Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Reuters

A newspaper in Tehran, Iran, on Sept. 18, 2022, shows a front page picture of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died after being arrested by the Islamic Republic's "morality police."

The girls had already taken off their headscarves, in defiance of Iranian law. Then, in breaks between classes last week at their high school in Sanandaj, western Iran, they added their voices to nationwide protests, chanting demands for greater freedoms and an end to Iran’s theocratic rule.

As the students finished school and filed out – chanting again for the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and for “Women, Life, Freedom” – two police vans were waiting.

Policemen pushed six girls into the vehicles, and drove them away.

They were freed the same night, after their parents were forced to sign pledges that their daughters would not protest again, or risk “consequences” such as expulsion.

“But they’ve been chanting the same slogans ever since,” says a geography teacher at the school in the ethnic Kurdish city, which has become an epicenter both of protests and of the crackdown that rights groups say has taken more than 200 lives in four weeks. “I don’t think anyone will be able to stop this generation.”

After the incident, one of the detained girls “sounded incredibly determined about the future” despite being maltreated by the police, says the teacher, adding that the girl told her “we are just at the beginning of the path.”

Neither the teacher, speaking by telephone from Iran, nor her student could be named, for fear of reprisals.   

The defiant reactions provide insight into the reason why the month-long women-led protests persist, morphing into one of the broadest challenges to the Iranian religious leadership in recent years.

Students and other protesters “want regime change because they believe dialogue with this [ruling] system has failed more than once and has already burned older generations,” says the geography teacher, in her late 30s. “And wow, aren’t they right?”

Women’s rights ... and more

Schools and universities have become focal points of the protests, which broke out after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested and beaten by the so-called “morality police” for allegedly showing too much hair.

Raids on educational establishments, and arrests by police and staunchly ideological basij militia, have intensified.

WANA/Reuters

A police motorcycle burns during a protest in Tehran, Iran, Sept. 19, 2022, over the death of Mahsa Amini reportedly at the hands of "morality police."

Yet the protests have expanded well beyond the issue of women’s rights, into a more far-reaching contest, also fueled by economic grievances, between the aging religious leaders who rule the Islamic Republic and legions of citizens tired of their strict and intrusive rules, brutally enforced by militia.

The protests “are a plea and cry for a type of personal autonomy that many of the young generation have come to see as normal ... being able to walk in the street without being either harassed, or being arrested,” said Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American political scientist at Columbia University in New York, who has twice been detained in Iran for lengthy periods.

Video footage shot in Iran shows continued defiance, violent clashes, and security forces shooting live ammunition to disperse crowds – actions that protesting Iranians contacted for this article say have only hardened their resolve.

“Basijis and riot police must be punished right on the street, because they have proven that they have no mercy on us, the defenseless. We should teach them a lesson,” says Minoo, a humanities student at Azad University in Tehran who asked not to give her family name.

The violence has prompted her, with her boyfriend and a few classmates, to begin making Molotov cocktails – three of which she says they threw into groups of police in recent days.

“We are there to bring down the regime, it’s now or never. After Mahsa our lives are no longer like they were, we are not the same people we were a month ago,” says Minoo.

Her name a symbol

The protests began with the death of Ms. Amini, who witnesses say was severely beaten after her arrest for allowing too much hair to peep out from her headscarf. Such enforcement has been stepped up since hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi took office in August 2021. Authorities deny any abuse, but prevented the family from seeing the body before burial.

Painted in blue across her simple concrete gravestone in her home village of Saqqez are words that use Mahsa’s Kurdish name: “Dear Zhina – you haven’t died, your name will turn into a symbol.”

Iran’s mandatory hijab laws make Iran “utterly exceptional,” matched only by the Taliban’s Afghanistan, said Dr. Tajbakhsh, the analyst, speaking during a webinar on Tuesday. Today, in a sophisticated nation such as Iran, the laws are “such an anachronism that it has almost become like an embarrassment,” he added.

“This is a [young] generation that has grown up only within the confines of the ideological parameters of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said. “So the idea that this generation is turning its back on the values that it grew up in – that it was indoctrinated in, so to speak – must rattle the leadership of the regime.”

The result has been a strident debate about hijab, which has long been a pillar of the Islamic Republic. When a former reformist mayor suggested on state-run television in the first days of protest that 70% to 80% of Iranian women rejected mandatory hijab, the editor of a hard-line newspaper acknowledged that strict enforcement would require jailing or fining 20 million women.

Another hard-line pundit in the same debate, Sadeq Koushki, said “public opinion doesn’t count,” because wearing hijab “is the law of God.”

“Inspiring all of us”

The violence used by police as they round up protesters appears to have had little effect on the unrest, other than to radicalize some of the demonstrators.

“We are not backing off,” says a student at the prestigious Sharif University of Technology, who calls himself Yasser. “Many students here at Sharif are ready to take this battle to the end, even if they have to get armed at some point. This is a war that must have a winner. We are at the final stage.”

Such determination is recognizable back in Sanandaj, where teachers never expected police to show up on their school doorstep.

“I am from that older generation,” says the geography teacher, “and look at me – a bullied woman who hasn’t been able to stand up for her rights. But [the girls] are inspiring all of us now. The Islamic Republic has invited them into this war and victory is for our girls.”

How can she have such high expectations, when Iranian authorities have a successful track record of violently suppressing all previous protests?

“A ruling system that adopts such cowardly measures like attacking and arresting teenage schoolgirls is definitely counting its days,” she says.

“We do know they are brutal,” the teacher says of the police, “but I couldn’t imagine they would go to that length in spreading fear.

“Has it worked? My experience with these robust, fearless young ladies says ‘no.’ It might be years before the girls will get what they want, I know, but what matters is that this cause won’t die.”

An Iranian researcher contributed reporting for this story.

The House committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol made its closing arguments to the American public today and voted 9-0 to subpoena former President Donald Trump.

They highlighted snippets from more than a million Secret Service communications in the days and hours leading up to the breach of the Capitol, bolstering their thesis that then-President Donald Trump had incited a mob ​and bears singular responsibility for the violence that ensued.

“Armed and Ready, Mr. President!” read one snippet of intelligence presented in a Secret Service email on Dec. 24, 2020, about two weeks before the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress to formalize Joe Biden’s election victory.

“[T]he protesters should ‘start marching into the chambers.’”

“… ‘make sure they know who to fear.’”

Two days later, another Secret Service email included this from a tipster: “Their plan is to literally kill people.”

Yet on Jan. 6, even as the Secret Service was sharing alerts of armed Trump rallygoers and a midmorning threat that Vice President Mike Pence would be “a dead man walking if he doesn;t [sic] do the right thing,” the president urged the crowd to march down to the Capitol.

For more than two hours Thursday, the committee’s nine members recapped the president’s role in the events of Jan. 6 that they laid out over eight hearings this summer, with soundbites from a wide range of witnesses including Mr. Trump’s White House lawyers, advisers, campaign officials, and Justice Department officials. They reiterated that Jan. 6 represented a major threat to American democracy – a threat that did not disappear when Joe Biden was inaugurated – and one that could cause further damage if not checked.

At the end of the hearing, Chair Bennie Thompson announced a vote on whether to subpoena Mr. Trump, and laid out the case for doing so.

“He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on Jan. 6. We want to hear from him,” said Chair Bennie Thompson. 

It’s the committee’s responsibility to be fair and tell the most complete story possible, he added – and it’s Mr. Trump’s responsibility to be accountable to the American people. “He is required to answer for his actions.”

Getting Mr. Trump to testify may not prove feasible in the roughly three months remaining in the current Congress. Other witnesses who have been subpoenaed have refused to appear, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Steve Bannon, who was found guilty of contempt of Congress. Mr. Trump has expressed frustration that Leader McCarthy boycotted the committee, leaving the president without anyone to present his point of view in the hearings, but it’s unclear whether Mr. Trump would be willing to appear before a committee he has derided as a political witch hunt. 

Establishing the facts around the causes and events of Jan. 6 may be important not only for posterity but also for the nation’s present politics, whose divisions were both reflected in and exacerbated by the attack on the Capitol. Extreme partisanship interfered with creating a bipartisan congressional investigation and, to some critics, undermined perceptions of the committee’s credibility. Divergent views of the Capitol riot have made it difficult for Congress or anyone else to address the root causes and prevent such political violence in the future. 

“They put forth a compelling case that, in our polarized nation, maybe did not move those in the farthest corners – but did tell a really important story to the American people,” says Anne Tindall, counsel at Protect Democracy and a former congressional investigator. “And it’s shown us what good congressional oversight can look like.”

Not everyone agrees; even some who have condemned Mr. Trump’s actions that day say the hearings could have established greater credibility among Republican voters if they had tapped a wider range of voices and allowed for robust cross-examination. Republicans, who boycotted the committee after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected two of their appointees, have also criticized it for not looking into Capitol security failures that left police vastly outnumbered and underprepared to handle rioters.

Political implications

From its inception in the summer of 2021,  the committee sought to overcome criticism of its makeup and scope. Though made up mainly of Democrats, it relied predominantly on Republican witnesses in its tightly choreographed accounting of the events of Jan. 6 and the former president’s role in them. 

The committee made the case that former President Trump perpetuated a lie that the election was stolen, despite numerous Trump-appointed judges, political advisers, and campaign officials telling him there was no evidence to support that claim. And it argued the former president must be held accountable for inciting, abetting, and – for 187 minutes – doing nothing to stop the attack as Congress was meeting to tally the electoral votes and formalize Joe Biden’s victory.

Alex Wong/Reuters

A video of former President Donald Trump is played during a hearing by the Jan. 6 committee in Washington, Oct. 13, 2022. While the committee unanimously voted to subpoena Mr. Trump, getting him to testify may prove difficult in the roughly three months remaining in the current Congress.

The hearings, which at times felt more like a Netflix special than a C-SPAN affair, do not appear to have moved the needle much among Democrats or Republicans. But one summer poll showed that a third of independents now see the attack as more serious. Separately, polling by Citizen Data before and after the summer hearings found that among those who believe the 2020 election was stolen, the proportion who saw Jan. 6 as a violent attempt to overthrow the government nearly doubled from 6.5% to 11%. 

Despite the high-profile nature of the hearings, what happened on Jan. 6 – and the decision by 147 Republicans to vote against accepting the electoral vote tallies submitted to Congress – appear unlikely to impact the upcoming midterm elections much, if at all. Politico, using data from ad-tracking firm AdImpact, found that less than 2% of broadcast TV ad spending for House races so far has focused on Jan. 6.

Members of both the House and Senate have introduced bipartisan bills to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act. Among other things, the bills significantly raise the threshold for lodging objections to the electoral vote tally. On Jan. 6, only one member from each chamber was needed to trigger an interruption in the joint session, during which the House and Senate would separately debate whether to accept the tally. 

Legal implications

It remains to be seen whether the committee will recommend criminal prosecution for former President Trump. However, Vice Chair Liz Cheney said the committee now has “sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals.”

In some ways the committee's final report – detailing whether crimes have been committed and by whom, and expected in December – could carry just as much weight as a criminal referral, says Ms. Tindall.  

In her view, the committee’s focus on Mr. Trump’s role is unlikely to taint any potential Department of Justice legal action against the former president. Rather, by making the case to the public, they have freed up the DOJ to do its job. 

“[That] makes it easier for DOJ to apply the principles in a more straightforward manner and to eschew those political considerations that might weigh on them otherwise,” she says.

The Justice Department has been pursuing its own investigation, including a trial this month of five leaders of the Oath Keepers, an antigovernment militia group of former law enforcement officials and veterans, on seditious conspiracy charges. In total, 11 members or associates of the Oath Keepers have been charged with seditious conspiracy, which involves efforts “to overthrow, put down or to destroy by force” the government of the United States.

The Jan. 6 committee’s review of more than 140,000 documents and interviews with hundreds of people could give the Justice Department additional fodder, though it’s still unclear how much of that evidence will be turned over and when.  

The larger social context

The committee’s scope and purpose is different from that of a court of law, and it includes holding people to account publicly and politically. In that sense, its full impact could take years to be seen. 

Rachel E. Bowen, an associate professor of political science at The Ohio State University who studies truth commissions around the world, says it’s generally possible within a year or two to determine how successful a commission has been in establishing a social or political consensus about how to move forward. But when it comes to changing the political culture and preventing a recurrence of violence, it can take a decade or more to determine whether that has been accomplished.

While this is difficult in highly polarized societies, it can be done. South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has been hailed as exemplary, took place at a time when the leaders had come to an agreement but there were still deep divisions and tensions among the public. 

Professor Bowen says that while it’s valuable to remove leaders and break up organizations and movements that are harmful socially or politically, the larger context also needs to be addressed. “We also have a lot of cultural/social work to do in this country around the underlying issues that motivate groups like the Oath Keepers, that motivate people to see the other political party as corrupt,” she says. “Trump could disappear, or go to jail – he could be gone from the scene – and the underlying conditions would still exist.”

What next for extremist groups

Anthony DeAngelo, who on Jan. 6 was working as a congressional staffer for Democratic Rep. Andy Kim, says the hearings have been like turning on a light in a dark kitchen. 

“We’ve seen the bugs scatter a little bit,” says Mr. DeAngelo, now head of public affairs for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which works on disinformation, extremism, and hate. “These groups are becoming more isolated, decentralized, and a little more paranoid.”

However, he adds, they are still very much focused on the same core issues as in 2020. 

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, compares the impact on these groups to mercury being hit by a hammer. “Its consistency changes but not the toxins,” he says.

Indeed, if the goal is to prevent another Jan. 6-style attack, a congressional investigation will likely need to be complemented by legal, social, and security initiatives.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the university that hosts the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. 

Women at NASA’s storied Jet Propulsion Laboratory literally danced for joy when they learned in January that Laurie Leshin had been appointed JPL’s new director – the first female to lead this center for robotic space exploration in its 86-year history. She’s a barrier breaker in an industry long dominated by white men, but one that’s also rapidly changing.

Last week, the Monitor sat down with Dr. Leshin to ask her about diversity issues and upcoming missions at the lab. The space scientist is an expert in both, coming off eight years as the first female president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, and serving in leadership positions at NASA headquarters and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.  

More than 6,000 employees work at this sun-drenched campus in Pasadena, California, seeking answers to big questions like “Are we alone in the universe?” On the horizon are missions to orbit Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and to bring rock samples from Mars back to Earth. Both missions are related to the search for water, and possible life. The lab also devotes more than a third of its effort to tracking and studying Earth’s climate. 

Dr. Leshin, a self-described “water person,” has spent much of her work as a geochemist looking for water in meteorites and on Mars. She was first captivated by the red planet as a young girl, when the Viking landers sent back pictures of Martian rocks that looked like Arizona, where she lived. That interest turned into a career when, as a university student studying chemistry, she saw a notice for a NASA internship. Screwing up her courage, she knocked on the door of a female chemistry professor she did not know – and who dropped everything to help her.

The directorship is a homecoming for Dr. Leshin. She worked on the Mars rover Curiosity and was with the cheering crowd at JPL when it landed 10 years ago – on her birthday. The feeling is apparently mutual. In her office hangs a space-themed quilt sewn by more than 100 “JPLers” after she briefly mentioned at her first town hall that she also was a weaver and knitter. “This is what’s special about JPL,” she says of the quilt. “It’s this fabulous intersection of creativity and total nerdiness.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

JPL Director Laurie Leshin stands alongside a quilt in her office on Oct. 5, 2022. More than 100 JPL employees made the quilt for Dr. Leshin after she mentioned at an employee town hall that she likes weaving and knitting. "This is what's special about JPL," she says. "It's this fabulous intersection of creativity and total nerdiness"

We’ve had a lot of “firsts” for women over the decades – in politics, in the law, even in aerospace. Why do you think the JPL “first” is important?

It’s a moment in the aerospace industry when we are really getting serious about embracing diversity, embracing difference, and embracing inclusion. And I hope I can be a symbol of that. 

I was fortunate enough to be friends with Sally Ride, and one of the things I love most about her was that she took really seriously the responsibility of being the first American woman in space. I feel the same way about being the first woman director of JPL – that I need to use this opportunity to create space for others, and also to share the message about how important it is to honor diverse voices in this business that is so challenging. We need all the brains. We need everyone who can help us drive the frontiers of knowledge and of technology.  

As a college president, we dramatically increased the fraction of women in our incoming classes. I know it’s possible and lots of places are focused on women; they’re focused on underrepresented people of color, people with disabilities. That excuse of “Well, they’re not available,” I just don’t buy that anymore.  

Here in the LA Basin, we have an incredibly diverse community, an incredibly diverse set of colleges that we can draw from. We’re building pipelines of future workforce at those institutions. I think 23% of our summer interns last year were from Hispanic-serving institutions, for example. Now, once they’re here, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got an inclusive environment for them to thrive. You can’t just throw people together and expect that it’s going to work. You have to actually manage that process. 

To prep for this interview, I took a public tour of JPL. I met a middle school girl, a person of color, from Kern County, which is a pretty rural county in California. She is doing robotics at school. Her dream is to work at JPL. What advice would you give her?

One is don’t let anybody tell you that you don’t belong there because you completely do. And keep up the work on things like robotics teams. Hands-on learning like FIRST Robotics and other after-school activities are really life changing. It helps show the joy of doing STEM in ways that can be harder inside the formal classroom. So keep doing things that excite you, and then come and be a summer intern at JPL because we hire a ton of our workforce from our interns. 

STEM is about discovering something that no one’s known before. That’s what did it for me. It’s like that first time I did actual scientific research as a NASA intern when I was 19. I was like, “Oh my gosh, no one has ever figured this out before. I’m the first!” 

Two big upcoming JPL missions are related to water – on Mars and on Jupiter’s moon. Why is looking for water so important, and what are you hoping to find from these two missions?

Water is so important because wherever we find life, it is associated with water on Earth. It’s almost true that wherever we find water, we find life. So liquid water is a great sort of soup for life to exist within and around. We think it is one of the essential ingredients for life to have gotten started anywhere else. 

When we look at Mars, we see lots of evidence of dried-up riverbeds and dried-up lake beds. We know that Mars today is too cold and the atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to exist at the surface for any prolonged period. But clearly, in the past it did. And those times in the past, which were probably billions of years ago, was the same time that life was getting started on Earth. So it’s very interesting to try and understand whether Mars and Earth were much more alike back then and whether at that time, when there were nascent oceans on the Earth and there was a bunch of liquid water on the surface of Mars, whether life could have gotten started in both places. 

Our plan with Mars is to bring back some rocks that are going to allow us to answer that question. Today, as we speak, the Perseverance rover is drilling little pinky-sized cores of rock and stashing them away in her belly. And we know from the sensors that Perseverance has on board that some of these rock cores are chock-full of organic material. We’ve got to bring these rocks back and get them in the very best labs on Earth where we can tear them apart atom by atom, molecule by molecule, and really understand their history and their origins.  

It turns out this mission is also really hard. To go to Mars, get the stuff, and bring it home, we’ve never done that. It’s the most complex mission JPL will have ever done.

And sending a spacecraft to Jupiter’s moon Europa?

Europa is a whole different class of water worlds. It’s one we’re calling “ocean worlds.” It’s Jupiter’s giant amount of gravity pushing and pulling on Europa’s icy shell that causes some of the ice underneath to melt. We’re fairly confident there is an ocean underneath.  

We’re going to fly by it many times with the Europa Clipper, with nine different sensors to understand what’s happening both at the surface and also to even sense below the ice. From these flybys we’ll be able to tell so much more about what this ocean is like and where there might be spots where the ice is thin – where if, in a future mission, we were able to go and land on the surface and try and get into that ocean.  

So it’s a first mission truly exploring ocean worlds in the outer solar system. And we think there are a lot of them.  

Why is the U.S. government spending so much on space exploration when we have so many problems here on Earth? 

I think people think that somehow we’ve taken a couple billion dollars and put it on top of a rocket and launched it into space, which is not true. All of that money is actually spent right here on Earth. It is spent on people, inspiring this young middle schooler that you mentioned earlier to pursue STEM. She may or may not end up working in the space business, but, my goodness, she’s going to end up innovating somewhere. We spend it on good, high paying tech jobs. This is really good for our economy. It’s good for the competitiveness of the United States.  

And I would argue worrying only about today’s problems, and trying to solve the thing that’s right in front of you is a disservice to humanity. The beauty of being human beings is we can be long-term as well. We can look over the horizon and dream about what’s possible. We can help people imagine a different world. And I really think space exploration does that. I think it pulls us to be our best selves, and I think there’s huge value in that. 

We do a lot for planet Earth. Our next big launch is a mission called SWOT [Surface Water and Ocean Topography], which is going to revolutionize our understanding of Earth’s surface water. We do not have a global view of Earth’s fresh water. I didn’t know that myself until recently. This mission is going to do a global survey of Earth’s surface water in addition to doing work on the oceans and being able to understand ocean circulation in much greater detail. 

JPL is all about robotic exploration. What do you see as the proper balance between robotic and human missions, and also, should humans go to Mars?

I think having humans in space is part of what makes it real for lots of people. We’re at this really exciting moment where we’re about to venture back beyond low Earth-orbit, sending humans back to the moon. And this time it’ll be a more diverse set of humans, which to me is also really powerful. 

There’s also a ton of places that humans won’t be going any time soon. The outer solar system, these ocean worlds. If you want to try and understand planets around other stars, other star systems, we need robotic observatories to do that science. 

Mars has been on our wish list for generations to send humans to this neighboring world. I think it’s going to happen. Humans can discern and make decisions in real time and explore. And by the way, the systems that you build to support the humans are capable of bringing back way more rocks than the little pinky-sized samples that we will be bringing back with Mars Sample Return. 

You are in a position to put JPL on a course to be a certain kind of institution doing a certain kind of science. What’s your strategic vision?  

In fact, that’s the exact conversation we’re having with thousands of JPLers, because I’m a true believer in co-creation of a future. I don’t think any one person should come in and dictate the answer to that question. There’s brilliant, brilliant people here. And part of this is just about unleashing them on the hardest problems in science and space exploration. 

And we need to lead in this very fast changing and diverse ecosystem that is the space business right now. We need to get much better at being a great partner to others, leading by example with our own work around diversity, equity, and inclusion and accessibility, for example. I have this mantra that I’m talking to everyone about that’s called “succeed, seed, and lead” – mission success, seed the future, lead in the ecosystem. I’m just really proud to get the opportunity to take an incredibly storied institution like JPL and help it have a future that just knocks it out of the park.

The Bowenpally Vegetable Market in Hyderabad, India, is a hub of activity.

Every day, more than 5,000 traders, shoppers, drivers, and employees pass through the massive market yard, perusing mountains of cabbage and gourd varieties, sneaking by towers of onions, and eyeing baskets of bright red chilis. Small vendors such as Padma Devi come at least once a week, rain or shine, to stock up on produce for their businesses back home. 

“Sometimes I sell them within three days, and then I come back for more,” she says. 

The bustling ecosystem produces many happy customers – and heaps upon heaps of waste. Of the 1,500 to 2,000 metric tons of produce handled daily at Bowenpally, about 10 metric tons will be left behind. 

But for the past couple years, that waste hasn’t lingered. It’s been quietly redirected to the Bowenpally market’s very own compressed biogas (CBG) plant, where organic material is broken down into usable fuel. Instead of going into a landfill, spoiled or otherwise unsellable vegetables are gathered up daily and turned into electricity which powers buildings, streetlights, and a kitchen that prepares meals for hundreds of people, including Ms. Devi. 

“I didn’t know that the canteen was powered with waste,” she says, smiling. “It’s something good.”

While no silver bullet, biogas is an increasingly important part of governments’ climate action plans as countries try to move away from coal and fossil fuels. In India, industry groups expect corporations to invest millions in new biogas projects in the coming years. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a massive biogas plant in Indore in the state of Madhya Pradesh in February, and just this summer, a CBG plant in Punjab – the largest of its kind in Asia – began producing biogas for commercial sale. 

Critics warn that biogas has many limitations, and shouldn’t distract from developing more scalable and permanent climate solutions. But at a local level, the technology offers a convenient way to tackle two environmental problems at once.

“One, it’s a much-needed replacement for fossil fuels,” says Andrew Benedek, founder and CEO of Canadian clean energy company Anaergia. “And second, [biogas] makes use of waste that would otherwise emit the greenhouse gas methane, which is 37% of the climate change problem.”

Kavitha Yarlagadda

The Bowenpally Vegetable Market's biogas plant in Hyderabad, India, on July 10, 2022. Gas is stored here in massive balloons until it can be used, either to replace liquefied petroleum gas in the market's canteen, or by converting it to electricity using a combustion engine and generator.

Creating energy out of waste

There are millions of biogas plants operating across India, mostly small family plants designed to run on animal manure, but also medium- and large-scale enterprises that utilize food waste, sewage, and other organic matter.

At the Bowenpally market, unsold vegetables are shredded into a pulp and passed into an anaerobic digester, where bacteria eat up the waste and emit methane and carbon dioxide gasses. The gas is then stored in four huge balloons until it can be used. It can directly replace liquefied petroleum gas in certain applications, or be converted to electricity using a combustion engine and generator.

The plant can process 10 to 15 metric tons of waste every day, according to Shruti Ahuja, director and business head at Ahuja Engineering Services, a Hyderabad-based company that installed the plant on a piece of land donated by the government. It uses technology provided by Indian Institute of Chemical Technology, a government research center also based in Hyderabad. “Waste generated in the market yard changes over seasons, so the plant is designed to also handle low amounts of waste,” she says.

The plant generates enough gas and electricity to power the canteen kitchen – which makes 800 meals a day – as well as light the streets and buildings within the market. The Bowenpally Agricultural Market Committee reports that using biogas also helps the market save around $1,800 on its monthly electricity bill.

Not a universal fix

Biogas has its limits. Researchers say technological advancement is needed to streamline biogas production and make the relatively delicate process more scalable for a large population. As it stands, changes in plant temperature and input material can pose challenges.

“A minor change would be acceptable by the biological system, but if there is a drastic change ... the system will have to be cleaned and started again, which takes time,” says Sydney Lobo, a Mumbai-based international consultant in the clean technology space. “This is the biggest limitation.”

There’s also the issue of obtaining the waste. 

Biogas plants are less effective in urban settings, where organic waste may be plentiful, but costly to separate from other trash. India’s poor waste management record exacerbates this challenge, though it’s not necessarily insurmountable. Hopes are high for the plant Mr. Modi inaugurated earlier this year, for example, because Indore consistently ranks as one of India’s cleanest cities and already has a segregated waste system. 

Wide-ranging benefits

Yet where biogas plants are being established, the potential is great.

Experts say CBG can serve three critical needs of the growing economy: cooking, industrial energy, and transportation.

It also eases burdens on landfills, and produces a fertilizer known as “digestate.” While biogas is considered as the primary product, this nutrient-rich byproduct can serve as a valuable soil conditioner for farmers.

“If the potential is realized, biogas use can accrue additional wide-ranging benefits including emission reduction, improved public health, reduced use of chemical fertilizers, savings in fertilizer subsidies, and improved soil nutrition,” says Disha Agarwal, a program lead at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water in New Delhi.

But for many at the Bowenpally Vegetable Market, there’s a simple comfort in knowing that their garbage is getting a second life. 

S. Madhu makes monthly trips to the market, bearing farmers’ crops from his village in the neighboring state of Karnataka. At the end of the day, he and other traders often abandon unsold stock to save on transportation costs. 

“I am happy that the spoiled and excess vegetables we leave behind are being recycled and converted to something useful,” says Mr. Madhu.

AP

Men play football next to the Jean Jacques Dessalines monument in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Oct. 12.

Depending on the source, there are anywhere from 90 to 200 armed gangs in Haiti, an island nation of some 12 million people. They are not a new phenomenon. Some have enjoyed close ties to political leaders for decades. In poorer neighborhoods, they often functioned as providers of basic services neglected by the government.

Now, amid perhaps the worst political crisis in the country’s history, their presence has taken a deeply disturbing turn. The United Nations estimates that 934 people in Haiti​ ​were killed in gang violence during the first half of 2022. Kidnappings – a source of revenue – have increased fivefold since 2019. Gangs constrict the flow of goods throughout the capital and wield control over the police forces and businesses.

The threat they pose finally compelled Prime Minister Ariel Henry, Haiti’s unelected leader, to appeal for international intervention on Oct. 7. That call, since backed by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, presents an opportunity for the international community to rethink how to stabilize states in distress. That starts, Haitian reformers say, with listening.

“There are Haitians who have the competence, vision, and commitment to put the country on the path to a better future,” Velina Charlier, a Haitian pro-democracy activist, told the U.S. Congress last month. “Working with and listening to progressive forces of the nation and not the same corrupt figures who have led the country to the disaster we are experiencing today would be a step in the right direction.”

Haiti ranks near the bottom of several indexes of governance and development. It is the world’s 16th most corrupt country on Transparency International’s annual assessment. It is 116th out of 121 nations on the Global Hunger Index. The country’s democratic institutions, meanwhile, are in tatters; it has not held an election since 2016. A gallon of gas costs $30 on the black market.

The current political crisis has its origin in the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Mr. Henry stepped in, vowing to hold elections before the end of the unfinished presidential term in February 2022. The promise was not kept. In the interim, an assembly of more than 200 civil society groups convened to draft a road map back to democracy.

The Biden administration responded to Mr. Henry’s call for intervention by imposing new sanctions on officials with known ties to gang members. And on Wednesday, a delegation from the Pentagon and State Department arrived in Port-au-Prince to consider possible political reforms and security and humanitarian measures.

Foreign intervention is deeply unpopular among Haitians – but unity isn’t. In fact, the civil society groups seeking change through dialogue and the gangs seeking control through violence may have a common goal. As Jean Clarens Renois, a member of the National Union for the Integration and Reconciliation, a political party, told The New Humanitarian, “The solution is social, economic, and it’s about justice. ... Give [gang members] work and they will leave the gangs.”

A young gang member named Ti Zile agreed. “There wouldn’t be war if there was work.”

That offers a starting point for the kind of listening Ms. Charlier, the activist, seeks. As her colleague, Alermy Piervilus, executive secretary of the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organizations, told Congress in the same hearing, rebuilding Haiti rests on “justice, the end of impunity, and citizen participation.” Haiti’s crisis may be complex, but Haitians are saying the solutions are clear to those who are listening.