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The Environmental Protection Agency is delaying plans to tighten air quality standards for smog despite a recommendation by a scientific advisory panel to lower air pollution limits to protect public health.

The decision by EPA Administrator Michael Regan means that one of the agency’s most important air quality regulations will not be updated until well after the 2024 presidential election.

“I have decided that the best path forward is to initiate a new statutory review of the ozone (standard) and the underlying air quality criteria,’' Regan wrote in a letter to the EPA advisory panel last month. The letter cites “several issues” raised by the panel in a recent report that “warrant additional evaluation and review.’'

The review, which will last at least two years, will “ensure that air quality standards reflect the latest science in order to best protect people from pollution,’' Regan said.

Regan’s decision avoids an election year battle with industry groups and Republicans who have complained about what they consider overly intrusive EPA rules on power plants, refineries, automobiles and other polluters.

The delay marks the second time in 12 years that a Democratic administration has put off a new ozone standard prior to an election year. President Barack Obama shut down plans to tighten ozone standards in 2011, leading to a four-year delay before the standards were updated in 2015.

Paul Billings, senior vice president of the American Lung Association, called the EPA’s decision “profoundly disappointing” and a missed opportunity to protect public health and promote environmental justice. A recent report by the lung association showed that minority communities bear a disproportionate burden from ground-level ozone, which occurs when air pollution from cars, power plants and other sources mixes with sunlight. The problem is particularly acute in urban areas.

Billings called the ozone rule “the public health cornerstone of the Clean Air Act,’' adding that “millions of people will breathe dirty air for many more years’’ as a result of the delay. An increased number of asthma attacks, sick days and even premature death are likely to occur, he and other public health advocates said.

Raul Garcia, vice president of policy and legislation for Earthjustice, called the delay “shameful” and unjustified. “The science tells us we are long overdue,” Garcia said.

Democratic lawmakers also were disappointed. “Inaction threatens public health and puts those with underlying conditions such as asthma or lung disease at an elevated risk,’' said Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. He and 51 other Democrats had urged swift action on a new rule.

“Unfortunately we’ve seen the process for updating the ozone standards repeatedly swept up in political games that risk lives,’' the lawmakers said in an Aug. 7 letter to the EPA.

Conor Bernstein, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, applauded the EPA’s decision “not to race ahead with an unnecessary revision of the ozone standards,’' which have not been changed since 2015. The current standard was reaffirmed in December 2020 under then-President Donald Trump, a Republican.

Bernstein, whose members produce coal and other fossil fuels, urged officials to reconsider other regulations that he said target coal-fired power plants and endanger reliability of the electric grid. “It’s clear — and deeply alarming — that EPA (does not) understand the cumulative impact its rules will have on the grid and the nation’s severely stressed power supply,’' he said.

A spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry, said current ozone limits are among the most stringent in the world. “Any tightening of the standard could impact energy costs, threaten U.S. energy security and impact businesses and American consumers,’' spokeswoman Andrea Woods said in an email.

The EPA’s decision comes after two advisory panels — the EPA’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council — urged the agency to lower the current ozone standard of 70 parts per billion.

“Based on the scientific evidence currently available, it is concluded that the level of the current standard is not protective with an adequate margin of safety,’' the EPA panel said in a June report. A limit of 55 to 60 parts per billion “is more likely to be protective and to provide an adequate margin of safety,’' the panel said.

Lianne Sheppard, a University of Washington biostatistics professor who chairs the scientific advisory panel, said Regan’s decision was “his alone” to make.

“However, I am disappointed, given the robust scientific evidence that ozone is harmful to public health and welfare,” she told E&E News last month.

The White House environmental justice council, meanwhile, cited the “horrible toll of air pollution’’ and its disproportionate effect on minority communities. In a letter to the White House, co-chairs Richard Moore and Peggy Shepard said the problem is “compounded by the inadequate monitoring and enforcement in many of our communities.’'

Moore is co-director of Los Jardines Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while Sheppard is co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in New York City.

Tomas Carbonell, a top official in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said the report by the scientific panel left the EPA with little choice but to launch a comprehensive review even though all but one panel member supported a stricter ozone standard.

“When we’re looking at our national air quality standards, there’s really no way to cut corners around that process,’' Carbonell said in an interview.

The agency will convene workshops next spring to gather information and will release a review plan for action in late 2024, he said. A final decision could be years away.

archive: https://archive.ph/wip/lSj05

Britain’s second-biggest city effectively declared itself bankrupt on Tuesday, shutting down all nonessential spending after being issued with equal pay claims totaling up to £760 million ($956 million).

Birmingham City Council, which provides services for more than one million people, filed a Section 114 notice on Tuesday, halting all spending except on essential services.

The deficit arose due to difficulties paying between £650 million (around $816 million) and £760 million (around $954 million) in equal pay claims, the notice report says.

The city now expects to have a deficit of £87 million ($109 million) for the 2023-24 financial year.

Sharon Thompson, deputy leader of the council, told councilors on Tuesday it faces “longstanding issues, including the council’s historic equal pay liability concerns,” according to the United Kingdom’s PA Media news agency.

Thompson also blamed in part the UK’s ruling Conservative Party, saying Birmingham “had £1 billion of funding taken away by successive Conservative governments.”

“Local government is facing a perfect storm,” she said. “Like councils across the country, it is clear that this council faces unprecedented financial challenges, from huge increases in adult social care demand and dramatic reductions in business rates incomes, to the impact of rampant inflation.”

“Whilst the council is facing significant challenges, the city is very much still open for business and we’re welcoming people as they come along,” she added.

A spokesperson for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told reporters on Tuesday: “Clearly it’s for locally elected councils to manage their own budgets.” The spokesperson added that the government has been “engaging regularly with them to that end and has expressed concern about their governance arrangements and has requested assurances from the leader of the council about the best use of taxpayers’ money.”

The council’s leader John Cotton elsewhere told the BBC that a new jobs model would be brought into the council to tackle the equal pay claims bill.

The multicultural city is the largest in central England. It hosted last year’s Commonwealth Games, a major sporting event for Commonwealth countries, and is scheduled to hold the 2026 European Athletics Championships.

archive: https://archive.ph/E6C6d#selection-2871.7-2891.225

Dimension 20's Brennan Lee Mulligan led an adventuring party in a final battle as part of the strike at Universal Studios.

When Jon Strahd, the evil CEO of Ravenloft Studios, was defeated, the crowd at Universal Studios gave a huge roar. A group of 500 adventurers had shown up to picket at “the worst [Hollywood] location,” and about 100 were now engaged in a existential fight with a contemporary capitalist, a spin on Wizards of the Coast’s notorious vampire, Baron Strahd von Zarovich, led by DM Brennan Lee Mulligan. (Wizards of the Coast, which had recently produced a massive Dungeons & Dragons film with Universal Studios, did not endorse this event.)

But Strahd wasn’t the final villain. As the metaphorical vampire crumpled under the weight of a zone of truth cast in order to expose the real streaming numbers, battered by the orcas summoned to destroy his yachts, an even more terrifying monster emerged from the shadows. The adventurers waited with bated breath as Mulligan–a professional dungeon master known for his shows on Dimension 20–narrated the scene. Rising from the ashes of the CEO came a massive, five-headed dragon. This was the real Big Bad Evil Guy: the AMPTiamat.

This was the beginning of the end of the Dungeons & Dragons-themed picket day at Universal Studios on August 30. The event was organized by three members of the WGA: Daphne Miles (Batwoman, Legends of Tomorrow), Lindsey Allen (Agent Carter, Emergence), and Lauren Muir (The 100). Miles had the idea at another picket—how could she leverage her love of D&D to help the union? Immediately after floating the idea past a friend, he volunteered to run a one-shot, and she was off to the Sword Coast. Allen was quickly recruited to help and Muir immediately responded to the call for aid, and the three of them worked together to organize one of the largest pickets that Universal Studios has seen in the 100+ days since the WGA began its strike. io9 spoke with the three organizers over video chat for this interview.

Out of the over 500 people who attended, the organizers said that there were about 350 people there who had never been to a picket before—and that was a conservative estimate. There were so many people in attendance that “we ran out of signs,” said Muir, and that wasn’t all. “We ran out of character sheets, we ran out of dice, we ran out of nametags,” listed Allen. While Dungeons & Dragons might have been the draw for many people when they first heard about the picket, nobody at the event lost sight of the fact that they were there for the unions first. “They were there for D&D as much as they were there to support the cause,” explained Muir.

Allie Menelli was one of those first-time picketers. She’s a long time D&D player, and she said that she didn’t have “any direct connection” to the unions. While the initial draw was D&D, she said that “I appreciate the importance of writers in making [media] happen, and I think it’s a disgrace that many writers do incredible work crafting stories that we as an audience resonate deeply with, but still struggling to make ends meet and to be treated fairly by studios.”

People began showing up at nine sharp and were greeted by Liam O’Brien and Sam Reigel of Critical Role. They picked up dice, a character sheet, and a sign, and were directed to the picket line. For about an hour people marched the picket line and stopped at Gate Masters who ran “short, intense” adventures. If they succeeded, they were given a boon to use in the final battle, which would be run by Mulligan for the entire group. Then, at Citywalk, Mulligan gave a rousing speech, thanked the organizers—Miles, Allen, and Muir—and began the final encounter.

Another participant, Felix S. said they wanted to attend, “first and foremost, for union solidarity. I’m not in the WGA or SAG, but I am an IATSE member.” They also said that it “seemed like it was going to be fun. I mean, free food, mini-adventures, and I’m sorry, what do you mean Brennan ‘Capitalism is the Bad Guy’ Lee Mulligan is running a GROUP boss battle? What IS that?!”

Brennan Lee Mulligan’s name kept coming up in these interviews. Not just because he’s a well known D&D personality, but because he helped facilitate one of the most powerful moments of the strike: the final battle. io9 was able to get Mulligan on the phone to chat about the event, and after about 10 minutes of shooting the shit, we finally got to ask a few questions about the picket, and specifically that last scene in the final battle.

For each character class a group of people decided on their moves collectively, and took turns attacking the five-headed AMPTiamat. Then, “on the final blow, the Fighter ended up rolling a natural 20,” Mulligan explained, excited. He described how Muir’s game design tweaks meant that a natural 20 activated Union Power, and every class could add damage to the attack. So when that one fighter struck, they had the power of every other person striking alongside them. Under the collective force of all the classes—and all the unions out there, supporting the strikes—the dragon fell. Mulligan described it as “a beautiful melding of mechanics and philosophy and solidarity.”

Miles said, “It was a kismet moment in we could not have planned it or written it, you know?” Muir called it “magical.” Logan Griffin, who described Mulligan as one of his personal heroes, called the feeling at the picket “empowering” and “awe-inspiring.” The organizers recalled looking up and seeing people on the bridge above Citywalk cheering. Allen said that “being surrounded by this massive crowd who were all working together and, with so many more people than we had anticipated, still being able to work together as a group, being cheered on from above… I got emotional because it really just felt like we were fighting together.”

Mulligan described the “electric” feeling at the picket. He was genuinely so excited to talk about this, to be there, and was honored to have been called and asked, “Do you want to be in solidarity with your union and do the one skill you have in a helpful was?” Mulligan was effusively grateful to the organizers for letting him be a part of the event. He estimated that he responded to the initial ask in “less than 60 seconds,” and said the event was a “life highlight.”

After the AMPTiamet fell, the crowd began to chant “loot!” It’s common refrain for any D&D player; after an enemy dies, you loot the body. But this wasn’t just any body—this was the body of a dragon who had, as Mulligan explained, “stolen and expropriated treasure from the hero’s community. Which is of course the nature of capitalism and how it functions… So when the group started chanting ‘loot, loot, loot,’ I just stood up and I said, ‘It’s not looting if was your fucking money to start with,’ which is of course, the nature of the struggle, right?”

Melissa Feuchtinger, a member of the DGA and SAG-AFTRA, and a massive fan of D&D, emailed me to explain why she felt so moved after the picket, and specifically after this final battle. “So much of fantasy and science fiction is rooted in humanity and current events, so for us to fight a five-headed dragon called the AMPTP, to have our Rogue party member granted sneak attack because they’re always near allies as union members... it felt so personal.” Feuchtinger, like many other ADs, has been out of work since March as the studios wrapped productions, anticipating a disruption. “I hope that people who showed up who were less informed about the strike left knowing that this is affecting, this is hurting, so many of us and that we need that support and solidarity from everyone.”

Menelli agreed. “I really felt the solidarity in the crowd—we cheered each other on as each class contributed to the fight, we booed the corporate greed, we collaborated, we picked each other up when things got rough.” Nate Buchman was also in attendance, and he volunteered to run a one-shot for raffle winner. He’s not a member of either the WGA or SAG-AFTRA but said that being there felt like “the right thing to do.”

Dave Metzger, a TV writer and one of the folks who acted as a Gate DM, said via email that “It truly felt like the best kind of storytelling, using fiction to help us remember the truth, that we’re far stronger together than we are apart, and, no matter the pain and the cost, through collective action we will win out in the end.” He called the picket “hugely fun and inspiring” and emphasized that themed pickets, while sometimes disparaged, are extremely helpful when you’re working to keep morale high and keep people engaged. He said that many themed pickets “remind everyone of the creative spark that drew so many of us to this career, to begin with.”

As I was wrapping up my interview with the organizers they mentioned that they had raised a huge amount of money for the Entertainment Community Fund. As of writing, the JustGiving page for the D&D Day donation has raised over $12,000 to support the crew affected by the industry shutdown. It proves that this fight isn’t just for the unions; it’s for everyone, and everyone is willing to show up to support each other.

Earlier at the picket, Mulligan had a chance to address the crowd before the battle. “We face an enemy that depends on you believing that it cannot be defeated,” he said. “But we know that it can. Every person in this crowd is dedicated to stories about overcoming impossible odds and telling people that in the depths of despair there is always hope and no matter what you are facing when you face it together, you are unstoppable.”

You heard him. Roll for initiative.

archive: https://archive.ph/wip/VGUEg

In an excerpt from his book River Notes, leading anthropologist Wade Davis recalls how the taming of the Colorado River in the 1960s — ‘nature serves man’ went the thinking — helped shape the nation. But now facing a historic drought, all that could be lost in a generation.

I first visited the Grand Canyon in 1967 with two school friends and an elderly teacher who filled his summers by taking young students on long road trips, camping across the country. I mostly remember the color of the sky and the immensity of the chasm, with the Colorado River as seen from the canyon rim just a dirt thread lying across the bottom of the world. The nearest we got to the river was a mule ride down the Bright Angel Trail, three hours that left us sunburnt and swarming with ticks. Of the greater forces at play that summer, we were as oblivious as our teacher.

In retrospect, 1967 was an auspicious year for the army of engineers, planners, and developers whose confidence in their ability to tame the Colorado, transform the desert, and reimagine the hydrology of the American West had taken on a religious dimension, secured as if an article of faith.

The Glen Canyon Dam, built over a decade, had been formally dedicated by the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, on September 22, 1966. In scale, it was an astonishing feat of construction, a concrete arch surpassed in height only by its elegant sibling downstream, the Hoover Dam, an art deco masterpiece of engineering completed in 1935. Lake Mead above the Hoover Dam would remain the largest reservoir in the United States, but as the waters of the Colorado began to spread across the catchment of the Glen Canyon Dam in the first months of 1963, a vision emerged of a body of blue water in volume only slightly smaller than Lake Mead, but in scale and aspect incomparably more beautiful and dramatic.

To Floyd Dominy, the man ultimately responsible for the building of the Glen Canyon Dam—and its greatest champion—the reservoir that became Lake Powell was a thing of pure beauty, a miracle in the desert. “There is a natural order in our universe,” Dominy famously wrote.

“God created both Nature and Man. Man serves God, but Nature serves Man. To have a deep blue lake, where no lake was before, seems to bring Man a little closer to God.”

Even his archrival, David Brower of the Sierra Club, haunted all his life by the loss of Glen Canyon, agreed that Dominy was a good man, even a great American, though very much a product of his times. Like so many of his generation, including my own father, Dominy believed that any natural resource not used was wealth wasted. He had been raised as a boy on a dying farm in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. His first job as county agent in rural Wyoming was helping ranchers build earthen dams to secure water for their livestock. By his own account, he became a crusader for the development of water. As Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, singularly responsible for water policy in the American West, Dominy was not just an advocate of massive water projects, dams, and canals designed to tame every river and divert water to the cities, farms, and settlements of the desert southwest; he was, in his own words, “the messiah.”

As Lake Powell slowly came into being, with the flow of the Colorado shut down as if by a tap, there was little concern for the downstream consequences. In later years, conservation would sometimes trump engineering, but in 1963 ecological considerations hardly entered the conversation. The environmental movement was embryonic; as an organized political force it would only emerge in the wake of the dam’s construction, catalyzed by the outrage provoked as the reservoir above the dam deepened and spread, flooding Glen Canyon, famously eulogized by photographer Eliot Porter as “the place no one knew.”

The overwhelming national consensus in 1967 called for growth. Albuquerque’s population had doubled in a decade. Las Vegas that year had a population of 181,000; Tucson, 274,000; Phoenix, 763,000. Each of these cities would grow at least five-fold in a generation, with Las Vegas increasing to 2.8 million, and Phoenix by 2022 achieving a population of 4.6 million. If few in 1967 anticipated such figures, it was evident to all, as Dominy never ceased to say, that if there was to be any growth at all, it would be dependent on water, stored in Lake Powell.

Thus, over twenty years, as the reservoir expanded, reaching in 1983 a maximum depth of 583 feet, extending in length 186 miles, with a width of 25 miles and 1,900 miles of shoreline, Lake Powell—celebrated as a recreational wonderland — became a symbol of human triumph, capacity, and resolve. It stored 20 million acre-feet of water — enough to fill 10 million Olympic-sized swimming pools — a vital repository that made possible the transformation of desert lands that would, in time, be home to 40 million Americans.

In 1973, construction began on the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile diversion canal conceived to bring water from the Colorado — 456 billion gallons altogether — to Phoenix and Tucson, even while providing irrigation for more than a million acres, allowing farmers to grow cotton, hay, and alfalfa in the desert. To secure federal funds to cover construction costs, Arizona cut a deal with California that was certain to haunt the state should the flow of the Colorado ever be compromised or reduced. But with water in abundance, there was little concern. That the open canal lost over five billion gallons of water each year to evaporation, and another three billion to leakage, was considered tolerable wastage, given the scale and benefits of the project.

As Lake Powell reached its maximum capacity in 1980, water levels five times what they are today, the future seemed exceedingly bright. The only threat to the dam came in 1983 when a surge of snowmelt into the reservoir raised lake levels to a dangerous extent, forcing the engineers to open the spillways for the first time since the initial construction. Abundance of water, not a shortage, marked the 1980s, a decade now recognized as having been unusually wet.
...

archive: https://archive.ph/UOffT

In an excerpt from his book River Notes, leading anthropologist Wade Davis recalls how the taming of the Colorado River in the 1960s — ‘nature serves man’ went the thinking — helped shape the nation. But now facing a historic drought, all that could be lost in a generation.

I first visited the Grand Canyon in 1967 with two school friends and an elderly teacher who filled his summers by taking young students on long road trips, camping across the country. I mostly remember the color of the sky and the immensity of the chasm, with the Colorado River as seen from the canyon rim just a dirt thread lying across the bottom of the world. The nearest we got to the river was a mule ride down the Bright Angel Trail, three hours that left us sunburnt and swarming with ticks. Of the greater forces at play that summer, we were as oblivious as our teacher.

In retrospect, 1967 was an auspicious year for the army of engineers, planners, and developers whose confidence in their ability to tame the Colorado, transform the desert, and reimagine the hydrology of the American West had taken on a religious dimension, secured as if an article of faith.

The Glen Canyon Dam, built over a decade, had been formally dedicated by the president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, on September 22, 1966. In scale, it was an astonishing feat of construction, a concrete arch surpassed in height only by its elegant sibling downstream, the Hoover Dam, an art deco masterpiece of engineering completed in 1935. Lake Mead above the Hoover Dam would remain the largest reservoir in the United States, but as the waters of the Colorado began to spread across the catchment of the Glen Canyon Dam in the first months of 1963, a vision emerged of a body of blue water in volume only slightly smaller than Lake Mead, but in scale and aspect incomparably more beautiful and dramatic.

To Floyd Dominy, the man ultimately responsible for the building of the Glen Canyon Dam—and its greatest champion—the reservoir that became Lake Powell was a thing of pure beauty, a miracle in the desert. “There is a natural order in our universe,” Dominy famously wrote.

“God created both Nature and Man. Man serves God, but Nature serves Man. To have a deep blue lake, where no lake was before, seems to bring Man a little closer to God.”

Even his archrival, David Brower of the Sierra Club, haunted all his life by the loss of Glen Canyon, agreed that Dominy was a good man, even a great American, though very much a product of his times. Like so many of his generation, including my own father, Dominy believed that any natural resource not used was wealth wasted. He had been raised as a boy on a dying farm in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl. His first job as county agent in rural Wyoming was helping ranchers build earthen dams to secure water for their livestock. By his own account, he became a crusader for the development of water. As Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, singularly responsible for water policy in the American West, Dominy was not just an advocate of massive water projects, dams, and canals designed to tame every river and divert water to the cities, farms, and settlements of the desert southwest; he was, in his own words, “the messiah.”

As Lake Powell slowly came into being, with the flow of the Colorado shut down as if by a tap, there was little concern for the downstream consequences. In later years, conservation would sometimes trump engineering, but in 1963 ecological considerations hardly entered the conversation. The environmental movement was embryonic; as an organized political force it would only emerge in the wake of the dam’s construction, catalyzed by the outrage provoked as the reservoir above the dam deepened and spread, flooding Glen Canyon, famously eulogized by photographer Eliot Porter as “the place no one knew.”

The overwhelming national consensus in 1967 called for growth. Albuquerque’s population had doubled in a decade. Las Vegas that year had a population of 181,000; Tucson, 274,000; Phoenix, 763,000. Each of these cities would grow at least five-fold in a generation, with Las Vegas increasing to 2.8 million, and Phoenix by 2022 achieving a population of 4.6 million. If few in 1967 anticipated such figures, it was evident to all, as Dominy never ceased to say, that if there was to be any growth at all, it would be dependent on water, stored in Lake Powell.

Thus, over twenty years, as the reservoir expanded, reaching in 1983 a maximum depth of 583 feet, extending in length 186 miles, with a width of 25 miles and 1,900 miles of shoreline, Lake Powell—celebrated as a recreational wonderland — became a symbol of human triumph, capacity, and resolve. It stored 20 million acre-feet of water — enough to fill 10 million Olympic-sized swimming pools — a vital repository that made possible the transformation of desert lands that would, in time, be home to 40 million Americans.

In 1973, construction began on the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile diversion canal conceived to bring water from the Colorado — 456 billion gallons altogether — to Phoenix and Tucson, even while providing irrigation for more than a million acres, allowing farmers to grow cotton, hay, and alfalfa in the desert. To secure federal funds to cover construction costs, Arizona cut a deal with California that was certain to haunt the state should the flow of the Colorado ever be compromised or reduced. But with water in abundance, there was little concern. That the open canal lost over five billion gallons of water each year to evaporation, and another three billion to leakage, was considered tolerable wastage, given the scale and benefits of the project.

As Lake Powell reached its maximum capacity in 1980, water levels five times what they are today, the future seemed exceedingly bright. The only threat to the dam came in 1983 when a surge of snowmelt into the reservoir raised lake levels to a dangerous extent, forcing the engineers to open the spillways for the first time since the initial construction. Abundance of water, not a shortage, marked the 1980s, a decade now recognized as having been unusually wet.
...

archive: https://archive.ph/UOffT

Spanish research centre achieves first tank-bred Atlantic bluefin as NGOs warn of poor welfare, more antibiotic use and water pollution

The first successful breeding of Atlantic bluefin tuna at a Spanish research centre has spurred at least two companies to ramp up plans for the industrial farming of land-bred tuna.

The companies would be the first to use only tank-bred Atlantic bluefin stocks of fertilised eggs or young tuna. Up to now, farming of Atlantic bluefin has relied on catching young wild fish and fattening them in open-sea cages.

After the breakthrough in July at the government-run Mazarrón aquaculture plant in Murcia, the company Next Tuna said it plans to begin building a tuna farm north of Valencia. Nortuna, a Norwegian company, has also signed a deal with Mazarrón for the firm’s pilot site in Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa.

Commercial aquaculture companies argue that as more fish are farmed from stocks in closed tanks, fewer wild Atlantic bluefins will be caught for fattening or immediate consumption, reducing pressure on sea stocks. However, many NGOs note that an increase in farmed tuna would mean more fish taken from oceans to feed them. They have also raised concerns about animal welfare, antibiotic use and water pollution.

Two other species, the Pacific and southern bluefin, have been successfully bred on land before, but until July no one had successfully reproduced Atlantic bluefin (Thunnus thynnus) from tank-based adults. Atlantic bluefin are highly prized for sushi, but their commercial importance has attracted overfishing and populations have plummeted by as much as 80% in some areas of the Atlantic Ocean.

Aurelio Ortega, who leads the research team at the Mazarrón centre, said: “We have about 2,000 or 3,000 tuna fish now. They weigh about 5g to 10g each, and they will take two to three years to reach a size of about 30kg to 40kg.”

Under the plans, the plant will supply fertilised eggs and juvenile tuna to the newly created commercial firms, which will either continue the breeding cycle on land, or use a combination of land-based tanks and sea cages.

NGOs said this will pitch companies into unknown territory, given how little is known about the bluefin species. Catalina López, a veterinarian and director of the Aquatic Animal Alliance at the Aquatic Life Institute, said: “Very little is known about [tuna] requirements for adequate welfare, as it is a highly migratory species with complex hunting behaviours and migration patterns.

“Without extensive scientific research on the welfare of tuna, it is irresponsible to farm them intensively, and could lead to many welfare issues [including] stress, frustration and, ultimately, poor immunity.”

Environmentalists have also noted that more tuna in captivity will mean diverting fish supplies that could be eaten by humans. Tuna, said López, are “a very unsustainable species to farm, since 90% of the species used for fish meal and fish oil are food grade, meaning it could feed humans directly”.

More tuna farming would also mean increased use of antibiotics, which intensive farmers typically employ to avoid diseases spreading, given the relatively poor immunity of farmed animals.

Nortuna and Next Tuna have signed contracts with the Mazarrón research centre, Ortega said. Both companies claim to have plentiful space, which would allow low densities of tuna in the tanks. However, according to Claudia Millán, a fish welfare specialist with the NGO Equalia, even spacious captivity may be incompatible with the needs of a migratory species that crosses oceans to find food and reproduce.

Inefficient feeding practices can also produce toxic wastewater, said Salazar. “Left untreated, [this wastewater] can deplete surrounding waters of oxygen, causing algal blooms [or] dead zones, and public health issues,” she said.

The new breeding successes mean the supply of fertilised eggs could expand outside the species’ natural reproductive season, normally limited to about 45 days in June and July. By controlling the natural spawning triggers of water temperature and lighting, the researchers said they hope the reproduction period could last for 60 or more days.

Other tools to induce breeding include implanting female fish with a synthetic version of a hormone that causes them to release eggs for fertilisation.

Paul Sindilariu, a co-founder of Next Tuna, said the company’s farming plan involved “a closed system that will bring in seawater, but there will be no outflow, so no environmental impacts”. He said the firm’s model, known as a recirculating aquaculture system, would use floating cages that are on, but not in, the sea, and this would allow the company to control the water quality and temperature conditions in a similar way to a laboratory.

“The system has to be tuna-friendly,” said Andrew Eckhardt, who manages site selection and financing for Next Tuna. “They have to be comfortable. Our stocking density will be very low, less than 10kg [of fish weight] per cubic metre.”

The company said it plans to establish its own breeding programme and sell young fish to “grow-out” farms for fattening and sale. It aims to bring its first stocks from the research centre tanks to the new site at the port of Castellón de la Plana next year, with the goal of selling about 45 tonnes of juvenile Atlantic bluefin tuna by 2025, and 1,200 tonnes by 2028.

Nortuna also said it would keep stocking densities low. The company’s chairman, Anders Attramadal, said one of the attractions of the pilot site in Cape Verde was space. He said the company aims to get fertilised eggs from the Mazarrón research centre this year in order to produce saleable fish weighing between 12kg and 30kg by late 2024.

“We would buy eggs every week if we could. Right now, we can only get a six-to-eight-week supply,” he said.

Attramadal dismissed concerns about food supply, saying farmed tuna ate less than wild ones. “With formulated food we expect to be getting down to 3kg to 4kg of feed per kilo of [farmed fish] muscle mass,” compared with about 30kg per kilo of muscle for wild Atlantic bluefin, he said.

Eckhardt said that although the main food for the tuna would be fishmeal and fish oil, Next Tuna would be “working with our feed partners to add other ingredients, maybe plant proteins, algae, insects or krill”.

Nortuna said antibiotic usage would be minimal, only for brief periods if fish are sick, while Next Tuna said it would not use any antibiotics at all because they are incompatible with its recirculating aquaculture model.

Welfare experts said another problem with captive tuna was how to kill large, strong fish in a humane way. Recommended tuna-killing methods include shooting or stabbing heads with a metal spike, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health.

Next Tuna said it would sell young fish before slaughter, while Attramadal said Nortuna would “use the best humane approved methods that apply at the time”, adding that a “stressed, uncomfortable fish tastes less delicious”. According to a 2009 European Food Safety Authority report, when “Atlantic bluefin tuna struggle to escape before dying, they produce considerable amounts of lactic acid … resulting in severe degradation of the flesh, [making them] unsuitable for the sushi and sashimi market”.

archive: https://archive.ph/BAE0i

Spanish research centre achieves first tank-bred Atlantic bluefin as NGOs warn of poor welfare, more antibiotic use and water pollution

The first successful breeding of Atlantic bluefin tuna at a Spanish research centre has spurred at least two companies to ramp up plans for the industrial farming of land-bred tuna.

The companies would be the first to use only tank-bred Atlantic bluefin stocks of fertilised eggs or young tuna. Up to now, farming of Atlantic bluefin has relied on catching young wild fish and fattening them in open-sea cages.

After the breakthrough in July at the government-run Mazarrón aquaculture plant in Murcia, the company Next Tuna said it plans to begin building a tuna farm north of Valencia. Nortuna, a Norwegian company, has also signed a deal with Mazarrón for the firm’s pilot site in Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa.

Commercial aquaculture companies argue that as more fish are farmed from stocks in closed tanks, fewer wild Atlantic bluefins will be caught for fattening or immediate consumption, reducing pressure on sea stocks. However, many NGOs note that an increase in farmed tuna would mean more fish taken from oceans to feed them. They have also raised concerns about animal welfare, antibiotic use and water pollution.

Two other species, the Pacific and southern bluefin, have been successfully bred on land before, but until July no one had successfully reproduced Atlantic bluefin (Thunnus thynnus) from tank-based adults. Atlantic bluefin are highly prized for sushi, but their commercial importance has attracted overfishing and populations have plummeted by as much as 80% in some areas of the Atlantic Ocean.

Aurelio Ortega, who leads the research team at the Mazarrón centre, said: “We have about 2,000 or 3,000 tuna fish now. They weigh about 5g to 10g each, and they will take two to three years to reach a size of about 30kg to 40kg.”

Under the plans, the plant will supply fertilised eggs and juvenile tuna to the newly created commercial firms, which will either continue the breeding cycle on land, or use a combination of land-based tanks and sea cages.

NGOs said this will pitch companies into unknown territory, given how little is known about the bluefin species. Catalina López, a veterinarian and director of the Aquatic Animal Alliance at the Aquatic Life Institute, said: “Very little is known about [tuna] requirements for adequate welfare, as it is a highly migratory species with complex hunting behaviours and migration patterns.

“Without extensive scientific research on the welfare of tuna, it is irresponsible to farm them intensively, and could lead to many welfare issues [including] stress, frustration and, ultimately, poor immunity.”

Environmentalists have also noted that more tuna in captivity will mean diverting fish supplies that could be eaten by humans. Tuna, said López, are “a very unsustainable species to farm, since 90% of the species used for fish meal and fish oil are food grade, meaning it could feed humans directly”.

More tuna farming would also mean increased use of antibiotics, which intensive farmers typically employ to avoid diseases spreading, given the relatively poor immunity of farmed animals.

Nortuna and Next Tuna have signed contracts with the Mazarrón research centre, Ortega said. Both companies claim to have plentiful space, which would allow low densities of tuna in the tanks. However, according to Claudia Millán, a fish welfare specialist with the NGO Equalia, even spacious captivity may be incompatible with the needs of a migratory species that crosses oceans to find food and reproduce.

Inefficient feeding practices can also produce toxic wastewater, said Salazar. “Left untreated, [this wastewater] can deplete surrounding waters of oxygen, causing algal blooms [or] dead zones, and public health issues,” she said.

The new breeding successes mean the supply of fertilised eggs could expand outside the species’ natural reproductive season, normally limited to about 45 days in June and July. By controlling the natural spawning triggers of water temperature and lighting, the researchers said they hope the reproduction period could last for 60 or more days.

Other tools to induce breeding include implanting female fish with a synthetic version of a hormone that causes them to release eggs for fertilisation.

Paul Sindilariu, a co-founder of Next Tuna, said the company’s farming plan involved “a closed system that will bring in seawater, but there will be no outflow, so no environmental impacts”. He said the firm’s model, known as a recirculating aquaculture system, would use floating cages that are on, but not in, the sea, and this would allow the company to control the water quality and temperature conditions in a similar way to a laboratory.

“The system has to be tuna-friendly,” said Andrew Eckhardt, who manages site selection and financing for Next Tuna. “They have to be comfortable. Our stocking density will be very low, less than 10kg [of fish weight] per cubic metre.”

The company said it plans to establish its own breeding programme and sell young fish to “grow-out” farms for fattening and sale. It aims to bring its first stocks from the research centre tanks to the new site at the port of Castellón de la Plana next year, with the goal of selling about 45 tonnes of juvenile Atlantic bluefin tuna by 2025, and 1,200 tonnes by 2028.

Nortuna also said it would keep stocking densities low. The company’s chairman, Anders Attramadal, said one of the attractions of the pilot site in Cape Verde was space. He said the company aims to get fertilised eggs from the Mazarrón research centre this year in order to produce saleable fish weighing between 12kg and 30kg by late 2024.

“We would buy eggs every week if we could. Right now, we can only get a six-to-eight-week supply,” he said.

Attramadal dismissed concerns about food supply, saying farmed tuna ate less than wild ones. “With formulated food we expect to be getting down to 3kg to 4kg of feed per kilo of [farmed fish] muscle mass,” compared with about 30kg per kilo of muscle for wild Atlantic bluefin, he said.

Eckhardt said that although the main food for the tuna would be fishmeal and fish oil, Next Tuna would be “working with our feed partners to add other ingredients, maybe plant proteins, algae, insects or krill”.

Nortuna said antibiotic usage would be minimal, only for brief periods if fish are sick, while Next Tuna said it would not use any antibiotics at all because they are incompatible with its recirculating aquaculture model.

Welfare experts said another problem with captive tuna was how to kill large, strong fish in a humane way. Recommended tuna-killing methods include shooting or stabbing heads with a metal spike, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health.

Next Tuna said it would sell young fish before slaughter, while Attramadal said Nortuna would “use the best humane approved methods that apply at the time”, adding that a “stressed, uncomfortable fish tastes less delicious”. According to a 2009 European Food Safety Authority report, when “Atlantic bluefin tuna struggle to escape before dying, they produce considerable amounts of lactic acid … resulting in severe degradation of the flesh, [making them] unsuitable for the sushi and sashimi market”.

archive: https://archive.ph/BAE0i

Ukraine has broken the first line of Russian defenses in some places and has had "some success" against the second, US official John Kirby said.

• Ukraine's counteroffensive in the south had made "notable progress," a top US official said.
• They have had "some success" against the second line of defense.
• Ukrainian forces are battling complex Russian defenses, including dense minefields and fortifications.

Ukraine's counteroffensive against Russia's invasion in the south of the country has made "notable progress" in the past 72 hours, according to a top US official.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Ukraine had broken through Russia's first line of defenses in several places in the advance in the Zaporizhzhia area, The Guardian reported.

"They have achieved some success against that second line of Russian defenses," Kirby added.

He said it was now up to Ukraine to capitalize on the progress.
Ukraine recaptured the village of Robotyne this week, and troops have been penetrating Russian lines between the village and Verbove in the Zaporizhzhia region, according to Western assessments, per The Guardian.

As Ukraine troops push forward, they have come up against complex Russian defenses, including dense minefields and fortifications, according to the Institute for the Study of War think tank.

The next layer of defense likely consists of "anti-tank ditches; dragon's teeth anti-tank obstacles; and additional minefields," the think tank said, with Russian fighting positions behind these obstacles.

Ukraine aims is to reach the Sea of Azov, where it aims to split Russian occupation forces in two.

Ukraine's long-anticipated counteroffensive kicked off to a slow start on June 4, with progress being slower than expected.

Recent reports, including one from the New York Times, have quoted Western officials criticizing the counteroffensive's strategy and pace.

Kirby said that criticism from anonymous officials was "not helpful" and said: "Any objective observer of this counteroffensive, you can't deny that they have made progress now."

Ukraine's deputy defense minister Hanna Maliar also said on Friday that Ukrainian forces were advancing in the Zaporizhzhia region and that the first line of defenses had been broken in some places, per The Guardian.

However, she said that Ukraine's troops were coming up against major defensive Russian fortifications.

"Our armed forces have to overcome a lot of obstacles in order to move forward," she said.

archive: https://archive.ph/esDlY

Long before quiet quitting, boomers rejected "working for the man," says UNC sociologist Arne Kalleberg, "which is exactly what’s happening now."

The ideal job of the 1950s looked a great deal like a marriage. As Fortune editor William Whyte wrote in his classic workplace study The Organization Man, by midcentury, the ranks of the rapidly growing white-collar workforce became filled with young men who had left their hometowns to devote themselves to their companies. It was an anonymous, bureaucratic turn for the supposedly ruggedly individualistic American economy. In turn, the employers, flush with profits in the postwar economic boom and wanting to retain their talent, offered a steady stream of promotions and carrots, like health insurance and pensions, that kept people tied to their employer. Then the job-hoppers arrived and consigned the organization man to history.

The dominant media narrative of the last several decades pinned the blame for this on Gen Z and millennial up-and-comers, often painted as the mercenaries who killed off corporate loyalty—ready to walk the minute they don’t get all they ask for, and the driving force behind the Great Resignation, “quiet quitting,” “rage applying,” and any number of similar workforce trends.

But the federal government itself has weighed in with new data that exposes this has been a lie. The original job-hoppers were none other than the baby boomers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who switched employers at least as much, and possibly more frequently, than millennials did at the same age.

In particular, men born in the second half of the baby boom era, 1957 to 1964, had racked up an impressive 10 jobs by the time they turned 34, and averaged 12.7 jobs by the time they turned 56, the BLS noted in a recently released report. Most of that job-hopping, as one might expect, happened early in their careers, with, on average, just under one job per year between ages 18 and 24, more than millennials did at the same age.

“In the beginning of your career, you sample the job market, you look around and see what is available, and you don’t get into stability until you’re in your 30s or 40s. That is a pattern that’s always held true,” said sociologist Arne Kalleberg, who teaches at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Indeed, rather than belonging to a particular generation, job-hopping appears to be a byproduct of the modern economy: a behavior that most workers experience early in their career (something they often forget that they had done once they’re more established). Like Gen Zers today, millennials and Generation X and, yes, even boomers had to contend with accusations that their desire for meaningful work, decent pay, and work-life balance were unreasonable. In fact, the boomers initiated the rebellion against the “organization man” mindset of their parents, Kalleberg said.

“Young people in the late ’60s, and ’70s began to criticize this view of work, because it was part of the establishment. They started rejecting the materialism of their parents and saying, ‘we’re going to find self-actualization,’” Kalleberg said.

“They rejected this idea of working for the man, which is exactly what’s happening now,” he added.

More stable than their predecessors
If anything, compared with their predecessors, millennials job-hopped at a slower rate. According to BLS figures, older millennials—those born between 1980 and 1984—had held an average of seven jobs by age 28, one less than baby boomers at the same age. At age 34, millennials averaged 8.6 jobs, about one less than baby boomers at the same age.

Blame the 2007 financial crisis, the Great Recession that followed, and the excruciatingly slow “jobless recovery” that hit young people hardest. Job hopping is one sign of a strong economy—workers don’t move unless they have somewhere to move to. In the decade after the recovery and until the pandemic, “the labor market just hasn’t been as tight, so people didn’t have as many opportunities to switch jobs,” said Nick Bunker, chief economist at job board Indeed.

Another reason, economists say, is that today’s young people stay in school longer and take more time to formally enter the job market, which reduces the number of jobs they hold on average during their lifetimes. And the heavy student debt load racked up by young graduates has also likely made them less inclined to take risks by job-switching.

In fact, while some pundits today worry that the stereotypical younger worker is “disengaged” or “doesn’t see a future” with their employer, as Gallup wrote in a poll this year, it wasn’t so long ago that economists had the opposite worry—that younger workers don’t move around enough.

In 2016, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco highlighted “a pronounced decline in the job switching behavior of young workers,” and mused whether those workers were choosing job security “at the cost of diminished experimentation with different jobs.” That same year, another set of Federal Reserve researchers highlighted the trend at a Brookings Institution symposium, noting that “Less fluidity in the labor market leads to fewer opportunities for workers… and thus may have important implications for the macro economy in general.”

No more ‘organization man’
The data also makes clear that the archetype of the “company man” who stays in a single job for his entire career was well on the decline by the time baby boomers came of age. To be sure, some of the boomer generation who started working in the late 1970s and early 1980s had this experience of stability. But this was also the decade that ushered in massive de-industrialization, the transition from a goods to a services economy, the decline of unions that had protected workers and encouraged company loyalty, and the mass layoff as a corporate strategy. (One of the strategy’s early proponents, General Electric CEO Jack Welch, eliminated a quarter of the company’s jobs in the first half of the 1980s, Quartz notes.)

Against the backdrop of this ever-more-uncertain economy, it’s no wonder that younger generations have tended to switch jobs less and less. The decades of the early 2000s, in which workers stayed put more and more, skewed Americans’ perception of what a “normal” job market looks like, noted Indeed’s Bunker. “We got used to such low levels of quitting and job switching, that [after the pandemic] when it went back to where it was in the year 2000, people got angsty,” he said.

Outside of a layoff, job hopping has well-documented benefits for workers. Getting a new job is usually the easiest way to get a raise, with pay for job switchers consistently rising faster than for those who keep the same job, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. The young boomers who switched jobs nearly every year at the start of their careers saw annual pay jumps of 6.5%, the BLS found. Pay—the reason most humans work—remains a major motivator today. When consulting firm McKinsey earlier this year asked workers why they took a new job, nearly all groups gave the same No. 1 reason: More pay.

“Worker mobility—the ability to find and take another job—is at the core of worker power,” economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, wrote last year.

Not only that, but higher rates of job-switching are associated with a more productive economy overall, according to a recent working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“Over the long term, people moving around and finding the best fit for their career is going to be a good thing for productivity,” said Jesse Wheeler, senior economist at the business intelligence company Morning Consult. “Ultimately we want people doing jobs they like as much as possible and they are good at.”

archive: https://archive.ph/Dt8kW

A striking purple species is one piece of the fungal kingdom’s uncharted diversity

Deep in eastern Brazil's Atlantic Forest, a team of biologists spotted a fuzzy purple stalk protruding from the leaf litter on the ground. Following the spore-covered body down into the soil, they found a mummified spider swaddled in fungal filaments called hyphae.

One of the mycologists, João Araújo, immediately recognized the purple protrusion as a new, undocumented species of predatory fungus belonging to the genus Purpureocillium. Spores from these fungi latch onto and kill their insect or arachnid prey—and then a fruiting body bursts from the corpse to spread more spores.

Purpureocillium species share many similarities with those of their sister genus Ophiocordyceps, which includes the “zombifying” fungi that hijack the bodies of their insect prey and are featured in the apocalyptic television show and video game The Last of Us. Araújo, who works for the New York Botanical Garden, has dedicated his career to discovering new species in this intriguing evolutionary group. “Many of these specimens we collect are new species,” he says. “We know so little about them.”

The “beautiful, velvety” purple specimen would be only the seventh species of Purpureocillium discovered, says Jennifer Luangsa-ard, a mycologist at Thailand's National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. These fungi are found across the world and include one species that causes eye and skin infections in immunocompromised people. Scientists know surprisingly little about the fungal kingdom despite its importance for our health, food and environment; according to conservative estimates, only 10 percent of species have been identified, Luangsa-ard says. “We need more people looking for the missing taxa,” she adds. There's “still a lot to be discovered.”

The wild popularity of The Last of Us may lead people to spot new species, which are often hiding in plain sight, Araújo says. He adds that a naturalist recently spotted two potential species of Ophiocordyceps infecting ants at a nature preserve in Pennsylvania, a short drive from Araújo's laboratory. This discovery may allow his team to closely study the still mysterious ways these fungi manipulate and kill their prey.

archive link: https://archive.ph/ytEKh

A striking purple species is one piece of the fungal kingdom’s uncharted diversity

Deep in eastern Brazil's Atlantic Forest, a team of biologists spotted a fuzzy purple stalk protruding from the leaf litter on the ground. Following the spore-covered body down into the soil, they found a mummified spider swaddled in fungal filaments called hyphae.

One of the mycologists, João Araújo, immediately recognized the purple protrusion as a new, undocumented species of predatory fungus belonging to the genus Purpureocillium. Spores from these fungi latch onto and kill their insect or arachnid prey—and then a fruiting body bursts from the corpse to spread more spores.

Purpureocillium species share many similarities with those of their sister genus Ophiocordyceps, which includes the “zombifying” fungi that hijack the bodies of their insect prey and are featured in the apocalyptic television show and video game The Last of Us. Araújo, who works for the New York Botanical Garden, has dedicated his career to discovering new species in this intriguing evolutionary group. “Many of these specimens we collect are new species,” he says. “We know so little about them.”

The “beautiful, velvety” purple specimen would be only the seventh species of Purpureocillium discovered, says Jennifer Luangsa-ard, a mycologist at Thailand's National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. These fungi are found across the world and include one species that causes eye and skin infections in immunocompromised people. Scientists know surprisingly little about the fungal kingdom despite its importance for our health, food and environment; according to conservative estimates, only 10 percent of species have been identified, Luangsa-ard says. “We need more people looking for the missing taxa,” she adds. There's “still a lot to be discovered.”

The wild popularity of The Last of Us may lead people to spot new species, which are often hiding in plain sight, Araújo says. He adds that a naturalist recently spotted two potential species of Ophiocordyceps infecting ants at a nature preserve in Pennsylvania, a short drive from Araújo's laboratory. This discovery may allow his team to closely study the still mysterious ways these fungi manipulate and kill their prey.

archive link: https://archive.ph/ytEKh

A US B-2 Spirit bomber recently carried out a historic hot pit refueling at Orland Air Base, Norway, marking the first landing of the stealth bomber in the Scandinavian nation.

As per the US Air Force statement, the event occurred on August 29 and serves as a symbol of the joint commitment between the United States and Norway to deter potential threats and enhance the NATO Alliance.

Hot-pit refueling is an efficient technique employed to minimize aircraft downtime and enhance overall reliability. Instead of shutting down the aircraft’s engines after landing and parking, the aircrew keeps an engine operational while refueling takes place. This method ensures a continuous and streamlined refueling process.

The service said that the practice of hot pit refueling within NATO nations enables the B-2 to expand its fuel range while minimizing its downtime on the ground, ultimately enhancing the capacity to bolster combat airpower across the European theater for the United States and its allied partners.

According to Gen. James Hecker, who leads US Air Forces in Europe & Africa and NATO Allied Air Command, hot-pit refueling is evolving as a transformative tactic in bomber operations, offering increased adaptability.

This clever technique expands USAF’s operational reach, establishing temporary hubs at strategically selected and sometimes unexpected locations. These flexible capabilities form the cornerstone of modern airpower projection.

The B-2, one of three Spirit bombers stationed at Whiteman Air Base in Missouri, has been deployed to Iceland’s Keflavik Air Base. Simultaneously, a contingent of roughly 150 skilled airmen from the 509th Bomb Wing was dispatched on August 13 to lend invaluable support to this vital overseas mission.

This mission holds special significance as it marks the first return of the aircraft to the European theater following their last deployment to the continent in 2021.

These aircraft were temporarily grounded for five months starting in December due to safety concerns triggered by a fire incident involving one of the bombers.

In their current European assignment, the B-2 bombers are engaging in extensive training exercises alongside NATO and US Air Force units, although the precise duration of their stay remains unknown.

US Bomber Missions In Europe
In recent years, the strategic importance of operations in the High North has surged, exemplified by the deployment of B-2 stealth bombers to this region.

This heightened significance is linked to the evolving landscape of climate change, which potentially foresees the opening of an Arctic passage during the summer months in the not-so-distant future.

Simultaneously, uncertainties have arisen concerning the security of Northern Europe due to the profound impact of events in the Ukraine conflict and the incorporation of Finland and Sweden into NATO.

Considering this perspective, the US Air Force highlighted the paramount importance of US forces and equipment seamlessly operating alongside its Allies and Partners, recognizing that this synergy is essential for strengthening an expansive network of alliances and partnerships capable of effectively addressing both current and future challenges.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Andrew Kousgaard, 393rd Expeditionary Bomb Squadron commander, said, “The long-range, penetrating strike the B-2 provides is a truly unique capability in the world, but long-range requires a lot of gas.”

“Honing our ability to interoperate with our allies and utilize partner-nation equipment and infrastructure to refuel can significantly reduce what we often call our ‘tanker bill;’ in some cases, it could be the difference between mission success and failure,” Kousgaard said.

The brief mission to Norway also aligns with the US Air Force’s ongoing commitment to exercise its agile combat employment concept, which aims to strategically reposition aircraft and airmen across various airfields to prevent them from becoming static targets in the event of a large-scale conflict.

In June, a pair of B-1B Lancer bombers from Texas made history by landing at Sweden’s Lulea Kallax Air Base during their deployment at RAF Fairford in England.

Since 2018, the United States has been conducting strategic bomber missions in Europe with the primary objective of acquainting their crews with the region, as well as nurturing relationships with NATO allies and partners.

Overall, the service believes that the greater their ability to seamlessly integrate forces and equipment for strategic maneuvering across Europe, the better prepared they become to effectively confront security challenges, both in the present and in the years ahead.

archive link: https://archive.ph/vzNsY