Month: January 2020

For centuries, Mexico City residents brought warm tortillas home in reusable cloths or woven straw baskets, and toted others foods in conical rolls of paper, “ayate” mesh or net bags, or even string bundles.

People in Mexico’s massive capital city may have to return to those old ways starting Wednesday, when a new law takes effect banning the plastic bags that became ubiquitous over the last 30 years. Some say they are ready and willing, and grocery stores are promising to promote reusable synthetic fiber bags, but others are struggling to get their minds around how the ban will work in practice.

“We have a very rich history in ways to wrap things,” said Claudia Hernandez, the city’s director of environmental awareness. “We are finding that people are returning to baskets, to cucuruchos,” she said, referring to cone-shaped rolls of paper once used to wrap loose bulk goods like nuts, chips or seeds.

Some Mexico City residents still use traditional ayate bags, or tortilla towels or baskets, and many — especially the elderly — pull two-wheeled, folding shopping baskets through grocery stores. Some merchants still use old sardine cans to measure out bulk goods.

Under the new law, grocery stores will be fined if they give out plastic bags. Most will offer reusable shopping bags made of thick plastic fiber, usually selling them for around 75 cents.

“They are not giving them away, they are selling them, and that is what I don’t agree with,” said city subway worker Ernesto Gallardo Chavez, who wonders what will happen if he goes grocery shopping after Jan. 1 and forgets to bring his reusable bags.

“Just imagine, I forget my bag and I buy a lot of stuff,” said Gallardo Chavez. “How do I carry it all, if they don’t give you bags anymore?”

Like most city residents, Gallardo Chavez thinks protecting the environment is “very good.” But plastic bags in Mexico City are almost never really single-use: most city residents have bought garbage cans and waste paper baskets just the right size to be lined with supermarket bags. And the bags are commonly used to clean up after dogs on sidewalks.

“We use the bags for garbage, to separate it into organic and inorganic, and then take it out to the garbage truck,” he notes.

Hernandez, the environment official, said people should get out of the habit of putting their garbage in plastic bags. “They can take it out (to the garbage truck) directly in garbage cans.”

But that is complicated given the city’s stubborn water shortages. It’s all very well to tell city residents not to line their trash cans with plastic bags, but washing out a kitchen receptacle every couple of days after use because it doesn’t have a plastic liner will takes its toll on water supplies.

Not to mention the widespread habit of tossing used toilet paper into wastepaper baskets to spare the strain on many homes’ aged and insufficient plumbing. Used toilet paper is not the kind of thing you can turn over loose to the trash collector.

Data analysis specialist Daniel Loredo says he is planning to hoard his last remaining plastic shopping bags precisely for that purpose.

But he and his roommates have already taken steps to build up a supply of reusable bags and make sure whoever goes to the grocery store is carrying a few. But for poorer city residents, forgetting to do so even one day could carry a high price in a country where the 75-cent reusable bag costs the equivalent of an hour’s worth of the minimum wage.

“I think this will be a challenge, because these bags represent an additional cost, and maybe not everyone can bear that cost quite as easily,” Loredo said.

Aldimir Torres, the leader of the country’s Plastic Industry Chamber, called the new law “cheap populism,” noting that it was drawn up without having clear guidelines about what kind of “compostable” bags would still be allowed.

The law leaves the door open to using plastic bags “for reasons of hygiene,” presumably for items like deli meats or cheese. It also allows for bags that biodegrade very quickly, but sets no specific standards for them.

“This was a law that was copied and put together in a rush, without consulting people who really know about this issue,” Torres said.

Hernandez acknowledged there was still a lot of work to be done on alternatives.

For example, Mexico City’s ubiquitous street food stalls often use plastic bags to temporarily cover plastic plates, in areas where they have no taps or sinks to wash each plate after use. While that might seem to be covered under the “hygiene” clause of the new law, Hernandez said somewhat ingeniously that “this could be solved by some device to wash the plates.”

The law, she claimed, had to be rushed into effect.

“I don’t know why, but sometimes we need a little more pressure in order to take action,” Hernandez said, noting the bag ban “is an invitation, a provocation to rethink they way we consume.”

Loredo thinks the law may be imperfect, but worth it.

“I think that in some way this is a responsible strategy, to introduce us to some more appropriate method of consumption,” he said. “In the end, they (plastic bags) are something that pollute and hurt the environment.”

By 2021, the same law will ban handing out plastic straws, spoons, coffee capsules and other single-use items.

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will lead a group of U.S. officials who will attend the World Economic Forum later this month in Davos, Switzerland, the White House said Wednesday.

Mnuchin will be joined by officials including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and White House senior advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Also attending will be Keith Krach, a State Department undersecretary for growth, energy and the environment, and Christopher Liddell, a White House deputy chief of staff.

Reuters reported Dec. 17 that President Donald Trump planned to attend the annual Davos economic forum, citing a source familiar with the plan. A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that Trump is still expected to attend at this time.

In 2019, Trump had to cancel his plans to attend the annual gathering of global economic and world leaders because of a government shutdown. He attended the Davos forum in 2018.

The World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort town is scheduled to run Jan. 21-24.

Events in Congress could affect the Republican president’s attendance at the event.

Trump, who on Dec. 18 became the third American president to be impeached, faces a trial on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress once House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, sends the charges, called articles of impeachment, to the Republican-controlled Senate.

A dispute between Pelosi and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell over how the trial will be conducted arose after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump.

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Islamic State militants have increased their terror activity in recent weeks in Syria, carrying out deadly attacks against Syrian regime troops and U.S.-backed forces. 
 
Since early December, the terror group has conducted at least three major attacks on Syrian government forces and their allied militias in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour, local sources said. 
 
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor that has reporters across the country, recent attacks claimed by IS against Syrian military forces have killed at least 30 soldiers and wounded more than 50 others. 
 
Last week, at least three fighters with the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces were killed in what local military officials described as a suicide attack carried out by IS militants in the province of Raqqa, IS’s former de facto capital before it was freed in 2017 by the SDF and its U.S.-led allies.  

‘Threat to our forces’ 
 
IS “terrorists still pose a threat to our forces, especially in the eastern part of Syria,” an SDF commander told VOA. 
 
“They have been able to regroup and reorganize in some remote parts of Deir el-Zour, where there is a smaller presence of our forces or any other forces,” said the commander, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to journalists. 
 
He added that despite the declaration of the physical defeat of the terror group in March 2019, IS “still has hundreds of sleeper cells that have the capability to wage deadly attacks on civilians and combatants alike.” 
 
In the town of Tabqa, in western Raqqa, local news reports this week said a suspected IS sleeper cell assaulted a family, killing three of its members, including a child. The reports did not say why the family was attacked, but IS has in the past targeted people whom it suspected of having ties to or working for the government or U.S.-backed local forces. 
 
While most of the recent activity has been in areas IS once controlled as part of its so-called caliphate, the militant group has been particularly active in Syria’s vast desert region. 
 
The Syrian Observatory reported at least 10 IS-claimed attacks in December that originated from the mostly desert eastern part of Homs province in central Syria. 

Baghdadi’s death 

Despite the death of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in October in a U.S. operation in northwestern Syria, IS still represents a major threat in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, experts say. 
 
“As ISIS returns to its original decentralized structure, members of the group are trying to show ISIS still poses a threat, even after the defeat of its caliphate and the recent death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,” said Kaleigh Thomas, a Middle East researcher at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, using another acronym for IS. 
 
Sadradeen Kinno, a Syrian researcher who closely follows Islamist militancy, echoed Thomas’ views. 
 
“IS is now living a period of stability, so to speak. After the death of Baghdadi, their objective is clearer now. They try to stay focused on carrying out assassinations, ambushes and suicide attacks, and they have been successful at that,” he told VOA. 
 
Kinno said IS “really believes in a recurrent cycle of violence, so for them the territorial defeat they experienced this year is just a phase of their ongoing jihad.” 
 

US withdrawal 
 
U.S. President Donald Trump in October announced a withdrawal of troops from Syria, which was followed by a Turkish military offensive against U.S.-backed SDF fighters in northeast Syria. 
 
Some experts say the U.S. troop pullout allowed IS to regroup, and thus its terror attacks have increased. 
 
“The U.S. decision sent a signal to [IS] that the U.S. is not interested in a long-term presence in Syria,” said Azad Othman, a Syrian affairs analyst based in Irbil, Iraq. 
 
IS “now feels that its low-level insurgency in Syria could be even more effective as long as the Americans don’t have a significant military presence in the country,” he told VOA. 
 
The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said in a report in November that “ISIS has exploited the Turkish incursion and subsequent drawdown of U.S. troops from northeastern Syria to reconstitute its capabilities and resources both within Syria in the short term and globally in the longer term.” 
 
“The withdrawal and redeployment of U.S. troops has also affected the fight against ISIS, which remains a threat in the region and globally,” Glenn Fine, the principal deputy inspector general, said in the report. 
 
But the U.S. has decided to keep about 500 troops to secure oil fields in Syria to prevent IS militants and the Syrian regime forces from accessing them.  
 

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Protesters in Iraq stormed the U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone on Tuesday. The protesters appeared to belong to a pro-Iran faction upset over deadly U.S. airstrikes targeting Iran-backed militia in the region. The incident marked the latest escalation in tensions between Tehran and Washington.  As VOA’s Jesse Oni reports, defense experts fear even more violent confrontations could erupt.

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The worldwide refugee crisis continues to deepen. According to the United Nations, the world is witnessing “thehighest levels of displacement on record.” Spurred by conflict and persecution, the numbers of displaced are expected to rise further in the future, as climate change pushes people out of their homes. VOA’s Ardita Dunellari reports.

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Carol Lee collaborates with University of Montpellier colleagues researching how tiny plankton cope in an ever-saltier Mediterranean sea and a freshwater-infused Baltic one. From the foothills of the French Pyrenees, Camille Parmesan experiments with cutting-edge climate modeling, hoping it may offer clues for future biodiversity conservation.

Both biologists have pulled up stakes from previous posts, counting among U.S. scientists who are responding to the Trump administration’s upcoming withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement with their feet.  

“I know quite a lot of really top-notch scientists who have just moved to other countries,” said Lee, citing colleagues who have headed to Europe and China. “And a big, alarming trend is there are a lot of very smart people who are not moving to the U.S.”  

Lee’s assessment follows numerous allegations that the U.S. government is undermining climate and other research on multiple fronts, from shrinking funding and shutting programs to diminishing science’s role in policymaking. Hundreds of scientists have left their jobs, according to a recent New York Times article, although it’s unclear how many have headed overseas.  

U.S. officials offer a different picture. A State Department statement issued ahead of December’s climate talks in Madrid, for example, said the government remained committed to research and innovation. It credited advances, ranging from renewables to “transformational” coal technologies, for allowing the United States to simultaneously reduce emissions, protect the environment and grow the economy.  

Yet these days Europe is more often seen as the climate leader. Still, it faces its own set of challenges. The European Union’s climate-fighting efforts vary sharply by member state, with countries like Poland still heavily reliant on coal.  

Moreover, a recent study by the European Investment Bank finds the EU must invest massively more in research and development to a meet a new and ambitious 2050 goal of zero net emissions. Indeed, it finds Europe lags behind the US and China in climate change mitigation investments as a share of GDP.  

French grants

In France, Lee and Parmesan count among more than a dozen U.S. scientists benefiting from generous research grants under President Emmanuel Macron’s Make the Planet Great Again program, a direct rebuttal to Washington’s departure from the Paris pact. Yet Macron himself is criticized at home for failing to match climate-fighting rhetoric with action, while experts say French science overall is seriously underfunded.  

“It’s very clear there isn’t enough investment in France, and we’ll need to concentrate on this in the years to come,” says Stephane Blanc, who heads the MOPGA initiative, pointing however to upcoming legislation aimed to significantly boost research funding.  

Launched in mid-2017, Macron’s initiative — known more prosaically as MOPGA — offers three- to five-year matching grants of up to $1.7 million for cutting-edge environment research on areas that also include biodiversity loss and sustainable agriculture. American and formerly U.S.-based scientists dominate the 41 grantees, who also include French and other Europeans. Germany has rolled out a similar, but more modest initiative.  

“When Macron made that announcement, I thought ‘I’m applying for that,'” says Lee, who had previously collaborated with Montpellier University.  

Her grant of nearly $900,000 allows her to hire graduate students for research into how plankton can adapt to changes in salinity and temperature. Her two targets are witnessing diametrically opposite climate-affected impacts; while the Mediterranean is increasing in salinity, ice melt is injecting a mass of freshwater into the Baltic Sea that promises to decimate key local species like cod.  

“I’m looking at the base of the food chain, because that’s so important for maintaining everything — that’s the little guys, the copepods,” she says of the plankton.  

At home in Madison, Wisconsin, Lee launched a more personal climate change fight, going vegetarian and powering her house with wind. But she does not see enough action on a national level.  

“I feel like scientists are getting ignored in the United States, that what we say doesn’t matter right now, and that is incredibly distressing,” she says.  

In France, by contrast, she is confident her research will be published and widely disseminated.  

“Somebody is going to listen to us,” she says. “In Europe and elsewhere.”  

Modeling change  

For Parmesan, France amounted a Eurostar train ride away from her previous research posting in Britain. During her career, she has given talks at the White House, testified before Congress and collected prestigious awards for her research, which includes helping to solidify the science behind the 2°C-degree global warming cap set by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  

“I think I’ve done my thing about the fact we need to reduce carbon emissions,” Parmesan says. “What I’m trying to do now is go more towards what we do about it.”

Today, she works at a French research station in the tiny southwestern commune of Moulis, trying to apply economic-style simulations to biodiversity conservation under a rapidly changing climate.  

“It’s really tricky, because there’s a lot of uncertainty,” she says. “How do you come up with a conservation plan? What do you preserve and where to you preserve in the face of all this?”

She describes a recent slew of emissions and global warming records as yet more grim data points on a now-clear trajectory.  But she is alarmed the United States is not leading the response.  

“A lot of the best science has come out of the United States, but that’s going away,” she says.  

While some U.S. colleagues are staying put in their jobs, mindful of family and financial constraints, others are not, she says.  

“If they’re old enough they’re retiring, if they’re young enough they’re getting the hell out of there,” Parmesan said, adding a number are asking her about research options in Europe.  

She is worried about the future, but energized by the rising tide of youth climate activists.  

“Young people will see a tremendous degradation of their lifestyle — everyone who reads the science knows that,” Parmesan says. “So I’m really excited that age group is finally getting charged up, and demanding these older politicians do something.”

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