Author Archives: ClaribelOwx

Ryan Zinke’s new gig could be a disaster for the environment too

by ClaribelOwx Posted on January 28, 2019

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Trump’s former secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, departed Washington in January amid a barrage of ethics investigations. It didn’t take long, but Zinke has managed to find a new gig that sees him going from one controversial enterprise (the Trump administration) to another: He’s now a cryptocurrency guy (yes, really).

In an interview with Vice News, Zinke, sporting MAGA socks, made his post-government business debut as the managing director of Artillery One, a little-known blockchain and cryptocurrency investment company based out of North Carolina. He said he’s hoping to make the private crypto company “great again.”

But making something great again implies it was great at some point in the past.

It’s no secret that cryptocurrencies, of which Bitcoin is the first and most valuable, have a huge environmental toll. Most are maintained by a network of specialized computers that crunch mathematical puzzles, or “mine” to log transactions and make new coins. All those computations take a massive amount of energy: At its peak, Bitcoin was consuming the same amount of energy every year as nearly 7 million U.S. homes.

But the libertarian fantasy currency had a wild year in 2018, with more than $480 billion of value wiped off the entire market. With a lower financial worth, Bitcoin only demands the same amount of energy as powering 4 million US households. (Which, you know, is still not ideal.)

Somehow evaluating power-sucking cryptocurrencies in a swanky hotel in Switzerland, as he’s doing in the Vice News clip, seems all too appropriate for Zinke. After all, his legacy at the Interior Department is putting 13 million acres of public lands in private hands for dirty fuel development, rescinding environmental protections, shrinking national monuments, and … an extensive hat collection.

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Ryan Zinke’s new gig could be a disaster for the environment too

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America’s Rash of School Shooting and Bomb Threats Continues

by ClaribelOwx Posted on February 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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School officials sent home nearly 2,000 students after receiving a bomb threat at McLean High School in northern Virginia at approximately 8:00 a.m. Monday morning. The Washington Post reports:

The 10th largest school district in the country, Fairfax County schools face nearly daily threats. Security officials have said that threats come in frequently through the Internet and social media and that they investigate about 100 cases a year.

Earlier this year, fake bomb threats closed schools in six states, and in 2015 a threat forced school officials in Los Angeles to cancel classes for the second largest school system in the country.

Schools throughout the nation have been facing a rash of shooting and bomb threats. One study suggests that such threats are on the rise. In February 2015, Kenneth Trump, the president of the National School Safety and Security Services, released a study that reviewed 812 threats reported in the media from the first half of the 2014-15 school year. Threats had risen 158 percent since the first time he conducted the study in the previous year.

However, there is no comprehensive national data on school threats, and no mandate for schools or law enforcement to track them, so it’s diffucult to discern if the problem is in fact a rising trend. Meanwhile, also on Monday four students were reported injured in a school shooting in Ohio. Read more about the ongoing wave of threats to schools in our recent explainer here.

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America’s Rash of School Shooting and Bomb Threats Continues

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