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Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court

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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

A group of prominent international economists is applauding the recent move by Honduran President Xiomara Castro to push back against American crypto investors attempting to seize billions in public money from the Central American nation. The crypto crew is exploiting a dispute mechanism nested inside the World Bank, created by an obscure provision of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. Castro has deemed the forum, called the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID, to be an illegitimate usurpation of Honduran sovereignty and has hit upon an elegant solution: She has taken steps to withdraw Honduras from ICSID. The crypto crowd is crying foul. The spectacular battle playing out in Honduras and inside global financial institutions blends the 19th-century American legacy of gunboat diplomacy and banana republicanism with a contemporary twist: The lead group of investors battling Honduras by exploiting international financial institutions is made up of a band of crypto-libertarians. The fight presents an almost-impossible-to-believe scenario: A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies. Since Castro took office in 2021, the World Bank’s ICSID has seen investors bring no fewer than 10 cases targeting her government. The largest case, brought by U.S. corporation Próspera Inc., seeks more than $10 billion in compensation, which would equal roughly a third of the country’s GDP. Próspera, rooted in the world of crypto finance, describes itself as a “platform [that] powers the development of new cities in special economic zones that maximize generalized prosperity and wealth creation.” A city the company set up in Honduras accepts bitcoin as official tender. In an open letter published on Tuesday, the economists argued that Castro’s decision was a smart move. “We view the withdrawal as a critical defence of Honduran democracy and an important step toward its sustainable development,” reads the letter, which was organized by Progressive International, a left-leaning coalition. “For decades, international arbitration courts like ICSID have allowed corporations to sue states and restrict their freedom to regulate in favour of consumers, workers and the environment. Since 1996, governments in Latin America alone have been forced to compensate foreign corporations over $30 billion, intimidating regulators away from raising minimum wages, protecting vulnerable ecosystems, and introducing climate protections, among other domestic policy priorities. We find scant economic evidence that mechanisms like ICSID stimulate meaningful foreign direct investment, in return.” At issue are so-called ZEDEs created by previous governments of Honduras. The law that established ZEDEs — short for Zone for Employment and Economic Development — effectively carved out portions of Honduras and turned them over to American investors, who operate as effective sovereign governments. The ZEDEs could one day control 35 percent of Honduras’s territory, according to the United Nations, which has said that the zones raise human rights concerns. It took enormous political muscle more than a decade ago to force the ZEDEs into law. They only became possible when Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a U.S.-backed coup in 2009. After Zelaya was ousted, a new election brought in President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who quickly moved to undo Zelaya’s social reforms, attacking workers rights and reneging on land reform efforts. The Supreme Court struck down the first version of the ZEDEs law as unconstitutional, but after the constitution was amended and four new justices were added to the Supreme Court, the law stuck in 2013. Lobo Sosa’s rise was fueled not just by U.S. support but also by narco-trafficker cash, according to U.S. prosecutors who convicted Tony Hernández, the brother of former President Juan Orlando Hernández, for trafficking “monumental” amounts of cocaine. Juan Orlando Hernández was Lobo Sosa’s successor and was himself convicted of drug trafficking earlier this month in a U.S. federal court. He was president of the National Congress, Honduras’s legislative body, from 2010 to 2013, and was a primary mover of the ZEDEs legislation. He also led the overnight takeover of the Supreme Court that enabled their implementation. Prosecutors in the Tony Hernández case linked the brothers with Lobo Sosa in their sentencing memorandum. “Between 2004 and 2019, the defendant secured and distributed millions of dollars in drug-derived bribes to Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa and other politicians associated with Honduras’s National Party,” prosecutors wrote. So to put the ZEDEs in context: The radical “free market” intervention was only jammed into law as the result of a military coup and the stacking of the Supreme Court. The ZEDEs were then enacted and implemented for the benefit of U.S. investors by two narco-governors. On March 8, in celebrating the conviction of the former Honduran president who shepherded the law into being, and then oversaw its implementation, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Hernández — a man propped up throughout his tenure by his allies in the State Department — oversaw “a narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity.” Zelaya was overthrown ostensibly over his attempt to extend his presidency to what was deemed an unconstitutional second term. Yet Hernández breezily ran for reelection in 2017 and claimed victory amid an absurd amount of irregularities, all of them brushed aside by a supportive Trump administration. The years of chaos and violence led to a surge of migration toward the U.S. border. The U.S. had no evident problem with that freewheeling narco-state while Hernandez was in office and remained useful, yet once Castro took power in a backlash to the U.S.-fueled corruption, the United States suddenly rediscovered its respect for the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts with U.S. investors. Castro quickly and successfully moved to repeal the ZEDEs law in the face of intense bipartisan U.S. pressure to maintain them. The American response has been to repudiate the very idea of Honduran democracy and sovereignty, with investors using the World Bank’s ICSID to force the new Honduran government to respect the policies carried out by the former president now sitting behind federal bars. Among the dozens of signatories to the Progressive International praising Castro’s decision to exit the arbitration court are prominent South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang; Chilean Gabriel Palma, of the “Palma Ratio of inequality”; American economist Jeffrey Sachs; former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis; British economist Ann Pettifor; and Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh. Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, has been fighting the crypto crew for years and welcomed Castro’s move. “The Honduran people overwhelmingly opposed the ZEDE law, and when the Honduran legislature unanimously repealed this law, that should have been the end of the story,” she said. “This is just the latest example of corporations abusing this ISDS mechanism to challenge environmental, health, land use, and other public interest policies around the hemisphere. Honduras was wise to withdraw from the World Bank venue where many of these cases are brought as an important first step.” In its case before the ICSID, Próspera retained a top lobbying firm, employing former Democratic lawmaker Kendrick Meek, to pressure Honduras to pay up. Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, came out against the effort by Próspera to exploit the dispute resolution system to undermine Honduran sovereignty. “In the case of Próspera,” they write, “a ZEDE located largely on the Honduran island of Roatán, investors have created a governing council where 44 percent of members are appointed by the private company and 22 percent are elected by landowners in a system where their number of votes is proportional to the size of their property.” A conference Próspera held on Roatán last year signaled the company’s ethic. “Próspera aims to be the best jurisdiction for the crypto/web3 industry in the world, and we welcome the best ideas on how to achieve that with a sound legal framework,” said Chris Wilson of Próspera in publicity materials that described the confab as “specifically designed for legal hackers, crypto lawyers, jurisdictional polymaths, and businesses that want to create better laws to do business under.” The company’s response to a request for comment on the letter from the economists was representative of the unusual corporate structure it has been able to implement. The company’s communications director told The Intercept that a response to our questions would be submitted by Jorge Colindres, representing the “Office of the Technical Secretary.” Colindres’s email signature alludes to the public-private nature of the corporation, reading: Jorge Constantino Colindres Technical Secretary – Próspera ZEDE Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico República de Honduras Manager – General Service Provider Colindres responded as a government official. “Attached you will find my office’s statement on the unconstitutional withdrawal from ICSID by the Honduran government,” he said. His statement insisted: Próspera ZEDE is [a] local government and special economic zone of the Republic of Honduras. It is governed by the Technical Secretary, a Honduran citizen by birth, appointed by the Government of Honduras and empowered by article 329 of the Honduran Constitution and the ZEDE Organic Law to oversee the implementation of new policies and rules designed to foster economic development, facilitate job creation, attract national and foreign direct investment, and safeguard the fundamental rights of the workers and residents of this special jurisdiction. National and foreign companies alike are bound to comply with Próspera ZEDE Rules, which are Honduran rules, as they have been adopted by a local government of Honduras with the legal blessing of the country’s Executive Power, National Congress, and Supreme Court of Justice. Colindres claimed that the ZEDEs had resulted in more than $100 million in foreign investment so far, and that Castro had not gotten approval from the National Congress to withdraw from the World Bank’s dispute body. “We stand proud of our achievements in job creation and investment attraction, which run in stark contrast to the job killing policies of the national government, and we continue undeterred in our mission to transform the Honduran economy and catalyze prosperity through the oasis of economic freedom and rule of law that Próspera ZEDE offers to the Honduran people,” Colindres said. Fernando Garcia, a presidential commissioner appointed by Castro to oppose the ZEDEs, said that while the Honduran Constitution requires the National Congress to ratify new international treaties, it does not require the executive branch to notify the legislature ahead of a withdrawal. “The ICSID convention establishes the possibility of a sovereign state’s withdrawal from its convention,” Garcia told The Intercept. He added that the arbitration court has already legally accepted Honduras’s withdrawal, effective August. This does not, he said, “prevent those who have requested arbitration from proceeding in accordance.” The post Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court appeared first on The Intercept.

After the Honduran president repealed a law granting unfettered authority to outside investors, the cryptoquistadors took the dispute to a World Bank arbitration court. The post Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court appeared first on The Intercept.

A group of prominent international economists is applauding the recent move by Honduran President Xiomara Castro to push back against American crypto investors attempting to seize billions in public money from the Central American nation.

The crypto crew is exploiting a dispute mechanism nested inside the World Bank, created by an obscure provision of the Central America Free Trade Agreement. Castro has deemed the forum, called the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, or ICSID, to be an illegitimate usurpation of Honduran sovereignty and has hit upon an elegant solution: She has taken steps to withdraw Honduras from ICSID. The crypto crowd is crying foul.

The spectacular battle playing out in Honduras and inside global financial institutions blends the 19th-century American legacy of gunboat diplomacy and banana republicanism with a contemporary twist: The lead group of investors battling Honduras by exploiting international financial institutions is made up of a band of crypto-libertarians.

The fight presents an almost-impossible-to-believe scenario: A group of libertarian investors teamed up with a former Honduran government — which was tied at the hip with narco-traffickers and came to power after a U.S.-backed military coup — in order to implement the world’s most radical libertarian policy, which turned over significant portions of the country to those investors through so-called special economic zones. The Honduran public, in a backlash, ousted the narco-backed regime, and the new government repealed the libertarian legislation. The crypto investors are now using the World Bank to force Honduras to honor the narco-government’s policies.

Since Castro took office in 2021, the World Bank’s ICSID has seen investors bring no fewer than 10 cases targeting her government. The largest case, brought by U.S. corporation Próspera Inc., seeks more than $10 billion in compensation, which would equal roughly a third of the country’s GDP. Próspera, rooted in the world of crypto finance, describes itself as a “platform [that] powers the development of new cities in special economic zones that maximize generalized prosperity and wealth creation.” A city the company set up in Honduras accepts bitcoin as official tender.

In an open letter published on Tuesday, the economists argued that Castro’s decision was a smart move. “We view the withdrawal as a critical defence of Honduran democracy and an important step toward its sustainable development,” reads the letter, which was organized by Progressive International, a left-leaning coalition.

“For decades, international arbitration courts like ICSID have allowed corporations to sue states and restrict their freedom to regulate in favour of consumers, workers and the environment. Since 1996, governments in Latin America alone have been forced to compensate foreign corporations over $30 billion, intimidating regulators away from raising minimum wages, protecting vulnerable ecosystems, and introducing climate protections, among other domestic policy priorities. We find scant economic evidence that mechanisms like ICSID stimulate meaningful foreign direct investment, in return.”

At issue are so-called ZEDEs created by previous governments of Honduras. The law that established ZEDEs — short for Zone for Employment and Economic Development — effectively carved out portions of Honduras and turned them over to American investors, who operate as effective sovereign governments. The ZEDEs could one day control 35 percent of Honduras’s territory, according to the United Nations, which has said that the zones raise human rights concerns.

It took enormous political muscle more than a decade ago to force the ZEDEs into law. They only became possible when Castro’s husband, Manuel Zelaya, was removed in a U.S.-backed coup in 2009.

After Zelaya was ousted, a new election brought in President Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who quickly moved to undo Zelaya’s social reforms, attacking workers rights and reneging on land reform efforts. The Supreme Court struck down the first version of the ZEDEs law as unconstitutional, but after the constitution was amended and four new justices were added to the Supreme Court, the law stuck in 2013.

Lobo Sosa’s rise was fueled not just by U.S. support but also by narco-trafficker cash, according to U.S. prosecutors who convicted Tony Hernández, the brother of former President Juan Orlando Hernández, for trafficking “monumental” amounts of cocaine. Juan Orlando Hernández was Lobo Sosa’s successor and was himself convicted of drug trafficking earlier this month in a U.S. federal court. He was president of the National Congress, Honduras’s legislative body, from 2010 to 2013, and was a primary mover of the ZEDEs legislation. He also led the overnight takeover of the Supreme Court that enabled their implementation.

Prosecutors in the Tony Hernández case linked the brothers with Lobo Sosa in their sentencing memorandum. “Between 2004 and 2019, the defendant secured and distributed millions of dollars in drug-derived bribes to Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa and other politicians associated with Honduras’s National Party,” prosecutors wrote.

So to put the ZEDEs in context: The radical “free market” intervention was only jammed into law as the result of a military coup and the stacking of the Supreme Court. The ZEDEs were then enacted and implemented for the benefit of U.S. investors by two narco-governors. On March 8, in celebrating the conviction of the former Honduran president who shepherded the law into being, and then oversaw its implementation, Attorney General Merrick Garland said that Hernández — a man propped up throughout his tenure by his allies in the State Department — oversaw “a narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity.”

Zelaya was overthrown ostensibly over his attempt to extend his presidency to what was deemed an unconstitutional second term. Yet Hernández breezily ran for reelection in 2017 and claimed victory amid an absurd amount of irregularities, all of them brushed aside by a supportive Trump administration. The years of chaos and violence led to a surge of migration toward the U.S. border.

The U.S. had no evident problem with that freewheeling narco-state while Hernandez was in office and remained useful, yet once Castro took power in a backlash to the U.S.-fueled corruption, the United States suddenly rediscovered its respect for the rule of law and the sanctity of contracts with U.S. investors.

Castro quickly and successfully moved to repeal the ZEDEs law in the face of intense bipartisan U.S. pressure to maintain them. The American response has been to repudiate the very idea of Honduran democracy and sovereignty, with investors using the World Bank’s ICSID to force the new Honduran government to respect the policies carried out by the former president now sitting behind federal bars.

Among the dozens of signatories to the Progressive International praising Castro’s decision to exit the arbitration court are prominent South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang; Chilean Gabriel Palma, of the “Palma Ratio of inequality”; American economist Jeffrey Sachs; former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis; British economist Ann Pettifor; and Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh.

Melinda St. Louis, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, has been fighting the crypto crew for years and welcomed Castro’s move. “The Honduran people overwhelmingly opposed the ZEDE law, and when the Honduran legislature unanimously repealed this law, that should have been the end of the story,” she said. “This is just the latest example of corporations abusing this ISDS mechanism to challenge environmental, health, land use, and other public interest policies around the hemisphere. Honduras was wise to withdraw from the World Bank venue where many of these cases are brought as an important first step.”

In its case before the ICSID, Próspera retained a top lobbying firm, employing former Democratic lawmaker Kendrick Meek, to pressure Honduras to pay up.

Last year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, came out against the effort by Próspera to exploit the dispute resolution system to undermine Honduran sovereignty. “In the case of Próspera,” they write, “a ZEDE located largely on the Honduran island of Roatán, investors have created a governing council where 44 percent of members are appointed by the private company and 22 percent are elected by landowners in a system where their number of votes is proportional to the size of their property.”

A conference Próspera held on Roatán last year signaled the company’s ethic. “Próspera aims to be the best jurisdiction for the crypto/web3 industry in the world, and we welcome the best ideas on how to achieve that with a sound legal framework,” said Chris Wilson of Próspera in publicity materials that described the confab as “specifically designed for legal hackers, crypto lawyers, jurisdictional polymaths, and businesses that want to create better laws to do business under.”

The company’s response to a request for comment on the letter from the economists was representative of the unusual corporate structure it has been able to implement. The company’s communications director told The Intercept that a response to our questions would be submitted by Jorge Colindres, representing the “Office of the Technical Secretary.”

Colindres’s email signature alludes to the public-private nature of the corporation, reading:

Jorge Constantino Colindres

Technical Secretary – Próspera ZEDE

Zona de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico

República de Honduras

Manager – General Service Provider

Colindres responded as a government official. “Attached you will find my office’s statement on the unconstitutional withdrawal from ICSID by the Honduran government,” he said. His statement insisted:

Próspera ZEDE is [a] local government and special economic zone of the Republic of Honduras. It is governed by the Technical Secretary, a Honduran citizen by birth, appointed by the Government of Honduras and empowered by article 329 of the Honduran Constitution and the ZEDE Organic Law to oversee the implementation of new policies and rules designed to foster economic development, facilitate job creation, attract national and foreign direct investment, and safeguard the fundamental rights of the workers and residents of this special jurisdiction. National and foreign companies alike are bound to comply with Próspera ZEDE Rules, which are Honduran rules, as they have been adopted by a local government of Honduras with the legal blessing of the country’s Executive Power, National Congress, and Supreme Court of Justice.

Colindres claimed that the ZEDEs had resulted in more than $100 million in foreign investment so far, and that Castro had not gotten approval from the National Congress to withdraw from the World Bank’s dispute body. “We stand proud of our achievements in job creation and investment attraction, which run in stark contrast to the job killing policies of the national government, and we continue undeterred in our mission to transform the Honduran economy and catalyze prosperity through the oasis of economic freedom and rule of law that Próspera ZEDE offers to the Honduran people,” Colindres said.

Fernando Garcia, a presidential commissioner appointed by Castro to oppose the ZEDEs, said that while the Honduran Constitution requires the National Congress to ratify new international treaties, it does not require the executive branch to notify the legislature ahead of a withdrawal.

“The ICSID convention establishes the possibility of a sovereign state’s withdrawal from its convention,” Garcia told The Intercept. He added that the arbitration court has already legally accepted Honduras’s withdrawal, effective August. This does not, he said, “prevent those who have requested arbitration from proceeding in accordance.”

The post Honduras Ratchets Up Battle With Crypto-Libertarian Investors, Rejects World Bank Court appeared first on The Intercept.

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One of the Inflation Reduction Act’s most celebrated programs — a nationwide “green bank” to help fund climate projects that struggle to secure private-sector loans — has also been one of the most reviled by Republican lawmakers. Last October, House Republicans dogged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over…

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Randy Newman’s Genius for Political Irony

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most musicians on the left write songs that lack a decent sense of humor about serious matters, whether past or present. Earnest idealists abound: Think of Woody Guthrie warbling about “Pastures of Plenty” or Pete Seeger musing what he could do “If I Had a Hammer.” The radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s did spawn blunt satirists, such as Malvina Reynolds, who scorned suburbanites who lived in “Little Boxes,” and Phil Ochs, who spitefully pleaded, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Yet even the best of such creations, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” are hard to appreciate now with any emotion save nostalgia. If a revolution ever occurs in the United States, it will most certainly be seen and heard on billions of screens of every conceivable size.Randy Newman has been a great exception to this unhappy norm. He has never explicitly identified with any ideological tendency, preferring to let his music express his thoughts, he tells Robert Hilburn in the new biography, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman. But for nearly 60 years, Newman has been churning out wise and witty lyrics, set to genres from rock to blues to country, about a stunning variety of topics and individuals, political and historical. Among them are slavery, empire, racism, nuclear destruction, religion, patriotism, apartheid, environmental disaster, homophobia, Karl Marx, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. To list them so baldly obscures the imagination behind his best political songs. In many of them, characters talk about and for themselves, voicing odious sentiments that Newman recognizes are vital to making the United States the intolerable yet alluring mess it has always been. 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The song takes up the voice of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. “No one likes us, I don’t know why, / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try,” sings Newman with a casualness that quickly segues to a most ghastly of all solutions: “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.” Think of the glorious result: “There’ll be no one left to blame us.” And “every city the whole world round / Will just be another American town. / Oh, how peaceful it will be, / We’ll set everybody free.” “Political Science” is a hymn to American exceptionalism as imagined by a genocidal innocent: After the nuclear holocaust, no one will be alive except Americans. Well, he would spare Australia: “Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo / We’ll build an all-American amusement park there / They got surfing, too.”Unlike popular songs by leftists that seek to spark outrage or exultation or urge listeners to get out in the street and march, Randy Newman’s political music nudges you to reflect on the roots of your own beliefs and prejudices, and appreciate the power of characters you despise. “I believe in not hurting anybody,” he has said. That simple line is a version of the motto of PM, a left-wing daily paper published in New York City during the 1940s: “We are against people who push other people around, just for the fun of pushing, whether they flourish in this country or abroad.” Randy Newman has fun getting under such people’s skin.The irony about this virtuoso of political irony is that his best-known works are entirely apolitical. Born in 1943, Newman began his career in the early 1960s writing for such artists as Bobby Darin and Irma Thomas, as well as recording his own pop and rock songs. But since the 1970s, Newman has written music for 29 films, including such animated blockbusters as Toy Story (1, 2, 3, and 4), Monsters, Inc., and A Bug’s Life, as well as The Natural, the dark drama about an ill-fated baseball star, played by Robert Redford. When I ask students if they have heard of Newman, most draw a blank. But nearly all can recite a few lines from “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” which he wrote for the first Toy Story, a staple of kids’ cinema since Pixar released it in 1995. He has won two Oscars for his music and been nominated for many others.Newman was to the film business born: Three of his uncles wrote acclaimed scores, and his physician father wanted his son to be a musician more than he did. Newman shed that reluctance when he discovered he had a gift for writing songs. Shortly after he graduated from high school, the Fleetwoods, a pop trio with a brace of No. 1 songs to their credit, recorded his ballad, “They Tell Me It’s Summer,” in which a teenager laments, “it just can’t be summer / When I’m not with you.” The banal, if catchy, tune climbed as high as No. 36 on the Billboard chart.Over his long career, Newman has written far better, if similarly painful, songs about longing and depression, covered by the likes of Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, and Neil Diamond. In “Guilty,” recorded back in 1974, he captured with perfect pith the forlorn mood of a man on drugs: You know, I just can’t stand myselfAnd it takes a whole lot of medicineFor me to pretend that I’m somebody elseSuch songs appear on the same albums as do the overtly political creations, and Newman would probably object to the idea that there is a fundamental difference between them. “I’m interested in this country,” he told one interviewer, “geography, weather, the people, the way people look, what they eat, what they call things … maybe American psychology is my big subject.”In his political songs, however, Newman deploys satire in deft and original ways to highlight a horrific aspect of the nation’s past. Perhaps the greatest example is “Sail Away,” recorded in 1972. As the strings of an orchestra swell behind him, a slave trader eager to dispatch people in bondage across “the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay” speaks to a gathering of unwitting Africans. His offers them a P.R. pitch for the American dream, laced with condescending clichés: In America you get food to eatWon’t have to run through the jungleAnd scuff up your feetYou’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all dayIt’s great to be an American…In America every man is freeTo take care of his home and his familyYou’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey treeYou’re all gonna be an AmericanSail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySo climb aboard that big ship and don’t pay any heed to any chains you may see laying around. For you will soon be on your way to the promised land, like those Europeans who came before and will come after you. The despicable con job underlines a sober truth: To be proud to “be an American,” one should be able to enjoy “the fruits of Americanism,” as Malcolm X put it. “A secret ambivalence of four hundred years” of life in this country “finds a voice in this song,” wrote the critic Greil Marcus. “It is like a vision of heaven superimposed on hell.”Newman’s best-known commentary on white supremacy in America was also his most controversial song. “Rednecks,” the lead track on the 1974 album Good Old Boys, scores white liberals’ hypocrisy about racism. The song’s protagonist is a white dude from Dixie who freely admits to “keepin’ the n—s down.” He defends Lester Maddox—the one-term governor of Georgia and unabashed segregationist who threatened to attack any Black people who tried to eat in his fried chicken restaurant—as one of his own (“he may be a fool but he’s our fool”) while sneering at “some smart-ass New York Jew” who ridiculed Maddox in a TV interview show. Newman’s “redneck” embraces a slew of stereotypes about uncouth figures like himself: “We talk real funny down here / We drink too much and we laugh too loud”; “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.” Up to this point in the song, one might scoff at the benighted fellow’s easy acknowledgment of his racism and his other faults, too.Then the lyric takes a sharp turn away from mocking such not-so-good old boys. Up North, the redneck points out, white folks claim they “set the n— free” and call him a “Negro.” But oppression reigns there too. Black people are “free to be put in a cage / In Harlem in New York City” and “in the South Side of Chicago / And the West Side” and in Hough in Cleveland, in East St. Louis, in San Francisco and in Roxbury in Boston, the song goes on. To accuse one’s adversary of committing the same sins, without realizing it, is one of the oldest moves in ideological combat. It should have stung liberals who didn’t take responsibility for their own share of injustice. But the song may have been too clever for some. Newman stopped performing it in public when white audiences in the South began singing right along to it, n-word and all.For Newman, the meaning of Americanism always swings between elegiac hope and justifiable rage. He loves his countrywomen and men, but it’s the affection of a brutal realist. In the 2006 song Robert Hilburn chose as the title of his biography, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Newman contrasted President George W. Bush’s misgoverning of the nation with the muddled decency of its citizens:I’d like to say a few wordsIn defense of our countryWhose people aren’t badNor are they meanNow, the leaders we haveWhile they’re the worst that we’ve hadAre hardly the worstThis poor world has seenNewman then ticked off the regimes of bloodthirsty tyrants, like King Leopold of Belgium, whose minions caused the deaths of millions of Congolese, and the Spanish monarchs who oversaw the Inquisition that lasted for centuries. He wasn’t apologizing for the debacle of the invasion of Iraq, motivated by lies, but warning that the United States could be rushing toward the same fate that befell such once mighty domains:The end of an empire is messy at bestAnd this empire is endingLike all the restLike the Spanish Armada adrift on the seaWe’re adrift in the land of the braveAnd the home of the freeThe New York Times published an abridged version of this casual message of terminal decline as an op-ed. Yet, in cold type and pixels, it fails to capture the power of a satirist whose laid-back vocals assail the myopia and cruelties of U.S. history.Newman always conveys that critique with the affection of an artist who will never abandon the place that, in another song, he embraces: “This is my country / These are my people / And I know ’em like the back of my own hand.” I think Newman would nod in agreement with the American protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, an undercover spy in France, who remarks, “I miss being at home in a culture.… Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and … our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.”Hilburn’s biography does not explain how this rather shy fellow from a well-to-do Jewish family managed to create such provocative music about a cornucopia of subjects and the characters who embody them. He dispenses a surfeit of details about Newman’s personal life, but few bear on the content of his works, political and otherwise. Having conducted many hours of interviews with his subject, Hilburn can dwell at length on the highs and lows of Newman’s prolific career and two marriages. But to learn which of his albums made lots of money and which flopped or why he split from his first wife but is happily married to the second reveals almost nothing about what inspired his songs. Hilburn even fails to make clear why Newman has always sung with a gentle Southern drawl—although he spent just two infant years in New Orleans and has long lived in the leafy comfort of West L.A. The result is a biography seemingly intended for readers who already adore Newman’s music but might enjoy having a chronological reference book around as they listen to it.To his credit, Hilburn reprints all the words to a remarkable Newman song from 1999 that fans of classics like “Sail Away” may have missed. “The Great Nations of Europe” is something quite rare in popular music: a witty critique of empire inspired by a book written by a distinguished historian. In Ecological Imperialism, published in 1986, Alfred Crosby argued that adventurers from the Old World were able to subjugate the inhabitants of the New because they not just had plenty of “guns for conquest” but, without being aware of it, also carried in their cargo and bodies “infectious diseases for decimating indigenous populations.” Newman lifted a few shocking details from Crosby’s influential book and tied them together with a catchy chorus:The great nations of EuropeHad gathered on the shoreThey’d conquered what was behind themAnd now they wanted moreSo they looked to the mighty oceanAnd took to the western seaThe great nations of Europe in the sixteenth centuryHide your wives and daughtersHide the groceries, tooGreat nations of Europe coming throughThe Grand Canary IslandsFirst land to which they cameThey slaughtered all the canariesWhich gave the land its nameThere were natives there called GuanchesGuanches by the scoreBullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren’t there anymoreNewman offers no hope for collective liberation in this or any other song. They could never serve as the soundtrack for a left-wing gathering as “Solidarity Forever” or “This Land Is Your Land” once did. But the skeptical humor of his best creations may be more valuable to the left than the romantic uplift in such radical standards. Just as Mr. Burns in The Simpsons has probably taught more Americans to ridicule corporate moguls than have reams of Marxian essays, so “Sail Away” debunks the ideal of American exceptionalism with a panache no leftist scholar has equaled. “The common discovery of America,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “was probably that Americans were the first people on earth to live for their humor; nothing was so important to Americans as humor.”Now in his eighties, Newman has not performed in recent years and may never mount a stage again. But I will never forget the times I saw this small, froggish man sit down at a piano and drawl out doses of grim reality that made me grin and think about this land that’s our land—for better and for worse.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Most musicians on the left write songs that lack a decent sense of humor about serious matters, whether past or present. Earnest idealists abound: Think of Woody Guthrie warbling about “Pastures of Plenty” or Pete Seeger musing what he could do “If I Had a Hammer.” The radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s did spawn blunt satirists, such as Malvina Reynolds, who scorned suburbanites who lived in “Little Boxes,” and Phil Ochs, who spitefully pleaded, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Yet even the best of such creations, like Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” are hard to appreciate now with any emotion save nostalgia. If a revolution ever occurs in the United States, it will most certainly be seen and heard on billions of screens of every conceivable size.Randy Newman has been a great exception to this unhappy norm. He has never explicitly identified with any ideological tendency, preferring to let his music express his thoughts, he tells Robert Hilburn in the new biography, A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman. But for nearly 60 years, Newman has been churning out wise and witty lyrics, set to genres from rock to blues to country, about a stunning variety of topics and individuals, political and historical. Among them are slavery, empire, racism, nuclear destruction, religion, patriotism, apartheid, environmental disaster, homophobia, Karl Marx, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Ivanka Trump, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. To list them so baldly obscures the imagination behind his best political songs. In many of them, characters talk about and for themselves, voicing odious sentiments that Newman recognizes are vital to making the United States the intolerable yet alluring mess it has always been. He “inhabits his characters so completely,” a New York Times critic once wrote, “that he makes us uneasy, wondering how much self-identification he has invested in their creation. His work achieves its power by that very confusion.”Take “Political Science,” a novel ditty he wrote during the early 1970s, when demonstrators on multiple continents were raging against the carnage the United States was perpetrating in Indochina. The song takes up the voice of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. “No one likes us, I don’t know why, / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try,” sings Newman with a casualness that quickly segues to a most ghastly of all solutions: “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens.” Think of the glorious result: “There’ll be no one left to blame us.” And “every city the whole world round / Will just be another American town. / Oh, how peaceful it will be, / We’ll set everybody free.” “Political Science” is a hymn to American exceptionalism as imagined by a genocidal innocent: After the nuclear holocaust, no one will be alive except Americans. Well, he would spare Australia: “Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo / We’ll build an all-American amusement park there / They got surfing, too.”Unlike popular songs by leftists that seek to spark outrage or exultation or urge listeners to get out in the street and march, Randy Newman’s political music nudges you to reflect on the roots of your own beliefs and prejudices, and appreciate the power of characters you despise. “I believe in not hurting anybody,” he has said. That simple line is a version of the motto of PM, a left-wing daily paper published in New York City during the 1940s: “We are against people who push other people around, just for the fun of pushing, whether they flourish in this country or abroad.” Randy Newman has fun getting under such people’s skin.The irony about this virtuoso of political irony is that his best-known works are entirely apolitical. Born in 1943, Newman began his career in the early 1960s writing for such artists as Bobby Darin and Irma Thomas, as well as recording his own pop and rock songs. But since the 1970s, Newman has written music for 29 films, including such animated blockbusters as Toy Story (1, 2, 3, and 4), Monsters, Inc., and A Bug’s Life, as well as The Natural, the dark drama about an ill-fated baseball star, played by Robert Redford. When I ask students if they have heard of Newman, most draw a blank. But nearly all can recite a few lines from “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” which he wrote for the first Toy Story, a staple of kids’ cinema since Pixar released it in 1995. He has won two Oscars for his music and been nominated for many others.Newman was to the film business born: Three of his uncles wrote acclaimed scores, and his physician father wanted his son to be a musician more than he did. Newman shed that reluctance when he discovered he had a gift for writing songs. Shortly after he graduated from high school, the Fleetwoods, a pop trio with a brace of No. 1 songs to their credit, recorded his ballad, “They Tell Me It’s Summer,” in which a teenager laments, “it just can’t be summer / When I’m not with you.” The banal, if catchy, tune climbed as high as No. 36 on the Billboard chart.Over his long career, Newman has written far better, if similarly painful, songs about longing and depression, covered by the likes of Nina Simone, Ray Charles, Bonnie Raitt, and Neil Diamond. In “Guilty,” recorded back in 1974, he captured with perfect pith the forlorn mood of a man on drugs: You know, I just can’t stand myselfAnd it takes a whole lot of medicineFor me to pretend that I’m somebody elseSuch songs appear on the same albums as do the overtly political creations, and Newman would probably object to the idea that there is a fundamental difference between them. “I’m interested in this country,” he told one interviewer, “geography, weather, the people, the way people look, what they eat, what they call things … maybe American psychology is my big subject.”In his political songs, however, Newman deploys satire in deft and original ways to highlight a horrific aspect of the nation’s past. Perhaps the greatest example is “Sail Away,” recorded in 1972. As the strings of an orchestra swell behind him, a slave trader eager to dispatch people in bondage across “the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay” speaks to a gathering of unwitting Africans. His offers them a P.R. pitch for the American dream, laced with condescending clichés: In America you get food to eatWon’t have to run through the jungleAnd scuff up your feetYou’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all dayIt’s great to be an American…In America every man is freeTo take care of his home and his familyYou’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey treeYou’re all gonna be an AmericanSail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySail away, sail awayWe will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston BaySo climb aboard that big ship and don’t pay any heed to any chains you may see laying around. For you will soon be on your way to the promised land, like those Europeans who came before and will come after you. The despicable con job underlines a sober truth: To be proud to “be an American,” one should be able to enjoy “the fruits of Americanism,” as Malcolm X put it. “A secret ambivalence of four hundred years” of life in this country “finds a voice in this song,” wrote the critic Greil Marcus. “It is like a vision of heaven superimposed on hell.”Newman’s best-known commentary on white supremacy in America was also his most controversial song. “Rednecks,” the lead track on the 1974 album Good Old Boys, scores white liberals’ hypocrisy about racism. The song’s protagonist is a white dude from Dixie who freely admits to “keepin’ the n—s down.” He defends Lester Maddox—the one-term governor of Georgia and unabashed segregationist who threatened to attack any Black people who tried to eat in his fried chicken restaurant—as one of his own (“he may be a fool but he’s our fool”) while sneering at “some smart-ass New York Jew” who ridiculed Maddox in a TV interview show. Newman’s “redneck” embraces a slew of stereotypes about uncouth figures like himself: “We talk real funny down here / We drink too much and we laugh too loud”; “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground.” Up to this point in the song, one might scoff at the benighted fellow’s easy acknowledgment of his racism and his other faults, too.Then the lyric takes a sharp turn away from mocking such not-so-good old boys. Up North, the redneck points out, white folks claim they “set the n— free” and call him a “Negro.” But oppression reigns there too. Black people are “free to be put in a cage / In Harlem in New York City” and “in the South Side of Chicago / And the West Side” and in Hough in Cleveland, in East St. Louis, in San Francisco and in Roxbury in Boston, the song goes on. To accuse one’s adversary of committing the same sins, without realizing it, is one of the oldest moves in ideological combat. It should have stung liberals who didn’t take responsibility for their own share of injustice. But the song may have been too clever for some. Newman stopped performing it in public when white audiences in the South began singing right along to it, n-word and all.For Newman, the meaning of Americanism always swings between elegiac hope and justifiable rage. He loves his countrywomen and men, but it’s the affection of a brutal realist. In the 2006 song Robert Hilburn chose as the title of his biography, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” Newman contrasted President George W. Bush’s misgoverning of the nation with the muddled decency of its citizens:I’d like to say a few wordsIn defense of our countryWhose people aren’t badNor are they meanNow, the leaders we haveWhile they’re the worst that we’ve hadAre hardly the worstThis poor world has seenNewman then ticked off the regimes of bloodthirsty tyrants, like King Leopold of Belgium, whose minions caused the deaths of millions of Congolese, and the Spanish monarchs who oversaw the Inquisition that lasted for centuries. He wasn’t apologizing for the debacle of the invasion of Iraq, motivated by lies, but warning that the United States could be rushing toward the same fate that befell such once mighty domains:The end of an empire is messy at bestAnd this empire is endingLike all the restLike the Spanish Armada adrift on the seaWe’re adrift in the land of the braveAnd the home of the freeThe New York Times published an abridged version of this casual message of terminal decline as an op-ed. Yet, in cold type and pixels, it fails to capture the power of a satirist whose laid-back vocals assail the myopia and cruelties of U.S. history.Newman always conveys that critique with the affection of an artist who will never abandon the place that, in another song, he embraces: “This is my country / These are my people / And I know ’em like the back of my own hand.” I think Newman would nod in agreement with the American protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, an undercover spy in France, who remarks, “I miss being at home in a culture.… Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and … our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.”Hilburn’s biography does not explain how this rather shy fellow from a well-to-do Jewish family managed to create such provocative music about a cornucopia of subjects and the characters who embody them. He dispenses a surfeit of details about Newman’s personal life, but few bear on the content of his works, political and otherwise. Having conducted many hours of interviews with his subject, Hilburn can dwell at length on the highs and lows of Newman’s prolific career and two marriages. But to learn which of his albums made lots of money and which flopped or why he split from his first wife but is happily married to the second reveals almost nothing about what inspired his songs. Hilburn even fails to make clear why Newman has always sung with a gentle Southern drawl—although he spent just two infant years in New Orleans and has long lived in the leafy comfort of West L.A. The result is a biography seemingly intended for readers who already adore Newman’s music but might enjoy having a chronological reference book around as they listen to it.To his credit, Hilburn reprints all the words to a remarkable Newman song from 1999 that fans of classics like “Sail Away” may have missed. “The Great Nations of Europe” is something quite rare in popular music: a witty critique of empire inspired by a book written by a distinguished historian. In Ecological Imperialism, published in 1986, Alfred Crosby argued that adventurers from the Old World were able to subjugate the inhabitants of the New because they not just had plenty of “guns for conquest” but, without being aware of it, also carried in their cargo and bodies “infectious diseases for decimating indigenous populations.” Newman lifted a few shocking details from Crosby’s influential book and tied them together with a catchy chorus:The great nations of EuropeHad gathered on the shoreThey’d conquered what was behind themAnd now they wanted moreSo they looked to the mighty oceanAnd took to the western seaThe great nations of Europe in the sixteenth centuryHide your wives and daughtersHide the groceries, tooGreat nations of Europe coming throughThe Grand Canary IslandsFirst land to which they cameThey slaughtered all the canariesWhich gave the land its nameThere were natives there called GuanchesGuanches by the scoreBullets, disease, the Portuguese, and they weren’t there anymoreNewman offers no hope for collective liberation in this or any other song. They could never serve as the soundtrack for a left-wing gathering as “Solidarity Forever” or “This Land Is Your Land” once did. But the skeptical humor of his best creations may be more valuable to the left than the romantic uplift in such radical standards. Just as Mr. Burns in The Simpsons has probably taught more Americans to ridicule corporate moguls than have reams of Marxian essays, so “Sail Away” debunks the ideal of American exceptionalism with a panache no leftist scholar has equaled. “The common discovery of America,” Norman Mailer once wrote, “was probably that Americans were the first people on earth to live for their humor; nothing was so important to Americans as humor.”Now in his eighties, Newman has not performed in recent years and may never mount a stage again. But I will never forget the times I saw this small, froggish man sit down at a piano and drawl out doses of grim reality that made me grin and think about this land that’s our land—for better and for worse.

Business
Culture
Food

This seaside town will power thousands of homes with waves

A test site off the Oregon coast could be key to unlocking wave power in the United States. Surprisingly, residents aren’t opposed.

NEWPORT, Ore. — At a moment when large offshore wind projects are encountering public resistance, a nascent ocean industry is showing promise: wave energy.It’s coming to life in Newport, a rainy coastal town of nearly 10,500 people located a couple of hours south of Portland. Home to fishing operators and researchers, Newport attracts tourists and retirees with its famous aquarium, sprawling beaches and noisy sea lions. If you ask anyone at the lively bayfront about a wave energy project, they probably don’t know much about it.And yet right off the coast, a $100 million effort with funding from the Energy Department aims to convert the power of waves into energy, and help catch up to Europe in developing this new technology. The buoy-like contraptions, located several miles offshore, will deliver up to 20 megawatts of energy — enough to power thousands of homes and businesses.As federal officials look to shift America’s electricity grid away from fossil fuels, they are seeking alternatives to solar and wind, which can only deliver energy when the sun shines or the wind blows. Waves — constant and full of untapped energy — have emerged as a promising option. And because wave energy projects are relatively unobtrusive, they’re far less controversial than offshore wind, which has generated fierce opposition on both U.S. coasts. In September, the Biden administration announced up to $112.5 million would go toward the development of wave energy converters, the largest federal investment in marine energy.There’s enough energy in the waves off America’s coasts to power one third of all the nation’s homes, said Matthew Grosso, the Energy Department’s director of the water power technologies office.Spanning 2.65 square miles and located seven miles out from shore, the PacWave test site is expected to be a “game changer for marine energy,” he said in an interview.Under the water, subsea connectors are waiting to be plugged in like extension cords to wave energy converters developed by teams around the world. With deep-sea offshore testing, companies will see how much power these energy converters can produce, whether they can hold up in rough ocean conditions, what environmental impacts they might have and how the devices will interact with each other.PacWave, a project of Oregon State University (OSU), represents a necessary step for commercializing wave energy, experts said.“The research that’s been done in the past 15 years is reaching the point of what we can do just in labs or in theory,” Grosso said. “We’ve got to start testing some of this stuff out and see what works and what doesn’t.”How wave energy worksUnlike other forms of renewable energy, engineers have not yet settled on a single model of wave energy converters. While wind turbines have converged into the three-blade turbine shape, there’s many types of wave energy converters in development, turning the motion of the wave into electrical energy in different ways.You can feel the energy in the waves, when it laps at the shore or when it rocks your boat. Created by wind over the sea, it’s one part of the ecosystem of renewable energy that’s available to us. But since waves don’t move in a linear motion, they’re harder to capture energy from than the flow of wind over a turbine, for example.One wave energy converter may not work in all environments, either — models can vary based on the depth of water and conditions the converter will operate in. Some use rotating cylinders; some are buoys that move up and down with the waves; others look like snakes with joints that move when waves roll through.But all of these devices use the oscillating or orbital motion of a wave to generate an electrical current, explained PacWave Chief Scientist Burke Hales, in the same way that turbines use rotations to generate a current.With four different berths, the site can host devices by multiple developers at once. The cables carrying the electricity are buried under the seafloor, running 12 miles diagonal to the shoreline to avoid a rocky reef. On land, an operating site measures the energy output and sends the energy to the Central Lincoln power utility.Because there’s no wave energy converters plugged in yet, there’s still a clear view of the horizon from Newport’s beaches. But even the larger devices are unlikely to be visible to the naked eye once they’re there in the new year.Coexisting with fisheriesThe PacWave site sits where crabbers set out their pots to catch Dungeness crab, one of the West Coast’s most important seafood species. And yet, unlike an offshore wind project a hundred miles down the coast that sparked strong opposition, most residents are either unaware of the wave energy project or support it. The fact that the project is limited, and unlikely to spur commercial activity offshore that could damage the town’s fishing economy, has helped its cause.When deciding where to locate the project, Newport won out for its proximity to OSU’s main campus in Corvallis and the local fishing fleet’s openness to the idea. The town also hosts the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Operations Center for the Pacific, which has its own research fleet.PacWave also brought the promise of jobs, said Belinda Batten, who conducted outreach for PacWave when she directed the Energy Department’s Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center. Many here remember how NOAA’s move to Newport in 2011 created employment opportunities.Perhaps most importantly, OSU already had a strong relationship with the community given the marine center in town, according to Charlie Plybon, who lives in Newport and is the Oregon senior policy manager for the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation.It took years of outreach and many town hall meetings for Batten, who now serves as a senior adviser to the OSU provost, and Kaety Jacobson, Lincoln County commissioner and a fisherman’s daughter, to cement their trust with the community. When they assembled some fleet members to decide the site, it took all of 10 minutes for the crabbers to draw a plot on a map of the ocean for a location that could work for everyone involved.That area was important fishing grounds for the fleet, said crabber Bob Eder. In his button-down shirt and sneakers, Eder knows he doesn’t look like a stereotypical fisherman, but he’s one of the most well-respected crabbers in the fleet and still goes out in the waters every season at the age of 73. The PacWave site could represent a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the fleet every crabbing season, he said. On the navigation system in his boat, he pointed to a map that showed he had previously crabbed in the area that was now off limits.But the operators agreed to give it up for the sake of the experiment.Eder, a representative of the fishing community during the process, said that the agreement with Oregon State was a show of goodwill from the fishing community, whose members care about the environment and want to preserve their livelihood.“[Climate change] definitely affects those of us whose work is directly involved with the environment,” he said. “And so every fishery is at an environmental risk.”Where wave energy could thriveIn states like Oregon, where an abundance of renewable energy has lowered the price of electricity to around 3½ cents per kilowatt hour, wave energy isn’t a competitive option. The first large-scale commercial wave energy project, by contrast, is expected to produce electricity costing 12 to 47 cents per kilowatt hour.But in small, remote communities that depend on more expensive diesel fuel, wave power could ease energy woes.“There’s remote communities in Alaska where everyone is running on diesel generators, they’re not on the grid, they have no electrical system,” said PacWave Director Dan Hellin.The wave industry first has to overcome several challenges. The consensus in the industry is that wave energy’s development is 20 years behind that of wind. But Tim Ramsey, the Energy Department’s marine energy program manager, pointed out that wind began to take off at that point, in the early 2000s.In addition, putting something into offshore waters usually requires extensive federal permitting, which can take years. That’s why this test site is important for developers — PacWave’s operation offers a site that has already earned the necessary approvals.In order for wave energy to be economically viable, developers need to lower its cost. Technological advancements can help, and just as solar and wind energy have received government subsidies, federal support could help get wave energy off the ground.Members of the Newport fishing fleet — even those who aren’t fans of the project — have hope that this renewable energy offers possibilities.Crabber Bob Kemp, 75, said he isn’t thrilled that he won’t be able to fish for crab in that part of the ocean anymore, but he’s counting on the researchers to make good use of the space they’ve taken.“I want to make sure the project has some kind of pressure on it to keep going and not just [move on] like a contractor moves on to a new house,” Kemp said. “I want them to stay on that.”

Business
Climate
Energy

Little sign of rain to alleviate drought and wildfire risks in US north-east

Ongoing dry conditions threaten to aggravate blazes in New York and New Jersey as wildfire seasons grow in intensityWildfires continue to ravage parts of New York and New Jersey, fueled by high winds and record low precipitation and, despite some rain over last weekend, there is no immediate relief in sight for the historic drought in the region, with ongoing dry conditions exacerbating the risk of spreading fires.Last month was the driest on record in New York City, with only 0.87in (2.2cm) of rain compared with the historic average of 4.12in for October, and forecasts predict the deficit between normal levels of rain and this autumn in the region will grow before the end of the season. Continue reading...

Wildfires continue to ravage parts of New York and New Jersey, fueled by high winds and record low precipitation and, despite some rain over last weekend, there is no immediate relief in sight for the historic drought in the region, with ongoing dry conditions exacerbating the risk of spreading fires.Last month was the driest on record in New York City, with only 0.87in (2.2cm) of rain compared with the historic average of 4.12in for October, and forecasts predict the deficit between normal levels of rain and this autumn in the region will grow before the end of the season.The state of New York is currently under a burn ban and a drought watch, meaning that residents and businesses are encouraged to reduce their water usage.“We’re seeing extreme weather manifest itself,” said Zach Iscol, New York City’s commissioner of emergency management. “It’s important that we start conserving water now.”Earlier this week, New Jersey declared a drought warning, with mandatory water conservation issued in parts of the state and limiting all non-essential water usage like outdoor watering.The total water usage by over 8 million New Yorkers amounts to about a billion gallons a day. The last time New York City experienced a drought was over 20 years ago, lasting from 2001 to 2003, with the city’s water storage dropping below 42% during the worst of it. As of Thursday, the city’s water reservoir levels were sitting at around 62%, compared with typical 79%.Firefighters are continuing to battle the Jennings Creek wildfire that broke out last Saturday and scorched nearly 5,000 acres in both states, killing at least one person. Dariel Vasque, an 18-year-old parks and recreation aide with the New York state parks department, was killed last Saturday while battling the blaze.Dense, urban areas are not spared from the ongoing bush fires. New York City saw more than 229 brush fires in the two week period between 31 October and 12 November. Officials are still investigating the fire that burned 2 acres of Prospect Park in the borough of Brooklyn last Saturday, and on Thursday fire officials contained a 4-acre (1.6-hectare) fire in Manhattan’s Inwood Hill Park.“It is a more extreme fire season that we’ve had in recent history,” said Capt Scott Jackson, a forest ranger for the New York department of environmental conservation, at a press conference on Monday.New York state generally has two major fire seasons, a larger one in spring and a more abbreviated autumn season.“We did have a relatively light spring fire season this year, so I think we’re making it up for it in the fall,” Jackson said. “That’s the time when we have a lot of dead leaves off the trees, and grass on the ground, so you get that sunlight direct to the ground to dry out those forest fuels.”Wildfire seasons are getting longer and growing more intense, especially across the western United States, according to analysis by non-profit Climate Central. The climate crisis is shifting weather patterns, with warming temperatures and drier air increasing wildfire risks across the country.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion“We have seen a little increase in how early and late the seasons are going,” Jackson said. “So far, the changes are occurring at a slow enough rate that I think we’re adapting to those changes as they happen.”Farmers across New York and New Jersey are bracing for the impact of the drought on crop production and water resources.“I feel like it’s still the early days, and we haven’t seen the worst of it yet,” said Emily Eder, farm director at Poughkeepsie Farm Project. “We’d usually be watering our crops with just a small amount of rainfall, instead we’re moving irrigation around, which we typically wouldn’t this time in the season.”Eder said that although the region had experienced unusually warm temperatures and record low rainfall for several months, some people were starting to realize the full extent of the drought only recently.“A lot of us have had interactions with people where we’ll talk about how it hasn’t rained in so long and people will say: ‘Oh, really, I didn’t even notice,’” Eder said. “It’s this sort of semi-invisibility of climate change, despite the fact that these disasters are happening. There’s still a level of it that a lot of people are not seeing and those who work with the land and rely on it for their living are really seeing.”

Business
Climate
Conservation

State EV mandates touch off panic among automakers

Regardless of how President-elect Trump changes the Biden administration's long-term climate policies, automakers are already panicking about state-level electric vehicle mandates just around the corner.In California and 11 other blue states that follow its lead, 35% of new cars must be electric starting with 2026 models — some of which will be in showrooms as early as next spring.Why it matters: Carmakers are not even close to meeting those requirements.In many states. they would need to double or triple their EV sales in just one year — an unrealistic goal given the average $57,000 price of an EV and the lack of charging infrastructure, companies tell Axios.It's all likely to come down to a bitter fight between Trump and California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has presidential ambitions of his own.The stakes are enormous — not just for automakers and car dealers, but also for consumers.Funneling more EVs into markets that don't want them is "unnatural" and will "distort" the business, says Jack Hollis, president of Toyota Motor North America."It's going to limit a customer's choice of the vehicles they want," he told reporters Friday.Automakers, meanwhile, fear they'll have to choose between swallowing bigger losses on EVs or sacrificing profits on gasoline vehicles — neither of which is palatable.State of play: The 1967 Clean Air Act gave California a waiver to set its own greenhouse gas emissions standards, which typically outpace federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The law allows other states to choose whether to adopt California's standards or stick with the federal rules.In 2022, California's Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted the strictest rules yet, ratcheting up the percentage of zero-emission vehicles from 35% for the 2026 model year to 100% by 2035, effectively eliminating gasoline cars. Eleven states, plus Washington, D.C., have adopted California's latest rules, representing nearly 40% of the nation's vehicle market. Where it stands: EV sales have been growing steadily, but currently make up only about 9% of U.S. auto sales. In California, EVs account for nearly 26% of new car sales — putting that 35% goal by 2026 potentially within reach.Many of its blue-state allies, however, lag far behind, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.Washington, Colorado and D.C. are around 19% EV share, while others, including Massachusetts, Vermont and Maryland are closer to 11%. Of all the CARB-following states, New York is farthest off the pace at less than 10% EVs.Alarm bells are ringing across the industry as each automaker calculates its own compliance risk. Between the lines: Automakers basically have three options, none of them good for business: They can dump more discounted EVs into those 11 states to lure buyers. But that would just widen their billion-dollar losses on EVs. They could instead throttle back sales of gasoline trucks and SUVs in the affected states to make the EV sales ratio easier to meet. But that would choke off badly needed profits to fund their EV investments. They could buy compliance credits from Tesla, a pure-play EV manufacturer. But as the rules tighten, demand for those credits will increase, making them more expensive.What to watch: The situation between Trump and Newsom.In 2019, Trump revoked California's waiver to set its own emissions standards, triggering a chaotic legal battle which ended when Biden later reinstated the waiver. This time around, California has taken steps to "Trump-proof" its clean air strategies, including voluntary agreements with industry, Politico reported.Other states, which adopted California's tailpipe standard without enacting other policies to support EV growth, might opt to revert to the federal standards.While new rules set by the EPA under Biden would also compel carmakers to sharply accelerate EV sales in the coming years, industry leaders expect Trump to ease those requirements. The bottom line, Bozzella tells Axios: "You can't get ahead of the customer; the customer is in charge."

Regardless of how President-elect Trump changes the Biden administration's long-term climate policies, automakers are already panicking about state-level electric vehicle mandates just around the corner.In California and 11 other blue states that follow its lead, 35% of new cars must be electric starting with 2026 models — some of which will be in showrooms as early as next spring.Why it matters: Carmakers are not even close to meeting those requirements.In many states. they would need to double or triple their EV sales in just one year — an unrealistic goal given the average $57,000 price of an EV and the lack of charging infrastructure, companies tell Axios.It's all likely to come down to a bitter fight between Trump and California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has presidential ambitions of his own.The stakes are enormous — not just for automakers and car dealers, but also for consumers.Funneling more EVs into markets that don't want them is "unnatural" and will "distort" the business, says Jack Hollis, president of Toyota Motor North America."It's going to limit a customer's choice of the vehicles they want," he told reporters Friday.Automakers, meanwhile, fear they'll have to choose between swallowing bigger losses on EVs or sacrificing profits on gasoline vehicles — neither of which is palatable.State of play: The 1967 Clean Air Act gave California a waiver to set its own greenhouse gas emissions standards, which typically outpace federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The law allows other states to choose whether to adopt California's standards or stick with the federal rules.In 2022, California's Air Resources Board (CARB) adopted the strictest rules yet, ratcheting up the percentage of zero-emission vehicles from 35% for the 2026 model year to 100% by 2035, effectively eliminating gasoline cars. Eleven states, plus Washington, D.C., have adopted California's latest rules, representing nearly 40% of the nation's vehicle market. Where it stands: EV sales have been growing steadily, but currently make up only about 9% of U.S. auto sales. In California, EVs account for nearly 26% of new car sales — putting that 35% goal by 2026 potentially within reach.Many of its blue-state allies, however, lag far behind, according to the Alliance for Automotive Innovation.Washington, Colorado and D.C. are around 19% EV share, while others, including Massachusetts, Vermont and Maryland are closer to 11%. Of all the CARB-following states, New York is farthest off the pace at less than 10% EVs.Alarm bells are ringing across the industry as each automaker calculates its own compliance risk. Between the lines: Automakers basically have three options, none of them good for business: They can dump more discounted EVs into those 11 states to lure buyers. But that would just widen their billion-dollar losses on EVs. They could instead throttle back sales of gasoline trucks and SUVs in the affected states to make the EV sales ratio easier to meet. But that would choke off badly needed profits to fund their EV investments. They could buy compliance credits from Tesla, a pure-play EV manufacturer. But as the rules tighten, demand for those credits will increase, making them more expensive.What to watch: The situation between Trump and Newsom.In 2019, Trump revoked California's waiver to set its own emissions standards, triggering a chaotic legal battle which ended when Biden later reinstated the waiver. This time around, California has taken steps to "Trump-proof" its clean air strategies, including voluntary agreements with industry, Politico reported.Other states, which adopted California's tailpipe standard without enacting other policies to support EV growth, might opt to revert to the federal standards.While new rules set by the EPA under Biden would also compel carmakers to sharply accelerate EV sales in the coming years, industry leaders expect Trump to ease those requirements. The bottom line, Bozzella tells Axios: "You can't get ahead of the customer; the customer is in charge."

Business
Climate

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