2808. On the Origins of Dogs: The First Domesticated Animal

By Ed Yong, The Atlantic, June 2, 2016

Tens of thousands of years ago, before the internet, before the Industrial Revolution, before literature and mathematics, bronze and iron, before the advent of agriculture, early humans formed an unlikely partnership with another animal—the grey wolf. The fates of our two species became braided together. The wolves changed in body and temperament. Their skulls, teeth, and paws shrank. Their ears flopped. They gained a docile disposition, becoming both less frightening and less fearful. They learned to read the complex expressions that ripple across human faces. They turned into dogs.

Today, dogs are such familiar parts of our lives—our reputed best friends and subject of many a meme—that it’s easy to take them, and what they represent, for granted. Dogs were the first domesticated animals, and their barks heralded the Anthropocene. We raised puppies well before we raised kittens or chickens; before we herded cows, goats, pigs, and sheep; before we planted rice, wheat, barley, and corn; before we remade the world.

“Remove domestication from the human species, and there’s probably a couple of million of us on the planet, max,” says archaeologist and geneticist Greger Larson. “Instead, what do we have? Seven billion people, climate change, travel, innovation and everything. Domestication has influenced the entire earth. And dogs were the first.” For most of human history, “we’re not dissimilar to any other wild primate. We’re manipulating our environments, but not on a scale bigger than, say, a herd of African elephants. And then, we go into partnership with this group of wolves. They altered our relationship with the natural world.”

Larson wants to pin down their origins. He wants to know when, where, and how they were domesticated from wolves. But after decades of dogged effort, he and his fellow scientists are still arguing about the answers. They agree that all dogs, from low-slung corgis to towering mastiffs, are the tame descendants of wild ancestral wolves. But everything else is up for grabs.

Some say wolves were domesticated around 10,000 years ago, while others say 30,000. Some claim it happened in Europe, others in the Middle East, or East Asia. Some think early human hunter-gatherers actively tamed and bred wolves. Others say wolves domesticated themselves, by scavenging the carcasses left by human hunters, or loitering around campfires, growing tamer with each generation until they became permanent companions.

Dogs were domesticated so long ago, and have cross-bred so often with wolves and each other, that their genes are like “a completely homogenous bowl of soup,” Larson tells me, in his office at the University of Oxford. “Somebody goes: what ingredients were added, in what proportion and in what order, to make that soup?” He shrugs his shoulders. “The patterns we see could have been created by 17 different narrative scenarios, and we have no way of discriminating between them.”

The only way of doing so is to look into the past. Larson, who is fast-talking, eminently likable, and grounded in both archaeology and genetics, has been gathering fossils and collaborators in an attempt to yank the DNA out of as many dog and wolf fossils as he can. Those sequences will show exactly how the ancient canines relate to each other and to modern pooches. They’re the field’s best hope for getting firm answers to questions that have hounded them for decades.

And already, they have yielded a surprising discovery that could radically reframe the debate around dog domestication, so that the big question is no longer when it happened, or where, but how many times.

*    *   *

On the eastern edge of Ireland lies Newgrange, a 4,800-year-old monument that predates Stonehenge and the pyramids of Giza. Beneath its large circular mound and within its underground chambers lie many fragments of animal bones. And among those fragments, Dan Bradley from Trinity College Dublin found the petrous bone of a dog.

Press your finger behind your ear. That’s the petrous. It’s a bulbous knob of very dense bone that’s exceptionally good at preserving DNA. If you try to pull DNA out of a fossil, most of it will come from contaminating microbes and just a few percent will come from the bone’s actual owner. But if you’ve got a petrous bone, that proportion can be as high as 80 percent. And indeed, Bradley found DNA galore within the bone, enough to sequence the full genome of the long-dead dog.

Larson and his colleague Laurent Frantz then compared the Newgrange sequences with those of almost 700 modern dogs, and built a family tree that revealed the relationships between these individuals. To their surprise, that tree had an obvious fork in its trunk—a deep divide between two doggie dynasties. One includes all the dogs from eastern Eurasia, such as Shar Peis and Tibetan mastiffs. The other includes all the western Eurasian breeds, and the Newgrange dog.

The genomes of the dogs from the western branch suggest that they went through a population bottleneck—a dramatic dwindling of numbers. Larson interprets this as evidence of a long migration. He thinks that the two dog lineages began as a single population in the east, before one branch broke off and headed west. This supports the idea that dogs were domesticated somewhere in China.

But there’s a critical twist.

The team calculated that the two dog dynasties split from each other between 6,400 and 14,000 years ago.  But the oldest dog fossils in both western and eastern Eurasia are older than that. Which means that when those eastern dogs migrated west into Europe, there were already dogs there.

To Larson, these details only make sense if dogs were domesticated twice.

Here’s the full story, as he sees it. Many thousands of years ago, somewhere in western Eurasia, humans domesticated grey wolves. The same thing happened independently, far away in the east. So, at this time, there were two distinct and geographically separated groups of dogs. Let’s call them Ancient Western and Ancient Eastern. Around the Bronze Age, some of the Ancient Eastern dogs migrated westward alongside their human partners, separating from their homebound peers and creating the deep split in Larson’s tree. Along their travels, these migrants encountered the indigenous Ancient Western dogs, mated with them (doggy style, presumably), and effectively replaced them.

Today’s eastern dogs are the descendants of the Ancient Eastern ones. But today’s western dogs (and the Newgrange one) trace most of their ancestry to the Ancient Eastern migrants. Less than 10 percent comes from the Ancient Western dogs, which have since gone extinct.

This is a bold story for Larson to endorse, not least because he himself has come down hard on other papers suggesting that cows, sheep, or other species were domesticated twice. “Any claims for more than one need to be substantially backed up by a lot of evidence,” he says. “Pigs were clearly domesticated in Anatolia and in East Asia. Everything else is once.” Well, except maybe dogs.

Other canine genetics experts think that Larson’s barking up the wrong tree. “I’m somewhat underwhelmed, since it’s based on a single specimen,” says Bob Wayne from the University of California, Los Angeles. He buys that there’s a deep genetic division between modern dogs. But, it’s still possible that dogs were domesticated just once, creating a large, widespread, interbreeding population that only later resolved into two distinct lineages.

In 2013, Wayne’s team compared the mitochondrial genomes (small rings of DNA that sit outside the main set) of 126 modern dogs and wolves, and 18 fossils. They concluded that dogs were domesticated somewhere in Europe or western Siberia, between 18,800 and 32,100 years ago. And genes aside, “the density of fossils from Europe tells us something,” says Wayne. “There are many things that look like dogs, and nothing quite like that in east Asia.”

Peter Savolainen from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm disagrees. By comparing the full genomes of 58 modern wolves and dogs, his team has shown that dogs in southern China are the most genetically diverse in the world. They must have originated there around 33,000 years ago, he says, before a subset of them migrated west 18,000 years later.

That’s essentially the same story that Larson is telling. The key difference is that Savolainen doesn’t buy the existence of an independently domesticated group of western dogs. “That’s stretching the data very much,” he says. Those Ancient Western dogs might have just been wolves, he says. Or perhaps they were an even earlier group of migrants from the east. “I think the picture must seem a bit chaotic,” he says understatedly. “But for me, it’s pretty clear. It must have happened in southern East Asia. You can’t interpret it any other way.”

Except, you totally can. Wayne does (“I’m certainly less dogmatic than Peter,” he says). Adam Boyko from Cornell University does, too: after studying the genes of village dogs—free-ranging mutts that live near human settlements—he argued for a single domestication in Central Asia, somewhere near India or Nepal. And clearly, Larson does as well.

Larson adds that his gene-focused peers are ignoring one crucial line of evidence—bones. If dogs originated just once, there should be a neat gradient of fossils with the oldest ones at the center of domestication and the youngest ones far away from it. That’s not what we have. Instead, archaeologists have found 15,000-year-old dog fossils in western Europe, 12,500-year-old ones in east Asia, and nothing older than 8,000 years in between.

“If we’re wrong, then how on earth do you explain the archaeological data?” says Larson. “Did dogs jump from East Asia to Western Europe in a week, and then go all the way back 4,000 years later?” No. A dual domestication makes more sense. Mietje Genompré, an archaeologist from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, agrees that the bones support Larson’s idea. “For me, it’s very convincing,” she says.

But even Larson is hedging his bets. When I ask him how strong his evidence is, he says, “Like, put a number on it? If was being bold, I’d say it’s a 7 out of 10. We lack the smoking gun.”

Why is this so hard? Of all the problems that scientists struggle with, why has the origin of dogs been such a bitch to solve?

For starters, the timing is hard to pin down because no one knows exactly how fast dog genomes change. That pace—the mutation rate—underpins a lot of genetic studies. It allows scientists to compare modern dogs and ask: How long ago must these lineages have diverged in order to build up this many differences in their genes? And since individual teams use mutation rate estimates that are wildly different, it’s no wonder they’ve arrived at conflicting answers.

Regardless of the exact date, it’s clear that over thousands of years, dogs have mated with each other, cross-bred with wolves, travelled over the world, and been deliberately bred by humans. The resulting ebb and flow of genes has turned their history into a muddy, turbid mess—the homogeneous soup that Larson envisages.

Wolves provide no clarity. Grey wolves used to live across the entire Northern Hemisphere, so they could have potentially been domesticated anywhere within that vast range (although North America is certainly out). What’s more, genetic studies tell us that no living group of wolves is more closely related to dogs than any other, which means that the wolves that originally gave rise to dogs are now extinct. Sequencing living wolves and dogs will never truly reveal their shrouded past; it’d be, as Larson says, like trying to solve a crime when the culprit isn’t even on the list of suspects.

“The only way to know for sure is to go back in time,” he adds.

The study informally known as the Big Dog Project was born of frustration. Back in 2011, Larson was working hard on the origin of domestic pigs, and became annoyed that scientists studying dogs were getting less rigorous papers in more prestigious journals, simply because their subjects were that much more charismatic and media-friendly. So he called up his longstanding collaborator Keith Dobney. “Through gritted teeth, I said: We’re fucking doing dogs. And he said: I’m in.”

Right from the start, the duo realized that studying living dogs would never settle the great domestication debate. The only way to do that was to sequence ancient DNA from fossil dogs and wolves, throughout their range and at different points in history. While other scientists were studying the soup of dog genetics by tasting the finished product, Larson would reach back in time to taste it at every step of its creation, allowing him to definitively reconstruct the entire recipe.

In recent decades, scientists have become increasingly successful at extracting and sequencing strands of DNA from fossils. This ancient DNA has done wonders for our understanding of our own evolution. It showed, for example, how Europe was colonized 40,000 years ago by hunter-gatherers moving up from Africa, then 8,000 years ago by Middle Eastern farmers, and 5,000 years ago by horse-riding herders from the Russian steppes. “Everyone in Europe today is a blend of those three populations,” says Larson, who hopes to parse the dog genome in the same way, by slicing it into its constituent ingredients.

Larson originally envisaged a small project—just him and Dobney analyzing a few fossils. But he got more funding, collaborators, and samples than he expected. “It just kind of metastasized out of all proportion,” he says. He and his colleagues would travel the world, drilling into fossils and carting chips of bone back to Oxford. They went to museums and private collections. (“There was a guy up in York who had a ton of stuff in his garage.”) They grabbed bones from archaeological sites.

The pieces of bone come back to a facility in Oxford called the Palaeo-BARN—the Palaeogenomics and Bioarchaeology Research Network. When I toured the facility with Larson, we wore white overalls, surgical masks, oversoles, and purple gloves, to keep our DNA (and that of our skin microbes) away from the precious fossil samples. Larson called them ‘spacesuits.’ I was thinking ‘thrift-store ninja.’

In one room, the team shoves pieces of bone into a machine that pounds it with a small ball bearing, turning solid shards into fine powder. They then send the powder through a gauntlet of chemicals and filters to pull out the DNA and get rid of everything else. The result is a tiny drop of liquid that contains the genetic essence of a long-dead dog or wolf. Larson’s freezer contains 1,500 such drops, and many more are on the way. “It’s truly fantastic the kind of data that he has gathered,” says Savolainen.

True to his roots in archaeology, Larson isn’t ignoring the bones. His team photographed the skulls of some 7,000 prehistoric dogs and wolves at 220 angles each, and rebuilt them in virtual space. They can use a technique called geometric morphometrics to see how different features on the skulls have evolved over time.

The two lines of evidence—DNA and bones—should either support or refute the double domestication idea. It will also help to clear some confusion over a few peculiar fossils, such as a 36,000 year old skull from Goyet cave in Belgium. Genompré thinks it’s a primitive dog. “It falls outside the variability of wolves: it’s smaller and the snout is different,” she says. Others say it’s too dissimilar to modern dogs. Wayne has suggested that it represents an aborted attempt at domestication—a line of dogs that didn’t contribute to modern populations and is now extinct.

Maybe the Goyet hound was part of Larson’s hypothetical Ancient Western group, domesticated shortly after modern humans arrived in Europe. Maybe it represented yet another separate flirtation with domestication. All of these options are on the table, and Larson thinks he has the data to tell them apart. “We can start putting numbers on the difference between dogs and wolves,” he says. “We can say this is what all the wolves at this time period look like; does the Goyet material fall within that realm, or does it look like dogs from later on?”

Larson hopes to have the first big answers within six to twelve months. “I think it’ll clearly show that some things can’t be right, and will narrow down the number of hypotheses,” says Boyko. “It may narrow it down to one but I’m not holding my breath on that.” Wayne is more optimistic. “Ancient DNA will provide much more definitive data than we had in the past,” he says. “[Larson] convinced everyone of that. He’s a great diplomat.”

Indeed, beyond accumulating DNA and virtual skulls, Larson’s greatest skill is in gathering collaborators. In 2013, he rounded up as many dog researchers as he could and flew them to Aberdeen, so he could get them talking. “I won’t say there was no tension,” he says. “You go into a room with someone who has written something that sort of implies you aren’t doing very good science... there will be tension. But it went away very quickly. And, frankly: alcohol.”

“Everyone was like: You know what? If I’m completely wrong and I have to eat crow on this, I don’t give a shit. I just want to know.”

2807. U.K. Appoints a Minister for Loneliness

By Ceylan Yeginsu, The New York Times, January 17, 2018

LONDON — Since Britain voted to leave the European Union more than a year ago, Europeans have mockingly said that the decision will result in an isolated, lonely island nation.

But Britain, in fact, already has a serious problem with loneliness, research has found. More than nine million people in the country often or always feel lonely, according to a 2017 report published by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness.

The issue prompted Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday to appoint a minister for loneliness.

“For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life,” Mrs. May said in a statement.

“I want to confront this challenge for our society and for all of us to take action to address the loneliness endured by the elderly, by carers, by those who have lost loved ones — people who have no one to talk to or share their thoughts and experiences with.”

Mark Robinson, the chief officer of Age UK, Britain’s largest charity working with older people, warned that the problem could kill.

“It’s proven to be worse for health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, but it can be overcome and needn’t be a factor in older people’s lives,” he said.

A former United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review last year arguing that loneliness needed addressing in the workplace.

It can be associated, he wrote, “with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression and anxiety.”

The British report was commissioned by the Red Cross in partnership with the Co-op, a cooperative supermarket chain, and published by the Cox commission in December.

The group operates in memory of Ms. Cox, 41, a Labour Party lawmaker who was shot dead by a right-wing extremist in 2016, and who had been a prominent voice in Parliament on the issue, setting up a cross-party commission that aimed to start a The prime minister announced on Wednesday that Tracey Crouch, who is the under secretary for sport and civil society in the culture ministry, would lead a governmentwide group to build on Ms. Cox’s legacy and establish policies on the issue.

In parallel, the Office for National Statistics would help to establish a method of measuring loneliness, and a fund would be set up to help the government and charities to develop a wider strategy to identify opportunities to tackle the problem.

The Cox commission, led by the lawmakers Rachel Reeves and Seema Kennedy, said it welcomed the government’s “prompt response” to its report.

Quoting Ms. Cox, the lawmakers said in a joint statement, “Young or old, loneliness doesn’t discriminate.”

“Throughout 2017 we have heard from new parents, children, disabled people, carers, refugees and older people about their experience of loneliness,” they added.

Government research has found that about 200,000 older people in Britain had not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month.

Carol Jenkins, 64, a retired nurse from Berkshire, in southwest England, said she started to feel lonely when her son moved abroad and she downsized to a smaller house in a different county.

“It was a financial decision to move, and I didn’t really have it in me to start making new friends,” Ms. Jenkins recalled on Wednesday in a phone interview. “Months would go by without seeing my friends or family, and I felt really depressed and alone.”

Ms. Jenkins has since joined a Facebook group for Britons affected by loneliness, which, she says, has helped her to get out of the house more.

“It’s not so much about meeting people on the internet and making new friends, but it’s more of a motivational support network that gives you direction on how to cope and fix the problem,” she said, adding that she was surprised by how many young people had joined the group.

“There are so many university students who just lock themselves in their rooms for days because they feel rejected or that they don’t fit in,” Ms. Jenkins said. “It’s only a matter of time before loneliness turns into depression. And that’s where it gets dangerous.”

2806. New Research Dispels the Myth That Ancient Cultures Had Universally Short Lifespans

By Mika McKinnon, smithsonian.com, January 15, 2018 

The truth is in the teeth. Photo: iStock/Drbouz. 

After examining the graves of over 300 people buried in Anglo Saxon English cemeteries between 475 and 625 AD, archaeologist Christine Cave of the Australian National University made a discovery that might surprise you. She found that several of the bodies in the burial grounds were over 75 years old when they died.

Cave has developed a new technique for estimating the age that people died based on how worn their teeth are​. The work is dispelling myths that ancient cultures had universally short lifespans, Stephanie Dalzell reports for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

 “Teeth are wonderful things. They can tell us so much about a person, they are simply marvelous,” Cave tells Dalzell.

While archeologists have long been able to estimate the age at time of death for younger people based on their skeletal development, techniques for dating older people have been inconsistent. “When you are determining the age of children you use developmental points like tooth eruption or the fusion of bones that all happen at a certain age,” Cave explains in a statement released by the university. But because the degradation from aging impacts skeletons in such a diverse range of ways, it’s harder to come up with a single universal comparison point.

“We normally just lump our age of death estimates into young, middle-aged, and old adult categories,” biological anthropologist Justyna Miskiewicz tells Dalzell of ABC.  This can result in lumping anyone over 40 into a single group. 

Over at “Bones Don’t Lie,” the blog of anthropologist Kathryn Meyers Emery, she highlights why that’s such a problem and calls attention to a 2011 paper authored by C. G. Falys and M. E. Lewis, published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, which points to the lack of international standards for the analysis of remains in bioarchaeology.

Caves hopes to use her technique to further investigate elderly populations in historical cultures, particularly debunking the persistent myth that most people died before their 40th birthday during the Middle Ages. “I want to examine the invisible elderly — that’s what I call them — people who don’t get noticed in most cemetery reports,” she says, instead of just those with unusual pathology indicating they required special care.

2805. Cape Town Is 90 Days Away From Running Out of Water

By Aryn Baker, Time Magazine, January 15, 2018

Tap water is predicated to run out by April 29, 2018

After three years of unprecedented drought, the South African city of Cape Town has less than 90 days worth of water in its reservoirs, putting it on track to be the first major city in the world to run out of water. Unless residents drastically cut down on daily use, warns Cape Town Mayor Patricia De Lille, taps in the seaside metropolis of four million will soon run dry. On April 22, to be exact. Here’s what to know:

The date is just a scare tactic, surely?

Nope. Day Zero, as it is called, is real, and is calculated every week based on current reservoir capacity and daily consumption. On Jan. 8 Mayor De Lille revised the date down from April 29, based on a citywide uptick in daily usage. The city won’t literally run dry; in most cases, reservoirs can’t be drained to the last drop, as silt and debris make the last 10% of a dam’s water unusable. City authorities have decided that once the dams reach 13.5% capacity, municipal water supply will be turned off for all but essential services, like hospitals.

What happens when the taps are turned off?

Cape Town enters Mad Max territory (well, almost). Residents will have to go to one of some 200 municipal water points throughout the city where they can collect a maximum of 25 liters (6.6 gallons) a day. Armed guards will be standing by to keep the peace and prevent anyone from taking more than their share. Of course, the truly wealthy will be protected. The local version of Craigslist is already full of listings for companies wiling to truck in tankers full of water from less drought-prone parts of the country, for a price.

What steps are residents taking?

The city has capped household water usage at 87 liters (23 gallons) per person, per day. For most homes, that means keeping showers under 2 minutes, no watering the garden or washing the car, refraining from flushing the toilet unless absolutely necessary, recycling bathing water where possible and severely limiting dishwasher and washing machine use. Water storage tanks are already on backorder, unwashed hair is now a symbol of upright citizenship, and public restrooms are festooned with admonishments to “let it mellow.”

Are the self-imposed limits working?

Not really. According to city statistics, only 54% of residents are hitting their target, one of the reasons why Day Zero was moved forward a week earlier this year. But the city has few options for punishing individual water abusers and ensuring compliance, so everyone pays the price.

Didn’t anyone see this coming?

Yes and no. City planners have long pointed out that Cape Town’s water capacity hasn’t kept up with population growth, which has nearly doubled over the past 20 years. Still, a three-year drought on this scale is a “once a millennium” event, say climatologists, and even the best-planned water system would have taken a hit under current conditions. Now the city is playing catch up, hastily (and expensively) installing desalination plants and looking into groundwater extraction. But it’s unlikely any of those systems will be brought online before Day Zero, or even before the rainy season is due to start up again in May (if indeed it does). These systems are unlikely to go to waste, however. Climate change researchers predict more frequent dry years and fewer wet years to come. More likely, they say, Capetonians are just getting a preview of the new normal.

2804. Bitcoin and Climate Change

By Nathaniel Popper, The New York Times, January 21, 2018

An employee at a Bitmain facility in Inner Mongolia, one of the biggest Bitcoin farms in the world. Photo: Giulia Marchi for The New New York Times. 

SAN FRANCISCO — Creating a new Bitcoin requires electricity. A lot of it.

In the virtual currency world this creation process is called “mining.” There is no physical digging, since Bitcoins are purely digital. But the computer power needed to create each digital token consumes at least as much electricity as the average American household burns through in two years, according to figures from Morgan Stanley and Alex de Vries, an economist who tracks energy use in the industry.

The total network of computers plugged into the Bitcoin network consumes as much energy each day as some medium-size countries — which country depends on whose estimates you believe. And the network supporting Ethereum, the second-most valuable virtual currency, gobbles up another country’s worth of electricity each day.

The energy consumption of these systems has risen as the prices of virtual currencies have skyrocketed, leading to a vigorous debate among Bitcoin and Ethereum enthusiasts about burning so much electricity.

The creator of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is leading an experiment with a more energy-efficient way to create tokens, in part because of his concern about the impact that the network’s electricity use could have on global warming.

“I would personally feel very unhappy if my main contribution to the world was adding Cyprus’s worth of electricity consumption to global warming,” Mr. Buterin said in an interview.

But many virtual currency aficionados argue that the energy consumption is worth it for the grander cause of securing the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks and making a new kind of financial infrastructure, free from the meddling of banks or governments.

“The electricity usage is really essential,” said Peter Van Valkenburgh, the director of research at Coin Center, a group that advocates for virtual currency technology. “Because of the costs, we know the only people participating are serious, that they are economically invested. That creates the incentives for cooperation.”

This dispute has its foundations in the complex systems that produce tokens like Bitcoin; Ether, the currency on the Ethereum network; and many other new virtual currencies.

All of the computers trying to mine tokens are in a computational race, trying to find a particular, somewhat random answer to a math algorithm. The algorithm is so complicated that the only way to find the desired answer is to make lots of different guesses. The more guesses a computer makes, the better its chances of winning. But each time the computers try new guesses, they use computational power and electricity.

The lure of new Bitcoins encourages people to use lots of fast computers, and lots of electricity, to find the right answer and unlock the new Bitcoins that are distributed every 10 minutes or so.

This process was defined by the original Bitcoin software, released in 2009. The goal was to distribute new coins to people on the Bitcoin network without a central institution handing out the money.

Early on, it was possible to win the contest with just a laptop computer. But the rules of the network dictate that as more computers join in the race, the algorithm automatically adjusts to get harder, requiring anyone who wants to compete to use more computers and more electricity.

These days, the 12.5 Bitcoins that are handed out every 10 minutes or so are worth about $145,000, so people have been willing to invest astronomical sums to participate in this race, which has in turn made the race harder. This explains why there are now enormous server farms around the world dedicated to mining Bitcoin.

This process is central to Bitcoin’s existence because in the process of mining, all the computers are also serving as accountants for the Bitcoin network. The algorithm the computers solve requires them to also keep track of all the new transactions coming onto the network.

The mining race is meant to be hard so that no one can dominate the accounting and fudge the records. In the 2008 paper that first described Bitcoin, the mysterious creator of the virtual currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, wrote that the system was designed to thwart a “greedy attacker” who might want to alter the records and “defraud people by stealing back his payments.” Because of the mining and accounting rules, the attacker “ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules.”

The rules have kept attackers at bay in the nine years since the network got going. Without this process, most computer scientists agree, Bitcoin would not work.

But there is disagreement over the real value of Bitcoin and the network that supports it.

For people who consider Bitcoin nothing more than a speculative bubble — or a speculative bubble that has enabled online drug sales and ransom payments — any new contribution toward global warming is probably not worth it.

But Bitcoin aficionados counter that it has allowed for the creation of the first financial network with no government or company in charge. In countrie like Zimbabwe  and 
Argentina, Bitcoin has sometimes provided a more stable place to park money than the local currency. And in countries with more stable economies, Bitcoin has led to a flurry of new investments, jobs and start-up companies.

“Labeling Bitcoin mining as a ‘waste’ is a failure to look at the big picture,” Marc Bevand, a miner and analyst, wrote on his blog. The jobs alone, he added, “are a direct, measurable and positive impact that Bitcoin already made on the economy.”

But even some people who are interested in all that innovation have worried about the enormous electrical use.

Mr. de Vries, who keeps track of the use on the site Digiconomist, estimated that each Bitcoin transaction currently required 80,000 times more electricity to process than each Visa credit card transaction, for example.

“Visa is more centralized,” Mr. de Vries said. “If you really distrust the financial system, maybe that is unattractive. But is that difference really worth the additional energy cost? I think for most people that is probably not worth the case.”

The figures published by Mr. de Vries have been criticized by Mr. Bevandand other Bitcoin fans, who say they overstate the energy costs by a factor of about three. Many critics add that producing and securing physical money and gold also require lots of energy, in some cases as much as or more than Bitcoin uses.

Mr. Van Valkenburgh, of the Coin Center, has argued that Bitcoin miners, who can do the work anywhere, have an incentive to situate themselves near cheap, often green energy sources, especially now that coal-guzzling China appears to be exiting the mining business. Several mining companies have opened server farms near geothermal energy in Iceland and hydroelectric power in Washington State.

But the concerns about electricity use have still hit home with many in the industry. The virtual currencies known as Ripple and Stellar, which were created after Bitcoin, were designed not to require electrically demanding mining.

Perhaps the biggest change could come from the new mining process proposed by Mr. Buterin for Ethereum, a process that some smaller currencies are already using. Known as “proof of stake,” it distributes new coins to people who are able to prove their ownership of existing coins — their stake in the system. The current method, which relies so heavily on computational power, is called “proof of work.” Under that method, the accounts and people who get new coins don’t need existing tokens. They just need lots of computers to take part in the computational race.

Energy concerns are not the only factor encouraging the move. Mr. Buterin also believes that the new method, which is likely to be rolled out over the next year, will allow for a less centralized network of computers overseeing the system.

But it is far from clear that the method will be as secure as the one used by Bitcoin. Mr. Buterin has been fiercely attacked by Bitcoin advocates, who say his proposal will lose the qualities that make virtual currencies valuable.

Mr. Van Valkenburgh said that for now, throwing lots of computing power into the mix — and the electricity that it burns — was the only proven solution to the problems Bitcoin solves.

“At the moment, if you want robust security, you need proof of work,” he said.

2803. Cape Town Water Wars: A Literal Shitstorm

By Sharmini Periers and Patrick Bond, The Real News, January 18, 2018

SHARMINI PERIES: It's The Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore.

Cape Town, South Africa. It is on the brink of running out of water. Historically, Cape Town a port city situated in a natural bowl to catch the fresh rainwater, was recognized for its lush, green vegetation. But for a few decades now it has been suffering from water shortages, and now it is gripped by the worst drought in a century.

Residents will have to queue for emergency rations, come April. Dam levels fell below 30 percent in the first week of this year. If it hits 13.5 percent, then residents will have to queue for their water collection at many points. Some 200 sites may have to be set up across the city.

Mainstream media has picked up this story, as Cape Town is the world's first major city to run out of water; but what they are not talking about is the drought's link to climate change. With us to discuss all of this from Johannesburg, South Africa, is Patrick Bond. He is professor of Political Economy at Wits University in South Africa, and author of Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis from Above, Movement from Below, and co-editor of BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique.

Welcome, Patrick.

PATRICK BOND: Great to be with you again, Sharmini. Thanks.

SHARMINI PERIES: Patrick, the water shortages in Cape Town appears to be a slow moving environmental disaster that Cape Town has been unable to prevent. What is causing this crisis?

PATRICK BOND: It's certainly the amplification of all of these weather vectors that have brought the whole country into a drought situation. Most of the country did recover about a year ago, but we had a two-year drought that left rural areas devastated and then there were major storm events. As you say, Cape Town's been suffering a creeping drought, but we've had unbelievable storms that have wrecked huge swaths of the infrastructure in Johannesburg here, as well as in the port city of Durban.

All three of the major cities between about three and a half million people in Durban, four million in Cape Town, a little over four million here in Johannesburg ... What they've really shown, these storm events and the drought, is how unprepared major cities in a fairly sophisticated economy, which is a major greenhouse gas emitter, not only therefore is a villain, but also a victim. The inability of the city of Cape Town --and they're run by a center-right government, not the African National Congress but the Democratic Alliance -- their inability to manage this and to run a mitigation and adaptation program that would work may well cost the mayor her job. Patricia De Lille is on the verge of being kicked out of the mayorship by her own party, and the water crisis and its mismanagement is the central reason.

As you say, Sharmini, it does mean for "Day Zero" as it's called -- April 20 is now the predicted date at which there won't be water in the residents' taps -- they'll have to start queuing up in just 200 water collection points, for those four million people. It may well be quite a disastrous situation, particularly given the water apartheid that Cape Town has inherited from centuries ... Since 1652 when Dutch settlers arrived with the Dutch East India Company. This is really a city in which white people have taken vast amounts of water for the English gardens or swimming pools, leaving the Africans and colored people without sufficient water, and now the chickens are coming home to roost for everyone.

SHARMINI PERIES: Patrick, this is not only a war and a crisis, but a slow-moving economic crisis and also a pending food shortage crisis. Elaborate on this for us.

PATRICK BOND: Well, there's quite an interesting debate and it's, as in California, an awareness raising, at which where is this sort of bulk water going, and it turns out that 60% of the incoming bulk supply to Cape Town has already been reserved for the commercial agriculture. Now, that's not necessarily the kind of staple foods, the maize meal, the corn that is the basic staple for most of the residents, but instead it's actually used for irrigation, and that's often in this wealthy agricultural area, for the finest wines in Africa and some of the finest in the world, as well as the famous tea, the Rooibos Tea.

The stress agriculturally, on these two products - the vineyards that create these beautiful wines and the Rooibos Tea. This red bush Rooibos Tea, may well put them out of business entirely in coming decades. That's one of these adaptation questions. Can there be different agricultural systems or better irrigation systems, or should we begin to think about these cities as really having to undergo ... That this changes everything. A revolution that Naomi Klein and her major book on the topic, on sort of taking advantage of these crises and using them to re-jig the local economy. The production system, the agricultural system, the urban form, to make it more compact and water efficient. The consumption norms and disposal systems. All of these now must come up for debate.

What's interesting in Cape Town, is that there's a long tradition of environmental justice, and yet, because I think true across the world, many of our local environmental justice movements have been oriented to stopping pollution or addressing very localistic systems. Food systems, for example is a very important part of the Cape Town progressive community, but it's not yet been the ability to connect the dots and to put climate justice onto the national agenda and to ask the questions, should this new government that's about to take power nationally, as we have a new incoming president of the African National Congress. He may well take over the presidency of the country in coming months.

Cyril Ramaphosa, but he comes from the coal industry, and Shanduka is his company, and that as well as Lonmin, the Marikana massacre thing, and that may mean we'll see a revitalization of carbon-intensive economic activity. Notwithstanding this huge wake-up call that Cape Town's drought and probable desperation water-rationing now represents for this country.

SHARMINI PERIES: Patrick, you mentioned this earlier. The people that are going to be most affected by this crisis. So, describe the class nature of the crisis and what we can expect as the problem deepens.

PATRICK BOND: Along with Johannesburg, which is the widely acknowledged by UN-Habitat and researchers, the most unequal city in the world here. Cape Town's in the top five, Durban as well in the top 10. These three cities, these South African cities, have had exceptional urban resistance from shack settlements and townships and low-income suburbs, from women, from environmentalists, and from labor. The South African working class, according to the World Economic Forum is considered the most militant in the world, and we have the most corrupt capitalist class in the world, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Bank regularly acknowledges it's the most unequal country in the world. This is an explosive situation. The question is: Will there be a possibility to bring environmental justice into a sort of maybe even eco-socialist approach to addressing this?

We've seen just one indication in Cape Town that's been quite explosive, and that's the use of shit. I know shitstorms and shit houses and shitholes are regularly discussed in the United States, but in Cape Town, shit has been used by people in the townships, Khayelitsha specifically, as a weapon of the weak, because there aren't flush toilets in these sites. There are chemical toilets and various kinds of pit latrines, and that gives the poor people the ability to take their buckets, their large plastic containers, and use those as weapons. We've begun to see a class struggle take place over water, or specifically the lack of water.

The most famous moment was two years ago, three years ago, 2015. When shit was used to ... Thrown on Cecil Rhodes' statue at the University of Cape Town, and lead to that statue being removed in a huge movement. #FeesMustFall, #RhodesMustFall -- an emerging of radical students. So there's something quite evocative, a sort of nuclear weapon, if you will, of poor people, their last resort is the sanitation system breaking down. That's all they've got at hand and that would be, I would suspect, something we'll see much more of as the water wars break out.

Johannesburg had, along with Cochabamba, Bolivia, about 18 years ago in the famous 2000 battles ... Johannesburg, Cochabama, were the water wars of the 21st century, and in those cases it was privatized water. Johannesburg, it was a big French company, Suez, and they were tossed out by activists after about six years of a contract with the city they wanted to extend for 30. What I suspect might now happen with these water shortages, is we begin to see a different kind of water politics. Not really necessarily about privatization, but about the physical scarcity of water when we have a water apartheid, poor people in these vast townships just not given enough historically, and they'll see the big English gardens, the swimming pools ... Mostly now these swimming pools, they're not allowed to be filled.

I should add that there may be a break in this drought. It might come in June when the winter rains start again, but in the meantime what I think many people are asking: Will -- in a context of lots of political turmoil in South Africa -- will water become one of the sites of struggle that helps to fracture an existing system in which the center-right, the centerist politics of the African National Congress, the neoliberalism, and in Cape Town, the Democratic Alliance can be challenged from below in a way that might teach the rest of the world the first major city running out of water, what will the activists do to take advantage of that? We'll soon see.

SHARMINI PERIES: Finally Patrick, as I mentioned in the introduction, a lot of the world's mainstream media is talking about the water crisis in Cape Town, but they're not linking it to climate change. Is South African media doing so, and if not, what are the ways in which this link can be made for people to get a better understanding of the changing climate and this crisis?

PATRICK BOND: I think that's the right question because as Naomi Klein put it, you really need to connect the dots. This changes everything, and looking at political economy and in politics in a cultural and a gendered and a highly racialized inequality in Cape Town through the climate lens should add quite a bit to us. One would be the tourism industry in Cape Town. Vast industry, lots of low-income people working in the hotels, working in the various aspects of the tourist trade; food and services. That will be under pressure, and yet the attempt by the tourist industry is to pretend it's not happening, and to tell people, "No, no it's fine. You can come here. We're gonna have some water for you." There's a sort of fakery going on in tourism, because that's a lifeblood of this city.

The second is that there's been a purchase, it's actually being confirmed this week, it's by Sinopec, the big Chinese company of Chevron's refinery and retail shops. So Chevron, a huge oil company from the U.S., dastardly company, one of the worst, very implicated in climate politics of denialism and massive emissions and no mitigation and terrible pollution in all of its sites. That would be one of the sites where if Sinopec, the Chinese company with a terrible record on its own takes over, I would suspect we're gonna see some politics of resistance amongst climate justice activists who know the oil industry, and Sinopec has this potential huge refinery in Cape Town. They've committed over $500 million to expending that. That's a very serious climate crime that's about to be committed, and I don't think the activists in South Africa are going to stand for that. So, these are the sorts of struggle sites; water, tourism, a new owner of the major refinery system in Cape Town.

Like we've seen in Durban, South Durban, one of the sites of the biggest refineries in Africa, amazing struggles there. Here in Johannesburg, major struggles over the extent to which urban social movements can access energy and electricity, whether that comes from coal or huge solar potential. This is a country that has some of the worst extremes of abuse, but some very talented people at the grass roots, so I learn a great deal from them. I'm sure we all will.

SHARMINI PERIES: Alright.

Now, I did say that was the last question, but I cannot let you go without asking you this. This drought condition that South Africa faces is really a much bigger sub-Saharan African issue if we look at the current map that Princeton University African Flood and Drought Monitor has provided us. That there are droughts going on all over the sub-Saharan African part of the world. Tell us a little bit more about that link.

PATRICK BOND: I would also add North Africa, which is going to certainly experience the sort of 40 degree Celsius conditions regularly, and maybe the Qatar World Cup in the least, won't even happen in 2022, because the climate will have advanced rapidly. So, North Africa's the most threatened, but yes. The East African zones, particular in the horn of Kenya, running up through Somalia, have had terrible ongoing droughts. Water wars on the Nile with new dams that Ethiopia and Egypt are contesting, and in West Africa and Central Africa where we were seeing terrible civil wars ... Your viewers will know about the DRC in Sierra Leone and Northern Uganda, South Sudan, and these war sites are also the sites that are -- Darfur maybe most spectacularly -- where climate change has had an impact on the way in which desperation of herders and farmers lead to these conflicts.

Yes, there are studies going on and I certainly resort occasionally to the U.S. Pentagon-funded Minerva Program, which works with University of Texas in Sussex, to identify the correlations between social protests and anger and frustration, fury really on the one hand, and the climate crisis. As we've seen in many African sites and you could look at Syria, you could look at many other places, these are the sites where we're beginning to find massive rebellions emerging.

If we were talking, Sharmini, five years ago, people would have said, "Well, Africa's rising." It was a sort of hope that the commodity boom that sort of petered out by around 2011 and ended with a crash in 2015, that that commodity boom would allow African sort of trickle-down to work and keep this continent moving forward. In reality, Africans are uprising against this Africa Rising expert-oriented, commodity driven, highly unequal system of accumulation, and I think climate will amplify that, and the question is whether networks like the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance with over 1,000 groups and members, this group, and begin to generate a really serious political economy that demands a new system locally, as well as globally, and now with Donald Trump having walked out of Paris, one of the big questions many would ask is well, since Paris provided the liability protection so you don't have a climate debt if you sign onto Paris, you don't have to worry about your historic debt, that's part of the deal that the U.S. State Department cut in Paris in 2015.

Now it's time, not only for Africans, for all affected people by climate change, by the youth in the United States or a couple of dozen kids ... Jim Hansen's grandchild as well ... Suing Donald Trump for climate damage, and I think that whether you like the courts or not, the idea is very important. We should now be talking about those vulnerable parts of the world, the vulnerable generations who have to live through a future of extreme weather events and global warming, and in this part of the world, we're already seeing in Cape Town some of the worst micro-impacts of that if we see a major city, the second largest in South Africa, four million people, literally run out of water.

SHARMINI PERIES: Patrick, I thank you so much for joining us and always very informative. Thank you.

PATRICK BOND: Thank you. Good to be with you.

SHARMINI PERIES: Thank you for joining us here on The Real News Network.