Fentanyl update; Billionaire style free speech; Global warming update

A NYT opinion discusses fentanyl:

Last year over 70,000 Americans died from taking drug mixtures that contained fentanyl or other synthetic opioids. The good news is that recent data suggests a decline in overdose deaths, the first significant drop in decades.

One potential reason fentanyl spread more slowly to the West Coast is that heroin there has long been sold in a dark, sticky form known as black tar. In the East, heroin was sold as a light-colored powder, so it was easier to conceal fentanyl’s presence. Nonetheless, synthetic opioids have now spread fully to the West, in black tar and powder form and pressed into counterfeit prescription pills.

Some people argue that the current fentanyl disaster in the US and the West generally is China's payback to the West for the British opium war against China. That is one plausible motive. The opium trade and subsequent Opium Wars had profound long-term effects on China. That marked the beginning of the "unequal treaties" era that eroded Chinese sovereignty.

Regardless of motive, there is some evidence that China intentionally supports supplying chemicals needed to make fentanyl. Why do that? At the very least, the cost to the US economy of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids was about $1.5 trillion in 2020. Fentanyl is a cheap, (probably mildly profitable) easy way to wage a significantly damaging war against democracy (i) without firing a shot, and (ii) without accountability for the ensuing human carnage and misery.

Fentanyl is a big win for China and a big loss for the West and the US.

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The NYT reports:

5 Days With Elon Musk on X: 

Deepfakes, Falsehoods and Lots of Memes

Almost a third of 171 posts last week from the X owner were false, misleading or missing vital context

Hours before former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a rally in New York last week, rumors started circulating online that a bomb had been discovered nearby. While the report was debunked, Elon Musk nonetheless amplified it in a post to his nearly 200 million followers on X.

It was among dozens of false or misleading posts that Mr. Musk shared on the platform from Monday to Friday last week — after both the second presidential debate and the second apparent assassination attempt on Mr. Trump. In 171 posts and reposts during that frenetic five-day period, the tech mogul railed against illegal immigration, boosted election fraud conspiracy theories and attacked Democratic candidates, according to a New York Times analysis.

Ah yes, the stench of dark free speech packaged as valiant, patriotic absolute free speech allegedly justified by the fallacy that "the more speech, the better." That is "reasoning" is insulting. We are not that stupid. 

Well, with Musk the blatant liar having 200 million followers, maybe some of us really are that stupid.

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The WaPo reports (not paywalled) about an odd discovery of an old piece of wood that points to a possible way to sequester carbon:

A cheap, low-tech solution for storing carbon 

may be sitting in the dirt

Figuring out ways of locking carbon out of the atmosphere, such as by burying wood, is key to stalling the worst consequences of climate change

About 3,775 years old but it didn't rot!

A 3,775-year-old log unintentionally discovered under a farm in Canada may point to a deceptively simple method of locking climate-warming carbon out of the atmosphere for thousands of years, according to a study published Thursday.

“This accidental discovery really gave a critical data point,” said Ning Zeng, a University of Maryland climate scientist whose team unearthed the ancient chunk of wood.

“It’s a single data point,” he added, but it “provides the data point we need to really say under what conditions we can preserve wood for a thousand years or longer.”

But much of [the carbon in trees] quickly makes its way back into the air once insects, fungi and bacteria chew through leaves and other plant material. Even wood, the hardiest part of a tree, will succumb within a few decades to these decomposers.

What if that decay could be delayed? Under the right conditions, tons of wood could be buried underground in wood vaults, locking in a portion of human-generated CO₂ for potentially thousands of years. While other carbon-capture technologies rely on expensive and energy-intensive machines to extract CO₂, the tools for putting wood underground are simple: a tractor and a backhoe.

Radiocarbon dating revealed the log to be 3,775 years old, give or take a few decades. Comparing the old chunk of wood to a freshly cut piece of cedar showed the ancient log lost less than 5 percent of its carbon over the millennia.

The log was surrounded by stagnant, oxygen-deprived groundwater and covered by an impermeable layer of clay, preventing fungi and insects from consuming the wood. Lignin, a tough material that gives trees their strength, protected the wood’s carbohydrates from subterranean bacteria.  

The next step is to find prehistoric logs in other locations, to see how well other types of soil preserve wood.  

The researchers estimate buried wood can sequester up 10 billion tons of CO₂ per year, which is more than a quarter of annual global emissions from energy, according to the International Energy Agency.

One of the biggest challenges isn’t so much the supply of wood but rather the cost of transporting it to the right spots, Poisson said. “There’s probably a lot of unmerchantable wood right now that doesn’t have any market or doesn’t have any purpose.”

It's not clear if this can be done on a large scale. The cost of moving wood to burial spots is probably a deal killer for this idea.