Author Archives: ArielO42brir

Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

by ArielO42brir Posted on October 24, 2014

Always low standards. Always.

Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

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24 Oct 2014 1:32 PM

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Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

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Please don’t mistake Walmart’s bigness for greenness. Thank you.

On Tuesday, Slate proclaimed that “Walmart is killing the rest of corporate America in solar power adoption” because the company leads the nation in total “installed capacity” — in essence, it has installed more solar panels than anyone else. In reality, Wally World is a greenwashed clean-energy laggard owned by a family that funds anti-solar groups.

Slate’s data, which shows that Walmart has more than double the megawatts than second-place Kohl’s, comes from the Solar Energy Industry Association, a U.S. trade group. But in that same report, Walmart ranked 11th (out of an undisclosed list of megacorporations) in the proportion of facilities with solar power, at just 5 percent. (For comparison, a small business with one facility and one solar installation would score 100 on that test.)

In all, solar, wind, and biomass accounts for just 3 percent of Walmart’s total U.S. electricity use, according to data from the EPA’s Green Power Partnership. And less than one-fifth of the renewable energy the company purchases from offsite is third-party certified, meaning we just have to take Walmart’s word for it. More than 200 organizations in the EPA program meet 100 percent of their electricity use with green sources, including fellow retail giants Whole Foods, Staples, and Kohl’s.

“The idea that Walmart is a major driver behind the growth of solar is pretty ludicrous,” says Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Last year, Walmart installed about 16 megawatts of solar power. Homeowners installed about 800 megawatts of solar power,” according to this report.

Then there’s the Walton family, Walmart’s majority owner, which is actively undermining renewables. A recent report from ILSR finds that family members have donated nearly $4.5 million to two dozen organizations — including the infamous lobbying outfit ALEC — that lead the charge against clean energy policy.

The family actually owns a company called Solar First, that builds big arrays for big utilities. But while that may seem like a good thing, it means that the Waltons want us all to remain captive utility customers, not produce our own power. The family has worked to block rooftop solar, even scoring a tiny victory in Arizona last year. It’s a typical family strategy: Walmart tried to pay workers in Mexico with store vouchers.

Solar First, which manufactures its panels mostly in Malaysia, is even working via through the World Trade Organization — the enforcer of globalized free-marketism — to repeal solar incentives in several U.S. states simply because those policies give preference to local producers. Thanks, Walton clan.

In short, the super-rich Waltons and their exorbitantly profitable superstore empire won’t spend an extra dime on green energy if it means foregoing all-out profit maximization. The company’s 2013 Global Responsibility Report apologizes for a decline in renewable energy use thusly: “Walmart U.S. was unable to renegotiate an expiring [renewable power] contract with competitive pricing.”

Money above social responsibility. It’s the Walmart way!

Source:
Walmart Is Killing the Rest of Corporate America in Solar Power Adoption

, Slate.

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Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, wind energy, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

5 Ways Climate Change Is Ruining Your Breakfast

by ArielO42brir Posted on August 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Welcome to the worst breakfast-related crisis since Lord of the Rings: There might be an impending Nutella shortage. And there’s a good chance the culprit is climate change.

The price of hazelnuts, a main ingredient in the delicious chocolate spread, is up 60 percent after unseasonable ice storms devastated hazel tree farms in Turkey’s Black Sea coastal region this year. And colder winters and heavier precipitation are exactly what the EU’s Centre for Climate Adaptation says the Black Sea coast should expect as climate change advances. Though Nutella’s manufacturer hasn’t raised its prices yet, it’s facing increasing strain as palm oil and cocoa get more expensive, too.

It would be bad enough if Nutella were the only food that melting ice caps and changing weather patterns are threatening to rob from the breakfast table. But no—the list of climate change’s culinary casualties goes on. Here are some other ways it’s making the most important meal of the day a little less satisfying:

  1. Rising cereal prices. Kix might be kid-tested and mother-approved, but have fun buying them in 2030, when their cost could be as much as 24 percent higher due to drought-stricken grain crops, according to an Oxfam International report. (And that doesn’t even account for inflation.) Lovers of Frosted Flakes and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes should also start stockpiling now—Oxfam predicts their respective prices will rise by 20 and 30 percent by 2030.
  2. A global bacon shortage. The aporkalypse is nigh. Even if you’re on a no-carb diet, shrinking grain supplies are bad news. Pricier corn and soybeans equals pricier pig feed, and pricier pig feed equals smaller pig herds. In 2012, Britain’s National Pig Association announced that a pork and bacon shortage “is now unavoidable.”
  3. Bland-but-costly coffee. There’s an epic drought in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee exporter. As a result, one commodities trading firm says caffeine addicts will consume 5 million more bags of beans than coffee growers can produce in the 2014-2015 season, and the price of coffee futures has already doubled to $2 a pound. To make matters worse, beans grown at higher temperatures don’t develop the blend of aromatic compounds that give coffee its distinctive flavor.
  4. Waffle woes. The nation had to collectively leggo its Eggos in November 2009, when record flooding in Atlanta stopped waffle production at the local Kellogg plant. Sure, this has happened once so far, but according to the Environmental Protection Agency, “projected sea level rise, increased hurricane intensity, and associated storm surge may lead to further erosion, flooding, and property damage in the Southeast.”

More here: 

5 Ways Climate Change Is Ruining Your Breakfast

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Help Reduce Child Labor with Fair Trade Chocolate

by ArielO42brir Posted on May 3, 2014

Taken from:

Help Reduce Child Labor with Fair Trade Chocolate

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Yes, "Cosmos" Fans, Creationists Also Deny the Science of Comets

by ArielO42brir Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last night, Fox’s Cosmos series yet again waded into a bizarre politico-scientific controversy. This time, though, it wasn’t about evolution, or climate change, or even the Big Bang.

No. This time, it was about comets.

The Cosmos episode was about what comets are, and why they are not, as humanity believed until quite recently, evil omens. Before the age of science, explained host Neil deGrasse Tyson, “comets were portents of doom” across cultures. Tyson also pointed out that the word “disaster” itself means “bad star” in Greek. The show then dove into the history of science to tell the story of Edmund Halley, who realized how comets work and that the comet that now bears his name returns roughly every 75 years (most recently in 1986; next up, 2061). Halley also inspired Sir Isaac Newton to publish what may be the most important book ever in the history of science, the Principia Mathematica.

So why does the science of comets irk some creationists?

Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton hanging out on Cosmos Fox

To understand that, you first need to understand that Young Earth creationists don’t just deny the science of evolution; they deny all science that suggests that either our planet or anything else in the universe is more than a few thousand years old. That includes comets, of course, many of which are not exactly young.

On the latest Cosmos, Tyson explained that some comets come from the Oort Cloud, an extremely distant region of icy bodies far beyond Pluto, but still in orbit around our sun. There are as many as 2 trillion of these frozen objects, and occasionally, one will get knocked off its course and travel on a very long journey into the inner part of the solar system. As an object nears the sun and heats up, the sublimation of ice and gases give it a tail, and if it is close enough to Earth, we see it as a comet. Other comets, meanwhile, come from the Kuiper Belt, the neighborhood of Pluto, which also contains a huge number of icy bodies.

But here’s the problem for creationists: According to NASA, “The objects in the Oort Cloud and in the Kuiper Belt are presumed to be remnants from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.” The Oort Cloud extends from about 5,000 to 100,000 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, according to NASA, where each AU is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun, or 93 million miles. That means that it also takes these comets very long periods of time to travel into the inner solar system, earning them the name of “long-period comets.”

Comets that are vastly older than creationists believe all of creation to be present a bit of a problem. Hence, if you visit the website of creationist Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis and search for “Oort Cloud,” you will find multiple articles providing a creationist take on the origins and nature of comets. In one of them you will find the assertion that there is “zero observational evidence that the Oort cloud exists,” followed later by this observation: “but if the solar system is only thousands of years old, as God’s Word clearly teaches, there is no problem.” In another article, you get this:

Actually the Oort cloud, like Peter Pan’s Neverland, has never been observed. The Oort cloud was imagined to provide a birthplace for new comets, since comets like ISON could not exist in a billions-of-years-old universe without some renewable source. The Oort cloud is thus a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless.

In other words, the problem for creationists is the idea that comets are ancient and are sometimes traveling vast distances, from the Oort Cloud, into the inner solar system, a journey that would take a huge amount of time. Now you see why the Oort Cloud is such a threat to their worldview.

Fox

But of course, creationists are wrong, wrong, wrong. If you want an extensive rebuttal of creationist claims about comets, go here. The gist: We have plenty of evidence for the existence of both the Oort Cloud and, especially, of the Kuiper Belt. The Oort Cloud is more distant and dark, and not easily observed. However, notes one NASA site, it is “the best theory to explain how long-period comets exist.”

Anyway, it’s not as if creationists are denying the existence of the Oort Cloud after a careful consideration of the evidence. Rather, they start from an impossible theory, and then dismiss evidence inconsistent with it. What’s truly sad is the smallness of the universe that therefore results.

UPDATE: We got a comment from astronomer and Slate blogger Phil Plait about creationists and comets (and how wrong the former are about the latter). Here it is, in its entirety:

One of the funny things about believing the Earth is young is that sometimes there’s a consistent internal logic to it. That doesn’t mean it’s right, just that it’s self-contained. In this case, astronomers see comets coming in every few months from deep space. We assume there has to be a repository of billions or trillions of them out there, or else we would’ve run out of them long, long ago — that’s because we assume the Earth is old, billions of years old. So the Oort Cloud is where we think those comets are. If you assume the Earth is 6000 years old, you don’t need an Oort cloud to supply you with comets, so some creationists deny it exists.

Problem is, if the Oort cloud is there, then the physics of it demands there should be an intermediate population, out just past Neptune; thousands or millions of icy bodies a few miles across. And lo, we found it: the Kuiper Belt. Quite a few denizens of it have been seen.

So once again, science was right, and creationism wrong. The Earth is old, the Kuiper belt exists, and the Oort Cloud must as well. But somehow I don’t think this rock-solid proof of science will change any creationists’ minds, any more than the thousands of other such pieces of evidence routinely denied by those who feel that reality must bend to belief, and not the other way around.

On a recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, we were thrilled to host Cosmos‘ Tyson, who explained why he doesn’t debate science deniers; you can listen here (interview starts around minute 13):

Link – 

Yes, "Cosmos" Fans, Creationists Also Deny the Science of Comets

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Net Neutrality Drifts Ever Closer to Oblivion

by ArielO42brir Posted on January 28, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In the wake of a circuit court ruling that the FCC doesn’t have the authority to mandate net neutrality, Brian Fung reports on the likely next step from federal regulators:

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler appears to be leaning increasingly toward using the FCC’s existing legal authority to regulate broadband providers. Industry watchers say this approach would likely turn on a part of the Communications Act known as Section 706, which gives the FCC authority to promote broadband deployment.

….Over the past week, some insiders, including industry representatives and public advocates, have said that Section 706 actually gives the FCC much more power than we thought….While the agency can’t lay down a blanket rule prohibiting ISPs from abusing their power, it could go after offending companies on a case-by-case basis. This is exactly what Wheeler has in mind.

“We are not reticent to say, ‘Excuse me, that’s anti-competitive. Excuse me, that’s self dealing. Excuse me, this is consumer abuse,'” said Wheeler on Tuesday. “I’m not smart enough to know what comes next in innovation. But I do think we are capable of saying, ‘That’s not right.’ And there’s no hesitation to do that.”

So long as the FCC can argue that a company is hindering the rollout of broadband or broadband competition (a pretty vague definition), the agency may be able to regulate ISPs, content intermediaries, and possibly Web services like Google and Netflix themselves.

Hmmm. Maybe Wheeler has no hesitation to do that, but this basically puts net neutrality at the whim of the president. All it takes is a few FCC members who think net neutrality is a crock, and enforcement would end instantly. This is a pretty thin reed for supporters of net neutrality.

Excerpt from – 

Net Neutrality Drifts Ever Closer to Oblivion

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