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European agency declares popular pesticide too dangerous for bees

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 17, 2013

European agency declares popular pesticide too dangerous for bees

By Susie Cagle

Are you sick of hearing about colony collapse? Hey, me too! But I’m guessing the bees are even more fed up at this point.

For the first time, Europe’s food safety agency this week officially labeled the world’s most popular insecticide, imidacloprid, as so dangerous as to be unacceptable for use on crops pollinated by bees, though the body lacks the power to ban the chemical. The report also called into question two other types of neonicotinoid pesticides. All three sound super-evil.

From The Guardian:

[Imidacloprid’s] manufacturer, Bayer, claimed the report, released on Wednesday, did not alter existing risk assessments and warned against “over-interpretation of the precautionary principle”.

The report comes just months after the UK government dismissed a fast-growing body of evidence of harm to bees as insufficient to justify banning the chemicals. …

Scientists at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), together with experts from across Europe, concluded on Wednesday that for imidacloprid “only uses on crops not attractive to honeybees were considered acceptable” because of exposure through nectar and pollen. Such crops include oil seed rape, corn and sunflowers. EFSA was asked to consider the acute and chronic effects on bee larvae, bee behaviour and the colony as a whole, and the risks posed by sub-lethal doses. But it found a widespread lack of information in many areas and had stated previously that current “simplistic” regulations contained “major weaknesses”.

Bayer and other chemical giants published their own report this week, claiming that banning neonicotinoids would cost farmers hundreds of millions. But neonicotinoid manufacturers will still have to give the European Commission a response to the EFSA report by the end of this month, and the Commission could actually possibly maybe ban the pesticides.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture have expressed concern over the chemicals in the past, but pretty much stopped there — at concern. And then approval. And then widespread spraying on just about everything we and the bees eat!

The EFSA isn’t a regulatory board, just an advisory one, so the E.U. doesn’t have to listen to its warnings. But bee health seems to be EFSA’s jam, and it’s not likely to back down. Last summer, the organization put together this video on all the threats to our tiny, stingy, pollinatey pals. It’s as cute as it is horrifying.

The more we learn about exactly what’s killing all the bees, the more the problem seems fixable, at least in theory. If the E.U. really goes to war with big chemical companies over tiny bees, it could be a game-changer. Meanwhile, the U.S. will be over here, still spraying with abandon.

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

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Another urgent need for infrastructure spending: Levees

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 17, 2013

Another urgent need for infrastructure spending: Levees

By Philip Bump

One source of contention during the House’s aggrieved, extensive debate over providing aid to Hurricane Sandy victims was how much money should be spent on preventative measures. To what extent, that is, should the government spend money now in order to save money in the future — spend money bolstering coastlines in New York and New Jersey so that the next time a big storm comes through, damage is less severe. The preferred answer of the House Republican majority was: zero dollars.

usacehq

An intentional levee breach in Iowa.

The GOP’s refusal to spend on prevention is looking all the more shortsighted in light of a new assessment by the Army Corps of Engineers of the strength of the nation’s levees. What the Corps is finding is not encouraging, raising the specter of another massive infrastructural need. From the Associated Press:

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has yet to issue ratings for a little more than 40 percent of the 2,487 structures, which protect about 10 million people. Of those it has rated, however, 326 levees covering more than 2,000 miles were found in urgent need of repair.

The problems are myriad: earthen walls weakened by trees, shrubs and burrowing animal holes; houses built dangerously close to or even on top of levees; decayed pipes and pumping stations.

How big is the risk? Hard to say.

The Associated Press requested, under the Freedom of Information Act, details on why certain levees were judged unacceptable and how many people would be affected in a flood. The Corps declined on grounds that such information could heighten risks of terrorism and sabotage.

It’s up to local governments to maintain levees, just as it’s up to each of us to go to the dentist. It’s costly, it takes time, and if there’s no immediate problem, it’s easy to postpone. The longer you go without maintenance, though, the bigger the problems that result.

One would think that — following 2005 when all of New Orleans’ teeth fell out and its wisdom teeth were all impacted and so on — communities would be eager to figure out how to prevent the same thing from happening to them. Not so.

Some local officials say that the Corps is exaggerating the dangers, that some deficiencies were approved or not objected to by the federal government and that any repairs could cost them hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

“It’s just not right to tell a little town like this to spend millions of dollars that we can’t raise,” said Judy Askew, mayor of Brookport, a hardscrabble town of about 1,000 on the banks of the Ohio River.

If the Ohio floods and the levee fails, someone will pay to restore Brookport — at a price tag almost certainly greater than those millions Askew doesn’t have. And these areas are very likely to flood, if the federal government’s draft climate change report is any indicator.

As we’ve noted before, government has a bias toward funding relief and an antipathy to funding prevention. A lot of this is politics; there’s much more political will to help those left homeless than there is to raise money to protect the home in the first place. It’s why each of the people who spoke out against Sandy aid were very deliberate in articulating how far their hearts went out to victims, even as they pushed measures that would ensure there’d be more victims in the future.

In the meantime:

As of Jan. 10, the agency had rated 1,451, or 58 percent, of [the nation’s levees]. Of those, 326 were unacceptable, 1,004 were minimally acceptable with deficiencies that need correcting, and 121 were acceptable. …

A number of local managers blame their “unacceptable” ratings on the Corps taking a harder line on compliance with levee construction, operation and maintenance standards.

“Since Katrina, they’re almost hyper-vigilant,” said John Sachi, city engineer for South St. Paul. “It’s almost like they’re remedying their mistakes from the past by putting the onus on us to make sure things get better.”

That’s almost exactly what it’s like.

Source

Deficient levees found across America, Associated Press

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

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Michael Gerson Pens a Modern Masterpiece

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 15, 2013

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Jonathan Chait directs my attention to a remarkable Michael Gerson column today. It might set a new mainstream media record for compressing the largest number of conservative pathologies into the smallest possible space. First this:

In cliff negotiations, Obama had one overriding goal: to make Republicans vote for rate increases on the wealthy. For 20 years the refusal to raise taxes has been one of the core issues that held together the disparate groups of the GOP. If Obama saw his job as bringing together a broad coalition to fix the long-term debt problem, he would have maneuvered Democrats to take on some of their core issues as part of a package, just as Republicans had to do. But Obama did not view his job this way. He wanted Republicans to swallow their humiliation pure.

That’s not even close to reality. Obama’s first fiscal cliff offer was a $1.6 trillion bargain that included something like $600 billion in spending cuts. His second offer contained about $900 billion in spending cuts, including reductions in both Medicare and Social Security that Democrats would have had a hard time swallowing. This was only three weeks ago, but apparently Gerson has forgotten already.

Then he goes on to admit that refusing to raise the debt ceiling would be irresponsible. But:

Given this weak Republican position, Obama must be tempted by a shiny political object: the destruction of the congressional GOP. He knows that Republicans are forced by the momentum of their ideology to take positions on spending that he can easily demagogue. He is in a good position to humiliate them again — to expose their internal divisions and unpopular policy views. It may even be a chance to discredit and then overturn the House Republican majority, finally reversing his own humiliation in the 2010 midterms.

Holy cow! Obama might be tempted to expose Republicans’ internal divisions and unpopular policy views? The fiend! And Republicans are helpless to resist because tea party crackpots the momentum of their ideology doesn’t allow them to be reasonable. They literally have no choice except to surrender to fanaticism. What’s next on Obama’s agenda?

Force the GOP to surrender on the debt limit, with nothing in return. Require Republicans to accept new taxes in exchange for any real spending reductions. If they agree, their caucus is fractured (again). And if they refuse (which they are likely to do), paint them as obstructionists and extremists who are willing to destroy the economy/the nation’s credit rating/the military for their own ideological purposes.

Obama wants Republicans to accept new taxes in exchange for spending reductions? Apparently the man will stop at nothing. And we’ll all pay the price:

There is one main downside to this approach. It delays any serious action on long-term debt for at least another two (and probably four) years. It is the path of a government that moves from fiscal crisis to crisis, gradually undermining global confidence that it can manage its own affairs. Etc.

Actually, America’s finances aren’t in bad shape. Obama has already cut the deficit by about $2.4 trillion over the past couple of years, and he’s stated repeatedly that he’s willing to negotiate another $1.5 trillion as part of the sequestration talks. That would put the federal budget on a pretty sound footing. There’s no Armageddon here unless the GOP insists on creating one.

So there you have it. Obama refused to negotiate over the fiscal cliff. His only goal is humiliation and unconditional surrender. Republican views on taxes should be viewed as a law of nature, so it’s unfair to expect them to back off their fanatic position by even a dime. And the end result of all this will be to turn the United States into another Greece.

Gerson has synthesized every Republican phantasm into a concise 800 words. This is how they view things. And then they wonder why they have so much trouble negotiating with someone whose policy views are still firmly rooted in the real world.

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California cold snaps farmers’ crops

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 14, 2013

California cold snaps farmers’ crops

By Susie Cagle

Time for more predictably weird weather news! Sunny California, while still sunny, has been freezing this week. Temperatures statewide plunged to as much as 20 degrees F below normal, the lowest lows the state has seen in years.

The freezing overnight temps are seriously bad news for California farmers’ crops, especially the state’s $2 billion citrus industry, which accounts for most of the commercially available oranges and lemons in the U.S.

mr. ephotopoet

Strawberry and avocado farmers, too, “are having a lot of sleepless nights,” protecting crops with in-field heaters, coverings, fans, and water.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The cold snap has been a particular concern for citrus farmers across the state, who have been up all night since Thursday. There are $1 billion in oranges, lemons, tangerines and grapefruit still on trees in California, the nation’s largest producer of fresh citrus.

The year had been off to a good start, with a particularly flavorful crop of mandarins and good sugar content across the state …

“We were looking at a very profitable year,” said John Nelsen, president of California Citrus Mutual, an association of the state’s 3,900 citrus growers, the majority of which are family farmers.

But a cold snap can change that in hours. In January 2007, citrus growers lost 60% of the state’s crop to freezes. In 1998 it was 85%. The worst season in memory was the Christmas freeze of December 1990, when a week of temperatures in the teens defoliated the orchards, leading to a total loss for that season and the one after, Nelsen said.

Nothing like some weird weather to remind us how tenuous our centralized food system truly is! The delicious irony here is that a modest touch of cold weather actually regulates citrus sugars well, making better and more stable fruit. So enjoy the California clementines while you can — they may be freezing today, but soon they’ll be rotting on the vine.

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

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Australia’s Climate Inferno "Encroaching on Entirely New Territory"

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 11, 2013

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Smoke near Cooma, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2013 New South Wales Rural Fire Service

Australia’s top government-appointed climate commissioner says this week’s heatwave is occurring amid record-breaking weather around the world. “This has been a landmark event for me,” Professor Tim Flannery told Climate Desk from his home in Melbourne. “When you start breaking records, and you do it consistently, and you see it over and over again, that is a good indication there’s a shift underway—this is not just within the normal variation of things.”

Flannery is perhaps best known in the US for his 2005 book, The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change; Downunder, he was named Australian of the Year in 2007, and appointed chief climate commissioner in 2011 by the current Labor government, which tasked him with communicating climate science to the Australian public (a government-funded job that may well sound unimaginable to American readers).

Flannery says the harsh weather is a sign of things to come: “What we’ve seen is the bell curve shift to the hot end. The number of very hot days is increasing quite dramatically. But we’re also encroaching on entirely new territory.”

That new territory involves record-breaking temperatures. The number of consecutive days where the national average maximum temperature topped 102.2°F (39°C) was broken in the last week, almost doubling the previous record set in 1973. There are now new first- and third-place winners for highest temperatures on Australia’s books, too. The number of record high temperatures have outstripped the number of record low temperatures at a ratio 3-to-1 over the last decade, according to the Bureau of Meterology.

Tim Flannery Mark Coulson, 5th World Conference of Science Journalists.

Several fires are still burning in Tasmania, Australia’s lush island state, where the crisis began last week. The cost of the destruction of 200 buildings there is pegged at $A50 million ($US52.7m), according to the Australian newspaper. Luckily—perhaps shockingly given the extent of damage—lives were spared.

Statewide total fire bans remain in force across the weekend in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), where at last count more than 95 fires are still burning, with 18 out of control. NSW Rural Fire Service Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that new fires on Saturday might be “beyond the ability for fire services to suppress.”

And don’t think there’s any rest from wild weather. Not content which just record-breaking heat, the skies are now hurling Narelle—a category 4 severe tropical storm comparable to a strong Category 3 hurricane—at the North West of the vast continent. Communities living along a coastline roughly as long as the stretch from New York to North Carolina are bracing for gale force winds and heavy rains.

Tropical Cyclone Narelle off the West Australian coast Australian Bureau of Meterology

“There is no doubt,” Flannery said, “that climate change is playing a significant roll in this. If this was just one record-breaking event you might write it off as a statistical anomaly. But that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing records falling around the world.”

Flannery told Climate Desk the Australian government has confirmed he will hold his seat for the next two years, but it might not play out that way. The conservative opposition party is likely to erode the Climate Commission if elected, something that will be decided by a deepy divided electorate towards the end of this year. The election promises to be fought over the government’s carbon tax. Opposition leader Tony Abbott famously made a “blood pledge” to repeal the tax which will lead to a carbon trading scheme.

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GOP Rep.’s Gold Standard for Gun Stores Was Sued for Negligence

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 11, 2013

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On Thursday, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) stopped by the Cobb County chamber of commerce to explain his views on gun control. But it wasn’t just any gun store—Gingrey, the Marietta Daily Journal reported, “took the time to praise Adventure Outdoors owner Jay Wallace as the gold standard for running a responsible gun retail business.”

The problem: Adventure Outdoors is anything but. In 2006, New York City sued the firm for negligence in preventing its guns from falling into the hands of criminals. Between 1996 and 2000 alone, 256 guns sold at Adventure Outdoors were connected to crimes—21 in New York City alone. “ATF has established that a very small percentage of retail gun dealers—about 1%—are responsible for approximately 57% of the illegally-possessed guns nationwide,” the city explained in its lawsuit. “The Defendants are among this small group of gun dealers who arm illegal gun possessors. As such, the Defendants cause, contribute to and maintain a public nuisance within the City of New York.”

The city specifically singled out Adventure Outdoors for selling guns to what are known as “straw purchasers.” Based in part on the work of two investigators the city hired, the complaint charged that “upon information and belief, Defendants intentionally or negligently sell handguns to prohibited persons through ‘strawman’ purchases, in which an individual legally able to buy a handgun purchases the gun from a licensed gun dealer, intending to transfer it immediately to a prohibited person.”

Here’s the lawsuit:

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A default judgment was issued against Adventure Outdoors in 2008, and in 2011, a federal court ordered that an independent outside expert be appointed to oversee the company’s sales practices and ensure it didn’t sell guns to straw purchasers (a federal appeals court later struck a portion of the “special master” mandate, but still subjected the company to an outside monitor*).

Gingrey’s comments came at the same chamber of commerce breakfast in which he defended his former colleague Todd Akin’s suggestion that women who have been raped have special mechanism to prevent a pregnancy, citing his own experience as an OBGYN. Gingrey is chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus.

h/t James Carter IV

*I’ve clarified the language here.

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Assessing the Lead-Crime Evidence: A Followup

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 9, 2013

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Yesterday I linked to some criticism of my article about lead and crime from Scott Firestone, a public health researcher in Chicago. If you’d like to follow the conversation further, statistician Andrew Gelman has more here, and Firestone responds in comments.

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Keystone protesters take the fight to TransCanada offices

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 8, 2013

Keystone protesters take the fight to TransCanada offices

By Susie Cagle

Not content to protest from the trees, anti-Keystone activists mobilized on Monday at two different offices of pipeline builder TransCanada.

Tar Sands Blockade

Nearly 100 activists took over the lobby of TransCanada’s Houston office to dance, chant, prance with puppets, die-in, and then be kicked out by police.

At one point a blockader dropped to his knees and pleaded with a line of police holding batons: “Help! There are eco-terrorists upstairs! They’re killing me!” Officers arrested two of the activists once they’d been ushered from the lobby.

Police, who were probably having a bad day, also did this:

Just as the action in Houston died down, eight college students and recent grads were chaining and gluing themselves inside TransCanada’s corporate office in Westborough, Mass. They were promptly unchained and arrested, because that’s how much TransCanada cares about your Harvard degrees, kids.

Tar Sands Blockade

These weren’t huge actions nor were they sustained blockades, but they mark another escalation in tactics that protesters are using to fight the Keystone XL pipeline. Activists in the Northeast are gearing up for protests on Jan. 23 and 26 against tar-sands transport through New England. And a Feb. 17 anti-Keystone rally in front of the White House could attract 20,000 people, 350.org says.

Meanwhile, TransCanada twirled its mustache and released this statement Monday afternoon:

TransCanada has the legal authority to construct the Gulf Coast Project, and this is another example of the protestors’ attempt to stop a project that is currently providing thousands of jobs to American workers. This project is also a key component of the ‘all of the above’ strategy to enhance American energy security — especially refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Then executives laughed manically over their tiny model of the Keystone XL pipeline, and wondered if it was broken or something, because it just keeps leaking. Weird.

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

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Will Thorium Nuclear Energy Save Us All?

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 8, 2013

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Even in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which half-drowned our biggest metropolis, Congress is still ostriching on climate change and thinking about chopping clean-energy programs as part of fiscal cliff, part II. Meanwhile, China, which has been leading the way on futuristic ideas from offshore wind energy to high-speed rail, is spearheading the development of nuclear energy derived from thorium, a naturally occurring radioactive element.

The Telegraph reports that the politically connected industrialist Jiang Mianheng is bankrolling a $350 million project at China’s National Academy of Sciences to develop thorium power, which would be used to fuel molten-salt reactors, as opposed to old school uranium-fueled water reactors, and which would be much cleaner and meltdown-safe.

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Today in Orwellianism: Torture Isn’t Torture if it Stops When You Start Talking

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 7, 2013

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From CIA veteran Jose Rodriguez, explaining why the CIA’s torture program wasn’t really torture:

Detainees were given the opportunity to cooperate. If they resisted and were believed to hold critical information, they might receive — with Washington’s approval — some of the enhanced techniques, such as being grabbed by the collar, deprived of sleep or, in rare cases, waterboarded. (The Justice Department assured us in writing at the time that these techniques did not constitute torture.) When the detainee became compliant, the techniques stopped — forever.

So….it was OK because detainees could make it stop anytime by doing what they were told. In other words, pretty much the same as every other episode of torture in history.

Paul Waldman has a question about this that he’d like answered:

Can you give a definition of torture that wouldn’t include waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation? I have no idea what such a definition might be, and I have to imagine that if they had any idea they would have offered one. Because here’s the definition of torture you’d think everyone could agree on: Torture is the infliction of extreme suffering for the purpose of extracting information or a confession.

I have a different question: if you think the CIA torture program was OK, presumably that means you wouldn’t be outraged if the same techniques were used on U.S. soldiers in order to extract information from them. Right? It can’t possibly be the case that it’s OK for us to do this stuff, but not for anyone else, can it? Given that, the only sensible interpretation of Rodriguez’s position is that the CIA program wasn’t torture and therefore should be thought of as the new baseline for treatment of enemy combatants throughout the world.

Welcome to the brave new barbarism.

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