The Cost Of Carbon
July 30, 2021
It’s time to play… Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader (if that 5th grader read a TON of news). Test your knowledge of recent world news with this short quiz. Submissions must be made by 12pm EST Monday, 8/2. The winner, announced Wednesday, will win bragging rights for the week as well as a free Daily Pnut t-shirt.
“My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain…There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.” — Chief Seattle
Retaliatory Strikes
In northwestern China lies Xinjiang, an autonomous region that is home to the Uyghurs. Uyghurs are historically Muslim people that face extraordinary persecution from China’s Communist Party. On the final day of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared what was happening there to be a genocide, and the Biden administration has maintained that position as well.
The Xinjiang region of China has some of the country’s largest oil deposits. When people from other parts of China began moving into the region in greater numbers, they also instituted crackdowns on the local languages, culture, and religion, and minority groups now struggle to survive due to discrimination. As the resentment began to turn to violence, in 2016, a new Communist party leader Chen Quanguo transferred to the region from Tibet.
Chen was relentless, and put large numbers of Uyghurs and Kazakhs into “re-education camps.” Reports say at least one million people have been sent to the camps. There are reports that, in an attempt to keep the population of Uyghurs down, China forced sterilizations. Children are sent to boarding schools to indoctrinate them, and mosques are regularly destroyed by authorities.
As the repression continues, or even intensifies, Uyghurs that have left the country have started to speak out about the atrocities committed. But back home, their families face the repercussions of their honesty. Abduweli Ayup first drew the attention of authorities for trying to expand the use of the Uyghur language, and he was arrested in 2013 and spent over a year in prison. After his release, he fled to Norway, where he continues to campaign on behalf of his fellow Uyghurs.
Agricultural scientist Mihriay Erkin was living in Japan when she suspected that her father had been taken by the authorities into a camp in 2017. When she went back to find him two years later in mid-2019, despite warnings that she shouldn’t, she disappeared. Ayup, her uncle, believes that they took her in February of 2020 to punish him after he spoke with international news outlets about a leaked government document that outlined how Uyghurs were tracked and chosen for detention. She died last year at the age of 30.
Before she left Japan, Erkin told her mom, “I want to try to find my father, even if it means I might die.” A national security officer from her hometown said she died in a detention center in Kashgar, which her uncle believes to be the same detention center in which he was held and physically and sexually abused six years prior.
Ayup says the government handed over her body to her family, but they were warned not to have a funeral and to tell people she died at home. The Xinjiang government’s statement to the New York Times said that she “had returned from overseas in June 2019 to receive medical treatment. On Dec. 19, she died at a hospital in Kashgar of organ failure caused by severe anemia” and that “from the time she went to the hospital until her death, she had always been looked after by her uncle and younger brother.”
Road Block
- Aid workers in Ethiopia claim that an unofficial Ethiopian government blockade has cut off the only road into the conflict-torn region where millions of Ethiopians face the threat of mass starvation. A relief convoy headed for Tigray came under fire on the road on July 18, forcing it to turn around. On Tuesday, the World Food Program said 170 trucks loaded with relief aid were stranded in Semera, the capital of the neighboring Afar region, waiting for Ethiopian permission to make the trek into Tigray.
- “These trucks must be allowed to move NOW,” the agency’s director David Beasley wrote on Twitter. “People are starving.” The blockade is intensifying what some call the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in a decade. The crisis comes during an intensifying war, which has deepened ethnic tensions and stoked fears that Ethiopia will collapse. The United Nations estimates that 400,000 people there are living in famine-like conditions, and another 4.8 million need urgent help.
- The Ethiopian prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, said last week that his government was providing “unfettered humanitarian access” and committed to “the safe delivery of critical supplies to its people in the Tigray region.” However, Mr. Abiy’s ministers have publicly accused aid workers of helping and even arming the Tigrayan fighters, leading to aid workers being attacked at airports, and even killed. “This is a desperate, desperate situation,” said Lorraine Sweeney of Support Africa Foundation. “It brings me back to famine times in Ireland… This is crazy stuff in this day and age.” (NYT, $)
Trouble Man
- Chinese billionaire Sun Dawu was sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of gathering crowds to attack state agencies, illegal fundraising, and “provoking trouble.” The billionaire pig farmer was found guilty of eight charges by the Gaobeidian District People’s Court in Hebei province during China’s latest effort to rein in powerful businessmen and limit the influence of private enterprises. Nineteen of Sun’s relatives and employees were given shorter sentences, and his Dawu Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Group conglomerate was fined $480,000.
- The initial case against Sun started last summer, when a minor property dispute with a neighboring state farm turned violent. Authorities kept over twenty of Sun’s relatives and employees under secret house arrest, in what some called brutal conditions. “There were no windows in the designated residential surveillance area and the lights were on 24 hours a day, making it impossible to distinguish between day and night,” said Jin Fengyu, Dawu Group’s deputy director. “A camera watched me and because of the lack of privacy, I never once could bathe.”
- It has not been a good year for private businesses in China. The country’s most valuable technology companies are facing a wave of new regulations severely restricting their scope of business. In addition, thousands of owners of small and midsize private businesses have been ensnared in a three-year anti-corruption campaign. (NPR)
Additional World News
- Pentagon chief in Vietnam to advance ties but rights concerns linger (Reuters)
- Pedro Castillo inauguration: From rural schoolteacher to Peru’s presidency (WaPo, $)
- Floods make thousands homeless in Bangladesh Rohingya camps (AP)
- Ever Given, the ship that blocked the Suez Canal, arrives in Rotterdam (Reuters)
- Beijing reports first Covid case in 179 days as alarm grows over Nanjing Delta cluster (CNN)
- Tunisia’s Saied moves on economy and Covid-19 after dismissing government (CNN)
The Cost Of Carbon
- New research on the social cost of carbon emissions has revealed that the lifestyles of roughly 3 average Americans create enough emissions to kill one person. The research also showed that a single coal-powered plant created enough emissions to kill 900 people.
- The results come from research on the “social cost of carbon,” a concept which assigns both a monetary cost and death toll to each ton of carbon. The analysis concluded that every 4,434 metric tons of carbon dioxide produced above 2020’s emission rates will lead to one premature death from increased temperatures. 4,434 metric tons is equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans.
- Fully eliminating carbon emissions by 2050 could potentially save 74 million lives, but the calculated figures for the social costs of carbon only account for heat-related deaths and not deaths from other impacts of climate change, including flooding or crop failures. On top of this, carbon emissions also create direct deaths, with 8 million people dying yearly due to toxic emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. (Guardian)
If At First You Don’t Succeed…
- Senate Democrats are planning to release a new voting rights bill roughly a month after Republicans blocked a previous attempt to expand voting rights with a more wide-spanning bill. The bill comes as Republican states continue to restrict their constituents’ voting rights on the premise that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former president Trump. States such as Georgia and Texas have rolled back their voting rights, with Texas Democrats fleeing the state in order to slow the passage of voting restrictions in their state.
- Last month’s For the People Act failed on a party-line vote, but the new scaled back legislation could gather support across the aisle as many Republicans were opposed to the federal mandates detailed in the original bill. While most Democrats present at a Wednesday meeting over the new bill remained quiet on its contents, one anonymous source stated that the bill would strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and could block states from overturning elections results, something that the new Georgia law would allow. (WaPo)
Additional USA News
- With evictions set to restart, housing advocates fear another coronavirus wave (CBS)
- California Gov. Gavin Newsom pulls his children from summer camp over mask policy (CNN)
- St. Louis public health leader said a mob called him racist slurs for promoting masks: ‘We are not the enemy’ (WaPo, $)
- Some people in Missouri are getting vaccinated against Covid-19 in secret, doctor says. They fear backlash from loved ones who oppose the vaccines (CNN)
- GOP, Democrats battle over masks in House, Senate (The Hill)
- Manchin, Schumer, Warnock and others craft revised voting rights bill (WaPo, $)
Ocean’s 60+
- A 60 year-old woman by the name of Lulu Lakatos was found guilty of stealing diamonds worth $5.8 million, the highest-value theft of its kind ever committed in the U.K. She has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison for the heist. So, how did she do it?
- In 2016, Lakatos posed as a gem expert named “Anna” who was hired to check the value of some stones for “wealthy Russian buyers.” Her target was the jeweler Boodles in Mayfair London. The job was a surprisingly simple one. Lakatos got access to the diamonds, did a sleight of hand trick to switch them out with ordinary pebbles, and then ditched them in the bag of a fellow heist member before her own bag could be checked by security.
- The heist crew fled from the U.K. to France in less than three hours. Interestingly, Lulu claims that “Anna” was actually her late sister Liliana who passed away in a car accident in 2019. But in the end, Lulu was found guilty on Wednesday. (The Guardian)
Additional Reads
- UK PM Johnson’s umbrella mishap amuses Prince Charles (Reuters)
- How Tanzania Went From Vaccine Denier To (Skeptical) Vaccine Embracer : Goats and Soda (NPR)
- Jeff Bezos offers Nasa $2bn in exchange for moon mission contract (Guardian)
- Londoners Were Promised a Hill With a View. They Got a Pile of Scaffolding. (NYT, $)
- Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release (WSJ, $)
- Uncontrolled thrusters firing on Russian module pushes ISS out of place (The Verge)