According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), plastic waste accounts for nearly 20% of what’s going into landfills. That’s after recycling and combustion has reduced the total amount of plastic waste. Now according to this article by David Nield at ScienceAlert engineers at the University of Texas have developed a way of depolymerizing the plastic (breaking it down into more basic molecular units) quickly:

In tests, products made from the polymer polyethylene terephthalate (PET) were broken down in a week and, in some cases, 24 hours – these are products that can take centuries to degrade properly in natural conditions.

“The possibilities are endless across industries to leverage this leading-edge recycling process,” says chemical engineer Hal Alper from the University of Texas at Austin.

They also demonstrated the ability to repolymerize it chemically to make new plastic. Equally interesting is the method they used:

The team has called the enzyme FAST-PETase (functional, active, stable, and tolerant PETase). They developed the enzyme from a natural PETase that allows bacteria to degrade PET plastic and modified it using machine learning to pinpoint five mutations that would enable it to degrade the plastic faster under different environmental conditions.

Clearly, there’s a lot left to be done. Can the enzyme be used at scale? Are mitigation measures needed to control its use? Does it bear additional risks? Is it cost-effective? Once these issues have been resolved this newly-discovered enzyme or one like it has important benefits in reducing the amount of plastic waste going into landfills.

More here.

I also wonder what the energy requirements might be for either the depolymerization step, the repolymerization step or both. Thermodynamics tells us that there will be some. That’s one of the reasons that I think that producing more energy more efficiently is a better solution for us than producing less energy. It expands the possibilities open to us.

While I found Allison Schrager’s City Journal review of Thomas Piketty’s new book interesting throughout, I found its opening paragraph particularly so:

The overwhelming majority of economists agree on a few things: secure, well-defined property rights are a vital ingredient of growth; people respond to incentives; the economy is not zero-sum; sustainable growth comes from innovations that enable us to make more from less; some trade-off between equality and growth is necessary because innovation often makes some people rich, and they must be rewarded for their risk-taking and talents.

The reason: I think it’s a succinct statement of the views of socialists including “democratic socialists” in the United States. They do not seem to believe in property rights, that peole respond to incentives, that the economy is not zero-sum, i.e. that in a purchase transaction there is always an exploiter and an exploited, or that economic inequality should exist. The empirical evidence for the matters Dr. Schrager lists is overwhelming but, as Jonathan Swift observed:

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.

No amount of evidence will persuade anyone from disagreeing with those views because they are essentially religious in nature, i.e. by reasoning never acquired.

Nonetheless I agree with Dr. Piketty that a violent revolution against market systems is coming but, unlike Dr. Piketty, I think it will result in the empowerment of a new aristocracy and the impoverishment of billions.

There is presently a furor of reporting that the Supreme Court will reverse Roe v. Wade, the 50 year old Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationally in the U. S. (with certain restrictions), spurred by the release of what is purported to be a draft of the forthcoming decision produced by Politico. I have demurred from commenting on the subject because I find it distasteful. but this is a good opportunity to present my views.

I think that abortion is wrong. I think that Roe v. Wade is bad law. I think that as implemented our abortion policy is bad policy. As I see it there are only two coherent policy positions: either abortion should be banned except to save the life of the mother or abortion should be funded under Medicaid.

All of the preceding notwithstanding I think that Roe v. Wade should be allowed to stand under stare decisis, the legal principle that courts should follow long-established precedent in their rulings, especially regarding the expansion of rights, and on First Amendment (freedom of religion) grounds.

If Roe v. Wade is, indeed, reversed, I would hope that this would be what is called a “teachable moment” for progressives: don’t rely on the courts to change the society for you. That battle should be fought in the legislature, particularly state legislatures. I doubt that hope will be fulfilled.

I also think that any who believe that reversing Roe v. Wade will alter Democrats’ prospects in November are dreaming. The only people for whom it would be decisive in changing their vote will vote Democratic anyway.

Today I was thrilled to receive in the mail a box full of treasures from my second cousin, Jean. I haven’t examined them closely yet but I couldn’t resist taking a few pictures and sharing them. The pictures at the top of the post is a Bible belonging to my great-grandmother Emma Bader. Emma was born just after the American Civil War. She was my father’s maternal grandmother.

The other picture is of my grandmother, Esther Wagner, and her younger brother, Louis P. Wagner, Jr.

Esther was born in 1891. Louis was six years younger than she. I have seen other pictures of them but none at so young an age. There is another, much fainter picture of the two of them in 1898.

I wanted to remark on the first sentence of the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s observations on Germany’s steps of late last week which included stepping up its shipments of munitions to Ukraine and demurring from negotiating with the Russians separately from Ukraine, “over the heads of the Ukrainians” as the editors put it. I think both are steps in the right direction.

Here’s the sentence in question:

It’s a good bet Vladimir Putin hopes that, as his Ukraine war drags on, Western allies will be tempted to sacrifice Ukraine for the sake of ending the conflict.

My concern is that “the West” will discourage the Ukrainians from negotiating or accepting a negotiated settlement which they would otherwise be prepared to accept. IMO that’s a formula for continued escalation and many more Ukrainian lives lost.

I wanted to bring some attention to this report (PDF) from Microsoft released last week. Perhaps like me you’ve read multiple statements of surprise that the Russians weren’t engaging in a more active cyberwar than they have. I think the report explains what has actually been happening.

The TL;DR version is that since the very earliest days of the Russian invasion quite a number of “destructive” cyberattacks have been launched against Ukrainian government, infrastructure, and corporate targets and these attacks show signs of coordination with “kinetic” attacks, i.e. conventional military attacks. Brave New World, indeed.

Here’s a snippet:

A day before the military invasion, operators associated with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service, launched destructive wiper attacks on hundreds of systems in Ukrainian government, IT, energy, and financial organizations. Since then, the activity we have observed has included attempts to destroy, disrupt, or infiltrate networks of government agencies, and a wide range of critical infrastructure organizations, which Russian military forces have in some cases targeted with ground attacks and missile strikes. These network operations have at times not only degraded the functions of the targeted organizations but sought to disrupt citizens’ access to reliable information and critical life services, and to shake confidence in the country’s leadership.

Based on Russian military goals for information warfare, these actions are likely aimed at undermining Ukraine’s political will and ability to continue the fight, while facilitating collection of intelligence that could provide tactical or strategic advantages to Russian forces. Through our engagements with customers in Ukraine, we have observed that Russia’s computer-enabled efforts have had an impact in terms of technical disruption of services and causing a chaotic information environment, but Microsoft is not able to evaluate their broader strategic impact.

It’s the best information on this subject that I have read to date.

I don’t think that their recommendations will be widely heeded, indeed, I think that most companies and government agencies are pretty reckless when it comes to computer security but that needs to change and quickly.

This piece at Axios by Rebecca Falconer puts a little meat on the bones of the claim that I have been making about Germany’s financing Russia’s war:

The European Union bought 71% of Russian fossil fuels via shipments and pipelines from Russia, the study found.

• Germany imported more than any other country, according to the report — spending an estimated 9.1 billion euros ($9.65 billion).
• Italy was the next biggest customer (6.9 billion euros), followed by China (6.7 billion euros), the Netherlands (5.6 billion euros), Turkey (4.1 billion euros) and France (3.8 billion euros).

The Germans, in particular, need to decide which is more important to them: ending global warming or ending the war in Ukraine.

I don’t see any way economic sanctions can be effective on Russia without being extended to its energy exports.

There’s quite a bit of waggery over President Biden’s “Disinformation Board”. When and if the board actually starts to act, I expect it will result in a considerable amount of litigation.

Rather than comment on the merits or lack thereof of the board, I propose that we create two lists:

• The topics that will be criticized by the disinformation board.
• The topics that will not be criticized by the disinformation board.

Continuing with the common theme, I detect a note of real despair in David Sirota’s piece in the Guardian:

As his poll numbers crater, Biden appears to be offering no course correction, and he still hasn’t signed a stack of executive orders on matters ranging from debt cancellation to drug pricing. Caught between the electorate and Democrats’ campaign sponsors, he appears to have decided that he cannot – or does not want to – stop the spread of the Joker pill. So he is now just mainlining its active ingredients into America’s veins with bold promises and even bolder betrayals.

Consider a brief list:

• Biden promised a $15 minimum wage, and then he and his party promptly abandoned that initiative.
• Biden pledged to halt drilling on federal land and spent the first year of his presidency promising climate action – all while he outpaces Donald Trump’s drill-baby-drill initiatives and deploys his spokespeople to brag about flooding the world with fossil fuels amid the ecological emergency. He has also been using his executive authority to ramp up methane-emitting natural gas exports.
• Biden promised an “immediate cancellation of a minimum of $10,000 of federal student loan debt” – which he has the executive authority to do at any moment. But he’s been refusing to do it and has been trying to overturn bankruptcy court victories for the most beleaguered debtors.
• Biden pledged to protect traditional Medicare and “give Americans a new choice, a public health insurance option”. Then he never again mentioned the public option when he became president. Instead, he is helping his healthcare industry donors further privatize Medicare and reap even more subsidies as insurers reduce coverage, rake in record profits and jack up premiums.
• Biden continues to insist he wants to lower the predatory cost of medicine and distribute vaccine recipes to halt the global spread of Covid. At the same time, he has refused to invoke his executive authority to reduce the price of medicines that were developed with public funding – he has effectively abandoned his Covid vaccine pledge, and he’s intervening in a primary to endorse a Democratic lawmaker who gutted his own drug pricing bill.
• Biden portrays himself as a union supporter and promised to “ensure federal contracts only go to employers who sign neutrality agreements committing not to run anti-union campaigns”. Yet he abandoned his campaign pledge to rein in union-busting federal contractors, he has not implemented his own labor taskforce’s weak recommendations, and his administration gave Amazon a $10bn contract while the company fought labor organizers.

He calls it the “Jokerization of America”.

I suspect he’s also looking at the Democrats’ polling numbers which suggest that the Republicans are likely to take control of both houses of the Congress in the next Congress. That won’t do much to promote President Biden’s agenda. Said another way, this is probably about as good as it’s going to get.