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Jane Fonda gets arrested for climate protest, plans to do it again

by Salina60Xmqo Posted on October 11, 2019

Jane Fonda has joined many a protest in her eight decades on God’s green earth. She has marched with working mothers, supported the Black Panthers, and sat on an anti-aircraft gun in Vietnam. Now, the star of Barbarella, Monster-In-Law, and dozens more movies, TV shows, and exercise videos is lending her voice and influence in a new way to an old cause: climate change.

For the next 13 Fridays, the 81-year-old Academy Award winner will demonstrate on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to ask lawmakers to put an end to fossil fuel drilling. She’ll have to stop protesting in December so she can start filming the seventh season of Grace and Frankie, her Netflix comedy series.

Fonda is calling the protests “Fire Drill Fridays,” and they’re like a combination of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future protests and the activist group Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience. Fonda says she plans to protest each week until she is arrested. “I’m going to take my body, which is kind of famous and popular right now because of the [television] series and I’m going to go to D.C. and I’m going to have a rally every Friday,” the actress said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Greta said we have to behave like it’s a crisis,” she added. “We have to behave like our houses are on fire.”

True to her word, Fonda, sporting a red pea coat and a spiffy checkered cap, was arrested alongside other protesters on the steps of the Capitol building on Friday.

Assuming she’s released in time, Fonda will host online teach-ins on Thursday evenings that will include lectures from climate scientists and discussions about how environmental concerns overlap with social issues, in addition to her Friday protests, which will start every week at 11 a.m.

The eight-time Golden Globe winner has protested in the name of climate change before, at Standing Rock in 2016 and at regional protests on the West Coast, including the climate rally in Los Angeles last month. Now, her number one priority is “cutting all funding and permits for new developments for fossil fuel and exports and processing and refining.”

Celebrities are often keen to wade into activism, but it doesn’t always have the intended effect (and the media has a tendency to bungle the message). Yahoo News covered actress Shailene Woodley’s protests at Standing Rock thusly: “Shailene Woodley’s Mug Shot Is as Beautiful as Her Message.” Other celebs have advocated for eliminating straws but seem to have no problem flying private jets all over the damn place, a great way to fry the planet, reusable straws and all.

But Fonda’s multi-pronged approach, which pairs civil disobedience with education and raises awareness about student strikes, seems to be in line with what a bunch of experts told Grist is the right way for a celebrity to support environmental activists. As Barbarella herself would say, “Decarbonize or I’ll melt your face!”

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Jane Fonda gets arrested for climate protest, plans to do it again

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Dear white people: We need to talk about your diet’s carbon footprint

by greenenergy4 Posted on March 29, 2019

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When it comes to emissions, our food choices carry some serious weight. And according to a new study, white individuals’ eating habits contribute more on average to climate change-related emissions than other demographic groups.

The study, published Monday in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, examined the “food pipeline” — the production, distribution, and waste associated with the products we eat — to assess the environmental impacts of three different demographic groups, “Blacks, Latinx, and Whites.” Using data from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, researchers found that the typical diet of a white American includes more foods that require more land and water — and emit more greenhouse gases — than the typical diets of black and Latinx communities.

In the study, white Americans’ eating patterns had the highest per capita greenhouse gas and water impacts of any demographic group due to their consumption of “environmentally intense food items” such as potatoes, beef, apples, and milk. Black Americans’ diets had the highest per capita land impact “due to their consumption of land‐intense food items in the fruit and ‘protein foods’ food groups,” but had the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions of the three groups examined.

“If we are to draft policies related to food, they can’t be one-size-fits-all policies because different populations have different eating patterns which have their own unique impacts on the environment,” Joe Bozeman, a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago and first author on the paper, said in a statement.

Of course, how you eat depends on more than just your race. Individuals’ food habits vary depending on geographic location, socioeconomic status, age, gender, culture, religion, and personal preference, to say the least. But the study is just the latest piece of evidence that, on a population level, disparities exist between which demographic groups contribute to — and bear the burdens of — climate change.

According to research published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, people of color are exposed to higher levels of air pollution than what would be expected based on their own rates of consumption (a contributor to emissions). The PNAS study found that non-white Hispanics breathe in 63 percent more air pollution than caused by their own consumption, while black people are exposed to about 56 percent more than they cause. As for white Americans, the study found they breathe in 17 percent less air pollution than they cause.

“The approach we establish in this study could be extended to other pollutants, locations, and groupings of people,” said study co-author Julian Marshall in an interview with USA Today. “When it comes to determining who causes air pollution — and who breathes that pollution — this research is just the beginning.”

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Dear white people: We need to talk about your diet’s carbon footprint

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Your weather tweets are showing your climate amnesia

by MikelArriaga935 Posted on February 26, 2019

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This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Every time someone in a position of power (for example) says that a cold snap in winter proves that climate change is not a thing, a dutiful chorus responds with a familiar refrain: Weather is not climate. Weather happens on the scale of days or weeks, over a distance relevant to cities or states. Climate happens over decades, centuries even, to an entire planet.

The problem is, guess what timescale and space-scale people live on?

The question of what can make human beings understand climate change is literally an existential one. It’s complicated by humans’ pathetically short lifespan and their attention-span, roughly akin to that of a cat in a laser-pointer QA lab. How can anyone expect people to grasp the planetary, millennium-encompassing implications of their half-remembered actions? There’s bad news on that front, and as is customary with bad news, it comes from Twitter.

From a database of 2.18 billion tweets sent by 12.8 million people in the continental U.S. — stripped of all identifying information except for date and location — a team of climate researchers isolated the ones that talked about the weather. Specifically, they looked for tweets talking about whether it was hot or cold. And then they compared the volume of those tweets to the “reference temperature” for the county where they originated; which is to say, they looked at historical data for whether that county was seeing an unusual number of hot or cold days over time.

In one respect, the researchers found what you might intuit. People bitch about the weather when the weather’s bad. But then, curiously, they stop. What used to seem extreme starts to seem normal. “If you have a recent history where you have abnormally warm or colder temperatures, that reduces the probability you’ll tweet about the weather,” says Fran Moore, an environmental scientist at UC Davis and lead author of a paper about this in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s not that people get used to that new normal, though. They just get sort of blind to it. Moore and her colleagues ran the non-weather tweets from their Twitter corpus through two different automated systems for sentiment analysis, the Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning (VADER) and the much less cool-ly initialized Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Sentiment analysis is still a field where smart people could disagree on whether it works, but even so, both analyses of the emotional content of these tweet streams showed the same thing. “People stop tweeting about these unusual temperatures,” Moore says, “but as best we can tell, the temperatures are still making them kind of miserable.” Yes, miserable even for Twitter.

It has been about a century since people began pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in earnest. Climate researchers rely on millennia-old data like tree rings and ice cores to show change. But, Moore says, it takes just about five years for people to forget what used to be normal. The cartoonist Randall Munroe had it right in a 2013 XKCD strip: “What used to be normal now feels too cold.” And that worries scientists like Moore, because it might mean that people essentially get amnesia when it comes to climate change. The variation is too subtle for anyone to notice or do anything about — until it’s not, when it’s too late. Which, arguably, is now.

Broadly this idea is called “shifting baseline syndrome.” As happens a lot when it comes to ecological disasters, the ocean researchers noticed it first. As commercial fisheries fall apart, what constitutes a “large catch” gets defined downward, as the marine biologist Daniel Pauly wrote in 1995. As the overall climate takes on the quality of non-stationarity — where past performance no longer predicts future events — memory gets shorter and shorter. It’s not historical, nor generational, nor even extending as far back as childhood; all we’re left with is now.

Or maybe not. Don’t panic. “It’s an important finding to see what they call the remarkability, the noticeability, of these unusual weather conditions tends to decline over time,” says Peter Howe, a geographer at Utah State University who studies people’s understanding of climate. “The effect they’re finding is real. What it poses are some interesting questions about how that relates to perceptions and opinions.” In Howe’s own work, which uses survey data as opposed to the clever expediency of social media, people in 89 different countries have been able to tell when the overall temperatures were going up.

Weirder still, the weather didn’t change people’s minds about climate change as much as the other way ‘round. People who understood that human activities were warming the planet were more likely to perceive weather events as being related to climate change. Those who didn’t, didn’t. And people’s opinion about climate change correlates with nothing so highly as their political affiliation. “Our pre-existing belief about the issue, driven by political factors and other things, shapes what we think we’ve experienced,” Howe says.

Yet even that baseline is shifting. Data from surveys conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show a marked change over the last five years. Since 2013, the number of Americans who are worried about climate change has gone up 16 percentage points, to nearly 70 percent overall. The number who think it’s human-caused has gone up 15, to 62 percent. Those trends hold across the survey — and across political leanings, as well. So, sure, 95 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats are “very” or “somewhat worried” about global warming. But so are 32 percent of conservative Republicans, up from just 14 percent five years ago.

The quinquennial National Climate Assessment and the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the National Intelligence Community emphasized the present, ongoing dangers posed by human-caused climate change, from extreme weather to deaths from heat to disease outbreaks to displaced persons. More than a fifth of all the corn planted in the U.S. is genetically modified to be drought-tolerant, suggesting that no matter what farmers think about climate change, they know the climate is changing. Even petrochemical companies acknowledge in court, on the record, that climate change is real, dangerous, and human-caused (while continuing to pump out of the ground and sell the chemicals that cause it — arguably their fiduciary duty, genocidal though it may be).

Despite the mnemonic frame-drag suggested by Moore’s Twitter research, most of the country is on board with getting something done about climate change, whether it’s a Green New Deal or some other attack on the problem. As a climate scientist (herself something of a skeptic) observed to Andrew Revkin in National Geographic, the last bastion of disbelief is the White House — which is, let’s be honest, one hell of a bastion.

The next step, then, is to figure out what makes people believe humans are changing the climate even as their own baseline shifts. “We’re not trying to say that this result means that no one’s going to believe in climate change, because people’s own experiences of weather are not the dominant piece of information they use,” Moore says. “What you could say is that you can’t expect people’s experience of weather alone is going to passively convince them.” So next she’s going to try to figure out if events other than temperature change might have more of an impact — wildfires, hurricanes, or coastal flooding. Weather definitely isn’t climate, but extreme weather may still change some minds.

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Your weather tweets are showing your climate amnesia

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Arctic Dreams – Barry Lopez

by Myrna Posted on May 25, 2018

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Arctic Dreams

Barry Lopez

Genre: Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: June 25, 2013

Publisher: Open Road Media

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


This New York Times –bestselling exploration of the Arctic, a National Book Award winner, is “one of the finest books ever written about the far North” ( Publishers Weekly ).   “The nation’s premier nature writer” travels to a landscape at once barren and beautiful, perilous and alluring, austere yet teeming with vibrant life, and shot through with human history ( San Francisco Chronicle ). The Arctic has for centuries been a destination for the most ambitious explorers—a place of dreams, fears, and awe-inspiring spectacle. This “dazzling” account by the author of Of Wolves and Men takes readers on a breathtaking journey into the heart of one of the world’s last frontiers ( The New York Times ).   Based on Barry Lopez’s years spent traveling the Arctic regions in the company of Eskimo hunting parties and scientific expeditions alike, Arctic Dreams investigates the unique terrain of the human mind, thrown into relief against the vastness of the tundra and the frozen ocean. Eye-opening and profoundly moving, it is a magnificent appreciation of how wilderness challenges and inspires us.   Renowned environmentalist and author of Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey has called Arctic Dreams “a splendid book . . . by a man who is both a first-rate writer and an uncompromising defender of the wild country and its native inhabitants”—and the New Yorker hails it as a “landmark” work of travel writing. A vivid, thoughtful, and atmospheric read, it has earned multiple prizes, including the National Book Award, the Christopher Medal, the Oregon Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Barry Lopez including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.  “Jubilant. . . . Barry Lopez lavishes his discoveries into a portfolio of delights.” — The New York Times Book Review “Rich, abundant, vigorously composed. . . . A meditation on the land and the art of existence.” — The Boston Globe “A powerful storyteller. . . . Here is a book full of resonance.” —Margaret Atwood Barry Lopez (b. 1945) is the author of thirteen books of essays, short stories, and nonfiction. He is a recipient of the National Book Award, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous other literary and cultural honors and awards. His highly acclaimed books include Arctic Dreams , Winter Count , and Of Wolves and Men, for which he received the John Burroughs and Christopher medals. He lives in western Oregon. 

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Arctic Dreams – Barry Lopez

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The Feather Thief – Kirk Wallace Johnson

by Myrna Posted on May 1, 2018

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The Feather Thief
Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
Kirk Wallace Johnson

Genre: Nature

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: April 24, 2018

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


“Fascinating from the first page to the last—you won’t be able to put it down.” — Southern Living A rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty for readers of The Stranger in the Woods , The Lost City of Z , and The Orchid Thief . On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin’s, Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man’s relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man’s destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

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The Feather Thief – Kirk Wallace Johnson

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These Migrant Moms Are on Hunger Strike to Protest Being Locked Up Indefinitely

by NedHMTKiuufr Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Nearly two dozen migrant women at a family detention center outside Philadelphia have been on hunger strike for more than a week to protest their extended confinement—and, more broadly, what they claim is the Obama administration’s mischaracterization of the detention of Central American families.

Earlier this month, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that DHS has been detaining families for an average of no more than 20 days. This directly contradicted the experience of the hunger strikers, who say they have been held with their children in the Berks County Residential Center between six months and a year while awaiting their asylum claims to be appealed. So on August 8, 22 women began refusing all food and drinking only water, and two days later they sent a letter to Johnson asking to be released while they wait for their claims to be heard.

“All of us left our countries of origin fleeing violence, threats and corruption,” they wrote. “We are desperate and we have decided that we will get out alive or dead.”

Bridget Cambria, one of the attorneys representing the women, says most of them have lost between 6 and 10 pounds over the last 11 days. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said the agency fully respects the hunger strikers’ right to express their opinions and said that health personnel are actively monitoring their well-being. The spokesman also said that ICE only recognizes 18 hunger strikers; previously, it acknowledged just four. (Last year, a wave of similar hunger strikes took hold at immigration detention centers across the country—including at one family detention center in Karnes City, Texas.)

The Berks County Residential Center is the smallest of three family detention centers in the United States. It currently houses 75 detainees, 34 of whom are adult women. The country’s other two (much larger) family detention centers are located in Texas. In 2014, when increasing volatility in Central America led to a surge in women and children fleeing for the US border, the Obama administration responded by increasing the federal government’s capacity to detain families.

However, those detention centers soon came under scrutiny for poor medical care, allegations of sexual abuse, lack of access to counsel, and unaffordable bonds that make it difficult, if not impossible, for families to obtain their release. Last summer, Johnson announced a series of family detention reforms meant to reduce the length of confinement, including setting bonds at a more realistic level. The following month, a district court in California ruled that the government must release migrant children within three to five days, or within 20 days under extreme circumstances. Otherwise, the court said, the administration would be in violation of an 18-year-old court settlement dictating the proper treatment of migrant children in detention.

Earlier this month, Johnson told reporters that the government is in compliance with those standards, having limited the average length of stay at family detention centers to 20 days or less. But advocates point to the prolonged detention of children in Berks as a clear violation. “It’s 100 percent violating the settlement,” Cambria said. “There is a right for the children to be released. I don’t even get it. I don’t…We should be caring for the best interests of the child.”

In their letter to Johnson, the hunger strikers stressed their concern for their children’s mental health. They said their sons and daughters have even expressed suicidal thoughts. Human Rights First, which has been making periodic visits to the Berks facility, issued a new report Friday documenting the poor state of mental health at the facility. For example, the report claims that one preteen girl wet the bed so frequently that she had to wear diapers at night. An independent psychological evaluation determined that she had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and that her bed-wetting, though it started well before her incarceration, was “exacerbated by her continued experience of heightened stress and hypervigilance while being detained.” The girl told her therapist that the thought of leaving her mother even briefly in the middle of the night filled her with so much fear that she often wouldn’t make the trip to the bathroom.

Numerous studies have shown that even short periods of detention can affect children’s mental and physical health. In a letter to Johnson in July 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that incarcerating Central American families could lead to “poorer health outcomes, higher rates of psychological distress, and suicidality.”

The ICE spokesman said he is prohibited from commenting on specific cases for privacy reasons but noted that the agency takes these allegations seriously and will review them. He also emphasized that comprehensive medical care, including from licensed mental-health providers, is available throughout a migrant’s detention, along with 24-hour emergency care.

Cambria and other immigrants’ rights advocates say that families seeking asylum shouldn’t be detained at all, let alone for months at a time. They would rather see women transferred out of detention into the care of their relatives in the United States or community-based programs while their asylum cases are processed.

“We’re not dealing with people who are violent. We’re not dealing with people who are a danger,” Cambria said. “They’re children and vulnerable women.”

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These Migrant Moms Are on Hunger Strike to Protest Being Locked Up Indefinitely

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Bernie Sanders Has Really Pissed Off Margaret Archer

by Yvonne9866 Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders is headed to the Vatican:

Whether or not the pope shares the Vermont senator’s enthusiasm for Eugene Debs, he’s “feeling the Bern” enough to have invited the Jewish presidential candidate to speak at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, during a conference on social, economic, and environmental issues. Sanders will head to Rome immediately after the April 14 Democratic debate in Brooklyn.

But apparently the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is decidedly not feeling the Bern:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders reached out to obtain his invitation to the Vatican and showed “monumental discourtesy” in the process, a senior Vatican official said.

“Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is hosting the conference Sanders will attend, said in a telephone interview. “I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly—not that he will.“

Huh. I wonder what Bernie did to piss off Margaret Archer? Maybe it has something to do with his views on conflation:

Margaret Archer argues that much social theory suffers from the generic defect of conflation where, due to a reluctance or inability to theorize emergent relationships between social phenomena, causal autonomy is denied to one side of the relation. This can take the form of autonomy being denied to agency with causal efficacy only granted to structure (downwards conflation). Alternatively it can take the form of autonomy being denied to structure with causal efficacy only granted to agency (upwards conflation).

…In contradistinction Archer offers the approach of analytical dualism. While recognizing the interdependence of structure and agency (i.e. without people there would be no structures) she argues that they operate on different timescales. At any particular moment, antecedently existing structures constrain and enable agents, whose interactions produce intended and unintended consequences, which leads to structural elaboration and the etc. etc.

Does that help? No? Sorry about that. I guess someone will have to ask Archer just what Bernie did that was so monumentally discourteous. Was it merely asking for an invitation in the first place? Is it the fact that Bernie is pro-choice? Or something more? We need someone to dig into the Vatican gossip machine and let us know.

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Bernie Sanders Has Really Pissed Off Margaret Archer

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Bernie Sanders to Speak at Vatican City About Social Justice

by LavernBousquet Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sen. Bernie Sanders has accepted an invitation to speak at the Vatican for a conference on social justice next week. The April 15 event, which will be hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, is scheduled to cover a number of the Democratic presidential hopeful’s signature campaign issues, including income inequality and the environment.

Sanders’ appearance at Vatican City will come just days before the New York primary on April 19.

“I am delighted to have been invited by the Vatican to a meeting on restoring social justice and environmental sustainability to the world economy,” Sanders announced in a statement on Friday.

“Pope Francis has made clear that we must overcome ‘the globalization of indifference’ in order to reduce economic inequalities, stop financial corruption, and protect the natural environment. That is our challenge in the United States and in the world.”

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Bernie Sanders to Speak at Vatican City About Social Justice

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Are You One of the 7 Million Americans Threatened by Man-Made Earthquakes?

by ReaganMackness Posted on April 3, 2016

If you lived on the San Andreas Fault in California, where the earth’s crust shifts naturally on a somewhat regular basis, you would know that an earthquake could strike there almost any day.

But if you live in Kansas? Or Oklahoma? Or Colorado, New Mexico, Arkansas and Texas?

Believe it or not, even if you occupythe middle of the country, you could be facing a future filled with damaging earthquakes, too. But that’s not because volatile tectonic plates are sliding back and forth and crashing against each other to create massive cracks in the continent’s surface.

It’s because oil and gas operations are sending enormous volumes of wastewater deep underground, where they can push the earth’s crust further downward, increase pressure against already existing fault lines and cause a great big rumble that will knock down your china cabinetor worse.

A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) assesses the risk of earthquakes or seismic activity caused by humans. The agency particularly looked at earthquakes triggered when wastewater from oil and gas operations is injected underground, as it is during the “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing occurring in the energy fields east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Mississippi River.

What they found has sent shockwaves across news outlets, social media sites and of course, the households in the paths of these operations: “The report shows that approximately 7 million people live and work in areas of the central and eastern U.S. (CEUS) with potential for damaging shaking from induced seismicity.”

“The chance of damage from all types of earthquakes is similar to that of natural earthquakes in high-hazard areas of California,” warns the USGS.

The conclusions are based on analysis of a “hazard model” that considers where, how often and how strongly earthquake shaking could occur anywhere in the U.S. in 2016 while taking into account seismic activity of the last six years. The USGS noted that the central parts of the United States have undergone the most dramatic increases in earthquake-type events, with 1,010 happening in 2015. Already through mid-March 2016, 226 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or larger have occurred in this part of the country. The largest occurrednear Prague, Oklahoma, where some of the most active wells injecting wastewater underground exist.

Sparking earthquakes is not the only concern that’s been raised related to fracking. Though the process has enabled access to enormous stores of natural gas, it has also been blamed for poisoning ground water and drinking supplies. Citizens and public health researchers have documented chemical spills around fracturing operations, reduced air quality, noise and night sky light pollution. The landscape is also destroyed as forests and wild lands are scraped clear to make way for drills, rigs and other industrial energy facilities. The award-winning film “Gasland,” which was nominated for an Academy Award, made a particularly striking point when it showed water that had been contaminated with fracking chemicals coming out of the faucet of a kitchen sink and catching fire.

The USGS and various state agencies will continue to monitor earthquake activity related to oil and gas activity, but that’s not going to do much to stop it. That’s turning out to be a state and federal decision. Already in the U.S., Maryland and New York have banned fracking statewide, while cities in Texas, Ohio and California have followed suit. U.S. federal agencies and President Obama are also being pressured to institute a moratorium on fracking, but those efforts have not gained much traction yet.

Meanwhile, if you’re concerned about both fracking and the rise in earthquakes caused by fracking, you can support organizations like Americans Against Fracking, a national coalition that includes Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, Breast Cancer Action, Democracy for America and 350.org.

You can also do your part to reduce demand for the natural gas that fracking generates. Start by saving energy at home, especially if your home is heated with gas and if you have gas appliances. Install a programmable thermostat to help cut down on how much energy you use. Insulate your attic and crawl spaces. Weatherstrip windows and doors. Have an energy audit to see where you can save the most energy the fastest.

Just as importantly, if not more so, explore your options to switch to solar panels or buy wind power. Increasingly, utilities make it possible for their customers to purchase wind-generated energy from independent sources. You can also buy or rent solar photovoltaics to get yourself off the utility grid.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Are You One of the 7 Million Americans Threatened by Man-Made Earthquakes?

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What would actually happen if we stopped eating so much meat?

by JarrodBevan29 Posted on March 23, 2016

What would actually happen if we stopped eating so much meat?

By on 23 Mar 2016commentsShare

If you follow the news about food, you’re no doubt aware that there’s a lot of concern over the impact of eating and raising meat, on both human health and the planet. A new study provides more to chew on: It suggests that if we halved our meat consumption by 2050, we could make huge emissions cuts and save millions of lives.

The Oxford University researchers who published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences don’t expect the whole world to suddenly switch to vegenaise. But they wanted to explore possible environmental and human health outcomes from different diets. So they started by assuming that more people in developing countries would be eating like meat-loving Americans — a logical assumption, since that’s the way the world is headed — then looked at what would happen if we somehow cut that projected meat consumption by half by the middle of this century.

Their conclusion: The world could cut greenhouse gas emissions from food (which currently make up a quarter of the total) by 29 percent, and save 5.1 million lives per year through reduced heart disease, cancer, stroke, and other illnesses associated with meat consumption.

Of course, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of diet advice: There are places where livestock form an important part of the ecosystem, and where people are making real efforts to raise more sustainable meat. But for those of us with abundant food choices, this study provides more evidence that less meat makes more sense.

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What would actually happen if we stopped eating so much meat?

Posted in alo, Anchor, eco-friendly, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What would actually happen if we stopped eating so much meat?