Author Archives: AshleyAragon

Pruitt’s EPA tenure helped sharpen a Trump-era climate strategy

by AshleyAragon Posted on July 12, 2018

There’s no debating that President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, led until recently by the flagrantly corrupt Scott Pruitt, has dealt a series of woeful and lasting setbacks to our planet’s habitability.

With coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler stepping in as interim EPA administrator, things probably won’t get better for federal environmental policy anytime soon. There’s a good chance Wheeler’s EPA will have fewer soundproof booths, cheaper pens, and a less-massive security detail. But Wheeler is on record saying his agenda will be the same as Pruitt’s. And a less scandal-ridden EPA administrator could do even more damage.

With all three branches of government stacked against them, environmental advocates have to focus on geographically-targeted policy. Luckily, it is a strategy that most are already accustomed to. So beyond the smog at the federal level, you can make out a constellation of small, but still massively consequential, sub-national victories emerging for champions of clean air and a stable climate.

Julie Cerqueira, the director of U.S. Climate Alliance, an association of state governors, points to recent successes in improving energy-efficiency standards and coordinating to build out zero-emission vehicle infrastructure. “There are strategic opportunities for the states to work together in ways that can help shift the market towards lower carbon and more resilient solutions for the nation,” she says.

The rapid rise of renewable energy means that the transportation sector is now the leading source of emissions in the U.S. So two groups of states on the West Coast and in the Northeast are already working together to “rapidly accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and reduce transportation related greenhouse gas emissions,” says Sarah McKearnan, a policy advisor for Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, a group advocating for better air quality.

Working against them is that one of the Trump EPA’s main goals is to undo Obama-era vehicle emission standards, a fight that will center on California due to the state’s status as a testbed for stricter motor vehicle regulations. Environmental groups are ready for the fight, having become more litigious in defending these regulations and other policies already on the books.

Pruitt’s “success” at the EPA was mostly in decimating staffing and morale, as well as eliminating science. But with Trump’s recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, it’s likely the next Supreme Court won’t do much to stop the tearing down of regulations. To have any success, organizations suing on behalf of the environment will have to tailor their arguments to win over Chief Justice John Roberts, who now has the swing vote.

“We have sued Trump 77 times so far,” says Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Trump administration is so beholden to the polluters they are supposed to be regulating that they make a lot of mistakes in their headlong rush to gut protections for our air, water, and health. Because of that, we’ve had many victories in court, and we’ll have many more.”

Luckily for greens, the environment is inherently local — and cities and states aren’t just passing policies the feds won’t, they’re also setting ambitious targets to tackle climate change. (That, you’ll recall, is the phenomenon that’s no longer mentioned by executive branch agencies.)

Since Trump was elected, more than 1,400 mayors have agreed to shift their cities to 100-percent renewable energy by 2035, in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Last fall, St. Louis became one of the biggest cities so far to set that lofty goal. The city of Berkeley, California, went even further recently, declaring an “existential climate emergency” and aiming for net-negative emissions by 2030.

It’s ambition like that, if realized, that will provide climate leadership for the rest of us in the Trump era. Meanwhile, Siegel, of the Center for Biological Diversity, is aiming her organization’s resources at least in part on making sure cities and states’ actions match their rhetoric.

“We are pushing the state of California, which is viewed as a model for climate leadership, to be a model worth following,” says Siegel. “In California, we have a moratorium on federal oil and gas leasing that has been in place since 2013, due to our litigation victories. We expect the Trump administration to try to restart leasing this summer. We will fight that in the street and in court.”

Sierra Club Legal Director Pat Gallagher says that both public opinion and the economics support his organization’s efforts to expand the use of renewable energy throughout the country.

“We’re using every means at our disposal to protect clean air, clean water, and healthy communities,” he explains. “We’re going to hold the line against rollbacks of environmental and public health protections by emphasizing that science and the law are on our side.”

The truth is, climate change is happening so fast that we can’t wait for a national-scale policy to slow it down. So rather, we should double down on this huge momentum throughout the country. We need bold, near-term leadership — and one good way to make that happen is with as many people in as many places as possible leading by example.

See original article here – 

Pruitt’s EPA tenure helped sharpen a Trump-era climate strategy

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How to Trick a Child Into Eating a Vegetable

by AshleyAragon Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michelle Obama has gotten a lot of flak for her efforts to improve the nutritional value of school lunches and reduce the rate of childhood obesity. On Twitter, for instance, kids have been using the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama to complain that new lunch standards she spearheaded have resulted in less appetizing meals.

By some accounts, the First Lady’s school lunch program seems to be working. A 2014 study from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that compared to 2011, kids eating school lunches were selecting 23 percent more fruit overall after the guidelines were imposed in 2012. What’s more, vegetable consumption per student rose 16 percent. The problem is that the amount of food left uneaten and thrown away seems to have increased considerably, as well. According to a study from the School Nutrition Association, schools reported an 81 percent increase in the amount of food left on plates, with vegetables making up the majority of the waste.

The fact that kids (and many adults) generally don’t like vegetables isn’t exactly an earth-shattering discovery. Parents and policy makers have long struggled over the question of how to get children to eat their broccoli. But Traci Mann, a health psychologist who has spent much of her career studying our eating habits, has come up with a simple solution. “Just put the vegetable in a competition it can actually win,” said Mann on a recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast.

Of course, in a contest between vegetables and, say, mac and cheese, the veggies don’t stand much of a chance. But Mann has an elegant strategy for improving the odds. “As far as I can tell,” she says, “the only competition a vegetable can routinely win is the competition between a vegetable and nothing.” Mann first discovered this kernel of wisdom by observing the behavior of her own children. In a Los Angeles deli, when her kids were 3 and 6, she watched them happily consume sauerkraut while waiting for their meals to arrive. “After much scholarly effort,” writes Mann in her newly released book Secrets from the Eating Lab, “I developed a highly technical theory about why they ate the sauerkraut: They ate it because it was there.”

And, being a scientist, Mann decided to put this theory to the test. Using schoolchildren as subjects, Mann and her colleagues conducted two field studies in an elementary school where most of the students were eligible for free or reduced-cost lunches. In one study, the scientists first figured out what the baseline consumption rate was for a reasonably well tolerated vegetable—in this case, carrots. Then, the scientists waited three months for the exact same menu to be served again. This time, as the children waited at their class tables before receiving their full meals, they had access to small paper cups filled with baby carrots. Once the meal was over, the scientists painstakingly weighed all the leftover carrots in cups, on the floor, on trays, and anywhere else they could be found. Sure enough, kids ate more carrots when they were left alone with them at their tables than they did on a normal day. The result, wrote the researchers, was an “increase in carrot consumption of over 430% that was almost entirely driven by many students eating carrots from the cups before entering the line.”

Encouraged by these findings, the scientists then conducted a follow-up field study in which broccoli was the prized vegetable. On a regular day, broccoli was among the foods that the children could select as they went through the cafeteria line. But on the study days, the students were handed cups of broccoli while they waited for the rest of their meal. Once again, the experiment worked. The students as a whole consumed far more broccoli when that was the first food they had access to.

Mann and her colleagues even tested the “veggies first” theory on college students, comparing their consumption of baby carrots and M&Ms while manipulating which snack was offered first. Undergraduates not only ate more carrots when that was the first option, but they also then ate fewer M&Ms.

“For most of us, the main obstacle to eating a vegetable is that we don’t like them as much as the other stuff,” says Mann. And most of us are also pretty lazy. Since vegetables in general require more preparation than many other foods, and are not as tasty, we tend to eat less of them than is good for us.

But there’s an upside to our laziness: If the goal is to limit consumption of an unhealthy food, even a minor obstacle can make a difference. On Inquiring Minds, Mann describes a Dutch study of M&M consumption. “They showed that if you have a bowl of M&Ms on the table right by you, you’ll eat a lot,” says Mann. That’s not surprising. But if you place that bowl farther away, requiring you to get up from your desk to grab a handful, consumption decreases significantly. “Here’s the even more amazing thing,” adds Mann. “Take that same bowl of M&Ms, put it on the same table that you’re sitting at—except instead of right by your hand, put it two feet across the table.” Within-reach, but requiring a bit of stretching. It turns out that you’ll consume just as few M&Ms as if they were across the room.

Adding obstacles, even tiny ones, is so effective at reducing unhealthy food intake that even a simple manipulation in Google’s New York offices made headlines recently. When M&Ms were put in opaque rather than glass containers, and healthier alternatives such as figs and nuts were made more visible, Google employees consumed 3.1 million fewer calories from M&Ms over seven weeks, according to the Washington Post.

One of Mann’s experiments shows just how much of an impact the visibility of food can have. In another effort to get school kids to eat more veggies, her team placed photographs of green beans and carrots into two of the compartments on the children’s lunch trays. With this simple manipulation, they found that twice as many kids served themselves green beans and nearly three times as many took carrots, compared with what happened on a typical day.

Mann attributes the success of the photos to the social forces that impact our eating habits. It’s not effective to simply tell a kid to eat his vegetables. But putting photos on the trays, according to Mann, sends the message that other kids are choosing those veggies and placing them in those two compartments. And, as any parent knows, fitting in can be a powerful motivator.

To listen to our full interview with Mann, click below.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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How to Trick a Child Into Eating a Vegetable

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