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On Tuesday, President Donald Trump initiated a trade war with Canada and Mexico, Americas two largest trading partners. Following through on weeks of threats, he imposed 25% tariffs on imported goods from Mexico and Canada and a lower 10% tariff on imports of Canadian energy resources. Leaders in Canada and Mexico quickly struck back. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unveiled an immediate 25% tariff on $20.5 billion worth of goods from the United States and promised to extend the tax to another $85 billion in products in late March. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced she also planned to unveil retaliatory tariffs this coming Sunday. Trumps tariffs, which are widely expected to raise prices for U.S. consumers, are also poised to upend the American electricity market. All U.S. power grids except for Texass have some level of interconnection with grids in Canada, the largest energy supplier to the U.S. Historically, the U.S. has imported roughly twice as much power from Canada as it exports there, though that ratio has started to shift in recent years as climate change-driven drought has slowed the output of hydroelectricity in provinces like Quebec and Ontario. Some 98% of Americas natural gas imports, and 93% of its electricity importsmuch of that from hydroelectric damscome from Canada. Americas reliance on Canadian power is not evenly distributed. Northern energy grids are generally more reliant on Canadas energy resources than southern grids due to their geographic proximity to Canada. States like New York and Minnesota have also entered into energy market agreements with Canadian provinces to receive their hydroelectricity in order to meet ambitious and rapidly approaching climate change goals. From Canadas perspective, withholding or taxing energy exports to the U.S. is an effective bargaining chipperhaps one of the countrys most powerful. I see energy as Canadas queen in this game of chess, Andrew Furey, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, said in January, when Trump had not yet followed through on his threat of Canadian tariffs. Fureys province is one of five that supplies the U.S. with hydropower. On the evening before the tariffs took effect, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, threatened to cut off energy exports to the United States full stop with a smile if Trump continues to target Canada with tariffs. On Tuesday, Ford announced a 25% export tax on power Ontario ships via transmission lines to 1.5 million homes in three statesMichigan, Minnesota, and New Yorkand said a full export ban was still on the table. All three states affected by Ontarios export tax have climate targets on the books that rely in some measure on hydroelectric power. Minnesota, Michigan, and New York all aim to achieve clean electricity grids by 2040. Michigan is relying in large part on its own hydroelectric facilities, but Minnesota and New York are, to varying degrees, dependent on Canada to reach their targets. Experts told Grist its too soon to say what Trumps tariffs, and Fords retaliatory measures, mean for these states climate goalsand their residents. When youre adding unnecessary friction into the market, of course youre going to see price increases, said Daniel A. Zarrilli, who served as chief climate policy adviser to former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Tariffs are going to flow to the consumer, either directly or indirectly. Zarrilli noted that its unclear what those price hikes might look like, and whoratepayers, utilities, or some combination of actorswill shoulder them. The trade war may be felt especially acutely in New York, where developers are extending a transmission line from Quebec all the way to Queens in order to pump much-needed hydroelectric power into New York City. Once the Champlain Hudson Power Express is operational in 2026, New York City is guaranteed hydroelectric power during the summer months. It is not, however, guaranteed that reliable power during the winter. As the state has electrified its power grid, energy demand has been increasing during the cold weather months. New York power grid operators are preparing for demand during the winter to double over the next 30 years. But whether the state gets the hydropower it needs to provide reliable, renewable power during that peak demand now depends on how the trade war plays out. The fallout could be actually catastrophic, said Adrienne Esposito, executive director at the nonprofit Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which has helped push New York City to adopt a climate plan that mirrors the states. It defies logic. This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.
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E-Commerce
Before Donald Trump took office, Memphis-based staff for the environmental advocacy group the Southern Environmental Law Center used a tool called EJScreen to measure air quality in South Memphis. The resource tracked air quality over time, allowing SELC staffers to quantify the cumulative impacts of air pollution in the neighborhood. But when the Trump administration began shutting down federal environmental websites and scrubbing the words climate change from government websites, EJScreen went dark. The disappearance of this resource is just one example of how the SELCs work has been stymied in recent months, according to geospatial analyst Libbie Weimer. In just the first two weeks of his presidency, Trumps administration removed dozens of web pages and datasets from the official sites of the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Council on Environmental Quality, NASA, and others. At the SELCwhich specializes in legal environmental advocacy in the Southmany of those pages were part of the organizations daily efforts to track regional concerns. To address this loss, Weimer and her team have created a guide that preserves archived environmental sites. The guide, published last Friday, includes three main sections: data archives, including suggested places to search for archived raw data, metadata, and scientific papers; a web clone section, which includes links to cloned tools like EJScreen and the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Environmental Justice Index; and a web archive, which guides users through the Wayback Machine to find old pages. The whole guide is underpinned by a searchable list that allows users to quickly find specific lost sites. [Screenshot: FC] Where I work, I serve a staff of over 100 people, plus our dozens of community-based partner organizations across six states, Weimer says. Overnight, those people stopped having access to the information they use on a daily basis to protect the air, water, land, wildlife, and people where they live. The guide is my attempt to reconnect folks to the information and data they need. The guide runs off a website that Weimer maintains by cross-referencing other grassroots lost-site trackers with a list of the sites that are important to her staff. Critically, Weimar notes, shes not the only person tracking the Trump administrations culling of federal environmental web pages: The Data Rescue Tracker, Public Environmental Data Partners, and Climate Change Transparency Project have already embarked on a similar mission. The purpose is simple: We believe that everyone should continue to have access to public information and data, Weimer says. These resources belong to us and were created for the public good.
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E-Commerce
In the second season of Severance, theres an unexpected character: a child supervisor named Miss Huang, who matter-of-factly explains shes a child because of when I was born. Miss Huangs deadpan response is more than just a clever quip. Like so much in the Apple TV+ series, which has broken viewership records for the streaming service, I think it reveals a devastating truth about the role of work in the 21st century. As a scholar of childhood studies, I also see historical echoes: What constitutes a childand whether one gets to claim childhood at allhas always depended on when and where a person is born. An age of innocence? Americans are deeply invested in the idea of childhood as a time of innocence, with kids protected by doting adults from the harsh realities of work and making ends meet. However, French historian Philippe Aris famously argued that childhood, as many understand it today, simply did not exist in the past. Using medieval art as one resource, Aris pointed out that children were often portrayed as miniature adults, without special attributes, such as plump features or silly behaviors, that might mark them as fundamentally different from their older counterparts. Looking at baptism records, Aris also discovered that many parents gave siblings the same name, and he explained this phenomenon by suggesting that devastatingly high child mortality rates prevented parents from investing the sort of love and affection in their children thats now considered a core component of parenthood. While historians have debated many of Ariss specific claims, his central insight remains powerful: Our modern understanding of childhood as a distinct life stage characterized by play, protection, and freedom from adult responsibilities is a relatively recent historical development. Aris argued that children didnt emerge as a focus of unconditional love until the 17th century. Kids at work The belief that a child deserves a life free from the stress of the workplace came along still later. After all, if Miss Huang had been born in the 19th century, few people would question her presence in the workplace. The Industrial Revolution yielded accounts of children working 16-hour days and accorded no special protection because of their tender age and emotional vulnerability. Well into the 20th century, children younger than Miss Huang routinely worked in factories, mines, and other dangerous environments. To todays viewers of Severance, the presence of a child supervisor in the sterile, oppressive workplace of the shows fictional Lumon Industries feels jarring precisely because it violates the deeply held belief that children are occupants of a separate sphere, their innocence shielding them from the dog-eat-dog environs of competitive workplaces. Childhood under threat As a child worker, Miss Huang might seem like an uncanny ghost of a bygone era of childhood. But I think shes closer to a prophet: Her role as child-boss warns viewers about what a work-obsessed future holds. Today, the ideal childhoodaccess to play, care, and a meaningful educationis increasingly under threat. As politicians and policymakers insist that children are the future, many of them refuse to support the intensive caregiving required to transform newborns into functioning adults. As philosopher Nancy Fraser has argued, capitalism relies on someone doing that work, while assigning it little to no monetized value. Child-rearing in the 21st century exists within a troubling paradox: Mothers provide unpaid childcare for their own children, while those who professionally care for others childrenpredominantly women of color and immigrantsreceive meager compensation for this essential work. In other words, economic elites and the politicians they support say they want to cultivate future workers. But they dont want to fund the messy, inefficient, time-consuming process that raising modern children requires. The shows name comes from a severance procedure that workers undergo to separate their work memories from their personal ones. It offers a darkly comic version of work-life balance, with Lumon office workers able to completely disconnect their work selves from their personalities off the clock. Each is distinct: A characters innie is the person they are at the job, and their outtie is who they are at home. I see this as an apt metaphor for how market capitalism seeks to separate the slow, patient work required to raise children and care for other loved ones from the cold-eyed pursuit of economic efficiency. Parents are expected to work as if they dont have children and raise children as if they dont work. The result is a system that makes traditional notions of childhoodwith its unwieldy dependencies, its inefficient play, and its demands for attention and careincreasingly untenable. Capitalisms ideal child Plummeting global fertility rates around the world speak to this crisis in childcare, with the U.S., Europe, South Korea, and China falling well below the birth rate required to replace the existing population. Even as Elon Musk frets about women choosing not to have children, he seems eager to restrict any government aid that would provide the time or resources that raising children requires. Accessible healthcare; affordable, healthy food; and stable housing are out of the reach of many. The current administrations quest for what it calls government efficiency is poised to shred safety net programs that help millions of low-income children. In the midst of this dilemma, Miss Huang offers a surreal solution to the problems children pose in 2025. She is, in many ways, capitalisms ideal child. Already a productive worker as a tween, she requires no parents time, no teachers patience, and no communitys resources. Like other workers and executives at Lumon, she seems to have shed the inefficient entanglements of family, love, and play. In this light, Miss Huangs clever insistence that she is a child because of when I was born is darkly prophetic. In a world where every moment must be productive, where caregiving is systematically devalued, and where human relationships are subordinated to market logic, Miss Huang represents a future where childhood survives only as a date on a birth certificate. All the other attributes are economically impractical. Viewers dont yet know if shes severed. But at least from the perspective of the other workers in the show, Miss Huang works ceaselessly and, in doing so, proves that she is no child at all. Or rather, she is the only kind of child that Americas economic system allows to thrive. Anna Mae Duane is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
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