Read about J. Robert Oppenheimer from a Japanese perspective. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing …

… read about the hard choices to a green sky.

Jet-setting is hardly a new phenomenon, but as the world continues to heat up, the emissions from the overwhelmingly dominant mode of air transportation may ultimately change the speed and distances at which people travel. Writing at Noema, Henry Wismayer surveys the future promises of Green Aviation [[link removed]] and what tech can offer. At the heart of every possible iteration is the balance of lift and propulsion, of the weight in a fuel source versus the power and speed it offers. Airships use fuel more efficiently than any other model and offer vertical landings and launches, but are hobbled by speed; even at 100 mph, they can’t match the immediacy of jet travel. New jet fuels, made from sources other than fossil fuels, could offer lower missions but require deep attention to supply lines, as growing biofuel could mean monocrop orchards displacing better natural carbon sinks. Electric flight relies on batteries, which are awful at trading weight for power, especially in flying machines, though they are trending better. Faced with all this, Wismayer wonders: What will it take for people to forgo flight? Policy possibilities abound, of which new tech is but one option.

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Westbank Grind

Before there were skateparks, skateparks were there. Skater culture transcends nations, and so long as kids can get a good skateboard together and a place to reliably try, fail, and try again, skate culture can take hold. Photographer and skater Maen Hammad has a book of skate photography [[link removed]]coming out later this year, excerpts of which are in N+1 [[link removed]].

“In 2014, I returned to Palestine for the first time in over a decade, to study Arabic. That’s when I stumbled into a group of skaters in the village of Birzeit. Having been an avid skateboarder throughout my childhood and teens, I had lost the touch in college, but it came rushing back to me now. I befriended the skaters in Birzeit and rode with them for hours, days, months,” Hammad writes.

Through family narrative, as well as photographs and scenes of skaters in Palestine today, Hammad weaves together a portrait of a community that turns the built environment around them, oppressive in many ways, into a terrain for exploration.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Cluster bluster

Imagined Coalitions

On July 23, 2023, Spanish voters went to the polls and delivered a curious result: A large vote share for the right-wing party, but insufficiently large to allow it to form a governing coalition in parliament on its own. That makes the victory an upset for Spain’s socialist Left. The Left is already in power but has its work cut out because it needs to secure a coalition. The good news is that unlike the right-wing parties, the Left has an expansive enough vision of the Spanish nation to include Basque and Catalan nationalist parties that the far-right wants to make illegal, which should help with coalition-building.

“These nationalist parties will be key to whether Sánchez will continue as prime minister. The narrow electoral math means that he will need to secure support from the center-right Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia), led by former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, who has been living in exile since his region’s failed bid at independence in 2017,” write Bécquer Seguín and Sebastiaan Faber for The Nation [[link removed]].

Coalition-building is hard work, and governing from the left in Spain will prove tricky even with a coalition, but part of what secured this hold on power was the popular revolution against the idea of the far-right party Vox being part of the governing coalition.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Burying The Lead: Part I

Lead is abundant and, when ingested or inhaled, harmful, especially to children. While leaded gasoline is now banned across the globe, lead-acid batteries are an integral part of most road vehicles. It can also be found in pigments, paints, ammunition, toys, and more. Lead pipes, or even pipes soldered together with lead, can also deliver the toxic metal to people. The health impacts of lead are many and well-documented [[link removed]], but a new paper examines if exposure to lead is enough to explain massive differences in educational attainment across the globe.

In “ How Much Would Reducing Lead Exposure Improve Children’s Learning in the Developing World [[link removed]]?,” authors Lee Crawfurd, Rory Todd, Susannah Hares, Justin Sandefur, and Rachel Silverman look to establish a connection between blood lead levels and performance on IQ tests, as well as standardized tests.

“In a simple model of global learning gaps, this effect size is sufficient to suggest that observed lead levels explain over half of the gap in learning outcomes between developing and developed countries,” write the authors before caveating that reality is more complex than simple models.

Still, the overall effect of lead on test scores is staggering, and the impact of eliminating lead exposure, especially to children, could have outsized returns for literacy and numeracy, especially in poor countries. The researchers examined observed blood lead levels (measured in micrograms per deciliter or 0.5μg/dL) as compared to the World Bank’s Harmonized Learning Outcomes score.

“As an example, the lowest scoring country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, lies 250 points below the global mean of 500, and reducing BLL to 0.5μg/dL would improve scores by 29 points,” write the authors. “On average for these 34 countries, reducing BLL to US levels improves learning by 23 points, equivalent to 21 percent of the 110 point learning gap to the global benchmark of 500 points on the World Bank scale.”

Such sizable gaps suggest even a modest reduction in lead exposure could be meaningful and have a massive return on investment. The end of leaded gasoline also helps. Other actions include cleanup of deeply polluted sites, soil remediation, household cleaning, paint remediation, and the end of leaded pipes. Some of these interventions have already yielded results, like lead paint remediation in the United States and soil capping in Bangladesh.

“Targeted environmental interventions, such as soil remediation in highly polluted areas, have shown large reductions in blood lead levels. However, such interventions are costly and we have limited evidence from developing countries,” write the authors in a companion blog post [[link removed]]. “Educational interventions, such as providing information and advice to parents on reducing lead exposure, have led to reasonable reductions in blood lead levels in some countries. Medical interventions, particularly calcium supplementation, have also shown promising results in some contexts.”

Rather than treat this kind of intervention as pie-in-the-sky, the authors point to the successful elimination of lead from high-income countries and conclude, “It’s been done. It’s fairly cheap. And a handful of simple policies could go part way to closing the learning gaps between rich and poor countries.”

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Emily Haavik surveyed [[link removed]] the diminishing bogs of Germany's Black Forest, where the loss of biodiversity takes a trained eye to spot. One such example is the greening of told bog spots, where trees fill what was once a wetland. “Most people think, ‘Wow, yeah, it’s a good sign,’” Thomas Sperle told Haavik. “Because if something gets greener, we have less concrete and more nature. Colorful meadows have disappeared. Less colorful flowers mean you have less pollinators.” Summer heat is the likely culprit, as it ruins microclimates that once supported niche species in favor of adaptable generalists.

Raimy Khalife-Hamdan decried [[link removed]] the US decision to suspend food aid to Ethiopia. The suspension came about, according to USAID head Samantha Power, to prevent the aid from being diverted into local markets. “Local news outlets like Tigrai Television [[link removed]] reported an immediate increase in starvation-caused deaths in children under five years of age across Tigray after the start of the suspension,” explained Khalife-Hamdan. Even when aid is diverted to the market, the abundance of supply undercuts local prices and allows more folk to get food. Suspension, instead, cruelly exacerbates scarcity.

Daniel Ofman interviewed [[link removed]] the team of Russian journalists attempting to catalog the country’s war dead. Since Russia launched its full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it has offered only an official tally of under 6,000 Russians killed. The journalists and researchers told Ofman they estimate it to be at least 47,000. “There are volunteers who are going to cemeteries, taking photos of graves. On the grave, you see the dates and then you see a photo in a military uniform, and then it’s pretty obvious that this person died in the war,” Mika Golubovsky, a Lithuania-based journalist with Mediazona, told Ofman.

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A quick programming note on the well-played section. X, the site owned by Elon Musk and formerly known as Twitter, is increasingly managed in a way that is unsafe for users. Most recently, this came to light when Musk personally intervened [[link removed]] to restore an account that had posted upsetting and illegal imagery. Safeguards against the upload of such imagery [[link removed]] appear to be missing from the site. This is normally the part of the newsletter where I tell jokes, riffing on the news of the week as seen on Twitter, which is one of the joys of producing and sharing Critical State. However, given the refusal of the company to maintain basic and vital safeguards, I feel uncomfortable directing anyone to the site once and probably still known as Twitter.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL-PLAYED

It’s weird how these UFOs keep being spotted in the same designated airspace the US Air Force likes to fly in. [[link removed]]

Powerpoint’s greatest victim may be the well-constructed military slide [[link removed]].

What part of the climate emergency is it when buried power cables melt [[link removed]]?

The Leopard 2 tank’s expandable crow’s nest lets the tank cross streams, but it has an even greater effect by baffling enemies on the battlefield who are now fighting a giraffe-tank [[link removed]].

PEPFAR is almost universally recognized as the one unequivocally good thing George W. Bush did in foreign policy, so of course reactionaries have it on the chopping block [[link removed]].

Twitter lived long enough to become a vital climate disaster infrastructure, so of course it’s collapsing with nothing to replace it [[link removed]].

Life, it never die / women are my favorite guy [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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