“I had some ideas for ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ when we were still based in Woodstock making Music From Big Pink,”

[David P.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EisXJSsULGM
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‘Up On Cripple Creek’: The Story Behind The Band’s Song
By Martin Chilton, Nov 29, 2022, U Discover Music
On November 2, 1969, The Band gave their only performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. The famous host introduced them by saying, “Here are the new recording sensation for youngsters, The Band!” They opened the show by performing the Robbie Robertson-penned song “Up On Cripple Creek,” which was the fifth song on their eponymous second album, and which was released as a single by Capitol on November 29 that year.

The writing of “Up On Cripple Creek”
----------------------------------
“Up On Cripple Creek,” which draws on The Band’s musical roots, is sung from the viewpoint of a truck driver who goes to Lake Charles in Louisiana to stay with a lover called Bessie. In an exclusive interview with uDiscover Music, Robertson looked back on the creation of one of his classic songs.

“I had some ideas for ‘Up On Cripple Creek’ when we were still based in Woodstock making Music From Big Pink,” recalls Robertson. “Then after Woodstock, I went to Montreal and my daughter Alexandra was born. We had been snowed in at Woodstock and in Montreal it was freezing, so we went to Hawaii, really as some kind of a way to get some warmth, and to begin preparing for making our second album. I think it was really pieces and ideas coming on during that travelling process that sparked the idea about a man who just drives these trucks across the whole country. I don’t remember where I sat down and finished the song, though.”

The lyrics are full of wordplay and alliteration – as well as the title, there are repeated references to “a drunkard’s dream” – and contain some wonderfully vivid imagery. The final recording featured drummer Levon Helm as the lead vocalist. In one verse he sings, “Now there’s one thing in the whole wide world/I sure would like to see/That’s when that little love of mine/Dips her doughnut in my tea.”

Robertson laughs as he recalls the phrase. “The doughnut line just sounded good to me at the time and I didn’t hear anybody writing in that kind of way. It’s sometimes hard to describe where lyrics come from.”

The influence of Spike Jones
--------------------------
Another memorable line is about Spike Jones, a bandleader, and musician whose zany songs made him a cult hero in the 40s and 50s. He even sang a satirical song about Adolf Hitler that included blowing raspberries at the Nazi leader. Robertson penned the following lines in “Up On Cripple Creek” in tribute to this musical innovator:

Now me and my mate were back at the shack
We had Spike Jones on the box
She said, “I can’t take the way he sings
“But I love to hear him talk”
Now that just gave my heart a throb
To the bottom of my feet
And I swore as I took another pull
My Bessie can’t be beat

Robertson is still enthusiastic about his affection for the music of Spike Jones And The City Slickers. “Yeah, I was a Spike Jones admirer,” says The Band’s songwriter. “I thought the way that he treated music was a healthy thing. He could take a song and do his own impression of it that was so odd and outside the box – and in many cases hilarious. I liked him a lot.”

“Up On Cripple Creek” is also notable for breaking ground in featuring a Hohner clavinet played with a wah-wah pedal. The riff, which was performed by Garth Hudson, is heard after each chorus of the song – and set a trend that was followed in lots of funk music in the 70s. The song also appears in The Band’s concert film The Last Waltz and they performed it regularly on tour with Bob Dylan. It has also been covered by Oak Ridge Boys and Eric Church.

The song’s legacy
----------------------
The Band’s original version, produced by John Simon, reached No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100. In January 1970, in the wake of the success of their new album, The Band appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Robertson has admitted that the song is not dealing with particularly sophisticated people. Did he want fans to like the protagonist of “Up On Cripple Creek”? “I didn’t care,” laughs Robertson. “I just wanted to write something that was stirring inside of me. I didn’t know anything about this man’s journey, except that I had to pursue it in a song.”

https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/the-band-up-on-cripple-creek-song/

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As Covid Spreads Fast, Beijing Isn’t in Lockdown. But It Feels Like It.
By Keith Bradsher and David Pierson, Dec. 13, 2022, NY Times

Restaurants have closed because too many staff members have tested positive for Covid. The usually ubiquitous food delivery workers zipping through traffic on their scooters have nearly vanished because of infections. Pharmacies have been emptied of cold medicine, and supermarkets have been running low on the essentials such as disinfectant solution and antibacterial wipes.

Less than a week after the Chinese govt lifted its stringent “zero Covid” restrictions, following a spasm of protests across the country, Beijing looks like a city in the throes of a lockdown — this time, self-imposed by residents. Sidewalks and pedestrian shopping streets are barren, and once busy traffic thoroughfares are deserted. Residents are hunkering down indoors and hoarding medicine as a wave of Covid sweeps across the Chinese capital.

“No one dares to come out now,” said Yue Jiajun, a Beijing restaurant owner, who initially celebrated when customers were allowed to dine indoors last week only to learn later that the surge in infections would keep them away.

“Even takeaway, I have no customers,” said Mr. Yue, who admitted that there probably weren’t enough delivery drivers for his orders anyway.

All over the city, residents were gripped by the sinking realization that a virus most of the world had already experienced was spreading freely and rapidly for the first time, three years after it emerged. Weibo, China’s popular social media service, was awash with people around the country sharing news of their infections and their personal experiences with Covid.

“50-60% of my relatives and friends have tested positive,” wrote one person on Weibo, a social media site.

Liu Qiangdong, CEO of the e-commerce site JD.com, and Wang Shi, a real estate tycoon, shared on Weibo their experiences about recovering from Covid. A virus-stricken Zhang Lan, the founder of a popular restaurant chain, South Beauty Group, summoned the energy to hawk vitamin supplements and sausage as potential remedies on a livestream.

“I’m here to encourage you,” Ms. Zhang told her viewers. “Adjust your mentality, drink plenty of water. You’ll be fine.”

Rapid antigen tests are now one of the hottest commodities in town after they were all but sold out at stores. Medicine has also become hard to find, either at hospital clinics or at pharmacies. Many residents complain that the city should have done more to anticipate the Covid outbreak and to stockpile drugs ahead of time.

“The most urgent issue is the shortage of medicine,” said a 25-year-old Beijing resident who gave only his family name, Wang, given the political sensitivity of the issue.

Mr. Wang said that he developed a fever of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and a sore throat on Saturday morning and became dizzy. He tested positive for coronavirus on a rapid antigen test at home and went to a fever clinic at a hospital.

“I don’t know if I’m doing it right at home, so I came to the hospital to find out if there are any precautions,” Mr. Wang said, adding that he tried to obtain ibuprofen, a painkiller, and a popular herbal remedy called Lianhua Qingwen that has been the subject of price gouging.

The doctor instead prescribed loxoprofen, a different painkiller, and Ganmao Qingre granules, a less coveted herbal remedy. “Many medicines in great demand are not available now, and I don’t know if other medicines prescribed can have the same effect,” Mr. Wang said.

Vincent Chen said he resorted to begging friends outside Beijing to send him fever medication after he couldn’t find any at his local pharmacies or online. He had to splurge on an express delivery company because ordinary services were either too busy or didn’t have enough staff.

“Couriers are paralyzed,” said Mr. Chen, 35.

Others have caught on. Tutorials are now spreading on Weibo teaching city dwellers how to purchase drugs from pharmacies in the countryside.

The hoarding of remedies isn’t limited to cough medicine and lozenges. Stores are now running out of jarred peaches because they’re believed to be packed with enough nutrients to ward off the virus. The sweet snack is popular in northeastern China for treating cold symptoms, but it now appears to be winning converts elsewhere as people try to gain an edge on the illness. State media has had to weigh in, declaring there’s no proof peaches make a difference.

It wasn’t the only time in the last week the government has had to step in to try to calm a frenzy over an elixir. The State Administration for Market Regulation, a market watchdog, warned producers and retailers about runaway prices after Lianhua Qingwen, the herbal remedy, started selling at more than triple its regular price.

“It is strictly forbidden to drive up prices,” the regulator said on Friday.

Shares of Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical, the maker of Lianhua Qingwen, have jumped more than 20 percent on the Shenzhen stock market since Covid restrictions were relaxed.

The shortages don’t appear to have extended to food. Beijing has repeatedly promised that groceries would remain adequate through the pandemic. The capital, given its political importance, has traditionally had priority for food supplies.

Large piles of oranges, corn, cabbage and other produce were still available at supermarkets in the city that were able to round up enough staff to remain open. The only sections with dwindling inventory were for cleaning products and booze as customers tried to hedge how much time they’d need to stay indoors.

Other businesses aren’t so fortunate as grocery stores. China tried to revitalize its travel industry last week by ending the many restrictions on travel between provinces. But some Beijing hotels have stopped admitting new guests because they have too few staff to look after them.

The severity of Beijing’s outbreak is hard to discern. China’s mass testing system is being dismantled, so the number of infections is unknown. The city recorded 559 confirmed cases and 468 asymptomatic infections on Monday. That’s down from 1,163 confirmed cases and 3,503 asymptomatic infections on Dec. 5, the last day authorities required a negative test to enter public spaces.

Other available data suggests a city experiencing a surge in cases. Li Ang, a spokesman for the Beijing Municipal Health Commission, said at a news conference on Monday that the number of calls for emergency services on Friday was six times higher than normal and that visits to fever clinics had increased 16-fold in a week.

One of the biggest questions is whether China can maintain medical care for people who fall seriously ill with Covid or who have unrelated conditions requiring treatment. Beijing, with some of the country’s best hospitals, has an advantage over rural areas. The city appealed on Saturday for people not to call the medical emergency hotline if they were asymptomatic or had only mild cases.

Several older people leaving a hospital in the Dongcheng district on Saturday said in separate interviews that they had received treatment, including for kidney dialysis and an injured foot.

But a 66-year-old man, complaining about a week of chronic pain at the base of his back, said that he had been turned away because the emergency room was full. The man, who gave only his family name, Gao, given the political sensitivity in discussing China’s pandemic response, said that he would try again later.

“I am still in pain,” he said. “I will come again.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/world/asia/china-covid-zero-beijing.html

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What’s Powering Argentina at the World Cup? 1,100 Pounds of Yerba Mate.
By James Wagner, Dec. 13, 2022, NY Times

DOHA, Qatar — Yerba mate is not, to be fair, for everyone.

A strong and often bitter herbal infusion brewed hot or cold from the leaves of a plant native to South America, yerba mate is popular in Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. Some of the best soccer players in the world hail from that region and swear by it, and they have spread it around the world through their club teams. The World Cup in Qatar, though, raised some logistical and supply challenges, not least of which was: Where would devotees find yerba mate in the Gulf?

So they came prepared. Brazil’s national team, which has a few mate drinkers, brought 26 pounds of it to Qatar, a team official said. Uruguay’s squad packed about 530 pounds. But it was Argentina, which will face Croatia in the semifinals on Tuesday fully expecting to extend its stay through Sunday’s final, that topped them all. To ensure that the roughly 75 members of its traveling party — players, coaches, trainers and the rest — would have a steady supply of a drink they consider essential, Argentina’s team hauled a whopping 1,100 pounds of yerba mate to Qatar.

“It has caffeine,” Argentine midfielder Alexis Mac Allister said in Spanish while explaining why he consumed so much of the drink that some have likened to a stronger green tea. “But I drink it more than anything to bring us together.”

A spokesman for Argentina’s national team, Nicolás Novello, said the team brought different types to suit everyone’s taste: yerba mate with stems (a milder taste), without stems (a stronger, more bitter taste) and with herbs (for other flavors). Observers said nearly everyone, including the team’s star, Lionel Messi, was drinking it; the team’s devotion to the drink was clear every time it unloaded its team bus, and after matches, a handful of players would carry out the traditional mate essentials: a cup made of a hollow gourd, its accompanying straw and a thermos of hot water.

Drinking mate is so commonplace within the Argentine and Uruguayan teams, in particular, that the latter made the thermos, known as Botija in Spanish, its official mascot. A large blue mascot’s outfit even made it to Qatar, where it struggled to fit through the turnstiles of the metro system in Doha.

“When I played in Argentina, a nutritionist used to say mate hydrates you,” said Sebastián Driussi, a midfielder for Austin F.C. in Major League Soccer. Driussi represented Argentina at the youth level internationally and spent three years with the popular Argentine club River Plate. “I don’t know, but it’s like water for us. Before a game, in the locker room, everyone is drinking it all the time. There is no schedule or bad time to have mate. Us in Argentina, we say that mate makes friendships.”

Juan José Szychowski, the president of the National Institute of Yerba Mate in Argentina, said there is an art to perfecting the brew, with every drinker preferring slightly different variations, from sweet to bitter, hot to cold.

“If you start drinking mate, you won’t stop,” Szychowski said in a telephone interview. “It’s more than just a custom. When someone comes over, we tell them, ‘You should have some mate.’ It’s sharing and something social and good for your health.”

Szychowski said mate, which was originally consumed by the region’s Indigenous residents before it was spread by Jesuit missionaries, contains polyphenols, a compound that has antioxidant properties. Some studies, he added, have suggested that the beverage can have a positive effect on health.

The influence, and the example, of mate-drinking players from South America like Messi, Uruguay’s Luis Suárez and Brazil’s Neymar — who used to be club teammates at Barcelona — have led other players to adopt the practice.

Antoine Griezmann, a fixture in the France team that will play in the semifinals on Wednesday, took up the habit after befriending the Uruguayan players Cristian Rodríguez and José María Giménez when they were teammates at Atlético Madrid. Griezmann has said that he now drinks it daily. Another French star, Paul Pogba, said in 2018 that he got hooked on mate after one of his Manchester United teammates at the time — Marcos Rojo, an Argentine — gave him some of his own infusion.

“It’s perfect,” Pogba told an Argentine television channel. “I loved it.”

Szychowski called soccer players the best yerba mate ambassadors around the world, before noting that Pope Francis, an Argentine, is also known to enjoy a cup.

Not every player, though, is a fan of the taste that some have called too bitter, too herbaceous, too earthy. (Experts advised beginners to start with a sweet mate.) Walker Zimmerman, a defender on the United States team that was eliminated from the World Cup in the round of 16, said two of his Argentine teammates at F.C. Dallas years ago — Maximiliano Urruti and Mauro Díaz — introduced him to mate, but he admitted, “I don’t think I’d ever get into it on my own.”

Lisandro López, a former Argentina defender, said not everyone was used to him nursing his mate through a straw when he played in Portugal. “A lot of the time — and I lived in Lisbon for four years — I went to a plaza to drink mate and people looked at me weird, like you’re doing drugs or something,” López said.

Luis Hernández, the former Mexican striker, said his palate couldn’t quite get used to the taste when he spent a season at Boca Juniors in Argentina. While everyone else on the team drank mate, he said, he was the lone holdout.

“I prefer a good coffee than a cup of mate,” Hernández said, adding later with a chuckle, “They say it helps them? But mate doesn’t help you score goals.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/sports/soccer/argentina-yerba-mate.html

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The Question Is No Longer Whether Iranians Will Topple the Ayatollah
By Karim Sadjadpour, Dec. 12, 2022, NY Times
The protests in Iran, now in their third month, are a historic battle pitting two powerful and irreconcilable forces: a predominantly young and modern population, proud of its 2,500-year-old civilization and desperate for change, versus an aging and isolated theocratic regime, committed to preserving its power and steeped in 43 years of brutality.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the only ruler many protesters have known, seems to be facing a version of the dictator’s dilemma: If he doesn’t offer his people the prospect of change, the protests will continue, but if he does, he risks appearing weak and emboldening protesters.

The protests were set off by the Sept. 16 death of a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, after she was detained by the morality police for allegedly wearing improper hijab. Although Iranian opposition to the regime is unarmed, unorganized and leaderless, the protests continue despite a violent crackdown by the regime. More than 18,000 protesters have been arrested, more than 475 have been killed, and 11 people have been sentenced to death so far. On Thursday, a 23-year-old man, Mohsen Shekari, who was arrested during the protests, was hanged.

However the protests are resolved, they seem to have already changed the relationship between Iranian state and society. Defying the hijab law is still a criminal offense, but women throughout Iran, especially in Tehran, increasingly refuse to cover their hair. Videos of young Iranians flipping turbans off the heads of unsuspecting Shiite clerics are popular on social media.

Symbols of the government are routinely defaced and set on fire, including, according to social media reports, the ancestral home of the revolution’s father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Laborers, bazaar merchants and petrochemical workers have gone on intermittent strikes, reminiscent of the tactics that helped topple Iran’s monarchy in 1979.

The ideological principles of Ayatollah Khamenei and his followers are “Death to America,” “Death to Israel” and insistence on hijab. Mr. Khamenei’s ruling philosophy has been shaped and reinforced by three notable authoritarian collapses: The 1979 fall of Iran’s monarchy, the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Arab uprisings of 2011. His takeaway from each of these events has been to never compromise under pressure and never compromise on principles. Whenever Mr. Khamenei has faced a fork in the road between reform and repression, he has always doubled down on repression.

The rigidity of Iran’s hard-liners is driven not only by ideological conviction but also by a keen understanding of the interplay between the rulers and the ruled. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it, “The most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.”

Mr. Khamenei understands that rescinding compulsory hijab will be a gateway to freedom and will be interpreted by many Iranians as an act of vulnerability, not magnanimity. That Iranians will not be placated merely with the freedom of dress but will be emboldened to demand all the freedoms denied to them in a theocracy — including the freedom to drink, eat, read, love, watch, listen and, above all, say what they want.

There are signs of disarray within the ruling elite. While some officials have suggested the notorious morality police will be abolished, others have suggested this is merely a temporary tactic to restore order. “The collapse of the hijab is the collapse of the flag of the Islamic Republic,” said Hossein Jalali, a clerical ally of Mr. Khamenei and a member of the Cultural Commission of the Iranian Parliament. “Head scarves will return to women’s heads in two weeks,” he declared, and women who refuse to comply could have their bank accounts frozen.

The Iranian regime’s repressive capacity — at least on paper — remains formidable. Ayatollah Khamenei is commander in chief of 190,000 armed members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who oversee tens of thousands of Basij militants tasked with instilling public fear and morality. Iran’s nonideological conscription army, whose active forces are an estimated 350,000, is unlikely to take part in mass repression, but hopes from protesters that they will join the opposition have so far been in vain.

Until now, the political and financial interests of Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards have been intertwined. But persistent protests and chants of “Death to Khamenei” might change that. Would the Iranian security forces want to continue killing Iranians to preserve the rule of an unpopular, ailing octogenarian cleric who is reportedly hoping to bequeath power to Mojtaba Khamenei, his equally unpopular son?

The internal deliberations of Iran’s security services remain a black box. But it is likely that, like the Tunisian and Egyptian militaries in 2011, some of them have begun to contemplate whether cutting loose the dictator might preserve their own interests.

The sociologist Charles Kurzman wrote in his seminal book, “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran,” that the paradox of revolutionary movements is that they are not viable until they attract a critical mass of supporters but that to attract a critical mass of supporters, they must be perceived as viable.

The protest movement has not yet reached that tipping point, but there are ample signs that a critical mass of Iranian society has doubts about the regime’s continued viability. “What the people want is regime change and no return to the past,” said Nasrin Sotoudeh, a renowned human rights attorney and political prisoner who had long called for reform instead of revolution. “And what we can see from the current protests and strikes that are now being initiated is a very real possibility of regime change.”

Like many autocratic regimes, the Islamic Republic has long ruled through fear, but there are growing signs that fear is dissipating. Female athletes and actors have begun to compete and perform without the hijab — a criminal offense that has earned other women double-digit prison sentences — inspiring others to do the same. Political prisoners like Hossein Ronaghi have remained defiant despite imprisonment and torture. Rather than deter protesters, their killings often lead to mourning ceremonies­­­­­ that perpetuate the protests.

If the organizing principle that united Iran’s disparate opposition forces in 1979 was anti-imperialism, the organizing principles of today’s socioeconomically and ethnically diverse movement are pluralism and patriotism. The faces of this movement are not ideologues or intellectuals but athletes, musicians and ordinary people, especially women and ethnic minorities, who have shown uncommon courage. Their slogans are patriotic and progressive — “We will not leave Iran, we will reclaim Iran,” and “Women, life, freedom.”

The demands of the current movement are brilliantly distilled in Shervin Hajipour’s song “Baraye,” or “For,” which has become the anthem of the protests and articulates a “yearning for a normal life” rather than the “forced paradise” of a religious police state.

Senior American and Israeli intelligence officials recently stated they don’t believe Iran’s protests constitute a serious threat to the regime. But history has repeatedly illustrated that no intelligence service, political science theory or algorithm can accurately predict the timing and outcome of popular uprisings: The C.I.A. assessed in August 1978, less than six months before the toppling of Iran’s monarchy, that Iran wasn’t even in a “prerevolutionary situation.”

This is because not even the protagonists themselves — in this case the Iranian people and regime — can anticipate how they will behave as this drama unfolds.

Abbas Amanat, a historian of Iran, observed that one of the keys to Iran’s civilizational longevity, which dates to the Persian Empire of 2,500 years ago, is the power of its culture to co-opt its military invaders. “For nearly two millenniums, Persian political culture and, in a broader sense, a repository of Persian civilizational tools successfully managed to convert Turkic, Arab and Mongolian conquerors,” he told me. “Persian language, myth, historical memories and timekeeping endured. Iranians persuaded invaders to appreciate a Persian high culture of poetry, food, painting, wine, music, festivals and etiquette.”

When Ayatollah Khomeini acquired power in 1979, he led a cultural revolution that sought to replace Iranian patriotism with a purely Islamic identity. Ayatollah Khamenei continues that tradition, but he is one of the few remaining true believers. While the Islamic Republic sought to subdue Iranian culture, it is Iranian culture and patriotism that are threatening to undo the Islamic Republic.

Four decades of the Islamic Republic’s hard power will ultimately be defeated by two millenniums of Iranian cultural soft power. The question is no longer about whether this will happen but when. History has taught us that there is an inverse relationship between the courage of an opposition and the resolve of a regime, and authoritarian collapse often goes from inconceivable to inevitable in days.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/12/opinion/iran-protests-veil-khamenei.html

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The Five-Year Engineering Feat Germany Pulled Off in Months
By Georgi Kantchev, Dec. 8, 2022, WSJ
WILHELMSHAVEN, Germany—In March, the German government asked energy companies to weigh a seemingly impossible engineering task. Could a new liquefied natural gas import terminal, which normally takes at least five years to build, be erected in this port town by year’s end?

At the headquarters of the company asked to build the pipeline portion, technical director Thomas Hüwener posed that question to his team. “If no, then it’s a no,” he told them. “If yes, then we have to commit, with all the possible consequences for our company.”

After three days deliberations, the company concluded that if everything went perfectly the project could be done by Christmas. Since then, it has had to contend with potentially toxic soil and environmental regulations protecting frogs and bats. When workers encountered high groundwater, they had to drain trenches, then backfill them.

Another company building a jetty for the floating terminal needed to scan the seabed for unexploded World War II-era munitions and scour construction sites across Europe for supplies.

“This project is really a race against time,” said pipeline project manager Franz-Josef Kissing. “It’s a battle.”

Cut off from most Russian natural gas, much of Europe is rushing to line up alternative energy sources and build the infrastructure needed for them. If the continent fails to shore up its energy grid, governments might have to resort to rationing fuel this winter, possibly leading to closed factories and more pain for manufacturers. Next winter could be even tougher if gas storage facilities aren’t replenished. The EU has estimated that ending its reliance on Russian fossil fuels will add at least 300 billion euros, or around $315 billion, in infrastructure costs, through 2030.

Since Russia stopped most natural gas exports to Europe this fall, gas flows from Russia to Germany have shriveled from 55% of imports last year to zero. The three German liquefied natural gas terminals slated for completion for this year could cover at least 15% of the country’s gas demand. Berlin plans to install several more terminals next year and is working on more permanent installations. It has budgeted more than €6.5 billion for such terminals in 2022.

Dozens of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, facilities are slated for construction across the European Union in coming years, which would allow Europe to buy more gas from nations such as Qatar and the U.S.

Within days of taking on the job of building a 19-mile pipeline between the new Wilhelmshaven terminal and the natural gas grid, Mr. Kissing’s employer, pipeline builder Open Grid Europe GmbH, formed a team with specialists in everything from route planning and nature conservation to archaeology and law.

Cooling natural gas to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit turns it into a liquid that can be shipped in oceangoing tankers to terminals, where it can be converted back to gas. A floating LNG terminal is a gas facility on an enormous specialized tanker that receives liquid gas from another tanker and returns it to a gaseous state.

Select floating liquefied-natural-gas unit developments in the European Union, September 2021 to October 2022

The jetty that will be home to the floating Wilhelmshaven terminal is an especially complicated project because it has to withstand the force of two large, gas-filled ships pressing against it. For Niedersachsen Ports GmbH & Co. KG, which is building the jetty, the first challenge was finding materials—quickly. Ordering them from a factory would have taken months. Mathias Lüdicke, the company’s Wilhelmshaven branch manager, said the company had to scour Europe for construction materials, including the steel piles that would be driven into the seabed.

Niedersachsen Ports called suppliers in France, the Netherlands, Finland and the Baltics. It found 165-foot steel piles on an idle construction site in Lithuania. The original plan had called for smaller ones, so the company adjusted the blueprint.

To save time, much of the 3,000 cubic meters of concrete needed for the project was brought in the form of huge, semifinished blocks, which were assembled like Lego pieces.

“We needed stuff that’s ready,” Mr. Lüdicke said. “So we changed the whole planning process as we went along, based on what was available.”

Niedersachsen Ports idled other projects to focus on the job. Employees worked through Easter weekend to get the necessary documents ready. “Nobody paid attention to overtime because we all said, this has to work,” Mr. Lüdicke said.

The German bureaucracy made adjustments, too. The parliament passed an LNG Acceleration Act, speeding up procedures for reviewing, approving and awarding contracts for LNG projects.

“If there is a chance in this really terrible situation, it is that we shake off all this sleepiness and, in some cases, grouchiness that exists in Germany,” Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in March about speeding up the construction of LNG terminals.

Other large construction projects have moved slowly in Germany. In 2020, Berlin opened its new airport nine years behind schedule. Stuttgart’s new railway station, under construction since 2010, is now scheduled to open in 2025, after years of delays and ballooning costs.

The state of Niedersachsen issued some of the necessary permits for the LNG terminal on May 1, the International Workers’ Day, a Sunday. “It’s not a day when you’d expect that to happen,” said Olaf Lies, the state’s economy minister. “We needed a new German speed.”

Similar projects elsewhere in Europe have faced opposition from activists who are against building new fossil-fuel infrastructure, and those who say such projects harm the local environment.

In Italy, a floating LNG terminal in the Tuscan port of Piombino is supposed to go into service next May. But several local groups have staged protests, claiming the project poses risks for residents and the environment. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said anchoring the new vessel in Piombino is vital for Italy’s economy and for national security.

In Germany, the new pipeline would cross the path of an annual migration of frogs. To keep the creatures from plunging into a ditch in which the pipe would be buried, Mr. Kissing’s team erected frog fences. In some cases, experts had to create new caves for bats.

When they started digging, they discovered another problem. The soil in the region contains high concentrations of sulfate acid, which could become toxic under some circumstances if exposed to oxygen for too long.

Also, the groundwater level was high. The trenches had to be dry to weld the pipes together.

To solve both problems, Mr. Kissing’s 800 workers worked in 400-foot increments, draining the trenches with pumps, then backfilling them.

“You may rush as much as you want, but soil is soil,” Mr. Kissing said while walking around the site on a recent rainy morning.

The groundwater also contained more iron than the norm. So the company had to build special de-ironing facilities to filter the water before dumping it back into nearby fields.

Connecting the new pipeline to the German gas grid presented another problem. It needs to link to an existing pipeline carrying gas from Norway, which has become essential for Germany and can’t be shut down for the linkup work to occur in the coming days. A bypass device had to be built to keep the gas flowing.

Before it could start building the jetty, Niedersachsen Ports first needed to search for unexploded World War II ordnance. Wilhelmshaven, Germany’s only deep-water port, was bombed heavily during the war. The company scanned the seabed and removed some smaller ordnance.

In September, with four months to go before the deadline, a problem cropped up that threatened to make it impossible to finish on time. The Wilhelmshaven sea lock—a structure in the port used for raising and lowering boats passing between stretches of water—had a mechanical failure, prompting the port to shut down the passage. The piles needed for the jetty, which were being welded together at the harbor, were stuck there.

Mr. Lüdicke met with officials from the waterway authority and German navy and devised a workaround. The port would allow the ships carrying the piles to pass through the lock with just one gate open, but only when the tides were such that the water levels were equal.

“It was a very fine balancing act, a lot of coordination,” Mr. Lüdicke said. “If we hadn’t managed to do that, we wouldn’t have been able to launch the terminal this year.”

In September, explosions damaged the Nord Stream pipelines running under the Baltic Sea a few hundred miles east of Wilhelmshaven, in what European authorities have called an act of sabotage. That sparked concerns across Europe about the vulnerability of energy infrastructure. The local police dispatched officers along the route of the new pipeline, and boats patrolled around the jetty.

Mr. Lüdicke is hoping for good weather as his team races toward the finish line. Bad weather could force delays, and heavy wind routinely halts work. There is still work to be done and tests to be carried out before the floating terminal, the 965-foot Hoegh Esperanza, can dock in Wilhelmshaven in the coming days and the gas can start flowing.

Utility Uniper SE, which the German state recently agreed to nationalize and which will operate the terminal, said that if all goes according to plan, the first tanker carrying LNG will arrive at the start of next year.

“If we have extreme weather, that could cause problems and delay things,” Mr. Lüdicke said. “We’re so close.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/natural-gas-terminal-engineering-feat-germany-11670513353

=================

A Chatty Putin’s Underlying Message: I’m Still in Charge
By Anton Troianovski, Dec. 10, 2022, NY Times
Friday evening, continuing to take questions in a news conference after his spokesman tried to end it, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia put forward a blunt thesis on the nature of truth.

“You can’t trust anyone,” he told a reporter for Russian state media. “You can only trust me.”

It was a fitting coda to a week that saw Putin particularly busy in constructing his version of reality at a time when a Russian victory in Ukraine appears as distant as ever. In a marathon of public appearances that began on Monday with a televised drive across Russia’s damaged bridge to Crimea, Putin held forth on nuclear doctrine, prisoner swaps with the U.S., supposed Polish revanchism and even the “very harsh” practices of European zoos.

On Wednesday, the Kremlin published nearly three hours of footage of Putin meeting with his “human rights council.” On Thursday, it released a video showing Putin pledging to continue his attacks on Ukraine while appearing so jovial, champagne flute in hand, that some observers thought he was drunk.

And in the Friday news conference on the sidelines of a regional summit in Kyrgyzstan, the president dismissed the notion that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might be facing headwinds.

“The special military operation is taking its course, everything is stable for us there,” Putin said, using the Kremlin’s term for its war in Ukraine. “There are no issues or problems there today.”

Most of what Putin said repeated his past positions, and much of what he said was false. On Ukraine, he said that “in the end, we will have to reach a deal” to stop the war, even as he gave no hint of being prepared to respect Ukrainian sovereignty. And referring to Thursday’s release of the American basketball star Brittney Griner in return for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, Putin said that Russia “won’t say no to doing more of this work in the future.”

Yet his string of appearances was also a message in itself: that of a president who, despite an economy sagging under sanctions and Russia’s enormous military losses, is trying to portray himself as healthy, alert and still in charge.

The burst of activity has been a departure from November, when he held only one extended public event from Nov. 10 to 20 — an absence from the limelight that went unexplained by the Kremlin.

“He is simply showing, mainly to Russia’s ruling circles, that he continues to be in control of the situation,” said Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University at St. Petersburg. “When Putin speaks so much, what he is saying is not so important.”

Indeed, some of Putin’s commentary this week mainly served to reveal his fixation on his own government’s propaganda. At his Wednesday videoconference with a handpicked human rights panel, he responded to a question about the treatment of Russians in Europe by claiming that “nationalist elements in Poland” were “dreaming” of seizing parts of western Ukraine — repeating an unfounded claim that one of his top intelligence officials had made the week before.

He then went on a tangent about zoos: “In some Western countries animals in the zoo are killed in front of children, butchered and so on. This absolutely does not correspond to our culture, the culture of the peoples of the Russian Federation.”

It was a reference, pro-Kremlin media reported, to the decision by the Copenhagen Zoo in 2014 to kill a giraffe because of the risk of inbreeding. And it was an example of how Putin is trying to use whatever arguments he can to bolster anti-Western sentiment among the Russian public.

But in Putin’s autocracy, it is his own words that offer the best guide to Russian policy. On that score, he offered no hint of self-doubt this week, reprising the comparison he made last June of his own conquests to those of Peter the Great, the pivotal 18th-century czar.

“The fact that there are new territories — this is a significant result for Russia, it’s serious,” Putin, flashing a self-satisfied smile, said at his videoconference Wednesday with his human rights council, despite his military’s increasingly tenuous grip on those regions.

“Peter the Great was already fighting for access to the Azov Sea,” Putin added, referring to the southeastern Ukrainian coastline that Russian troops now control.

The next day, Putin awarded Russia’s Gold Star to military officers at the Kremlin. In addition to releasing footage of his speech, Putin’s office published a 4-minute clip of the president making military small talk with the honorees, as each held a champagne flute.

“The attack aircraft are fighting just great, as are the ‘sushki,’” Putin said, referring to the military’s Sukhoi warplanes with a diminutive. “Great, just excellent.”

He went on to justify Russia’s assaults on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with a “But who started it?” rhetorical question, claiming Ukraine was to blame because it had attacked the Kerch Strait Bridge to Crimea, which Russia uses to supply its frontline troops.

On social media, some expressed surprise that the Kremlin released the footage, given that Putin — whose sobriety and self-control are central to his carefully crafted image in Russia — looked like he may have been tipsy as he swayed back and forth. But Golosov said that broadcasting Mr. Putin seeming happy and relaxed as he discusses his country’s deadly war was effective for the Kremlin’s spin doctors.

“Putin needs to show the public that everything is going well,” Golosov said, “that he is able to talk about what is going on with amusement.”

Still, Putin also has a global audience in mind. On Friday, he elaborated on what he said could be a shift in Russia’s nuclear doctrine, warning that Russia could amend its philosophy to allow for a pre-emptive strike. American policy, he said, might necessitate a more aggressive stance — even as he left his options open, as he usually does.

“We’re just thinking about it,” Mr. Putin said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/world/europe/putin-ukraine-nuclear.html

================

In a Future Filled With Electric Cars, AM Radio May Be Left Behind
Carmakers say that electric vehicles generate electromagnetic interference, causing static, noise and a high-frequency hum.
By Michael Levenson, Dec. 10, 2022, NY Times

About 47 million Americans listen to AM radio, representing about 20 percent of the radio-listening public, according to the Nielsen Company, the media tracking firm. AM listeners tend to be older than other radio listeners (about one-third are over 65), and the amount of time they spend listening to AM has increased slightly over the last five years, to just over two hours a day, Nielsen reported.

Even though some AM stations have translators that send duplicate broadcasts over the FM airwaves, AM signals travel farther and reach more people. AM stations can also be less expensive than FM stations to operate, allowing some to offer programming geared toward specific religious, cultural or other communities.

Brian Winnekins, the owner of WRDN in Durand, Wis., which has seven hours of farm-related programming available every weekday on AM and FM, said he has been urging listeners to tell carmakers not to drop AM, noting that it can reach farmers in remote areas.

“If you can make a vehicle drive by itself,” Mr. Winnekins said, referring to the driver-assistance systems in Teslas and other vehicles, “you can make a decent radio receiver.”

Nola Daves Moses, distribution director at Native Voice One, which distributes Native American radio programs, including some in Indigenous languages, said she hoped that more Americans would switch to electric vehicles.

But “if radio disappears out of cars, that would be really devastating,” she said. “Is this a first step? Is FM next?”

In a letter to 20 car manufacturers published on Dec. 1, Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, requested that they keep AM radio in electric vehicles, describing it as an issue of public safety.

“Despite innovations such as the smartphone and social media, AM/FM broadcast radio remains the most dependable, cost-free, and accessible communication mechanism for public officials to communicate with the public during times of emergency,” Mr. Markey wrote. “As a result, any phaseout of broadcast AM radio could pose a significant communication problem during emergencies.”

Many AM broadcasters say their stations’ news reports are the quickest way for drivers to find out about tornadoes, flash floods and other severe weather. Diane Newman, operations and brand manager at WWL in New Orleans, said that during Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, the station carried vital information about rescue and recovery efforts.

“There was no Wi-Fi; there were no phone connections,” Ms. Newman said, adding, “You take away AM radios in cars and you take away a lifeline, a connection when the community needs you most.”

Carmakers noted that drivers can still stream AM radio on apps and not all electric vehicles have dropped it. Hyundai, which makes electric vehicles, said in a statement that it had no plans to phase out AM radio. And some observers say the threat from electric vehicles may be overblown.

“The challenge for AM’s survival may be more about broader demographics than autos,” said Michael Stamm, a cultural historian at Michigan State University who studies media. “Do younger people care about AM at all, in cars or otherwise?”

AM signals travel farther and reach more people, and their stations can be less expensive than FM to operate.Credit...Rich Schultz for The New York Times

Not all young drivers have moved away from AM radio.

“AM is where you get the information,” said Alex Cardenas-Acosta, 34, a Saab driver who works at an auto repair shop in Union, N.J. Like many who drive gas-powered cars, he was unaware that some electric vehicles had dropped AM radio. Mr. Cardenas-Acosta said he listens to the Mets on the transmission.

“I don’t think it should be taken away,” he said. “If you want to find something serious, instead of all that crap they have on FM, you turn on AM.”

Outside a Tesla dealership in Springfield, N.J., several Tesla owners said they were not terribly bothered by the lack of AM radio. The company began phasing it out several years ago, prompting a 2018 headline in The Wall Street Journal, “Your Tesla Can Go Zero to 60 in 2.5 Seconds But Can’t Get AM Radio.”

Brandon Utrera, 27, said he hadn’t noticed that the Tesla Model Y he bought five days earlier did not have AM radio. “The only time I really listen to AM radio is when the Yankees are on,” he said.

Mr. Utrera said his parents listen to it more than he does, although he couldn’t remember the station. “It’s for the old-timers,” he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/business/media/am-radio-cars.html

==============

Pants Recovered From Shipwreck Sell for $114,000 at Auction
By Amanda Holpuch, Dec. 11, 2022
The trunk’s condition prevented its contents from exhibiting the bacterial degradation and biological consumption seen in items that were more exposed on the shipwreck, Robert Evans, the chief scientist and historian of the S.S. Central America project, said in the auction catalog.

Inside the trunk, scientists also found the work pants, which are made of a thick unknown material and covered in black and brown stains. It was not clear who made the winning bid for the pants.

Holabird Western Americana Collections said the work pants could be affiliated with Levi Strauss because he was a major seller of dry goods during the Gold Rush and lost treasure in the shipwreck. The unlabeled pants have a five-button pattern on the fly, and the buttons are “nearly identical size and manufactured style,” further convincing the sellers that the pants could be made by, or for, Strauss, the auction catalog said.

Mr. Strauss and his associate, Jacob Davis, patented the first modern bluejeans in 1873, 16 years after the S.S. Central America sank.

Tracey Panek, a historian and director of the Levi Strauss & Co. Archives, said in an email that linking the pants to Mr. Strauss was speculative.

Ms. Panek, who inspected the pants and other artifacts from the wreckage in person, said that while she was excited by the discovery, she saw nothing that would link the pants to Mr. Strauss.

“From the white color, lack of suspender buttons, five fly buttons instead of four, and the unusual fly design with extra side buttonholes, to the non-denim fabric that is a much lighter weight than cloth used by LS & Co. for its earliest riveted clothing, the Dement trunk pants are not typical of the miner’s work pants in our archives,” Ms. Panek said.

No matter the origin of the pants, at the time of the shipwreck, they would not have come close to the value of other loot on the S.S. Central America.

Passengers boarded the ship with gold coins and nuggets, which had been collected in the gold mining towns of Northern California during the Gold Rush. California’s business center at the time was in San Francisco, where passengers boarded the S.S. Sonora before transferring to the ill-fated S.S. Central America in Panama.

More than a century after the ship went down, the treasure hunter Thomas G. Thompson found the wreck. He was later accused of not providing proceeds from the haul to the 161 people who invested in his search.

Some of the investors sued Mr. Thompson in 2012, and he was ordered to appear in court and disclose the location of gold recovered from the shipwreck. He fled and became a fugitive until U.S. marshals arrested him in 2015 at a hotel in Florida. He has been in federal prison since 2015.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/us/jeans-shipwreck-auction.html

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Will We Ever Be Able to Recycle Our Clothes Like an Aluminum Can?
By Alden Wicker, Nov. 30, 2022, NY Times

A new textile recycling plant opened by the company Renewcell in the small coastal city of Sundsvall, Sweden, is so big that employees use bikes to get from one end of the production line to the other.

Large bales of cotton waste are dumped on conveyor belts, shredded, and then broken down into a wet slurry, with the help of chemicals. That slurry, known as dissolving pulp, is then bleached, dried, stamped into sheets of what looks like recycled craft paper, given the brand name Circulose, and shipped off to manufacturers to be made into textiles like viscose for clothes.

Up until now, most clothes marketed as made from recycled materials only contained a small percentage of recycled cotton or were made from water bottles, fishing nets and old carpets. (Technology exists to recycle polyester into polyester but is prohibitively expensive and rarely used.)

Renewcell’s factory is one of the first steps toward a system that turns old clothes into new high-quality clothes made entirely with recycled fabric. It also helps to address the mountains of textile waste accumulating worldwide and may help reduce the number of trees that are harvested from ecologically sensitive forests to produce fabrics for fashion. (More than 200 million trees are cut down every year to produce dissolving pulp for man-made cellulosic fabrics, including rayon, viscose, modal, and lyocell, according to Canopy, a Canadian nonprofit that works with the paper and fashion industries to reduce deforestation.)

About a half-dozen start-ups around the world are aimed at commercial textile recycling, and Renewcell is the first to open.

Many consumers seem to be increasingly uneasy about what happens to their old clothes, and fashion companies are searching for ways to continue expanding while simultaneously fulfilling promises to reduce their negative environmental impact and achieve a circular system in which clothes are looped back through instead of being sent to a landfill. The European Union has mandated expanded textile collection for all member states by 2025, which is expected to significantly increase the flow of fashion waste in need of a destination.

“It’s exciting,” Ashley Holding, a sustainable textile consultant and founder of Circuvate, said of the factory’s opening. “It’s great to see them get to such a stage.”

The Rise of Unwanted Goods
-------------------------
Fashion circularity wasn’t always this complicated. Before industrialization, most people made their own clothing from all-natural materials. The wealthy repurposed and passed their clothes down to servants, and then on to people in rural communities, who patched them until the garments were no longer wearable and then bartered them to rag collectors, according to a 2018 study from the University of Brighton. In Europe, these rags were collected in warehouses and then finally sent to be made into paper or wool shoddy for affordable blankets and coats.

With the industrialization of fashion at the end of the 19th century, people who previously sewed their clothes at home began to buy some of their garments, Adam Minter, the author of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale,” wrote in an email.

“As garments fell in value, and women entered the industrial work force, consumers had fewer incentives and less time to mend and repair,” according to Mr. Minter.

There was an expanded flow of unwanted goods, and the Salvation Army, which opened in New York in the late 19th century, started raising money for charitable projects by taking in, repairing and reselling clothing and housewares, according to Mr. Minter. Goodwill was founded around the same time as a Boston church’s charitable program.

“By the 1910s, the volume of unwanted clothing and other consumer goods was so great that charities transitioned away from mending,” Mr. Minter said.

Today, most of our clothing ends up in the trash, said Maxine Bédat, the author of the 2021 book “Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment.” It is hard to get a reliable figure of how much is discarded, especially in the United States. But, she said, “We’re still primarily throwing it out.”

More data is available for Europe. On average, 62 percent of clothing that comes to market each year in six Western European countries ends up in landfills or incinerators, according to a recent study by Fashion for Good.

What isn’t thrown out mostly still flows to organizations like Goodwill, which pass on what can’t be sold to for-profit sorting companies, according to Ms. Bédat. Wearable clothes are sold to resale markets in developing countries, and unwearable textiles are turned into rags and lower-quality fibers for things like insulation. Clothes given to farmers’ market collections and fast fashion brands through take-back programs usually also end up with these for-profit sorting companies, Ms. Bédat said.

About 40% of what the Western world ships to one of the largest resale markets in Accra, Ghana, is considered trash, according to the Or Foundation, which advocates better clothing waste management. Mountains of old clothing have been photographed on beaches, in landfills and in deserts in Africa and Latin America.

“The resale market is being crushed under the weight of the amount of trash, basically, they’re receiving,” said Rachel Kibbe, the chief executive of the fashion consultancy Circular Services Group. “We have these businesses that are becoming de facto waste managers.”

Currently, very little textile waste becomes new clothing. In Western Europe, according to Fashion for Good, just 2 percent of collected textiles — pure wool, pure cotton and acrylic — are mechanically recycled into new textiles, mostly mud-colored wool shoddy blankets for disaster relief work, and low-quality cotton that must be mixed in with virgin cotton for new textiles. Combined with the low collection rates, that means less than 1 percent of clothing sold in Western Europe is recycled into new fibers.

“We have to wrap our heads around the fact that your clothes, if you should part with them, may land in someone’s desert, in someone’s waterways, in someone’s field, burning,” Ms. Kibbe said.

The Race to Recycle Textiles
---------------------------
The new Renewcell factory accepts only pure cotton textile waste, and many clothes are made from synthetic blends. But it will be able to take in a lot of it — more than 120,000 metric tons a year. Around 163,000 metric tons of low-value cotton waste, ripe for chemical recycling, flows annually out of six Western European countries, according to a recent study by Fashion for Good.

Using fabric sourced globally from denim factories and secondhand retailers, the factory produces sheets of dried dissolving pulp, called Circulose, which it sells as the main ingredient for man-made cellulosic fabrics like viscose, rayon and modal.

“We are creating circularity within the fashion industry,” said Patrik Lundström, the chief executive officer of Renewcell. “Today circularity in the fashion industry doesn’t really exist. We have been talking about this environmental impact for the last 20 years. We have very, very little progress so far.”

Renewcell’s founding researchers, ​​Mikael Lindstrom and Gunnar Henriksson at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, first developed the technology to process cotton waste in 2012.

The company produced enough recycled fabric for a dress in 2014 and built a demonstration plant in 2017. It attracted the interest of brands like Stella McCartney, which funded a life cycle analysis showing Circulose had the lowest climate impact of 10 different synthetic cellulosic fibers. H&M became a minority shareholder in the company in 2017.

The company went public and was listed in Sweden on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market in 2020. H&M, Levi Strauss and Bestseller, an international clothing chain based in Denmark, have committed to incorporating Circulose into their clothes. (In 2021, Levi’s debuted a capsule collection of jeans that were 16 percent Circulose.)

“The Circulose that comes out is very valuable because it’s a recycled fabric, but it behaves like virgin,” said Paul Foulkes-Arellano, the founder of Circuthon, a circular economy management consultancy.

A handful of other companies are also racing to produce recycled fabrics on a commercial scale. Two Finnish start-ups, Spinnova and Infinited Fiber Company, have patented technologies to turn plant-based waste into fabrics that mimic the feel of cotton. Spinnova said its commercial-scale plant will be operating by 2024. Infinited hopes to open in 2026. The U.S. start-up Evrnu has raised $31 million for its recycling technology, the company said, and expects to be open by 2024.

The technology to process polyester-cotton blends is a little further behind, and those blends make up a large chunk of the old clothing that is discarded. An Australian start-up, BlockTexx, said it is building the first commercial-scale recycling plant that can process poly-cotton blends and hopes to open in 2023.

The British start-up Worn Again Technologies said in October that it had received more than $30 million in funding and is constructing a plant in Switzerland to separate and recycle blended textiles. The U.S. start-up Circ announced in July that it had received more than $30 million, through a funding round led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and which included investment from Inditex, the parent company of Zara.

“All of a sudden, there’s been a sweep,” said Kathleen Rademan, the director of the innovation platform at Fashion for Good, an accelerator for sustainable fashion technology. “But I think we’re still at the beginning. They’re still fighting for money at this stage.”

The consulting firm McKinsey estimated in a 2022 report that six to seven billion euros would need to be invested by 2030 to handle at least 18 percent of the textile waste generated in Europe.

Critics point out that the most sustainable thing to do would be to rewear, repair and upcycle fabrics into new clothing, like people did in the 19th century.

Even Renewcell, which runs on hydropower, is not quite closing the loop, because it is not turning cotton into cotton. (Though some brands like Levi’s have used Circulose to partially replace cotton in some products, and lab tests show it can be run through this process up to seven times, similar to paper recycling.)

“Recycling stuff is energy-intensive,” Mr. Foulkes-Arellano said. “If we were sensible, we would just cut all the denim up, all the T-shirts up, and just upcycle them into new garments. I mean, there’s a lot of really good upcycled denim companies out there. But big business wants new fabric.”

Ms. Rademan estimates it will be at least another decade before anyone will be able to recycle a worn-out sweatshirt the way they can recycle a soda can. She said there is a need for more capital investment in building recycling plants, more commitment from brands to buy recycled fibers, and a commitment from clothing manufacturers to integrate recycled products into the supply chain.

Ms. Rademan said in the next 10 years she “would feel comfortable that when I put this sweater in that recycling bin, it is not going to some bad place.” But in the United States, she said, progress depends on the political landscape: “It’s driven by whoever’s in charge.”

Mr. Holding predicts it will be 2050 before we have a global textile-to-textile recycling infrastructure.

Although Renewcell is an important development, “it’s still a drop in the bucket,” he said, “compared to the amount of textile feedstock that exists and the amount of materials which are produced every year.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/style/clothing-recycling.html

[Brennus]

"David P." <less...@gmail.com> wrote in
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>

Nobody cares. Fuck off, queer. LOL!