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Beau Biden, the Vice President’s Son, Has Died

Mother Jones

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RIP:

Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden III, the son of Vice President Biden and former state attorney general of Delaware, died Saturday after battling brain cancer for several years.

Biden, 46, the oldest son of the vice president and the rising star of a family dynasty, had been admitted recently to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington as he fought the cancer, a battle that his father largely kept private in the last weeks as his son clung to his life.

So sad.

Here’s the Vice President’s statement:

It is with broken hearts that Hallie, Hunter, Ashley, Jill and I announce the passing of our husband, brother and son, Beau, after he battled brain cancer with the same integrity, courage and strength he demonstrated every day of his life.

The entire Biden family is saddened beyond words. We know that Beau’s spirit will live on in all of us—especially through his brave wife, Hallie, and two remarkable children, Natalie and Hunter.

Beau’s life was defined by service to others. As a young lawyer, he worked to establish the rule of law in war-torn Kosovo. A major in the Delaware National Guard, he was an Iraq War veteran and was awarded the Bronze Star. As Delaware’s Attorney General, he fought for the powerless and made it his mission to protect children from abuse.

More than his professional accomplishments, Beau measured himself as a husband, father, son and brother. His absolute honor made him a role model for our family. Beau embodied my father’s saying that a parent knows success when his child turns out better than he did.

In the words of the Biden family: Beau Biden was, quite simply, the finest man any of us have ever known.

And the statement from the President:

Michelle and I are grieving tonight. Beau Biden was a friend of ours. His beloved family – Hallie, Natalie, and Hunter – are friends of ours. And Joe and Jill Biden are as good as friends get.

Beau took after Joe. He studied the law, like his dad, even choosing the same law school. He chased a life of public service, like his dad, serving in Iraq and as Delaware’s Attorney General. Like his dad, Beau was a good, big-hearted, devoutly Catholic and deeply faithful man, who made a difference in the lives of all he touched – and he lives on in their hearts.

But for all that Beau Biden achieved in his life, nothing made him prouder; nothing made him happier; nothing claimed a fuller focus of his love and devotion than his family.

Just like his dad.

Joe is one of the strongest men we’ve ever known. He’s as strong as they come, and nothing matters to him more than family. It’s one of the things we love about him. And it is a testament to Joe and Jill – to who they are – that Beau lived a life that was full; a life that mattered; a life that reflected their reverence for family.

The Bidens have more family than they know. In the Delaware they love. In the Senate Joe reveres. Across this country that he has served for more than forty years. And they have a family right here in the White House, where hundreds of hearts ache tonight – for Hallie, Natalie, and Hunter; for Joe and for Jill; for Beau’s brother, Hunter; his sister, Ashley, and for the entire Biden clan.

“I have believed the best of every man,” wrote the poet William Butler Yeats, “And find that to believe it is enough to make a bad man show him at his best or even a good man swing his lantern higher.”

Beau Biden believed the best of us all. For him, and for his family, we swing our lanterns higher.

Michelle and I humbly pray for the good Lord to watch over Beau Biden, and to protect and comfort his family here on Earth.

And this old tweet from Beau is heartbreaking:

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Beau Biden, the Vice President’s Son, Has Died

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Is it a good idea to pay farmers to store carbon in soil?

Is it a good idea to pay farmers to store carbon in soil?

Haydyn Bromley

Climate protection is getting down and dirty Down Under.

Soil serves as a great reservoir for carbon, yet it’s often overlooked in climate protection efforts. That’s changing in Australia, where farmers will soon be able to earn cash for projects that store carbon in the soil — such as tree plantings, dung beetle releases, and composting. Aussie farmers are already eligible to make money by reducing greenhouse gas pollution from livestock, manure, and rice fields.

Australia’s environment minister announced Tuesday that farmers could start applying for payments for soil carbon storage in July.

The government considers the replenishment of carbon in soil to be one of the cheapest and best ways of reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions — although federal scientists recently concluded that it could only provide “low levels of greenhouse gas abatement.”

The money for payments to farmers will come from the country’s Emissions Reduction Fund — which is climate-denying Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s planned replacement for a nascent carbon tax. Having the government pay for projects that reduce CO2 might be a nice idea, but not when it comes at the expense of having polluters pay for their emissions. And the plan to make soil-storage payments to farmers been criticized by experts as a potentially ineffective corporate handout.


Source
Graziers now able to tap carbon farming, Reuters
Soil carbon storage incentive, The Land

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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BP targets celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse over oil-spill claims

BP targets celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse over oil-spill claims

Innisfree Hotels

BP is angry that it’s being forced to compensate Gulf Coast businesses for income they lost after its Deepwater Horizon blowout. It’s so angry that it has taken the curious step of airing its vendettas in national advertisements.

The oil company took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times last week lambasting celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, complaining that his restaurant management company is undeserving of more than $8 million in spill-related claims awarded to it by a federal court. Lagasse is a star of food-themed TV shows, author of popular cookbooks, and owner of a national chain of restaurants. BP’s advertisement didn’t name Lagasse, but he was clearly the target. The New Orleans Times-Picayune explains:

In the ad — the latest in a series from BP — the company asks “would you pay this claim?” and outlines the story of an unnamed “celebrity chef” whose restaurant management company “was awarded more than $8 million” based on a “fictional loss” in its finances that year. It holds up the claim as an abuse of the settlement program. …

BP argues that more than $500 million has already been paid for undeserving claims.

Claims administrator Patrick Juneau responded to BP’s ad in a statement, saying the settlement claim identified by BP “satisfied those requirements agreed upon by BP” and plaintiffs’ lawyers. BP appealed the initial approval.

Ironically, Lagasse has been one of BP’s few allies, saying earlier this year that the company had “stepped up to the plate and they did what they had to do” after the oil spill. We’re guessing his opinion of the oil giant may now have shifted — particularly because it still hasn’t coughed up any of $8 million it’s whining about. “We have not received any payment,” a spokesperson for Lagasse’s company said.


Source
Celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse targeted by BP in fight over oil spill payments, New Orleans Times-Picayune

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Forest Service’s firefighting fund can’t keep up with wildfires

Forest Service’s firefighting fund can’t keep up with wildfires

NASA

The Forest Service can’t keep up with the rising costs of fighting wildfires in a warming world.

As climate change dries out fire-prone forests, the frequency and intensity of forest fires are increasing. Between 1985 and 1999, the federal government never spent more than $1 billion on fire suppression in a single year, according to this National Interagency Fire Center table [PDF] of firefighting costs since the mid-’80s.

But in 2000, the federal bill came in at $1.4 billion, and then it continued to increase, exceeding $1.5 billion five times from 2006 to 2012. And the number of acres of forest burned each year has also been rising.

This year has been a nightmare fire season in the American West: The U.S. Forest Service, which incurs most of the nation’s forest-fire suppression costs, ran out of firefighting money. Again. From E&E Publishing:

Lightning bolts rained across the West in August, sparking hundreds of wildfires in California, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, and pushing the cash-strapped Forest Service to the brink.

The service had at that point spent $967 million battling wildfires that had torched more than 3.4 million acres in 2013. Its emergency fund exhausted, it had about $50 million left — enough for about half a week.

That’s become business as usual for an agency that’s run out of wildfire suppression funds seven times in the last 12 years. So Chief Tom Tidwell did what his predecessors had done: He raided the agency’s nonfire accounts to make up the shortfall. …

The so-called fire borrowing — a result of insufficient appropriations — has happened with increasing frequency as wildfires have grown more intense and more homes are built in the forest.

The practice of raiding non-firefighting funds to fight forest fires fuels a vicious cycle. It takes money away from programs that clear would-be fuel out of national forests and it reduces spending on research into firefighting strategies. It also robs reforestation programs of appropriated funds.

E&E Publishing reports that the White House is looking for a solution to what has become an entrenched funding problem. One possibility that’s being explored is treating wildfires like other emergency disasters, funded from the same pot of money that helps repair cities after they are hit by wild storms.

“For whatever reason, lightning strikes that start forest fires are treated differently from a funding perspective than hurricanes and tornadoes and other natural disasters,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said recently. “We think there should be greater alignment.”


Source
Federal Firefighting Costs (Suppression Only), National Interagency Fire Center
Forest Service: ‘It’s just nuts’ as wildfires drain budget yet again, E&E Publishing

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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10 Non-Violent Video Games that Kick (Metaphorical) Butt

Mother Jones

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Still from the acclaimed game Journey Thatgamecompany

A bunch of us here at MoJo play games, love games, and cringe at the publicity that a few shoot em’ up games like Call of Duty receive every time another terrible mass shooting hits the news. Despite three decades of research, we’re still far from a definitive answer on whether violent video games are linked to IRL violence, as Erik Kain has noted here before. But like any art form—and yes, video games are art—there’s as broad a range of expression in games as the space between Kill Bill and Amelie and well beyond. Games can be emotionally moving, intellectually challenging, deeply political, and straight-up good quirky fun.

Here’s our buyers guide to perhaps lesser known but thoroughly excellent titles we think you might love and are almost entirely devoid of physical combat, whether fantastical or realistic. We figured you’ve already heard of the big sports titles like Madden and the FIFA series, music games like Guitar Hero, and movement games like Dance Dance Revolution or Wii Sportsâ&#128;&#139;; our list focuses on immersive narratives, physics-based games (think Angry Birds but way better), and “sandbox” games that let you build your own worlds.

Use the comments to yell at us about everything we missed.

Portal

If the last time you touched a game controller involved a spastic blue hedgehog, Portal is a great gateway into modern gaming. You’re an unwitting subject who’s just been mysteriously dropped into the test chambers of the dimly lit Aperture Science Enrichment Center. You’re not exactly sure why you’re there, but a droll artificial intelligence being named GLaDOS informs you there’s cake at the end of all the lab trials if you make it through. It so happens that you possess a blaster gun that can open portals in walls, and soon enough you’re popping out of floors and zooming through ceilings, leaping and hurling yourself around the lab, timing jumps for maximum velocity. It’s mind-bending gameplay that works your puzzle-solving skills and memories of 8th grade physics, so much so that the sequel, Portal 2, is popular with K-12 physics teachers as a teaching tool.

Available on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation 3, $9.99

Journey

Frankly, this stunningly beautiful game is impossible to describe. Take our word for it, or the fact that leading the Gawker gaming site Kotaku named Journey Game of the Year in 2012, it earned a profile from the New Yorker, and has even been likened to a “nondenominational religious experience.” The game itself is utterly devoid of dialogue: its characters never utter a single word. So let’s wrap this review up with just two: play it.

Available on PlayStation 3

â&#128;&#139;Minecraft

Ever wanted to build your own personal USS Starship Enterprise? A giant terrarium in the shape like R2D2? Landscape your own Westeros from Game of Thrones? The massively popular Minecraft was initially conceived as a straightforward game where players used the game’s Lego-like building blocks to build shelters from menacing creatures and so on. But even before the game made it out of its beta version, gamers began working together across multiplayer servers to construct ambitious and elaborate new lands and scenarios. You might build a digital replica of your house, down to the plumbing and light switches, and why not relocate the Arc de Triomph to your backyard while you’re at it? Slash your way through zombies and other creepy creatures if you so choose, but violence is entirely avoidable. In Minecraft, you create the world you want to live in.

Available on Windows, Mac, Xbox 360, GNU/Linux, $26.95

â&#128;&#139;Dear Esther

Game scholarship (yes, that’s a thing) hasn’t decided whether this “poetic ghost story” is a bona-fide video game or an interactive film. The workaday gamer doesn’t care—this 90-minute game turned a profit just five and a half hours after being released. You’re a shipwrecked man wandering around a beautifully realized island, exploring cliffs, caves, and beach as a narrator reveals bits of letters that eventually coalesce into a haunting story. Some may find the gameplay constraining—our protagonist doesn’t fight anyone or solve puzzles to advance. “Stripped down to its constituent parts, there’s very little game here at all,” PC Gamer’s Chris Thursten writes. “But at the same time, it’s a story that only games give us the freedom to hear.”

Available on Windows and Mac computers $9.99

â&#128;&#139;Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing moves you into a town populated by anthropomorphic raccoons, penguins, and goats, and simply lets you live your new fauna-fabulous life. Make friends with the hippo next door, stitch yourself a new animal-print wardrobe, hang out with a guitar-playing dog named K.K. Slider—it’s all up to you. While the game observes the changing of the seasons and the passing of time, its world is constantly changing, from the species of fish you can catch in its rivers to the goods available in village shops, with plenty of hidden surprises (including classic Nintendo games) to find. Critics have praised the simplicity and addictiveness of the game, even the parts that are essentially chores. “Some of the things you can do in Animal Crossing wouldn’t be considered fun at all were they to take place in real life,” IGN’s Peer Schneider wrote. “But that’s the beauty of the game.”

â&#128;&#139;Available on Gamecube, Wii, 3DS $30 (New Leaf)

â&#128;&#139;LittleBigPlanet

Like Minecraft, LittleBigPlanet is all about creating and sharing your own worlds. You’re a cheery little yarn-knit sackperson attempting to make your way across stylized levels inspired by locations like New York City streetscapes or the African savannah. Get though, and you can fire up the game’s DIY universe-building kit and build new stages and games to your heart’s desire. Fans have built everything from a bunny-themed version of Super Mario to a nearly hourlong feature film. You can buy and download extra themes like Toy Story, The Muppets, and Marvel Comics from developer Media Molecule. “Like the most prolific creators in the series’ community,” Gamespot reviewer Justin Calvert said about the most recent PS3 edition, it’s “a game that just keeps on giving.”

Available on PS3, PSP, Vita, $20 (LittleBigPlanet 2)

â&#128;&#139;

â&#128;&#139;Slender: The Eight Pages

In a mood for a good scare, but don’t care for blood and guts? Slender shares its fear factor with the Blair Witch Project: the scariest monster is the one you can’t see. You play from the first-person perspective of a regular person lost in the woods at night. You traipse around with only a flashlight in hand, doing your best to avoid the Slender Man, an loomingly tall, faceless figure who might have crawled out of the deepest recesses of your nightmare. This character was spawned from a real Internet meme in which people Photoshopped a tall man in black into the backgrounds of otherwise unremarkable photos, a sort of creeper photobomb writ large. Among the game’s many deliciously eery elements: there’s no music. You hear only the sound of own footfalls snapping twigs, the occasional cricket, your flashlight clicking on and off, and a pulsing, ominous beat that grows louder every time you find one of eight mysterious notebook pages scattered around the woods. This is one to play with headphones on and lights off.

Microsoft, Mac, free download —Maggie Caldwell

â&#128;&#139;Gone Home

You are 18-year-old Katie Greenbriar, just returned home from a long trip to Europe. Your family moved homes while you were gone, and you show up at the new address for the first time late one thunderstorm-soaked night only to find your family has disappeared. You slowly piece together what happened to your parents and lovestruck little sister Sam as you search the house, combing for clues in the magazines, ticket stubs, and letters they left behind. What you find is knowingly realistic (the food items in the fridge have ingredients on the back), funny (check your dad’s box of magazines at your own peril), and eventually extremely poignant. The game is heavy on 90s nostalgia, with a soundtrack by riot grrrl-era favorites Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy. With its deeply realized coming-of-age storyline and themes of gender identity and sexuality, this indie game proves you don’t need big bucks to tell a great story. “Even though they weren’t mine, it still evoked the memories of my own time as a teenage riot grrrl with a secret love,” wrote one fan. “That’s something I thought I would never get back.”

Available on PC, Mac, Linux $19.99

â&#128;&#139;Katamari Damacy

The King of the Cosmos got loose one night and knocked all the stars and planets out of the sky. Your job, as the star prince, is to clean up the mess and replace the missing celestial bodies with whatever you can. First stop: Earth. Using a magical sticky ball that rolls up anything in its path, you travel around picking up smaller and then larger and larger objects, from ants to thumbtacks to cities and mountains, lumping them all into a big ball that will be thrown back into the sky. The title loosely translates from the Japanese to “clump spirit,” resulting in one wonderfully wierd, quirky, and oddly joyful game.

Available on PlayStation 2 (sequels available on PS3), $14.99 (pre-owned)

â&#128;&#139;Braid

Another brain-stretcher, this game allows you to rewind time and redo actions, even if your character dies. With some art nods to old school Nintendo games, Wired described its aesthetics as if “Mario’s art director had been Van Gogh.” But don’t let the dreamy palette and the tranquil music lull you, you’ll be facing difficult challenges and must collect pieces of different puzzles that will eventually explain the main character’s affecting backstory and motivations. This strange and beautiful game will leave you feeling both challenged and haunted.

Available Xbox 360, Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 3, Cloud, $9.99

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10 Non-Violent Video Games that Kick (Metaphorical) Butt

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Is this the beginning of the end for coal?

Is this the beginning of the end for coal?

Aaron Hockley

Coal is going off the tracks.

From a failed coal auction in Wyoming to slowing demand in China, times are tough for the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel. And that’s before we even get to EPA’s new proposed power-plant rules.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management held an auction Thursday for the right to mine 167 million tons of coal from the 1,254-acre Hay Creek II coal tract in Campbell County, Wyo. The highest bid of $35 million, by Kiewit Mining Properties, was so low that the bureau rejected it. From Bloomberg:

The company’s offer was less than one-fifth what mining companies paid for similar deposits last year, and the lowest amount per ton since 1998. It didn’t meet the government’s estimate of fair value, the bureau said in a statement.

“The bottom has just dropped out of the market,” Mark Northam, director of the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources, said by telephone. “This represents a high degree of uncertainty about whether coal will stay robust in the future.”

The remarkably low bid followed a similar auction last month, held by the same BLM office in Wyoming, in which not a single company bid on the right to mine a 316-million-ton coal reserve.

Meanwhile, controversial plans to build new coal export terminals on America’s West Coast are flailing. From a New York Times report last week:

United States coal exports this year are expected to decline by roughly 5 percent from last year’s record exports of 125 million tons, and many experts predict the decline will quicken next year.

At the beginning of 2012, the coal industry had plans to expand port capacity by an additional 185 million tons. But those hopes have faded this year.

“Global coal prices right now are not supportive of large-scale U.S. coal exports,” said Anthony Yuen, a Citigroup energy analyst.

The AP has more on coal’s troubles around the world:

Economic forces, pollution concerns and competition from cleaner fuels are slowly nudging nations around the globe away from the fuel that made the industrial revolution possible.

The U.S. will burn 943 million tons of coal this year, only about as much as it did in 1993. Now it’s on the verge of adopting pollution rules that may all but prohibit the construction of new coal plants. And China, which burns 4 billion tons of coal a year — as much as the rest of the world combined — is taking steps to slow the staggering growth of its coal consumption and may even be approaching a peak.

Michael Parker, a commodities analyst at Bernstein Research, calls the shift in China “the beginning of the end of coal.” While global coal use is almost certain to grow over the next few years — and remain an important fuel for decades after that — coal may soon begin a long slow decline.

With coal on the downslide, who do we need to talk to about getting our mountains back?

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Is this the beginning of the end for coal?

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Shell fined $1.1 million for polluting Arctic air during error-plagued drilling efforts

Shell fined $1.1 million for polluting Arctic air during error-plagued drilling efforts

U.S. Coast GuardWorkers were evacuated after Shell’s exploratory oil rig ran aground. 

In the words of then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Shell completely “screwed up” its efforts to tap Arctic oil reserves last year. A series of accidents in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, off the North Slope of Alaska, led to the abandonment of drilled wells and damage to both of the company’s Alaskan exploratory oil rigs, one of which ran aground. Those blunders prompted the Obama administration to bar Shell from the region this year. They also claimed the job of Shell Vice President David Lawrence, who once described drilling in the Alaskan Arctic as “relatively easy.”

But that’s not all. As we told you in January, amid its chain of mishaps, the company was also sullying the Arctic air and violating the Clean Air Act. Now it has been fined for those air-pollution transgressions. From an EPA press release:

Based on EPA’s inspections and Shell’s excess emission reports, EPA documented numerous air permit violations for Shell’s Discoverer and Kulluk drill ship fleets, during the approximately two months the vessels operated during the 2012 drilling season.

In today’s settlements, Shell has agreed to pay a $710,000 penalty for violations of the Discoverer air permit and a $390,000 penalty for violations of the Kulluk air permit.

The $1.1 million in penalties is, of course, chump change for an oil giant that has already spent more than $4.5 billion on its Three Stooges-like efforts to plunder the Arctic.

But it’s nice to know that the federal government is at least keeping one eye on Shell’s Arctic operations.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Shell fined $1.1 million for polluting Arctic air during error-plagued drilling efforts

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Retiring GOP Congressman: Fundraising Is “The Main Business” of Congress

Mother Jones

On Tuesday, Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), who was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 2002 and then switched to the GOP in 2004, announced he wouldn’t run again. In an interview with the Norman News Star, Alexander said he’d done all he could do in Congress, and he looked forward to life beyond the gilded halls of Capitol Hill.

The most interesting part of Alexander’s interview, though, was his description of how fundraising dominates the life of a member of Congress. Here’s what he said:

But the time has come for someone else to advance that cause now. I made that decision when one stops aggressively raising money, well then people start to ask questions. And that’s an unfortunate part of the business that we’re in. But it’s the main business, and it’s 24 hours a day raising money. It’s not fair. It’s not fair for the member, not fair for constituency to have to be approached every day or two or week ore two about campaign contributions. So it’s just a grueling business and I’m ready for another part of my life.

“Twenty-four hours a day” is hyperbole, of course, but it’s nonetheless a eye-opening statement. In making these comments he joins a list of outgoing lawmakers who, freed from the burdens of fundraising, have embraced their inner Bulworth and vented about the exhausting fundraising hamster wheel. In January, after announcing his forthcoming retirement, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said that Congress barely functions because members spend too much time buckraking. “The time is so consumed with raising money now, these campaigns, that you don’t have the time for the kind of personal relationships that so many of us built up over time,” he said. “So in that way, fun, I don’t know, there needs to be more time for senators to establish personal relationships than what we are able to do at this point in time.”

Why is Congress fundraising so much? Because the cost of elections keeps rising. In 1986, according to the Campaign Finance Institute, it cost $753,274 to win a House race and $6.4 million to win a Senate race (in 2012 dollars). Last year, those figures were, respectively, $1.6 million and $10.3 million. And the cost to win is only climbing.

It takes a whole lot of phone calls, breakfasts at the Capitol Hill Club, skeet shootings, beer bashes, ski trips, and Star Wars-themed fundraisers to raise that much money. For Rep. Alexander, it was all too much.

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You can look forward to more blackouts in a climate-changed world

You can look forward to more blackouts in a climate-changed world

Julian Bravo

Climate change can bring with it forest fires, which can threaten power lines.

More global warming will mean a less reliable power system.

That warning comes from the Department of Energy, which released a report [PDF] on Thursday detailing the threats posed to the nation’s power infrastructure by rising temperatures, droughts, storms, floods, and sea-level rise.

“Climatic conditions are already affecting energy production and delivery in the United States, causing supply disruptions,” the report states. “The magnitude of the challenge posed by climate change on an aging and already stressed U.S. energy system could outpace current adaptation efforts, unless a more comprehensive and accelerated approach is adopted.”

Some of the threats listed in the report:

Power plants are threatened by decreased water availability and rising air and water temperatures, which make it harder to keep the facilities cool.
Refineries, oil and gas drills, power plants, and power lines along the coasts are at risk from rising seas, powerful storms, and flooding.
Hydropower, bioenergy, and some forms of solar power can be affected by droughts and rising temperatures.
Power lines carry less current and operate less efficiently in hot weather, and they are vulnerable to damage wrought by storms and forest fires.
Demand for electricity for air-conditioning is expected to rise, though demand for fuel oil and natural gas for heating is expected to fall.

According to The Hill, the release of the report marks the beginning of a larger effort by the DOE to push the energy industry to prepare for the rise in extreme weather events.

The department isn’t just talking in hypothetical terms. Click on the following map of climate-related energy disruptions to open an interactive version on the Energy Department’s website:

energy.gov

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Could the Monsanto Protection Act get repealed?

Could the Monsanto Protection Act get repealed?

Food Democracy Now!

Smuggled into the bill President Obama signed to avert a government shutdown in March was a sneaky little rider called the “farmer assurance provision.” It’s since come to be known as the Monsanto Protection Act, being very assuring to the biotech giant, if no one else. It allows farmers to plant genetically modified crops before they’ve been declared safe by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in defiance of court orders suspending planting until environmental reviews can be completed.

Once food-advocacy groups and then the general public found out about the quietly passed provision, outcry against it spread, in the form of petitions and even rare displays of bipartisan solidarity. On Monday, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) announced that he’s introducing an amendment to the Senate version of the farm bill that would repeal the Monsanto Protection Act in its entirety.

“The Monsanto Protection Act is an outrageous example of a special interest loophole,” said Merkley in a press release. “This provision nullifies the actions of a court that is enforcing the law to protect farmers, the environment and public health. That is unacceptable.”

Twilight Greenaway explained the background of this special-interest loophole for Grist last year:

As it stands now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can suspend planting while the environmental impact of one of these crops is being assessed. Or that’s how it’s been in theory at least.

And it is what happened in 2007 when a federal judge overturned the USDA’s approval of GMO alfalfa, in response to a lawsuit filed by farmers and the Center for Food Safety. (Planting of alfalfa resumed again in 2011 when the USDA fully deregulated the crop.)

In the case of GMO sugar beets, another hotly contested crop, planting was supposed to be suspended, but by the point that suspension was ordered, the market had been cleared out and there were no longer enough non-GMO seeds. As we reported recently, “America faced the prospect of a 20-percent reduction in that year’s sugar crop. In response — and in defiance of the federal judge’s order — the USDA allowed farmers to plant GM sugar beets anyway.” Now, all this back and forth could be moot to most farmers (unless a crop is officially, finally deemed unsafe — and well, that hasn’t happened yet).

The problem with planting GMO crops before they’ve been proven safe is that doing so doesn’t only affect the fields in which they’re sown; cross-pollination is a common concern for farmers trying to practice sustainable agriculture and maintain their organic status in an industry dominated by GM seeds. Cross-pollination can even bring legal troubles for unsuspecting farmers, Tom Laskawy explains:

[I]f you’re a farmer, GMO seeds can literally blow in to your fields on the breeze or just the pollen from GMO crops can blow in (or buzz in via bees) and contaminate your organic or “conventional” fields. And if that happens, Monsanto or Syngenta or Bayer CropLife maintain the right to sue you as if you had illegally bought their seed and knowingly planted it.

In an appropriately Orwellian twist, the companies even call such accidental contamination by their products “patent infringement.”

Merkley’s amendment attempts to help the USDA cling to what small scraps of control it still has over the biotech industry. He plans to push for a floor vote on it, according to The Huffington Post. Stay tuned …

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Originally posted here: 

Could the Monsanto Protection Act get repealed?

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, organic, oven, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Could the Monsanto Protection Act get repealed?