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In a First, California Plans to Clean Up Microplastics

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In a First, California Plans to Clean Up Microplastics

They’re in your intestine. They’re within the ocean. They’re even floating by way of the air in probably the most distant areas of the West. Microplastics — fragments of broken-down plastic no bigger than a fraction of an inch — have change into a colossal world drawback.

California needs to repair that.

Final month, the state grew to become the primary within the nation to undertake a technique addressing the scourge of tiny detritus. “We have to eradicate our habit to single-use plastics,” mentioned Mark Gold, the chief director of the Ocean Safety Council, the governmental physique that authorised the plan.

The technique just isn’t regulatory, however the council has dedicated to spending $3 million this 12 months, with discount targets laid out between now and 2030. Gold added, “You discover microplastics all over the place you look.”

By some estimates, people have manufactured about 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic, solely 9 p.c of which has ever been recycled. About 11 million metric tons of this plastic find yourself within the ocean yearly, and with out intervention, this quantity is anticipated to triple by 2040, in line with the council. When these plastics break down, they are often eaten by marine animals, stunting their development and inflicting reproductive issues. They’ve additionally been present in human organs, together with placentas, in addition to in soils and crops.

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California’s technique is a part of a world effort to handle this drawback. Final week, representatives from 175 nations agreed to start work on a legally binding treaty that will commit them to recycling and cleanup measures, in addition to curbs on plastic manufacturing. The treaty, supporters say, could be crucial environmental accord for the reason that 2015 Paris Settlement on local weather change.

On the native stage, California’s technique primarily goals to do two issues: First, stop plastics from coming into the surroundings. Second, monitor these which can be already on the market.

Step one, Gold mentioned, is lowering or finally eliminating the worst culprits, together with single-use plastics, artificial materials, cigarette filters and automobile tires. Analysis from 2019 confirmed that just about half of the microplastics polluting California’s coastal waters had been rubber fragments most likely shed from car tires, making them the biggest single contributor to the issue.

The technique additionally units targets to enhance storm water programs to catch the pollution earlier than they attain the ocean. “The factor about microplastics is that if they get into the ocean surroundings, they’re there to remain,” Gold mentioned.

The plan additionally commits to monitoring ranges of microplastics in California’s waters, simply because the state displays the extent of dangerous particulate matter within the air, which may usually enhance throughout occasions like wildfires. Such a program could be among the many first to persistently monitor these pollution within the surroundings.

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It additionally units targets to analysis the place nearly all of the microplastics are coming from, and the way a lot threat every variety poses to the well being of people and aquatic life. Although scientists agree that plastic air pollution is a blight, little is thought about precisely the way it impacts us.

“The proof of hurt just isn’t the identical because the proof of presence,” mentioned Britta Denise Hardesty, a principal scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Analysis Group, an Australian science company, and an skilled on microplastics, who just isn’t concerned within the plan. She added, “It’s superior that California is doing this.”

A smart state technique, she added, was way more prone to succeed than some earlier efforts, together with an enormous growth that set sail into the Pacific Ocean in September 2018 with plans to take away 150,000 kilos of plastic from the ocean in a 12 months. “You couldn’t design one thing to be extra pricey and fewer prone to succeed,” Hardesty instructed me.

The vessel returned a number of months later, in items.

The hope is that California — the state with the biggest financial system and among the many finest environmental protections within the nation — can forge forward in lowering the hurt of microplastics, even when it may’t remedy the issue by itself, Gold, the Ocean Safety Council govt, instructed me.

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“We’re California, we lead by instance; it’s in our DNA,” he mentioned, including: “We don’t need to get up in 5 years and discover out that is completely devastating to our marine ecology, and we didn’t do something.”

For extra:

  • Final week, representatives from 175 nations agreed to start writing a world treaty that will limit the explosive development of plastic air pollution.

  • Sending an enormous growth into the ocean to scrub up the Nice Pacific Rubbish Patch was most likely a nasty thought, Vox reviews.

  • A research in 2020 confirmed you’re most likely inhaling microplastics proper now.

Right now’s tip comes from Caitlin Rodriguez, who recommends a drive alongside State Route 150:

“One in every of my favourite issues to do within the tri-county space (Ventura, Santa Barbara, and L.A. counties) is to go for drives and discover the mountain, agricultural, and ocean sceneries of the realm.

My all time favourite drive is to drive alongside the 150, a mountain freeway that goes by way of the small, agricultural city of Santa Paula, as much as higher Ojai, and down into the Ojai valley. I all the time cease at Steckel Park on the outskirts of Santa Paula the place there’s a small aviary and wild peacocks roaming round. As you possibly can hear the decision of the peacocks within the distance, you possibly can go to with the very pleasant Cockatoo who likes to convey you sticks for a very good head scratching. He actually makes it onerous to depart. Persevering with up the 150, an important place to cease for lunch is a burger joint known as the Summit or after having fun with the scenic drive all the best way down into the Ojai valley, there are a number of locations to get pleasure from nice meals in Ojai.

After lunch, you possibly can hop again on the 33 and head down into Ventura the place you possibly can finish the drive on the uncrowded, native Ventura seashores.”

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Inform us about your favourite locations to go to in California. E-mail your ideas to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We’ll be sharing extra in upcoming editions of the e-newsletter.


The artist Josh Kline imagines an unmoored life within the post-climate-change future.


Be a part of The Occasions for a free on-line occasion on Wednesday with two of the nation’s most distinguished Covid-19 specialists.

Dr. Bob Wachter and Dr. Monica Gandhi, each on the College of California, San Francisco, have labored all through the pandemic to elucidate the dangers of Covid-19. And sometimes, they’ve disagreed.

See occasion particulars right here.

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In a current column, The Monetary Occasions’s Janan Ganesh fantastically argued a degree that I’ve lengthy struggled to articulate: Los Angeles is a good strolling metropolis.

Ganesh wrote that the usual walkability rankings overlook the marvel of Los Angeles by overemphasizing distances and comfort:

“The extra primary take a look at is whether or not there’s sufficient on the streets to see within the first place. Lacking that time is how Washington involves rank above Istanbul, and Munich above Bangkok. Being environment friendly and properly put-together is prized over the one factor a metropolis can not design or purchase: life, whether or not in its smile-raising or stomach-turning kinds. Susan Sontag wrote that the city wanderer have to be on the seek for ‘voluptuous extremes.’ That isn’t Bordeaux.

No western metropolis of comparable heft is weirder or extra random than L.A.”


Thanks for beginning your week with us. We’ll be again tomorrow.

P.S. Right here’s at present’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Equal notice to C sharp (5 letters).

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Soumya Karlamangla, Jonah Candelario and Mariel Wamsley to California Right now. You may attain the group at CAtoday@nytimes.com.

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Wanted: more bosses on the shop floor

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Wanted: more bosses on the shop floor

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On the day of the US election this week, I was struck by a familiar sense of anxiety, dismay and dread.

This had almost nothing to do with the election and everything to do with my decision to spend time that day on the FT’s main news desk. 

In the interests of research, I wanted to see what the job of news editing looked like since I last worked on that desk in London many years ago. 

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Clearly much has changed since. The homepage is all-consuming; an entirely different team of editors handles the printed paper. But much is still the same, like the stomach-grinding anxiety about inserting an error in the rush to publish. And the heart-stopping fear of receiving a late, garbled story needing not so much editing as open-heart surgery. And the remorseless speed of the work.

“You all right?” muttered the news editor, a man I’ve known for close to 20 years, as I faffed about trying to log in to the first morning news meeting of top editors. Flustered, I finally got the sound on as he was explaining why I was there, whereupon I thanked him and called him Tim instead of his actual name, which is Tom.

This was a reminder of something I had forgotten in my years away from that work. It is so much harder than it looks from the outside.

The experience confirmed that business leaders who do what Boeing’s new chief executive, Kelly Ortberg, did the other week deserve much credit. 

When Ortberg set out his plans to restore faith in the beleaguered aerospace giant, he highlighted one in particular: putting executives on factory floors as part of “a fundamental culture change”.

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“We need to know what’s going on, not only with our products, but with our people,” he said. “We need to prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix, and understand root cause.”

This seems obvious for any company, let alone one reeling from the aftermath of two fatal crashes of its top-selling 737 Max aircraft.

Yet if it really were apparent, there wouldn’t be headlines whenever someone like Ortberg issues such an edict. Or Home Depot tells corporate office staff to work a full day at one of its stores each quarter, as it did this year. Or Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, reveals he has been moonlighting as a driver, as he did last year. 

Maybe more bosses than we hear about spend time answering customer complaints on social media, such as Greg Jackson, chief executive of the UK’s Octopus Energy power supplier. Or decide a human can adjust a car window seal faster than a robot by trying it himself on an assembly line, as Elon Musk did at Tesla. 

But I doubt it. For one thing, few CEOs are like Musk. Also, running a business is hard. It can be easy to get caught up in the daily crossfire of drama. When Khosrowshahi was driving a customer to the airport one night, he had to ignore what the Wall Street Journal said were frantic phone calls from his chief legal officer trying to tell him the company’s network had been hacked.

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It also takes a lot of confidence to expose yourself to the ridicule of underlings who know more about how a job is done, especially for CEOs unfamiliar with the industry they join.

But I suspect many executives shy away from the shop floor because they have succumbed to an aspect of power poisoning, or the way behaviour changes when you reach the top.

In this case, they think that, because they are in charge, they understand everything they need to know in order to lead well, even when they palpably don’t. Academics call this the fallacy of centrality and it can be a dismaying thing to watch. Ask any worker repeatedly asked to do something provably unworkable by a clueless boss. 

Of course, hands-on experience alone does not guarantee success. Laxman Narasimhan did 40 hours of barista training before taking over as CEO of Starbucks and last year said he would keep working behind the counter for half a day each month. He was ousted 17 months later. Falling sales and an activist investor will probably always beat even the finest Frappuccino technique.

pilita.clark@ft.com

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Camarillo homeowners return to burned homes after devastating Mountain Fire

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Camarillo homeowners return to burned homes after devastating Mountain Fire

Camarillo homeowners have started to return to their scorched neighborhoods after the devastating Mountain Fire ripped through the area earlier this week. 

While some homes remain standing, many others have been reduced to rubble, with random pieces of furniture and appliances left behind. 

The fire, which has so far engulfed more than 20,000 acres and destroyed over 100 homes, broke out on Wednesday and quickly grew with the help of strong winds blowing through the area. 

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Flowers and a message of hope left behind in a decimated neighborhood in Camarillo after the Mountain Fire.

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It began in Moorpark before jumping SR-118 and entering neighborhoods in the foothills of Camarillo, where Jamie Randall and her husband Tyler Farnworth returned earlier this week to find that their home was gone. 

“I feel like the shock if wearing off a little bit,” Randall said. “It’s hard to see this. It’s harder today for me then it was even a few days ago to wrap my head around the gravity of what has happened to our home.”

The couple lived at the home with their children and were among the more than 10,000 residents forced to gather what they could and flee at a moment’s notice as the fire ripped through the neighborhood. 

Randall said that she packed two suitcases and grabbed some important documents, anticipating that they would be able to return home after the blaze was handled by firefighters. 

“I never thought in my wildest dreams this would be the last time I would be standing at my house,” she said. 

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They say that the fire hollowed out their home, reducing everything inside to ash. 

“There’s a few things that we wish we would have grabbed. Some things from my parents that are no longer with us,” said Farnworth. “Silly little things, you know.”

They say that it was more than just their home, but a community for the family, who owns a dance studio named Bobbie’s School of Performing Arts. 

After news was spread about their home, they say that they were contacted by an overwhelming amount of friends and families showing them love and support. 

“It spread so wide, the amount of love they’ve shown us and they continue to show us,” the family said. 

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The smiling statue of Buddha that survived the devastating Mountain Fire that ripped through a Camarillo neighborhood on Nov. 6.

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While they’re still unsure what their next steps may be, they’re taking one sign from the rubble as a bit of positivity — a smiling Buddha statue that survived the flames. 

“This is our home. This is our home, this is our street, these are our neighbors,” Farnworth said. “Everyone, I feel like, feels the same way.”

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Poorer voters flocked to Trump and other data points from the election

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Poorer voters flocked to Trump and other data points from the election

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Donald Trump’s win gave Republicans their highest share of the popular vote in two decades — and revealed big shifts in the US electorate, from the Democratic party’s reliance on wealthier, college-educated voters to the power of issues like immigration.

Low turnout by Democrats also hurt Kamala Harris’s chances while support from traditional left-leaning voting groups, such as Hispanic and Black voters, fell.

The results also show that poorer and less-educated voters now think Republicans best represent them — a reversal from 12 years ago, when Democrat Barack Obama was president.

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After a deep-dive into the data, here are five takeaways.

Democratic support depends on high-income voters

Economic realignment has been under way for some time, but hastened in this election. The Democratic party now appears to be the party of high-income voters, not those with low incomes.

For the first time in decades, Democrats received more support from Americans in the top third of the income bracket than from poorer groups, according to an FT analysis of voter surveys.

In contrast to 2020, the majority of lower-income households or those earning less than $50,000 a year voted for Trump this election. Conversely, those making over $100,000 voted for Harris, according to exit polls.

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At the same time, Trump enjoyed enduring support from voters without a college degree, with nearly two-thirds voting for the former president, according to exit polling in ten states by NBC News.

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Immigration probably pushed voters to Trump

A poll by Gallup before the election found that US voters saw immigration as the most important problem facing the country, with 55 per cent saying that it was a “critical threat” to the US.

The results from Tuesday show just how damaging the issue was for Harris, who was blamed by Trump for the record high number of border crossings during the Biden administration.

Some of the areas that swung furthest to the former president were on the US south-western border, including Hidalgo and Zapata counties in Texas and Santa Cruz County in Arizona.

In Texas, Trump managed to flip four counties on the US-Mexico border that had voted for Democratic presidential candidates since the 1970s.

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Trump captured the suburbs and cities became less Democratic

Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 owed much to the big Democratic turnout in swing-state suburbs, including a blue wave in the majority-white suburbs of Pennsylvania and Georgia, as well as both majority-white and majority-Latino areas in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.

But on Tuesday, Trump captured more votes than Harris everywhere outside large cities, including suburban areas. In large urban areas, Democrats lost more than 1mn votes compared to 2020, according to an FT analysis of the results.

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The rural-urban divide has increasingly become an entrenched dimension of US politics, but this election saw a sharp drop in Democratic support in large cities, while rural areas continued to become more red.

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Hispanic-majority areas swung to Trump

Days before the election, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s disparaging remarks about Puerto Rico at a Trump rally cast doubt on the Republican candidate’s ability to win over Latino voters.

But the results showed that Latinos, as well as other non-white voters, are increasingly drawn to Trump. The shift could have lasting implications given Latinos are among the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the US.

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Even in liberal enclaves like Philadelphia, the most populous city in the swing state of Pennsylvania, voters swung towards Trump in majority-Hispanic areas, even while Harris won those precincts overall, according to an FT analysis of municipal data.

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In Texas, some of the largest swings towards Trump also came from majority-Hispanic counties, including Starr County on the US-Mexico border, which has a Hispanic population of over 96 per cent.

Trump even managed to flip Florida’s most populous county, the majority-Hispanic Miami-Dade County, for the first time since 1988.

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Low turnout among Democrats accentuated the swing towards Trump

Not all of the swing towards Trump across the country was attributable to an increase in support for the Republican.

While New York swung to Trump by 12 points in 2024, fewer than 190,000 additional people voted for him than in 2020. But 800,000 fewer people voted for Harris than Biden in the state. Illinois and Ohio followed a similar trend.

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Of the swing states, only in Pennsylvania did Democrats lose more votes than Trump gained. In Wisconsin, Georgia and North Carolina, the party increased their vote count — albeit only by 300 in the North Carolina.

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Harris’s turnout effort did bear some fruit, with current estimates showing that the proportion of the voting-eligible population who voted increased in all but two of the swing states.

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Additional reporting by Radhika Rukmangadhan in New York and Alan Smith in London

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