Author Archives: greenenergy4

Republicans Have a Habit of Blocking Disaster Relief for Americans

by greenenergy4 Posted on January 3, 2013

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On Wednesday, Rep. Peter King lost it. Infuriated by a last-minute decision by House speaker John Boehner to kill a disaster relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy, the New York Republican spent the last day of the 112th Congress mulling the moral decline of the GOP. “I can’t imagine that type of indifference, that type of disregard, that cavalier attitude being shown to any other part of the country,” he said in a floor speech. In King’s telling, Boehner’s decision was a “a cruel knife in the back.” Later in the day, New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie also wondered what had come of his party, calling the decision “callous” and “disgusting,” and adding: “This used to be something that was not political.”

But King and Christie shouldn’t be surprised. Boehner’s stonewalling on disaster relief, far from a clean break with tradition, has become characteristic of how the currently deficit-obsessed GOP does business. Here’s a refresher:

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Republicans Have a Habit of Blocking Disaster Relief for Americans

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America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead

by greenenergy4 Posted on January 3, 2013

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When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.


America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead


Is There Lead In Your House?


Why Has the Crime Decline in Los Angeles Slowed Down?

More MoJo coverage of the dangers of lead.

Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting called “broken windows,” popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an influential article in The Atlantic. “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired,” they observed, “all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” So too, tolerance of small crimes would create a vicious cycle ending with entire neighborhoods turning into war zones. But if you cracked down on small crimes, bigger crimes would drop as well.

Giuliani won the election, and he made good on his crime-fighting promises by selecting Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the NYPD’s new commissioner. Bratton had made his reputation as head of the New York City Transit Police, where he aggressively applied broken-windows policing to turnstile jumpers and vagrants in subway stations. With Giuliani’s eager support, he began applying the same lessons to the entire city, going after panhandlers, drunks, drug pushers, and the city’s hated squeegee men. And more: He decentralized police operations and gave precinct commanders more control, keeping them accountable with a pioneering system called CompStat that tracked crime hot spots in real time.

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America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead

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2012 was the hottest year in history in New York, D.C., Louisville, Philadelphia …

by greenenergy4 Posted on January 2, 2013

2012 was the hottest year in history in New York, D.C., Louisville, Philadelphia …

By Philip Bump

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A city on fire, literally.

It’s not yet official, but 2012 was the hottest year in American history. Recorded history, that is; we’ll allow climate change deniers the possibility that the United States was hotter when it was a still-forming Pangeal mass of semi-solid lava. Beyond that, though: hottest ever.

This led to a bumper crop of “hottest year ever!” stories in local media last week. Here’s a Google News search for “hottest year.” Among the areas noting that accomplishment: Lexington, Richmond, Topeka, New Jersey, Cleveland and Columbus, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Burlington, Louisville, and New York City. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that its 170,000-odd monitoring stations in the U.S. recorded 24,280 new record highs over the course of 2012, and 9,728 tied highs.

Here are the records set in January of last year:

NOAA

Or, illustrated another way, here’s the percent of land area that saw “very warm” or “very cold” temperatures over the last several years.

NOAA

If that’s too hard to read, here’s how it breaks down: Over the 12 months of 2012, 34.3 percent of the country was unusually warm, on average. Only 0.7 percent was unusually cold.

Which exacerbated and contributed to the — still ongoing — drought. From Weather Underground:

According to NOAA’s monthly State of the Drought report, the 61.8% of the U.S. covered by drought this week was also what we had during July, making the 2012 drought the greatest U.S. drought since the Dust Bowl year of 1939. (During December of 1939, 62.1% of the U.S. was in drought; the only year with more of the U.S. in drought was 1934.) The Great Drought of 2012 is about to become the Great Drought of 2012- 2013, judging by the latest 15-day precipitation forecast from the GFS model.

Consider that. The level of drought in the U.S. right now is equivalent to what we saw in July.

The temperature extremes also continue. Des Moines hasn’t seen a subzero day in almost two years. Washington, D.C., saw its warmest year in history, with December temperatures running 5.6 degrees F above the 1980-2010 normal and a forecast of above-average temperatures to come.

So far this year, NOAA hasn’t recorded any record temperatures at its observation stations. But then: the year is young.

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

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2012 was the hottest year in history in New York, D.C., Louisville, Philadelphia …

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15 Green New Year’s Resolutions for 2013

by greenenergy4 Posted on December 31, 2012

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Welcome to the third annual Econundrums new year’s resolution roundup! I like to end every year of Econundrums by asking: What are your environmentally-themed goals for the year to come? (You can check out previous years’ resolutions here and here.) This year, I posed the question to my fellow Mother Jones staffers. Here are some of their responses:

Rinse and re-use plastic zip lock bags. Remember to take reusable vegetable bags to the store. Remember to turn off power strips not in use. -Khary Brown

Divest myself from fossil fuels. -Tim McDonnell

Stop buying palm oil imported from Indonesia. They’re destroying entire acres of precious habitat in order to grow palms for palm oil. The baboons who live here, as well as a species of tiger, are losing their habitat and may become endangered. -Young Kim

Make the switch to natural cleaning products. Go cruelty-free with cosmetics. -Allison Stelly

Eat less cheese. -Kate Sheppard

Eat only sustainably harvested fish/shellfish. Oh! I’m going to miss it so! And make all gifts and cards for the year out of things I already own–sewing projects using old clothes, mostly, but some book binding too. -Emma Logan

Bike to my nearest “park & ride” (as opposed to driving!) -Jacques Hebert

Stop drinking soy milk. -Maddie Oatman

Overcome the idea that real action on environmental problems has anything to do with individual consumer choice. -Luke Smith

Remember to bring my own bag and stop getting charged 10 cents. Reuse food scraps and pulp (for soups, pies, curry) before throwing into compost. -Jaeah Lee

Drink more—from reusable containers like growlers. -Tom Philpott

I want to opt out of a full-body TSA scan at least once. I’m not comfortable with the amount of radiation those scanners give off, or the way TSA handled the public’s health concerns around them. -Maggie Severns

Refill my hand, dish and laundry soap from the bulk section at my local health food store rather than bring new containers into my home. -Amber Hewins

Stop being afraid to tell the 7-11 guy that I don’t need a plastic bag. -Sydney Brownstone

…and as for me, I’m going to volunteer for at least one environment-related project in my community—maybe a community garden workday, a beach cleanup, or trail maintenance at a local park.

Do you have an environmental new year’s resolution? Leave it in the comments.

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15 Green New Year’s Resolutions for 2013

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