Libros
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Marines with 2nd Marine Regiment conduct a live-fire range at Camp Leatherneck, Helmand Providence, Afghanistan, Aug. 12, 2013. The exercise provided weapons familiarization to Marines upon arriving in Afghanistan. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Demetrius Munnerlyn/Released.
Originally from:
Oh yay. Just 5,840 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico are virtually bereft of life this summer.
Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium
The deadest parts of the 2013 dead zone are shown in red. Click to embiggen.
This year’s dead zone is much bigger than an official goal of 1,950 square miles, but not as bad as had been feared.
Heavy spring rains inundated Mississippi River tributaries with fertilizers and other nutrients, and once those pollutants flowed into the Gulf, they led to the growth of oxygen-starved areas where marine life can’t survive.
But NOAA says things could have been worse. The agency had previously warned that this summer’s dead zone could be larger than the record-breaking one of 2002, when an 8,481-square-mile-area of low or no oxygen was detected during monitoring. Heavy winds came to the aid of the Gulf ecosystem this year, mixing up the oxygen-deprived waters and reducing the size of the dead zone.
The area of low oxygen covers 5,840 square miles of the Gulf floor — roughly the size of Connecticut — said scientists led by Nancy Rabalais of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. …
Rabalais said the survey boat encountered some bottom-dwelling eels and crabs that had swum near the surface of water that’s 60 to 70 feet deep to find oxygen.
“That’s a long way for something like an eel, that lives buried in the mud, to find its way to the surface,” she said in an interview.
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.
Source:
Gulf of Mexico dead zone is big, but not record-breaking big
The historic rise of carbon dioxide levels above 400 parts per million in the atmosphere has many people thinking about climate change’s Brobdingnagian impacts. And right on cue, new research indicates that huge numbers of people, animals, and plants can expect to find themselves ejected from their homes because of global warming over the coming years and decades.
An estimated 32.4 million people were forced to flee their homes last year because of disasters such as floods and storms, according to a new report released by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre — and 98 percent of that displacement can be blamed on climate- and weather-related events. That includes not just people in poor countries but also many Americans displaced by Hurricane Sandy and other disasters.
Also picking up the homeless theme is Lord Nicholas Stern, a British economist famous for a groundbreaking 2006 report on the costs of climate change. He warns that hundreds of millions of people will likely be displaced in the near future. From The Guardian:
Massive movements of people are likely to occur over the rest of the century because global temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5C because carbon dioxide levels have risen unabated for 50 years, said Stern, who is head of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.
“When temperatures rise to that level, we will have disrupted weather patterns and spreading deserts,” he said. “Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died. The trouble will come when they try to migrate into new lands, however. That will bring them into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth.”
Meanwhile, a study published Sunday warned of far-reaching impacts of the changing climate on the world’s plants and animals. From Reuters:
About 57 percent of plants and 34 percent of animal species were likely to lose more than half the area with a climate suited to them by the 2080s if nothing was done to limit emissions from power plants, factories and vehicles, [scientists] wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Hardest hit would be species in sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, the Amazon and Central America.
“Climate change will greatly reduce biodiversity, even for many common animals and plants,” lead author Rachel Warren of the University of East Anglia in England said. The decline would damage natural services for humans such as water purification and pollination, she said.
But the scientists said governments could reduce the projected habitat loss by 60 percent if global greenhouse gas emissions peaked by 2016 and then fell. A peak by 2030 would cut losses by 40 percent.
Only 4 percent of animals, and no plants, were likely to benefit from rising temperatures and gain at least 50 percent extra territory, the study said.
Brobdingnagian ugh.
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
, posts articles to
, and
. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:
.
Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy
Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories
Continue at source –
Lots of people, animals, and plants will be homeless thanks to climate change
Crews responding Wednesday to an oil spill in Doniphan, Mo.
ExxonMobil’s 1940s-era Pegasus pipeline has been shut down since it ruptured more than a month ago in the Arkansas town of Mayflower, spilling tar-sands oil and making a big mess. But the company is legendary when it comes to spilling oil, and it wasn’t going to let a little pipeline shutdown hold back its oil-spilling ways.
The very same pipeline that blackened Mayflower has leaked oil into a yard and killed plants in Doniphan, Mo., some 170 miles northeast of Mayflower.
“My grandfather noticed an oil spill that was in the yard [on Friday, April 26,] and it got bigger so we were concerned that it was going to go into the well water because we have well water to drink,” said Lori Arbeau.
But the spill apparently was not reported until four days later.
Doniphan resident Robert Cooley reported the spill to Exxon Tuesday, April 30, after seeing oil and dead vegetation in front of his house that sits on about 18 acres of land owned by Arbeau’s parents, Guy and Pat Meadors.
“The release occurred from the installation of a guide wire for a power line pipe that was installed approximately 30 years ago,” a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources said on Wednesday. “The guide wire was located almost directly on top of the pipeline and has worn down over the years.”
Crews were working into the evening on Wednesday to excavate the spilled oil.
The magnitude of the Doniphan spill, estimated to be a barrel’s worth of oil, pales when compared with the 5,000 or so barrels that spilled in Mayflower, forcing evacuation of a neighborhood. But the latest leak is a reminder of the ubiquitous and hazardous nature of the subterranean labyrinth of infrastructure that moves fossil fuels around America. It’s a labyrinth that would only be expanded if Keystone XL is allowed to move ahead.
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
, posts articles to
, and
. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:
.
Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology
,
Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories
Read the article:
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Matt Yglesias, who’s made of sterner stuff than me, read the cover story of National Review this week. It’s a long, detailed description of a conservative replacement for Obamacare, and it’s the same proposal that “serious” conservatives have been making for years. Here’s the meat of it:
The core of a replacement would be a change in the tax treatment of health insurance. The tax break for coverage would be flattened and capped so that people would not get a bigger break the more comprehensive their insurance. The break would also be extended to people who do not have access to employer coverage….Once a robust market for individually purchased insurance has emerged, the problem of people who are locked out of that market because of preexisting conditions should diminish: People will have both the incentive and the ability to buy cheap, renewable catastrophic policies before getting sick.
What should I say about this? If I don’t take it seriously, then I’m being snide and dismissive even though conservatives have done what I asked for and presented a real alternative to Obamacare. But if I do take it seriously, I’m just pretending. Because this plan is, and always has been, ridiculous. And conservatives know it.
Catastrophic insurance is already available to individuals, but there’s no robust market for it. Nor will different tax treatment change that: Insurers will continue to discriminate based on health status; they won’t offer renewable policies to everyone; and policies will remain too expensive for low-income workers. Being able to buy them with pretax dollars won’t change that, since most low-income workers don’t pay much—or any—federal income tax in the first place. A tax credit or a subsidy might help, but then you’re back to Obamacare—except that instead of offering poor people subsidies for actual healthcare, you’re offering them only the opportunity to make premium payments for a policy that probably won’t do them any good and that they can’t afford. So they won’t buy them.
So why does this proposal have such legs among the right? Partly it’s because it’s something, at least, and it has enough moving parts that you can fool some people into thinking it might work. But it’s also due to the odd conservative obsession with the fact that health insurance, as currently provided, isn’t true insurance. It doesn’t protect you against big but unlikely events, like auto insurance or fire insurance. It simply pays for healthcare. And that’s true. But who cares? Conservative need to get beyond that semantic hobbyhorse and instead address the problem that most Americans want addressed: provision of healthcare. If you don’t want to call it insurance, fine. Just call it healthcare coverage. And then explain how you’re going to provide that cheaply and efficiently to as many people as possible.
Once you do that, you run into a hard, shiny nugget that you can’t wiggle around: about a third of the country, maybe more, just flatly can’t afford decent healthcare for their families. No amount of smooth talk about HSAs and tax treatment and catastrophic care will change that. So you can either pay for this coverage via tax dollars or you can let them go without, and chalk it up to nature red in tooth and claw.
Insurance is a red herring. It’s not the primary cause of high healthcare costs in America, and offering different kinds of insurance, or making it available across state lines, won’t change things by more than a hair. The problem is the actual provision of healthcare. If you want to do that via a private sector middleman, that’s fine. Unnecessary, but fine. But you still have to pay for the actual healthcare somehow. When conservatives have a plan for that, let me know.
Originally posted here –
Mother Jones
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Here’s a little something to noodle on while I’m lounging in my easy chair trying to solve this week’s Saturday Stumper crossword puzzle. First, you need to click here and go read a post by Matt Yglesias. I’ll wait.
You didn’t read it, did you? Fine. I know you’re busy, so here’s the nickel summary. Matt is talking about the distribution of income in America, and he makes the point that modern capitalism is fundamentally based on a set of fairly complex rules created by humans. There’s no natural, “default” distribution of income, it all depends on what rules we agree on:
It takes an awful lot of politics to get an advanced capitalist economy up and running and generating wealth….You go through the trouble of creating advanced industrial capitalism because that’s a good way to create a lot of goods and services. But the creation of goods and services would be pointless unless it served the larger cause of human welfare. Collecting taxes and giving stuff to people is every bit as much a part of advancing that cause as creating the set of institutions that allows for the wealth-creation in the first place.
The specifics of how best to do this all are (to say the least) contentious and not amenable to resolution by blog-length noodling. But the intuition that there’s some coherent account of what the “market distribution” would be absent public policy is mistaken. You have policy choices all the way down.
Matt’s argument is a common one, and I’ve seen it made dozens of times in various ways. What’s more, it’s an argument with a lot of force. It really is true that income distribution depends on the rules of the game, and it can favor the rich or the poor depending on who sets up the rules. There are practical limits to how much you can muck with the rules and keep your economy humming along, but within these limits there’s nothing inherently natural about one set of rules vs. another.
So here’s the thing to noodle on. Despite having seen this argument made dozens of times, and despite its obvious force, I’ve never really seen it made in a way that’s very persuasive at a gut level. Conservatives have done a very good job of convincing the public that rules which favor the rich really are the most natural ones, and you fiddle with them at your peril. Liberals, conversely, haven’t done a very good job of convincing the public that a different, less business and wealth-centric set of rules, would be equally natural, and would benefit more people.
Why is that? It’s one thing to acknowledge that changing the rules is hard because rich people have a lot of political power and don’t want to see them changed. But that hardly even matters until you can make the egalitarian economic argument in a way that’s convincing to the public in the first place. That’s apparently very hard to do, but I’m not quite sure why. Guesses welcome in comments.
Jump to original:
