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martinelligi

As Auto Industry Goes Electric, Can It Avoid A Battery Bottleneck? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-it-avoid-a-battery-bottleneck

electric climate

shared by martinelligi on 15 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Every major automaker is preparing to pivot from gas and diesel cars to electric and hybrid ones. Ford F-150s and Kia crossovers, Volkswagen hatchbacks and BMW sedans: They'll all plug in instead of fill up. It's a remarkable transformation that will change the way we drive and shake up world energy markets.
  • But the massive shift is raising concern that the world's battery supply chain, from mines to manufacturers, will fail to keep pace, leading to a bottleneck that will slow the pace of electrification and derail companies' business plans — and the fight against climate change.
  • So battery supplies will need to scale up fast — starting with the raw materials that go into them.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In fact, a few years ago, lithium miners anticipated huge growth in electric-vehicle battery demand and expanded quickly — but the expected boom didn't come. Lithium prices collapsed.
Javier E

Anarchists and an increase in violent crime hijack Portland's social justice movement -... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-a55f-4871b8ac676f_story.html

crime portland social justice justice movement backlash BLM crisis

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • when you look over the longer history of what’s been going on in Portland — there’s something else happening. It’s not just the protests. It is not just covid-19. There is something else going on in Portland.”
  • Henning and others say crime was rising in the city before the pandemic shut it down and before Floyd died in Minneapolis with a White police officer’s knee on his neck. From 2019 to 2020, the number of homicides nearly doubled, something Henning called “unheard of” in Portland. This followed years with some of the nation’s lowest crime rates for a city its size.
  • “So these perpetrators, my guess, were coming of age, were in elementary and middle school right around the Great Recession,” said Brian Renauer, director of the Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute at Portland State. “Now they’re in their early to mid-20s. So what we’re seeing is the outgrowth of a breakdown in the family, in the economy, in those neighborhoods they came out of, if this is very much a homegrown phenomenon.”
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  • The rising gun violence, and for a time the downtown demonstrations, have stressed the police department and put it largely on its back foot, as a response unit rather than a force with resources to prevent crime. As one measure, police response time to emergency calls has more than doubled over the past eight years, to more than 40 minutes of wait-time before a call is even fielded by emergency dispatchers.
  • “Police are bailing,” Henning said. “We are losing our best, most experienced officers left and right, and calls for service are increasing every year.”
  • The Portland Police Bureau is authorized to have 1,001 sworn officers. At the moment it has about 900, a shortage that city officials blame on a lack of urgency in hiring and police leaders attribute to a lack of support and funding.
  • The City Council last year cut about $27 million from the roughly $200 million police budget — about $11 million because of a pandemic-caused budget crisis, and $15 million as part of the “defund” effort to shift some police resources to other agencies that may be able to handle nonviolent calls more effectively.
  • But Schmidt, who was elected with 77 percent of the vote, said the “message I was sending got twisted,” and the public began to think that no cases associated with protests would be prosecuted. Vandalism and property crimes spiked — and at a time of rising violence against young men of color, Schmidt was making the rounds to explain that people who broke windows and burned buildings would be prosecuted.
  • What I know is that being chief, and being a Black chief in particular, this movement to really exclude police from some facets of enforcement or community interaction, it really bears the brunt on the African American community,” Lovell said. “These shootings have an outsized impact on people of color.”
  • The chief’s goal to reestablish a larger uniformed presence on Portland’s streets and in its most dangerous neighborhoods appears to be supported by many residents, who just a year ago were very much opposed to the city’s police practices
  • A poll conducted by the Oregonian newspaper this month found that three-quarters of Portland-area residents did not want police officer levels to decline more than they have. Just more than half said they favored an increase in the number of officers.
  • “They are trying to run a Cadillac with a Volkswagen engine,” said Daryl Turner, who retired after nearly 30 years as a Portland police officer to lead its largest union, the Portland Police Association. “You cannot defund the police and expect the changes they are seeking. Our public officials are not reading the data.”
  • I was faced with a bunch of competing priorities,” he continued. “Do I use the power of this office to essentially criminalize people who are showing up to criticize the criminal justice system and the inherent conflict in making that decision? If I had to do that, from a public safety standpoint, is there a good public safety case to be made for people being prosecuted for this conduct?”
  • But the police bureau also disbanded a unit last July that focused specifically on gun violence, a high-profile initiative that had been designed to make the agency less reactive and more attuned in advance to rising gang- and gun-related crime as the protests began slowly fading.
  • So would police officers, a pledge he ran on. Within months, Schmidt will bring two cases involving shootings by officers to grand juries for possible indictments. He will hire outside counsel to present the cases, a change in policy designed to strengthen the public’s sense of independent accountability for police action.
  • Wheeler, the mayor, said he believes that the city has begun to recover, at least from the demonstrations that have left downtown largely empty on most days. Over the past year, he said, the city has recorded an 85 percent decline in downtown foot traffic. The result has been economic despair and more crime.
  • “Portland has always had this great tradition of protest,” Wheeler said. “But the anarchists that joined into the demonstration really co-opted what had been a nonviolent message in favor of change. And now that group has gotten much smaller, but also much more blatant in the damage they are causing and the targets they are picking.”
  • Over the spring, the group of self-described anarchists, usually masked and dressed in black, has shattered windows at the Oregon Historical Society, at a Boys & Girls Club, at a public library, and at many small businesses, including some owned by Black merchants. Wheeler made a public plea for Portlanders to “take the city back.”
  • At City Hall, Wheeler and the rest of the council are debating ways to increase police resources, a shift for a symbol of the defund movement.
  • he mayor plans to triple the number of unarmed officers in the police bureau, from 11 to 33, to help manage reports related to mental illness and mounting homelessness while freeing up armed police for more serious calls.
  • “I think other people are just understanding that this is a really challenging time to be a police officer,” Wheeler said. “And we are finally putting racial disparity and institutional racism front and center in our society. This is an opportunity for us to be honest about its existence, to call it out for what it is and to change it.”
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