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Coffee lovers beware: Those miracle beans just got all the more precious. Coffee rust, a fungal disease, and Brazil’s epic drought are driving up the cost of that vital morning fix.
As NPR reports, wholesale coffee prices have jumped by more than 60 percent since January, from $1.25 per pound to $1.85. And traders suspect that the worst is still to come. Some predict that during the main harvest next month, prices could shoot up to $3 a pound. The long-term forecast looks even grimmer: Global warming is only making it easier for the fungus to spread, and some studies even suggest that our favorite blends will be wiped out by 2080.
Will you need a savings plan just to cover your morning cuppa joe? Well, it’s really the farmers and distributors who bear the brunt of the rust. On the consumer end, the serious snobs will feel the sting most: Even if plants survive, the fungus can hurt the coffee’s flavor, so specialty shops will need go the extra distance, and pay the extra penny, to get the best beans.
Some shops are already raising their rates. Joe, a specialty coffee chain with 10 shops in New York City and Philadelphia, recently raised it’s prices by 25 cents a drink because of the higher cost of beans.
So at what price does the coffee habit no longer become worth it? Ugh … get me another cup and I’ll stew on it.
Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food
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Wind-turbine syndrome doesn’t exist. Sure, wind turbines can be annoying. But there isn’t a shred of peer-reviewed medical evidence that they can actually make anybody sick.
Yet a new Wisconsin bill scheduled for a hearing next week would make it easier for people living within 1.5 miles of a wind turbine to sue the energy developer for “physical and emotional harm suffered by the plaintiff, including for medical expenses, pain, and suffering.” And to sue for relocation expenses if they want to move away from turbines. And to sue over drops in property values. Never mind that researchers have also ruled out any impacts of wind farms on the value of nearby properties.
SB 167 wouldn’t just affect new turbines. It could be applied retroactively to sue existing wind farms out of existence.
Needless to say, the bill is just another effort to stamp out the growth of renewable energy in coal-friendly Wisconsin, which is already lagging behind much of the rest of the country in wind power.
The legislation is sponsored by State Sen. Frank Lasee (R), a notorious opponent of wind energy. A hearing into the bill on Wednesday will be overseen by a fellow wind foe, State Sen. Glenn Grothman (R), whose district includes a large wind farm.
“I’ve talked to a dozen people in my area who made a very credible case that their health has been damaged,” Grothman told Midwest Energy News. “Obviously their property values have gone through the floor.”
Well, obviously. I mean, if y’all say so. Let’s resume the outdated approach of building more coal plants and see how that affects property values and public health, shall we?
Source
Wisconsin bill would grant wide latitude to sue wind farms, Midwest Energy News
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Bill would promote bogus wind-turbine syndrome lawsuits in Wisconsin
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E.J. Dionne says the country became a lot more liberal this week:
Republicans took a big step back from the tea party. An ebullient progressive was elected mayor of New York City. And a Democrat was elected governor of Virginia after campaigning unapologetically as a supporter of gun control and a liberal on social issues
The one bright spot for Republicans, Chris Christie’s landslide reelection in New Jersey, was won precisely because Christie ran briskly away from the party’s right wing….And in the one direct intraparty fight over the GOP’s future, a tea party candidate lost a primary in Alabama to a more traditional conservative.
That’s….plausible. The number of data points is small enough that I’m reluctant to draw any broad conclusions here, but at the very least, it’s true that the tea party wing of the GOP had very little to celebrate on Tuesday. There are now a growing numbers of signs that Republicans have finally bumped up against a wall on their right flank and have to pull back a bit if they want to stay electorally relevant. If that’s true—a big if—it would be a fairly historic development for a party that’s moved steadily to the right for more than 40 years and has prospered the entire time.
I might add that they’ve prospered despite persistent warnings from us lefties, who have spent virtually this entire period convinced that Republicans couldn’t possibly get any more conservative than they already were. We’ve been wrong every single time so far, so I’d take this time with a grain of salt too.
Still, there has to be a limit somewhere. Maybe 2010 really did represent peak conservatism after all, and 2013 is yet another tidbit of evidence that moderation is the only strategy left to the Republican Party if it wants to keep winning elections. Wait and see.
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Fossil fuel companies stand to miss out on $9 trillion to $12 trillion in profits by the end of the century if carbon emissions are taxed at a high enough level to meet international climate goals. Cry us a river, right?
That’s because demand for coal, oil, and natural gas would fall as prices are pushed higher, leading companies to leave vast volumes in the ground, according to a new study.
On the flip side, how much revenue would be generated through taxes or the sale of carbon allowances? The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, found the fossil fuels that are mined and burned would generate carbon-tax or carbon-auction revenues of $21 trillion to $32 trillion during the same period. That means a net economic benefit of as much as $20 trillion.
“Implementing ambitious climate targets would certainly scale down fossil fuel consumption, so with reduced demand their prices would drop,” said Nico Bauer, lead author of the study and a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The resulting profit loss would be overcompensated by revenues from auctioning emissions permits or taxing CO2.”
After crunching numbers with an energy-economy-climate model, Bauer said the researchers were surprised that “revenues from emissions pricing were found to be at least twice as high [as] the profit losses we estimate for the owners of fossil fuels.”
Although revenues from carbon pricing would exceed lost fossil fuel profits globally, the same would not be true in all countries. From the paper:
[R]egions with high energy demand like China would generate huge carbon rents that are much larger than the loss of fossil fuel rent. For other regions including the Middle East and North Africa showing the largest loss of fossil fuel rent the carbon rent is still sufficient to compensate. However, for a country like Russia the compensation is not feasible based on the domestically generated carbon rent.
The report authors point out that governments who levy carbon fees and taxes will get to decide how to spend the revenues. They could be funneled into green-energy projects and climate adaptation efforts, for example, or simply used to reduce income taxes.
“We know that fossil fuel owners will lose out on profits, but the big question is who will benefit from the new revenues generated by climate policy?” said coauthor Elmar Kriegler, also of the Potsdam Institute. “It will fall to policy makers and society at large to decide this.”
Source
Emissions pricing revenues could overcompensate profit losses of fossil fuel owners, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Global fossil energy markets and climate change mitigation – an analysis with REMIND, Climatic Change
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Mother Jones
“To be fair, there were a couple of scientists you say were killed under mysterious circumstances in the movie,” I told the congressional candidate. “I’m sorry, I don’t necessarily remember all of their names.” It was the strangest thing I’ve said during an interview. But when you write an article about an alien conspiracy documentary directed by a wannabe congressman, it leads to unusual conversation.
On Thursday, Mother Jones reported that Amardeep Kaleka, a Democrat running in the primary to challenge Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), had directed, edited, and provided the “story idea” for Sirius, a documentary that contends that aliens have visited Earth and that vague corporate and governmental powers suppress alternative energy technologies, while scientists who dare to challenge the status quo die under mysterious circumstances. The film is based on a book written by Steven Greer, a former doctor and current amateur ufologist.
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Kaleka Distances Himself From Alien Theories, 9/11 Conspiracies
Mother Jones
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Yes, the NSA is collecting your address books and buddy lists too:
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts….Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.
….Because of the method employed, the agency is not legally required or technically able to restrict its intake to contact lists belonging to specified foreign intelligence targets, he said. When information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus,” the official added, “the assumption is you’re not a U.S. person.”
….A senior U.S. intelligence official said the privacy of Americans is protected, despite mass collection, because “we have checks and balances built into our tools.”
The NSA’s collection of bulk phone records and bulk online records is overseen by the FISA court. That may not be much, but in theory anyway, at least it’s something. But the NSA’s collection of address books is done solely under presidential order and has no oversight at all. They can collect anything they want and use it any way they want.
Luckily for us, the NSA has “checks and balances” built into their tools, so you have nothing to worry about.
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Mother Jones
I love words. Sling ’em with ’em all day, matter of fact. But when I pick up a photo book, I want the images to do the lifting. Or to put that in musical terms, I’d rather listen to the song than read the sheet music. Keeping Time: The Photographs of Don Hunstein, a wonderful new retrospective from Insight Editions, accomplishes exactly that. There’s a short foreword by Art Garfunkel (oh, great, now I’ve got “Mrs. Robinson” stuck in my head!) and a foreword and afterword by New York Times pop music critic Jon Pareles, but the rest of this coffee table must-have is all meat and potatoes, showcasing the mostly unseen and intimate images of Hunstein, who spent three decades as Columbia Records’ official photographer. From Pareles’ biopic foreword:
“There was nothing metaphysical about what I did,” he said in conversation with the music producer Leo Sacks who edited the collection. “I’d just like to think I had a good eye for detail, that I captured the moment at hand. But mostly, I just did my job.”
Lucky for Hunstein (who is still alive and kicking), that job involved being a fly on the wall as the musical geniuses of his generation went about their work. Being a label photographer as opposed to, you know, those unpredictable press hounds, he had the opportunity to be around when his subjects had their guards down, at ease in their creative element, laughing or hamming or frustrated or lost in thought. Hunstein’s M.O. was to pretty much vanish into the background.
“Discretion was the better part of valor. Shoot, then disappear. I never photographed during takes. I never wanted to be in the way, to be intrusive. I hope I never was.”
He did live photography, too, but preferred the recording studio setting, which was “less distracting”—never mind the rare portraits it enabled. And although he was limited to his label’s clients, there was no shortage of greatness there. As Pareles writes…
Hunstein photographed Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk. He photographed Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Pablo Casals, Igor Stravinsky, Philip Glass, Plácido Domingo, Yo-Yo Ma. He Photographed Barbra Streisand, Perry Como, Robert Goulet. He photographed Aretha Franklin, Mathalia Jackson, Janis Joplin, Sam Cooke, Labelle, Teddy Pendergrass, Minnie Riperton, Luther Vandross. He photographed Allen Ginsberg and Langston Hughes. He photographed Johnny Cash, George Jones, Charlie Daniels, the flying Burrito Brothers. He photographed Pete Seeger, Simon and Garfunkel, the Byrds, Joan Baez, Phoebe Snow; and, extensively, Bob Dylan, including Dylan’s first two album covers.
That’s merely a partial list.
So you’d like to actually see some of these images? I completely understand. Let’s put some vinyl on the phonograph and have a look, shall we? And, mind you, this is but a tiny sampling of the treasures you’ll find in this 200-plus page retrospective. (If you happen to live near Bethel, New York, you can catch a museum exhibition of Hunstein’s photos that runs through year’s end.)
Billie Holiday recording Lady in Satin, New York City, December 1957.
Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
Tony Bennett at a Miami nightclub, December 1957.
Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
Debuting songs from The Fabulous Johnny Cash at a Nashville press party, February 1959.
Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
Mahalia Jackson at a Rotary International Convention, New York City, June 1959.
Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
Johnny Cash during the recording of Ride This Train, October 1959.
Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
Aretha Franklin at her first Columbia recording sessions, New York City, August 1960.
Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
Boxer Cassius Clay with soul man Sam Cooke, New York City, March 1964.
Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
Bob Dylan, June 1965. Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
Paul Simon, left, and Art Garfunkel, London, October 1966.
Don Hunstein © 2013 Sony Music Entertainment
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Sometimes it’s nice to unplug and get away from it all. But just because you’re not connected to the internet doesn’t mean you won’t use your smartphone. It can be a flashlight, for lighting the way; a map and and a compass, for navigating; or a camera, for capturing scenic vistas. But if you need power to get home and that ever-important battery starts to wane, suddenly the wonder tool can seem rather useless.
There are options for recharging in the field, from hand-cracked chargers to portable solar cells. But a new device that just cleared its Kickstarter funding goal has a different take. The FlameStower, says Laughing Squid, uses the heat from a fire to generate electricity.
According to the FlameStower team, “The FlameStower Fire Charger works with the energy of your cooking or camp fires. Once the blade is in a fire, the thermal energy is transferred to the Thermoelectric Generator (TEG). The opposite surface of the TEG is in contact with the water reservoir – hot side gets hot, cold side stays relatively cool, and the temperature difference generates electricity.”
This isn’t the first portable device designed to produce electricity from fire—there’s also a purpose-built cooking stove or a small fuel cell. While the FlameStower is geared towards outdoor enthusiasts, there are other uses for these sorts of chargers, too. They could be useful during natural disasters, particularly for responders who drain their batteries finding their way, keeping in touch and documenting damage, or in countries without well-developed electrical systems.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Kickstarter Works Best for Game Designers
This Plastic-Printing Pen Lets You Draw In 3D
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Mother Jones
I got an email today from a regular reader asking why I didn’t seem to be much worried about all the glitches in Tuesday’s Obamacare rollout. And it’s true: I mentioned it briefly yesterday but didn’t treat it like a big deal. Why?
I can’t say for sure. But the answer probably lies in my background. I’m not an expert in rolling out massive software systems or anything, but I have been involved in dozens of big software launches in my life. And every one of them has gone exactly the same:
So….I dunno. I’ve seen this movie too many times before. Traffic on the Obamacare sites will settle down pretty quickly, and that will take care of most of the overloading problems. The remaining load problems will be solved with software fixes or by allocating more servers. Bugs will be reported and categorized. Software teams will take on the most serious ones first and fix most of them in short order. Before long, the sites will all be working pretty well, with only the usual background rumble of small problems. By this time next month, no one will even remember that the first week was kind of rocky or that anyone was initially panicked.
I might be wrong. I’ve been involved in a few rollouts that featured really serious bugs that took a long time to work out. It’s certainly possible that one or two states will fall into this category. But I doubt it. Technologically speaking, nothing that happened yesterday surprised me, and I don’t expect anything in the next month to surprise me much either.
UPDATE: A friend with more experience than me in this particular kind of software development emails to explain in more detail why the Obamacare rollout glitches are probably not very serious:
It’s because this exact product has been built thousands of times….It’s a bunch of forms on top of a bunch of conditional SQL. Nothing new, or innovative, or especially challenging. The problems are simply because of the scale, and with Google and Facebook and Twitter and the like, we’ve figured out how to do web-scale pretty well.
The “bugs” will be in the Java and SQL code, and they’ll be easy to fix. Everything else is just web-scale infrastructure, memcached and database tuning, load balancing, edge routing, nuts & bolts stuff. I’ve never been worried about it at all, because it’s just plain been done so many times before. Not exactly uncharted technological waters.
For what it’s worth, I’ll say this: If there are still lots of serious problems with these websites on November 1, I’ll eat crow. But I doubt that I’ll have to.
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