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The Titanic scale of floating wind turbines quantified

By David Wojick | CFACT | July 17, 2024

My regular readers know that I have often referred to the huge size of floating wind turbine assemblies. They are much bigger than fixed offshore wind turbine assemblies because there is a big float attached. This makes floating wind far more expensive than fixed wind, which is already far more expensive than reliable fuel-fired electric power.

Simple physics says that if you want to put a 2,000-ton generator on top of a 500-foot tower with three 300-foot wings attached on a boat and have it still stand up in hurricane-force winds, it will have to be a mighty big boat.

Happily, Philip Lewis from strategic analyst Intelatus has put some numbers on this nonsense in Offshore Engineer.

See https://www.oedigital.com/news/504812-addressing-the-challenges-of-developing-floating-wind-at-scale

And https://www.oedigital.com/news/514835-preparing-for-floating-wind-leveraging-the-oil-gas-supply-chain

Of course, these are just estimates based on proposed designs, not measurements. Keep in mind that no one, anywhere, has ever built one of these Titanic monsters. Governments are setting huge targets for a technology that does not exist.

Based on UK permit applications, we are looking at a colossal individual floater footprint of around 160,000 square feet. That is roughly three football fields, so a mighty big float. And the UK does not get anything like hurricane-force winds. Maybe 100 mph, but never 160.

Weight-wise, Lewis suggests up to 5,000 tons of steel or 20,000 tons of concrete per float. Mind you, 5,000 tons of steel floaters will not keep 2,000 tons on a tall pole upright. These designs are what are called “semi-submersible”. This means the Titanic float is something like half full of water. There is enough air to float it but also a lot of water to hopefully weigh it down. I have yet to see the math on all this and have my doubts about its viability, but this is what is reported.

Of course, these huge floaters make floating wind power extremely expensive. The guess is at least three times as much as the already ridiculously expensive fixed-bottom offshore wind power. It could be a lot more.

These enormous numbers are based on 15 MW turbines, which are the biggest built today, although none has yet been installed and operational offshore. But bigger are coming with 18 MW on order and 20 MW advertised. Floater size and weight scale exponentially with turbine weight and height, so the above huge numbers may actually be quite small.

As an engineer, I would build a few of these monster floating assemblies and run them through a few hurricanes to see how they did, especially if they survived. Of course, the hell-bent Biden folks and green States are doing nothing like that.

For example, next month, Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is selling 15,000 MW of floating wind leases in the Gulf of Maine. California just announced a 25,000 MW floating wind target with 5,000 MW already leased by BOEM.

Just to play with numbers, this 40,000 MW of floaters would take just under 3,000 of these monster 15 MW floaters. In addition to filling up a lot of surface ocean, each has to be anchored to the sea floor with at least three mooring cables, more likely around eight each. Plus each has a live wire cable transmitting its energy output.

Lewis says the depths involved are like this: “In the U.S., the first commercial-scale projects will be off California (500-1,300 meters). Future activity is planned off Oregon (550-1,500 meters), the Gulf of Maine (190-300 meters), and the Central Atlantic (over 2,000 meters).” A mile is roughly 1,600 meters.

So we have many millions of feet of mooring cables and hot wires filling the ocean between the floaters and the sea floor. This is a whole new form of harassment that needs to be authorized (or not) under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

What is really funny is I see no plans for building these thousands of Titanic floating wind assemblies. I recently pointed out that the Biden Transportation Dept was illegally diverting almost a billion dollars to build floating wind fabrication facilities in Maine and California. But, neither facility design has what it would take to actually make this stupendous semi-submersible junk, starting with dry docks.

I strongly suggest we put a big hold on leasing and funding floating wind technology. Let’s first see how and if it works and at what cost.

July 22, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism | , | Leave a comment

American Exceptionalism: US Foreign Policy Advisors Urge Resumption of Nuclear Testing

By John Miles – Sputnik – 07.07.2024

As of 2024 the United States is still the only country to have deployed nuclear weapons in a military setting, killing over 150,000 people in nuclear attacks in Japan as the country was on the brink of surrender amid an looming Russian attack.

Prominent figures in the United States national security establishment are pushing a resumption of nuclear weapons testing as the country continues to move towards weakening international arms control frameworks.

Former US national security advisor Robert O’Brien and George W. Bush State Department adviser Christian Whiton are among the foreign policy luminaries pushing the policy.

The Heritage Foundation think tank is also urging immediate nuclear testing if former President Donald Trump wins the White House this fall; the organization urged a remediation of “former Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear material sites” in a recent policy blueprint, demonstrating the continued influence of neoconservative foreign policy advocacy in Republican Party politics.

The think tank also backed the development of “new nuclear weapons and naval nuclear reactors.” Spent fuel from US reactors has been used in depleted uranium weaponry that the United States has repeatedly deployed in theaters of war such as Iraq and NATO aggression in Serbia. Human rights groups have called for the weapons to be banned, noting their depraved use on civilian populations in Belgrade and Fallujah has continued to result in elevated rates of cancer and birth defects.

“Since 1992, the U.S. has refrained from explosive nuclear testing and opted for other techniques, including expert appraisals and sophisticated modeling generated by supercomputers, to calculate the efficacy of its long-term stockpile and its newer weapons,” wrote analyst Zeeshan Aleem.

“That policy has helped nudge other countries away from pursuing live testing,” he added.

The resumption of live testing could actually worsen US national security, some experts have claimed, because it would allow adversaries to directly observe the country’s nuclear capabilities during real-world trials.

“Resuming U.S. nuclear testing is technically and militarily unnecessary,” according to Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association. “Moreover, it would lead to a global chain reaction of nuclear testing, raise global tensions, and blow apart global nonproliferation efforts at a time of heightened nuclear danger.”

The United States has frequently weakened international arms control efforts and has moved to end long standing agreements between the US and Russia in particular. The George W. Bush administration ended the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, while the Obama administration moved to install missile interception facilities in Romania.

The offensive NATO military alliance continued to expand during the Democratic president’s administration, absorbing Albania and Croatia in 2009.

“The reality is the United States has commandeered NATO in the European Union as a proxy army, and a slave economic force, and made Europe to be puppets and pawns of American foreign policy,” noted former US Army psychological warfare officer and US State Department counterterrorism analyst Scott Bennett. “The American government’s agenda – and specifically the banks, globalists and military-industrial complex, and the CIA have – all pursued an agenda to drive the break-up of Russia and the theft of its resources since 1990.”

Bennett noted that the United States’ shredding of arms control treaties has forced Moscow to prepare for the possibility of a nuclear war launched by an increasingly irrational and Russophobic West.

“It is precisely because the United States has become so untrustworthy and unstable and indeed deceitful in everything it says and does, and in every document it claims to sign and promise, it has forced President Putin to act in certain ways,” said the analyst.

“In order to preserve and protect Russia Putin understands he must have the flexibility and maneuverability to guarantee the West does not attempt to secretly undermine or exploit the vulnerabilities that Russia might have as a result of its futile hope in the United States being honorable.”

July 7, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Winning the Fluoride Fight – #SolutionsWatch

Corbett | June 19, 2024

Joining us today is Michael Connett, lead attorney for the plaintiffs’ in the #FluorideLawsuit. We discuss the history of the lawsuit, what’s at stake, and how people who are concerned about the fluoridation of the water supply can get involved in the fight against this uncontrolled medical intervention.

Video player not working? Use these links to watch it somewhere else!

WATCH ON: ARCHIVE / BITCHUTE ODYSEE / RUMBLE / RUMBLE SUBSTACK or DOWNLOAD THE MP4


SHOW NOTES:

“Fluoride” on The Corbett Report

Interview 1352 – Dr. Paul Connett on the Case Against Fluoride

TSCA Fluoride Lawsuit (Fluoride Action Network explainer page)

Food and Water Watch et al. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency et al. – Court page

Michael Connett – profile at Siri & Glimstad

Dr. Phillipe Grandjean Exposes The History Of Fluoride’s Harms (Derrick Broze interview)

Fluoride Trial Interview – Dr. Bruce Lanphear (Derrick Broze interview)

Fluoride Trial Interview – Dr. Howard Hu (Derrick Broze interview)

In re: Roundup Products Liability Litigation (MDL No. 2741)

Fluoride on Trial documentary / conversation with Michael Connett in Dallas

June 20, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism | , | Leave a comment

Brazilian experts warn of the risk of western intervention in the Amazon region

By Raphael Machado | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 17, 2024

On June 11, an important debate took place in the Brazilian Congress which could have some interesting repercussions. The event, called the “Debate on National Sovereignty in the 21st Century,” was held within the scope of the Foreign Relations and National Defense Committee of Congress, organized at the request of Representative Luiz Philippe de Orleans e Bragança.

The debate, held within one of the most important committees of the Brazilian Congress (as it deals precisely with fundamental state issues), included the participation of important specialists in military and intelligence matters, such as Commander Robinson Farinazzo, officer of the Brazilian Navy, the defense analyst Albert Caballé, and Professor Ricardo Cabral, former professor at the Naval War College, among others.

Referring to statements by former NATO officers, presidents, and prime ministers of various countries connected to the Atlantic Alliance, Farinazzo highlighted the fact that the fate of Brazilian territories, especially the Amazon region and its rainforest, is discussed in summits held outside Brazil, without the representation of Brazilian interests.

As an example, Farinazzo recalled a draft resolution in the United Nations Security Council, dated 2021, which aimed to categorize general climate issues as “security threats” that could be discussed, overseen, and operated within the framework of the Security Council. This draft was vetoed by Russia and India and did not have the support of China, which abstained.

Although the draft did not specifically mention the Amazon or Brazil, it is impossible to ignore the numerous references to the “internationalization of the Amazon,” seen as the “heritage of humanity,” in the context of the radicalization of ecoglobalist discourses created within the centers of knowledge and public policy of the Atlanticist West.

As jurist Carl Schmitt said, “whoever invokes humanity is trying to deceive.” Behind humanitarian discourse lie all the most brutal and nihilistic projects of the liberal Western elites. To prove this, we just need to look at how the narratives of “humanitarian intervention” were used in Libya, Iraq, and the Balkans over the past 30 years.

Indeed, in August 2019, American political scientist Stephen Walt published an article within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs speculating on the possibility of military actions legitimized by environmentalist discourse of defending “humanity” from “climate threats”. According to Walt, in the future, major powers might try to halt situations of environmental degradation through armed interventions in weaker countries, specifically mentioning Brazil as an example.

Less than a month later, The Guardian published an article by an author named Lawrence Douglas, in which he argued that the same logic applied to humanitarian interventions, such as the “Responsibility to Protect,” a globalist concept enshrined at the UN in 2005, should serve to legitimize the use of force against the geopolitical enemies of the Atlanticist West with a humanitarian/environmentalist veneer.

Indeed, at the event held in the Brazilian Congress, Stephen Walt’s article was specifically mentioned, along with many other pieces of evidence. It is necessary to recall, as Farinazzo did, that James Stavridis, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander and former SOUTHCOM Commander, claimed that fires in the Amazon Rainforest represented a security risk for the U.S., legitimizing their intervention in Brazil. Emmanuel Macron (who was warmly welcomed by Lula in the Amazon a few months ago) and Boris Johnson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, have also publicly stated that the Amazon region does not really belong to Brazil, but rather is a “common good” of so-called “humanity.” David Milliband, Secretary of the Environment under Tony Blair’s government, even went so far as advocate for the privatization of the Amazon Rainforest in 2006.

All this was presented to the Foreign Relations and National Defense Committee of the Brazilian Congress with abundant evidence and sources.

If the issue of Amazon fires was the most “weaponized” against Brazil during the Bolsonaro government, now the topic that generates the most furious reactions from environmental NGOs in Brazil, as well as “concerned” comments from foreign bureaucrats, is the exploration of oil in the Equatorial Margin, as pointed out by Professor Ricardo Cabral in Congress.

This is a topic that is linked, as he pointed out, with the entire history of efforts to prevent or hinder the exploitation of Brazilian mineral and energy resources, usually under allegations of “environmental damage” or “violations of indigenous peoples’ rights” – narratives that put pressure for the loss of sovereignty over parts of Brazilian territory, which should, as the narrative goes, be under “international tutelage,” in a more refined and postmodern version of the old British privatization proposals.

The problem, as analyst Albert Caballé pointed out, however, is that the Brazilian defense industry is in crisis; a crisis that has lasted for several years already.

If until approximately the 1980s, Brazilian companies in the defense sector not only supplied most of the national military needs but were also exporters, especially to the Middle East and Africa, the neoliberal avalanche of the 1990s in a post-Cold War context led to a gradual dismantling of the sector and its denationalization, with several of the main Brazilian defense companies, such as Ares and others, coming under the control of multinational companies – almost always from the same Atlanticist countries that show interest in the “internationalization” of the Amazon.

The hypothetical scenario discussed in the Brazilian Congress for an interventionist action against Brazil, as presented by Farinazzo, mentions the possibility of a blockade of the main Brazilian ports by Atlanticist naval forces, in a sort of “anaconda strategy” (a tactic that is part of the manual of Admiral Mahan, the father of American geopolitics).

The concern of Brazilian experts and representatives specializing in defense and international relations, therefore, is that Western greed in an era of transition and geopolitical crisis could turn against Brazil – and that Brazil, if it does not quickly wake up to the contemporary risks and dangers, may not be able to face this challenge.

June 17, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Ukraine launches drone attack near Europe’s largest nuclear power plant

RT | May 22, 2024

Kiev’s forces have once again attacked the grounds of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) using a kamikaze drone, the facility’s press service reported on Wednesday. The facility is the largest of its type in Europe.

According to a message issued by the service on Telegram, the drone reportedly hit a transport workshop of the ZNPP but did not cause any casualties or critical damage to the facility.

The strike comes amid a series of UAV attacks on the city of Energodar, located next to the facility, over the past two days, the press service said. It stressed that the shelling of civilians and attacks on the nuclear plant and its infrastructure are “unacceptable and clearly constitute terrorist acts.”

Throughout the Ukraine conflict, the ZNPP has repeatedly been targeted with drones and artillery since the Russian military captured the facility in the early months of its campaign.

The co-chairman of the council on integrating Russia’s new territories, Vladimir Rogov, also claimed in an interview last month that Ukraine’s special forces were in the midst of conducting exercises that focused on crossing the Dnieper river and capturing a “large man-made object.” According to Rogov, this “object” appears to be the ZNPP.

Moscow and Kiev have blamed each other for the shelling of the plant while Ukraine and its Western backers have accused Russia of using the facility as cover for its troops.

However, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi was unable to confirm the accusations after personally visiting the facility on several occasions. Following his latest visit in April, he admitted seeing armored vehicles and some security presence at the station, but said that there was “no heavy weaponry” or prohibited arms such as tanks, artillery or rocket launchers.

Nevertheless, Grossi was unable to determine which side had been attacking the facility, stating that the IAEA does not have a mandate to make such determinations and that “indisputable evidence” was needed to establish the culprits.

Meanwhile, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, stated last month following a UN Security Council meeting that the West, after accusing Russia of being responsible for the dangerous situation at the ZNPP, has effectively issued Moscow an ultimatum: “hand over control of the ZNPP to Kiev and then the attacks will stop.”

Nebenzya stated that the West had thereby “not only betrayed the Zelensky Regime completely, but also actually admitted to complicity in these irresponsible attacks.”

May 22, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Deadly Chemicals Found at US ICBM Bases Threaten to Send Personnel to Early Grave

Phalus © Photo : US National Park Service
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 22.05.2024

Introduced into service in the 1970s, America’s Minuteman III ICBM arsenal has been plagued by notoriously outdated tech, including computers using eight-inch floppies until the late 2010s. Efforts to modernize the missiles have been problematic, with the Air Force forced to ‘safely terminate’ a test launch in November after detecting an ‘anomaly’.

Personnel operating current and former US ICBM bases have been exposed to cancer-causing agents known as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), the Air Force has acknowledged.

“PCBs are likely present in decommissioned Titan and Peacekeeper missile facilities that the Air Force no longer has the ability to conduct sampling in,” Air Force Global Strike Command chief General Thomas A. Bussiere said in a release put out earlier this week.

But the pale yellow-colored, viscous substances have also been found at active Minuteman III sites. Bussiere said sampling “identified the continued presence of PCBs” at Minuteman bases “despite a comprehensive removal effort in the 1990s.”

“One of the consistent concerns we’ve heard throughout the Missile Community Cancer Study is that service members, retirees, and veterans have trouble explaining their concerns over potential exposure to toxic chemicals with their healthcare providers, especially civilian providers who don’t have access to military medical database,” Air Force Global Strike Command Surgeon General Gregory Coleman said.

“While this memorandum from Global Strike Command cannot capture the specifics of any individual Airman or Guardian’s service in the missile fields, it can serve as a starting point for discussions and documentation of potential exposure,” Coleman added.

PCBs are chemical compounds used in an array of old equipment, including electronics. They were banned in the US in the late 1970s, and worldwide in the early 2000s. They share characteristics with other persistent organic pollutants, easily contaminating the local environment, including rivers, soil, and farms.

They are extremely hard to break down or degrade, with elimination difficult and costly (incineration, for example, requires heating to temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius or above).

The substances are linked to diseases impacting the central nervous system, and endocrine disruption. PCBs can also cause aggressive skin and liver cancers, and have a suspected role in the development of other ailments by weakening the immune system. They easily penetrate skin and even protective equipment, including synthetic polymers and latex.

The US is expected to spend over $131 billion to replace its Minuteman III missiles with the new Sentinel missile program. The program has faced a string of delays and cost overruns, with the first test flight expected to take place in 2026 at the earliest.

The Pentagon is expected to spend a staggering $1.5 trillion (and rising) on its multi-decade nuclear rearmament program – which was begun by the Obama administration in 2016.

May 22, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism | | 1 Comment

State Of The Great Barrier Reef 2024

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | March 14, 2024

The Australian Environment foundation (AEF), which is a farmer friendly conservation group, has issued a new report entitled “State of the Great Barrier Reef 2024.”

Peter Ridd, the Chairman of the AEF, said the report shows that the reef is in excellent condition with record amounts of coral. “Despite all the catastrophism about hot water bleaching events in the last decade, the species most susceptible to bleaching, (the plate and staghorn corals), have exploded in number. Sadly, the impact of bleaching is routinely exaggerated by the media and some science organisations.”

“The impact of farm pollution in the Reef is negligible and all 3000 individual reefs have excellent coral. No other Australian ecosystem has shown such little change in modern times” Ridd said.

Peter Ridd added, “Australia spends roughly $500 million each year to “save the reef” but this money could be much better spent on genuine environmental problems such as control of invasive weeds and feral animals, or restoring indigenous fire practices into forests and rangeland”.

He concluded, “The public is being deceived about the reef. How this occurred is a serious issue for the reef-science community which has embraced emotion, ideology, and raw self-interest to maintain funding”.

“This new report distils a great deal of data about the reef” said Ridd “it is time that the reef science institutions confront this data rather than ignoring it and hoping nobody will notice. I challenge them to a public science duel – any time any place.”

The Great Barrier Reef is the largest reef system in the world, and scientists have been warning of its imminent demise since the 1960s.

The report is here.

March 15, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think

By David Fickling | Bloomberg | January 28, 2024

Excerpts:

Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.

It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.

China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.

Even tropical deforestation has slowed drastically since the 1990s, possibly because the rise of plantation timber is cutting the need to clear primary forests.

Remarkably, this may not be the first time human activities caused an expansion of the world’s forests. The devastating population declines caused by war and disease after the European colonization of the Americas may have caused a downturn in global temperatures between the 16th and 19th centuries, according to one 2019 analysis. With their populations reduced to about 10% of previous numbers, Indigenous people were no longer able to maintain agricultural systems based on clearing land with fire. As a result, 558,000 square kilometers of new woodlands grew, sufficient to lock away about 27 billion tons of CO2. …

The CO2 taken up by trees narrowly exceeded the amount released by deforestation.

Nor is global afforestation to date caused mainly by environmental imperatives. Indeed, in much of the world, it has been the rise of fossil fuels that turned the corner on deforestation almost a century ago, as industries turned to coal, oil and gas to produce heat and energy in place of wood.

Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy and commodities. He has worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.

February 4, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism | Leave a comment

NITROGEN 2000 The Dutch Farmers’ Struggle

BIG PICTURE with James Patrick | Release date: January 1, 2023

Nitrogen 2000 is a 45 minute documentary on the Dutch Farmer struggle of 2019-23. 70% of Holland is owned by small cattle farmers and since 2019, the Dutch government has been advocating a 50% forced buy out of their land. This amounts to a nationalization of a third of the territory of Holland. Will this plan play out? Will the farmers be able to resist this encroachment? Watch and share the film to raise awareness of this important issue.

Please donate to my work. I made this film for free to help save Holland from loosing it’s patrimony. https://bigpicture.watch/donations/su…

Sign up for email notifications of releases of BIG PICTURE films and interviews https://bigpicture.watch/newsletter/

ENCOURAGING UPDATE: Dutch Agriculture Minister Adema puts bomb on nitrogen policy: ‘Totally out of control model of reality’ https://lc-nl.translate.goog/frieslan…

January 29, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 1 Comment

US Navy Reportedly Failed to Warn Veterans of Radiation Exposure

By Mary Manley – Sputnik – 28.01.2024

According to an NBC News report, over a 20-year period about 3,000 gallons of chemical waste leaked out of damaged storage drums and poisoned the groundwater.

For more than 20 years the US Navy has been aware of multiple environmental contaminants at one of their bases, the news agency said. One seemingly healthy veteran recently died last month after being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia which can be caused by radiation exposure, the National Cancer Institute said.

Gilbert Wyand, the veteran, had lived and worked at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in California in the 1980s. After Wyand’s cancer diagnosis, his son found a Navy report published in June of 2023 that shows the Navy has been aware of radiation at the shipyard for at least two decades.

Initial contamination at the shipyard occurred from the 1940s to the 1960s due to workers disposing of toxic waste, according to the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC) report that Wyand’s son found. Following that, between the 1960s and until 1980 about 3,000 gallons of chemical waste leaked out of damaged storage drums into the ground.

That chemical waste poisoned the groundwater with high levels of dichloroethene, trichloroethylene, vinyl chloride and benzene, according to a Navy report from 2000. In 2008, Navy officials confirmed that the levels of radium and strontium far exceeded the remediation goals set for public safety.

The Navy veteran could have been exposed to radium-226 and strontium-90, which are radionuclides that have been linked to leukemia and other cancers. But Wyand and other veterans were not alerted about the potential risk of exposure because there is no system in place to notify veterans of potential exposure after a base closes, according to a spokesperson.

The fact that there is no outreach system in place means that tens of thousands of veterans who worked at the shipyard could have been exposed to deadly radiation and are unaware, American news report adds.

“We encourage any veteran who believes they were exposed to toxins during their military service to coordinate with their local Veterans Affairs office,” a US Navy spokesperson said.

January 27, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Davos Leaders Sing Praises of GMO Soil Microbes, But Critics Warn of ‘Irreparable Consequences’

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 22, 2024

The topic of “synthetic biology” — the science of reengineering living organisms to have “new abilities” geared toward solving problems in fields ranging from medicine to manufacturing to agriculture — came during several sessions held last week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) meetings in Davos, Switzerland.

Synthetic biology is the basis of the so-called “bioeconomy” valued at a trillion dollars in the U.S. and set to grow globally to over $30 trillion in the next two decades, according to Forbes. Initiatives like the Biden administration’s 2022 executive order mandating federal investment in biotech are expected to drive that growth.

Bioproducts include everything from mRNA vaccines to lab-grown meats, to bioelectronic medical devices. But much of the excitement during two of last week’s WEF panels on synthetic biology in food and agriculture — “Biology as Consumer Technology” and the “Bio-based Path to Net Zero” — centered on “biologicals,” which are genetically engineered (GE) nitrogen-fixing soil microbes.

Biologicals are farm inputs derived from living organisms like plants and bacteria rather than from fossil fuels, the source of most modern pesticides and fertilizers.

Biologicals produced through synthetic biology aren’t just living organisms, they are GE living organisms made to kill pests or to generate nutrients that are then used to fertilize plants.

They also are major money-makers for the companies that make them and for their investors, panelists were quick to point out.

Reeducating consumers to embrace processed foods

Chris Abbot, CEO of Pivot Bio Inc., maker of Proven, the first GE microbe on the market, spoke about how companies like his are “leveraging technology so that we actually can produce a product and sell it at an attractive margin” despite volatility in the commodity market.

Amy Webb, CEO and “global leader of strategic foresight” at the Future Today Institute called Pivot’s GE microbe product “amazing,” especially given that “agriculture hasn’t changed in like 14,000 years, I mean, not really, right?”

Webb was likely referring to the Neolithic revolution when humans transitioned from hunter-gatherers as agriculture emerged around the globe — something that happened approximately 12,000 (not 14,000) years ago.

The Neolithic revolution was followed by a series of major technological innovations in farming throughout the world over thousands of years.

Such innovations include many of the technological developments these new GE technologies are attempting to refine, such as the Haber-Bosch process — the industrial process that enhanced the nitrogen-fixing that is key to soil fertilization.

Abbot said his company’s GE microbes are being trained to do similar nitrogen-fixing in more efficient and less environmentally destructive ways. At some, yet unknown, point in the future, he predicted the GE microbes will be less expensive and more effective than existing synthetic fertilizers.

That GE microbes are more “sustainable” is a key part of their branding.

On the “Net Zero” panel, Ester Baiget from Novozymes, who announced her company is about to merge with engineered microbe producer Chr. Hansen, explained how her company’s products “bring us closer to Net Zero.”

“Everything we do leads to lower CO2 emission, lower chemical[s], lower waste, lower impact to the environment, healthier nutrients, higher sustainability on agriculture across the whole value chain,” she said. “We enable healthier foods, we enable sustainable foods.”

On the “Biology as Consumer Technology” panel, Dror Bin, CEO of the Israel Innovation Authority, predicted a future of “bioconvergence” where biology will merge with all scientific fields. Bioconvergence is not “imaginary,” Bin said. For example, Israel last week became the first country to approve selling cultured beef, made by Aleph Farms.

The one roadblock panelists agreed they all face when it comes to growing the bioeconomy is consumer acceptance. People are needlessly afraid of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), according to Pivot’s Abbot. “They’re not that bad. You can use them the wrong way, but we [at Pivot] use a lot less chemistry because of GMOs.”

Consumers, the panel agreed, need to be “reeducated” to embrace processed foods.

Biologics, Abbot conceded, are a little more “tricky” than synthetic fertilizers, “because you take a biologic organism, which has its own variability and they’re generally pretty fickle. And then you put it in a biological environment in soil with crazy weather that’s getting crazier every single year. And now try to predict to the earlier point how these things are all going to work.”

But that’s the exciting part, he said.

An ‘unprecedented open-air experiment’ 

Outside of the WEF, there’s less enthusiasm for GE microbes and other “food as software” synthetic biology technologies, such as precision fermentation or lab-grown meat.

A report published last August by Friends of the Earth raised concerns about the unknown and potentially disastrous risks associated with GE microbes, which are fundamentally different from the already controversial GMOs that, as panelists noted, have already been highly controversial for decades.

GE microbes are living organisms that share their genetic material easily with other species and travel vast distances in the wind. The genetic modifications released inside the microbes could move across species and geographic boundaries with unforeseen and potentially irreparable consequences, the report said.

And because they are microscopic, their numbers are vast.

“An application of GE bacteria could release approximately 3 trillion genetically modified organisms every half an acre — that’s about how many GE corn plants there are in the entire U.S.,” said Dana Perls, food and technology program manager at Friends of the Earth, in a press release.

Introducing GE microbes into agriculture represents an “unprecedented open-air genetic experiment,” the report says. “The scale of release is far larger, and the odds of containment are far smaller, than for GE crops.”

The report detailed a range of genetic mishaps that can, and in some cases, have occurred in the process of genetic engineering, including unintended DNA insertions and deletions.

It underscored that when these microbes with these potential problems are released into an environment with billions of species of other microbes — most of which science does not yet understand — along with other living things, the potential problems are myriad and serious.

No framework for assessing risks

Those risks haven’t stopped companies from releasing them. At least two GE microbes, Pivot Bio’s Proven and BASF’s Poncho Votivo seed treatments, are already being used by U.S. farmers on millions of acres of farmland.

The WEF panelists predicted the number of GE microbes on the market is set to skyrocket — especially given that the U.S. regulatory system has no framework for assessing their potential risks and greenlights them rapidly.

Panel participants said they prefer to develop their products for the U.S. market rather than the European one, which has many more regulatory barriers for genetically modified or engineered products and approval takes six years.

The U.S. regulatory framework is so unclear, according to Big Food watchdog group Food Tank, that it is hard to know how many of these products are actually on the market. But, “we are likely on the cusp of a wave of new GE biologicals moving from the lab to the field.”

Pivot launched Proven in 2019. The company, backed by major biotech investors — including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — raised more than $600 million in private equity based on its promise to “disrupt” agriculture by reducing the need for industrially-produced synthetic nitrogen, replacing it with “clean nitrogen” from GE microbes.

But its own scientific studies showed no reduction in nitrogen use by farmers when the GE microbe is applied.

Pivot Bio’s patent application for its GE microbe Proven, marketed as a nitrogen fertilizer, lists 29 different genes along with many proteins and enzymes that can be manipulated to “disrupt” and “short-circuit” the microbe’s ability to sense nitrogen levels in its environment and “trick” it into overproducing nitrogen.

The company’s scientists also published a study showing they were surprised to find removing genes enhanced nitrogen because it could have just as easily reduced it.

Pivot was the first company to get its GE microbes to market, but since then, several other startups and Pharma giants have gotten into the GE microbe game.

Abbot didn’t comment on his company’s studies, but he did say Pivot is scaling up its technology, aimed at creating an “enduring growth trend.”

In the last several years, five major agrochemical companies, Syngenta (ChemChina), BASFBayer-MonsantoFMC Corp and Corteva (DowDuPont) have acquired most existing biologicals companies.

These are the same corporations that controlled the creation and distribution of GE crops in the past.

They have “a long track record,” Friends of the Earth wrote, of disregarding the environmental and health impacts of their products, systematically undermining small farmers, obstructing the regulatory process and hiding the truth about their products.

Today, these corporations are partnering with major biotech firms and startups to drive the process forward.

Companies developing microbes highlighted on the WEF panels included the Danish bioscience company Chr. Hansen, which has been working in agriculture 145 years and has an existing library of around 50,000 microbesIndigo Ag also “enhances” natural microbes to address different agricultural challenges.

Ginkgo Bioworks tells SEC releasing GE microbes can have ‘unknown’ effects

Ginkgo Bioworks, a major player in the synthetic biology industry, is actively involved in food and drug development, including vaccines, and “cell programming platforms,” biosecurity and disease surveillance.

It designs and engineers microbes for applications ranging from cannabinoid-producing bacteria to yeast fermenting food proteins to soil microbes.

The company commercializes its GE microbes through Joyn Bio, a partnership with Bayer.

Through Joyn Bio, Ginkgo plans to further its commitment to “harnessing the power of programmable biology to enable sustainable food production and food security worldwide,” by partnering with different companies to develop “agricultural microbial solutions across crops and geographies through broad, fully-enabled technical platforms that address diverse market needs.”

For example, last month the company announced a new partnership with French biotech startup OneOne Biosciences to develop an “espresso-machine type” to “amplify” microbes with different functions, such as nitrogen-fixing, carbon sequestration, and more at the point of use.

Behind its utopian, “forward-looking statements,” according to its press releases, “Ginkgo does not give any assurance that it will achieve its expectations.”

The company’s risk report, filed with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and reported by the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), raised a number of concerns.

Similar to the risks highlighted by Friends of the Earth, Ginkgo told the SEC, “The release of genetically modified organisms or materials, whether inadvertent or purposeful, into uncontrolled environments could have unintended consequences,” which could be bad for business — its primary concern.

The report also stated:

“The genetically engineered organisms and materials that we develop may have significantly altered characteristics compared to those found in the wild, and the full effects of deployment or release of our genetically engineered organisms and materials into uncontrolled environments may be unknown.

“In particular, such deployment or release, including an unauthorized release, could impact the environment or community generally or the health and safety of our employees, our customers’ employees, and the consumers of our customers’ products.

“In addition, if a high-profile biosecurity breach or unauthorized release of a biological agent occurs within our industry, our customers and potential customers may lose trust in the security of the laboratory environments in which we produce genetically modified organisms and materials, even if we are not directly affected.

“Any adverse effect resulting from such a release, by us or others, could have a material adverse effect on the public acceptance of products from engineered cells and our business and financial condition. …

“We could synthesize DNA sequences or engage in other activity that contravenes biosecurity requirements, or regulatory authorities could promulgate more far-reaching biosecurity requirements that our standard business practices cannot accommodate, which could give rise to substantial legal liability, impede our business, and damage our reputation.”

“Ginkgo’s SEC filing makes clear how unleashing Frankenmicrobes into the environment might wreak havoc,” said OCA’s Alexis Baden-Mayer.

Baden-Mayer also noted that Ginkgo has acquired several synthetic biology technologies developed by longtime Monsanto scientists and CRISPR co-developer George Church.

That makes Ginkgo “Bayer’s most important partner in its ‘Food-as-Software’ scheme,” according to Baden-Mayer.

A spokesperson for RethinkX, a tech think tank and forecaster, explained “Food-as-Software” to The Defender in an email:

“Like software, food products will be continually improved through iteration as technology improves in both cost and capability and as these food component databases grow.

“Integration with information technology and the internet means that improvements in production methods and/or ingredients can be downloaded and incorporated almost instantaneously, allowing production to be fully distributed and decentralized — just like software.”

Baden-Mayer offered a more critical description of Big Food’s food-as-software vision:

“The Monsanto-Bayer business model is to ruin food and farming with pesticides and factory farms, and then, when customers clamor for ‘clean food,’ to offer it up in the form of new, lab-created synthetic Frankenfoods that can be marketed as toxin- and cruelty-free.”

Ginkgo’s report to the SEC, she wrote, “reads like a science fiction writer’s list of plots for disaster movies.”


Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 23, 2024 Posted by | Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment