Three years ago I seldom thought about single-use plastic bags. I used to only think about them when I had a pile of them so big I knew it was time to recycle. I also thought recycling was the perfect solution. That was before I really knew anything about plastic.
We use plastic bags an average of 12 minutes before throwing them away or recycling them. Single-use plastic bags don’t get recycled into new bags. They are down-cycled into carpet, decking or park benches, etc. So, it always takes new plastic to make more bags.
Only 5 percent of all single-use plastic bags actually get recycled. What happens to the other 95 percent? They end up floating around in our landscape and waterways. They do not biodegrade. They photo-degrade, which means they break down into smaller and smaller pieces. While this is happening they leach harmful chemicals into the land or water. They blow away from the landfills because they are so lightweight. Animals often eat this plastic and it usually means a painful death, as it will not digest.
Even the oceans are being affected. Every ocean now has a plastic gyre — a swirling mass of plastic — floating just below the surface. Because sea life ingests it, it ends up in our food chain. Those chemicals I mentioned earlier are showing up in humans.
Plastic bags also cost the public money because they get caught in drain systems and machinery, which have to be cleaned out. It’s a waste of time and energy.
Paper is not the answer. We need to grow more trees, not cut them down to make paper.
The best solution is to use a cloth reusable bag. Reusable bags can be used 700 plus times. They are very washable. I throw the dirty bags in with my weekly laundry.
Last week, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the nation’s first statewide ban on single-use plastic bags at grocery and convenience stores, driven to action by pollution in streets and waterways. Plastic bags will be phased out of checkout counters at large grocery stores and supermarkets such as Walmart and Target starting next summer, and convenience stores and pharmacies in 2016. It allows grocers to charge a fee of at least 10 cents for using paper bags.
State Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles, credits the momentum for statewide legislation to the more than 100 cities and counties, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, that already have such bans.
The law marks a major milestone for environmental activists who have successfully pushed plastic bag bans in cities across the U.S., including Chicago, Austin, and Seattle. Hawaii is on track to have a defacto statewide ban, with all counties approving prohibitions.
“This bill is a step in the right direction — it reduces the torrent of plastic polluting our beaches, parks and even the vast ocean itself,” Brown said in a signing statement. “We’re the first to ban these bags, and we won’t be the last.”
Changing to reusable bags is a simple matter of changing our habits, which will be good for the future of our planet. Getting people to understand “why” is the problem.
100Grannies.com For a Livable Future has partnered with the Iowa City Recycling Center for a “Bring Your Own Bag” promotion. We are asking retail stores to reduce their use of plastic bags and giving our seal of approval to those who do.
When we start thinking about the health of our planet, eliminating plastic bags from our environment is a crucial step. Let’s be a leader in Iowa and start the ball rolling here.
Becky Ross is a member of 100 Grannies For a Livable Future.
In the bleak mid-winter, which seems to have hit Iowa rather early on a number of fronts, I have been looking for signs of good news.
One of these is the agreement between the U.S. and China on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
China has never before agreed to stop growing their emissions but now has pledged to reach their peak emissions by 2030, with wind and solar to constitute 20 percent of that total. China and the U.S. are the largest greenhouse gas emitters, comprising 40 percent of the world’s total.
This agreement is not insignificant on its own but it is even more important as an encouragement to other nations to realize that the time for idle talk and empty pledges has come to an end. Action must be taken by all if we are to keep the temperature of the earth from rising 2 degrees over what it was before the industrial revolution.
I have come to understand that people will not admit to a problem if they do not like the solution. The human psyche is very good at denial and compartmentalization. For those who imagine cutting carbon emissions means living in the cold and dark, without a job, they need to think again. It is no longer the old either/or — jobs and the economy or combating global warming. This is very good news indeed. Here is how it can be accomplished.
By putting a revenue neutral fee on carbon at its source of extraction that would start at $10 a ton per annum and increase by $10 per year, emissions would come down by 50 percent after 20 years and put the country on track to achieve the 80 percent reduction needed by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate change.
There are two important things to note here: one is that all money would be returned to the American people as an equal across-the-board payment for each person and that border adjustments would be made so American businesses would be protected. As carbon becomes more expensive, and solar and wind and other non-carbon sources of energy become less expensive, there would be less reliance on coal, gas and oil.
Meanwhile, economically, here are some facts from a report issued by Regional Economic Models Inc. They predict that 2.8 million jobs would be added over 20 years. People are going to have more money in their pocket with the revenue returned to them. The GDP would increase $70 billion to $85 billion from 2020 on. The monthly dividend for a family of four with two adults in 2025 would be $288.
After 10 years, our air would be cleaner and our health better, with 13,000 lives saved annually. What’s not to like? Jobs and a healthier environment, with a chance to significantly reduce the carbon emissions that are damaging our atmosphere and currently setting us on a path for severe weather — more drought, more floods, more fires, higher sea levels, greater loss of species diversification. It is important to remember that action needs to be taken before the climate effects are irreversible. We don’t have long.
The good news with a Republican Congress is that they can embrace this free-market approach that grows our economy and imposes no new taxes. The carbon fee and dividend plan is supported by some leading conservatives, including former Secretary of State George Shultz. Under President Obama, wind production has tripled and solar production has increased by ten-fold. Let’s be able to credit the Republicans for taking us the rest of the way.
Meanwhile, we are getting ready to celebrate the American holiday of Thanksgiving. It is one that regardless of religious or political persuasion we can celebrate together, and we do it by sitting down at a table and sharing food with family and/or friends.
China may not have an American Thanksgiving, but she shares our common ground. Our common ground is our common ground. It is our earth and it’s the only one we will ever have.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
The Rev. Dr. Barbara Schlachter is a retired Episcopal priest who is a member of the Iowa City Climate Advocates, the Citizens Climate Lobby and 100 Grannies for a Livable Future.
“Every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable.” Thus spoke President Kennedy in a 1961 address to the United Nations. The threat he warned of was not climate chaos — barely a blip on anybody’s radar at the time — but the hydrogen bomb. The nuclear threat had a volatile urgency and visual clarity that the sprawling, hydra-headed menace of today’s climate calamity cannot match. How can we rouse citizens and governments to act for concerted change? Will it take, as Naomi Klein insists, nothing less than a Marshall Plan for Earth?
“This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate” is a book of such ambition and consequence that it is almost unreviewable. Klein’s fans will recognize her method from her prior books, “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies” (1999) and “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” (2007), which, with her latest, form an antiglobalization trilogy. Her strategy is to take a scourge — brand-driven hyperconsumption, corporate exploitation of disaster-struck communities, or “the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet” — trace its origins, then chart a course of liberation. In each book she arrives at some semihopeful place, where activists are reaffirming embattled civic values.
To call “This Changes Everything” environmental is to limit Klein’s considerable agenda. “There is still time to avoid catastrophic warming,” she contends, “but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing those rules.” On the green left, many share Klein’s sentiments. George Monbiot, a columnist for The Guardian, recently lamented that even though “the claims of market fundamentalism have been disproven as dramatically as those of state communism, somehow this zombie ideology staggers on.” Klein, Monbiot and Bill McKibben all insist that we cannot avert the ecological disaster that confronts us without loosening the grip of that superannuated zombie ideology.
That philosophy — neoliberalism — promotes a high-consumption, carbon-hungry system. Neoliberalism has encouraged mega-mergers, trade agreements hostile to environmental and labor regulations, and global hypermobility, enabling a corporation like Exxon to make, as McKibben has noted, “more money last year than any company in the history of money.” Their outsize power mangles the democratic process. Yet the carbon giants continue to reap $600 billion in annual subsidies from public coffers, not to speak of a greater subsidy: the right, in Klein’s words, to treat the atmosphere as a “waste dump.”
So much for the invisible hand. As the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson observed, when it comes to the environment, the invisible hand never picks up the check.
Klein diagnoses impressively what hasn’t worked. No more claptrap about fracked gas as a bridge to renewables. Enough already of the international summit meetings that produce sirocco-quality hot air, and nonbinding agreements that bind us all to more emissions. Klein dismantles the boondoggle that is cap and trade. She skewers grandiose command-and-control schemes to re-engineer the planet’s climate. No point, when a hubristic mind-set has gotten us into this mess, to pile on further hubris. She reserves a special scorn for the partnerships between Big Green organizations and Immense Carbon, peddled as win-win for everyone, but which haven’t slowed emissions. Such partnerships remind us that when the lamb and the lion lie down together, only one of them gets eaten.
In democracies driven by lobbyists, donors and plutocrats, the giant polluters are going to win while the rest of us, in various degrees of passivity and complicity, will watch the planet die. “Any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews,” Klein writes. “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”
Klein reminds us that neoliberalism was once an upstart counterrevolution. Through an epic case of bad timing, the Reagan-Thatcher revolution, the rise of the anti-regulatory World Trade Organization, and the cult of privatizing and globalizing everything coincided with the rising public authority of climate science. In 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, delivered historic testimony at Congressional hearings, declaring that the science was 99 percent unequivocal: The world was warming and we needed to act collectively to reduce emissions. Just one year earlier, Margaret Thatcher famously declared: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” In the battle since, between a collective strategy for forging an inhabitable long-term future and the antisocial, hyper-corporatized, hyper-carbonized pursuit of short-term growth at any cost, well, there has been only one clear winner.
But counterrevolutions are reversible. Klein devotes much of her book to propitious signs that this can happen — indeed is happening. The global climate justice movement is spreading. Since the mid-1990s, environmental protests have been growing in China at 29 percent per year. Where national leaders have faltered, local governments are forging ahead. Hundreds of German cities and towns have voted to buy back their energy grids from corporations. About two-thirds of Britons favor renationalizing energy and rail.
The divestment movement against Big Carbon is gathering force. While it will never bankrupt the mega-corporations, it can reveal unethical practices while triggering a debate about values that recognizes that such practices are nested in economic systems that encourage, inhibit or even prohibit them.
The voices Klein gathers from across the world achieve a choral force. We hear a Montana goat rancher describe how an improbable alliance against Big Coal between local Native American tribes and settler descendants awakened in the latter a different worldview of time and change and possibility. We hear participants in Idle No More, the First Nations movement that has swept across Canada and beyond, contrast the “extractivist mind-set” with systems “designed to promote more life.”
One quibble: What’s with the subtitle? “Capitalism vs. the Climate” sounds like a P.R. person’s idea of a marquee cage fight, but it belies the sophistication and hopefulness of Klein’s argument. As is sometimes said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Klein’s adversary is neoliberalism — the extreme capitalism that has birthed our era of extreme extraction. Klein is smart and pragmatic enough to shun the never-never land of capitalism’s global overthrow. What she does, brilliantly, is provide a historically refined exposé of “capitalism’s drift toward monopoly,” of “corporate interests intent on capturing and radically shrinking the public sphere,” and of “the disaster capitalists who use crises to end-run around democracy.”
To change economic norms and ethical perceptions in tandem is even more formidable than the technological battle to adapt to the heavy weather coming down the tubes. Yet “This Changes Everything” is, improbably, Klein’s most optimistic book. She braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism that shape the climate question. The result is the most momentous and contentious environmental book since “Silent Spring.”
Sept. 8—YERT, Your Environmental Road Trip: Called to action by a planet in crisis, three friends hit the road, with hope and humor in search of breakthrough solutions to humanity’s greatest environmental challenges in this award winning documentary. Becky H will moderate.
Sept. 15 The Age of Stupid: A novel approach to environmental documentaries. A future archisvist looks at old footage from 2008 and asks, “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?” A moderator is still needed.
Sept. 22 The Great Squeeze: Surviving the Human Project: Explores our current ecological and economic crises stemming from our dependence on cheap and abundant energy. Faced with challenges, can we find a path to a better future? The film offers some answers. Paula S will moderate.
Sept. 29 Green Fire: Iowa born environmentalist Aldo Leopold inspires us! His land ethic philsophy lives on in the work of organizations all over the country and the world. Molly S will moderate.
All films are Monday evenings at 6 pm at the Senior Center. There is no charge; bring friends.
I wish to commend The Gazette for its early reporting on a proposed pipeline that would run through 17 Iowa counties in a diagonal line stretching from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota to connect with a pipeline in Illinois, cutting a swath from the northwest corner of the state to the southeast corner.
I am especially appreciative of their extensive quote by Sen. Tom Harkin that even as this proposal needs serious scrutiny in light of the corrosive and volatile nature of the oil, we should as a nation be moving away from fossil fuels and utilizing the technology available to us in the form of wind and solar and electric vehicles.
As he said so simply, “We have to reduce our carbon footprint. The cheapest barrel of oil still is the barrel that you don’t burn.”
Let’s not invest in old technology that further contributes to global warming when the new technology is becoming better and less expensive and is certainly safer.
How many farms would be impacted, how many roads and rivers crossed? Too many.
Who will benefit from this? A company in Dallas.
Who takes the risks? All of us, especially those whose land would be crossed.
How is it that your land could be taken by eminent domain and yet you might be responsible if there were a leak?
Iowa citizens need to become informed about this and learn from our neighboring state of Nebraska about how and why to be pipeline fighters.
Our S’nit in’s are on the 4th Friday of each month –1 to 3 pm. Come join us! See latest meeting notes for the location. (In a s’nit & knitting for climite crisis)
Grannies S/Nit in at Johnson County Fair, July 21, 2014:
IOWA CITY, Iowa – Seven grannies, in the Old Capital Mall, at a table. They’re not playing Parcheesi, or a mundane game of Mahjong. They’re fighting for a cleaner environment with needles and yarn, what they call a “snit-in.””It’s kind of a take off a sit-in and a knit-in. And we’re in a snit because of the climate change,” said Rebecca Ross with the Iowa City-based environmentalism group 100 Grannies for a Livable Future.Ross said the ladies worry pollution will have wrecked the world by the time their grand kids grow up.”If we don’t solve the climate problem, the other problems aren’t going to matter,” said Katharine Nicholson with100 Grannies.So how will the stitching of knitting and sitting help? The women admit their first ever “snit-in” isn’t really about the things they’re stringing together, but rather the attention they nab from people passing by.
“We mainly just wanted to get together, have some fun, and have our posters out. Just get people aware of what’s going on,” said Maureen Arensdorf, another member of the group.
The “snit-in” came to the group, after they saw a similar environmentalism group, Knitting Nannas, give it a try in Australia.
“They’re really a hoot, so we’re hoping to somehow get to their level eventually,” said Arensdorf.
The ladies want to grow their numbers and have a “snit-in”, each month. They said they realize they can’t tackle climate change all at once. So, they’re starting small, petitioning city and county government to phase out the use of plastic bags.
“Plastic bags are made from fossil fuels and basically never go away. They’re a big pollution problem,” said Ross. “We feel like we’re making some progress.”
The group is nearly two years old, and they do more than knit. 100 Grannies will sponsor lectures on climate change at the Iowa City Senior Center in February and March.
Our new monthly event: 4th Fridays 1-3 pm at a local mall. In Feb we’ll be at Coral Ridge. Y’all come.
Barbara Eckstein and Stephen Voyce / Guest Opinion Iowa City Press-Citizen, July 7, 2014
When scholars of technology make statements like, “Our mobile electronic devices and even our desktop computers are extensions of our human bodies,” they get little argument from those who use, let alone those who sell, this equipment.
But our use of electronic devices connects us to other networks — industrial and environmental networks — that a wireless world has made invisible: the generation of electricity to run large servers that store and circulate information, the use of water to cool these servers, and the disposal of electronic objects.
Our chic, clever, 21st-century electronic devices are only as innovative as the means of generating electricity to run them, the use of water to cool them, and the disposal of them when we replace them. If those systems are the same as the ones that heated the homes of Dickens’s 19th-century London and fouled its waterways as well as its streets, just how progressive are our canny devices?
The term “cloud computing” offers up a misleading metaphor. Clouds conjure up an image ethereal, clean and limitless. But, of course, digital networks don’t belong to nature nor does the vast technological apparatus necessary to power the online economy.
Images like the cloud inadvertently conceal the very physical, energy-consuming nature of the Internet. Maybe the cloud is more of a pun than a metaphor. It is we humans who are in a cloud, a fog, about just what fuels and cools these devices at the ends of our arms.
Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon rely on sprawling data centers. These are factories in the very traditional sense, where rows upon rows of servers are placed tightly together and outfitted with industrial scale cooling systems.
Tens of thousands of these factories run 24/7, consuming energy on a sublime scale. Between 2000-2005, the energy needed to power the internet doubled. Between 2005-2010, it jumped another 75 percent.
Estimates place global output at 30 billion watts of electricity per annum (approximately 30 nuclear power plants or the equivalent generation from coal). What is more, for many data centers in the U.S., diesel-burning generators are used to guard against potential power failure. New York Times writer James Glanz found that many of California’s data centers rank among the state’s worst toxic air polluters.
In Iowa, taxpayers have provided over $76 million since 2007 to Google, Microsoft and Facebook for the building of large data centers in this state — with the promise of creating 238 jobs. Data center supporters here have used the metaphor “server farms” to describe these data centers to Iowans.
Speaking clearly, Google’s vice president for technical operations Lloyd Taylor, told Arizona legal scholar Robert Glennon that the company’s server farms are “heavy manufacturing facilities” that need to be sited in industrial parks with ready access to water and electricity.
The demand for electricity is something in excess of 2 megawatts per 10,000 square feet of server farm. (This in a state still dependent upon burning coal to generate the majority of its electricity.)
The demand for water is huge but none of the major internet providers would give Glennon numbers on how huge. He does report that one server farm in Virginia pumps 13.5 million gallons a day for four immense “chillers.” And what is the state of this water after it has been used in this way? we wondered. Local environmental engineers told us, “It is pretty well known that cooling water returned to surface waters at even slightly higher temperature have adverse impacts on ecosystems.”
The hopeful news in Iowa is that Google has agreed to purchase 407 megawatts of wind energy from MidAmerican to fully power its data center. Facebook entered into an agreement to purchase wind power for their data center from MidAmerican’s most recently announced wind energy project. Facebook also promises that they will use an “innovative outdoor-air cooling system” and build their facility to gold LEED standards.
But it would be a mistake to use these promises as an excuse to remain in the cloud about the full cost to climate change and water quality, and so to all of us, of ever-increasing electronic use and the building of new server farms.
It would also be a mistake to remain in a cloud about the worldwide impact of electronic waste. A 2012 World Bank report estimates an increase in solid waste from 1.3 billion to 2.2 billion tons in the near future, while the annual cost of waste management exceeds $200 billion.
“E-waste” accounts for a significant portion of this increase. Virtual networks require physical screens, cables, servers, phones, tablets, routers, batteries. These objects consist of glass, metal, plastics, and rare earth metals, much of which is hazardous, toxic and difficult to recycle. Some estimates suggest that the US gets rid of approximately 30,000 computers per day, while Europe discards millions of cellular phones every year.
To date, the U.S. has refused to sign the Basel Convention prohibiting countries to outsource e-waste to the developing world. Much of it ends up in places many in the West have not heard of: Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Bengaluru, India; and Guiyu, China, where workers scavenge junk computers for precious metals, plastics, and wiring. The heating process used to melt many of these components releases harmful toxins into the atmosphere, causing serious health and environmental issues.
The answer to every problem — or just passing boredom — can’t be in “the cloud.” Wi-fi, it tuns out, is actually thousands, millions, of miles of wire.
We are connected, for sure!
Barbara Eckstein’s and Stephen Voyce’s work in Iowa City entangles them in these wires.
“What have future generations done for us?” Justin Gillis from the New York Times quotes a banner hung from a freeway bridge in California. He says that there is an implied second question here: “Should we spend our heard-earned money trying to make the world better for them?”
These are no longer hypothetical questions. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Climate Assessment have issued reports that are pretty clear. Climate change is here right now and will be worse for future generations unless we do some hard work of installing more renewable energy and reducing our reliance on greenhouse gas producing fuels. We have 15 years before we make life miserable for our descendants.
James Gustave Speth, author of “The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Captialism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability,” is dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. In the preface to his book he writes, “All we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today.”
Like almost all Americans, I am the descendant of immigrants who came to this country to make a better life for themselves and their children. They were willing to experience some privation, dislocation and loss of culture and customs so that those who came after could have a better life. We are the beneficiaries of that sacrifice and hope, and I for one do not want to say that the hope died with my generation.
We already have been told that the generation that follows us will not have as high a standard of living. That may be OK because we have used more than our fair share of the planet’s resources. But they are not going to live as long because of the way we have poisoned the soil, water, air and food.
Then add the destructive elements of climate change with its increased heat waves, droughts and floods, sea level rises, increase in certain diseases, ocean acidification and possible food shortages and we are giving them a tsunami just waiting to engulf them, a bubble loan that cannot be paid, a diagnosis of disastrous proportions, the kind of which the doctor says, “If you had just come earlier when you started experiencing symptoms, we could have done something.”
We know what we need to know. We have our diagnosis. We know our treatment: reduce our use of fossil fuels. It can be done if we have the political will. It can also be done if businesses get on board.
Ideally, a revenue neutral carbon tax passed by Congress would be a great help in making renewable energy play on the same field as fossil fuels and also help oil, coal, and gas pay for their contribution to environmental degradation. I am hopeful that enough Americans will say enough is enough to our dysfunctional Congress and that this solution will be adopted.
One thing that would be helpful for all of us to understand is that it is not true that we have to choose between jobs and the environment. On June 2 a REMI report (Regional Economic Model) will be released indicating that with a carbon tax scaling up to $100 a ton over 19 years we can get the emissions reductions we need and benefit our economy. Iowa is in one of the regions that would especially benefit.
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter is a retired Episcopal priest who is active in several environmental groups in Iowa City including 100Grannies for a Livable Future and Iowa City Climate Advocates.
Tom Linzey, Community Environmental Defense Fund, on making Sustainability Legal. At the Shwartz-Guich Sustainable Living Center, Sustainable Living Department, Maharishi University of Management. Tom was a consultant to Ecuador when they drafted a new constitution inclusive of the rigths of nature
Posted inCommunity Rights|TaggedCRWG|Comments Off on Tom Linzey at MUM in Fairfield (23 Apr 2014)
by Becky Hall & Ann Christenson – UI should say ‘no’ to fossil fuels
How is a proposed $75 million power plant fueled mostly with natural gas true to the University’s “Vision 2020” goal to achieve 40 percent energy renewability within five years?
Yes, natural gas burns cleaner than any other fossil fuel, but the extraction of natural gas involves fracking, an environmentally disastrous method. Natural gas, an energy source that will soon be obsolete, is not a prudent choice for the future.
Nuclear is not the answer, either, as Jonathan Carlson proposed in the Press-Citizen recently. Carlson presents an excellent argument for moving away from fossil fuels without delay, but many alternatives offer safer, more sustainable solutions for future generations than nuclear.
Thoughtful proposals were offered in the University’s own Anthropocine Symposium last week. For example, Lonnie Thompson, featured speaker from Ohio State University, pointed out that OSU gets 25 percent of its energy from wind. Despite Iowa’s extraordinary production of wind energy, our university hasn’t even begun to tap the wind.
Because of the intermittent nature of wind and sun at this point, they may only be viable as ancillary sources for the proposed power plant, but have geothermal and hydro been considered as we know the use of biomass has? Are the great minds at this university are capable of tackling a problem of this magnitude? We want to believe that within this institution is the knowledge, imagination and creativity for leadership in this type of endeavor, to meet this challenge.
Let’s attain the “Vision 2020” goal of 40 percent renewable by putting our money where our mouth is. Let’s say “no” to fossil fuels.
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