The challenges and promises of climate lawsuits

Lawsuits against emissions-spewing governments and fossil fuel companies have established themselves as a key tool in the battle against climate change, but they aren’t always successful

By Katarina Zimmer

Even the temperate, mountainous country of Switzerland isn’t immune to climate change. Sizzling heat waves are melting alpine glaciers, killing trees and fish and, in the cities, likely causing an uptick in human deaths.

Rosmarie Wydler-Wälti, who lives in Basel, is acutely aware of this. A woman in her 70s, she belongs to the demographic most vulnerable to heat-related death. To her, the government’s response to recent heat waves — cautioning seniors to stay in the shade during hot days, for instance — seemed like a Band-Aid. She wanted to see people tackling the problem’s root cause: countries like Switzerland not doing enough to curb emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

With support from Greenpeace Switzerland, Wydler-Wälti and other members of a group of senior women climate activists filed a lawsuit against the Swiss government in 2016, demanding that the state curb emissions more quickly. They argued that the government, by not sticking to policies consistent with the worldwide goal of limiting warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, was threatening senior women’s fundamental human right to life. Indeed, many of the women involved ultimately reported having experienced heart palpitations, vomiting, swollen arms and legs and breathlessness during recent heat waves, and some reported having fainted.

Hundreds of lawsuits like these have been filed around the world in recent years, as activists, frustrated by the slow pace at which nations are acting to cut greenhouse gas emissions, have turned to the courts for help. The success rate has surprised many experts. Of those cases filed outside the United States — the focus of one analysis — dozens had outcomes that encouraged more aggressive climate action, according to a 2022 report from the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In one landmark case that concluded in 2019, for example, Dutch courts ordered the government to set more ambitious climate targets.

But such cases don’t always succeed. To Wydler-Wälti’s disappointment, after a series of courts dismissed the case, the Swiss Supreme Court concluded in 2020 that the women’s rights hadn’t been violated severely enough to merit a case. “We would have to be half dead for them to believe that we’re particularly affected,” Wydler-Wälti says angrily.

Examining why some cases succeed while others don’t is key to understanding the future of this rapidly growing field of litigation. Experts say that success hinges on many factors — not only on the plaintiffs’ arguments, but also on the design of a country’s legal system, its political environment and the apparent willingness and/or ability of judges to interpret the scientific evidence around climate change.

“One of the reasons it’s so important to look closely at these cases and the impact they’re having is because their impact is likely to only grow in the years to come, as people increasingly see litigation as an important way to address the problems of climate change,” says Hari Osofsky, a human rights law expert now at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, who in 2020 coauthored an overview of climate change litigation in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science.

That said, “litigation by itself is not going to close the emissions gap,” Osofsky adds. “Solutions to climate change require a lot of different kinds of action.”

Climate change as a human rights problem

Taking governments to court over climate change was once considered a long shot, says César Rodríguez-Garavito, an international human rights and environmental law expert who heads New York University’s Climate Litigation Accelerator, which studies and advocates for climate litigation, and edited the 2022 book Litigating the Climate Emergency. Climate change is, after all, a tricky issue for courts to address.

For one thing, there’s the question of whether individual governments can be held accountable for the climate crisis when no single actor is responsible. For another, courts are typically designed to react to harms that have already been inflicted, whereas the bulk of climate-related damage will unfold in the future.

The Dutch courts’ decisions, the last of which was reached in 2019, were groundbreaking in how they handled both questions. The courts rigorously applied the latest scientific evidence on how countries’ policies contribute to climate change, concluding that the Netherlands must do its fair share regardless of what other countries do. The courts also agreed with the plaintiffs — the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch nonprofit, and 886 Dutch citizens — that the government has a duty to reduce not only current harms of climate change to its citizens, but also future risks. The Dutch courts ordered the state to raise its existing goal of reducing emissions from 17 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to 25 percent below.

The state complied that year, and later announced that it would greatly reduce the capacity of coal-fueled power stations, among other measures. It was a “Big Bang moment” in climate litigation in Europe, says human rights researcher Corina Heri of the University of Zürich in Switzerland. “That really changed the idea of what could be possible legally.”

The decision inspired a wave of like-minded lawsuits, some of which saw similar success. In 2021, Germany’s constitutional court decided a lawsuit brought by nine young people against the German government that claimed insufficient climate goals. The court ordered the government to set clearer emissions targets for 2031 onward. Soon after, the government passed a bill containing faster emissions reductions and announced plans to become carbon-neutral by 2045 — faster than its previous goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050.

Like the Urgenda case, the German lawsuit invoked human rights — fundamentally arguing that the worsening hazards driven by climate change threaten the very rights to life and dignity, particularly for future generations. This is legally, as well as symbolically, a powerful argument, because many regions have specific legal pathways and courts dedicated to dealing with human rights cases, and such arguments center and individualize the suffering of people.

In recent years, the argument has gained traction in courtrooms and international law, Rodríguez-Garavito says, and on the whole, “it has been much more consequential and much more effective than any of us would have thought.” However, while such successful cases create an impetus for action, actually changing and implementing new policies is often a longer-term project, Heri notes.

For instance, some courts, such as the German one, have stopped short of mandating specific targets for reducing emissions and instead leave that up to legislators. Some youth activists argue that the governments’ new climate policies aren’t aggressive enough and are still in violation of human rights.

And, as Wydler-Wälti’s experience illustrates, this argument hasn’t worked everywhere. In her case, the courts rejected the argument that the senior women were disproportionately affected by climate change compared to the general public — an argument adapted to a Swiss legal system that largely doesn’t allow public interest lawsuits, Heri says. In another case, a lawsuit against the Norwegian government by two activist groups over new oil drilling licenses in the Barents Sea in the Arctic was rejected.

Those plaintiffs had argued that by exacerbating climate change, the licenses infringed on the human right to a healthy environment, which is enshrined in Norway’s constitution. After years of litigation in domestic courts, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the youths’ rights weren’t violated, in part because it was uncertain at that time how much the licenses would actually end up contributing to climate change.

Part of the reason the Urgenda case succeeded while these two didn’t could lie in the design of the Dutch legal system, which makes it easier for environmental groups to bring collective claims of this kind. “What works is very jurisdictionally specific,” Osofsky says. “European jurisdictions that are legally similar to the Netherlands are going to be the most promising jurisdictions for a successful Urgenda-style case.”

To Heri, it also comes down to the willingness of courts to engage with and understand the scientific evidence around climate change and its impacts, which they were with Urgenda, she says. The fact that the case was heard by judges who understood the need for urgent climate action and the evidence before them “in the end made all the difference,” she says.

Far from giving up, the plaintiffs in Switzerland and Norway have since taken their cases to higher powers: the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, which can order states to change policies it deems unlawful. The Swiss case and two others are among the first climate cases the Strasbourg Court is reviewing, and its decisions could influence climate policy across Europe, Heri says.

Lasse Eriksen Bjørn, a plaintiff in the new Norway case and a member of the Saami Indigenous community, whose way of life is threatened by Arctic warming, is optimistic that the Strasbourg Court may decide more favorably than Norwegian courts, which have closer ties to the oil industry. In late March, the Strasbourg Court held an official public hearing for the Swiss case and for a French lawsuit. “If we win,” Wydler-Wälti says, “I think I will see it as a feminist win for older women, who usually come last in society.”

Other legal strategies

Invoking human rights may be a promising legal strategy in places like Europe and Latin America, where 25 youths recently won a lawsuit against the Colombian government over deforestation in the Amazon. Latin America also has a regional human rights court. But the strategy is less useful in jurisdictions like the United States, whose legal system doesn’t recognize human rights in the same way.

“I think that’s actually been one of the main reasons that we haven’t seen the same sorts of major victories when it comes to strategic climate litigation that we have seen in some other countries, particularly in Europe,” says Jessica Wentz, a climate law expert at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

The US Constitution doesn’t recognize the human right to health, for example. But some states, like Montana, do acknowledge the right to a healthy environment, and youth plaintiffs are now using that right to sue the state of Montana over climate change. At the federal level, plaintiffs can bring cases based on the political human rights the Constitution does contain, like the rights to liberty and property, and indirectly argue that having a stable climate is essential to exercising these. Still, this strategy is neither particularly successful nor common; only a tiny fraction of the more than 1,100 climate cases filed in the United States have invoked constitutional rights.

One of the most famous of these was the Juliana case, named after one of the youth plaintiffs who sued the federal government in 2015 over causing harmful levels of greenhouse gases. Although the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged that the government is obligated to address climate change, it still ultimately dismissed the case, arguing that decisions over climate policy should be left to the elected branches of government, not the courts.

US courts have often reached this conclusion in cases that have pursued emissions reductions, Wentz says. It’s possible, she adds, “that the reason this has become such a prominent thing in US climate cases is linked to how climate change itself has been politicized in our public discourse.”

A more popular and effective legal strategy in the US has involved targeting government decisions over specific infrastructure projects, such as permitting new gas pipelines or extracting fossil fuels from public lands, and forcing federal agencies to consider the climate impacts, notes Michael Burger, the Sabin Center’s executive director. Such cases often draw on the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates that federal agencies assess the full scale of the environmental impact of proposed projects, including the greenhouse gas emissions they cause.

Courts may not necessarily put a stop to such projects, but in forcing government agencies to redo their environmental analyses to take carbon emissions into account, Osofsky says, these lawsuits often raise the cost and time required for such projects. Wentz adds that the impact can be seen in trends in government decision-making. “We have seen a big shift, where the federal government is, in fact, thinking through the climate implications of its actions in much greater detail than it did before,” she says. “I think litigation has helped drive that.”

Like some other regions, the United States has also seen an uptick in cases brought against fossil fuel companies. The US doesn’t have strong laws requiring that corporate entities limit the global environmental damage they cause. In Europe, Friends of the Earth Netherlands recently argued in its lawsuit against the Dutch oil giant Shell that companies, like states, had such obligations. Instead, US plaintiffs often claim that oil and gas companies are deliberately misleading the public by underplaying the harms of climate change in order to deepen their profits, in a similar vein to suing tobacco companies over downplaying the health risks of smoking.

“We know that a very small [number] of companies are responsible for half the world’s emissions. So we really need to hold companies accountable,” says Sam Cossar-Gilbert, who coordinates Friends of the Earth International’s economic justice program. However, he adds that this strategy has drawbacks. Since some companies — like some governments — have deep pockets, they “can delay a lot of these decisions for a very long time.” In the case against Shell, the company has appealed the decision and the process is still ongoing three years after the judgment.

Suing over damages

Most climate lawsuits aim to get big emitters like governments to more rapidly reduce emissions in order to reduce future harm. But as climate change is increasingly making its mark in the present, many of the plaintiffs suing fossil fuel companies are testing another approach — suing for compensation for damages already caused or for the costs to prevent future ones.

Several US cities, states and counties are suing such companies for the damages incurred during hurricanes and for the costs of relocating infrastructure away from shorelines due to rising sea levels. While it’s still early days, some experts note that such cases could be strengthened by a growing body of evidence on how climate change fuels specific extreme weather events and connecting specific damages to the emissions of fossil fuel producers.

Suing for damages or compensation to prevent future damage may become an especially important approach in developing countries in hotter parts of the world where the worst climate impacts are being felt, Rodríguez-Garavito says. There’s long been a scarcity of climate lawsuits in many pockets of the developing world where people lack access to courts or the financial means to sustain the legal process, notes Lisa Vanhala, a political scientist at University College London who published an overview of how law is being used to prevent environmental degradation in the 2022 Annual Review of Law and Social Science. But cases in South America, Asia and Africa are growing in number, and some of them are targeting entities in wealthier, high-emitting countries.

One such case has been ongoing since 2015, when the Peruvian farmer Saúl Luciano Lliuya, whose city is threatened by flooding from a melting glacier, filed a lawsuit against the German energy company RWE, demanding that it pay for local flood protections. Such cases can be challenging, because corporations aren’t always legally responsible for the environmental damage they cause overseas — it depends on the jurisdiction, Rodríguez-Garavito says.

Developing countries may even consider taking legal action against high-emitting countries — something they’ve long been reluctant to do as they’re often geopolitically dependent on wealthier countries and have prioritized international negotiations over climate targets, Rodríguez-Garavito says. But, he adds, “after 30 years, a lot of people have lost patience, and the effects are also much more urgent and serious. So that perception is changing.”

For instance, the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, which is under threat from rising seas, recently spearheaded a United Nations request to the International Court of Justice — which handles disputes between countries — for an official opinion on whether states have an obligation under international law to ensure a safe and livable climate for everyone. The opinion could then set the stage for lawsuits brought by individual countries.

Rodríguez-Garavito predicts that the coming years will see a rise in cases between developing nations and wealthy ones. There may also be lawsuits against other high-emitting entities like carmakers and cement companies, and even banks for financing fossil fuels as plaintiffs continue to explore new strategies, the Grantham Institute report notes. Their success remains to be seen — but many experts stress that even where lawsuits fail in the actual courts, they can still win in the court of public opinion, and raise awareness around climate change as a justice issue.

Bjørn, of the Saami community in the Arctic, says he witnessed this after Norwegian courts rejected the oil drilling case. “The way oil drilling in the Arctic was talked about in northern Norway had completely changed,” he observes. “The feeling was that we had succeeded in many ways, no matter what the result was.”

Katarina Zimmer is a science and environment journalist.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. 

Preparing Your Children for Kindergarten

Being ready for kindergarten is about far more than writing names and reciting the ABCs. It is also about building a foundation for deeper conceptual thinking, curiosity, creativity and social and emotional skills that can help children during their early school days and also in life.

For parents, this transition can be nerve-wracking and raise questions about how to best prepare their children for the next step in their educational journeys.

Dr. Lauren Starnes, senior vice president and chief academic officer at The Goddard School, and Lee Scott, chairperson of The Goddard School’s Educational Advisory Board, recommend helping children prepare for kindergarten through:

Building Strong Routines and Foundations for Learning:

• Language and literacy: Practice writing by making place cards for the dinner table. For younger children, it can be the first letter of each person’s name or fun scribbles on the card. Early scribbles are part of developing writing skills.
• Mathematics: Count while you work. Ask your children to put away toys. As they work, you can count the toys together.
• Science: Make yard cleanup fun. As you clean the yard, talk about the leaves and why they turn colors and fall to the ground. Pile them up and jump in.
• Executive function: Incorporate your children in planning for the family. Help your children stay organized with a daily or weekly chart. Have your children make the chart with you. For younger children, you can use drawings or pictures instead of words.
• Creative expression: Sing and dance while you work. Make up songs or repeat favorites as your children go through a few basic chores such as putting clothes away.
• Social-emotional development: Build a sense of responsibility and caring for others with real or pretend pets. Take the dog for a walk, feed the cat or water the pet rock. Taking care of a pet can help children develop a sense of responsibility and empathy for others.
• Healthy development and well-being: Daily routines help your children practice fine motor skills while doing a few chores, such as setting a table, helping you cook by mixing or stirring, putting their clothes on or brushing their teeth.

Incorporating Playful Experiences:

• Puzzles: Solving puzzles supports the development of skills such as concentration, self-regulation, critical thinking and spatial recognition.
• Board games: Playing games provides a number of benefits for children, including supporting memory and critical thinking, helping them learn to take turns and count, and developing early language skills.
• Blocks: Block building supports creativity, cognitive flexibility, planning and organization. Take some time to build with blocks using different shapes and colors.
• Clay: Children need to develop fine motor skills beyond using devices. Few things are better for developing fine motor skills than modeling clay. Learning to sculpt with clay also builds creativity, artistic expression and strategic thinking.

• Recycled materials: Inspire creativity by finding things around the house to build with, such as cardboard, paper, paper towel rolls and plastic bottles.

For more actionable parenting insights, guidance and resources – including a webinar with Scott focused on kindergarten readiness – visit GoddardSchool.com. 

SOURCE:
The Goddard School

Bank of England interest rate rise: why this could be the last increase for a while

The Bank of England, London. cristapper/Shutterstock

Edward Thomas Jones, Bangor University and Yener Altunbas, Bangor University

The Bank of England has increased its benchmark interest rate to 4.5% – the seventh rise since May 2022, when the base rate was just 1%. It is now at the highest level since 2008.

The European Central Bank (ECB) also increased its benchmark rate to 3.25% at its latest meeting in early May and is now nearing a high not seen since 2001. A few days before, the US Federal Reserve increased its rate from 5% to 5.25%, the highest level since mid-2007 and its 10th consecutive increase in just over a year.

Both central banks are nearing the end of their rate-tightening cycles as price pressures fall from a peak and the world anticipates a looming credit crisis.

But plans could change depending on how the economy fares. And whether we can expect the same from the Bank of England could depend more on the fragility of the banking system than the need to continue to tame inflation.

The UK’s new 4.5% base rate may seem high, but it’s actually quite low compared to the 1980s and 1990s. During these decades, the rate peaked at 16% and 13.88% respectively, but was always higher than 5%. These high rates reflected a similar battle with high inflation by the bank as it is dealing with today.

Low base rate today versus 1980s and 1990s:

Bank of England

So why are today’s interest rates at such (relatively) low levels? This is because of the toolkit central banks use to tackle rising prices, in particular base rate adjustments.

Like the Fed and the ECB, the Bank of England is trying to hit an inflation target of 2%. The latest official UK data shows inflation is at 10.1%, considerably above this target.

Inflation is measured by tracking the yearly change in the prices of a “basket” of goods and services that includes items like food, petrol and leisure activities. Surging energy prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February caused inflation to spike but have now been priced in to the annual measure.

Now food prices are keeping it elevated with a 19% rise over the year to March – the fastest increase in over 45 years.

Interest rate changes are a blunt tool to control such price rises without severely denting economic activity. A good example of this is when the US suffered painful inflation during the 1970s.

It took a crackdown by cigar-chomping Fed chairman Paul Volcker to break the cycle of rising prices and wages. He slammed the brakes on the economy by raising interest rates to 20%. Volcker’s actions worked: inflation retreated from 14.8% in 1980 to just over 3% by 1983. But 4 million people lost their jobs in recessions in the early 1980s.

Paul Volcker smokes a cigar while testifying before the House Banking Committee in 1986 during his time as US Federal Reserve Chair. mark reinstein/Shutterstock

Three effects of central bank decisions

Even without such drastic rate changes, such monetary policy decisions affect the wider economy and inflation in three main ways. Economists call these transmission channels.

The most obvious of the three is the interest rate channel because the changes in a central bank’s rates affect other interest rates such as mortgages. Higher rates will translate into higher repayments and less cash to spend on other things. Less spending means that businesses will be reluctant to increase their prices, which should lower inflation.

Interest rates also affect the real economy and inflation through the credit channel. It covers lending to both businesses and people. This can be seen through the availability of bank loans, as well as business balance sheets and risk taking.

When interest rates rise, the risk that some borrowers cannot safely repay their debts may increase so much that a bank will not lend any more money to them. These borrowers are then forced to stop spending or investing. This helps reduce inflation because less demand for products or services encourages companies to cut prices.

Changes in interest rates also affect firms’ balance sheets. An increase in interest rates lowers the value of things a company owns such as a building. In a higher rate environment, the property will be worth less, which matters if a business wants to use it as collateral on a loan for further investment in the business.

The effects of rate decisions on risk taking is thought to operate in two ways. First, low interest rates boost asset (and collateral) values. This, along with the belief that an increase in asset values will last for a long time, leads both borrowers and banks to accept higher risks. Second, low interest rates make riskier assets more attractive because investors must search for higher yields to make returns.

So, when interest rates are low, banks relax their lending rules, which can lead to an excessive increase in loan supply. This pumps more money into the financial system. Rate increases have the opposite effect.

Banking crisis fears

These effects can be seen recently via banking failures, most notably Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse. While they happened for different reasons, both collapses exposed regulatory failures and poor risk management. Both were also triggered by tightening credit conditions, and by the increase in interest rates related to central bank rate hikes.

Such financial fragility should be expected in any parts of the banking system that are badly managed, poorly regulated and more exposed to tight credit conditions. This means another banking crisis could happen, especially if central banks continue to tighten monetary policy.

The Bank of England takes all of this into account when deciding on the next move for interest rates. And so, if it has stopped raising rates for now, it’s not because inflation has been tamed but because the risk to the banking industry is too great at the moment.

Edward Thomas Jones, Lecturer in Economics / Director of the Institute of European Finance, Bangor University and Yener Altunbas, Professor of Banking, Bangor University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

US debt default could trigger dollar’s collapse – and severely erode America’s political and economic might

Kevin McCarthy., left, Chuck Schumer, right, and President Joe Biden meet at the White House on May 9, 2023. AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Michael Humphries, Touro University

Congressional leaders at loggerheads over a debt ceiling impasse sat down with President Joe Biden on May 9, 2023, as the clock ticks down to a potentially catastrophic default if nothing is done by the end of the month.

Republicans, who regained control of the House of Representatives in November 2022, are threatening not to allow an increase in the debt limit unless they get spending cuts and regulatory rollbacks in return, which they outlined in a bill passed in April 2023. In so doing, they risk pushing the U.S. government into default.

It feels a lot like a case of déjà vu all over again.

Brinkmanship over the debt ceiling has become a regular ritual – it happened under the Clinton administration in 1995, then again with Barack Obama as president in 2011, and more recently in 2021.

As an economist, I know that defaulting on the national debt would have real-life consequences. Even the threat of pushing the U.S. into default has an economic impact. In August 2021, the mere prospect of a potential default led to an unprecedented downgrade of the the nation’s credit rating, hurting America’s financial prestige as well as countless individuals, including retirees.

And that was caused by the mere specter of default. An actual default would be far more damaging.

Dollar’s collapse

Possibly the most serious consequence would be the collapse of the U.S. dollar and its replacement as global trade’s “unit of account.” That essentially means that it is widely used in global finance and trade.

Day to day, most Americans are likely unaware of the economic and political power that goes with being the world’s unit of account. Currently, more than half of world trade – from oil and gold to cars and smartphones – is in U.S. dollars, with the euro accounting for around 30% and all other currencies making up the balance.

As a result of this dominance, the U.S. is the only country on the planet that can pay its foreign debt in its own currency. This gives both the U.S. government and American companies tremendous leeway in international trade and finance.

No matter how much debt the U.S. government owes foreign investors, it can simply print the money needed to pay them back – although for economic reasons, it may not be wise to do so. Other countries must buy either the dollar or the euro to pay their foreign debt. And the only way for them to do so is to either to export more than they import or borrow more dollars or euros on the international market.

The U.S. is free from such constraints and can run up large trade deficits – that is, import more than it exports – for decades without the same consequences.

For American companies, the dominance of the dollar means they’re not as subject to the exchange rate risk as are their foreign competitors. Exchange rate risk refers to how changes in the relative value of currencies may affect a company’s profitability.

Since international trade is generally denominated in dollars, U.S. businesses can buy and sell in their own currency, something their foreign competitors cannot do as easily. As simple as this sounds, it gives American companies a tremendous competitive advantage.

If Republicans push the U.S. into default, the dollar would likely lose its position as the international unit of account, forcing the government and companies to pay their international bills in another currency.

A U.S. debt default would mangle the dollar’s international reputation. photovideostock/E+ via Getty Images

Loss of political power too

The dollar’s dominance means trade must go through an American bank at some point. This is one important way it gives the U.S. tremendous political power, especially to punish economic rivals and unfriendly governments.

For example, when former President Donald Trump imposed economic sanctions on Iran, he denied the country access to American banks and to the dollar. He also imposed secondary sanctions, which means that non-American companies trading with Iran were also sanctioned. Given a choice of access to the dollar or trading with Iran, most of the world economies chose access to the dollar and complied with the sanctions. As a result, Iran entered a deep recession, and its currency plummeted about 30%.

President Joe Biden did something similar against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Limiting Russia’s access to the dollar has helped push the country into a recession that’s bordering on a depression.

No other country today could unilaterally impose this level of economic pain on another country. And all an American president currently needs is a pen.

Rivals rewarded

Another consequence of the dollar’s collapse would be enhancing the position of the U.S.‘s top rival for global influence: China.

While the euro would likely replace the dollar as the world’s primary unit of account, the Chinese yuan would move into second place.

If the yuan were to become a significant international unit of account, this would enhance China’s international position both economically and politically. As it is, China has been working with the other BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia and India – to accept the yuan as a unit of account. With the other three already resentful of U.S. economic and political dominance, a U.S. default would support that effort.

They may not be alone: Recently, Saudi Arabia suggested it was open to trading some of its oil in currencies other than the dollar – something that would change long-standing policy.

Severe consequences

Beyond the impact on the dollar and the economic and political clout of the U.S., a default would be profoundly felt in many other ways and by countless people.

In the U.S., tens of millions of Americans and thousands of companies that depend on government support could suffer, and the economy would most likely sink into recession – or worse, given the U.S. is already expected to soon suffer a downturn. In addition, retirees could see the worth of their pensions dwindle.

The truth is, we really don’t know what will happen or how bad it will get. The scale of the damage caused by a U.S. default is hard to calculate in advance because it has never happened before.

But there’s one thing we can be certain of. If Republicans take their threat of default too far, the U.S. and Americans will suffer tremendously.

Michael Humphries, Deputy Chair of Business Administration, Touro University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

How did abuse get baked into the restaurant industry?

Many restaurant workers see violence as a core aspect of a hardscrabble kitchen culture that has existed for generations. Jetta Productions/David Atkinson via Getty Images

Ellen T. Meiser, University of Hawaii at Hilo and Eli R. Wilson, University of New Mexico

When the The New York Times and The Boston Globe recently published exposés in which employees of award-winning chef Barbara Lynch described their abusive work environments, we weren’t surprised.

Anyone who has spent years working in restaurants probably wouldn’t be surprised, either.

As sociologists who study the culinary industry and its workers, we recently published research showing that many kitchen staffers come to view mistreatment and abuse as a mundane – and often inevitable – part of working in restaurants.

‘Showers of slaps’ and ‘grab-ass’

Much of the reporting provided damning accounts of Lynch’s own behavior – her alleged mistreatment of employees, tirades, threats, groping and sexual innuendos.

But while Lynch may be in the spotlight today, she and her alleged behaviors are, unfortunately, closer to business as usual in restaurant kitchens, where a culture of violence has been normalized.

Numerous articles and chef memoirs dating as far back as the late 1800s have detailed everyday forms of abuse in restaurants. For example, pioneering French restaurateur Auguste Escoffier wrote in his memoir that his first chef “believed that it was impossible to govern a kitchen ‘sans une pluie de gifles’” – without a shower of slaps.

Some, such as Anthony Bourdain’s memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” even romanticize these behaviors. At one point, Bourdain fondly recalls a kitchen he worked in early in his career as having an “atmosphere [that] was not unlike a Pinero play, very jailhouse, with a lot of grab-ass, heated argument, hypermacho posturing and drunken ranting. Two burly men who’d just as soon kill you as look at you, when talking to each other, would often nestle a hand tenderly next to the testicles of the other, as if to say, ‘I am so not gay – I can even do this!’”

The allegations against Lynch are only the latest in a long string of high-profile chefs and restaurateurs who have been accused of cultivating similar physically, psychologically and sexually violent workspaces.

Mario Batali, for instance, was accused in 2019 by an employee of groping and indecency, charges that he was acquitted of in 2022 and resolved with a civil settlement.

Oakland chef Charlie Hallowell and New York restaurateur Ken Friedman also came under fire during the #MeToo era, with each accused of sexual harassment and assault. Hallowell ended up selling two of his restaurants and penned a public apology, while Friedman shuttered a flagship restaurant and paid claims to 11 former employees.

Celebrity chef Mario Batali leaves Boston Municipal Court following an arraignment on a charge of indecent assault and battery in 2019. Scott Eisen/Getty Images

In our own research, we wanted to learn more about how workers deal with toxic kitchen culture. Do they ever push back? Do they flee? Or do they put their heads down and simply rationalize it as part of what they signed up for?

If you can’t take the heat …

There are obvious economic realities that prevent many from leaving violent workspaces. After all, most everyone has bills to pay.

Quitting is also hard in light of the other upsides to professional cooking, such as creativity and freedom, sensory stimulation and reciprocal joy from watching a satisfied customer eat. One sous chef we spoke with described the latter as “life-changing to me. It was addicting.”

These pressures aside, the workers we interviewed tended to see violence as a core aspect of a hardscrabble kitchen culture that has existed for generations.

Others admitted that they’ve come to expect as much after seeing the ways in which abusive chefs are glorified in the media – think Gordon Ramsay’s entertaining tongue-lashings on the show “Hell’s Kitchen,” or Ralph Fiennes’ recent portrayal of a homicidal chef in “The Menu.”

Because those we talked to saw violence in kitchens as unexceptional, most of them responded to it by sticking it out rather than resisting it. Many of them viewed enduring violence on the job as just another task on their daily to-do list.

A key element of rationalizing the violence involved justifying the perpetrator’s behavior.

There’s evidence of this in both articles about Lynch’s restaurants: Workers and the public touted Lynch as an early fighter of industry sexism, a portrayal that presented her as an ally and may have softened her blows. Her public acknowledgments of her own battles with substance abuse and childhood trauma painted her in a sympathetic light and allowed some staffers to excuse her alleged behavior.

Barbara Lynch’s employees regularly excused her behavior. Marla Aufmuth/Getty Images

Similar rationalizations were found in our study: A chef named Jesus, for example, recounted to us a time when his boss became so upset that, after berating his crew, he “flipped everyone off and told them to ‘go f— themselves.’” But rather than note his boss’s inappropriateness, Jesus praised him for being “straightforward” and “honest.” In doing so, Jesus excused the outburst as simply a product of honesty and emotion, rather than of a work environment that bred such behavior.

We also noticed that Lynch’s own staff rationalized their decisions to stay – despite saying they’d been subjected to abuse – because they felt that working in Lynch’s restaurants would help them find better jobs in the future. This approach was echoed by several cooks in our study – a chef named Carsen, for example, explained away the abuse he endured once at a Michelin-starred restaurant: “I was there for the experience. I wasn’t there because I was invested in the restaurant.”

Perpetuating a culture of violence

As workers endure violence in kitchens, they deal with not only the harms of being targeted, but also the psychological and emotional discomfort of remaining at a job that causes them suffering.

Studies have also shown that learning to endure violence can increase the chances of repeated abuse, as well as the incorporation of unproductive behaviors into victimized workers’ own actions. The latter can look like adopting abusive behaviors themselves or engaging in small acts of damaging rebellion, like sneaking a swig of cooking wine here or slowing the pace of work there. Cruelly, enduring violence unintentionally aids the process of making violent behavior feel and seem normal in the workplace.

So a cycle of violence perpetuates and reverberates, embedding itself deeper into the fabric of restaurant kitchens, often being passed down from one generation of cooks to the next.

Workers begin to expect it. Grant, a cook we interviewed, explained: “The abuse is normalized. And sometimes romanticized as well. … Chefs being [jerks] is common in part because that’s the expectation for what it is to be a chef. … And while it [seems] like most places are getting better, it’s still a big part of kitchen culture.”

The accusations against Lynch are not exceptional. Sadly, we think it’s likely only a matter of time before another case of an abusive high-profile chef comes to light. Outrage will occur, and then it will settle. Rinse and repeat.

But culinary brilliance and artistry need not be pre-seasoned with violence. Not venerating violent kitchens and chefs would be a start. Perhaps reporting and resisting abuse, rather than enduring it, will then become the norm.

Ellen T. Meiser, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Hawaii at Hilo and Eli R. Wilson, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of New Mexico

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Astronomers just saw a star eat a planet – an astrophysicist on the team explains the first-of-its-kind discovery

New research shows that the destructive merging of a star and a planet expels huge amounts of gas, as shown in this artist’s impression. K. Miller/R. Hurt (Caltech/IPAC), CC BY-ND

Morgan MacLeod, Harvard University

For the first time, astronomers have captured images that show a star consuming one of its planets. The star, named ZTF SLRN-2020, is located in the Milky Way galaxy, in the constellation Aquila. As the star swallowed its planet, the star brightened to 100 times its normal level, allowing the 26-person team of astronomers I worked with to detect this event as it happened.

I am a theoretical astrophysicist, and I developed the computer models that our team uses to interpret the data we collect from telescopes. Although we only see the effects on the star, not the planet directly, our team is confident that the event we witnessed was a star swallowing its planet. Witnessing such an event for the first time has confirmed the long-standing assumption that stars swallow their planets and has illuminated how this fascinating process plays out.

The Zwicky Transient Facility in Southern California is one of the observatories that captured the flash of light caused by the star consuming its planet. Caltech/Palomar, CC BY-NC

Finding a flash in the dynamic night sky

The team I work with searches for the bursts of light and gas that occur when two stars merge into a bigger, single star. To do this, we have been using data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, a telescope located on Palomar Mountain in Southern California. It takes nightly images of broad swaths of the sky, and astronomers can then compare these images to find stars that change in brightness over time, or what are called astronomical transients.

Finding stars that change in brightness isn’t the challenge – it’s sorting out the cause behind any specific change to a star. As my colleague Kishalay De likes to say, “There are plenty of things in the sky that go boom.” The trick to identifying stellar mergers is to combine visible light – like the data collected at Palomar – with infrared data from NASA’s WISE space telescope, which has been surveying the entire sky for the past decade.

In 2020, the star ZTF SLRN-2020 suddenly became 100 times brighter in visible light over just 10 days. It then slowly started to fade back toward its normal brightness. About nine months before, the same object started to emit a lot of infrared light, too. This is exactly what it looks like when two stars merge together, with one critical difference – everything was scaled down. The brightness and total energy of this event were about a thousand times lower than any of the merging stellar pairs astronomers had found to date.

When a star swallows its planets

The idea that stars could engulf some of their planets has been a long-standing assumption in astronomy. Astronomers have long known that when stars run out of hydrogen in their cores, they get brighter and begin to increase in size.

Many planets have orbits that are smaller than the eventual size of their parent stars. So, when a star runs out of fuel and starts to expand, the planets nearby are inevitably consumed.

The star ZTF SLRN-2020 increased in brightness in both visible and infrared wavelengths of light, with the peak occurring on May 24, 2020. M. MacLeod, CC BY-ND

Interpreting a stellar flash

In the ZTF SLRN-2020 outburst, our team never saw the planet itself, only the brightening from when the star absorbed the planet. This is where combining theoretical models with the observational data allowed us to understand what the telescopes captured.

The merging of two stars into a single, bigger star is a dramatic event that throws matter out into the stars’ surroundings. A large part of my career has focused on modeling the way stellar gas moves and crashes into itself and is expelled in these moments of intense interaction.

My work has shown that the total mass of matter ejected in a merging event is proportional to the size of the objects involved in the merger. Merge two equally large stars and you see a huge disturbance. Merge one star with a much smaller companion and the event might throw out a tiny fraction of the total mass of the stars.

The energy released during ZTF SLRN-2020’s outburst was a thousand times lower than typical for a two-star merger. This implies that the object that merged with the star weighed a thousand times less than a normal star. This clue pointed our team toward a gas giant planet – like Jupiter in our own solar system, which weighs roughly a thousand times less than the Sun.

Compared to Jupiter, however, this planet must have orbited much closer to the star, with one revolution around the star only taking a few days. About 1% of stars share this configuration of a large planet orbiting incredibly close to its parent star.

Further, I think that this configuration of a big planet close to its star is important in generating the event our team saw. My past research suggests that smaller planets – or ones in more-distant orbits that only get consumed once a star has grown massively in size – might be swallowed without a detectable flash.

The planet around ZTF SLRN-2020 skimmed the stellar surface before eventually falling into the star.

Learning from the real thing

From our data and modeling for ZTF SLRN-2020, our team has been able to paint a much clearer picture of how stars and planets merge. First, the planet skims across the surface of the star for many years, slowly heating up and expelling material from the star’s atmosphere. As this gas expands and cools, some of it forms molecules and dust. This cloud of dust gives the star a progressively redder color and emits increasing amounts of infrared radiation.

In the case of ZTF SLRN-2020, the orbit of the planet shrank slowly at first, then faster and faster as the planet smashed through the denser layers of the star’s atmosphere. Eventually, in just a few final days, the planet plunged below the surface of the star and was torn apart by the heat and force of the collision. This rapid injection of energy supplied heat to power ZTF SLRN-2020’s 10-day, hundredfold increase in brightness. Following this climactic moment, the star began to fade, telling our team that the planet-swallowing process was over and that the star was beginning to go back to business as usual.

While the destructive event has passed, there is still much to be learned. Next week our team will start analyzing data from the James Webb Space Telescope in the hopes of learning about the chemistry of the gas that now surrounds ZTF SLRN-2020.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

Chiro Wellness Center, LLC

 

Mothers’ lives in ancient Greece were not easy – but celebrations of their love have survived across the centuries

An ancient Greek relief depicting a baby with its mother and grandmother. David Lees/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Joel Christensen, Brandeis University

As a father of three and the husband of an amazing woman, I know that one day a year is far too little to recognize everything mothers do. But my work as a scholar of ancient Greek literature has shown me how much harder it was to be a mother in antiquity.

The ancient Greeks may not have had the kind of Mother’s Day celebrated in the United States and United Kingdom today – holidays that began at the turn of the 20th century and in the Middle Ages, respectively. But they did have festivals to honor motherhood, focused primarily on the goddess Hera or the earth mother Cybele – though more often than not, women did the lion’s share of the labor for those events.

The stories that remain of both real and mythical mothers let us know how important they were. Thanks in part to their connection to the life cycle, women in ancient Greece were both symbols of mortality and a force to humanize heroes.

Historical lives

What we know of women’s lives in ancient Greece is generally not good. According to the poet Hesiod, typically dated to around 700 B.C., it was thought good practice for women to be married off to older men “four or five years after puberty.” Philosophical and medical traditions of the time saw women as inferior and defined by their ability to give birth, even though the popular notion was that male semen contained everything needed for a baby.

We have uncertain evidence for what lives were like after marriage. Some accounts estimate an average of six births per woman, and as many as 40% of infants may not have survived to a marriageable age, though estimates of infant mortality vary. Most historians agree that child loss was common enough in antiquity to be an expectation rather than a surprise.

A marble tombstone dated 420 B.C. Photo12/Ann Ronan Picture Library/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Information about maternal mortality is equally obscure, though demographic data suggests that at times more than 30% of mothers died from complications related to childbirth. But there is anecdotal evidence from funeral inscriptions gathered from all over antiquity’s Greek-speaking world. The 21-year-old Prakso, wife of Theocritus, died in labor and left a 3-year-old behind. Kainis died from prolonged childbirth at 20, “just barely experienced in life.” Plauta also passed away at 20, during her second birth – but her fame “sings on, as deep as her dear husband’s endless grief,” according to her tombstone.

Classics students often learn that ancient Greek men did not usually spend much time with very young children, given the high rate of loss. Some ritual practices may have been responses to the precariousness of early life, such as holding a naming ceremony only on the 10th day after birth or officially registering the child as a member of the father’s family in municipal records during the first year.

As a parent, however, I am less convinced that high rates of loss led parents to be more distant. I suspect that the sense of uncertainty made children more precious to all family members and that those early years only tightened the bonds between mothers and children in particular.

Women in stories

When people think of the field I study, epic poetry, I suspect they generally think of violent male heroes and victimized women. While this image is certainly not wrong, it overlooks other ways that women, and mothers in particular, were crucial to the world of Greek poetry and myth.

Ancient Greece had a whole genre of catalog poetry – basically, lists of people and their stories in brief – dedicated to telling the stories of heroic families based on brides and mothers, which helped humanize heroes for their audiences.

A plaque from the 5th century B.C. shows Odysseus returning to Penelope, harassed by suitors. Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In “The Odyssey,” for example, Odysseus taps into this tradition during a voyage to the underworld and tells the stories of all the heroic mothers he met among the dead – listing his own mother as one of the first. During his brief visit to speak with the dead, he learns that his mother, Anticleia, died of a broken heart over his long absence. And throughout the epic, Odysseus spends much of his time struggling to get home to Penelope: his wife, but also a protective mother of their son, Telemachus.

In “The Iliad,” the powerful warrior Achilles’ mother, Thetis, is instrumental in appealing to Zeus on his behalf when Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, dishonors him. Once the almost invincible fighter goes to face Hektor, Thetis laments his short life nearing its end.

A painting of Andromache intercepting Hektor before he goes off to battle, by Fernando Castelli. A. De Luca/De Agostini via Getty Images

Throughout the stories of war and honor in “The Iliad,” mothers remind listeners of the real consequences of war. In one arresting moment, Hektor, the prince of Troy, waits to face Achilles and likely death. Hecuba, his mother, stands on the walls of the city and bares her breast to her son, begging him to remember the care he received from her and to stay in the city to protect her.

But the one scene that has driven me to tears are the words of Hektor’s wife, Andromache, after she learns of her husband’s death. She laments their son’s future suffering as an orphan, denied a seat at other men’s tables, left to wander and beg. This moment was even more heart-wrenching for ancient audiences who knew the fate of their son, Astyanax: After Troy fell to the Greeks, he was hurled from the walls of the city.

Heroic mothers helped ancient Greeks define themselves and understand their place in the world, almost always to their own detriment. They remind listeners of the meaning of labor and sacrifice.

As a son, as well as a father, I know how complex family relationships can get. We generally see the modern world as being so very different from the past, but there is still little in human life as transformative as giving birth or raising a child.

Some words from ancient playwrights drive home how much remains the same. In one fragment, referred to as 685, Sophocles claims that “children are the anchors of a mother’s life.” In a fragment of his own, 358, Euripides writes, “Love your mother, children, there’s no love anywhere that could be sweeter than this.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.