Author Archives: gerdi

Essential Gardening Books for Planters and Admirers

by gerdi Posted on January 29, 2013

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Essential Gardening Books for Planters and Admirers

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Almost half of all coal burned in the world is burned in China

by gerdi Posted on January 29, 2013

Almost half of all coal burned in the world is burned in China

By Philip Bump

Speaking of air pollution in China, here’s a disconcerting graph from the U.S. Energy Information Agency.

EIA

The EIA explains:

Coal consumption in China grew more than 9% in 2011, continuing its upward trend for the 12th consecutive year, according to newly released international data. China’s coal use grew by 325 million tons in 2011, accounting for 87% of the 374 million ton global increase in coal use.

China now uses 47 percent of the world’s coal. It’s an almost unfathomable figure.

The EIA also created this animation of Asian coal growth between 1980 and 2010.

In 2011, China’s per-person carbon footprint neared Europe’s, but was still far behind that of the U.S. As the country consumes more coal, that figure will rise — meaning an exponential increase in carbon dioxide, soot, and other toxic pollutants in the air and atmosphere.

One last bit of bad news, from Financial Times energy reporter Ed Crooks:

We’ll update with some good news if possible. Someday.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Almost half of all coal burned in the world is burned in China

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Anti-Abortion Group to Lawmakers: Please, Let’s Talk About Rape!

by gerdi Posted on January 29, 2013

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Comments about “legitimate” rapes and pregnancies that “God intended” got several GOP politicians in trouble last year, and cost the party at least two seats in the Senate. But now one of the country’s most extreme anti-abortion groups is encouraging Republican politicians to keep talking about rape. Personhood USA—the group behind efforts to grant fertilized eggs the same rights as adult humans—announced last week that it is launching a new campaign to push lawmakers to strip rape exceptions from federal abortion laws.

Although abortion has long been a fraught issue in American politics, many anti-choice politicians have felt compelled—either out of personal belief or because of public pressure—to allow for narrow exceptions to all-out bans on abortion in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at risk. Federal policy has, for the most part, aligned with those exceptions. The Hyde Amendment, the legislation that governs much of the federal government’s relationship with abortion providers, forbids federal funding for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, and where the life of the mother is endangered. But Personhood USA’s new “Save the 1” campaign wants to eliminate those exceptions, and eventually make all abortions—even for rape victims—illegal.

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Anti-Abortion Group to Lawmakers: Please, Let’s Talk About Rape!

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In the Future, Everyone Will Have a Super-PAC

by gerdi Posted on January 28, 2013

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Charles Spies has seen the future of American elections, and it is drenched with super-PAC cash—much of it aimed at getting single politicians elected.

That’s what Spies told me recently when I asked him to peer into his crystal ball and venture a prediction about the future of big-money politics in America. Spies (rhymes with “cheese”) is a well-connected Republican lawyer and former top adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2008 campaign. For the last election cycle, however, Spies choose to support Romney’s presidential bid in a new way: He started a super-PAC.

Restore Our Future, the super-PAC Spies launched with two other Romney ’08 alums, strategist Carl Forti and ad man Larry McCarthy, spent $161 million—the most of any super-PAC—to help elect Romney president, mostly by blasting President Obama with negative ads. Spies’ candidate, of course, lost, but his experience running Restore Our Future taught him a thing or two about the strange, rapidly changing new world of super-PACs.

Super-PACs may have spent $635 million during the 2012 elections, but that’s chump change compared to what they’ll likely unload in the next presidential election. (Only 45 months away!) Ditto for the 2014 midterm elections compared to the 2010 midterms. Spies predicts at least 250 new super-PACs will spend serious money on races up and down the ballot in 2014. And he says voters should expect a lot of them to be devoted to promoting the fortune of a single House or Senate candidate, big-money bazookas firing away to nudge their preferred politician that much closer to Washington.

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In the Future, Everyone Will Have a Super-PAC

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McDonald’s new sustainable fish is — surprise! — not so sustainable

by gerdi Posted on January 25, 2013

McDonald’s new sustainable fish is — surprise! — not so sustainable

By Susie Cagle

This week, McDonald’s announced that it will start serving a lot more fast-food fish starting next month, in the form of “Fish McBites” that it hopes will boost sales.

The company also announced that all those bites, plus its Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, will be made from sustainable, wild-caught Alaska pollock, with the Marine Stewardship Council’s stamp of approval right there on the box.

Marine Stewardship Council

The MSC “is proud to support McDonald’s and its commitment to sustainability.” The fast-food giant has been serving four kinds of MSC-labeled sustainable fish in European locations since October 2011.

Is this the part where I’m supposed to say, “Yay McDonald’s”? Because yeah, that’s not happening.

Not all conservation groups can agree on what’s a sustainable fish and what’s not, and often what’s sustainable today is overfished tomorrow, especially when a company with an appetite as big as McDonald’s is involved.

Alaska pollock is not considered a “best choice” on the respected Seafood Watch list put out by the Monterey Bay Aquarium; rather, it’s lumped into the middle “good alternative” category. From Seafood Watch:

Alaska Pollock populations are moderately healthy, but their numbers have been declining. Alaska Pollock are now at their lowest levels in over 20 years.

The fishery uses midwater trawling gear that’s designed to not impact the seafloor. However, these midwater nets contact the seafloor an estimated 44% of the time—resulting in severe damage to seafloor habitats of the Bering Sea.

Alaska pollock fishing operations also catch up large numbers of declining Chinook salmon, and might be hurting the endangered Steller sea lions and Northern fur seals that rely on the pollock for food.

Even presuming Alaska pollock is a “good alternative,” there’s still the matter of, you know, everything else McDonald’s does, from serving antibiotic-laden meats to leading the fast-food industrial complex. McDonald’s may be improving its treatment of fish, but it’s not improving its treatment of workers.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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McDonald’s new sustainable fish is — surprise! — not so sustainable

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Baseball person Derek Jeter to world leaders: Climate change is a thing

by gerdi Posted on January 23, 2013

Baseball person Derek Jeter to world leaders: Climate change is a thing

By Philip Bump

Here’s how you know that the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, attracts all of the world’s best and brightest: This morning, an audience heard from Derek Jeter.

If you don’t know who Derek Jeter is, allow me to explain. Imagine a group of pirates, a vile, filthy band of lawbreakers and miscreants. Now imagine this group had a captain who seemed perfectly nice and was very good at being a captain, but he’s spent his life in service to an evil, repulsive entity. That’s Derek Jeter. He’s the captain and star of the New York Yankees.

keithallison

Jeter yells at someone, probably not about the climate.

But living in New York (until recently, in a $15.5 million apartment atop Trump World Tower) means that Jeter (despite his deep and abiding flaws) saw firsthand the devastation of Hurricane Sandy. From the Columbus Dispatch:

“It’s just something that’s gotten so much attention,” Jeter said of climate change. “Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s something that needs to be addressed because we’re seeing more and more natural disasters each year, it seems like. Something has to be causing it.”

But Jeter, himself a global icon as the captain of one of the most recognizable and successful sports franchises in the world, said he doesn’t try to interject into politics.

“I know my place,” Jeter said.

Jeter’s place is clearly among amoral, hypercompetitive overachievers.

The good captain is not alone in linking Sandy with climate change. A poll taken last December suggested that New Yorkers readily made that connection — with a concomitant increase in a desire to address the problem. Yesterday, we wondered if this would be the year that Davos attendees finally took real action on global warming; if a multi-millionaire athlete can help them do so, so be it.

In case you still don’t really get what Davos is all about, this might help explain: Baseball star Derek Jeter is at the convening — having been invited by Pepsi — where he talked about the climate. I’m not sure it can be summarized any better than that.

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Jeter concerned about climate change, Columbus Dispatch

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Clinton Blows Up at GOP Senator During Benghazi Hearing

by gerdi Posted on January 23, 2013

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At a much-anticipated Senate hearing on Wednesday morning, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton erupted at a Republican senator who demanded to know why the Obama administration said the September 11 attacks on a US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, began as a protest.

“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or because of guys out for a walk one night and decided to go kill some Americans? At this point, what difference does it make senator?” Clinton said, raising her voice at Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). “It is our job to figure out what happened and prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

Despite months of GOP sound and fury over the Benghazi attack—which led to John McCain and other GOP senators preemptively scuttling UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s bid to replace Clinton at Foggy Bottom—for the most part Republicans at the hearing were respectful of Clinton, who has recently been ill. (GOP Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky did suggest that Clinton should have been “fired and replaced” for being responsible for what he called “the worst tragedy since 9/11”). When Senator James Risch (R-Ohio) asked her about the talking points (which tied the attacks to supposed protests over an anti-Islam video) that Rice quoted when she appeared on several Sunday morning television shows to discuss the Benghazi assault, Clinton said that the motivations of the attackers have yet to be completely determined. There was no organized protest at Benghazi, but the role of that anti-Islam film in motivating the attackers in Libya (as well as protesters elsewhere in the Middle East) remains murky. After all, the group suspected of carrying out the attack in Benghazi has cited the movie as motivation.

Still, Senator Johnson accused the administration of deliberately misleading the public and of using the fog of war that followed the attacks as an excuse. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Clinton declared. (The information that the Benghazi attack had begun as a protest actually came from the CIA.)

Conservatives are likely to frame Clinton’s contention that the existence (or lack thereof) of any protest doesn’t really matter as merely a way to sidestep the administration’s initial attempt at a some sort of a cover-up. But her point is that if there had been a protest, the consequences of the attack would not have been any less terrible and the administration would have been no less culpable, so there was no motivation for them to lie. In other words, sometimes a mistake (even one that originates with the CIA) is just a mistake, and not a conspiracy.

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Clinton Blows Up at GOP Senator During Benghazi Hearing

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Why An Unknown Senator Named CeCe Is a Breakthrough in the Campaign Money Wars

by gerdi Posted on January 23, 2013

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You probably haven’t heard of Cecilia Tkaczyk—CeCe to her friends. But the nation’s leading activists fighting to get big money out of politics want you to hear her story. After months in court, Tkacyzk squeaked out the second-narrowest win in the history of New York’s state Senate, a win progressives are hailing as a potential turning point in the fight to clean up Albany’s noxious politics. And if they can pass reform in New York, the front line of the campaign finance wars, activists believe they can pressure other states to do the same.

Liberals love Tkaczyk because she made the public financing of elections a central issue, if not the issue, in her campaign. The underdog in a race against GOP state Assemblyman George Amedore, Tkaczyk proposed replacing New York State’s lax campaign finance system with a voluntary program that matches small-dollar donations with taxpayer money. The idea: nudge candidates to court lots of less wealthy individual donors instead of wooing a handful of rich ones. Throughout the campaign, Tkaczyk pressed Amedore on the campaign cash issue, and in the final weeks of the campaign, Amedore turned around and attacked her specifically over public financing, ripping it as too costly and unnecessary.

Strange, right? Two candidates locking horns over…campaign finance? Yet in the Amedore-Tkaczyk race, the dry, unsexy issue of money in politics was front and center.

After the ballots had been counted, and a few dozen votes separated Amedore and Tkacyzk, the election headed to the courts. The two sides fought over which ballots to count and which to exclude, Amedore briefly took a 37-vote lead, but then, more than two months after the election, the court’s decision to count a few more ballots tipped the race to Tkacyzk. According to the current count, she won by 19 votes. Campaign reformers point to her victory as proof, albeit on a small scale, that corruption and the influence of money in politics resonates with voters, and that an anti-big-money candidate can win by running on this specific issue. “Her victory shows that voters will support candidates who champion real campaign finance reform, including citizen-funded elections,” says Jonathan Soros, who runs Friends of Democracy, which he calls an anti-super-PAC super-PAC.

Yes, Tkaczyk had lots of help. Progressive groups such as Citizen Action of New York and the Working Families Partner phone-banked and knocked on doors. Soros’ super-PAC spent $265,000 on polling, TV ads, and phone calls to elect Tkaczyk, focusing on the campaign finance issue. And Protect Our Democracy, another pro-reform super-PAC started by investor Sean Eldridge, the husband of Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, spent thousands more to back Tkaczyk while highlighting the campaign money issue. If all that spending sounds a tad ironic to you—outside groups spending big to support an anti-big-money candidate—that’s because it is.

But Soros and Eldridge say they want to build a coalition of pro-campaign-reform candidates in New York State, and they argue that it takes money to do so. They focused on New York State Senate races because Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly signaled his support for public financing—but he needs the legislature to send him a bill. Tkaczyk’s win adds another pro-reform Democrat to the state Senate. Now, in a divided state Senate, the hard work begins. “It’s now up to Ms. Tkaczyk,” the Albany Times-Union wrote in an recent editorial, “and all those politicians from Gov. Andrew Cuomo on down who say they stand for campaign reform to live up to their promises to do it.”

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Why An Unknown Senator Named CeCe Is a Breakthrough in the Campaign Money Wars

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Japan plans world’s largest offshore wind farm near Fukushima

by gerdi Posted on January 16, 2013

Japan plans world’s largest offshore wind farm near Fukushima

By Philip Bump

pjh

An offshore farm near Kent, U.K.

The world’s largest offshore wind farm is coming to Japan. Eventually.

From New Scientist:

By 2020, the plan is to build a total of 143 wind turbines on platforms 16 kilometres off the coast of Fukushima, home to the stricken Daiichi nuclear reactor that hit the headlines in March 2011 when it was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami.

The wind farm, which will generate 1 gigawatt of power once completed, is part of a national plan to increase renewable energy resources following the post-tsunami shutdown of the nation’s 54 nuclear reactors. Only two have since come back online.

The project is part of Fukushima’s plan to become completely energy self-sufficient by 2040, using renewable sources alone. The prefecture is also set to build the country’s biggest solar park.

The planned farm will be almost twice the size of the largest such facility currently in operation. By installing the turbines near Fukushima, utilities can leverage the abandoned plant’s now-unused grid connections.

By 2020, it is possible that the United States will still have a wind industry. Stay tuned.

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Japan to build world’s largest offshore wind farm, New Scientist

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems

by gerdi Posted on January 16, 2013

North Frackota’s population boom means more young men — and more problems

By Philip Bump

Huffington Post

Click to embiggen.

Last year, the North Dakota division of tourism unveiled an ad as part of a series that it hoped would lure people to the state. “Drinks, dinner, decisions,” the ad copy read. “Arrive a guest. Leave a legend.” Reaction to the ad (which you can see at right) was fast and strongly negative. The image of two men leering out a window at a group of women in short skirts struck many as sexist, tone-deaf, and worse.

It turns out that the ad’s subtext may have been more accurate than we knew. From the Times:

At work, at housing camps and in bars and restaurants, men have been left to mingle with their own. High heels and skirts are as rare around here as veggie burgers. Some men liken the environment to the military or prison.

“It’s bad, dude,” said Jon Kenworthy, 22, who moved to Williston from Indiana in early December. “I was talking to my buddy here. I told him I was going to import from Indiana because there’s nothing here.”

This has complicated life for women in the region as well.

Many said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.

Reuters / Jim UrquhartOil industry worker Bobby Freestone enjoys a day off at a so-called man camp outside Watford, N.D.

North Dakota is the fastest-growing state in the country. Fracking the Bakken Shale formation for oil has brought thousands and thousands of young men to the state, given them good salaries, crammed them into whatever housing they can find. It has also created a massive imbalance in the number of men to women in some parts of the state — and the men that have arrived are young and bored.

Prosecutors and the police note an increase in crimes against women, including domestic and sexual assaults. “There are people arriving in North Dakota every day from other places around the country who do not respect the people or laws of North Dakota,” said Ariston E. Johnson, the deputy state’s attorney in neighboring McKenzie County, in an e-mail.

Over the past six years, North Dakota has shot from the middle of the pack to become the state with the third-highest ratio of single young men to single young women in the country. In 2011, nearly 58 percent of North Dakota’s unmarried 18-to-34-year-olds were men, according to census data. That disparity was even starker in the three counties where the oil boom is heaviest — there were more than 1.6 young single men for every young single woman.

The Times article includes a graphic showing those states with the highest imbalance of single men to single women. The top five states — Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, and North Dakota — are all among the states with the highest levels of oil and gas exploration.

New York Times

That imbalance is no excuse for sexism, assaults, or harassment. It is, however, another sign of a region strained by a booming fossil fuel industry — a region that receives very little support from that increasingly rich industry to deal with the problems that are created.

Come to North Dakota, a new, more accurate ad might beckon. Instead of being at a bar, it’s in front of a fracking rig, and instead of two guys, it will show six. And it won’t show three young women, but one — with a nervous expression on her face.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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