America’s spy agency is making compensation payments to agents who claim they suffer from “Havana Syndrome.” The alleged condition was first reported by government employees in Cuba who reported suffering various symptoms, including dizziness, headaches and memory loss.
The New York Timesreports that “About a dozen people suffering from debilitating symptoms that have become known as Havana syndrome have either received the payments or been approved to receive them, the people familiar with the program said.”
“Several of the recipients are former C.I.A. officers who were injured while serving in Havana in 2016 and 2017,” the Times detailed further. “However, payments are also being processed for current and former officers whose injuries occurred elsewhere.”
The CIA has studied over 1,000 potential cases of the mysterious ailment and has been unable to prove it exists.
Havana Syndrome was brought into the spotlight during the early Trump administration. In 2017, US officials stationed in Havana reported a vague set of symptoms. The White House responded by rolling back President Barak Obama’s policy of normalizing the US relationship with Cuba.
At the time, people who asserted they were suffering from Havana Syndrome claimed it was caused by a foreign power using sonic or microwave weapons. The official recorded the sound generated by the alleged weapon, which was later determined to be crickets.
Multiple government agencies have examined 1,000 cases of people claiming to be Havana Syndrome victims. Natural causes have explained nearly all cases; many of the people were experiencing psychosomatic symptoms. There are a few cases where an alternative cause that cannot explain the symptoms.
The CIA has begun compensating employees for Havana Syndrome, which CIA Director William Burns acknowledges is not real “in the majority of incidents” https://t.co/oL8eie49Bs
A few dozen people who work for the CIA and have unexplained symptoms are now receiving compensation payments. Congress authorized the funds through the HAVANA Act, which was signed into law last October.
Global demand for electricity is set to grow around 50% by 2040.
As the only energy source of low-carbon, scalable, reliable, and affordable electricity, nuclear is set to play a prominent role in meeting this growing demand while satisfying decarbonization objectives globally.
Nuclear is considered an important source of clean energy, being the second largest source of low-carbon electricity in the world behind hydropower.
Nuclear power plants produce no greenhouse gas emissions during operation, and over the course of their life cycle, they produce about the same amount of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions per unit of electricity as wind, and one-third of the emissions per unit of electricity when compared with solar.
Nuclear fuel is extremely dense and generates minimal waste. All of the used nuclear fuel produced by the U.S. over the last 60 years could fit on a football field at a depth of fewer than 10 yards.
To power up reactors, uranium demand is expected to rise ∼160% over the next decades.
Several countries are going nuclear in a bid to reduce reliance on fossil fuels while building reliable energy grids. Not many, however, have uranium deposits that are economically recoverable.
Canada has the world’s largest deposits of high-grade uranium with grades of up to 20% uranium.
The Highest-Grade Uranium Deposits in the World
Canada’s Athabasca Basin region in Saskatchewan and Alberta has the highest-grade uranium deposits in the world, with grades that are 10 to 100 times greater than the average grade of deposits elsewhere.
Uranium was first discovered in the Athabasca Basin in 1934, and today the region remains a major hot spot for uranium exploration.
Besides hosting the richest uranium grades in the world, the region is a top-tier mining jurisdiction, with the best practices for environmental protection.
In recent years, a number of junior uranium companies have made exciting new discoveries in the basin, with Skyharbour Resources among them. The company holds an extensive portfolio of fifteen uranium exploration projects, ten of which are drill-ready, covering 450,000 hectares of mineral claims.
In recent years, America has seen parents fighting back against the indoctrination of their children in public schools. School board members have been ousted from their positions, and bills combating the influence of political ideology in classrooms have been signed into law. Teachers’ unions longstanding monopolization of education policy looks like it could finally be coming to an end. With the midterms approaching, the parental-choice movement has reason to feel encouraged.
But raising our voices and electing the right leaders are only parts of the solution. Contrary to what many on the Left claim, parents must play a central role in educating our children. The recent progress we’ve witnessed is the start of a movement not only to keep political ideology out of classrooms but also to increase parental involvement in the education of the next generation. Mothers and fathers must lead this effort.
It is not uncommon for fathers to feel like they don’t have a defined role to play in the education of their children. Even when fathers are involved, they often play second fiddle to mothers when it comes to many aspects of parenting, especially education. After all, if we look around at the parent-led education reform groups that exist today, we are more likely to see a mother- or mother-grandmother-led coalition than we are to see a father- or grandfather-father-led group. This needs to change.
We must encourage fathers not only to get involved but also to become leaders in their children’s lives when it comes to education. In an age when kids face so much pressure to embrace radical and destructive ideologies, fully engaged fathers can act as a bulwark against these ideas.
Though progress has been made in some states to end the brainwashing that too often happens in classrooms, the fight is only beginning. Plentiful reports have emerged about lessons in schools trashing masculinity as “toxic” and shaming boys for being beneficiaries of “the patriarchy.” Does anyone – other than radicalized educators – believe this is what our kids should be taught?
If fathers do not involve themselves in educating their children, nothing will prevent these kids from believing the falsehoods they might be exposed to in the classroom. We cannot allow these lies to take root in the minds of our children. They particularly hurt young men, who will be less likely to become fathers or stay present in their children’s lives as a result. This cycle will only continue if fathers and grandfathers don’t make it their business to stop it.
To break this cycle, we must make a concerted effort to encourage fathers to participate in the education of kids. For too long, the Left’s cultural dominance has undermined the role of fathers in the lives of our children. But even many advocates for parental involvement in education haven’t sufficiently emphasized fathers’ importance.
Fathers must help instill the values in their children that will guide them throughout life. If we fail to do this, our kids will be molded instead by the bureaucrats who continue to exercise control over the education system. Do the same people who closed schools for two years really care about what’s best for our kids?
Now more than ever, it is time for fathers to step up and become advocates for parental involvement in education. Fathers must be the protectors our kids deserve, and this starts by shielding them from the pernicious influence of political ideology in the classroom. Though it is remarkable to see the success of the parental-choice movement in recent years, we cannot become complacent when there is so much work left to do. That work will be much easier and more effective if fathers pick up the mantle and help lead the way.
German Beastiality Buffs Demand Legalization Of Sex With Animals
Germans beastialitists are protesting to eliminate the country’s animal protection law – which forbids having any sexual relations between humans and animals.
To that end, Bavarian zoophiles held a public demonstration demanding recognition in a ‘Zoophilia Pride March.”
One of the protesters told Russia’s state-owned Ruptly that it’s possible to form a loving sexual relationship with animals – in fact, “it is much easier to build a relationship with animals than humans,” said the man who brought his dog.
Germany’s animal protection law prohibits any sex acts with animals, or supplying animals to those who wish to bury the bone in fido (or vice versa). Offenders face a stiff penalty of 25,000 euros (US$24,910).
Meanwhile in Australia, the upcoming “Festival of Dangerous Ideas” will host professor Joanna Burke, who will discuss the ethics of “humans loving animals,” according to The American Conservative.
The historian plans to present a modern history of sex between humans and animals and will invite audience members to look at the ‘changing meanings’ of bestiality and zoophilia and the ethics of ‘animal loving’.
‘It is only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality,’ the speaker is quoted on the website. ‘Are their arguments dangerous, perverted or simply wrongheaded?’
Outraged Australians took to social media to lash festival organisers for allowing a presentation they argued was intellectualising animal abuse.
‘Intellectualising about the abuse of animals isn’t edgy or cool.It IS abhorrent and anyone who attends this event is an immoral c***,’ another said.
Others took to Twitter to share their thoughts with the author and event organisers.
‘This is not about ‘loving animals.’ If you’re going to be heinous at least be honest. This is about abusing animals. Shame on anyone involved in this session,’ one said.
‘They are conflating having sex with animals with loving them. The first is not only unethical it is illegal,’ they tweeted.
The swift escalation of the feud between former President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) does not help inspire candidates or rally GOP voters in closely watched midterm races in swing states, some political strategists and analysts have told The Epoch Times. The Republican Party infighting may ultimately lead to more disappointing results in the midterms than have been predicted in recent months, unless party leaders can unite on the issues that the electorate cares about most to galvanize voters, they say.
Over the weekend, the former president and expected 2024 candidate sent out a fiery post on Truth Social, in which he called McConnell “a broken down hack politician” and denounced the senator’s perceived tendency “to openly disparage hard working Republican candidates for the United States Senate.”
“This is an affront to honor and to leadership,” Trump wrote, adding that McConnell “should spend more time (and money) helping them get elected” and less time helping his wife and family get “rich on China!”
McConnell’s wife is Elaine Chao, who served as Secretary of Transportation during the Trump administration. Trump’s post was in response to McConnell having cast doubt on the quality of Republican candidates in the primaries that have taken place in recent weeks and in the ongoing midterm races. On Aug. 17, McConnell said, in the course of remarks at a luncheon in Kentucky, “I think there’s probably a greater likelihood the House flips than the Senate. Senate races are just different—they’re statewide, quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”
McConnell went on to comment on what he sees as the likely razor-thin margins of victory for either side in November.
“Right now, we have a 50-50 Senate and a 50-50 country, but I think, when all is said and done this fall, we’re likely to have an extremely close Senate, either our side up slightly or their side up slightly.”
Trump may have been particularly sensitive to such comments given the close attention given to Senate races where insurgent candidates he has endorsed are competing against Democrats, such as in Pennsylvania, where TV personality Dr. Mehmet Oz is running against Democratic candidate John Fetterman for the seat vacated by Republican Sen. Pat Toomey; Ohio, where author and personality J.D. Vance seeks to defeat the Democratic nominee Rep. Tim Ryan; Arizona, where venture capitalist Blake Masters seeks to oust incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly; and Georgia, where former football star Hershel Walker (also endorsed by McConnell) is running against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.
Some of the GOP candidates are not doing nearly as well as hoped, according to recent polling. In Pennsylvania, a Trafalgar Group poll on Aug. 22 found Oz trailing Fetterman by nearly five points. In the Arizona race, the incumbent, Kelly, enjoys a nearly nine-point lead over Trump-endorsed Masters, according to FiveThirtyEight polling.
An Unneeded Distraction
The quarrel between Trump and McConnell is not only unnecessary, since the two politicians agree on more than they disagree on and both want to help defeat Democrats, but is also an increasing distraction from the issues of concern to ordinary voters. Public discontent with the Biden administration’s handling of economic and social matters could provide the groundwork for broad GOP victories in the absence of such a distraction, the analysts say.
“I think voters are more concerned about issues like inflation, immigration, and crime, they’re not sitting there saying ‘Oh my gosh, Donald Trump is disparaging Mitch McConnell’s wife,’” John Feehery, a strategist, commentator, and former press secretary to Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), told The Epoch Times.
Feehery finds it particularly ironic that, after having appointed Chao to a top cabinet position in 2017, Trump should single her out for criticism on the grounds of her involvement with her family’s business, Foremost Group, which has received financial support from Chinese state-run entities. Chao resigned her post five days after the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
“It’s ironic that he’s disparaging McConnell’s wife, because she worked for Trump for four years. If he had known that McConnell’s wife is so involved in this stuff, why did he have her in his employ for so long?” Feehery asked.
More importantly, Trump’s criticisms of McConnell are needlessly divisive and undermine the efforts that McConnell is making to help candidates in swing states where results may be extremely close, Feehery believes. Feehery contrasted the financial backing that McConnell has provided to candidates with the more symbolic support of an endorsement.
“Frankly, McConnell is spending time and resources to get Senate candidates elected. It’s not clear to me where Trump’s money is going. He’s clearly making bets, but is he making large financial investments? He’s giving his good name to these candidates and that means something, there’s no doubt about that. But McConnell is buying in, his Super PAC is going in, in a big way,” Feehery continued.
Economy Above All
From the candidates’ point of view, the most practical thing is not to take sides with either Trump or McConnell in their current tiff but to present themselves as unifiers—at least within the GOP—willing and able to take on the policies of the Biden administration on the issues of concern to the average voter, Feehery believes.
“I think it’s never a good thing when Republicans are fighting with one another. There also seems to be a spat going on between McConnell and Rick Scott,” the Florida senator, Feehery said.
Such disunity can deprive candidates on the ground of votes they badly need and may even contribute to a scenario where disaffected Republican leaders are actively helping the other side.
“You do have that. Liz Cheney and the Never Trump people, they’ve been trying to get people to vote against Republicans. She said terrible things against Josh Hawley, and said she couldn’t support Ted Cruz. She seems like someone who’d burn the party down on her way out,” Feehery said, alluding to Cheney’s recent remarks in which she said it would be “very difficult” for her to support Hawley or Cruz after they questioned the integrity of the 2020 election results.
The infighting does not help Republican candidates who want to portray themselves as in a strong position to fix an economy derailed by President Joe Biden, Feehery believes.
“I think the best thing these candidates can do is to keep their focus on Biden. The one thing that unites the party is Biden’s dismal performance,” he said.
Struggling Campaigns
Other observers and strategists echo the view that Republican candidates should keep their focus on Biden’s Achilles heel, namely inflation. Straying from the critical issues has been a tactical and logistical mistake, they argue.
“The Republicans are united in their criticisms of President Biden and the direction in which the Democrats want to take the country. Clearly, what they ought to do is circle the wagons and do the best they can” on economic issues, D. Stephen Voss, a professor in the political science department at the University of Kentucky, told The Epoch Times.
Given the widely criticized missteps of the Biden administration, and its association in the public mind with record inflation, the Senate races should not be as competitive as they are, Voss believes.
“Not only have Trump’s attacks on other Republicans weakened the unity of the Republican Party, but the party’s organizations have had to spend massive amounts of election money in the primaries trying to hold off fairly weak candidates so that they could retake the senate,” Voss said.
“So already, this clash between the Trump movement and the Republican establishment has hurt the party’s resources by causing campaign resources to dwindle,” he added.
The infighting and a potential backlash against Trump could have bad practical consequences on the field, including disappointing results for Trump-endorsed candidates in swing states at a time when control of the Senate hangs in the balance, Voss believes.
“The race everyone’s talking about now is Pennsylvania, where Dr. Oz received the nomination but now his campaign might end up costing the GOP a Senate seat that should have been theirs. We’re seeing how badly Oz is starting to trail in the polls. Oz is underperforming and may not get that seat,” he added.
A similar phenomenon is at work in Ohio, where J.D. Vance currently looks weaker than an insurgent GOP Senate candidate in the state should look at this juncture, Voss said.
Other examples abound. Normally, a popular GOP Senate candidate in Georgia would be doing quite well in the polls, given the political composition of the Georgia electorate and given how opposition parties historically have performed during midterms. But Voss called the Georgia race “one of McConnell’s headaches.” Voss also pointed to the Arizona Senate race, where Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly may end up handily defeating the GOP insurgent in what should have been a much more competitive race.
Again, the possible results run counter to trusted historical models going back to the presidency of John F. Kennedy, Jr.
“The party that holds the White House has not gained more than two Senate seats since JFK, yet the forecast now suggests that the Democrats could gain two or more seats. Prospects for the Republicans taking the Senate are poor, despite the fact that the president is unpopular,” Voss said.
“You can’t blame Trump for this. Having unexpected candidacies has hurt the Republican Party, but so has the ruling on abortion, which has whipped up Democrat voters,” he added.
David Carlucci, a former New York State senator who now works as a political commentator, also believes that the disunity is hurting the Republican candidates, and that the divides may grow as some who received Trump’s support during the primary races may now seek to identify more closely with McConnell.
“Historically, the minority party, or the party opposing the president, does well in the midterms. And with all the criticism that the Democrats are getting, the Senate Republicans should be doing a lot better. But because they’ve endorsed these subpar candidates, things like this are eating away at the candidacies and giving Democrats a much better chance than they had before. McConnell was fun and easy to attack in the primary, but now they’re going to be sprinting to him,” Carlucci said.
McConnell Lowering Expectations
Keith Naughton, president of Silent Majority Strategies, a consultancy based in Germantown, Maryland, concurs about the political costs of the lack of Republican unity.
China Launches Giant Cloud-Seeding Drones To Combat Record Drought
With China’s water supply rapidly deteriorating to catastrophic levels – something which could have profound effects on the global food, energy and materials markets – officials in the southwestern province of Sichuan have deployed two giant cloud-seeding drones in the hopes of turning around a dire situation which is now affecting hydropower production.
The Wing Loong-2H UAVs are deploying silver iodide flame bars during four-hour flights to create “artificial rain.”
The move comes as almost half the country is suffering from a record heatwave, according to its National Climate Center – has has affected Sichuan province’s ability to deliver hydropower to cities like Jiangsu and Shanghi, located more than 1,000 miles away, Insider reports.
To improve the situation, the two drones deployed on Thursday will eventually cover an area in Sichuan spanning 2,317 square miles, according to state-owned CCTV. The cloud seeding operation will be carried out until Monday.
Communist Party-owned People’s Daily also reported the news.
China on Thursday used its self-developed Wing Loong-2H UAV to assist fight against drought in SW China’s Sichuan. The drone ignited 20 silver iodide flame bars during its 4-hour flight to create “artificial rain” for the drought-hit region. pic.twitter.com/BhMkuWm0GW
Since the beginning of the month, hydropower plants in Sichuan have been forced to operate below 50% of normal capacity, leading to power cuts in the province and forcing companies like Toyota and Apple supplier Foxconn to suspend operations, according to Caixin news.
In some instances, groundwater levels have gotten so low that underground aquifers have collapsed – triggering a phenomenon called Land Subsidence, which can cause the ground to cave in over large areas, which in some case renders the aquifer unusable in the future.
The drought has also damaged crops and threatened the fall harvest, forcing China to compete for exports in an already-inflated market. As we noted earlier this week, 60% of China’s wheat, 45% of its corn, 35% of its cotton and 64% of its peanuts come from the at-risk North China Plain – where, in the example of wheat, their annual production of more than 80 million tons is on par with Russia’s annual output, while their 125 million tons of corn is nearly 3x Ukraine’s prewar production.
In order to sustain these harvests, water is being pumped to farms faster than nature can replenish it. According to satellite data, between 2003 and 2010, Northern China lost as much groundwater as Beijing consumes annually – leaving farmers struggling to find new sources.
“In order to sustain these harvests, water is being pumped to farms faster than nature can replenish it. According to satellite data, between 2003 and 2010, Northern China lost as much groundwater as Beijing consumes annually – leaving farmers struggling to find new sources.
Peer-reviewed scientific publishing works like this: a scientist or a science team have a scientific question, they come together to design and conduct an experiment to try to answer that question. The experiment may take months, years, or even decades. Once the scientists have collected and analyzed the experiment’s results, they write up their findings, and draw conclusions based on the already accepted knowledge in the field, their new discovery, and their educated speculations of what is yet to be known. Then they send their article to scientific journals within their field of study.
When a journal editor receives the article, the editor reads it carefully and either rejects it or sends it out to other known experts in the field, who were not involved with the study, to review the findings and the write-up. Once these experts weigh in, the editor then makes the decision about whether to reject the paper or to accept it, in most cases, with notes for the authors to revise their submission.
Peer-reviewers will often ask the researchers insightful questions or query parts of the findings in the paper. These queries help the researchers refine their ideas, review their findings, and double check that their data, and their analyses, are correct.
This sometimes quite lengthy peer-review process is to ensure that journals publish scientific articles that make a real contribution to our understanding to the field, whether it’s chemistry, biology, physics, social science, or any other subject.
Good science is work that has a high level of integrity and transparency, is conducted in an unbiased way, and leads to findings that can be replicated by other scientists.
Bad science is often ego-driven or industry-sponsored: published not for the good of advancing knowledge or helping people, but to mislead the public, often for financial gain. For-profit industries have and continue to use bad science to convince consumers to buy their products.
Junk Science
Recent history shows how “junk science” can have negative repercussions that harm human and planetary health.
In 1948 a husband-wife team at Harvard University, Olive Watkins Smith and George Van Siclen Smith, published an article that asserted that a synthetic hormone diethylstilbestrol (DES) not only prevented miscarriage but also made a normal pregnancy “more normal.” Drug manufacturers copied and distributed the Smiths’ study to thousands of medical doctors to encourage them to prescribe DES. The Harvard research was shoddy at best: they used a sample size of pregnant women that was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions and had no control group. The Smiths also failed to disclose that their research was funded by the drug industry. Largely based on this junk science, an estimated 5 to 10 million pregnant women in America took DES. Yet DES was neither helpful nor benign. It caused miscarriages and an aggressive hormone-induced reproductive cancer in teens whose moms had taken it. DES was banned for use in pregnancy in 1971.
Starting in the 1950s the tobacco industry began a sophisticated public relations campaign to counteract the peer-reviewed science that showed that smoking was harmful to human health. Though it was known by 1953 that smoking caused lung cancer, industry-sponsored science so effectively muddied the scientific waters that the connection was not acknowledged by public health authorities until the early 1990s.
In the 1990s, when biologist Tyrone Hayes found out that a common pesticide, atrazine, was so endocrine-disrupting that it turned male frogs into females, Syngenta, the company that makes the pesticide, did everything it could to keep this information from the public. Two class-action lawsuits revealed that Syngenta had the goal of publicly discrediting the scientist’s reputation in order to make environmentalists question the validity of his research. Publishing poorly designed studies that could not be replicated was an effective strategy to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating their $14 billion a year pesticide and seed sales. In 2014, as reported by The New Yorker, Syngenta was giving research money to 400 academic institutions around the world.
‘Sneer-Review’
The research that scientists publish affects their job prospects, livelihood, reputation, and even friendships. Given the explosion of scientific publications, it is easy to see how the peer-review process can go awry.
The Epoch Times spoke with a professor who spent more than 25 years in a top 10 medical school. This scientist did not want to be named for fear of reprisals.
“I call it sneer review,” the scientist said. “There is tremendous bias. Reviewers ignore data that doesn’t fit with what they already believe.”
The scientist said that certain fields have fewer problems with special interests than others, and certain topics—including the safety of modern medicine and, especially, the safety of vaccines—tend to push ideological buttons.
“The idea in science should be that we just push towards finding out the answer. We have a hypothesis, we ask questions, we test the hypotheses, we collect more data,” this scientist said. “That’s how we move forward. But when it gets polarized, the sneer-review phenomenon starts to happen. Then it becomes a more ideological confrontation.”
“People will try to publish total nonsense for ideological reasons,” the scientist added.
When Ideology Drives Decisions
When peer-reviewed studies have the potential to harm multi-billion-dollar industries, they often get retracted, several scientists told The Epoch Times.
It is especially difficult to publish research that calls vaccine safety into question in the first place, Lyons-Weiler said, and these studies are often summarily retracted by controversy-adverse editors.
“They tend to be retracted after critique by anonymous critics,” Lyons-Weiler said. “This is a problematic new development. The journals are retracting based on criticism from anonymous reviewers, instead of publishing the critique and allowing the authors to rebut. That means the critics’ comments are not peer-reviewed.”
A Danish medical doctor who worked for the pharmaceutical industry for almost a decade, Peter Gøtzsche saw firsthand how his bosses would manipulate data that did not fit their industry agenda. Largely as a result of that frustration, Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, a non-profit initiative with an explicit goal to keep bias out of science.
For years the Cochrane Collaboration was considered the gold standard of unbiased information and Gøtzsche, who himself published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and eight books, hailed as a crusader for scientific integrity.
In September of 2018, however, Gøtzsche was voted off Cochrane’s board (six in favor, five opposed, one abstention). This move led four board members to resign in protest. He was also fired from his position as director of the Nordic Cochrane Center and suspended from the hospital where he worked.
Gøtzsche told journalist and documentary filmmaker Bert Ehgartner that he believed his dismissal was because he and two co-authors criticized a Cochrane review that found “high-certainty evidence” that a vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV) protected women and girls from cervical precancer. Gøtzsche critiqued the review, pointing out that Cochrane had excluded almost half the trials and ignored glaring safety signals about the vaccine.
A hero of scientific integrity to many, Gøtzsche is now being ostracized by his colleagues and characterized as “an industry scold.”
“Eliminate Dead Zones”: Elon Musk Partners With T-Mobile For New Satellite-To-Cell-Service
Elon Musk’s SpaceX teamed up with T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert to beam cell service via Starlink satellites to “most places in the US,” including more than half a million square miles of dead zone areas that aren’t covered by cellular networks.
The two companies would create a new mobile network to broadcast T-Mobile’s existing mid-band spectrum via Starlink satellites to anywhere in the continental US, Hawaii, parts of Alaska, and Puerto Rico.
SpaceX and T-Mobile wrote in a press release that the new network would “provide near complete coverage in most places in the US — even in many of the most remote locations previously unreachable by traditional cell signals.”
Musk tweeted that the new service, launching in 2023, will “eliminate dead zones worldwide.”
Starlink V2, launching next year, will transmit direct to mobile phones, eliminating dead zones worldwide
Bloomberg explained how the new satellite-to-cellular service would work through powerful antennas attached to upgraded Starlink satellites:
The new network will be accessible thanks to large, powerful antennas attached to Starlink satellites. Musk said each antenna would measure some 25 square meters (269 square feet) and be “extremely advanced because they’ve got to pick up a very quiet signal from your cell phone and then be caught by a satellite that’s traveling 17,000 miles an hour.” The T-Mobile service will run in a similar way to data roaming, where a user’s mobile will scan for service and if it finds none it will connect to the satellite.
Musk, at an unveiling event at SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, along with T-Mobile Sievert, on Thursday evening, gave an “open invitation to carriers around the world” about adding the new service.
Bloomberg noted that most smartphones are already equipped with technology to beam a signal to space so that additional equipment won’t be required.
But there are limitations, and the main issue is bandwidth, as Bloomberg pointed out:
The main issue is bandwidth, which will at first limit the service to text messaging. The coverage area will be divided into large cell zones, with each zone’s connectivity limited to around 2-4 MBs. Musk said that would allow for some 1,000-2,000 voice calls per cell, or millions of text messages, but the service would not provide a substitute for ground cell stations.
“This is really meant to provide basic coverage to areas that are currently completely dead,” Musk said, adding there could initially be a delay of “half an hour, maybe worse” for messages to pass through the system.
Testing for the new satellite-to-cellular service is expected later this year after SpaceX launches the new satellites into low Earth orbit.
California’s precariously out-of-date hybrid power grid can’t handle the state’s growing amounts of solar and wind energy coming online, with system managers already forcing repeated cutbacks in renewables and a continued reliance on conventional energy to keep the grid stable, according to state data.
The shortcomings of the transmission grid, which energy consultants in this bellwether state have warned about for years, raise the prospect that marquee products of the growing battery economy such as electric vehicles – “emission free” on the road – will be recharged mainly from traditional electricity-generating power plants: energy from fossil fuels, some of it from out of state.
Writ large, the transmission problem threatens the zero-carbon future envisioned by green advocates nationwide. “We’re headed toward duplicate systems whose only benefit is to permit the occasional use of ‘clean power,’” said Grant Ellis, an independent electrical engineering consultant in Texas.
California, along with the rest of the desert Southwest, is adding solar and wind installations at a rapid pace. The state is projected to add four gigawatts of utility-scale solar energy this year alone, enough to power 2.8 million homes. The question is whether that’s going to be enough.
So-called “curtailments” of renewable power have become much more frequent for the state’s blackout-prone power grid because the state hasn’t constructed enough transmission lines, transformers, poles, and other infrastructure to keep up. The amount of renewable energy curtailed in California tripled between 2018 and 2021, according to operator statistics.
On top of the conventional power often deployed in its stead, that renewable power was thus wasted, since there is no place yet to store it. The state curtailed 596,175 megawatt hours in April, or 596,175 million kilowatt hours, according to several calculators. With 10,715 kilowatt hours the average annual electric consumption of a home in the U.S. in 2020, as calculated by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, California’s curtailed wind and solar energy in April could power 55,000 homes for a year.
The cutbacks mean that electric power generation falls back on nuclear and hydroelectric power, natural gas, and other more traditional sources, which provided nearly 60% of California’s electric generation last year.
The state also imported 30% of its electric energy last year from other states– 9.5% of it from coal, most of it from the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.
The curtailments come at a crucial time in what the Biden administration insists is a “transition” from a fossil fuel-driven country to one that relies on renewable energy to save the planet from what believers warn will be a climate-change disaster.
Eric O’Shaughnessy, a renewable energy consultant who has worked with the federally funded Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, blames a stalemate between renewable energy providers and electric system operators over who will pay for any infrastructure buildout.
“The system operators say, ‘We need this huge investment, and you are going to have to pay it,’ and the solar developer believes everyone should pay,” O’Shaughnessy said. Then politics comes into play “and that project gets shelved.”
The government’s answer is more taxpayer funding for transmission, although it will take at least 10-15 years to develop a new project, according to the Transmission Agency of Northern California, a group of publicly owned utilities in the state.
The messy process of connecting solar and wind plants to the grid is made more complicated by a maze of committees, panels, and lawyers that need to weigh in on the specifics of each project.
“If an energy company in California wants a transmission line, it has to go to a public utility to build it, and to the California Energy Commission and a bunch of other commissions,” said Rajat Deb of energy consultant LCG. “And the cities also have to approve in some cases, so it takes all that to get a transmission line. That’s a lot of hoopla you have to go through.”
There is less resistance to building individual solar plants in distinct locations than to transmission lines, often due to the wider geography needed for the latter. And so more solar plants get built while transmission projects languish.
Still, the state aims to have a carbon-free electric grid by 2045,a goal set before President Biden took office and declared 2035 as a national objective. With its goal in mind, California has imposed restrictions and requirements that have adversely impacted businesses, home builders, and car makers as well as taxpayers, who pay the highest prices for fuel and the third highest rate for electricity in the U.S., behind Hawaii and Alaska. Electricity prices for residential customers in California have increased 19% in the past year compared with 7% nationally.
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a 2020 executive order mandating that by 2035, all new vehicles sold in the state must be zero-emission. If that goal is reached, it would add a crushing demand to the state’s electric grid, according to some projection models.
With multibillion-dollar development of massive wind farms and solar plants outpacing transmission capacity, the number of miles of new high-voltage transmission has declined over the last decade from an annual average of 2,000 miles nationally from 2012-2016 to an average of just 700 miles from 2017-2021, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
A report issued by the department this year, titled “Queued Up…But in Need of Transmission,” acknowledges the problem: “A large amount of potential clean power capacity is struggling with the wait times and costs of connecting to the transmission grid. …”
The Energy Department’s advocacy of de-carbonization includes technical reviews by representatives of big solar concerns as well as big oil corporations, most of the latter of whom also are investing in renewables.
The department declined an interview request, but Becca Jones-Albertus, director of its Solar Energy Technologies Office, wrote in an email exchange: “DOE is working to improve transmission through the Better Grid initiative, and there are other tools available now to alleviate the long wait times and costs associated with connecting to the grid.”
Jones-Albertus was referring to the Building a Better Grid program, launched in January as part of $20 billion in federal funding for upgrading and developing transmission nationwide. She did not respond to a question regarding the nation’s longstanding lack of ability to transmit solar and wind energy.
Jones-Albertus also downplayed the necessity of transmission in meeting the current government’s green goals.
“While transmission expansion takes time, energy storage, active generation management, and demand flexibility are ready for deployment to help the nation achieve an emission-free electricity grid by 2035 without increasing energy prices,” Jones-Albertus said in the email. She was referring to the Biden administration’s nationwide push for “carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035,” according to a 2021 executive order from the White House.
Encouraged by green advocates, state and federal lawmakers have plowed money into renewable sectors with grants, tax breaks, loans, and other funding mechanisms while often leaving the “how to” of energy transmission to fend for itself.
This year transmission got more funding, including $2 billion in loans for infrastructure in the Democrats’ newly enacted Inflation Reduction Act.
Today, 61% of electricity in the U.S. comes from coal, petroleum, natural gas, and other sources. Without transmission resources – power lines that cut through swaths of land, both public and private, or the much more expensive underground cables – there is little chance of a dramatic reduction of fossil fuel electricity.
The recent rush into renewables has created a situation where solar and wind developers can end up with plants that have to wait a minimum of three years before securing approval to sell energy.
“There are a lot of renewable projects waiting in these lines requesting to connect to the system and they are not getting connected,” said Elise Caplan, director of electricity at the American Council on Renewable Energy.
“The vast majority of transmission has been local,” Caplan added. “The U.S. has done a bad job of building these critical larger-scale [projects].” Her group is among a growing number of renewable energy advocates asking the feds to examine the transmission problem at the local level.
Rajat Deb, the LCG consultant, voiced the frustration of green advocates.
“I am an environmentalist in my heart and the biggest problem we have right now is global warming,” he said. “I have been working on this for 40 years and nothing happens. And while they are talking about this, all these [non-governmental agencies] are making money and the state and federal government is spending money. Where is that going?”
The United States often ranks as one of the best countries to start a business in, but, as Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop details below, the ease with which one can do business varies state by state. There are many considerations that factor into starting a business like the available workforce, the condition of local infrastructure, access to investors, a culture that’s open to business, and so on.
This map ranks America’s best states to do business in based on a study from CNBC which measured 88 factors across 10 broad categories.
Methodology
Here is a further breakdown of the weight given to each of the 10 categories:
The Most Business Friendly States
North Carolina—coming in first place in the ranking—attracts an extremely talented and innovative workforce, largely thanks to the state’s investment in its Research Triangle Regional Partnership (RTRP).
Notably, there are three ties in the ranking: New York and South Carolina had the same score, tying for 36th, Connecticut and Nevada tied for 39th, and Hawaii and New Mexico tied for 46th.
Other states ranking high on the list are Washington, Virginia, and Colorado. One of the newest individual metrics CNBC took into consideration was an openness to the cannabis industry, likely playing into Colorado’s move up from 8th to 4th compared to last year.
Some states that perhaps surprisingly don’t crack the top 10 include California and New York, both often considered centers of finance and entrepreneurship. But with the high costs of living and of starting a business in those states, their overall score is reduced.
A Look at the Scoring — North Carolina, California, and Nevada
To better understand how this ranking works we’ve broken down three different states and how they ranked in all 10 categories that gave them their overall spot. Here’s a brief look at their place in each category:
While North Carolina is the number one state to do business in and has an extremely strong economy, they are 26th when it comes to the Cost of Doing Business.
Whereas California ranks low overall, the state ranks first in terms of Technology and Innovation, as well as Access to Capital.
Although Nevada scored highly in the Infrastructure and Business Friendliness categories, the state scored poorly in Technology and Innovation, and was dead last in the Education category.
Doing Business in America
New business applications have actually decreased 4% this year in comparison to the same timeframe in 2021.
Here’s a look at new business applications by region as of July 2022:
Northeast: 63,058
Midwest: 70,827
South: 197,663
West: 94,150
New business applications in July were the highest in the retail trade industry, numbering around 69,000 new applications, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Applications for professional service businesses were the second highest at 53,000, followed closely by construction businesses at 43,000.
Here’s a closer look at the industry breakdown:
A potential looming recession, alongside rising interest rates and inflation, may be creating a sense of cautiousness among businesspeople, leading to the lower rate of business applications compared to last year. And, at existing companies, the economic situation has lead to cuts in growth forecasts and subsequently, major layoffs.
But overall, the U.S. is a country which values entrepreneurship—even during the pandemic, massive spikes in new business formations were recorded—and certain industries and states will continue to flourish in any business environment.
