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Is It Time to Break Up Big Ag? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=60544"><span class="small">Dan Kaufman, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Thursday, 19 August 2021 08:19 |
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Kaufman writes: "Renewed attention to antitrust has been focussed on Big Tech, but concentration in agriculture may be an underlying source of rural America's pro-Trump political backlash."
'The crisis in dairy is real,' Greeno said at a hearing organized by Vilsack, in Madison, in 2010. (photo: Erinn Springer/The New Yorker)
Is It Time to Break Up Big Ag?
By Dan Kaufman, The New Yorker
19 August 21
Renewed attention to antitrust has been focussed on Big Tech, but concentration in agriculture may be an underlying source of rural America’s pro-Trump political backlash.
 n the spring of 2020, Dairy Farmers of America, the nation’s largest dairy coöperative, purchased Dean Foods, the country’s largest milk processor, for four hundred and thirty-three million dollars. D.F.A. formed in 1998, out of a merger of four regional co-ops. Last year, its members, more than twelve thousand dairy farmers, sold fifty-six billion pounds of milk, about twenty-five per cent of the nation’s total, and the organization as a whole brought in nearly eighteen billion dollars in revenue. With the acquisition of Dean, D.F.A. gained unprecedented power as both a milk supplier and buyer. Pete Hardin, the editor and publisher of the dairy trade journal The Milkweed, told me, “It’s the poster child for agricultural concentration—and what Big Ag has become.”
For years, D.F.A. members and nonmembers alike have complained about the co-op’s growing market power. “The only reason I’m with D.F.A. is there’s no other place to go,” a dairy farmer from the Ozarks, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “They have a ten-year exclusive contract with all the bottling plants within probably three hundred miles.” In other words, D.F.A. is the only available purchaser of his milk. An enterprise with a single buyer, called a monopsony, typically means lower prices for producers. He added that, when he started farming, in the early seventies, there were a dozen local plants that he could sell his milk to. “Over time, they kept getting squeezed out,” he said. “I’m set in steel now for ten years.”
Nationally, the four largest dairy co-ops now control more than fifty per cent of the market. They’ve been able to grow so big, in part, because of a 1922 law called the Capper-Volstead Act, which provides significant exemptions from antitrust laws for farmer-owned agricultural coöperatives. “The agricultural industry is different than other industries because Capper-Volstead allows them to combine in ways that other individuals would go to jail for,” Allee A. Ramadhan, a former Justice Department antitrust attorney who led an investigation into the dairy industry, told me.
The law’s protections were intended to give small, independent farmers the right to collectively bargain prices for processing and selling their goods, but many large co-ops, such as D.F.A., have increasingly come to resemble corporations. D.F.A. has dozens of affiliates and joint ventures, but according to its most recent financial report only about a quarter of the co-op’s profits were paid directly to its farmer-members. And, unlike publicly traded corporations, D.F.A. is not required to reveal how much its executives earn. Kristen Coady, a senior vice-president for D.F.A., told me that “out of respect for privacy” the co-op would not disclose any salary or compensation information for any of its employees. But, several years ago, the Times reported that Gary Hanman, D.F.A’s founder, had access to a private jet and earned thirty-one million dollars during the seven years that he was the co-op’s C.E.O. In 2017, D.F.A. moved into a new thirty-million-dollar headquarters, which includes a twenty-five-foot-tall sculpture of milk, bocce and basketball courts, and a fitness center. “Where does the money go?” Peter Carstensen, a former Justice Department antitrust attorney and dairy-industry expert, said. “There is no transparency with co-ops like D.F.A. It’s about as opaque as you can get.”
Meanwhile, D.F.A. has paid out large sums in fines and class-action lawsuits brought by its own members. In 2008, Hanman, D.F.A., and another D.F.A. executive agreed to pay twelve million dollars in fines for attempting to manipulate milk prices on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Five years later, D.F.A. paid a hundred-and-forty-million-dollar settlement for allegedly fixing milk prices in the Southeast. In 2016, it paid fifty million dollars to a group of members who alleged that the co-op was in an illegal conspiracy to restrain competition, fix and suppress prices, and control the buying and selling of raw milk in the Northeast; last year, it settled another lawsuit, for an undisclosed sum, with a separate group of Northeastern dairy farmers. Buying processors such as Dean, which benefit from paying farmers lower prices for milk, D.F.A.’s critics argued, created a conflict of interest. Einer Elhauge, a professor at Harvard Law School, testified that the alleged conspiracy in that case brought down prices by nearly eighty cents per hundred pounds of milk for all the dairy farmers in the region, and not only D.F.A. members. (As part of each settlement, D.F.A. denied any wrongdoing.) “D.F.A. was so powerful in the industry, no matter where you turned you were dealing with it,” Ramadhan told me. “Where they were present, there were complaints.”
The accelerating concentration of the agricultural economy is not confined to dairy. Since 1982, the four largest beef-packing companies went from controlling about forty per cent of the market to controlling more than eighty per cent. The four largest seed manufacturers increased their market share from twenty-one per cent in 1994 to sixty-six per cent in 2018. As a result, farmers are paying more for inputs—seeds, fertilizers—while selling their goods for lower prices and to fewer competitive buyers. “It’s as if farmers have become serfs again,” John Peck, the executive director of the nonprofit Family Farm Defenders, said. “They have no independence left, no autonomy—they’re owned by the lord.”
The pandemic has exposed the fragility of America’s consolidated food-supply chain. In April of last year, as restaurants and schools were forced to close abruptly, D.F.A. asked some of its farmers to dump their milk, resulting in millions of gallons being poured into manure lagoons. The sudden closure of slaughterhouses forced farmers to euthanize hundreds of thousands of pigs. And the cruelty was not limited to animals. Last spring, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meatpacking plants were responsible for between six to eight per cent of all COVID-19 infections in the United States; at a Tyson pork-processing plant in Waterloo, Iowa, managers placed bets on how many workers would contract the disease.
Curt Meine, an environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, believes that this transformation has inspired a political backlash. In the last election, Donald Trump won rural America by a greater margin than he did in 2016, capturing nearly two-thirds of its vote. “Concentration fed and fuelled the politics of resentment, entrenched corporate power, depopulated the landscape, and weakened the autonomy and agency of farmers, consumers, local governments, and communities,” Meine said. “I think this is at the very heart of the rural-urban political divide.”
In a poll conducted last year by Family Farm Action, eighty-one per cent of rural respondents said that they were more likely to vote for a candidate who believed that “a handful of corporate monopolies now run our entire food system,” and who would impose “a moratorium on factory farms and corporate monopolies in food and agriculture.” The Ozarks farmer, an enthusiastic Trump voter, is also a staunch supporter of antitrust enforcement. “We need to break up D.F.A.,” he told me.
Most of the recent attention on antitrust has been focussed on technology companies. A poll showed that seventy-four per cent of Americans favor breaking up Big Tech. Joe Biden has appointed several aggressive critics of monopoly power to his Administration, placing Tim Wu on the National Economic Council, and appointing Jonathan Kanter, a prominent Google critic, as the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan is best known for writing a Yale Law Journal article in 2017 that upended much of the conventional thinking on whether Amazon should be a target of antitrust enforcement. But, five years earlier, Khan had written a scathing investigative article in The Washington Monthly that detailed the damage which monopolization had done to the economy and ecology of rural America. As Peck, of Family Farm Defenders, told me, “You don’t have to try and push antitrust as much now. People are getting traction with Big Tech and Big Pharma. Why not Big Ag, too?”
American antitrust law is, in many ways, rooted in the grievances of beleaguered farmers. In the late nineteenth century, farmers in the Great Plains and Upper Midwest, beholden to monopolistic railroads, meatpacking companies, and grain-elevator operators, began building a social-democratic movement to challenge corporate power. “Wall Street owns the country,” Mary Elizabeth Lease, an organizer of the Farmers’ Alliance, a national organization with more than a million members, said, in 1890. “The great common people of this country are slaves and monopoly is the master.” That same year, agrarian populists helped win the passage of the Sherman Act, the country’s first antitrust law, by a near-unanimous vote.
Initially, the government often deployed the law against striking unions. Enforcement against big business, the Sherman Act’s intended target, was scarce until President Theodore Roosevelt took office, in 1901, and used it to dismantle the Northern Securities Company, a railroad monopoly controlled by J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. A decade later, Louis Brandeis, then a chief economic adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped persuade Congress to enact what became the two other pillars of American antitrust law: the Federal Trade Commission, designed to protect consumers by preventing anticompetitive business practices, and the Clayton Act, which prohibited mergers that reduce competition. For Brandeis, regulating competition was a means of preëmpting the creation of monopolies in the first place. “We must make our choice,” he is said to have remarked. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
In 1919, the F.T.C. used the Clayton Act to diminish the market power of the country’s five largest meatpacking companies—which, the agency noted, had “attained such a dominant position that they control at will the market in which they buy their supplies.” In the early nineteen-twenties, Congress passed two antitrust laws to benefit farmers: Capper-Volstead and the Packers and Stockyards Act, which prohibited meatpackers from manipulating livestock prices and authorized the Department of Agriculture to pursue legal action against antitrust violations. But, after the stock-market crash of 1929, a third of all American farmers lost their farms. The mounting desperation sometimes turned violent. In 1933, after a collapse in milk prices, Wisconsin dairy farmers staged three statewide strikes, during which they bombed a cheese factory and several creameries. In the course of the demonstrations, a National Guardsman shot two striking teen-agers, killing one of them.
Such unrest helped spur Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to leave some acres fallow and boosted prices on the acres that they planted. The New Deal also brought electricity to isolated communities, made crop insurance available to farmers, built rural roads, reseeded grazing lands, and planted three billion trees. In 1938, Roosevelt appointed Thurman Arnold, a Yale Law School professor, as the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. During the next five years, Arnold became the country’s greatest trustbuster, issuing nearly as many indictments as had been brought since the Sherman Act was passed. He brought cases against virtually every industry suspected of price-fixing or monopolization, including fertilizers, tobacco, and dairy distribution. Although Arnold drew the ire of the labor movement, for using antitrust law against some trade unions, his legacy of vigorous enforcement endured for more than three decades.
In 1978, Robert Bork, a Yale law professor, published an influential collection of antitrust writings called “The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself.” Bork, who had graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, believed that antitrust enforcement was being used to implement socialism by stealth, and argued that the only purpose of the Sherman Act should be to promote economic efficiency and “consumer welfare.” The “paradox” of antitrust, Bork claimed, was that it increased prices for consumers and protected inefficient businesses from competition. The prioritization of consumer benefits—over the wages of farmers and other producers—has shaped antitrust enforcement ever since.
Bork’s view found particular sway under Ronald Reagan, whose Administration nearly halved the antitrust activities of the F.T.C. Mergers and acquisitions began to soar, particularly in agribusiness. In 1980, the country still had more than three hundred thousand dairy farms. Today there are only about thirty thousand. “The Justice Department’s guidelines were radically altered after 1981, and the levels of concentration greatly increased,” Carstensen, the former Justice Department antitrust attorney, said. “It went from ‘we will challenge you’ to ‘we will investigate you.’ Many excuses to do nothing were considered.”
Perhaps the most pivotal figure in any effort to break up Big Ag will be Tom Vilsack, Biden’s Secretary of Agriculture, and the only Cabinet member from the Obama Administration to return to office under Biden. Vilsack had been a rural adviser for Obama’s 2008 campaign, which offered a decidedly populist message to farmers. “The game’s been rigged,” Obama had said, during a visit to a farm in Adel, Iowa. “It’s time we had a government that understood it’s the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of Agribusiness.” After winning the Democratic nomination, Obama released a plan for rural America that included rigorous enforcement of antitrust laws like Packers and Stockyards. Obama won forty-five per cent of the national rural vote, carrying Iowa by ten points and Wisconsin by fourteen.
When Obama picked him to lead the Department of Agriculture, Vilsack was widely considered a pro-business choice, a former governor who had supported tax breaks for the ethanol industry. But his political ascent was preceded by a difficult childhood. Born to an unwed Irish American mother, in Pittsburgh, he was placed in a Catholic orphanage, and adopted as a four-month-old; by the time he left for college, his adoptive mother, who struggled with alcohol and prescription drugs, had made two suicide attempts. After graduating from law school, in Albany, New York, he moved to Mount Pleasant, Iowa, his wife’s home town, and joined his father-in-law’s firm. The job put him in contact with farmers who, during the Reagan Administration, were facing their biggest crisis since the Depression. “I represented a lot of farmers who were losing their farms,” Vilsack told me. “That directed my interest to try to provide some help.”
In December of 1986, a disgruntled homeowner, angry about backed-up water in his basement from the town’s sewer system, rose at a Mount Pleasant city-council meeting, pulled out a handgun, and shot and killed the mayor, Edd King. King’s father asked Vilsack to run in the ensuing special election. Vilsack won the mayor’s race—and, later, a state senate seat, and then two terms as Iowa’s governor.
As a member of Obama’s cabinet, Vilsack publicly embraced organic agriculture, established a program to bring locally grown foods to school cafeterias, and launched the U.S.D.A.’s StrikeForce Initiative, which invested more than twenty-three billion dollars in infrastructure, conservation, nutrition, and other programs in rural counties with persistently high poverty rates. But he also proved to be a mostly reliable steward of the corporate-friendly status quo. He approved so many genetically modified crops that critics began calling him Mr. Monsanto. At the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen, he unveiled a plan for the U.S.D.A. to help farmers cut greenhouse-gas emissions by buying manure digesters, even though they are useful only for large, carbon-intensive factory farms.
Vilsack also faced pressure to revive antitrust enforcement. Two years before he took office, a U.S.D.A. inspector general’s report revealed that the Grain Inspection, Packers, and Stockyards Administration, or GIPSA, the agency within the U.S.D.A. tasked with enforcing fair business practices, was actively blocking the enforcement of its own rules. Most notably, GIPSA’s acting administrator had stashed about fifty of the agency’s enforcement actions in a desk drawer, instead of prosecuting them. In response, Vilsack proposed a set of sweeping measures that would, among other things, make it easier for farmers to sue processors for harming their business. “I think it’s fair to say what we’re proposing is aggressive,” Vilsack said, in a news conference announcing the new rules. “Our job is to make sure the playing field is level for producers.”
In 2010, Vilsack hosted a nationwide series of hearings to investigate anticompetitive practices and market concentration in various agricultural sectors. “The President has instructed the Department of Agriculture to establish a framework for a new rural economy,” he said at the first hearing, in Iowa, which was attended by Attorney General Eric Holder and Christine Varney, the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. At a hearing in Madison, Wisconsin, which focussed on the dairy industry, hundreds of farmers were in attendance, some from as far as California and New Mexico. Vilsack highlighted the problems that agricultural consolidation was causing for rural America. He noted that rural counties in the U.S. accounted for ninety per cent of those with persistent poverty—meaning, twenty per cent or more of the population has lived in poverty for the past thirty years—and that nearly half the country’s dairy farms had been lost in the previous decade. “When we lose farming operations, it not only impacts that specific family but it also has a significant impact on rural America,” he said. “I have a growing concern about the condition of rural America.”
Meanwhile, the meat industry began an intensive lobbying campaign against Vilsack’s proposed GIPSA rules, which the National Farmers Union had dubbed the “Farmer and Rancher Bill of Rights.” The House and Senate Agriculture Committees requested that Vilsack extend the deadline for comments, which he did, putting the new deadline beyond the 2010 midterm elections. That year, as the journalist Christopher Leonard details in “The Meat Racket,” the country’s five largest meat companies and their front groups spent nearly ten million dollars on lobbying, casting the GIPSA rules as job-killing regulatory overreach. After the midterms, when Republicans regained control of Congress, they attached an annual rider to the U.S.D.A. appropriations bill stripping the agency of funds to complete the rule-adoption process. Vilsack did not fight back. In 2016, he told the Des Moines Register, “I don’t think just because a couple of the major players are going to potentially merge or consider some other kind of arrangement that that necessarily long-term absolutely guarantees that farmers are going to have less choice.”
A few weeks after leaving office, Vilsack was hired as president of a dairy-export group, earning roughly a million dollars a year. His successor in the Trump Administration, Sonny Perdue, effectively eliminated GIPSA. “When Vilsack failed to follow through, it really set the effort back,” Leonard told me. “It was worse than if they had done nothing. It emboldened the companies not only to continue their practices but to intensify them.”
Joel Greeno, a dairy farmer from Kendall, Wisconsin, and the president of Family Farm Defenders, was one of eight dairy farmers selected to testify at Vilsack’s hearing in Madison. His family has been farming in Monroe County since 1872, but in the early nineteen-nineties banks stopped lending to his parents. “My parents’ twenty-ninth wedding anniversary was a foreclosure notice,” he told me, when I visited his farm, last year. “Their thirtieth was a sheriff’s auction. They sold everything on the courthouse steps. Nobody actually bought the farm that day—the bank took it back. The sheriff just stood in the courthouse and said, ‘Going once, twice, three times—done.’ Then it’s just over. Your whole life is done in five minutes.”
Greeno’s activism began a few years later, when he joined a group of dairy farmers protesting alleged price-fixing at the National Cheese Exchange. A forty-month investigation conducted by Wisconsin’s department of agriculture and a group of economists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had found that, although less than one per cent of the cheese in the United States was sold on the exchange, which was then based in Green Bay, the exchange’s listed price was used as the basis for as much as ninety-five per cent of the bulk cheese sold nationally. The investigation also found that Kraft, the largest buyer of cheese in the U.S. and the dominant seller on the exchange, had made trades to depress prices. In response, the exchange fled Green Bay, its home of forty years, and moved to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
In 2010, at Vilsack’s hearing in Madison, Greeno described the constant stress that farmers experience from low prices, noting that nearly a hundred dairy farmers in the United States had committed suicide since the 2008 financial crash. Greeno implored Justice Department officials to investigate D.F.A. and cheese-trading at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “The crisis in dairy is real,” Greeno said. “The problems in dairy are man-made. It’s easy to do nothing. Do we have the will to fix it?”
Three years later, low milk prices and marriage problems forced Greeno to sell his own forty-eight-cow herd. “I’ve had family members pass, but that day was probably the single hardest day of my life,” he told me. “Your cattle are like your kids.” Hours after his cows were sold at auction, Greeno started a job at an Ocean Spray plant, making cranberry-juice concentrate and Craisins. He works a twelve-hour shift, from 4 P.M. to 4 A.M., and feels lucky to make twenty-seven dollars an hour, though more than a third of his check goes to paying off a three-hundred-thousand-dollar debt from farming loans. “I tell every new hire, ‘You should have had to milk cows for five years before you start here,’ ” he said. “ ‘Then you will know what it’s like to work twenty hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, for absolutely no pay whatsoever.’ ”
Agricultural prices have a far-reaching effect on places like Monroe County. In 2017, the Wall Street Journal found that rural America was faring worse than cities, suburbs, and smaller metropolitan areas in terms of poverty, college education, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance, and male labor-force participation. Many economists and historians see the decades-long vanishing of the American family farm—once the foundation of rural economies—as the underlying problem. Since 2011, that problem has intensified: more than a hundred thousand family farms have been lost. Most rural residents now work in health care, construction, and the service industry, or at big-box retail stores, such as Dollar General, where the median annual pay for store employees is less than seventeen thousand dollars a year.
John Ikerd, an emeritus professor of agricultural economics at the University of Missouri, told me that the failure to enforce antitrust laws has led to the “economic colonization” of rural America. “Agriculture employs very few people anymore, and most of the benefits of it go to outside the rural community, like pesticide or fertilizer manufacturers,” Ikerd said. “What many rural communities are left with are the consequences of this large-scale agriculture—soil erosion, air and water pollution, and a lack of jobs. We’re extracting wealth out of these communities and destroying employment opportunities, particularly on family farms. When you do that, you strangle the whole rural culture.”
Greeno, who is fifty-four, with broad shoulders, a ruddy face, and a sardonic laugh, no longer relies on farming for his income, but he still grows organic corn, hay, and grain. When I visited his farm, he told me, “Growing up, we never had to leave Kendall. There were barbershops, hardware stores, grocery stores, restaurants.” Now, not much remained besides a bank, a few taverns, and a gun store. Greeno believes that bringing back small-scale farming is the key to reviving towns like Kendall. “Too much has gone on for too long,” he said. “If this Administration has any intention of doing the right thing—and keeping its promises—it better prove it early.”
In 2015, John Kwoka, an economist at Northeastern University, analyzed the effects of forty-six mergers approved by the federal government. Kwoka found that, as a result of thirty-eight of them, prices for consumers rose by more than ten per cent on average, an empirical rebuke to the contention of Robert Bork that mergers are either neutral or enhance efficiency, and thus benefit consumers. “Someone described my work as driving a stake into the heart of the argument,” Kwoka told the journalist David Dayen. “It takes on the Chicago School on its own terms and describes that theory as false.”
Lina Khan’s Yale Law Journal article about Amazon also refuted Bork’s narrow vision for antitrust law. “The undue focus on consumer welfare is misguided,” she wrote. “It betrays legislative history, which reveals that Congress passed antitrust laws to promote a host of political economic ends—including our interests as workers, producers, entrepreneurs, and citizens.”
At Khan’s Senate nomination hearing, in April, she was warmly received by Democrats and Republicans alike. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who once praised Bork for ushering in a “reorientation of antitrust law away from business regulation,” said that he looked forward to working with her. But conservatives’ newfound enthusiasm for antitrust has been driven by Twitter and Facebook’s banning of Donald Trump from their platforms, and directed almost exclusively at technology companies. Little was made of Khan’s description of agriculture as a sector with some of the most extreme examples of concentration. She promised that the F.T.C. would be “vigorously enforcing the law over the markets and the food-supply chain.”
A number of Democrats in Congress are pushing for more aggressive antitrust enforcement. Representative Mark Pocan, of Wisconsin, is planning to reintroduce a bill that he co-sponsored with Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, that would block large agricultural mergers. “We’ve got some pretty villainous behavior in the food system to look at right now, with COVID,” Pocan told me. “We need to make sure we act while the memory is still fresh.”
In July, Biden signed a sweeping antitrust executive order that, among other things, called on the Secretary of Agriculture to “address the unfair treatment of farmers and improve conditions of competition in the markets for their products.” Vilsack, who has announced a new set of proposed GIPSA rules, told me he now believes that the entirety of America’s vertically-integrated food system needs to be reëxamined. “I think the pandemic has given us the opportunity to make the case that there is a need for greater resilience in our food-supply system,” he said.
Perhaps no one is more eager to see Vilsack take on monopoly power than disgruntled D.F.A. members. The Secretary of Agriculture can investigate co-ops for monopolization and restraint of trade, and bring them to court for antitrust violations. Since its merger with Dean, D.F.A. now controls more than fifty per cent of the fluid milk market in New England, according to some estimates. In May, The Counter, an online food journal, reported that D.F.A. has purchased millions of dollars of milk produced by prison labor, in South Carolina and Colorado, raising new questions about its status as a co-op. “The Secretary of Agriculture needs to step in and straighten these co-ops out,” a small dairy farmer from the Southwest, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution from D.F.A., told me. “Vilsack’s got a good story line this time around—that he’s going to be for the small farmer. I hope he follows through with that, but I don’t have a lot of confidence.”
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The Planet Is in Peril. We're Building Congress' Strongest-Ever Climate Bill |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=24193"><span class="small">Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Wednesday, 18 August 2021 12:52 |
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Sanders writes: "More than any other legislation in US history it will transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into sustainable energy."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
The Planet Is in Peril. We're Building Congress' Strongest-Ever Climate Bill
By Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK
18 August 21
More than any other legislation in US history it will transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into sustainable energy
 he latest International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is clear and foreboding. If the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions, the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage. The world that we will be leaving our children and future generations will be increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable.
But we didn’t really need the IPCC to tell us that. Just take a look at what’s happening right now: A huge fire in Siberia is casting smoke for 3,000 miles. Greece: burning. California: burning. Oregon: burning. Historic flooding in Germany and Belgium. Italy just experienced the hottest European day ever. July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded. Drought and extreme weather disturbances are cutting food production, increasing hunger and raising food prices worldwide. Rising sea levels threaten Miami, New York, Charleston and countless coastal cities around the world in the not-so-distant future.
In the past, these disasters might have seemed like an absurd plot in some apocalypse movie. Unfortunately, this is now reality, and it will only get much worse in years to come if we do not act boldly – now.
The good news is that the $3.5tn budget resolution that was recently passed in the Senate lays the groundwork for a historic reconciliation bill that will not only substantially improve the lives of working people, elderly people, the sick and the poor, but also, in an unprecedented way, address the existential threat of climate change. More than any other legislation in American history it will transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy.
This legislation will be a long-overdue step forward in the fight for economic, racial, social and environmental justice. It will also create millions of well-paying jobs. As chair of the Senate budget committee my hope is that the various committees will soon finish their work and that the bill will be on the floor and adopted by Congress in late September.
Let me be honest in telling you that this reconciliation bill, the final details of which are still being written, will not do everything that needs to be done to combat climate change. But by investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the reduction of carbon emissions it will be a significant step forward and will set an example for what other countries should be doing.
Here are some of the proposals that are currently in the bill:
Massive investments in retrofitting homes and buildings to save energy.
Massive investment in the production of wind, solar and other forms of sustainable energy.
A major move toward the electrification of transportation, including generous rebates to enable working families to buy electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances.
Major investments in greener agriculture.
Major investments in climate resiliency and ecosystem recovery projects.
Major investments in water and environmental justice.
Major investments in research and development for sustainable energy and battery storage.
Billions to address the warming and acidification of oceans and the needs of coastal communities.
The creation of a Civilian Climate Corps which will put hundreds of thousands of young people to work transforming our energy system and protecting our most vulnerable communities.
The Budget Resolution that allows us to move forward on this ambitious legislation was passed last Wednesday at 4am, by a vote of 50-49 after 14 hours of debate. No Republican supported it, and no Republican will support the reconciliation bill. In fact, Republicans have been shamefully absent from serious discussions about the climate emergency.
That means that we must demand that every Democrat supports a reconciliation bill that is strong on solutions to the climate crisis. No wavering. No watering down. This is the moment. Our children and grandchildren are depending upon us. The future of the planet is at stake.
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Welcome to the Pyrocene |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=60531"><span class="small">Stephen J. Pyne, Grist</span></a>
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Wednesday, 18 August 2021 12:43 |
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Pyne writes: "We have created a planetary fire age. Now we have to live in it."
A man attempts to extinguish the forest fires approaching the village of Pefki on Evia, Greece's second largest island, in August 2021. (photo: Angelos Tzortzinis/Getty)
Welcome to the Pyrocene
By Stephen J. Pyne, Grist
18 August 21
We have created a planetary fire age. Now we have to live in it.
he fires of 2020 seemed to be everywhere, a pyric pandemic.
Places that commonly burn, such as Australia, California, and Siberia, burned with epic breadth and intensity. Australia had established a historic standard for a single outbreak with its 2009 Black Saturday fires; its 2019–20 Black Summer burns broke historic standards for a season. California endured its fourth year of serial conflagrations, each surpassing the record set the season before. Like a plague, the fires spread across Oregon and Washington, and then leaped over the continental divide to scour the Colorado Rockies. Siberian fires moved north of their home territory and flared beyond the Arctic Circle. Places that naturally wouldn’t burn, or that would burn only in patches, were burning widely. The Pantanal wetlands in central South America burned. Amazonia had its worst fire season in 20 years.
What the fires’ flames didn’t touch, their smoke plumes did. Australia’s smoke circled the globe. The palls from the West Coast fires spread haze through the country; they struck with the symbolic impact and visual intensity that dust storms evoked during the 1930s. The fires’ smoke obscured subcontinents by day; their lights dappled continents at night, like a Milky Way of flame-stars. Where fires were not visible, the lights of cities and of gas flares were: combustion via the transubstantiation of coal and gas into electricity. To many observers, they appeared as the pilot flames of an advancing apocalypse. Even Greenland burned.
The smoke and flames of last year’s fire season were a symptom, not a syndrome. Now they are back, like a revived wave of COVID. Greece and Turkey have replaced Australia as this year’s ground zero. Evacuations by sea beneath red skies on Evia and Mugla echo those from Mallacoota a year before. The West Coast fires have moved north into British Columbia. Siberia burned at an even larger scale. Algeria burned. Outbreaks follow migrating heat domes. What didn’t dry, drowned or flooded after burning. Wetting and drying is the climatic rhythm behind landscape fire; as each phase intensified into drought and deluge, so fires swelled. Smoke flowed across continents, like dust storms on Mars. But such rolling insurgencies were only half the story.
The planet’s current unhinged pyrogeography has also been shaped by fires that should have been present and weren’t. These are the fires historically set by nature or people to which landscapes had adapted. Now those fires are mostly gone, and the land has responded by degrading ecologically while building up combustibles to stoke more savage wildfires. The Earth’s fire crisis, that is, is not just about the bad burns that trash countrysides and crash into towns. It is equally about the good fires that have vanished because they were extinguished or no longer lit. The Earth’s biota is disintegrating as much by tame fire’s absence as by feral fire’s outbreaks.
There is a third facet to this planetary fire triangle, one that looks beyond present and absent fires to deep time. Its combustibles come not from living biomass, but from lithic ones. With increasing frenzy, humans are binge-burning fossil fuels. They are taking fuel out of the geologic past, burning it in the present with complex (and little understood) interactions, and then releasing the effluent into the geologic future. Industrial combustion has restructured the dynamics of fire on Earth. Fossil fuel combustion acts as an enabler, as a performance enhancer, and by its disrupting effects on the atmosphere as a globalizer. It has ensured that little of the Earth will be untouched by fire’s reach if not its grasp.
The dialectic between burning living and lithic landscapes explains most of the paradoxes of Earth’s current fire scene. The first is that the more we try to remove fire from places that have co-evolved with it, the more violently fire will return. Without the counterforce provided by petrol-powered machines, from helicopters to portable pumps, there could have been no serious effort to exclude fire in the first place. Second, while wildfires gather more and more media attention, the amount of land actually burned overall is shrinking. Fossil fuel societies find surrogates for fire and remove it (or suppress it) from landscapes. California experienced 4.2 million burned acres in 2020; in pre-industrial times, it would have known perhaps 15 million to 20 million acres burned, though not in wild surges. Fire would have resembled irrigated fields, not sprawling floods. The third paradox is that as we ratchet down fossil fuel burning, we’ll have to ratchet up our burning of living landscapes. We have a fire deficit. We have many landscapes ill-adapted to what they are experiencing. We need to make firescapes more robust against what is coming, and fire is the surest way to do it.
Add up all these fire influences — those directly through flame, those indirectly through smoke, removed fire, fire-enabled land use, and a warming climate — and you have the contours of a planetary fire age, the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age. You have a Pyrocene.
The Pyrocene proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. It renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. It comes with a narrative — the long alliance between fire and humans. It proposes an analogy for the future — the sum of our fire practices is creating a fire age that is equivalent in stature to the ice ages of the Pleistocene. With fire as a theme, it offers a sideways view on climate change, continental scale shifts in biogeography, the sixth extinction, changes in ocean chemistry and sea level, and the character of the human presence on Earth. Like fire, the Pyrocene integrates its surroundings — geographic, historical, institutional, intellectual.
The history it tells chronicles three fires. The first is the fire of nature—fires that had appeared as soon as plants colonized continents and have remained ever since. Fossilized charcoal traces their presence back 420 million years. A second is the fire set and abetted by humans. Thanks to cooking, a dependence on fire had become coded into hominin DNA; thanks to favorable conditions at the end of the last ice age, this expression of fire has steadily spread everywhere humans have. Together, people and fire have competed with nature’s fire and expanded the overall domain of burning such that very little of terrestrial Earth — places blanketed by ice, implacable deserts, sodden rainforests — lack fire. Still, human-kindled fires burned as nature’s did, in living landscapes, subject to shared conditions and constraints. The third fire to appear is qualitatively different.
These fires burn lithic landscapes no longer bounded by such ecological limits as fuel, season, sun, or the cadence of wetting and drying. The source of combustibles is essentially unbounded; the problem is the sinks, where to put all the effluent. This third fire has unsettled not only climate and biotas, but the affinity between people and fire. Second (anthropogenic) fire was an act of domestication, perhaps the model for domesticating, in which people had transformed wild fire into hearth and torch just as they had cultivated teosinte into maize, and aurochs into dairy cows. Both fire and people spread in a kind of mutual-assistance pact. There was a fundamental inequality in their relationship because fire could exist without humans while humans could not exist without fire. But both nature’s fires and humanity’s operated within a shared set of bounded conditions.
The third fire — industrial combustion — has decoupled that relationship. People can thrive without it, but it cannot flourish without people. It is about power; not using the power of fire to nudge, leverage, integrate, and quicken within living landscapes, but the brute force of fire distilled and mechanized. The second fire was a kind of mutual taming, a partnership. It helped create habitats more suitable for humanity, what the ancients called a ‘second nature.’ The third fire is just a tool, like a factory farm for combustion. It generates raw power. With it, humanity is fashioning a third nature, one that threatens to make the Earth progressively uninhabitable for its creators.
Nature’s fire has existed since plants colonized continents, some 420 million years ago. Anthropogenic fire has existed in some form for most of the Pleistocene, probably 2 million years or more, though it became a growing planetary presence across the Holocene, the last 10,000 years. It complemented and competed with nature’s fire. Initially, over the past two centuries, industrial combustion competed as well by seeking technological substitutes where possible and otherwise suppressing open fire wherever possible. Now, thanks to how it has restructured landscapes and unmoored climate, third fire is colluding with the others.
Over the last century, the terms of these interactions have changed. Something flipped. In unprecedented ways the Earth had too much bad fire, too little good fire, and too much combustion overall. It was not simply fire’s indirect relationship to climate that was upset: the whole of fire’s presence on Earth was deranged. The sum of humanity’s fire practices have overwhelmed the existing arrangement of ecological baffles and barriers. Fire is creating the conditions for more fire.
Since the onset of the last interglacial, we have systematically driven off the relics of the ice ages and fashioned, piece by piece, a more fire-friendly world that has yielded a fire-informed one. Propagating ice previously helped push the planet into an ice age; so likewise our binge burning is now propelling the Earth into a fire age.
We have created a Pyrocene. Now we have to live in it.
So what does a full-blown fire age look like, and can we adapt?
In the near term, the future will likely resemble today’s pyrogeography, but enhanced. Places that have fire now are likely to experience it more frequently and more intensely. Places that have little fire now may acquire it, depending on how climatic shifts interact with what people do. Slashing rainforest, draining peatland, abandoning cultivated fields – all can make biomass more susceptible to fire-favoring weather.
So long as the conditions that prevailed before a fire persist, fire will renew the scene and the old order will return. But if new species have come or old ones gone, if the weather sharpens its rhythms of wetting and drying, if land is cleared or drained or subject to grazing, then fire will catalyze a new arrangement. Probably it will be one more prone to fire, but a different kind of fire, as forests may shrink to shrublands, or scrub to grass, or prairie is overrun with woods. Fire is infinitely adaptable: It will synthesize whatever those new surroundings become. The issue is whether humanity can be equally adaptable.
In simple terms, I imagine three hierarchies of responses. They have different scales and timetables of implementation but we need to do them all concurrently. In truth, we should have begun them 40 years ago.
First, limit the damage to communities and critical assets from wildfire. Most fires (97 percent) around inhabited areas start from people — no surprise. In principle, nearly all these ignitions can be eliminated or their threat dampened by removing their power to propagate at strength. Many megafires have begun from powerline failures in high winds; these have technical fixes. Others, such as those from abandoned camp or signal fires, can be significantly reduced with enough effort.
We know how to protect towns and exurbs from burning. Most ignitions result from ember blizzards that attack points of vulnerability — imagine a swarm of fire-kindling locusts. We don’t have to rebuild towns from scratch, just fix those critical weaknesses. Many of these concerns involve infrastructure and land use — issues we’ve recognized for decades that we need to address. We need to add fire to the mix. The know-how and tools exist. If we are serious, we can resolve many of the threats within a handful of years.
An intermediate suite of responses addresses fire in living landscapes, something humans have done all our existence as a species. We can leave fire to nature. We can substitute our fires for nature’s. We can alter the fuels that power any and all fires. We can try to exclude fire altogether.
Leave it to nature. There are plenty of places for which fire is necessary as well as inevitable. It makes sense to monitor or loose-herd such fires — let them do the ecological work the land needs while keeping them within borders that don’t threaten human settlements. Remote areas and many nature reserves fall within this realm. Fire management in Alaska has long targeted point protection (keeping fire out of villages and towns) while burning out from secure perimeters such as rivers that box in fires and their smoke.
It’s not easy, and it involves a mindset alien to urbanites. In a city, every fire put out is a problem solved. In fire-prone landscapes, most fires put out are problems put off. We can’t, and shouldn’t want to, eliminate fire in the countryside as we can in the built-environment.
Substitute our fires for nature’s. The control of fire has long been at the core of human identity. We got small guts and big heads because we learned to cook food. We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes. Now we have become a geologic force because we’ve begun to cook the planet. Using fire is our ecological signature.
The trick is getting it right. Fire takes on the character of its context. A candle or cooking fire is mostly under our control because we created the fuels and designed the site where it burns. But in landscapes arranged by wind, mountains, gorges, and complex assemblages of vegetation there is little we govern. In true wildlands prescribed fire can be akin to training a grizzly bear to dance.
Yet humans have done it successfully for all our existence. A good fire culture codes the needed behavior into stories, seasonal migration routes, rites, as well as software and legal prescriptions. Oddly, by extinguishing traditional knowledge, modern science destroyed much of the basis for controlled fire in landscapes, and has not yet been able to replace that lost knowledge fast enough or fully enough.
For the past 50 years America’s federal fire agencies have operated under a policy that has sought to prevent bad fires while promoting good ones. The prescribed fire has served as the compromise between those who sought to ban all burning and those who demanded the right to burn anywhere anytime. The policy is new, but the concept is ancient, and in fact, predates our species. (After all, from Erectines to Neanderthals, hominins could also manipulate fire.)
Change fire’s setting. Unlike hurricanes or earthquakes, which can occur without a particle of life present, fire is a creation of the living world and feeds off biomass. No fuel, no fire. The ability to determine where and when to kindle a fire is an enormous power, but controlled fire is still constrained by the capacity of the environment to allow it to spread. By cutting, draining, loosing livestock, and so on, people can expand the seasons and settings for fire. They can kindle it where and when it would not burn on its own.
This is, in fact, the basis for most agriculture, and it is how places like Mediterranean Europe, with its notoriously fire-prone environment, prevented wildfire from overrunning human settlement. When such lands are abandoned (as they have been for several decades), wildfires return. Portugal and Greece have experienced this scenario for years; this year it has played out in Sardinia, Italy, and Turkey. Similarly, well before global warming made itself felt, America was swept by a century of megafires that gorged on the slash left by logging and land-clearing. Controlling the axe helped end those serial conflagrations.
‘Land management,’ however, can be a loaded term, easily hijacked to promote agendas that have little to do with fire, further animated by the visceral fears that free-running fire can instill. It can mean lessening landclearing in places like Amazonia where large-area fires are converting rainforest to pasture. It can mean finding modern equivalents to traditional agriculture in Italy, Spain, and the Balkans. It can mean managing to promote ecological goods and services in parks and protected reserves.
Suppress fire. There are places where fire is unnatural and unwanted. Historically, towns burned along with their surroundings since they were made of the same materials and subject to the same winds and droughts. But modern cities broke that old cycle; conflagrations became rare, and occurred typically only when simultaneously subject to earthquakes, riots, or wars.
In the past few decades, throughout the industrialized world, urban sprawl has recolonized what had been rural settings or pushed buildings against the borders of public lands. Mostly, those sites have been considered as wildlands (or countryside) with houses rather than exurban enclaves with peculiar landscaping, so the practices that kept fire out of cities were ignored, and fire is returning. Keeping fire out of those communities makes sense. Keeping it out of their surroundings often doesn’t because it only allows conditions to deteriorate and fuels to stockpile.
Few places will be satisfied with only one strategy; most will require a cocktail of treatments, adjusted to the particulars of place. Fire is interactive, a full-spectrum ecological catalyst, and a reaction that varies according to the small as well as the large features of its setting. It requires relentless tinkering, and its alliance with humanity continual negotiation. It is not a once-and-done vaccination. We will be burning in perpetuity.
All these mitigations will fail unless we end the burning of fossil fuels. That is the deep, destabilizing presence, and so long as it continues (or in its current state, accelerates), efforts to ameliorate its effects will falter. Yet as the most recent IPCC report emphasizes, global warming is already baked into the planet for decades, perhaps centuries. Moreover, even replacing combustion as an energy source with sun and wind will still leave the structures that a fossil-fuel civilization created. We will still have exurbs at risk from fire; landscapes both slashed and uncultivated and prone to blowups; and biotas starved for the right kind of burning.
Our maturing fire age isn’t just about fossil-fuel powered climate change since land use contributes in equally significant ways. But the pyric pandemic is mostly about fossil fuels because they supply the power that underwrites land use in industrialized societies. They have made possible how we live on the land and relate to fire. We will be coping with the legacy of industrial combustion for a long time. Stripping away the overlay of lithic landscapes will still leave us with fire-prone living landscapes famished for the flames our addiction to fossil fuels tried to remove.
What we have made, even with all its unanticipated consequences, we can unmake, even accepting more unanticipated consequences. But however the Pyrocene evolves, we have a lot of fire in our future.
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FOCUS: Trying - and Failing - to Save the Family of the Afghan Who Saved Me |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53338"><span class="small">David Rohde, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Wednesday, 18 August 2021 11:52 |
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Rohde writes: "Twelve years ago, Tahir Luddin helped us both escape after we were kidnapped by the Taliban. Now I am struggling to get his family out of Kabul."
The Afghan journalist Tahir Luddin, with two of his children. (photo: David Rohde)
Trying - and Failing - to Save the Family of the Afghan Who Saved Me
By David Rohde, The New Yorker
18 August 21
Twelve years ago, Tahir Luddin helped us both escape after we were kidnapped by the Taliban. Now I am struggling to get his family out of Kabul.
n the middle of March, I texted my friend Tahir Luddin, an Afghan journalist who lives in the Washington area, after I saw a video he had posted on Facebook of his teen-age son running on a treadmill. My text was banal, a quick check-in to see how he and his loved ones were faring amid the isolation of the past year. “How is your family? How are you?” I wrote. “See the pictures of your children on FB. Your son is very tall!!!” Tahir did not reply. At the time, I didn’t worry and assumed that he would get back to me. Our communications were sporadic, but our bond was unusual.
Twelve years ago, Tahir, an Afghan driver named Asad Mangal, and I were kidnapped by the Taliban after one of their commanders invited me to an interview outside Kabul. Our captors moved us from house to house and eventually brought us into the remote tribal areas of Pakistan, where the Taliban enjoyed a safe haven. Our guards told Tahir how eager they were to execute him and the many ways that they would mutilate his body. They treated me far better and demanded that the Times, my employer at the time, pay millions of dollars in ransom and secure the release of prisoners from Guantánamo. We were held all together, in the same room, and Tahir and I spent hours talking, regretting the anguish that we were causing our families.
After more than seven months in captivity, Tahir and I escaped. As our guards slept, Tahir guided us to a nearby military base. (Asad fled on his own, several weeks later.) It was an end to our ordeal that neither of us had dared to believe was possible. I reunited with my wife—we had got married just two months before I was kidnapped—in the United States. Fearing reprisals from the Taliban, Tahir and, later, Asad moved here as well. In the years since, Tahir and I both transformed our lives. I forswore war reporting and became the proud father of two daughters. Tahir’s path was more arduous. Settling in northern Virginia, he worked as an Uber driver, then started delivering packages for Amazon. He lived with other immigrant men in a succession of cramped apartments, sending most of his earnings home to his large family, who remained in Kabul. In 2017, after becoming a U.S. citizen, Tahir brought his five oldest children to the U.S. to live with him.
In April, I tried calling Tahir but couldn’t reach him. Concerned, I sent him a series of text messages. Again, no reply. Alarmed, I sent him an e-mail, and he responded right away. “I am in kabul since March the 28th,” he wrote, in the fragmented English that I’d come to know well during our months in captivity. “The taliban are just outside kabul. Thousands of afghans are leaving kabul everyday.” He said he had applied for visas that would enable the rest of his family in Afghanistan to join him in the U.S. I was relieved to hear this. Days earlier, President Biden had announced that all U.S. troops would pull out of Afghanistan by September 11th. For years, Tahir had hoped for a peace deal in Afghanistan. Now he was focussed on safely getting his loved ones out of the country. I assumed that Tahir, as an American citizen, would be able to secure visas for his wife and remaining children, the youngest of whom is four.
Around the same time, another Afghan friend of mine, Waheed Wafa, who spent a decade as a reporter for the Times in Kabul, had come to the same conclusion as Tahir about the prospects for his country. Waheed had made repeated visits to the United States but always returned to Afghanistan, determined to stay in his homeland. In 2019, a gunman had fired on a car that was supposed to be taking Waheed to the airport, wounding the driver. Waheed was not in the vehicle at the time and is not sure whether he was the one being targeted. He helped to rescue the driver and take him to the hospital. In 2020, the Taliban carried out a wave of targeted assassinations that killed more than a hundred Afghan civilian leaders, including doctors, journalists, and human-rights advocates. In a new tactic, the Taliban had begun placing magnetic bombs under the cars of their victims—to terrorize the city. “They are going to the soft targets,” Waheed told me in a phone call.
In May and June, I contacted refugee-aid groups, nonprofit legal organizations, and academic entities to see whether they could help Tahir and Waheed. The replies I received were warm but noncommittal. Becca Heller, the head of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told me that she was shocked at the Biden Administration’s lack of advanced planning. Senior White House and State Department officials did not appear to grasp the number of Afghan civilians who, like Tahir and Waheed, had backed the U.S. effort and would be in grave danger if the Taliban regained power. The U.S. had attempted one of the largest efforts to rebuild a nation since the Second World War, funding the creation of schools, health clinics, and independent media outlets across the country. According to the International Rescue Committee, over the past twenty years three hundred thousand Afghan civilians have been affiliated with the American project in the country.
Tahir spent two months in Kabul waiting for his wife and children to receive visa interviews at the U.S. Embassy, and then, in mid-June, returned to the United States. He was frustrated and out of money. In the wake of Biden’s announcement about the American withdrawal, thousands of Afghans had applied for visas, and Tahir’s applications for his wife and children were somewhere in the queue. A COVID outbreak in the U.S. Embassy further slowed the process.
In mid-July, as the pullout of U.S. troops approached, Tahir and Waheed told me that they had both given up on the idea of American visas. They told me that they would welcome visas to Turkey or another third country, where they would be beyond the Taliban’s reach. I reached out to current and former government officials whom I had met during past reporting. They told me that priority was being given to processing the applications of twenty thousand Afghans who had worked as translators and other employees of the U.S. military. Current and former military officials assailed the pace of that effort by the Administration as well. Three months after Biden’s withdrawal announcement, only about seven hundred of the twenty thousand military translators had arrived in the United States. Advocates had pressed for the U.S. to undertake an effort akin to the Ford Administration’s evacuation of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese—by air and by boat to Guam—before the fall of Saigon, in 1975. Biden Administration officials listened politely but seemed to lack urgency. When I asked Administration personnel about the Guam option and Tahir’s case, I got caring replies but the same message: there was nothing that could be done for Tahir’s family in Kabul.
On August 3rd, I decided to go public. During the Aspen Security Forum, which was held virtually this year, I asked Zalmay Khalilzad, the senior U.S. diplomat overseeing peace negotiations with the Taliban, about Tahir’s case. “He is desperately trying to get his wife and children out of Kabul,” I said. “What do I say to this journalist? He saved my life. He’s a U.S. citizen. He has a right to bring his wife and children here.” Khalilzad said that he, as an immigrant himself, understood Tahir’s situation. “With regard to your journalist friend, I would urge him to get in touch,” he said. “We will put him in touch with the right person at the embassy.” The answer raised my hopes. I obtained an e-mail address from the State Department for Khalilzad’s office. Days later, a staffer was in touch with Tahir but had little new information. At this point, his six-year-old’s petition for travel to the U.S. had been cleared, but the petitions for his other young children were still being processed, more than four months after they had been submitted.
Over the next several days, I visited Tahir in his apartment in northern Virginia. For hours, Tahir and I sat alone in a room, trying to come up with a plan. It was the most time we had spent together since we had been kidnapped. One evening, news broke that the Taliban had assassinated the government’s top media officer in Kabul. Tahir knew the official, a former journalist. When he showed me a video of the man singing to a group of his friends, he wept, just as we both had, at times, in captivity. The highlight of the trip was meeting his five older children, who ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-one. We ate Afghan food and homemade pizzas. His eldest teen-age son worked at McDonald’s. His younger son loved riding his bike around Washington. His two oldest daughters dreamed of attending Northern Virginia Community College and becoming physician’s assistants. His children all spoke a few words of Spanish, a language they were learning from their classmates in high school. His daughters talked of the discrimination they faced because they wear head scarves. Tahir and I had spent hours discussing religion in captivity. He told me that Islam and Afghan tradition required him to save my life. He was, and remains, deeply religious. We talked about the ways, both good and bad, that living in America was changing his children. I told Tahir that they were becoming Afghan Americans. He said that he was proud of them.
Late one night, Tahir called his family in Kabul. He told his wife that I was visiting. She thanked me for my help. She assumed that I could save their lives, just as Tahir had saved mine. The uncomfortable truth was that, despite three months of effort, I had made no progress. The U.S. government said that it was helping, but the American effort was focussed, much as it had been throughout the war, on saving American lives, not Afghan ones. The same discounted value of Afghan lives compared to American ones had been in effect during our confinement. Tahir and Asad would have been executed before me, because my life was considered more valuable than theirs. Now, a dozen years later, American diplomats were being rescued—but the Biden Administration, intentionally or not, had created the conditions for a humanitarian catastrophe for Afghans.
On Thursday, August 12th, with the Taliban beginning to seize provincial capitals, Waheed texted me that he had managed to obtain Turkish visas for himself and his family, with the help of a friend, another foreign journalist. Waheed told me that he had purchased tickets for a flight from Kabul to Istanbul on August 20th. But it would be too late. Two days later, the Taliban had surrounded Kabul. I texted Waheed and asked him whether I could send him money or help him in any way. “Thank you, David, I am heartbroken for what is happening here but so proud to have friends like all of you,” he wrote. “I am grateful to all of your kind messages and support.” On Sunday morning, the Taliban entered the city, and I texted Waheed again. He responded optimistically. “Kabul panicked this morning and the city was in chaos,” he said. “Now it is getting better.”
I reached Tahir, who was frantically calling his family in Kabul. He said that the Taliban were patrolling the streets outside their home. He decided that it was best for them to stay inside. Waheed and his family, along with thousands of other Afghans, went to the Kabul airport in hopes of flying out of the country. Waheed told me that U.S. troops were allowing American citizens into a small military-run section of the airport that was secure. Afghans were left to fend for themselves. Instead of the five thousand troops that the Biden Administration claimed were being dispatched to Afghanistan to facilitate the evacuation of U.S. personnel and a limited number of Afghans who had aided the American effort, Waheed estimated that he saw five hundred American troops trying to secure the area, without barbed wire or any other equipment. At one point, shooting erupted. After waiting for twenty hours, Waheed and his family left the airport. There was a Taliban checkpoint outside. Taliban members searched the family’s bags and found his son’s PlayStation. One of the Taliban men, thinking the device was a computer, demanded that Waheed give them “the passport,” probably meaning “the password.” Waheed tried to explain that it was only a children’s game. “They said it’s a computer. It’s a game. Can you believe it?” They finally let the family pass.
Waheed told me that he was going into hiding for two days. When I spoke with him again, on Tuesday, he said that Afghans were primarily responsible for the debacle. “Most part of it was our own mistake, our own incapability, that’s why we see this situation. Now, no one can take the blame out of them. The civil society, the government, everybody.” But he also questioned the lack of planning around the U.S. withdrawal. “They saw these provinces were falling day by day and there was no action to at least protect Kabul for some time,” he said. “What happened to your intelligence, your defense ministries?” Waheed also confided his fears to me. “We saw the city full of these strange armed men. With strange clothing and hair styles. We are back in the nineties, you can’t believe these people are back.” The last time the Taliban had seized power, in 1996, their reign had begun with relative calm, but they quickly started conducting house raids, making arrests, and inflicting other abuses.
On Monday night, Tahir called me after midnight. He spoke in a whisper because his children were asleep. He had heard that the Taliban were searching homes in Kabul and looking for anyone who had worked with Americans. “I think the Americans are trying to leave Kabul and just take the diplomats,” he said. Just as he had in captivity, he shared with me his anxieties. “I’m strong, you know I am strong,” he said, but he was having trouble sleeping. “I cried so many times. Everyone says we’re left behind. What shall we do?”
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