Mon, 8/27/2018, 2PM (CT) on 90.1FM. POSSIBLE TOPICS: Harris Cty Flood Control Bond Passes Amid Low Turnout, 1 Year After Harvey, Half-staff Flag Blip at WH, New ‘NAFTA”?, MORE. SUPPORT KPFT. GUESTS: Open Forum [AUDIO/VIDEO] SUPPORT @KPFTHouston. GUESTS: Open Forum [AUDIO/VIDEO] @KPFTHouston

2. Harris County voters overwhelmingly approve $2.5B flood-mitigation bond proposition, By Olivia Pulsinelli – Senior web editor, Houston Business Journal | Aug 25, 2018, 7:28pm CDT

With 100 percent of precincts had reported results from the Aug. 25 special election and 64 percent of voters approved the proposition.
MIKE: 85.64% approval sounds impressive. But only 6.66% of eligible voters participated in this bond election, meaning that 5.7% of eligible voters turned out or mailed in ballots for this critically important “stealth” election.
According to a list created by the Harris County Flood Control District, the bond program is intended to support projects such as:
1. Channel modifications to improve stormwater conveyance
2. Regional stormwater detention basins
3. Major repairs to flood-damaged drainage infrastructure
4. Removing large amounts of sediment and silt from drainage channels
5. Voluntary buyouts of flood-prone properties
6. Wetland mitigation banks
7. Property acquisition for preserving the natural floodplains
8. Drainage improvements made in partnership with other cities, utility districts, or other local government agencies
9. Upgrading the Harris County Flood Warning System
10. Click here to see a full list of proposed projects, which was finalized Aug. 6 and approved by the Harris County Commissioners Court Aug. 14. The list of 237 projects includes 38 that were added thanks to community engagement meetings. Some of the projects will be supported by local, state or federal funding partners, as well.
Nearly 10 percent of Texans displaced by Harvey still haven’t gone home, survey says, by Brandon Formby – Meanwhile, 15 percent of homes damaged or destroyed by the storm are still unlivable. Yet FEMA and Texas officials aren’t keeping track of how many people remain displaced one year later, by Brandon Formby 23, 20182 AM | TexasTribune |Aug. 23, 2018
1. One year after Hurricane Harvey slammed the Texas coast, 8 percent of the people impacted by the disaster have not been able to return to their homes, according to a report from two nonprofits that surveyed Texans about how the storm affected their finances, health and living conditions.
2. Fifteen percent of the hundreds of thousands of homes damaged by the storm are still unlivable. And of the 1,651 people from 24 counties who answered the survey, 30 percent of those impacted by the storm said their lives are still “somewhat” or “very” disrupted by the devastating storm’s lingering damage….
White House Flags Return To Full Staff Less Than 48 Hours After John McCain’s Death – Flags remained lowered at the U.S. Capitol in honor of the late Arizona senator, By Hayley Miller | HUFFINGTON POST | 08/27/2018 09:51 am ET Updated 27 minutes ago
1. The White House was operating under a protocol of keeping the flag at half-staff for a day and a half following the death of a sitting member of Congress. Anything beyond that would require a presidential proclamation ― a relatively simple order to draft but one that President Donald Trump does not appear to have much interest in.
2. Presidents typically issue a proclamation when a high-profile figure dies, ordering all public buildings and military bases to fly the U.S. flag at half-staff until the day of interment. Trump did not issue a proclamation for McCain, whose body will be laid to rest Sunday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
3. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who controls the Capitol’s flags, told HuffPost in an email Monday that the flags “will remain lowered through the day of internment (sic).” …
I’m not going to discuss the Jacksonville shooting except to say “TOO MANY GUNS! Thanks Putin and the NRA!
1. Jacksonville deadly shooting: Livestream shows red dot on player’s chest, abc7chicago.com
Trump announces separate U.S.-Mexico trade agreement, says Canada may join later, By David J. Lynch, Reporter & Damian Paletta , Reporter & Erica Werner, Reporter | WASHINGTON POST – August 27 at 12:30 PM
1. Trump announced Monday that the United States has reached agreement with Mexico on a new trade deal that he declared will not be called NAFTA — a name he said has bad connotations.
2. Canada might or might not be part of the new deal, Trump said — a startling suggestion that would represent the biggest change yet in U.S. trade policy under the Trump administration, if Trump indeed rips up the North American Free Trade Agreement and replaces it with a bilateral deal with Mexico.
3. The agreement reached Monday was narrowly focused on auto manufacturing. But the president said that the limited agreement with Mexico could supplant NAFTA. …
2017 was a great year for CEOs. Not so much for the average worker – A new study shows that CEOs made about 312 times more money in 2017 than the average worker, By Alexia Fernández Campbell@AlexiaCampbellalexia@vox.com Aug 16, 2018, 11:10am EDT
1. Earnings for the top executives at America’s largest companies skyrocketed in 2017, while wages for the average worker hardly budged.
2. CEOs for the 350 largest US companies earned an average pay of $18.9 million in 2017, a sharp 17 percent increase from the previous year, according to a new study by the left leaning Economic Policy Institute. These estimates include salaries, bonuses, restricted stock grants, cashed-in company stock, and other forms of compensation for chief executives at those firms. Meanwhile, wages for the average US worker grew a paltry 0.2 percent during that time.
3. This means that the CEOs made about 312 times more money than the average worker last year — an even larger gap than in 2016, when they made 270 times more money, according to EPI. But even more shocking is how much the gap has widened in the past 50 years: In 1965, CEOs earned only 20 times more than the average worker. …
4. … there is another theory, which [the author] think is more persuasive: Starting with the Reagan tax cuts passed the 1980s, CEOs have more incentive than ever to inflate their pay.
5. Vox’s Ezra Klein puts it this way:
6. “Consider that for much of the post–World War II era, paying your CEO a lot of money didn’t make much sense because the government would simply tax it all away. Top marginal tax rates on income were above 90 percent. President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts sent those top rates tumbling, and so a CEO who could negotiate a much bigger salary could also keep a much bigger salary.”
7. [Also] Capital gains tax rates, which tax income earned from stocks, have also plummeted since then. …
8. MIKE: IN A CHART WITH THE ARTICLE, YOU CAN SEE THAT INCREASES CLIMB SIGNIFICANTLY THROUGH THE 1980s AND THEN TAKE OFF THROUGH THE 1990s AND BEYOND
In victory for unions, judge overturns key parts of Trump executive orders, By Lisa Rein, Reporter |WASHINGTON POST | August 25, 2018
1. Unions representing federal workers on Saturday declared victory in what they have described as an assault by the Trump administration after a federal judge struck down key provisions of a set of executive orders aimed at making it easier to fire employees and weaken their representation.
2. The ruling, by [Obama-appointed] U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, was a setback to the White House’s efforts to rein in federal unions, which have retained significant power over working conditions even as private-sector unions are in decline.
3. “It’s a big win for us,” said David Borer, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees. With 750,000 members, the AFGE was the largest of about a dozen unions to sue the administration to block the new rules affecting 2.1 million civil servants.
4. The AFGE and the other plaintiffs plan to demand that the administration immediately reverse the new rules, which were issued just before Memorial Day and had begun to take effect in several agencies.
5. In a 122-page decision, Jackson … took issue with key elements of each order and immediately barred the administration from enacting them. …
6. “They’re going to have to unwind what they’ve already done,” [AFGE general counsel David] Borer said. …
Jeff Bezos’s $150 Billion Fortune Is a Policy Failure – Growing inequality in the United States shows that the game is rigged, By Annie Lowrey | THEATLANTIC.com | Aug 1, 2018
1. Last month, Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, has accumulated a fortune worth $150 billion. That is the biggest nominal amount in modern history …
2. … Bezos is the world’s lone hectobillionaire. He is worth what the average American family is, nearly two million times He has about 50 percent more money than Bill Gates, twice as much as Mark Zuckerberg, [and] 50 times as much as Oprah …
3. …He needs to spend roughly $28 million a day just to keep from accumulating more wealth. …
4. … Bezos has argued that there is not enough philanthropic need on earth for him to spend his billions on. (The Amazon founder, unlike Gates or Zuckerberg, has given away only a tiny fraction of his fortune.) “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” he said this spring. “I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.”
5. In contrast, half of Amazon’s employees make less than $28,446 a year, per the company’s legal filings.* …
6. … Amazon itself paid no federal corporate income taxes last year, despite making billions of dollars in profits. It has fought tooth-and-nail against state and local taxes, and has successfully cajoled cities into promising it billions and billions and billions in write-offs and investment incentives in exchange for placing jobs there. (Given that Bezos is a major Amazon shareholder, such tax-dodging redounds directly to his benefit.) …
7. … The result of these decades of trends and policy choices is that Jeff Bezos has accumulated a $150 billion fortune while the average American family is poorer than it was when the Great Recession hit. Concerns about such astonishing levels of inequality are not just about fairness, nor are they just sour-grapesing about runaway success. The point is not that Jeff Bezos himself has done wrong by accumulating such wealth, or creating such profitable and world-changing businesses. But wealth concentration is bad for the economy and the country itself, and the government has failed to counter it. Rising inequality fuels political polarization and partisan gridlock. It slows economic growth, and implies a lack of competition that fuels economic sclerosis. It makes the government less responsive to the demands of normal people, potentially putting our very democracy at risk. Bezos’s extraordinary fortune shows that the game is rigged. He just happened to play it better than anyone else.
Some Bacteria Are Becoming ‘More Tolerant’ Of Hand Sanitizers, Study Finds, By Melody Schreiber [NPR.org] August 2, 20184:22 PM ET
1. In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
2. But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
3. In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
4. But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
5. In particular, enterococcal infections — caused by bacteria that affect the digestive tract, bladder, heart and other parts of the body — started increasing.
6. This wasn’t only happening in Australia. Countries around the world saw rises in this type of infection even as hand sanitizer became more popular. Globally, enterococci make up ten percent of bacterial infections acquired in the hospital. In North America and Europe, they are a leading cause of sepsis, a deadly blood infection.
7. Now, researchers say, they may have found the cause. Blame it on the alcohol.
8. New research published by Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday shows that several strains of these bacteria have begun adjusting to alcohol-based hand sanitizers. They’re not resistant to the alcohol — at least, not yet — but they’re becoming “more tolerant” of it, the authors write. That means the bacteria were able to survive for longer periods of time after being doused with alcohol.
9. The researchers used different strengths of alcohol concentrations to combat the bacteria, starting with 23 percent. Eventually, at a 70-percent alcohol mixture, the bacteria were conquered. Typically, hand sanitizers are 60 percent alcohol.
10. To make matters worse, many of these alcohol-tolerant bacteria are resistant to multiple drugs as well. Half of the strains the researchers studied cannot be treated with vancomycin, a last-line antibiotic. That means the bacteria are spreading more easily within hospitals, and there aren’t many options for treatment.
11. The researchers were surprised by their findings.
12. “To our knowledge this was the first time anyone had shown hospital bacteria becoming tolerant to alcohols,” says Timothy Stinear, a coauthor of the study and a researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. …
13. … Health-care institutions trying to control the spread of these infections will need to “adhere rigorously to hand-hygiene protocols,” Stinear says — and probably institute additional measures to stop the spread, such as increased hand-washing with soap after coming into contact with the bacteria. …
14. … Lance Price, a professor at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health and the founding director of GW’s Antibiotic Resistance Action Center, was also surprised by the findings. … “If you’re washing your hands less because that alcohol-based hand sanitizer makes you feel confident that your hands are clean,” Price says, “all of a sudden you can become a vehicle for alcohol-resistant organisms.”
15. The research is still clear that alcohol-based hand sanitizers are more effective at battling some bacteria, like those causing staph infections. However, this study indicates that other bacteria are best cleaned off with simple soap and water.
16. “It’s the physical action of lifting and moving them off your skin, and letting them run down the drain,” Price says.
17. “We have to be careful about this new trend towards heavy reliance on alcohol-based hand sanitizers,” Price continues. “Soap and water should be our number-one protection” — both in hospitals and for personal use….
New Drug Wipes Out Malaria In A Single Dose — But There’s One Hitch, by Michaeleen Doucleff [NPR.org] July 26, 20181:02 PM ET
1. The world now has a potent, new weapon against malaria — one that can wipe out the parasite from a person’s body with a single dose.
2. But before many people around the world can use it, scientists have to overcome a big obstacle. …
3. … In certain people, tafenoquine can cause red blood cells to burst open and die. As a result, people can become anemic, and in some instances, this can be lethal.
4. Here in the U.S., there is a lab test available to see which people will respond poorly to Krintafel. It’s called a “G6PD” test. The FDA and the World Health Organization require a health care worker to give this test before prescribing tafenoquine or other similar drugs.
5. Right now, this test requires expensive machinery and a high level of expertise to run it, Domingo says.
6. “It requires the kind of laboratory facilities that are not available where most people with malaria seek care,” he says.
7. But Domingo and his colleagues are trying to change that. Over the past few years, several companies and nonprofits have been working together to develop an affordable, easy-to-use test that runs off a battery. …
8. … In terms of cost, GlaxoSmithKline and Medicines for Malaria Venture say it’s too early to say how much tafenoquine will cost in poor countries.
9. “[We] are committed to making tafenoquine accessible and affordable on a not-for-profit basis to those who need it most,” a spokesperson for GlaxoSmithKline wrote in an email to NPR. “A shared goal is for the cost of tafenoquine not to be a barrier to access.”
Meteor Explodes with 2.1 Kilotons of Force 25 Miles Above US Air Force Base in Greenland, By Jack Phillips [TheEPOCHTIMES.COM] August 3, 2018 Last Updated: August 3, 2018
1. A meteor exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force above a U.S. Air Force base in July, but the military has made no mention of the event, according to reports.
2. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that a meteor exploded 26 miles above U.S. Air Base Thule on July 25. It was detected by … the early missile warning radar at Thule Air Base, The Aviationist reported on Aug. 3.
3. The Aviationist’s Tom Demerly, … reported on the incident, [and] wrote in an analysis that it’s concerning because there was no public warning from the U.S. government about the meteor blast. “Had it entered at a more perpendicular angle, it would have struck the earth with significantly greater force,” he wrote.
4. [As of August 3,] The Air Force has remained silent about the incident.
5. MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES

MAJOR FOREIGN HOLDERS OF TREASURY SECURITIES (in billions of dollars)

HOLDINGS 1/ AT END OF PERIOD

May Apr Mar Feb Jan Dec Nov Oct Sep

Country 2018 2018 2018 2018 2018 2017 2017 2017 2017

China, Mainland 1183.1 1181.9 1187.7 1176.7 1168.2 1184.9 1176.6 1189.2 1182.3 1201.7 1166.9 1146.5 1102.2

Japan 1048.8 1031.2 1043.5 1059.5 1065.8 1061.5 1084.1 1094.0 1096.0 1101.7 1113.3 1090.3 1111.5

Ireland 301.0 300.4 317.9 314.0 327.5 326.5 324.3 312.4 310.6 309.0 312.3 304.4 297.8

Brazil 299.2 294.1 286.0 272.9 265.7 256.8 265.3 270.0 272.8 273.6 271.9 269.7 269.7

United Kingdom 265.0 262.7 263.7 250.5 243.3 250.0 237.5 225.9 237.4 225.0 229.6 236.0 236.4

Switzerland 243.4 242.2 245.4 248.0 251.1 249.6 250.9 254.0 253.3 248.2 244.5 244.1 239.4

Luxembourg 209.1 213.9 221.6 218.6 220.9 217.6 218.3 217.9 213.9 213.3 213.0 211.6 208.0

Hong Kong 191.7 194.0 196.2 196.5 194.1 194.7 194.9 192.3 194.4 194.5 196.7 201.1 196.6

Cayman Islands 185.8 180.7 165.5 176.9 168.0 170.6 240.4 247.2 246.9 242.9 240.5 249.3 250.1

Taiwan 164.8 168.1 170.1 170.7 175.4 180.9 179.9 181.7 183.9 182.0 184.1 185.9 181.2

Saudi Arabia 162.1 159.9 151.2 150.9 143.6 147.4 147.6 145.2 136.7 137.9 142.5 142.0 134.0

Belgium 150.5 137.6 125.5 125.7 123.7 119.2 115.3 116.0 104.8 96.9 99.4 98.3 98.7

India 148.9 152.8 157.0 152.9 148.6 144.7 140.8 141.4 145.1 138.9 135.7 130.3 127.3

Singapore 118.9 118.0 117.8 118.0 122.6 125.0 124.2 130.4 125.2 119.3 112.3 106.4 107.9

Korea 104.7 100.1 100.4 101.3 101.7 96.2 98.5 100.1 94.3 95.0 97.9 96.8 100.1

Canada 96.6 89.4 92.9 89.1 85.5 86.1 82.4 78.0 75.0 73.6 75.5 76.5 80.1

France 89.6 82.5 80.9 77.0 78.4 80.9 76.6 77.9 78.2 76.0 80.0 72.2 74.4

Germany 78.3 86.0 76.5 78.5 71.0 72.3 71.6 72.9 74.9 73.0 73.3 68.3 68.3

Bermuda 63.6 64.7 66.4 67.4 67.5 67.0 63.5 62.9 62.4 62.3 61.5 60.2 59.8

Thailand 62.2 60.8 57.2 68.0 67.2 60.9 68.0 68.4 70.8 71.6 67.2 66.1 66.5

United Arab Emirates 60.0 59.7 59.2 57.5 55.1 57.7 58.2 57.7 54.3 55.9 59.9 58.8 60.5

Norway 49.7 39.3 40.2 50.4 46.9 51.1 55.3 60.6 64.1 58.0 54.9 53.7 48.3

Sweden 45.5 45.1 46.2 46.3 46.3 43.9 44.7 45.3 45.9 44.3 42.7 41.0 40.8

Netherlands 45.1 42.5 43.9 44.8 45.1 48.6 47.6 45.1 47.5 50.3 50.5 53.1 52.2

Kuwait 43.9 42.6 36.9 36.3 36.9 36.8 36.8 39.4 38.0 35.6 33.0 31.8 31.6

Mexico 43.2 41.9 45.2 35.4 33.9 38.7 40.6 41.6 40.5 34.7 35.8 32.4 38.9

Poland 40.2 41.4 40.3 40.4 40.7 40.0 38.4 38.8 37.3 36.3 35.6 34.1 35.0

Italy 39.6 36.4 37.2 36.6 35.4 35.2 35.6 34.5 35.3 35.4 36.2 36.1 35.6

Australia 37.6 36.0 34.1 38.5 37.8 37.5 40.6 38.7 36.9 37.8 37.9 38.1 37.1

Spain 34.5 31.3 32.0 32.4 34.7 33.5 36.2 36.9 38.1 38.2 38.2 36.6 37.9

Turkey 32.6 38.2 40.9 45.6 49.6 52.6 61.2 61.5 60.8 57.7 54.5 58.9 49.5

Philippines 31.6 31.5 32.1 33.0 33.8 36.4 35.8 36.4 35.5 36.3 38.1 37.9 38.2

Chile 30.2 28.4 29.8 30.2 29.0 28.9 29.2 28.8 25.6 26.2 27.1 27.4 27.3

All Other 512.5 533.5 575.2 575.9 571.4 575.9 585.3 581.3 583.3 566.6 567.7 556.0 565.6

Grand Total 6213.6 6169.0 6216.6 6216.4 6186.6 6209.7 6306.2 6324.1 6301.9 6249.4 6230.2 6151.9 6108.4

11. Facebook’s 20% Stock Implosion Signalled By Insider Selling, But Is It A Buy Now?, by Roger Aitken Contributor [FORBES.cpm] Jul 28, 2018, 04:16pm

… In becoming the biggest-ever one-day wipeout in U.S. stockmarket history, Facebook’s stockmarket value recovered somewhat, but still declined by 19% to around $120 billion. In so doing, the personal wealth of Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of the social networking site, tanked by almost $16 billion over stalling growth. Some analysts described it as a “bombshell” moment and the earnings news caused immediate waves of selling on Wall Street. …
… “I think we were all caught off guard by the extent of the move. However, investors should really have seen something like this coming as insiders at Facebook have been selling shares heavily in recent months,” remarked Neil Wilson, Chief Market Analyst at Markets.com in London in the wake of the earnings release.
Indeed, over the last three months alone insiders – including Mark Zuckerberg – have sold off $3.8 billion worth of stock in the company. …
MIKE: But why isn’t the insider selling for months prior to the crash discussed more in the article?

12. Typhus making comeback in Texas, By Todd Ackerman | August 3, 2017, Updated: August 3, 2017 10:20pm

… Between 2003 and 2013, typhus increased tenfold in Texas and spread from nine counties to 41, according to Baylor College of Medicine researchers. The numbers have increased since then.
Harris County, which reported no cases before 2007, had 32 cases in 2016, double the previous years’ numbers. Researchers do not know why the numbers are increasing. …
… the infection is severe enough that 60 percent of people who contracted the infection during the 10-year period had to be hospitalized. Four died, one in Houston.
“We can now add typhus to the growing list of tropical infections striking Texas,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital, “Chagas, dengue fever, Zika, chikungunya and now typhus – tropical diseases have become the new normal in south and southeast Texas.” …

13.Sucking carbon out of the air won’t solve climate change – But it might fill in a few key pieces of the clean energy puzzle, By David Roberts @drvox david@vox.com Updated Jul 16, 2018

Climate change is caused by putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What if, instead, we took it out? …
… In June, we got the first solid engineering and cost numbers on DAC [“direct air capture”], courtesy of a company called Carbon Engineering out of Calgary, Canada. …
… The headline news from the paper is that the cost of capturing a ton of CO2 — estimated at around $600 in 2011 — has fallen to between $94 and $232. Almost any source of renewable energy can prevent a ton of carbon for cheaper than that, but still, down at the lower end, beneath $100, DAC starts to look viable in a low-carbon world. …
… To state the bottom line clearly: The ability to pull carbon out of the air is not a silver bullet. It is not the cheapest or most effective way to fight climate change. It won‘t allow us to bypass any of the hard work of reducing our emissions. …
‘’’ From a climate change mitigation perspective, there are two basic ways of dealing with CO2 emissions.
The smartest and cheapest is to not emit them in the first place. We can do that in a million different ways, by reducing our consumption, using current technologies more efficiently, or shifting to low-carbon technologies and practices.
The second is to remove CO2 from the biosphere and put it back into the geosphere, where it won‘t cook the planet. Such “negative emissions” may end up being necessary if we emit more CO2 than our “carbon budget” for no more than 2 degrees Celsius rise in global average temperatures, the target the world agreed on in Paris.
Much of the confusion around [“direct air capture”] arises from the fact that it can play either role — it can either prevent CO2 emissions or draw down CO2. At least for now, Keith’s company, Carbon Engineering, has elected to play in the former space, not the latter. …
… getting to true negative emissions [has] the greatest long-term implications: moving carbon from the biosphere back into the geosphere, taking it out of circulation (sequestering it) so that it no longer warms the earth.
… From a net-carbon perspective, all that matters for negative emissions is burying more carbon than you dig up. It doesn’t matter what carbon you bury, or where, as long as the overall sign is negative, more in than out. …
… Why aren’t the commercial DAC [“direct air capture”] plants burying their emissions? Two reasons.
First, … CO2 used for greenhouses has economic co-benefits … Same with CO2 used to make fuels, or for enhanced oil recovery, or as an industrial feedstock. In contrast, burying CO2 has no economic co-benefits whatsoever. …
… Second, even if there were a market for sequestration … [it] would pay for any CCS [“carbon capture and sequestration”], anywhere. That would put DAC in direct competition with carbon capture at thermal power plants, and it is always going to be easier to pull CO2 out of an exhaust stream, where it is concentrated (roughly 1 molecule out of every 10), than out of the air, where it is highly dispersed (roughly 1 molecule out of every 2,500).
… [T]o get negative, we‘ll have to do more. [T]here are a number of ideas for how it might be done…
[One] is bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS), which involves burning biomass (plants or biowaste) in a thermal power plant, capturing CO2 from the exhaust stream, and burying the CO2. Biomass is from the biosphere, so this really does involve transferring carbon from the biosphere to the geosphere — reducing net atmospheric carbon.

14.California’s future: More big droughts and massive floods, new study finds, By Paul Rogers | progers@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group [mercurynews.com] PUBLISHED: April 23, 2018 at 8:00 am | UPDATED: April 23, 2018 at 9:18 am

The extreme weather swings that Californians have experienced over the past six years — a historic drought followed by drenching winter storms that caused $100 million in damage to San Jose and wrecked the spillway at Oroville Dam — will become the norm over the coming generations, a new study has found.
Those types of extremes are not new, but because of climate change, they can be expected to occur more frequently, as hotter global temperatures and warming oceans are putting more water vapor into the air, concluded the study, which was published Monday in the scientific journal Nature Climate Change.
And perhaps most ominous, the odds are rising that a mega-storm — like the one that famously flooded California in 1862, forcing Leland Stanford to take a rowboat through the streets of Sacramento to his inauguration as governor — will strike again. Such a storm “is more likely than not” to hit the state at least once in the next 40 years and twice in the next 80, the study found. The 1862 event, the largest recorded flood in California history, saw 43 days of continuous rainfall that washed whole towns away and forced the state capital to be temporarily moved to San Francisco.

TOPICS FROM PREVIOUS WEEKS:

The Daily 202: Puerto Ricans who fled to Florida after Hurricane Maria are not registering to vote, By James Hohmann [WASHINGTON POST] July 27, 2018 Email the author With Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve
1. … Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico last September and prompted a mass exodus of more than 100,000 residents to the mainland United States. …
2. … The exact number is still not known, but tens of thousands of people permanently resettled in Florida. …
3. …Because they’re already U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans are eligible to vote as soon as they move to the mainland. The thinking last fall was that they’d be so angry at Trump that they’d be champing at the bit to vote against Republicans in the midterms. Operatives from both parties said that this could prove decisive in a perennial battleground like Florida where elections are always close. …
4. … The freshest data reveals that there has been no surge in new Puerto Rican voters. During the nine months before the hurricane — January through September of 2017 — there were 343,000 people who registered to vote in Florida, and 18 percent were Hispanic, according to Daniel Smith, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Florida. During the nine months after the hurricane — from last October through the end of June — there were 326,000 new registered voters. Just 21 percent were Hispanic. That’s a pretty small uptick — and not necessarily explained by Puerto Rican registration at all.
5. The Puerto Ricans emigres have mostly gravitated toward the Orlando area, mainly because so many other Puerto Ricans already lived there. The number of people of Puerto Rican origin living in Florida surpassed 1 million in 2015, which is more than double what it was in 2000.
6. Steve Schale, a Tallahassee-based Democratic strategist who directed Barack Obama’s 2008 victory in Florida and was a senior adviser on his 2012 reelection campaign, has been closely tracking these numbers in Excel spreadsheets, which he shared Thursday.
7. “The concern I’ve had for a while is that … the Maria impact was probably not going to be as significant as people initially thought,” he said. “We’ve got two-and-a-half months left for voter registration. But these numbers show it’s not going to happen organically. … This is a warning flare that there’s real work to be done. … Dems need to be registering around the clock, which they clearly aren’t doing.”
Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling, by Fred Barbash July 27 at 10:31 AM Email the author
1. … John Mikhail, a law professor with a PhD in philosophy and associate dean at the Georgetown University Law School … went to dictionaries available to the framers of the Constitution in 1787, which is what litigants do when trying to figure out what the Founding Fathers meant.
2. With the aid of a Georgetown law student, Genevieve Bentz, he embarked on a lexicological odyssey into dozens of long-forgotten dictionaries, published over a 200-year period before 1806, 40 regular dictionaries and 10 legal dictionaries, listed here.
3. The research yielded a very different, much broader definition than that put forward by Trump’s lawyers. “Every English dictionary definition of ’emolument’ from 1604 to 1806″ uses a “broad definition,” including “profit,” “advantage,” “gain,” or benefit,” he wrote in his paper describing the research.
4. As to the “office-and-employment-specific” interpretation by Trump’s team, Mikhail wrote that “over 92 percent of these dictionaries define ’emolument’ . . . with no reference to ‘office’ or ’employment.’ ”
5. In other words, by his research, the emoluments clause would bar any benefit or profit to a president via a foreign state, whether in his capacity as president or in any other role, such as the owner of a hotel. It would, specifically, cover Saudi Arabia or Kuwait renting out space at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
6. … On Wednesday [July 18], Mikhail’s labors paid off. In a historic decision, U.S. District Judge Peter Messitte in Greenbelt, Md., ruled that a suit brought by the District of Columbia and Maryland could go forward instead of throwing it out, as the administration desired.
7. Messitte cited, in part, what he called the “exhaustive” research of Mikhail, mentioning him by name 17 times.
8. And while citing numerous other factors, the judge’s choice of definition proved crucial to the ruling, the first on the meaning of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. (There are two, one covering domestic gain, the other foreign.)
9. The judge noted that Mikhail’s dictionary research was more extensive than that of the president’s lawyers, covering “virtually every founding-era dictionary.” Citing Mikhail again, Messitte said, “the President’s definition appears in less than 8% of these dictionaries” vs. 92 percent for the broader meaning.
10. “The clear weight of the evidence,” wrote the judge, “shows that an ’emolument’ was commonly understood by the founding generation to encompass any ‘profit,’ ‘gain,’ or ‘advantage.’ …
TV Talk:
1. “The Good Place”
2. “The Orville”
3. “Adam Ruins Everything”

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SOURCES WHICH MAY BE RELEVANT TO OTHER DISCUSSION:

Op-Ed: Texans should be wary of bullet train proposal, By Alain Leray – Guest Contributor, Mar 22, 2018, 12:27pm –
1. This opinion piece was written by Alain Leray, president and CEO of SNCF America Inc., which is France’s national state-owned railway company
2. Amtrak partners with Texas Bullet Train for ticketing, access to national routes, By Dallas Business Journal staff, May 4, 2018, 1:09pm

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2. Harris County voters overwhelmingly approve $2.5B flood-mitigation bond proposition, By Olivia Pulsinelli – Senior web editor, Houston Business Journal | Aug 25, 2018, 7:28pm CDT

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