Something’s Fishy About the ‘Migrant Crisis’ | A New Era of Financial Warfare | Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be, and more

A New Era of Financial Warfare  (Ali Ahmadi and Owais Arshad, National Interest)
The twenty-first century ushered in a “new era of financial warfare” as the United States imposed robust financial sanctions on its adversaries. Unlike traditional trade sanctions, these measures focus on disrupting a target state’s cross-border financial channels to isolate it from the global economy. However, this also allowed America to leverage the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Furthermore, relatively few giant banks are responsible for most global cross-border transactions, relying on the U.S. dollar to carry out basic operations. Blocked access to the dollar is an effective death sentence for most major financial institutions. 
Hence, banks quickly adopted American preferences regarding legal practices—what some scholars call the Americanization of compliance—and erected massive compliance bureaucracies elevated from middle offices to core nodes within the firms’ operations. It is not unusual for 10 percent of the staff of an individual bank to be compliance professionals. Now, the Biden administration is placing them at the center of the West’s most pressing sanctions necessity: enforcing export controls. 
While financial sanctions still have an essential role for the United States and its allies, the focus has shifted to export controls. Economic sanctions were very influential in undermining the economies of countries like Iran, Syria, and Venezuela. However, as sanctions become a weapon of choice in the era of great power competition, export controls are taking the spotlight. The need to restrict Russian military and economic access to high-value Western technological products and slow down China’s fast-expanding military and industrial base has made Washington rediscover enthusiasm for technological export controls abandoned in favor of promoting free trade after the Berlin Wall fell. 

Ending Dependence on Russia’s Nuclear Sector  (Andrea Stricker, National Interest)
Nearly two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia’s state-run nuclear conglomerate, the Rosatom Corporation, raked in $14 billion dollars in annual revenue in 2023. U.S. and European purchases of Russian nuclear commodities likely amounted to over $2 billion of this total. This is unacceptable.
The Biden administration must take the lead on banning such imports and threaten sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Moscow’s nuclear sector. If the administration fails to act, the Kremlin will continue earning billions of dollars in annual revenue via such exports, undermining the West’s goal of helping Ukraine defeat Russia.
 The Biden administration has yet to sanction Russia’s nuclear sector because U.S. nuclear utilities remain partially dependent on Russian imports. Only in February 2023 did the administration begin sanctioning a handful of related entities and individuals. While Congress has introduced a number of bills aimed at curtailing nuclear imports from Russia, it has failed to sign any into law.
American efforts to reduce or end U.S. imports of Russian nuclear commodities are progressing but slowly. Thanks in part to increased focus from Congress, the U.S. Department of Energy is quietly advising U.S. nuclear utilities to prepare for a wind-down and, ultimately, a ban on Russian nuclear imports.

Los Angeles Just Proved How Spongy a City Can Be  (Matt Simon, Wired)
Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.
With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.

All That Rain Is Driving Up Cases of a Deadly Fungal Disease in California  (Zoya Teirstein, Wired)
Last week, a long, narrow section of the Earth’s atmosphere funneled trillions of gallons of water eastward from the Pacific tropics and unleashed it on California. This weather event, known as an atmospheric river, broke rainfall records, dumped more than a foot of rain on parts of the state, and knocked out power for 800,000 residents. At least nine people died in car crashes or were killed by falling trees. But the full brunt of the storm’s health impacts may not be felt for months.
The flooding caused by intensifying winter rainstorms in California is helping to spread a deadly fungal disease called coccidioidomycosis, or valley fever. “Hydroclimate whiplash is increasingly wide swings between extremely wet and extremely dry conditions,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Humans are finding it difficult to adapt to this new pattern. But fungi are thriving, Swain said. Valley fever, he added, “is going to become an increasingly big story.”