Man's Best Friend
Veterinarians
If you own a pet, or were lucky enough to avoid puppy scams during the pandemic and adopt one, you may be having difficulty booking appointments at your local vet. Turns out, not only human health care has been impacted by events of the last two years:
Hospitals, clinics, and vet offices around the U.S. in the past year have been turning animals away because they are short staffed. This crisis has hit all levels of the system, from general practice to specialists, but animal emergency rooms—where the job is most stressful—have it the worst.
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The staff shortage has gotten so bad in some areas that Maureen Luschini, an emergency-care vet in central New York, put it to me bluntly: “Emergency care cannot be guaranteed for your pets right now.” There are simply not enough people to take care of all the sick animals.
Words you do not to hear when your pet is sick or injured. One cause of the shortage is large numbers of vets - a field that skews heavily female - retiring or quitting to avoid illness or due to lack child care. Prior to COVID-19, veterinary medicine had issues with burnout - its 16 percent yearly turnover rate is much higher than human medicine - and, believe it or not, suicide:
Female veterinarians are also 3.5 times as likely to die by suicide as the general population, and male vets are about twice as likely, according to a 2018 CDC study. Jurney, the neurology specialist, is also president of the nonprofit Not One More Vet, which operates a crisis hotline and gives out emergency grants to veterinarians who need help. In the past two years, she says, “the demand for our services went up tenfold.”
It makes sense, given the extreme stresses of the job:
But the job also comes with watching a lot of animals suffer: Some owners have to let their pets die because they cannot afford care while others might refuse euthanasia and instead subject animals to futile medical treatments. In a 2018 survey that [Lisa] Moses conducted, 62 percent of vets said they sometimes or often encountered cases in which they could not “do the right thing.” More than 75 percent said these cases have caused them moderate or severe distress.
When the majority of vets are regularly put in terrible situations, forced to either give inadequate care or deal with owner neglect, it’s no wonder many took the opportunity the pandemic offered to find new careers.
Clinics are also badly in need of vet techs, a job that pays worse than…McDonald’s?
The low wages in veterinary medicine only added to the problem. “McDonald’s is paying $15, $16” an hour, [Larry] Block says. “There are still veterinary technicians, I’m sure, that are making less than that amount in Rhode Island.”
A quick Google estimates the average vet tech salary at $38,000 dollars, which doesn’t constitute a living wage in many places. The ‘low’ end of the range is less than thirty grand. The pandemic has exposed is how badly we pay the people we expect to care for us and our loved ones. An unintended side effect of upward wage pressure on fast food and retail jobs is they’re drawing skilled workers away from critical care jobs. Who’d have thought working at McDonald’s was less stressful and paid better than caring for animals?
Like nurses and other care workers, the vet shortage is only going to get worse in the next decade:
By 2030, the U.S. will need nearly 41,000 additional veterinarians and nearly 133,000 credentialed vet techs, according to a recent Mars Veterinary Health report.
In good times, veterinary medicine is challenging, stressful, and doesn’t pay well. In bad times, it may prove nearly impossible to get emergency or even routine pet care.
Alzheimer’s
For decades, scientists have been working on understanding and finding treatments and cures for Alzheimer’s disease, a terrifying cognitive illness that destroys a person’s memory. It’s high-stakes research, funded by government agencies and drug companies to the tune of billions a year.
In 2006, a groundbreaking paper published in Nature claimed to shed light on a specific type of plaque that collected in the brain and impaired communication between neurons:
In the brains of [Karen] Ashe’s transgenic mice, the UMN team discovered a previously unknown oligomer species, dubbed Aβ*56 (pronounced “amyloid beta star 56”) after its relatively heavy molecular weight compared with other oligomers. The group isolated Aβ*56 and injected it into young rats. The rats’ capacity to recall simple, previously learned information—such as the location of a hidden platform in a maze—plummeted.
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Ashe touted Aβ*56 on her website as “the first substance ever identified in brain tissue in Alzheimer’s research that has been shown to cause memory impairment.”
Ashe was a renowned neurology researcher and her paper was cited hundreds of times over the years, leading to increased grant funding for ‘amyloid and oligomer’ Alzheimer’s studies.
Ashe’s co-author on the study, who provided the brain imagery proving the link between the plaque and cognitive decline, is named Sylvain Lesné. He became famous alongside Ashe, and published many papers since then. Except, it turns out some or all of the original images he provided in his study were likely fabricated:
A 6-month investigation by Science provided strong support for [Matthew] Schrag’s suspicions and raised questions about Lesné’s research. A leading independent image analyst and several top Alzheimer’s researchers—including George Perry of the University of Texas, San Antonio, and John Forsayeth of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—reviewed most of Schrag’s findings at Science’s request. They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.
The authors “appeared to have composed figures by piecing together parts of photos from different experiments,” says Elisabeth Bik, a molecular biologist and well-known forensic image consultant.
Seems bad! It turned out many of Lesné’s papers had come under scrutiny for suspected alteration:
IN ALL, SCHRAG OR BIK identified more than 20 suspect Lesné papers; 10 concerned Aβ*56.
How could this happen? Scientific publications now have technology to detect fabricated imagery, but they didn’t in the 2000s when the first papers were published, and researchers are not required to provide original imagery to publications or their fellow scientists. Some attribute the lack of scrutiny to the desire for any good news in Alzheimer’s research, since the disease has proven incredibly difficult to crack:
In the fanfare around the Lesné-Ashe work, some Alzheimer’s experts see a failure of skepticism, including by journals that published the work.
We saw the same lack of skepticism in the Biogen drug’s rush to market. Fortunately, after enough outcry, the government denied Biogen Medicare coverage, potentially saving tens of thousands of seniors being injected with infusions that may have been no better than a placebo.
It remains to be seen how badly Lesné’s fabrications have set back Alzheimer’s research, but two friends I spoke to in drug research say his amyloid findings have been mostly disregarded in modern Alzheimer’s drug trials, so hopefully most funds are being used in authentic research to try and better understand and treat this awful disease.
Land Life
We have talked before about greenwashing and ways companies are using carbon offsets to continue spewing greenhouse gases into the air while telling their investors they’re saving the planet, actually. Lots of companies provide greenwashing services, but let’s look at one in particular, a Dutch reforestation company called Land Life. Their business model is to plant trees and sell carbon credits to polluters. How’s that going?
On Monday, Dutch reforestation company Land Life started what has become a 35,000 acre forest fire in Spain.
The fire started in Bubierca, a province of Zaragoza, the capital of autonomous community Aragon, when a Land Life contractor planting trees accidentally set off sparks that ignited nearby plant life.
Oh boy. How did this happen?
"The fire started while one of our contractors was using a retro-spider excavator to prepare the soil to plant trees later this winter," Land Life said in a statement on Thursday.
This is a spider excavator, which answers the question ‘What if we gave West Coast Customs access to industrial machinery?’:
I don’t know how excavators generate sparks big enough to start massive forest fires, but it’s not a great look for a reforestation company. It’s also not the first time they’ve done this:
…on June 20, it sparked another inferno that wiped out 20 hectares. (49 acres).
That’s two fires in two months? What? The mayor of Bubierca has some thoughts:
"It is not good that it happens once and that they continue working," the mayor of Bubierca told local media.
No, it’s definitely not good when your reforestation company is setting multiple accidental forest fires. They should either stop lighting trees on fire with their low rider excavators, or find a new line of work.
BP
Speaking of carbon credits, here is a story about oil giant BP paying less than half market rate for carbon credits in rural Mexico:
After two years of work, the village got its first annual payment in late 2021. The pay, split among 133 members of the community, amounted to about $40 each, a fraction of what the village’s then-leader, Álvaro Tepetla, expected. He’d hoped they could earn as much as $44,000 in total per year, or at least match the $8,100 paid by a recently canceled government conservation program. The final sum was 30% lower and worth little more than a week’s work per person.
BP contracted with the town through a nonprofit, who worked with the World Resources Institute - one of the more prestigious climate nonprofits - to train the community on conservation practices to keep large sections of their native forest uncut, in exchange for pennies. The program is part of a larger initial the oil company started in 2019:
The project, named CO₂munitario, spans 59 communities in more than a half-dozen states and covers around 200,000 hectares of land. BP put forward $2.5 million to start the program in 2019, which was matched by USAID, the US government’s development arm. In 2021 the oil giant inked a deal with Pronatura to buy as many as 1.5 million offsets at $4 each.
Forestry offsets are now worth $12 to $16 dollars each and could go even higher in the next few years, perhaps doubling again. One problem with pricing the offsets so low is it doesn’t encourage the villagers to keep the forests maintained, because they’re earning a week’s worth of pay for months of labor.
This assumes that carbon offsets are legitimate tools to conserve nature, or ‘offset’ carbon pollution from large companies:
A major US offset supplier told Bloomberg Green that most projects, including some of his own, are shortchanging the climate. An Australian ex-official described projects there as “largely a sham.”
One could say they’re a sham because a small village in Mexico is agreeing not to cut down its forest for one year - were they going to before the offset? how would we know? - and in exchange, BP can continue to pump and sell millions of barrels of oil and gas to its clients. It pays a bit of money, funds a few programs it can write off as charitable programs, and it’s business as usual. Considering the climate is warming at a breakneck pace at current CO2 emissions levels, I’m not sure allowing companies to do accounting gimmicks to say they’re ‘carbon neutral’ is going to provide the change we need?
The WRI has created guidelines for companies buying offsets, saying they should maximize cuts to their greenhouse emissions before buying, but with a company like BP that’s basically impossible, as its carefully worded commitment shows:
BP holds itself at the vanguard of oil companies seeking to transition to a green economy, saying that by 2030 it aims “to be a different kind of energy company” and committing to net-zero emissions by 2050 across operations, production, and sales.
The way oil companies attempt to wriggle out of the warming effect of the products they sell is by laying those emissions on their customers. Sure, if BP can transition its corporate offices to solar or green buildings or whatever, its sales and operations will be net-zero, somehow. The people burning all that oil, well, they’ll have to buy some forest in Mexico. Fortunately, BP can sell it to them:
But BP says it plans to sell the credits as commodities to clients, because it has committed to not using offsets to meet its end-of-decade emissions targets. It could use the Mexican credits to brand gas as “carbon offset,” as it did with offsets from a Mexican project last year. Pronatura, which signed the contract with BP, says the project did not regulate the company’s use of the offsets.
This shell game extends to Saudi ARAMCO, which got positive press for the same net-zero promise, but sang a different tune in its sustainability reports:
The anomaly shows up in Aramco’s first dedicated sustainability report published last week, where it noted that absolute emissions in 2035 will be almost the same as the level recorded in 2021. In that period, Aramco expects to increase oil production by 1 million barrels a day by 2027 and boost gas production by 50% by the end of this decade. While that means its emissions per unit of fossil fuels extracted may fall, it’s not enough to meet the Paris climate goals.
So the world’s largest oil producer is going to increase output, and not even bother trying to offset those emissions - or the ‘customer’ from people burning its product - with accounting gimmicks. Don’t worry though, they signed the Paris Agreement!
Short Cons
ProPublica - ““When people feel that their attitudes reflect strong moral convictions, that gives them permission to dehumanize those who oppose them,” said Linda Skitka, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who’s researching ideological divides.”
NYT - “A lawyer working for a Mississippi state agency and trying to recoup tens of millions of dollars in misused welfare funds was fired on Friday after he issued a subpoena that could turn up details about the involvement of prominent Mississippians…”
The Markup - “Uber has produced at least 24,000 “safety incident reports” that involved physical assaults perpetrated against its drivers by passengers from 2017 to 2020…”
The Guardian - “Nearly one third of people killed by US police since 2015 were running away, driving off or attempting to flee when the officer fatally shot or used lethal force against them, data reveals.”
NBC Dallas - “More than 20 Republican attorneys general including Texas' Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Tuesday against President Joe Biden's administration over a Department of Agriculture school meal program that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Tips, thoughts, or low rider excavators to scammerdarkly@gmail.com