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It’s that time of year again. You’re enjoying unseasonably warm weather / digging out from under an unexpected snow storm, looking forward to a summer full of invasive mosquitos, and oh, what’s this? Why, it’s another U.N. Human Development Report with terrible news about the planet!
The report celebrates advances in developing countries, improved conditions for the poor, and the “dramatic rebalancing of economic power” worldwide, i.e. the rise of Brazil, China, and India to crush Western white people. But it warns all that could be lost with climate change, deforestation, and air and water pollution. As usual, and as noted in past U.N. reports, the poor have the most to lose.
“Environmental threats are among the most grave impediments to lifting human development … The longer action is delayed, the higher the cost will be,” warns the report, which builds on the 2011 edition looking at sustainable development.
“Environmental inaction, especially regarding climate change, has the potential to halt or even reverse human development progress. The number of people in extreme poverty could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050 unless environmental disasters are averted by co-ordinated global action,” said the UN.
“Far more attention needs to be paid to the impact human beings are having on the environment. Climate change is already exacerbating chronic environmental threats, and ecosystem losses are constraining livelihood opportunities, especially for poor people. A clean and safe environment should be seen as a right, not a privilege.”
The notoriously toothless U.N. often has strong words about climate change. This report will be filed away with all the other U.N. reports, and then when the world is burning the U.N. can say, “We told you so!” Which will be at least a little vindicating. Except for the part where the world is burning.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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U.N. to poor people: Sorry, pollution and warming will hit you hardest
Excellent infographicker Dorothy Gambrell recently broke down falling American food costs and some changing tastes for Bloomberg Business Week.
Click to embiggen.
Beef prices and consumption are both way down, while fresh fruit prices decreased less than any other category. Overall, though, it looks like food is getting a lot cheaper! And that’s true, ish, but it’s not the whole picture.
Over the past century, food costs as a percentage of income have been dropping like overripe fruit that you forgot to pick off the tree. But those lower prices aren’t exactly adding up for the poor. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic finds that poor families are still spending the same percentage on food that they did 30 years ago, while middle-income and richer folks are paying significantly less.
Overall, the falling burden of food costs is good news for lower- and middle-class families. It means they can devote more money to things like health care and education and energy and homes, which are getting expensive faster than their wages are rising. But we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that those accelerating costs are putting pressure on poor families to spend less on food.
In other words, we can’t rule out that the lowest-income households only spend one-sixth of their money on food, not only because real food prices are falling, but also because they’re forced to consume less, as mortgages and gas prices eat into the budget.
As a part of those food costs, Thompson breaks down at-home and eating-out budgets. The poor spend more than twice as much eating at home than they do at restaurants, while the rich spend only slightly more on home-cooked meals. Thompson presumes this means the poor are eating at home way more often. That could be, but this analysis only takes into account dollars spent, not the number of meals those dollars bought. Folks making less money may be eating out, too — after all, fast food is cheap as hell.
And as Thompson himself points out, Americans are eating out far more than we used to. Here’s his graph comparing overall eat-at-home and eat-out trends over the last century, as a percentage of total meals eaten.
How many of those meals might have been off the McDonald’s $1 menu? And how many of them might have been bought with food stamps? In some states, fast food restaurants are some of the only places people can buy hot prepared meals with food stamp benefits, making them extra palatable and convenient for the working poor.
At the Nation, Greg Kaufmann points to A Place at the Table, a new film which highlights the hungry plight of the poor and the assistance programs aimed at alleviating, but not solving, the problem.
In the last 30 years, America’s soup kitchen and food bank ranks have grown from 200 to 40,000 (assistance that isn’t taken into account when we talk about how much the poor spend on food). To blame, according to the filmmakers: Big Ag lobbyists and subsidies for corn and grain that leave pricier fresh produce out of poor hands. “Since 1980, costs for fruits and vegetables increased by roughly 40 percent leaving financially struggling families with little choice when it comes to cheapest calories at the local mini-mart,” writes Kaufmann.
But, but, that pretty graph said they were cheap now…
[B]eyond reforming the formidable lobby that prevents Congress from fixing kids’ nutrition in America, the film hints at what else is needed. At the end of the day, even if we’re funding healthy meals for all Americans and feeding our kids properly, we haven’t fixed the root problem of poverty. … [I]f working American families aren’t afforded a livable wage, then we will forever be reacting to hunger, not preventing it.
A lack of a farm bill has left the future of food benefits in limbo for months. Now cue the sequestration that’s set to make this all even worse. Our food may be getting cheaper, McDonald’s included, but we have a lot of work to do if we’re serious about getting good food to those millions of grumbling American bellies.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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Smart people say food prices are falling — depends what you mean by ‘food’
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This passage from tonight’s 60 Minutes interview with Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook COO who just published Lean In, was striking:
Norah O’Donnell: You know, Sheryl, people are going to say, “Oh she’s got a charmed life, She went to Harvard. She’s a billionaire.”
Sheryl Sandberg: Yep.
Norah O’Donnell: “And she’s telling me what I should do?” Do they have a point?
Sheryl Sandberg: I’m not trying to say that everything I can do everyone can do. But I do believe that these messages are completely universal.
….Norah O’Donnell: And for those who say, “Easy for you to say?”
Sheryl Sandberg: It is easier for me to say this. And that’s why I’m saying it.
Can you imagine anyone posing questions like these to Richard Branson or Jack Welch? Last I looked, they were pretty rich too, and they’ve also written bestselling books providing advice on business and life. Nobody ever asks them why they think they can offer advice to the masses from their lofty perches, but apparently it feels natural to ask Sandberg these questions just because her primary audience is other women. Funny that.
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Is that a high concentration of greenhouse gases I see up there?
Schoolkids might soon know more about climate change than you do. Millions of young Americans will finally be taught, in a methodical manner, about the science behind the biggest threat to their generation: climate change.
Inside Climate News reports that new national science standards, which will make global warming lessons a part of the public school curriculum, are expected to be adopted by the 26 states that helped craft them. Another 15 states have indicated that they may also adopt the standards. Textbook publisher McGraw-Hill thinks that number could climb even higher.
Under the Next Generation Science Standards, which are scheduled to be ready for adoption this spring, students will learn how and why fossil fuel emissions are causing the world to overheat.
The only previous federal science teaching standards were published in 1996, and they avoided the issues of evolution and climate change. It didn’t matter much — the standards were developed without the input of the states, so states have generally been ignoring them. But the new standards were developed with states’ input to help educators and students cut through the scientifically unjustifiable doubt that’s clouded these two subjects. From Inside Climate:
[The standards] recommend that educators teach the evidence for man-made climate change starting as early as elementary school and incorporate it into all science classes, ranging from earth science to chemistry. By eighth grade, students should understand that “human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming),” the standards say. …
The … priority was making sure the standards were based on the latest science, said Heidi Schweingruber, deputy director of the Board on Science Education at the National Research Council. This was particularly important for evolution and climate change, which had become so politicized that scientists and educators feared students didn’t know how to separate scientific fact from religious beliefs or political opinion.
The old standards made no mention of climate change because the consensus about whether global warming was happening—and if it was caused by humans—hadn’t been solidified.
“We understand it a lot better now than we did some 15 years ago,” Schweingruber said.
Many teachers have been skipping the subject altogether to avoid confrontations with conservative administrators or parents. Others teach it as a controversial theory, either because they don’t understand the evidence for global warming or because they reject it, educators told InsideClimate News.
The new standards should provide kids who grow up around Fox News-watching, Wall Street Journal-reading adults with some immunity from the dangerous virus of misinformation. Maybe some enlightened students will even help their parents come to grips with basic climate science.
States colored blue helped craft the national science standards and are expected to adopt them. Other states might also adopt the standards. Texas will not.
John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who
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Schools across the U.S. will soon start teaching real climate science
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In “10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down”, I collected a range of research and statistics that challenge some of pro-gun advocates most popular sound bites. The National Rifle Association took notice and has been returning fire with a series of short videos attacking the “media misinformation.” The clips score a couple of good points, but they’re far from bulletproof. So let the debunking of the debunking of the debunking begin!
Myth #1: They’re coming for your guns.
“Mother Jones is right,” declares NRA News host Cam Edwards as he kicks off what he promises will be a 10-part rebuttal. “There is no way to round up all the privately-owned firearms in the United States.”
That hasn’t stopped his colleagues at the NRA from claiming that the government will soon be coming for your guns. The group’s executive vice president Wayne LaPierre has long insisted that the Obama administration is behind a secret “conspiracy” to impose “gun owner licensing and gun registration regimes that could be used for gun prohibition, confiscation, and ultimate destruction.” (He was at it again recently, claiming universal background checks would lead to your guns being taken away.)
Besides, nobody in Washington is proposing gun confiscation. Tellingly, Edwards only cites non-lawmakers, such as this Daily Kos writer, who have called for restrictions far beyond anything being considered on Capitol Hill. And regulating firearms doesn’t make confiscation inevitable. For example, the National Firearms Act of 1934, which requires the owners of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns to register with the federal government, led to no such roundup, and today machine guns are hardly ever used in crimes. When it passed, the law was endorsed by the NRA.
Myth #2: Guns don’t kill people—people kill people.
Here Edwards claims that “we know that there really is no correlation between gun ownership rates and suicide rates.” Yet researchers have found a link between higher rates of gun ownership and higher rates of suicide by gun—but not by other means—in the United States.
Edwards is correct that the suicide rate is much higher in virtually gun-free Japan. (Most Japanese suicides are hangings.) Obviously, gun availability isn’t the only factor behind suicides in Japan (or the United States). Yet internationally, as the World Health Organization reports, readily available firearms “facilitate unplanned suicide acts” and “increase the suicide frequency.”
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Anniversary-wise, the big news right now is the upcoming 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. I’ll have a bit more to say about that later. But there’s another milestone that’s right around the corner too: the 10th anniversary of Friday Catblogging.
The actual anniversary is still a few days away, but I figure you want the whole catblogging story, don’t you? So this is where it started: with the post on the right ten years ago today. The world seemed awash in troubles that day, but when I looked outside, Inkblot seemed to have the whole thing all figured out. Just snooze your troubles away! So I took a picture and put it on the blog. Four days later that led me to the next fateful step on the road to Friday Catblogging. I’ll have that for you on Monday.
NOTE: Many thanks to my old friends at the Washington Monthly, for helping recreate these historic blog posts, which had sadly fallen into disrepair over time. The internet, as we all know, is not an archival-quality medium.
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The U.S. State Department just released a draft environmental impact statement for the Keystone XL pipeline, and it’s not what climate activists have been hoping for.
As The New York Times puts it, the report “makes no recommendation about whether the project should be built but presents no conclusive environmental reason it should not be.” According to The Washington Post, the report “suggest[s] that blocking the project would not have a significant impact on either the future development of Canada’s oil sands region or U.S. oil consumption.”
More from the Times:
The new impact statement says that extracting, shipping, refining and burning oil from the tar sands produces more climate-altering greenhouse gases than most conventional oil, but less than many of the project’s critics claim. The State Department study says that tar sands oil produces 5 percent to 19 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than other crude, depending on what oil was compared and who performed the calculations.
It predicts that Canada and its oil industry partners will probably continue to develop the oil sands even if the Keystone XL pipeline is not built. It states that building or not building the pipeline will have no significant impact on demand for heavy crude in the United States.
And it says that alternate means of transporting the oil — rail, truck, barge — also have significant environmental and economic impacts, including higher cost, noise, traffic, air pollution and the possibility of spills. It does not say that one method is better for the environment than the other, but says that a spill is more likely for rail transport but the volume of oil spilled from a pipeline probably would be greater.
Mother Jones reports that some of the document’s conclusions “have enviros worried that a greenlight is inevitable”:
Enviros immediately seized on the new report, arguing against its claim that any spills associated with the pipeline are “expected to be rare and relatively small,” and said it underestimated the project’s contribution to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. They also challenged the idea that TransCanada’s pipeline will not make a huge difference in the development of the tar sands, pointing to the industry’s own claims that the pipeline is essential to their plans to expand export of this type of oil.
Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune captured the feelings of many activists with his response to the news: “President Obama said that he’s committed to fighting the climate crisis. If that is true, he should throw the State Department’s report away and reject the dirty and dangerous Keystone XL pipeline.”
When government officials release 2,000-page reports on Friday afternoons, it generally means they’d prefer that you didn’t hear about them. The full report is here if you’d like to spend your whole weekend feeling crappy about this news (maybe you’d like to discuss it with some people at #NoKXL or #Keystone).
This is by no means a final decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. This draft report will be published next week and then subject to 45 days of public comment, after which it will be revised and finalized. The State Department also still has to release an analysis of whether the pipeline is in the “national interest,” so look for that to drop on another Friday afternoon. Ultimately, President Obama will make the final decision, probably in late spring or summer.
In the meantime, get those angry comments ready, folks. You know the American Petroleum Institute is already all over it.
U.S. Report Sees No Environmental Bar to Keystone Pipeline, The New York Times
Blocking Keystone XL won’t save the climate, State Department analysis says, The Washington Post
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If you believe the folks at NASA—and really, why shouldn’t you?—it’s only a matter of when, not if, we need someone like Dr. Bong Wie to save the human race from a civilization-destroying catastrophe.
Wie is the director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, the only institution in the United States dedicated to the deflection of what NASA calls Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)—”asteroids” to the rest of us. He’s been busy lately. On Friday, Americans woke up to reports and videos of the largest meteorite in more than a century crashing into Siberia. In the late afternoon, 600,000 people watched online as the DA14 asteroid passed just 17,000 miles from Earth. In response to all of this, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, announced he would hold a hearing “to develop contingencies” in the event of an imminent threat from outer space.
Scientists have been calling on the government to wake up to the NEO threat for decades, “but nothing happened,” Wie says. “We are very lucky to have today’s events.”
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Over at the New York Times Magazine, Robert Draper has a long piece about the woes of the Republican Party. A lot of it focuses on their inability to embrace the kind of technology favored by young people, but Ed Kilgore points out that the problem goes way, way deeper than technology. Here’s an excerpt about a focus group conducted recently by a GOP pollster named Kristen Soltis Anderson:
About an hour into the session, Anderson walked up to a whiteboard and took out a magic marker. “I’m going to write down a word, and you guys free-associate with whatever comes to mind,” she said. The first word she wrote was “Democrat.”
“Young people,” one woman called out. “Liberal,” another said. Followed by: “Diverse.” “Bill Clinton.”“Change.”“Open-minded.”“Spending.”“Handouts.”“Green.”“More science-based.”
When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”
….The session with the young men was equally jarring. None of them expressed great enthusiasm for Obama. But their depiction of Republicans was even more lacerating than the women’s had been. “Racist,” “out of touch” and “hateful” made the list — “and put ‘1950s’ on there too!” one called out.
Ed sums up: “If you had to choose one theme that underlies the arguments Draper’s hearing from the cool kids of the GOP, it’s that the Christian Right has gotta go.”
For years, Democrats complained about the fact that so many working class voters had abandoned them on pocketbook issues and instead began voting on social issues. These voters didn’t like hippies or abortion or busing, so they voted Republican even though the GOP was the party of rich people.
But now the worm is turning. The Reagan Democrats who started this trend are now senior citizens, or close to it. They’re no longer natural Democratic voters who are defecting to the Republican column, they’re just natural Republican voters who are voting for Republicans. That doesn’t really help the GOP.
What’s worse, social issues are no longer a trump card with 20- and 30-something working class voters. So now Republicans are feeling some of the same frustration that Democrats did during the Reagan era, because they probably think they have a decent pocketbook case to make to younger voters: Democrats want to raise your taxes; Obamacare forces you to buy insurance you don’t want, and raises your premiums in order to subsidize older folks; liberals won’t let you send your kids to better schools; they’re wrecking the economy with higher entitlement spending and a refusal to save Social Security.
Obviously liberals have answers to all this. Still, Republicans probably feel like they have a reasonable case to make. And they do. Not a slam dunk case, but a reasonable one.
But it doesn’t matter, because a growing block of voters is still voting on social issues. The problem is that the social issues they’re voting on aren’t hippies and abortion. The issues are global warming, gay rights, gun extremism, contraception, immigration, and a generally toxic attitude toward anyone non-white. And in this generation, all of these issues help Democrats. Even centrist 30-somethings largely don’t have a problem with gay marriage, are appalled at objections to contraception, and are offended when Fox News goes on one of its xenophobic jags. They want no part of this, even if they’re not super thrilled with the Democratic Party’s economic agenda.
So who’s going to write the conservative version of What’s the Matter With Kansas? I’m not sure. But someone sure needs to write it. My own guess is that for a lot of voters who are only marginally engaged with politics, they simply don’t believe that either party is really likely to help them financially. So no matter how much they tell pollsters that their #1 issue is jobs, it often doesn’t affect their actual vote that much. Social issues are all that’s left, and these days, outside the Christian Right, that mostly helps Democrats, not Republicans.
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