Pre-filed testimony in support of the ten persons group by Nathan G. Phillips

I have two interrelated technical concerns with the Enbridge Model used by MassDEP to grant the air permit for the proposed Weymouth, which invalidate the air permit. I state these immediately below and elaborate on them thereafter. Rural Designation Ignores Coastal Site. Enbridge mischaracterized the site as “rural” when in fact it is a coastal, shoreline site embedded in an urban coastal community. This means the model cannot assess key meteorological phenomena important for pollution dispersion. Using an incorrect site characterization - even if surface meteorological measurements were made in a reasonably comparable location (Logan Airport compared to 50 Bridge Street, Weymouth) - means that the model cannot represent coastal/shoreline advection and incorrectly assumes that surface winds are uniform across a uniform surface rather than exhibiting sharp spatial gradients in surface energy balance and resulting atmospheric stability, winds, and air mixing associated with the water-land boundary. Shoreline Boundary Layer Development and Thermal Inversions Ignored. Since the Enbridge model is incapable of capturing shoreline effects it cannot assess the potential of pollution trapping through under-developed thermal internal boundary layers that may blanket residential areas. Moreover, MassDEP made no data collection or model validation across seasons, crucially ignoring winter coastal temperature inversions and resulting pollution trapping. Thermal and radiative inversions occur typically over vertical length scales of 150 meters, whereas the paired surface and upper air temperature measurements (from Gray, Maine, 185 miles away) used in the Enbridge Model are intended to and can only capture mesoscale effects, and cannot resolve crucial shoreline inversion events. The applicant’s consultant does not state what altitude it used for “upper air” measurements (www.mass.gov/files/documents/2018/06/11/algonquin-modeling.pdf) but according to EPA guidance these are typically several kilometers. The Enbridge Model mistakenly effectively assumes a fully-developed boundary layer condition and is thus unable to produce conditions that produce shoreline-induced looping or downwelling fumigating plumes that can expose residents to intermittently high concentrations of pollutants.https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vZdk_nbW7QwY8aQR9s8wDvbwATy0dj-izt6MP1Ef7PM/edit2021-02-24Published versio

After the Arab Spring: power shift in the Middle East?: Syria’s bloody Arab Spring

When the dictatorial regimes of Tunisia and Egypt were toppled by popular unrest few expected Syria to follow. Despite suffering under dictatorship for over 40 years and facing similar economic and social challenges that had prompted rebellion elsewhere, Syrians appeared to support their young president, Bashar al-Assad, who had cultivated an image as a populist anti-western moderniser. When protests did eventually reach Syria in March 2011, in the southern town of Deraa, they called on Assad to reform not resign. Yet any faith in Assad as a reformer soon evaporated. His security forces responded with live fire, killing hundreds in Deraa and elsewhere, while the president offered only piecemeal reforms. The regime fashioned a narrative that protests were led by criminal armed gangs, intent on stirring up sectarian divisions within Syria’s heterogeneous population. Yet in these early stages it was mostly regime-backed Shabiha militia from Assad’s own Alawi sect that were responsible for any violence, while most protestors remained peaceful and inclusive. Tragically, as regime violence continued and protests spread, with over 9,000 deaths in the first year, that narrative became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not only have some taken up arms against Assad, but sectarianism is increasing, with the Alawi community as a whole blamed for Assad’s excesses

The 1972 miners' strike: popular agency and industrial politics in Britain

The national miners' strike of 1972 is central to contemporary British history: it undermined Edward Heath's Conservative government and sharpened social conflict; the common interpretation of the strike as a 'victory for violence', shown here to be disingenuous, legitimised the Thatcherite attack on organised labour in the 1980s. This article examines the high politics of the strike, but situates popular agency - the actions and attitudes of the miners - as the predominant historical contingency. This was especially so in the uproarious events documented at Longannet in Fife, which shaped the outcome of the strike. This analysis is related to the character of industrial politics more generally in the 1960s and 1970s

A right to a risk filled life : understanding and analysis of the risk discourse for consumers in mental health : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Policy at Massey University

This thesis documents the perspective and discourse of risk for eleven people who identify as someone with lived experiences of mental illness and mental health service use. The thesis followed a participatory methodology and involved consumers in both formulating and conducting the research. Following qualitative research methods some key findings included that there was a correlation between increased exposures to risk during increased acute unwellness; increased exposure to risk because of service use; that the people interviewed wished to have some control and self-responsibility in managing risks, that life was full of risk and that this was quite usual; and importantly, that risk was experienced as a stigmatizing phenomena for the participants. The stigma of risk was such that participants had to develop significant coping strategies to manage others perceptions and deal with the experience of having normal behaviours and emotions considered by others as abnormal and risky. The thesis makes recommendations for consumers, services and mental health service staff and for policy makers. Many of the recommendations consider how understandings of risk and approaches to risk management could alter or increase consumer safety and wellbeing. The thesis additionally includes an analysis of the participatory process that was followed with recommendations made encouraging an increased frequency and strengthened quality of consumer participation in research

Mottness Collapse and T-linear Resistivity in Cuprate Superconductors

Central to the normal state of cuprate high-temperature superconductors is the collapse of the pseudogap, briefly reviewed here, at a critical point and the subsequent onset of the strange-metal characterized by a resistivity that scales linearly with temperature. A possible clue to the resolution of this problem is the inter-relation between two facts: 1) A robust theory of T-linear resistivity resulting from quantum criticality requires an additional length scale outside the standard 1-parameter scaling scenario and 2) breaking the Landau correspondence between the Fermi gas and an interacting system with short-range repulsions requires non-fermionic degrees. We show that a low-energy theory of the Hubbard model which correctly incorporates dynamical spectral weight transfer has the extra degrees of freedom needed to describe this physics. The degrees of freedom that mix into the lower band as a result of dynamical spectral weight transfer are shown to either decouple beyond a critical doping, thereby signaling Mottness collapse or unbind above a critical temperature yielding strange metal behaviour characterised by $T-$linear resistivity.Comment: 27 pages, Prepared for theme issue on the Normal State of the Cuprates for Philsophical Transactions