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[0:00] I'm Daniel Forkner, and this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
But if we learn from all this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
Our favorite cohost David Torcivia is in Los Angeles for the week and will not be joining us today. And We are happy to be joined in studio by Moriah King. Moriah is a native of Atlanta, GA in the United States, who just returned a few months ago from a 2 year service in Peace Corp China. Now she works for an NGO out of Washington DC and we are fortunate to have her on to provide her perspective on some of the issues we're going to be discussing.
[0:55] Hi Daniel thank you for having me on the show.
[0:57] Well we’re really happy to have you Moriah, and like I said you served in Peace Corps China for 2 years right? What did you do over there?
[1:04] I was a university English teacher and I did some teacher training in small communities in Northwestern China in Gansu Province, in Lanzhou City.
[1:13] That sounds really interesting, I think we have a section today that we’re going to be talking about some things going on in China, and I can't wait to hear your perspective on that.
But now you're back in the states, you work for an NGO, what do you do with this NGO?
[1:26] Yeah so right now I'm working for an NGO out of Washington DC, and I do community programming working with food security in the area; health and nutrition providing healthy meals, and I work with local organizations to help them build out their membership databases.
So data and all that stuff.
[1:45] Okay awesome.
If you have listened to Ashes Ashes in the past, you know that on this show we discuss the underlying structural and systemic flaws in our world. Flaws that threaten to collapse our very way of life. And each week we go in depth on a specific system to determine some of the root causes, and what we can or cannot do to fix them. These range from the environmental, social, economic, political, to the technological and more.
But we're going to do something a little different this week. Partly because David is out of town, but also because our world is in constant flux and is changing so fast, we thought this would be a good time to look back towards some of the episodes we've done in the past and provide some new updates.
You ready to get started?
Yep I’m ready.
[2:32] Alright let’s do it.
So in Episode 5 – End of the Road we discussed infrastructure in the United States.
On March 7 around 2:30 in the morning, a 48-inch water main busted under Buford Highway in Atlanta, flooding the road and leaving up to 700,000 residents in Dekalb County - the Eastern half of the city - without water. Many businesses were closed Wednesday and Thursday. Hospitals had to reschedule surgeries and redirect ambulances, and public schools and Universities in the area closed their doors. The CDC, which is headquartered in Atlanta, shut down it's campus for two days. The pipe was fixed Friday morning the entire county was advised to boil all tap water until that evening. The repairs involved about 50 people working 24/7 for two and a half days. We were also fortunate that a neighboring county had some pipes in storage that we were able to buy from them, or else it might have taken longer.
Moriah you were in Atlanta the day this happened right?
[3:36] Yeah I was.
[3:37] And did it catch you off-guard?
[3:38] It caught me completely off-guard. I just remember waking up in the morning, I'm excited about going on with my daily routine, and I go to turn on the water and there's no water. And I think okay maybe there was scheduled maintenance that I wasn't made aware of, so I was totally surprised.
[3:55] Yeah the same thing happen to me. I woke up, tried to take a shower, didn't work, so I went to work in a baseball cap because my hair looks terrible when I don't get to wash it and then I ended up getting my shower in the next day so.
[4:07] Well I just waited for a little while and then when my mom told me - she works at Dunwoody Elementary School - she called me and said that the school was being let out early because they're also wasn't any water. That's when I knew there was probably a big issue.
[4:20] So it caught you off-guard but when you were living in China did this type of thing ever happen?
[4:25] Oh man this happen all the time. So I lived in a very dry area, pretty much a desert, and so water outages were frequent and sometimes they were scheduled but often times they were not.
[4:37] Wait why would why would they be scheduled?
[4:39] Well the local government often scheduled outages just to check on the pipes make sure everything was okay, and the way I would find out was through a notice that was just put on my door “hey water will be out from this time to this time so do what you have to do.”
[4:54] When the water did stop working, either because of some problem or because of this government scheduling it to do maintenance and repairs, did school shut down?
[5:03] Oh no schools never shut down. Like I said I was a university teacher so I would go in for my regular hours. What a lot of people in my community what they would do was store water in their washing machines, or store water in their kitchen sinks, so lots of water storage ahead of time or they would just go to the local grocery market and just buy a couple gallons of water.
I also started storing my water in my washing machine and I learned it from my 阿姨 āyí, my auntie that lived across the way. She told me “hey you know we all just store water; boil it up and you'll be okay.”
[5:37] That's really interesting. It seems like you were more prepared for the water to go out living in China where it happened more frequently, than you were in the United States right?
And it's also interesting because it makes me wonder if maybe we have allowed ourselves to be spoiled here in the United States. I think it's possible that we kind of take it for granted that things are always just going to work, and for that reason we don't adequately prepare for when they don't - I mean I don't know anybody who stores water in washing machines. Are there any other ways you might have prepared for the water going out?
[6:07] Besides that no, but I think one difference between my community in China and the community that I live in here in the states is that they would just deal with it. I think in America we are so used to having all of these conveniences that we take it for granted that we have access to water electricity 24/7, and we don't realize that there may be some periods of time where we just won't have it and we'll just have to make do. My students had to pay to shower; that's another way that they saved and conserved water in China is that they sort of limit the usage of water. So my students showered once or twice a week.
Whereas here in America we shower one or two times a day.
[6:43] Okay so definitely spoiled when it comes to showering.
[6:46] Spoiled when it comes to just having access to water and electricity.
[6:50] And maybe it's not just that we're unprepared when things stop working; maybe the fact that we do expect the water to be there 24/7; maybe that fact itself has exacerbated the risks for some of our infrastructure problems: Because we are not willing to tolerate any intentional interruptions to our services, there is no political will for shutting things down to carry out necessary repairs. That is, until there simply is no other option.
We did mention in our infrastructure episode how the Chairman of DC's Metro, their public rail system, stated in 2016 that $25 billion dollars was needed for major repairs of the Metro, and that if they did not shut it down for months at a time to carry out those repairs, the whole system wouldn't be functioning at all in less than a decade. Well over two years later, now there are plans to make some of these repairs, and it's not going to be easy on DC residents. In the summer and fall of this year four stations will be shut down at some point to conduct repairs, including two that will be out of commission for 45 days.
[7:55] Well you know Daniel this kind of reminds me of some of the ways they maintain transportation in China. I remember the first time that I traveled to China back in 2014 in Beijing. They were trying to do some maintenance on their system and they just shut the whole thing down.
So again I think Americans are really fortunate that it’s just a couple of stations for 45 days. So I think this shut down for 45 days will just encourage DC residents to think about alternative modes of transportation and I think it could actually be a good thing.
[8:24] Well it certainly will take care of hopefully some major repairs that they need to do, and maybe delay some of the even greater repairs they will have to do going forward.
Speaking of trains, in February of this year 116 people were taken to a hospital and 2 people died when an Amtrak train collided with a freight train. A switch was locked into the wrong position, which diverted the train to the wrong track. At the same time, a signaling system was down at the time and could not set off warnings, and the train itself was lacking an automatic braking system. And when we talk about infrastructure maintenance, these are the things we mean. Whether it’s a company or a politician, it's a lot easier to spend money on a flashy new rail car for instance than the switches and software programs that form the underlying structures put in place to keep these systems safe and operational, and all these infrastructure systems are related. If increased failings in our railways causes some logistics companies to shift transportation to other methods, like inland waterways, or trucks and highways, then that just puts additional stress on those systems as well, and these problems can compound.
[9:36] Man there's so much that can be said about infrastructure in the United States.
[9:40] Yeah well it’s certainly getting a lot of attention now that a lot of these liabilities are coming due.
But we did an entire episode on just one aspect of the infrastructure problem in the United State, and that's the power. So let's talk about that for a second.
In the Western United States, over 25% of all power outages result from weather events, and that number will only increase as we seen more extreme weather patterns from climate change. But it's not just in the west that weather is a problem. Because right now, New England has been getting hit hard by a series of storms, resulting in prolonged and wide-spread power outages across several states.
These storms, called nor'easters, form from low pressure areas in the Atlantic just outside Massachusetts and North Carolina. Differences in atmospheric pressure caused by the North Atlantic Oscillation lock jet streams into place over the Eastern seaboard and Greenland, and the mixing of warm Atlantic air with the cooler arctic get swept up and directed into the coast bringing heavy rain and snow, causing blizzards, floods, an hurricane winds.
Well these storms have been going on from Virginia to Maine and just wreaking havoc, most notably to the electrical grid.
On Friday March 2nd, an intense storm bringing powerful winds slammed into New England, and around 2 million people lost power. School Systems as far south as DC were shut down, and the federal government shut its doors. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, Amtrak stopped running its trains. Amid historic flooding, both Maryland and Virginia declared states of emergency, and the National Guard was called into Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Power companies were trying to restore power, but the winds were so powerful bucket trucks could not be deployed. By the time the storm left, 600,000 people were still without power.
Moriah, you were in Washington DC when this happened right?
[11:38] Yeah I was actually in town for a big conference and Leadership event, and we had our biggest day. So we actually didn't cancel our event but I remember waking up and calling my brother and asking him if he could pick me up from my hotel because the trains weren't running, the buses weren't running. So I needed to get to the event and during the early part of the morning the wind weren’t that strong - I think they're about maybe 25 to 30 miles an hour - but around 2 p.m. they hit 60 miles an hour and they just increased.
[12:06] I think in some places it went much higher than that.
[12:09] No it did go much higher than that; just at the beginning it started off at 60 miles an hour and that's my point. That's a lot of wind and I know that some of the attendees at my event, they had to go home early because trees had knocked down power lines in their backyard.
[12:23] Did you experience any power outages in the city?
[12:25] Some parts did. I didn't. I'm thinking they possibly had a backup generator and at the conference center that we were at we also weren't hit, but I was in such a large building and you could still hear and feel the weight of the winds.
[12:38] And DC was actually on the southern end of this big storm - one of the least impacted by this - and yet you're still having to deal with public transportation being shut down and the federal government you...
[12:49] Oh yeah I'm sorry yeah the federal government shutdown that day. My brother's girlfriend works for the federal government, she didn't go into work.
[12:58] Typical federal workers not going to work right?
[13:02] Right. But what’s surprising to me is that it’s still going on; it's almost I would say almost two weeks.
[13:07] Oh yeah well we're going to get to that; this is still going on and so there was a second Nor'easter that occurred on Wednesday March 7th, 5 days later. 40,000 people were still without power when a second storm slammed into New England. Heavy snow was dumped in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and all over southern New England bringing down even more power lines. More than 500 flights were cancelled, Amtrak had to shut down trains again, and this time over 500,000 people had no power.
But this story doesn't end.
Today, about 170,000 people are without power in Massachusetts after a third nor'easter slammed into the state with 80 mph winds on Tuesday, March 13. We are recording this on the 14th, so there will likely be more updates by the time you listen to this, but these storms are expected to persist for another two weeks or maybe more.
[14:06] Every one of these storms has set a record in some way. This storm brought a ton of snow and broke the record from a 1993 blizzard.
[14:14] Do you have any updates about what they're trying to do to fix the problem? I know earlier you mentioned that the winds were too strong for the trucks to even be sent out.
[14:22] Well I mean they're just doing the same thing. They're just trying to fix power lines. That's all you can do is just try to rebuild and recover from these storms but you can't stop them, and this is one of the possible consequences of climate change.
David has gone over this in detail but as you add energy to these climate systems, storms like this happen more frequently and they come with a much bigger impace.
[14:44] What would you suggest that Americans do to better prepare for this kind of situation? We talked about water outages and shortages, but what about something like this? How do you prepare for that?
[14:55] Well let me ask you. When you were living in China, not just the water but the power would go out too right? What would your community do to help prepare for some of these things?
[15:03] Well first of all I think that's a great question. I think the way my community was I guess organized is that if the power was out it was okay. They would go outside, they would walk, really they would just carry on about their day.
[15:18] What about food storage? Did anybody store food?
[15:20] But see again I think it just goes back to the culture they naturally don't keep as much food.
[15:26] And I'm generalizing here, in their fridge they usually, they go to the market the local market every morning to buy what they need for the day, so you know it's not like a lot of their food would oil or anything.
[15:38] Although if you do rely on getting your food each day, if your food transportation system relies on electricity and these power grids go down, you may have trouble getting this food in the first place. I mean especially if you're in the United States and you live in a suburb, and you have to go to the grocery store where your food comes from far away; these are the types of systems that could become disrupted so storing food is definitely something I would recommend for people in the United States.
[16:04] I think that's the biggest difference or a big difference between America and China, is that they have an abundance of local markets that don't rely on big 16-wheel trucks to deliver. Most of them come from smaller local farmers and such.
[16:17] Well that's great and that's actually another point. That's something we talked about last week when we sat down with Chris D'Alessandro is the way we get food in the United States, this huge system for transporting food from far distances and the reliance on Industrial agriculture, that itself is not sustainable and maybe we do need to get back towards a system of local farmers and local markets, and I guess what you experienced in China Moriah is when the power goes out it wasn't really a problem because people had a dependable source of locally-produced food.
[16:47] Yea food and if you want to go there activities. Most people in my community would wake up really early and they would go out for their morning exercise every single day, and we had a really large community square where thousands of people would gather and just you know take part in what's called guangchangwu or dance, or whatever activity. So it didn't really disrupt their life as much.
[17:09] I'm glad you bring this up so this may be a good place to discuss community, and some of the effects the rising costs from these events that disrupt power grids, and damage infrastructure can have on our communities. In our infrastructure episode we mention the Death Spiral that cities and municipalities face in an environment of rising liabilities from infrastructure, and investment gaps in things like our pension systems. And it’s a simple concept really.
Many cities and municipalities took on debt to expand their infrastructure; roads, water pipes, light rail, power lines and grid infrastructure, in the expectation that the added infrastructure would stimulate growth, bring in new citizens, and then these citizens would pay for the cost of maintaining and upgrading these systems. But it didn't really work out that way. As populations grew, new infrastructure had to be built to support these new people, and this growth expanded outwards in patterns of sprawl, so that the ratio of infrastructure per resident increased dramatically. So that's water pipes per person for example. This means that ultimately the cost of this infrastructure outpaces revenue coming in, and maintenance gets ignored as the can just get kicked further down the road until these ageing systems can't withstand the stress anymore, and they start breaking.
Ant the water infrastructure in Los Angeles is one example of this that we highlighted in that episode. 76% of all the water pipes in LA are between 75 and 100 years old, and these are pipes that were built to last no more than 100 years.
[18:47]Currently, the city is replacing their pipes at a rate of once every 300 years, although they are hoping to get to a 250 year replacement cycle. So as these systems start failing in ways that impact the day-to-day lives of residents - water leaks, busted pipes that flood streets like in Atlanta, or any other infrastructure failure that becomes more frequent like power outages - as these things happen a Death Spiral sets in. Residents that can afford to do so leave. This erodes the tax base, leaving the municipality with less money to address these problems, they get worse, and more people leave. Now the city has trouble paying and maintaining quality civil servants and city services suffer. More people leave and it becomes impossible to recover.
And I wonder, could we help mitigate the risks of these death spirals if we built communities in a more integrated way? In a way that emphasized the value of social relationships so that instead of moving away from problems, people felt invested in solving them together? This is something we touched on briefly at the end of last week's Agriculture episode so maybe we don't need to go into it into much detail but, it is something to think about, and something I think you bring up Moriah with your example of how community is structured a little bit differently in China.
[20:04] Yeah I would agree with your point about building communities to help people feel more invested in solving problems.
[20:11]But let's move on and look at another broken system that represents more demand for public funds, adding to the risk of these death spirals.
This of course comes from Episode 10 – Broken Promises where we talk about the public and private pension systems not just in the US but globally.
A recent survey came out this year suggesting that 42% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved for retirement. That puts many at risk of retiring broke, since those over 65 years old spend on average $46,000 per year.
And to recap from our episode Broken Promises, there is a pension crisis in this country and around the world that faces an inevitable melt down, which puts countless people at risk. Both directly from retirement benefits promised that cannot be fulfilled, and indirectly from stock market losses and financial crises that result. In the United States alone, there are $6 trillion dollars in unfunded public pension benefits. That's 40% of our GDP, and it's how much we would need right now so that the principal and interest, and tax revenue going forward will be able to match pension payouts in the future. This does not even include social security, which is a whole different but related animal. By 2050, the global savings gap - the figure needed to prevent people from retiring broke - will be $400 trillion dollars. That's trillion with a T, and it represents about 4 to 5 times the total global GDP, or gross world product.
[21:43] Now obviously, we will never come up with that money. And in the episode we discuss in depth a little bit how we got into this unfunded mess in the first place, and some of the perverse incentives keeping everyone's eyes closed to the reality that these pension systems are going to go bust, and drag many municipalities down with them.
In the same way that cities took on huge liabilities to expand their infrastructure in the hopes that it would attract more residents and revenue, they did the same thing with pension promises, taking on huge liabilities in the form of future payouts, with the hopes that the amazing benefits would attract good civil servants, which would then bring in more residents and more revenue.
[22:24] And to quickly summarize, a pension fund has two ways of making money. It receives tax revenue, usually as some percentage of worker salary, and it tries to grow its fund through investment. Well when the managers of this pension fund decide how much workers should contribute, they take into account what they expect to make in the financial market. The more they expect to make from investment, the less they have to take from workers. So from a political standpoint, there is an incentive to minimize the amount workers contribute - because that's what makes it attractive to work for this city - and exaggerate the returns the market can generate.
Many public pension funds have done this but the market hasn't been returning what these funds expected, and now they don't have enough money to keep their promises, and it's a big problem.
California has the biggest unfunded liability in the United States at $1 trillion. They won't admit this, they say their liability is only around $150 billion. But this is a phenomenon that occurs in many of the broken systems we talk about. Climate change; the economy; agriculture; whatever it is; the people who are at the vanguard of these unsustainable systems continue to say nothing is wrong, ignore the naysayers, don't listen to that show Ashes Ashes. And sometimes it can create a comical situation.
Ok are you ready for this Moriah?
On February 12 of this year, The Sacramento Bee, a California newspaper reported the following:
"Pension fund hits milestone: It’s earning more money than it’s paying out." The Chief investment officer of CalPERS, the California pension system, said that they are now stable! They are making more money than ever, because of the gains they've made from the stock market, and because of worker contributions. And that they project that they will continue to make positive cash flow for the next few decades because of these great stock market returns. On February 20, the Wall Street Journal reports - this might have even been on the front page but I don't remember - they report that over a 10-day period in February, CalPERS lost $18 and a half billion dollars, representing 5% of all the assets they own. The same Investment officer that the Sacramento Bee quoted said "looks like it's going to be a pretty volatile year" or something like that.
The market did return about half that value back to the fund over the next couple weeks, and this is a great example of two things. 1) the disengunity of these funds in their localities to tell the truth about their dire situation, and 2) the perverse incentive these funds have to invest more and more into risky assets, that make them vulnerable to these market swings, and guarantee that they will go bust even harder when the next market recession comes. And Private Equity groups like Blackstone, the same group we discussed as being almost predatory in the way they take advantage of pension funds, well Blackstone announced in February that they plan to double the total assets they manage, and that's being driven in large part by these pension funds and their desire to take on risk to satisfy their impossible goals.
[25:32] That sounds like trouble.
[25:33] Well it is trouble Moriah because the more these pensions take on risk, the more they get in trouble, and the more they have to pull funding away from other city services - away from other public funds, and it all adds to the storm leading these cities and municipalities into that death spiral.
[25:50] Yeah when you talked about Blackstone taking on more risk - doubling their risk - it kind of reminds me of the financial crash a couple years ago.
[25:59] That’s a great point because the 2008 financial crisis, it kind of put so many of these public Pension funds in dire situations. Because a lot of them had a big portion of their assets allocated into stocks, you know the financial crash occurred, and a lot of these Pension funds lost a ton of value and with that their ability to pay these benefits in the future.
And what's so ironic about that is that it's only increased the need, or the desire among these fund managers, to put even more assets into risky classes. So right now the average percentage of pension fund assets in these risky equities is higher, even higher than it was prior to the 2008 financial crisis. So it’s absolutely true that this is really a foreshadowing I think of another big market crash that's going to really hurt these Pension funds in ways that they've never been hurt before, and I don't think that they're going to be able to recover, because they haven't recovered even from the 2008 financial crisis and this next one is going to be even worse.
[27:04] This is where community is really important. I hate to continue to talk about this and make the comparison but in China and their culture, to respect your elders it means to take care of them in their old age. They spent 20 or 30 years taking care of you and supporting you, and in turn you’re expected to do the same.
They do have something like a pension fund from the government depending on if they are government worker or not, then they are in some ways taken care of by the government, but in the most ways their children take care of them.
The first time I lived in China I worked with what was called the “abandoned elderly.” They either didn't have children to support them or their children moved overseas and were unable to support them, and they came together as a community and would do things together to have a life too, and I think when these Pension funds do crash we're going to need more Americans to sacrifice and be willing to help out.
[27:56] If we as a society said “hey it's not okay for people to die in poverty,” then we as a community can come together and help take care of people, and it doesn't have to just “well those are your parents you pay for them. It’s not coming out of my pocket. Whether I pay taxes, or whether I directly pay I'm not doing it.”
That's not community. I mean that's just everyone out to take care of themselves.
[28:15] I know you guys talk a lot about community. What does community mean? To you all when you guys continue to use the term “community,” how do you define that? In Peace Corps they used that a lot: “find your community, find your community,” well what does that look like in the city of 14 million people; in a province of a couple million people.
On your pension thing you said the risk of these death spirals if we built communities in a more integrated way, what does that mean?
[28:39] I would say two things. One, with that whole integrated thing I mean literally building cities that are integrated. Meaning I don't put a neighborhood here, a factory here, and the offices here. We integrate them so that people have to work together in order to make them work.
You put a factory next to a neighborhood, that neighborhood doesn't want pollution so they're going to fight to keep pollution down from the factory. That would require them to interact with the factory. You put the factory a hundred miles away, they don't ever have to see it, the factory can pollute no problem, that's what I mean by integrated.
But number two, to your point about “oh I have a large city what is 14 million…” well you know maybe that's part of the problem is that we scaled things too big, and we need more smaller integrations. We need Farms close to where people eat -
[29:21] So you're defining community by size, and by location, and by -
[29:27] The way I define it is the relationship that people have to each other, meaning I do something, it affect someone else. I want you to see the effect that you have on someone else. The way that I live my life, the foods that I buy, the energy that I burn is harming someone else. But because I don't see it, I don't give a shit.
So my point about bringing communities closer is if I do something wrong; if I do something that causes a bad externality, I want to see that and I want to see the people that effects, and part of that means we don't just outsource everything; we don't just move everything away from what we do.
So community is “I relate to you, my actions impact you, your actions impact me, therefore we're more incentivized to help each other.”
When you're in charge of a pension fund and you got a billion dollars under assets, and you make some decision that gives you a million dollars in your bank account, and it somehow affects the people but you don't really care… you’ve hurt people, you’ve caused maybe thousands of people to go broke, but you don't care because you don't see it. It doesn't mean anything to you.
So we don't need systems, I mean this is the central realization, is that centralization and power is harmful. You allow power to accumulate into a small point, you leverage harm and you increase the cascading effect that someone can make a decision that is so far removed from their lives that they don't care, and it affects millions of people and ruins their lives; that should not be allowed.
That's what we need to not support; is systems that allow power to consolidate in these very small concentrated ways that start wreaking havoc on our lives because a very small people have some very perverse incentives that benefit them but harm millions more.
But Moriah you bring up a good point so let me ask you: are your parents retired at this point?
[31:09] My dad is retired and my mom is on the way.
[31:12] What did your dad do before he retired?
[31:14] My dad was a math teacher for 30 years in different Metro Atlanta counties. My mom did social work for 10 years and then she became an elementary school teacher, and she's been doing that for the past 15 to 20 years.
[31:27] Okay and do you have any siblings?
[31:29] Yeah I have 3 siblings. I have an older brother, an older sister and a younger brother.
[31:34] And if something happened to the Financial Security of your parents - let's say they can no longer support themselves in their old age. Do you think that you and your siblings would try to pitch in to kind of help them?
[31:47] I know we would pitch in to help them survive. There's no way I would tell my parents “oh well you don't have any money; you're out of luck” and continue to live my life.
No we definitely would all pitch in and consider the best option.
[31:59] Well I don't think you're alone in that. I think a lot of people would do the same thing and that’s really the point I want to stress here. In the same way that these cities and municipalities are on the precipice of a death spiral like we talked about, because of rising infrastructure costs, the threat of a shrinking tax base, increased unfunded liabilities in their pensions systems... because of all these things competing for public funds, cities no longer have good choices and bad choices; they just have equally bad trade-offs. The choice becomes: do we pay our pension benefits and neglect needed infrastructure repairs and experience rapid decline; or do we pay for infrastructure but renege on pension promises and go bankrupt?
Well in the same way, individuals and families are in very similar situations. Wages are stagnant, but costs are rising - student debt; health care bills; cost of living; and now social costs like the burden of your parent's retirement. Under the weight of all these things people are finding it difficult to stay afloat and the choices become trade-offs: Do I put a couple hundred bucks away for my own retirement each month and let my parents suffer? Or do I help them but neglect my own future?
But the narratives surrounding these issues don't seem to address the systemic aspect of these problems. Even that study that I referenced at the beginning of this section - that 42% of Americans are at risk for retiring broke - describes the solution as "people should save more for retirement," which puts the blame and responsibility solely on the shoulders of individuals and families.
But look don’t' get me wrong, if you have the ability to save money and be financially responsible, you absolutely should. Because it will make your own life easier, and those that depend on you and care for you. But looking at this as a larger system, this is not a failing of individuals. When half the entire country is facing poverty in their old age, we can't just say "people should save more," we have to recognize that there are deep flaws in the way we have organized our economy, and it is that economy that is failing people.
But that's enough about infrastructure and municipalities and the economy… let's move on to a completely different topic and that is government surveillance. This is something that we cover in Episode 9 – Nothing Left to Hide in which we deal with the proliferation of techniques by governments to surveil their citizens, and the industry that has sprung up to support those government; to sell them products and to make a profit off the desire of governments to control their own population.
And so a huge component of the issues surrounding Government Surveillance is the enormous industry that is churning out technologies to sell to governments for the purpose of repressing dissidents in their own country; spying on law-abiding citizens; and compiling illegal data on people.
We discussed in the episode how Turkey had been detaining hundreds of thousands of people for simply downloading a phone app. Many of the people who were detained hadn't even downloaded the app, but were detained anyway on suspicion that they were. Many other human rights abuses have been and are being carried out in Turkey, including about 50,000 people held in detention without trial, and many journalists, human rights activists, and feminists have been locked up in prison on false charges.
[35:14] Well it was recently revealed that the UK authorized a company called Surveillance Group to export about $3.2 million worth of surveillance technology to Turkey last year. The company specializes in things like social media data collection and facial recognition.
What's really revealing about this story is not just that the company Surveillance Group is selling spy technology to a repressive government, but that it is doing so in the face of enormous evidence the Turkish government is repressing its own people.
This is not speculation at this point but is something that both the UN and the UK Government itself have publicly stated. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said the Turkish government quote:
seems to have criminalized the legitimate exercise of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and freedom of opinion and expression, using emergency decrees that fail to meet international human rights standards.
And a committee of the UK Parliament said quote:
there is a fundamental intolerance of alternative narratives in Turkey, with the government broadly suppressing, discrediting or punishing those who contradict its authorized accounts of sensitive events.
Moriah quick question, so this Surveillance Group is a private company. Do you think there should be rules, maybe international rules, in place to prevent private companies from selling military and spy equipment to governments that are going to use that equipment against their own people?
Should private companies have free range to sell harmful technology to anybody in the world that's willing to pay for it?
[36:47] There definitely needs to be international laws regulating that, because I think the differences between a private company and a government is that they have different incentives, with private companies primarily looking for markets and who will pay the money and buy their equipment, and governments having a whole different set of priorities, so yeah.
[37:05] Well you're not alone in that opinion. The European Union has rules specifically for that. And yes the UK is still part of the EU - at least for another year, and as per the legal language of EU rules that oversee the exportation of military technology, quote:
Member States shall deny an export license if there is a clear risk that the military technology or equipment to be exported might be used for internal repression.
So this is a clear failing of both the UK government which had to explicitly approve the exportation of Surveillance Group products, but this is also a failing of the company itself.
[37:44] Is it a failing or just… I think it's more a total disregard for the law. I mean failing implies that you tried and you just couldn't uphold the standards. They intentionally you know decided to disregard the law.
[37:58] Yea well in episode 9 we said "look these companies say they are just trying to help and don't allow their products to be used for oppressive means, but that's just what they say and it's not true." Well maybe someone out there could have argued with us in defense of these companies saying "how are these companies to know? They're halfway around the world in Israel, New Zealand, the UK, or the US how are they supposed to know their technology will get used by say the Mexican government to oppress nutrition activists? How are they supposed to know their tech will be used to persecute political dissidents in Tukey?"
[38:28] Whoever asked that question does not know how these company operates; they have analysts; they have country specialists who are well aware of the situations in these countries.
[38:37] But there really is no argument here. At least in this story, there is no controversy over Turkish repression, and it's illegal for EU members to sell this tech to repressive governments, but this company does it anyway, knowing that it's tech will be used against law-abiding and innocent citizens. The people at this company do not care. They do it because they know they can make some profit, and get away with it.
But this spying is not limited to companies selling to repressive governments, but within governments that we might consider very democratic and progressive.
It was recently discovered that Norway built a surveillance base with the help of the US National Security Agency, and more than $33million of tax payer money, and hid its function from the public. The Norway government itself was told in classified documents that the purpose of the base is to monitor for terrorism abroad, while the public was told the purpose was simple communication between NATO allies and military troops. What it actually has been doing, in addition to military intelligence, is intercepting phone call and email records by Norwegian citizens to friends and family overseas, in order to analyze social networks, and identify new targets for investigation. The Norwegian Intelligence Security is now in an ongoing classified dispute with the Norwegian Government for spying on its own citizens. Discuss: What this reveals to me is that the surveillance systems we allow our governments and companies to build, IN the name of national security, ultimately come back home and are used against us. So again, when our governments and our tech companies tell us they want to use the power we give them to only fight the bad guys that want to hurt us, should we believe them?
Something to think about.
And not just something to think about, but something we see happening right here in the United States.
There is an ongoing lawsuit filed by the Georgetown Center of Privacy and Technology against the NYPD regarding the New York Police secret facial recognition program. Researchers have been trying for a couple years now to get the Police Department to reveal the scope of the facial recognition program they have implemented. The police have admitted to using it extensively, in everything from monitoring protesters, to routine stops and misdemeanors. And although at least 5 people have been misidentified by the technology, there is no public knowledge of what happened to these people; there is no knowledge about what the police do with the data they get; no knowledge on how they use it or what the purpose of it is. Court dates set for April and May might reveal more information if the Judge agrees to force the NYPD to disclose more information.
So stay tuned on that, and let's take a look at another secret police initiative that has come to light:
As early as 2012, the New Orleans Police formed a partnership with the Silicon Valley company Palantir. Palantir is a company that was founded by Peter Theil and with money from the CIA. It builds counter-terrorism and intelligence products, and also markets itself to the private and financial sector. And the company formed this partnership with New Orleans Police to test and build predictive policing technology.
Now, predictive policing is hugely controversial, as it should be, and in Episode 9 we outline some of the reasons we should be skeptical of it:
And in New Orleans, this highly intrusive program, costing a millions of dollars a year, was kept totally secret by the mayor and by Palantir by classifying it as a philanthropic initiative that did not need to be disclosed.
[42:45] I mean you have city council members in charge of overseeing public data that just had no idea this was going on, no idea the data being given to the company and the risks involved. And although Palantir as a company stresses their commitment to privacy, let's look at what they've been given access to in New Orleans.
[43:04] This is a private company right? This is insane.
[43:08] The Mayor allowed Palantir to access broad law enforcement databases that included court filings, licenses, addresses, phone numbers, social media data, parole information, jailhouse phone calls, and even the central case management system which has information on every single documented police interaction with citizens, even if there was no arrest.
[43:29] What will they do with the data?
So they take all this data, and they try to build social networks so that you can provide a name, and get a risk score for that person. So they would type in Moriah King, and based on all the data about you - but not just you, your family too - they would say "oh Moriah is likely to commit a crime, let's go monitor her." And what's insidious about this process is that maybe this conclusion is based on a cousin you have that's in jail. Since you are related to this person, you have a higher risk score. But now, since you have a higher risk score, maybe the risk scores of your friends go up because they are associated with you.
It's just a ridiculous technology. Black populations are already over-policed in this country. This crappy AI looks at arrest data and says "oh look, all this crime occurs in these areas, police should go there." And then it says "oh look, all these black people have criminal neighbors, they must be criminals too, monitor them." And it's easy to see how this just creates a feedback loop where over-policed areas get more policed, and communities continue to be segregated, and the poverty cycle continues all under the guise of philanthropy.
Another aspect of this is something called parallel construction, where evidence is acquired illegally, and then police build cases against people using that evidence, but making it look as if they acquired it honestly. Well for the past six years in New Orleans, authorities sentenced people in court using Palantir's products without ever disclosing that relationships, something that would normally be required.
[45:10] And Moriah we did discuss parallel construction in our government surveillance episode. We may be facing a future where parallel construction - this need for local authorities to acquire evidence in secret - is not even necessary to the same extent it is right now.
Moriah I want to ask you a question. If I'm a police officer, and I acquire evidence on you, using an illegal method without a warrant, you know let's say I stick a GPS tracker on your car without your knowledge. The way I get this information on you is in clear violation of the Constitution. When we go to court, can I use that evidence against you?
No.
You might think that, but you'd be wrong.
A man was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Arizona a while back for hauling marijuana with a tractor. He and his attorney appealed, saying the way that police acquired evidence against him, by placing a GPS tracker on his tractor without a warrant, was not legal. This appeal went to the Arizona high court, and the court agreed! They said you're right, police violated the man's rights when by acquiring this evidence illegally.
[46:18] So he went free? They let him go?
Wrong again Moriah, that's two strikes. The Arizona high court ruled that although the evidence was illegally acquired, it was still permissible in court, because the officers were trying their best to follow the law at the time.
[46:36] I'm so confused so what's the point of the Constitution if you just try to follow the law and just fall short?
[46:42] You know this sounds silly, but the Supreme Court agrees with this rationale. According to the highest court in this country, prosecutors are allowed to use evidence that was illegally acquired so long as investigators were trying to follow the law.
[46:59] Okay so how are they justifying this because this seems like a stretch.
[47:03] According to the Supreme Court, the whole intent behind the rule in the first place, the rule that illegally obtained evidence cannot be used in court - has nothing to do with protecting rights, but the intent is solely to prevent authorities from misconduct. Therefore, if police are trying to follow the law, it's not an instance of misconduct, and thus should be allowed.
Rights of the people be damned.
[47:29] But you know what, this reminds me of a constitutional Law class I had in college where they discussed how Supreme Court Justices ruled on cases, and a big one is Spirit of the Law, and that's what this reminds me of.
Well “if the spirit of the law, even if it says this, if the spirit was this then it's okay.” I think that goes back to a larger issue.
[47:49] I wonder if this spirit of the law logic would work next time I get pulled over. Well I'm white, you're black, so I guess I should say next time you get pulled over.
[47:59] Right hahaha.
[48:03] So Moriah you get pulled over; you think the police would let you go if you said "sorry officer, I was trying to follow the law, I just didn't see that red light?"
[48:11] There’s no telling what ticket I’d get.
[48:12] Okay well so far these have all been updates regarding surveillance and police in the West, with the exception of Turkey, and some people might still not be convinced that predictive policing, these surveillance technologies, and our own governments are things to really be concerned about, so this might be a good time to take a look at some updates in China's surveillance programs, and what some of this stuff looks like when it's ramped up a few notches.
Currently, spending on domestic security exceeds the national defense budget by 20%, and it accounts for 6% of all government spending. That's huge, and this is a part of the world undergoing rapid change in this area.
As we discussed in episode 9, Xinjiang may be one of the most heavily surveilled places on earth, and some new tech has arrived on scene to augment this fact. China already has about 150 million surveillance cameras in place- for comparison, the United Kingdom has about 6 million - and China has set a target for 600 million cameras, all equipped with AI and facial recognition software.
But now police officers are being equipped with facial recognition glasses that allow them to scan faces in real time and receive alerts related to individuals that are flagged by the database. It goes without saying but these predictive policing systems are of course being integrated with this technology.
The province you stayed at in China, how close were you to Xinjiang?
[49:52] It was right next to it. So a train from my capital city where I lived to the Capitol of Xinjiang would take about 12 hours, and within China that's not that long.
[50:06] Do you feel like the area you lived in was surveilled in any way?
[50:09] Oh yeah definitely. The whole of China is surveilled, but because my province was next to Xinjiang, and also it was beside Tibet, there was a lot of surveillance.
[50:19] So do you think - at least in Xinjian, a lot of these technologies are aimed at controlling the minority Uyghur population - do you think that this is just China trying to protect its citizens from dangerous people, or maybe something else going on?
[50:33] When you look at the larger picture of China and its behavior in the region, you'll see that it's trying to re-establish itself as a leader in Asian, not just East Asia, but also Central Asia and Southeast Asia.
Historically Russia has had more influence in the region but now that’s shifting towards China, and maintaining control of Xinjiang is very important for geopolitical reasons.
I'm not sure if any of you listeners know about the One Belt One Road initiative but Xinjiang is very important for that.
[51:03] Let me ask you this: obviously the authorities in China are coming down very hard on the Uyghur population. In your experience though how do just everyday Chinese citizens view this population? And is their view in some way influenced by the narrative by the state itself?
[51:23] That's a great question.
So first of all because of its location in the very far Northwest, most Chinese people don't travel to the region. It's not on their travel hotspots for when they are allowed to take vacation.
But definitely there is a lot of propaganda within the Chinese state-sponsored media about the people, about their culture, and about what they believe and how they act, especially since they are a minority that is more religiously oriented. So a lot of people I would say outside - and I'm generalizing here - a lot of people outside of the province believe Uyghurs to be uneducated, poor, and religious extremists.
That is due to a lack of knowledge, or lack of interaction with Uyghurs or people from the region, but more importantly from the state sponsored media to justify the surveillance and the violence and the control that the government is carrying out in the region.
[52:18] I think that’s such a great point and really what the danger with this stuff. We have to realize that these governments, and the companies that build their surveillance and control infrastructure use emotionally charged messages to make people afraid of terrorists; of their neighbors; of enemies overseas; whatever it takes to get these initiatives approved. So that people will tolerate human rights abuses in the name of security; and... so that they will turn a blind eye towards injustice against others.
[52:50] One thing I always found interesting about the state-sponsored propaganda as it relates to Uyghurs is that the Chinese government loves to advocate for a One China, or we’re all Chinese, we’re all one China, and yet it also through their propaganda distinguishes Uyghurs as Uyghurs, and as this extremist minority, and then we're Han, and we are peaceful, and they are the other.
But yet at the same time they justify what they're doing there because One China. They advocate for One China so that I've always found ironic. It just doesn't add up to me.
[53:26] Well it’s interesting you mention One China, because right now in Xinjiang authorities are using this artificial intelligence, and predictive policing, NOT to prevent violent crime or anything like that, but to systematically round up and imprison hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs into political-education camps.
These people are held for months in camps designed to brainwash and convert them to Chinese political doctrine. They're forced to sing patriotic songs, swear fealty to the Chinese State, and more. And the reasons for their incarceration are not crimes, but cultural: You are praying too much? You're sent to camp. You visited a website that we disagree with? You're sent to camp. You bought a lot of fertilizer? You are hoarding food in your apartment? You must be a terrorist. You're sent to camp. Your child didn't go to school? You must be planning a terrorist attack. You're sent to camp.
This is a human rights catastrophe. And the police are openly bragging about this. A police officer went on record to talk about the use of big-data in Xinjiang and says quote "before the application of big data, police often only arrested people after they had committed wrongdoing ... Now, they can take preventive measures in advance."
That’s obviously bad. A huge, like I said human rights catastrophe.
[54:59] But okay let's shift gears, only slightly, to cover the private sector and discuss updates to Episode 3 - Permanente record. In that episode we discuss surveillance and tracking by private companies, in the real world. The data that is harvested on us, sold to data brokers, and then used against us to take advantage of vulnerabilities, and manipulate us into certain behavior. One unintended consequence of this increased surveillance everywhere is the number of doors it opens for hackers and others with malicious intent to take advantage of.
In the UK, a group has picked up on security flaws in the superfluous surveillance cameras that are everywhere, and is actively streaming live footage of UK schools on its website. People who go to this website – and no we’re not going to provide the URL…
[55:43] That means I can't see it?
[55:45] No Moriah I’m afraid you can't spy on little kids in schools.
[55:48] Oh that sounds so wrong.
[55:49] Well this is what's happening! People can watch live feeds of school restrooms, playgrounds, wait I don't know… does the UK have cameras in their school restrooms? We don't have that in the United States.
[56:00] Not that we know of.
[56:01] Oooh good point.
Well this website brags about having a large database of available cameras to choose from, and is not limited to the UK but other countries as well including the United States. Other websites are doing similar things with private networks to display interiors of homes, churches, changing rooms, and all kinds of creepy stuff.
Now, there is an ongoing investigation into this website because it is clearly illegal, but it's so easy to obscure server locations, and the people behind online activity that this type of thing is no doubt going to become more and more common the more we allow these intrusive surveillance technologies to invade every part of our lives.
But this is not just a concern with cameras, but really any product in our world that has connectivity. And more and more companies are integrating their products with connectivity as it enables easier data collection, which they can then sell for profit to those data brokers we mentioned. A research group recently discovered massive security flaws in a range of wifi-enabled baby monitors, sold by a company out of Hong Kong. Over 50,000 user accounts were compromised to hackers. These researchers notified the company, but no patch has been put out to fix the flaws. And it was a simply flaw to exploit; researchers were able to gain direct access to the two-way audio functions, discover account information of people that owned this product, and more.
[57:23] I think the researcher should make this public so that the parents can be aware and just stop buying the baby monitors.
[57:28] Well no they did, and this is an ongoing research into these products made by this specific company, but see this is the problem is that so many of our products have this connectivity that a lot of security is compromised that we're not even aware of, but I mean what parent out there is going online to read obscure Tech blogs related to coding and various products that they may or may not have? Probably not that many right?
I mean we did see in Episode 3 how children's toys like dolls that were connected to the internet could be easily hacked to gain access to voice and audio capabilities and potentially interact directly with children.
In one case thousands of voice recordings of children using their toys were leaked from a company database, and many of these toys are produced by not toy companies, but intelligence companies that gather data about children, and then sell that data to advertisers and other data brokers.
[58:19] Talk about starting early you know? Getting that information on-
[58:22] Yeah this is such a big problem now, it does make me really question what is it doing to our future generations that are born into this data collecting world that everything about them is known from day one, I mean-
[58:35] They literally have no choice. No say in the matter.
[58:39] And that's exactly something I think we should bring up is when it comes to this data collection there really is no easy opting out. Something we talked about with Facebook. If you don't like it just don't use it, but when this is the entire world and everything we do is being monitored how do you just opt out of that?
[58:55] I was just going to say how do you opt out when you don't even know you are opted in?
[58:59] Exactly. But these wifi-enabled baby monitors are just another object under the umbrella of Internet of Things that we are discovering more and more is just a terrible thing to own, because of how easy they are to hack, and because of the data that they acquire about you and your families that can be sold and abused to take advantage of you.
Look, I just want to throw this out there, I don't want to make a big discussion about this, but we always stress in this show the need to question everything, and to question things at the source. The underlying systems. And this might be a case where underlying societal flaws have produced a negative symptom that we are trying to bandage as opposed to addressing the real problem. As I was reading about this security flaw in baby monitors, I noticed the proposed solutions are all the familiar ones, you know things like "oh we need to patch security in these types of devices," and "consumer need awareness and education," etc. but it made me wonder why do we have baby monitors in the first place? I mean, individualism is my favorite thing to criticize and it makes me wonder if this is just another symptom of a society that breaks people apart into little atomized compartments, puts stress on them so they have to constantly compete for jobs and wages, overloading their schedules and making it hard to focus on developing relationships and communities. Is it a positive thing that in our society parents are so busy they have to leave their newborns in separate rooms? Is it normal to make a baby sleep alone? Is that consistent with our biology and the way we evolved in the context of tightly-knit groups?
[1:00:27] I think if you think about it just from a cultural perspective, think about a new mother with her first child, and a big part of our culture is creating the baby room, and “oh what colors are you going to put in your Nursery?”
[1:00:39] And I don't think that people even realize consciously that it is not normal for your newborn baby, or even your 5 month old 6 month old, to sleep in a separate room. In some communities around the world most new babies stay attached to their mother and sleep with their parents up until they're two. I'm agreeing with you, why do we need baby monitors, why do we put our newborn babies into a separate room?
[1:01:03] You know what you just reminded me of is our episode on propaganda, you know what did you just say...
[1:01:08] About the nurseries in the baby room.
[1:01:10] This is just something cultural that's become normalized that we don't even think about, and that's exactly the type of thing that Edward Bernays and all these propagandists seek to do in shaping our behavior is “hey how can we make certain habits normal in society so that people don't even think about it? So that they don't even question the need to purchase a baby crib; they don't even think about the need to purchase a baby monitor, it's just what they do? And that's how we can make more money,” and this may just be another example of that, but just something to think about, I'm not a parent so moving on.
More cars were attitude cellular networks in 2017 then new phones were. And this year, 98% of new cars will have internet connectivity, and this is of course motivated by The increased Revenue that can be made by selling consumer data you know everything from fuel consumption tire pressure driving habits and so much more.
For those of you who have followed us on our Surveillance and Tracking series, who are still saying "what's the big deal about giving up our data to companies who can use that data to improve our experience?" Is it really about improving the experience, or is it as we've said just a clever ploy to get more money out of us, and control our behavior? Well, let's see what the Airline industry has to say:
Airlines are preparing for the integration of dynamic pricing in the way they charge customers. What does that mean? The idea is to use big data to personally identify each individual that comes to an airline's site, and then adjust prices based on that individual. How much money they make?; are they traveling for personal or business reasons?; do they travel often? etc. The more data they have on you, the more the can figure out the most you're willing to pay for a ticket, and then charge you accordingly.
And where does this data come from? It comes from everywhere. The websites we visit. The products we buy. The events we go to. The companies we work for. Big data has become so valuable to advertisers that just about every company that can acquire data on us will, and then turn around and sell that data to brokers who compile it, categorize it, and sell it in packages to others who want to use that information to take advantage of us, just like these airline companies.
And before you say, “they just want this data to improve their services for the consumer's benefit,” this dynamic pricing comes at the same time the Airline industry has been lobbying the Department of Transportation to remove regulations put in place to protect consumers. Some of the rules airlines have asked the DOT to remove include:
Moriah as we discussed in greater detail in Episode 3, ultimately the logical conclusion of all this tracking and data collection is to make more money.
Why do companies want to buy the data off your iRobot vacuum cleaner and figure out the layout of your house? why do they purchase data on the drugs you take, and any physical or mental diseases you might be suffering from? Why do they want to know how you drive your car, how often you fuel up at the gas station; how fast you drive; where you're going and when you go there? Because once they know everything about you, they can extract the most money possible from you. Oh you're trying to buy a ticket from Atlanta to Seattle? But you're a businesswoman with deep pockets? We can charge you more. Oh you're trying to buy a ticket from New York to Miami to visit your mother in the hospital? Well we know that you're going no matter what, and that you don't own a car so you don't have any alternative transportation options, so we're going to charge you more than we would someone else. Once everything is known about you, there is no limit to the creativity that can be conjured to take advantage of you at every opportunity.
And like you mentioned Moriah it becomes impossible to opt out of things like this. When 98% of all cars are connected to the internet, it becomes impossible to prevent insurance companies from getting data on how you drive, and now how you drive affects the money that you have to pay for your insurance. If you try to opt out of this, now it becomes the same way as if you’re trying to opt out of a credit card. “Fine, you don’t want to build credit? That’s okay but now we’re not going to give you a loan. Oh you want to opt out of this information data collection on your driving? That’s fine, but now we’re not going to give you car insurance.”
[1:05:39] You didn't even discuss how the state government requires you to have car insurance; you can't really opt out if you have a car and you need to drive because the infrastructure doesn't allow for you to take the train or the bus, so you need a car.
[1:05:52] That's a good point. Ultimately a lot of this data collection can just be integrated into the law and then yeah we really don't have any way to opt out of it.
So we covered a few of these episodes that we did end up just now and we're going to hit just three more episodes or we're going to do it quick so that we can give you as many updates as possible.
Let’s start with Episode 2 - Concrete Reef in which we cover the latest in sea level rise, and the impact this could have on coastal cities, climate refugees, and markets around the world as real estate values collapse in areas that traditionally have the highest values in the world.
Recently, Tim Grafton of the New Zealand insurance council came out with a startling statement, quote:
Let me be very clear, sea level rise is known, it is expected, it is not accidental and so it will NOT be insured.
At the same time that we have politicians and business leaders saying climate change is not a big deal, and there is an attempt to ignore the realities so that we can maintain the insane premises our economy is built on, those in industries that stand to lose from climate changes like the insurance industry are paying attention, because their bottom line is at stake.
[1:06:59] But I think this brings up the point that you made about community and that when things are so far removed from our very own, like where we live it's hard to believe that it's real.
I mean take the instance of the island in Louisiana, Isle de Jean Charles, and how it literally has disappeared. There's like a couple hundred residents left, but because it's so far removed from say Washington DC or a city in California, we don't know that it exists and it's easy to accept the fact that politicians and business leaders are saying that climate change is not a big deal.
We haven't really felt the full force of it but there are communities in America that have.
[1:07:37] And I think we're going to be feeling it a lot more as these problems start to affect these integrated systems.
[1:07:43] Yeah especially when the residents are pushed off their land and now they're moving into your city, and you’re like “well why are they coming here?” They literally don't have a place to stay, now real estate values change and markets become more expensive, because as you said these people have to have a place to stay.
[1:07:58] Well not only that but as these industries wake up to this problem, what happens to these coastal cities when banks won't loan on properties at risk for flooding anymore? What will happen when insurers refuse to insure property? And how will that affect the global financial market with so much money tied up in huge coastal investments? It may not be long before we have the answers to those questions, and it’s not going to be easy.
But let’s move on.
In Episode 15 – Terms of Service we discuss big brother Facebook, and just recently the UN announced preliminary findings related to an ongoing investigation into human rights abuses in Myanmar.
So far over 700,000 Rohingyas and other ethnic minorities have had to flee the country in the midst of military genocide. The UN reports that Facebook as a social media platform has exacerbated this conflict and quote "turned into a beast," enabling incitations of violence and hate against ethnic minorities to proceed unchecked.
Now of course, Facebook claims that it does not tolerate hate speech on its platform, but as we saw in Episode 15, the company ultimately heeds the requests of governments it perceives as powerful, and ignores the complaints of minorities and other disadvantaged groups when it comes to these issues.
In Episode 16 – What We Reap last week we discussed farming and the state of industrial agriculture with Chris D'Allesandro, and we touched briefly on the chemical inputs associated with industrial agriculture. Well because of population growth and an increased demand for meat products worldwide, global fertilizer production has quadrupled in the past 50 years, and we are expected to reach peak phosphorous maybe within the next 30 years. As phosphorous becomes scarcer, the price will go up, and that means yet another contributor to higher food prices in the future.
Moriah, normally we end Ashes Ashes episodes on a "what can we do" section, to explore possible solutions and things that we can do as individuals to prepare for and respond to all this bad news.
But we've covered too many topics to do a broad what can we do, so instead I've got a small bit of good news I think we can end on.
[1:10:09] Well that's always nice.
[1:10:11] Yeah and the UN estimates that at current topsoil loss, we have just 60 years left of agricultural yields before our entire food system collapses globally. That’s not the good news part, wait for it.
[1:10:23] I'm waiting.
*[1:10:24] Well the UK is responding to this crisis and this year a new bill will be brought before parliament that would mandate soil protection and regeneration within the United Kingdom. This would be the very first bill of its kind, and would be a good first, major step, towards the direction of reducing and maybe even reversing some of the consequences of industrial agriculture.
Of course, it has not been approved yet, so to find out what happens you'll need to stay tuned for another episode of Ashes Ashes.
Moriah, thanks again for joining us. I think you really provided a needed perspective on the show. We’ve all been getting tired of listening to David Torcivia.
Just joking David. Excited for you to be back next week.
[1:11:09] Thanks for having me I always enjoy listening to Ashes Ashes, and hearing the different perspectives of you and David, and I think Ashes Ashes brings up issues that aren't covered by major media platforms, and even some of the smaller ones.
Thanks for that, and thank you for joining us; I hope it’s not the last time that we have your perspective on the show.
If you want to find out more information about these topics, you can visit our website, ashesashes.org where we have a full transcript of this episode and many links, sources, and more information.
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Also we have an email address. It’s contact AT ashes ashes dot org, and we’d love to hear from you. Let us know what you think - positive or negative we'll read it - and if you have any stories related to these topics, let us know and maybe we can share them in an upcoming episode or on our website.
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We’ve got a super exciting episode next week that we really hope you tune into. David should be back in town and joining us for another deep dive into a very interesting, and very broken system.
Until then, this is Ashes Ashes.
Bye.