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Cool news: Big fridges to get more efficient under new Obama rules

by bvds34dfsg Posted on August 29, 2013

Cool news: Big fridges to get more efficient under new Obama rules

By

Michael Kappel

Soon Ben & Jerry’s will get to live in more efficient freezers.

After sitting on two energy-efficiency rules for more than a year and a half, the Obama administration finally released them on Thursday. They won’t be official until early next year, after the public has time to comment and regulators have time to consider those comments, but at least they’re now moving forward.

The proposed rules would require commercial refrigeration equipment, like restaurant fridges and deli cases, to use less energy. OK, that might not sound like the sexiest initiative, but efficiency matters — a lot. Plus this means you’ll soon have one more reason to feel better about buying Ben & Jerry’s.

As The Washington Post reports, “The proposals have a significant environmental impact because of the size of the appliances involved.” The White House says the new rules “could cut energy bills by up to $28 billion and cut emissions by over 350 million metric tons of CO2 over 30 years.”

Still, the White House had to be pushed to actually release the rules. From Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

The proposals were issued after environmental groups and state governments pressed for action from the administration of President Barack Obama. The draft rules were sent to the Office of Management and Budget for review more than a year ago, and missed the 90-day deadline for release.

Because of those delays, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman led 10 states in threatening legal action unless the rules were issued. Early this month, the administration settled with the states, and agreed to issue the proposals now and final rules in early 2014.

Earlier this month, the admin also proposed efficiency rules for the types of lights used in big-box stores and sports stadiums.

Efficiency is an important part of Obama’s climate plan, as laid out in his big June climate speech. And, fortunately, efficiency rules can be implemented without approval from an intransigent Congress.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

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How Russia’s Anti-Gay Law Could Affect the 2014 Olympics, Explained

by bvds34dfsg Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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Saddled with allegations of forced evictions, labor rights abuses, graft, and corruption—along with an estimated record price tag of $50 billion—the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, have been the source of international outrage for some time now. But when Russia’s Interior Ministry announced last week that the country’s so-called anti-gay law—which allows for fining and detaining gay and pro-gay people—would apply during the Games, gay rights and human rights activists around the world turned their focus to the small city on the coast of the Black Sea, one of the warmest corners of Russia.

We put together this backgrounder to help catch you up to speed on all things Sochi:

What’s the deal with Russia’s anti-gay law? Since President Vladimir Putin signed the new legislation—which passed the Duma with a 436-0 vote—on June 30, there’s been a steady stream of reporting on what this law means for the Russian people. In short, Article 6.21 of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses allows the government to fine people accused of spreading “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations amongst minors” between 4,000 and 1 million rubles ($120 to $30,000). A law passed in 2012 also bans gay-pride events in Moscow for the next 100 years.

Recent attempts at gay-pride events have deteriorated into violence:

Gay rights protesters after being attacked at a June rally in St. Petersburg Ruslan Shamukov/ITAR-TASS/ZUMA

Protesters attack an LGBT activist during a St. Petersburg event in June. Roman Yandolin/Russian Look/ZUMA

Last weekend, Russian American journalist Masha Gessen—who started Russia’s pink-triangle campaign for LGBT acceptance—published a gut-wrenching account in the Guardian of her own decision to move her girlfriend and children back to the United States after years living in Russia. “In June, the ‘homosexual propaganda’ bill became federal law,” she wrote. “The head of the parliamentary committee on the family pledged to create a mechanism for removing children from same-sex families.

“Two things happened to me the same month: I was beaten up in front of parliament for the first time and I realized that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle.”

What are some other tactics anti-gay activists are using in Russia? Though anti-gay actions and sentiment have been brewing for years—this federal rule comes on the heels of several similar regional laws, which have been enacted in St. Petersburg and other cities since 2006—this law has taken it to new heights: In July, the Spectrum Human Rights Alliance (SHRA), a US-based organization that advocates LGBT rights in Eastern Europe, helped bring international attention to a Russian group called Occupy Pedophilia. Led by notorious Russian neo-Nazi Maksim “Tesak” (“the Hatchet”) Martsinkevich, the group has been using social media, primarily VKontakte (Russia’s Facebook spinoff), to place fake dating ads to lure gay men. Once face-to-face with the men, group members interrogate and torture them, and a video of the encounter is put on YouTube. Here’s one such video from late July. (Warning: The content of the video is disturbing.)

Some of the videos are also placed on the group’s website, where victims are categorized by sexual orientation and users can rate the videos. As of this writing, Occupy Pedophilia has nearly 450 regional chapters listed on VKontakte.

Screenshot from VKontakte

Larry Poltavtsev, president and founder of SHRA, explains that months ago, Martsinkevich released a video declaring his own special plan for ending gay-pride events in Russia. Though it disappeared for a while, Poltavtsev says, it recently reappeared on YouTube (see below). In it, a shirtless Martsinkevich says this is his first time directly addressing the Moscow government. He explains that it’s a shame the government must sink so many resources into its gay-pride ban—dealing with civil rights lawsuits, paying out compensation, and the like. Instead, he suggests, why not simply make gay-pride events legal—but leave them without security or police presence? “This will be the first and last time,” Martsinkevich concludes, “that homosexuals will try to hold their parade in Russia.”

Poltavtsev also mounted a petition on Change.org to add Russian lawmakers Vitaly Milonov and Elena Mizulina, both of whom have sponsored anti-gay legislation, to the US Congress’ Magnitsky list of human rights violators. It currently has more than 11,000 signatures.

Meanwhile, an April 2012 TV appearance by Dmitri Kiselev—TV anchor and deputy director of VGTRK, Russia’s state-owned television and radio holding company—surfaced last week, showing Kiselev, a state employee, saying the following to a round of applause: “I think that just imposing fines on gays for homosexual propaganda among teenagers is not enough. They should be banned from donating blood, sperm. And their hearts, in case of the automobile accident, should be buried in the ground or burned as unsuitable for the continuation of life.”

In an interview this week on Moscow radio station Echo of Moscow, Kiselev defended his remarks, explaining that, to his knowledge, these practices are already employed in other Western countries, including the United States. (He cited the US Food and Drug Administration as a source.)

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FDA moves to keep arsenic out of your apple juice

by bvds34dfsg Posted on July 15, 2013

FDA moves to keep arsenic out of your apple juice

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Finally, more apples in our arsenic juice.

Apple juice may soon be as safe to drink as tap water. (Well, except for all that sugar.)

Nearly two years after consumer groups raised alarms about elevated levels of arsenic in some brands of apple juice, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed new limits on permissible levels of the chemical, which can cause cancer and other maladies.

The FDA’s proposed “action level” for inorganic arsenic in apple juice matches the EPA’s existing rules for tap water — 10 parts per billion.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

The FDA has tested arsenic in apple juice for at least 20 years and has long said the levels are not dangerous to consumers, in particular the small children who favor the fruit juice (second only to orange juice in popularity, according to industry groups).

But the agency issued a tougher stance with its announcement Friday. Under the new regulation, apple juice containing more than 10 parts per billion could be removed from the market and companies could face legal action.

The proposal follows testing by The Dr. Oz Show and Consumer Reports [PDF] that revealed that some apple juices contained more arsenic than was allowed in tap water.

WTF is arsenic doing in apple juice anyway? The Chicago Tribune explains:

Inorganic arsenic in food can come from pesticides or from soil and groundwater pollution, though some occurs naturally in the environment. Organic arsenic is viewed as relatively safe, but emerging research suggests that two types of organic arsenic may be toxic. The FDA says these occur rarely or in negligible quantities in apple juice.

It probably doesn’t help that a lot of the apple juice sold in the U.S. comes from concentrate imported from China, a country that does not have an exemplary food-safety record.

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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Thousands of Species Found in a Lake Cut Off From the World for Millions of Years

by bvds34dfsg Posted on July 8, 2013

Lake Vostok lies beneath 2.4 miles of the Antarctic Eastern Ice Sheet. Photo: NASA / GSFC

In a lake cut off from the world for maybe as much as 15 million years, beneath 2.4 miles of Antarctic glacier ice, scientists have discovered as many as 3,507 different species representing everything from bacteria and fungi to, maybe, even more complex multicellular life.

In 1956, Russian scientists set up the Vostok research station on a relatively flat patch of ice in the heart of Antarctica’s eastern ice sheet. Research soon showed that the reason the terrain was so smooth was because the camp was resting far above a giant lake—subglacial Lake Vostok. Starting around 35 million years ago, ancient climate change turned Antarctica from a green landscape into an icy one. The change in climate trapped Lake Vostok beneath the growing East Antarctic Ice Sheet, and, as the sea receded, the lake was cut off from the ocean.

Two decades ago, Russian scientists began the long project of drilling down into Lake Vostok, a mission they finally completed in February 2012. With the drilling done, the work of trying to figure out if anything is alive down there began.

Scientists working with water from Lake Vostok have found genetic material that they think represents up to 3,507 different species, they report in a recent paper. The genetic material came from lake water that had frozen to the bottom of the Antarictic glacier. Comparing the genetic material against a database of species from around the world that have had their genes sequenced the scientists say that more than a thousand of these line up with known lifeforms. The identified species were mostly bacteria, though there were also some eukaryotes (mostly fungi), and there were two species of archaea. NBC’s Alan Boyle describes what the genes might mean:

The sequences included close matches for various types of fungi as well as arthropods, springtails, water fleas and a mollusk. What’s more, some of the bacteria from the sample are typically found in fish guts — suggesting that the fish they came from may be swimming around in the lake.

…”While the current conditions are different than earlier in its history, the lake seems to have maintained a surprisingly diverse community of organisms,” the researchers wrote. “These organisms may have slowly adapted to the changing conditions in Lake Vostok during the past 15-35 million years as the lake converted from a terrestrial system to a subglacial system.”

A significant number of the sequences were linked to organisms that live around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, suggesting that such features exist at the bottom of Lake Vostok as well. “Hydrothermal vents could provide sources of energy and nutrients vital for organisms living in the lake,” the researchers said.

One of the scientists who worked on the study, Scott Rogers, explained to NBC’s Boyle that the fact that other genetic sequences didn’t line up with anything we’ve seen before doesn’t necessarily mean that these are entirely new species living down in subglacial Lake Vostok. Rogers says that though some of the lifeforms down there will probably be brand new, some of them are probably just things we already know about but whose genes haven’t been studied in-depth and put in the particular database the researchers used.

If these findings hold up and if there is life in Lake Vostok that is truly unique on Earth, the finding would be a testament to the hardiness of life. It would be a reassurance that life can persist in some of the harshest conditions and an encouraging finding for those looking for life elsewhere in the universe.

More from Smithsonian.com:

No Life Found In Lakes Beneath Antarctic Glaciers—Yet
Brand New, Never Before Seen Bacteria Found in Frozen Antarctic Lake—Maybe

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What Really Drives a Whistleblower Like Edward Snowden?

by bvds34dfsg Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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After Edward Snowden went public as the man who leaked the NSA’s secret surveillance system to the country via a 12 minute video interview with the Guardian, questions immediately sprang up around his motivation for whistleblowing, his personal life, and whether his background is what he claims it to be.

Why is suspicion and distrust the natural reaction? Because a lot rests on whether Snowden is telling the truth, yes, but also because most of us (perhaps nearly everyone but whistleblowers themselves) have trouble understanding exactly what motivates a whistleblower. As University of Maryland political psychology professor C. Frederick Alford notes, humans are tribal beings, and even though society considers whistleblowers brave in theory, in practice there tends to be a sense of discomfort with those who break from the tribe.

Alford has spent over a decade asking why some people reveal government secrets in the name of public good, while most don’t; asking what makes Edward Snowden Edward Snowden, and not one of the many other Booz Allen analysts who presumably saw the same information that Snowden did but kept quiet about it. Alford’s 2001 book, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power, examines the psychology of whistleblowing based on the extensive time he spent with people who’ve done it—some to much fanfare, others to very little. He says he’s received a phone call or an email from a whistleblower about every month since the book came out 12 years ago, and in many cases has kept up with those who reach out for years. He spoke with Mother Jones about the Edward Snowden-Daniel Ellsberg parallel, why whistleblowers tend to have big egos, and what Snowden might face in the coming weeks and months.

Mother Jones: Based on what we know about Edward Snowden so far, does he remind you of other whistleblowers you’ve spent time with or studied over the years?

C. Frederick Alford: Daniel Ellsberg, overwhelmingly. I don’t think Bradley Manning: Bradley Manning committed a data dump. He just released tons of information and I don’t think he understood all the information he was releasing. I don’t think anyone could have understood it all.

Ellsberg, who worked at the RAND Corporation at the time and had this contract to analyze the Vietnam War, but realized at a point long before the war had ended that the government knew they were never going to win it, and realized that this information should be part of the public debate, and decided in a very self-conscious way to make this information part of the public debate. Snowden reminded me so much of Ellsberg. Not in his personality, but in the reflective way he decided to be.

If we take the Guardian at its word, and we take Snowden at his word, he released information that would not endanger active agents or reveal the location of CIA stations. So I think Ellsberg is an obvious comparison. And I think the significance of all this is going to end up being comparable to the significance of the Pentagon papers.

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Bee-killing pesticide companies are pretending to save bees

by bvds34dfsg Posted on June 12, 2013

Bee-killing pesticide companies are pretending to save bees

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Even as bees drop dead around the world after sucking down pesticide-laced nectar, pesticide makers are touting their investments in bee research.

Nearly a third of commercial honeybee colonies in U.S. were wiped out last year, for a complicated array of reasons, scientists say: disease, stress, poor nutrition, mite infestations, and — yes — pesticides. Neonicotinoid pesticides seem to be particularly damaging to bees, so much so that the European Union is moving to ban them (but the U.S. is not).

Now the two main manufacturers of neonicotinoids, Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, are promoting their commitments to bee health, as is agro-giant Monsanto. From a feature story in the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

Monsanto Co., which two years ago bought an Israeli bee research company, hosts an industry conference on bee health at its headquarters in Creve Coeur this month. Bayer CropScience is building a 5,500-square-foot “bee health center” in North Carolina, and with fellow chemical giant, Syngenta, has developed a “comprehensive action plan” for bee health.

“The beekeeping industry has always crawled on its hands and knees to USDA and universities, begging for help,” said Jerry Hayes, a bee industry veteran recently hired by Monsanto to run its bee research efforts. “Now we have this very large company involved that knows how important bees are to agriculture.”

With a very large company involved, the bees are as good as saved, right?

Not surprisingly, the industry is downplaying the role of insecticides in bee deaths.

For example, Iain Kelly of Bayer CropScience does a suspiciously incomplete job of explaining the scary plight of bees during an interview with North Carolina Public Radio about the company’s new bee research center:

Kelly … says other insects and diseases are invading much of the bee’s natural habitat.

“They have real problems now with pests and pathogens, including viruses and fungal diseases,” Kelly says.

“We’ve lost a lot of the natural foliage for them as well, which is a big concern to beekeepers.”

Yeah, we know, this is a multi-faceted problem. But what about the pesticides? More on that from the Post-Dispatch:

Published last year, a study by Purdue University found that dead bees that had foraged in and around corn fields contained high levels of neonicotinoid compounds. The study was prompted by massive bee die-offs that happened in the spring, when corn planters were spewing neonicotinoid-containing dust.

“I know, definitively, that there’s a relationship between treated seed and spring die-offs,” said Christian Krupke, the study’s lead author. “It (neonicotinoids) blows out behind the planter and gets in the air, it lands on dandelions. It lands on the bees, even.”

While Krupke says there’s no direct link between neonicotinoids and Colony Collapse Disorder, he said, “anything that’s a stressor to bees is a concern now. We know they’re weaker because of it.”

The industry, however, flatly denies any link between bee health and the neonicotinoids it produces.

“There’s no scientific evidence linking neonics with bee health — period,” said Dave Fischer, director of environmental toxicity and risk assessment at Bayer CropScience.

Perhaps pesticide makers are hoping their happy PR buzz will distract us from the missing buzz of these critical pollinators.

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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Food-safety push in California hurts wildlife — and doesn’t make food safer

by bvds34dfsg Posted on May 14, 2013

Food-safety push in California hurts wildlife — and doesn’t make food safer

By Claire Thompson

Rigid rules for leafy greens are taking a toll on wildlife.

A deadly outbreak of E. coli in 2006, traced to a California spinach field, spurred an overhaul of food-safety regulations in the leafy-greens industry — and that’s got to be a good thing, right? Not so fast, says a study published last week in the journal Nature. Those regulations have contributed to a major loss of ecosystem diversity in California’s Salinas Valley, while at the same time doing little to alleviate the risk of food-borne illness.

In an effort to reduce the potential for contamination, the industry put in place standards that, while technically voluntary, quickly became widespread. Big produce buyers, fearing further disease outbreaks and the public-relations disasters they create, only want to do business with farmers conforming to the new guidelines. “Nationwide, U.S. fruit and vegetable farmers report being pressured by commercial produce buyers to engage in land-use practices that are not conducive to wildlife and habitat conservation, in a scientifically questionable attempt to reduce food-borne illness risk,” the study reports.

Scientific American describes what this ends up looking like:

Researchers discovered that the new farming practices have further de-incentivized growers from farming in ways that take into account the importance of natural systems of resource cycling and plant regeneration. Instead, many have cleared land of native vegetation, erected fences and laid poison to deter the presence of wildlife. As a result of growers’ attempts to control for all potential variables on crop sites, farmed areas have become not only uninhabitable for wildlife but also more vulnerable to climate change.

The Salinas Valley is not only an important agricultural area — California’s “salad bowl,” where 70 percent of the nation’s greens are produced — but also an ecological gem, The Guardian writes:

The floodplain habitat is a stopover and feeding ground for migrating birds like the Great Blue Heron, its plains and river harbour a number of endangered species like the steelhead salmon, and the waterway connects with one of the country’s largest marine sanctuaries.

The study found that between 2005 — before the E. coli spinach outbreak — and 2009, the Salinas Valley lost 13 percent of that precious riverside and wetland habitat. Clearing vegetation between crop fields and waterways not only disrupts ecosystems and displaces wildlife, it also gives pesticides and fertilizers an easier path to pollute water supplies, and eliminates natural plant buffers that slow erosion and diminish the impacts of flooding.

The worst part is that these new practices haven’t really done squat for food safety, SciAm writes:

Since the 2006 outbreak of E. coli was linked with spinach grown in California, at least 15 more domestic E. coli outbreaks have been reported. More than half included cases reported in California.

Obviously we want to do everything possible to prevent food — especially spinach, for goodness’ sake, which is supposed to the epitome of healthy — from killing people. But not with misguided, ineffective reforms that endanger the entire ecosystem and thus our ability to grow food in the first place.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for April 25, 2013

by bvds34dfsg Posted on April 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Pfc. Ivan Ibarra and Pfc. Alfredo Hidalgo, both of Company C “Chaos,” 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, Combined Task Force 4-2, provide security during a clearing operation April 10 in the Panjwa’i district of Afghanistan. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Kimberly Hackbarth, 4th SBCT, 2nd Infantry Division Public Affairs Office.

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"G.I. Joe: Retaliation": The Anti-Obama Conservative’s Fantasy

by bvds34dfsg Posted on March 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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G.I. Joe: Retaliation
Paramount Pictures
115 minutes

G.I. Joe: Retaliation—sequel to American Classic G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra—is escapist filmmaking for the paranoid wingnut.

Before I get to why, let me just state for the record that Retaliation is no Battleship—which is to say it is not a coruscating beacon of unimpeachably fantastic moviemaking. Yes, they are both Hasbro movies; but this one lacks a certain joy and self-aware humor—even though it was written by the same guys who wrote Zombieland and Spike TV’s The Joe Schmo Show. The brightest part of the movie is the fact that rapper/producer RZA * plays a blind ninja dojo master named Blind Master. (Click here to see RZA as a ninja-dojo-master action figure.) The film also has Channing Tatum, The Rock, North Koreans, Adrianne Palicki fighting North Koreans, and 3D visual effects.

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Seriously, WTF Is Up With Bob Woodward?

by bvds34dfsg Posted on February 28, 2013

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I was busy with something else and somehow missed the big Bob Woodward spat last night. Toward the end of the evening I reconnected with Twitter and caught up with a few exhausted tweets from people who were tired of the Woodward thing, or disgusted with the Woodward thing, or whatever, but I didn’t quite realize that something genuinely new had happened.

But yes. It’s splashed all over Drudge: “White House Threatens Woodward”! WTF? Well, one of the nice things about missing this in real time is that the whole story has now played out and I can catch up with it in a few minutes. Basically, Woodward told CNN that a “very senior person” at the White House had threatened that he would “regret doing this” if he published a story saying that the sequester originated with Obama. After fast forwarding through an entire day of confused stories, it turns out the official is Gene Sperling, and here’s the email he sent Woodward last Friday:

I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today. My bad. I do understand your problems with a couple of our statements in the fall — but feel on the other hand that you focus on a few specific trees that gives a very wrong perception of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here.

But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim. The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand barain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start. It was an accepted part of the understanding — from the start. Really. It was assumed by the Rs on the Supercommittee that came right after.

Woodward responded the next day that Sperling had no need to apologize. “I for one welcome a little heat; there should more given the importance.”

Some threat, huh? As a friend put it via email, “It’s odd that a reporter who you would have to assume has had many run-ins, shouting matches, accusations, etc. would go public with his perceived slights. I can’t imagine a junior reporter taking this tack now and not being chastised for mishandling it.”

Something very odd is going on with Woodward. The point of Sperling’s email is clear: he’s not taking issue with the idea that the White House proposed the sequester, but he does think Woodward is wrong when he says both sides agreed that the sequester substitute would be purely spending cuts with no tax increases. Virtually everyone in Washington agrees that Woodward is wrong about that, yet he’s been repeating that line for the past week in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary.

What’s more, Sperling quite clearly didn’t threaten Woodward, and Woodward didn’t take it as a threat at the time. Again: WTF?

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Seriously, WTF Is Up With Bob Woodward?

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