — and, more problematically, no term for what he was measuring out in the field. And so biodiversity “hit several things simultaneously,” he said. “It’s easy to popularize, it captures people’s imagination, and it’s scientifically credible.”

Three ecologists shaped “biodiversity” into the kind of science that goes mainstream, according to Pimm. Thomas Lovejoy coined the term “biological diversity” in the 1980s. Elliott Norse defined it as the variety of genes, species, and ecosystems in a given area. And Wilson, who initially deemed the contraction biodiversity “too glitzy,” ultimately popularized the word. In 1992, the UN codified the word biodiversity — and Norse’s definition — into the Convention on Biological Diversity, a multilateral treaty.

Biodiversity was thus conceived to capture two notions: a world teeming with wildlife, and the political problem of stopping extinctions. The idea had become “a force” capable of influencing global society, as climate and environmental law expert David Takacs wrote in his 1996 book The Idea of Biodiversity. “It is difficult to distinguish biodiversity, a socially constructed idea, from biodiversity, some concrete phenomena,” Takacs wrote.

But over the years, biodiversity has come to mean many things to different people — from “local species” to “wildness” to “natural balance” to just “a fancy word for nature,” according to a study of public opinion in Scotland. Researcher R.A. Lautenschlager, in a 1997 scientific article titled “Biodiversity is dead,” put it more bluntly: “Biodiversity has become so all-inclusive that it has become meaningless.”

“We need to be careful about what we are saying”

A practical question flows from this history: Does saving every species still matter?

Allington has seen colleagues try to address this kind of question publicly, and their answers, she says, tend to get misinterpreted. “We need to be careful about what we are saying,” she said.

To unpack this question in her college courses, Allington — who considers biodiversity to be “multifaceted” — passes out bags of mixed candy to her students, illustrating a key point: “The bags show that not all species play the same role in the ecosystem,” she said. Some species, like oysters, make key contributions to the ecosystem, and their disappearance would threaten all the rest. “The problem is that we still don’t know what functions the majority of species actually provide,” she said.

Scientists in today’s save-all-species debate disagree about where the science ends, and where the subjective idea of right and wrong begins. In this sense, debates about biodiversity may ultimately be debates about ethics, implicit human values, and whose ecological knowledge matters.

“Does every species matter?” asked Mark Vellend, a plant ecologist at University of Sherbrooke in Canada. “You cannot even give an answer unless you say, matter for what?”

How to measure “goodness”

The late biologist Michael Soulé, the “father of conservation biology,” was unequivocal that biodiversity is good — though its goodness, he wrote, “cannot be tested or proven.”

But in specific places, biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake is not necessarily good. On islands, for example, plant diversity is generally increasing because non-native species are arriving; some rare island plant species may go extinct as a result, but not always. Biodiversity might also be the wrong lens in ecosystems that weren’t diverse to begin with, like boreal forests close to the Arctic, which have low numbers of species that rarely face extinction even in the face of logging.

Many scientists recognize biodiversity as an imperfect yardstick. The total number of species, and how it changes, doesn’t capture all the ways that humans and other forces alter landscapes. “‘More biodiversity’ is not a universal prescription for conservation,” journalist Michelle Nijhuis writes in Beloved Beasts, a history of the conservation movement.

It also doesn’t capture the human experience of nature. A 2013 study — “Is biodiversity attractive?” — found that when it comes to outdoor recreation, visitors don’t actually prefer species-rich urban spaces. “Especially during the pandemic people [are] flocking to natural, wild spaces,” said Vellend. “Whether in those spaces there are 1,000 species or 100, to me that’s a pretty small part of the overall story.”

For many people, the on-ramp to nature is not through science. “Their point of entry is aesthetic,” Barry Lopez, the nature writer and Arctic Dreams author, said in a 2001 interview. “It’s not that they don’t know what biodiversity is, but it doesn’t have the pull,” he added. “The door for them lies elsewhere.”

A more measurable dimension of a place’s “goodness” within the human story, some scientists think, is ecosystem function. Forget the number of species, in other words, and focus on what each does for keeping an ecosystem enjoyable and humming, like the life-supporting role of oak trees — which support hundreds of species of caterpillars, a mainstay in most songbird diets — in North American hardwood forests. Using this framework, land managers would focus their conservation efforts on species that appear to play the most crucial role in a given ecosystem. (An 80-page US National Park Service report, called “Resist-Accept-Direct,” recently called for this triage approach.)

Pimm, for his part, thinks this framework is “total bullshit” — and he is not alone in that sentiment. It’s hard to develop a conservation plan around the emerging concept of ecosystem function, according to Pimm, precisely because we still know so little about the role of any given species in a place. “What does one even mean by ecosystem function?” he asked. “It doesn’t have any operational meaning.”

The concept of biodiversity is becoming even more influential in the realm of climate policy: In June, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first-ever joint report with the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Yet one of its authors, the Paris-Saclay University ecologist Paul Leadley, said while introducing the report that current on-the-ground approaches to saving species are essentially outdated. “We have to really rethink biodiversity conservation,” he said.

There is a broader movement to expand the meaning of “biodiversity”

So if the idea that saving every species saves the planet is imperfect, should we now abandon biodiversity?

“A concept can’t truly die until it’s got a replacement,” said Vellend. He says that the 1980s version of biodiversity should be seen as a starting point, with plenty of room for improvement. “Until somebody comes up with something better, we’re stuck with it.”

Even R. Alexander Pyron, the author of the explosive Post piece, cautioned against dropping “biodiversity” in a mea culpa he posted on his Facebook page after blowback from his peers. “I succumbed to a temptation to sensationalize parts of my argument,” Pyron wrote.

But others see an opportunity to expand the notion of biodiversity into something more inclusive and more just. Campaigns like #BiodiversityRevisited have created virtual dialogues and in-person workshops where an array of voices discuss ways of breathing new life into “biodiversity.” These discussions have pushed out possible replacement terms, like “fabric of life,” that might better capture the full range of life on Earth, from thriving trees to prospering pandas to healthy people.

One starting point might be to broaden the biodiversity concept to include humans, breaking down the barrier between our species and other animals. “My well-educated scientist colleagues will often slip and say ‘mammals and humans.’ Every time, I get a chill down my spine,” said Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist and curator at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Humans are mammals, after all. That even experts make these slips of the tongue “just highlights that there is still something to overcome there,” Hoekstra said.

Conservationists could also gain from a broadened notion of biodiversity that centers Indigenous and traditional knowledge, which has long been diminished by establishment science. Research shows that lands managed by Indigenous people are home to much of the world’s biodiversity, and that biodiversity tends to decline more slowly on those lands.

“Many of these Westernized concepts, we don’t see ourselves in them,” Andrea Reid, a fisheries scientist at University of British Columbia and a citizen of the Nisga’a nation, said. Indigenous concepts of conservation “include people within the system,” said Reid, who monitors diversity in British Columbia’s coldwater streams by counting species in ways that have cultural meaning to Indigenous people.

Reid has been working with Indigenous “knowledge keepers” who will go to a stream and look for certain species of dragonfly — for them, a “cultural indicator” that marks a healthy ecosystem. Other scientists might go to the same place and tally all insect species to measure local species richness. These measures can be used together, Reid says, to assess the overall condition of the stream over time.

This kind of “pluralistic” perspective, as some scientists call it, aligns with what Reid calls “two-eyed seeing” — a way of bringing together Indigenous and Western understandings. “It’s not about throwing something out, or just walking away from ‘biodiversity’ and its metrics,” Reid said. “It’s about enriching our understanding by bringing multiple perspectives to bear.”

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