Author Archives: pwbqczv

Weekly Poll Update: Hillary Clinton Still Flying High

by pwbqczv Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

Sam Wang’s meta-margin hasn’t changed much in the past week. He now has Hillary Clinton leading Trump by 4.4 percentage points:

Wang’s current prediction is that Clinton has a 99 percent chance of winning and will rack up 339 electoral votes. He still has the Senate tied, 50-50, but the Democratic meta-margin is up to 1.7 percent and the probability of Democratic control is 79 percent. On the House side, he has Democrats up by about 5 percent, which is not enough for them to win back control. Here’s Pollster:

Clinton has dropped a point and is now 7.3 percentage points ahead of Trump. For what it’s worth, if you look only at high-quality live phone polls, they have Clinton up by a whopping 9.5 percentage points. In the generic House polling, Pollster has Democrats ahead by 5.2 points, down a bit from last week.

If you add to all this the fact that Clinton almost certainly has a far superior GOTV operation compared to Trump, she could win the election by anywhere from 6 to 10 points depending on what happens over the next couple of weeks. Republicans appear to have resigned themselves to this, and are now putting all their energy into downballot races. This means the Senate is likely to be very close, and the House will probably stay in Republican hands—though only by a dozen seats or so.

Continue reading here:

Weekly Poll Update: Hillary Clinton Still Flying High

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Weekly Poll Update: Hillary Clinton Still Flying High

Coal-plant owner offers to wash cars after spewing ash over city

by pwbqczv Posted on October 25, 2013

Coal-plant owner offers to wash cars after spewing ash over city

By

Shutterstock

This was not a good week to be a neighbor of the John Twitty Energy Center in Springfield, Mo. Unless, that is, all you care about is getting your car cleaned for free.

A piece of equipment at a coal-fired power plant failed on Tuesday, sending a cloud of burned coal residue with the consistency of talcum powder out over the city. Homes, yards, cars, and unfortunate pedestrians within two to three miles were left coated with fly ash.

“I headed outside and [my cars] were just covered,” Springfield resident Bob Pasley told Ozarks First. “Neighbors’ cars were covered and we were walking through the grass and dust was coming up like you just put limestone on your lawn.”

City Utilities, which operates the plant, apologized and offered to pay to clean the cars of affected neighbors. “Our concern is on people’s vehicles,” spokesperson Joel Alexander said.

But what about all the lungs, plants, and ecosystems that were assaulted with stray bits of burned of coal? What does City Utilities propose doing about that? It’s already done all that it plans to do: It has denied that there are any dangers.

The dust “is not hazardous to people, animals, or vegetation and can be rinsed with water from most surfaces,” the utility said in a statement.

But that claim isn’t sitting so well with environmentalists. From the Springfield News-Leader:

John Hickey, the director of the Sierra Club’s Missouri chapter, took issue with that statement Wednesday, saying CU “has exposed people to a dangerous pollutant.”

“City Utilities said it’s harmless but the thing is, fly ash contains heavy metal pollution like mercury and arsenic. It’s not harmless. It has dangerous pollution in it,” Hickey said.

Asked to respond to Hickey’s criticism, CU sent an email Wednesday noting that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued regulatory determinations in 1993 and 2000 that “did not identify any environmental harm associated with the beneficial use of (coal ash) and concluded in both determinations that these materials were nonhazardous.”

OK, great. But “beneficial use” refers to recycling coal ash, such as in concrete and asphalt. Blowing coal ash all over the place for your neighbors to inhale does not count as a beneficial use of the waste material.


Source
City Utilities Provides Free Car Washes for Victims of Energy Plant Malfunction, Ozarks First
Sierra Club, CU disagree on health risk from fly ash, Springfield News-Leader

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

,

Climate & Energy

Follow this link:

Coal-plant owner offers to wash cars after spewing ash over city

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Coal-plant owner offers to wash cars after spewing ash over city

Turbine tourism: Bus tours of a wind-energy park are a big hit

by pwbqczv Posted on October 22, 2013

Turbine tourism: Bus tours of a wind-energy park are a big hit

By

Tina :0)

A wind turbine on a Michigan farm.

Michigan now has nearly 900 wind turbines, and that lit a lightbulb in the entrepreneurial mind of retired teacher Gene Jorissen. Last summer, he started leading hour-long bus tours of the turbine-dotted Lakes Winds Energy Park in the western part of the state. From Livingston Daily:

The bus stops 1,000 feet from a turbine, and passengers get out. “People want to know, how noisy are they? So, we sit and listen. We talk about various concerns people have about them,” he said.

Then, the bus stops at his cousin’s house. The cousin has one of the turbines on his property. The cousin lets Jorissen bring his tourists right up to the turbine and stand under its massive 476-foot height to get a feel of just how big it is.

“You can walk around it. But you can’t climb it. You can touch it. But you can’t go inside,” Jorissen said.

This summer, buses were full, and there often were waiting lists, said Jorissen, who is continuing tours through Saturday.

Tours “have become a big hit,” added Dan Bishop, Consumers Energy spokesman. “Eco-tourism, right here in Michigan.”

We told you in April that some Lake Winds neighbors were suing to block construction of new wind turbines. It’s good to hear that others in the area appreciate these revolutionary devices — and are finding novel ways to make a buck off them.


Source
Wind turbines new Mich. tourist attraction, Livingston Daily

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

,

Climate & Energy

Continued: 

Turbine tourism: Bus tours of a wind-energy park are a big hit

Posted in Anchor, ATTRA, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Turbine tourism: Bus tours of a wind-energy park are a big hit

One giant coal plant reopening in Minnesota, another shuttering in Massachusetts

by pwbqczv Posted on October 10, 2013

One giant coal plant reopening in Minnesota, another shuttering in Massachusetts

By

H.C. Williams

This coal power plant, Brayton Point, is shutting down in 2017.

For this coal-news update, we’ll get the depressing outlier out of the way first: One of the Midwest’s largest coal-burning plants is about to be fired back up following a two-year hiatus.

A filthy 900-megawatt generator in Minnesota was severely damaged in late 2011. But following $200 million in repairs, Xcel Energy says it should be up and running again within a week. From E&E Publishing:

Once at full power, Sherburne’s Unit 3, combined with two 750-megawatt coal burners, known as Units 1 and 2, should be able to produce 2,400 megawatts of electricity, according to Xcel.

The refired Unit 3 generator will also help burnish Sherco’s reputation as Minnesota’s largest point-source emitter of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas that scientists have linked to global climate change.

But the development is an unusual one in a world where coal is being slowly but surely kicked to the curb. This week, the private equity firm that just bought the coal-fired Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset, Mass., one of the biggest polluters in the region, announced it would shut down the facility in 2017. From the Providence Journal:

The New Jersey-based energy firm cited a host of issues in announcing its decision to close the plant, including low electricity prices because of the surplus of natural gas and the cost of meeting stricter environmental rules. The move comes just five weeks after it closed on the purchase of the facility from the Virginia-based energy conglomerate Dominion Resources.

The Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign is cheering the news:

With [the] announcement that the Brayton Point Power Station in Massachusetts would retire by 2017, the campaign officially marked 150 coal plants that have announced plans to retire since 2010.

According to the Clean Air Task Force, retiring these 150 coal plants will help to save 4,000 lives every year, prevent 6,200 heart attacks every year and prevent 66,300 asthma attacks every year. Retiring these plants will also avoid $1.9 billion in health costs.

We’ll end this coal update with the sad news that coal miners continue to die on the job in America. The Wall Street Journal reports on three fatal mining accidents that occurred on three consecutive days. They happened while more than half of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration staff is being furloughed by the government shutdown. “The fact that this occurred over the weekend, when there may be a greater expectation an MSHA inspector would not be present, is a red flag,” administration head Joseph Main told the newspaper.


Source
Coal on the decline — 150 coal plants set for retirement, Sierra Club
New owners to shutter outmoded Brayton Point Power Station in 2017, Providence Journal
Coal-Mining Accidents Kill Three in Three Days, The Wall Street Journal
Minnesota’s largest coal unit to restart, despite concerns over pollution, emissions, 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.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

Originally from: 

One giant coal plant reopening in Minnesota, another shuttering in Massachusetts

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, global climate change, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on One giant coal plant reopening in Minnesota, another shuttering in Massachusetts

Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

by pwbqczv Posted on October 8, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a 16-year-old could not get the abortion she wanted because she “was not mature enough to make the decision herself.” The Court’s ability to force the teen, a ward of the state known only as Anonymous 5, to carry her unwanted child to term is a direct result of the state’s 2011 parental consent law that requires minors seeking an abortion to get parental approval.

But Nebraska is not unique: similar rulings could happen in most other states across the country. Laws that mandate parental involvement in teens’ abortions offer anti-choice judges new opportunities to limit abortion access. And while it is unclear whether such parental involvement legislation affects minors’ abortion rates in general, Sharon Camp, former president and CEO of Guttmacher Institute, wrote in an article for RH Reality Check that such mandates can put teens at risk of physical violence or abuse and “result in teens’ delaying abortions until later in pregnancy, when they carry a greater risk of complications and are also more expensive to obtain.” The case of the Nebraska teen also shows that parental involvement legislation overlooks wards of the state, leaving pregnant young adults who have no legal parents at the behest of the court system.

Here’s a map of parental consent laws across the United States:

According to Guttmacher, “only two states and the District of Columbia explicitly allow” all minors to consent to their own abortions. On the other hand, a whopping 39 states require some kind of parental involvement in a minor’s decision to have an abortion.

There are two major types of legislation mandating parental involvement in their child’s decision to have an abortion: Parental consent and parental notification laws. Parental consent laws mandate that a minor who has decided to get an abortion first get the OK from either one or both of her parents (or her legal guardian). Parental notification laws, on the other hand, require that a parent or legal guardian be notified of a child’s decision to get an abortion, either by the minor herself or by her doctor. Eight states, including Nebraska, mandate a notarized statement of consent from a parent before the abortion is performed. And in Arkansas, the Governor recently signed a law making it a crime to assist a minor in obtaining an abortion without her parent’s consent, “even if the abortion was performed in a state where parental consent is not required.”

Almost all states with parental involvement laws include some exceptions to the rules. Many states allow exceptions in medical emergencies or in cases of abuse, assault, incest, or neglect. Only a handful of states extend their consent or notification laws to other adult relatives, like grandparents.

But one exception in particular has increased the role of the courts in the personal decision-making of teens. As a result of a Supreme Court ruling that parents cannot have complete veto power in determining whether their child gets an abortion, almost all states offer a “judicial bypass” to their parental involvement laws. The bypass allows minors to go to the courts to waive their state’s involvement laws; but in effect moves the power to veto a teen’s abortion from her family to the courts.

And here is where the Nebraska case comes in. In this case, the biological parents of Anonymous 5 had previously been stripped of their legal parental rights after physically abusing their daughter and, as a result, the pregnant teen had no legal parents and was instead a ward of the state. With no parent to consent to her abortion, she was forced to ask permission from the courts, who then denied her request, essentially finding her mature enough to carry a baby she doesn’t want but too immature to consent to her own abortion. Instead of offering an alternative to parental consent, the courts serve as just another barrier between teens—especially wards of the state—and access to safe abortion services.

Continue reading: 

Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Nebraska Court Decides 16-Year-Old Is Too Immature for an Abortion, But Motherhood’s Okay

In Silicon Valley hub, new homes must be wired for electric cars

by pwbqczv Posted on October 2, 2013

In Silicon Valley hub, new homes must be wired for electric cars

By

John UptonTesla roadsters charging at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters.

If you build a new home in Tesla Motors’ hometown, your electrician is going to need to wire it up for an electric vehicle charger.

The Palo Alto, Calif., City Council recently endorsed a building-code change that would require builders to include wiring in new homes that can easily be connected to a charger. The council also directed city staff to figure out how to make it easier and cheaper to obtain permits for new EV chargers.

To wire a new house for an electric vehicle charger, it costs under $200 — a quarter of the price tag for installing a charger at an existing home, Palo Alto Mayor Greg Scharff told the San Jose Mercury News.

Vice Mayor Nancy Shepherd said she received a phone call from a resident who had installed a curbside charger for public use. The electric-bike fanatic said the charger was a big hit in his neighborhood — but that obtaining the permit cost him hundreds of dollars. The council also heard that a Unitarian Universalist Church paid $459 for a permit needed to install its electric vehicle charger. Ouch. That “seems like a lot,” Council Member Liz Kniss deadpanned.

“Let’s figure out as a council what we can do to remove the obstacles to owning electric vehicles in Palo Alto,” Scharff said. “I think what we really need to do is make it convenient, easy, and economical.”

The council then voted 9 to 0 to endorse the changes, and sent a memo directing city staff to rewrite the building code and permitting rules accordingly.

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

,

Cities

,

Climate & Energy

Link – 

In Silicon Valley hub, new homes must be wired for electric cars

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In Silicon Valley hub, new homes must be wired for electric cars

Tanning Beds are Very, Very Bad for Teenagers

by pwbqczv Posted on August 20, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Is diet soda bad for you? Who knows. It might be in large quantities, but the evidence is pretty thin. On the list of things to get outraged about, it probably ranks somewhere near the bottom of the Top 100.

Indoor tanning, on the other hand, is just plain horrifically bad. Aaron Carroll provides the basics: indoor tanning before age 25 increases the risk of skin cancer by 50-100 percent, and melanoma risk (the worst kind of skin cancer) increases by 1.8 percent with each additional tanning session per year. Despite this, the chart on the right shows the prevalence of indoor tanning among teenagers. It’s high! Aaron is appalled:

This is so, so, so, so, so, so, so bad for you. Why don’t I see rage against this in my inbox like I do for diet soda? Why can’t people differentiate risk appropriately?

And who would fight a tax on this?

Answer: lots of people, including every single member of the Republican Party. Next question?

Read article here:

Tanning Beds are Very, Very Bad for Teenagers

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Tanning Beds are Very, Very Bad for Teenagers

Our Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis Wasn’t Great, But it Wasn’t That Bad Either

by pwbqczv Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Yesterday Paul Krugman suggested that the neoclassical synthesis in economics—”the idea that we can use monetary and fiscal policy to make the world safe for laissez-faire everywhere else”—has failed its biggest real-world test: guiding us safely out of the financial collapse of 2007-08. It’s not that printing money and running big deficits don’t work. Krugman thinks they do. But the events of the past few years have shown that it’s politically impossible to keep them going long enough to truly do the job of rescuing an economy in crisis. Central banks chicken out when their balance sheets get too scary looking, and national legislatures chicken out when deficits get too scary looking. It’s obvious that national leaders simply aren’t courageous enough to keep up the therapy long enough to cure the patient.

Krugman obviously has a point, but I’m less pessimistic than him for two reasons. First, the 2008 crisis and the subsequent recession had a couple of unique political features. In the United States, we had the rise of the tea party and its nihilistic approach to partisan politics. That won’t necessarily last forever. In Europe we had the problem of a new and shaky currency union. That will either implode completely or else it will eventually morph into a true fiscal union. In either case, the euro straitjacket will be gone.

Second, as Ryan Avent writes today, we have learned something since the Great Depression. When the financial crisis hit, the Fed flooded the market with liquidity. It kept the banks open. Congress passed TARP. And a stimulus package and then a mini-stimulus were both put in place.

That wasn’t enough. Politically, as Krugman says, we lost our nerve before we finished the job. Nonetheless, it was a helluva lot more than we did in response to the Great Depression, and as Avent’s chart on the right illustrates, it shows up in the economic data. The financial crisis of 2007-08 was as bad as the crisis of 1929-32—maybe worse, in fact—but the subsequent course of the economy has been way better and the aggregate amount of human misery has been way less. Avent looks at the long term:

Through the first 12 years of these experiments, today’s macroeconomic-policy framework (consisting of a much more robust safety net, countercyclical monetary and fiscal policy, and aggressive action to prevent financial-sector collapse) is clearly better than the one we had around in the 1930s….The “massive waste we’ve seen since 2008” has nothing on the waste of the 1930s and 1940s. In the absence of an alternative politico-economic framework that looks capable of delivering even better results we should be extremely reluctant to abandon the current working strategy.

A second thing to keep in mind is that the policy revolutions that develop in the aftermath of a macroeconomic disaster can take decades to run their course. We can very reasonably be frustrated with the policy performance of the past six years while also remaining hopeful that the intellectual battle will eventually be decided in a positive way.

….We learn from failure. It took the Great Recession to tell us where there has been intellectual progress in the fields of economics and political economy and where there has not. But there has been progress and there almost certainly will be more: building on the strengths of the broad neoclassical synthesis. If the trials of the last half decade yield one-tenth the intellectual dividend of those of the 1930s, then the world has good reason to expect the future to be quite a lot better than the past, in much the same way that the recent past is a world apart from the horrors of the 1930s.

Our shift to deficit hysteria in 2010, a mere six months into the recovery, was unprecedented in recent history. Government spending has kept increasing for years in the aftermath of every other recent recession, and only in this one did it actually decrease in real terms. This was the result of tea party know-nothingism, and the entirely unnecessary human immiseration it caused is an endless source of shame—or should be, anyway. So it’s easy to see why Krugman feels the way he does. But the tea party won’t last forever, and in any case, even they weren’t able to prevent us from acting rationally enough to stave off the worst. Economic progress may be slow, but it’s not nonexistent.

Link: 

Our Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis Wasn’t Great, But it Wasn’t That Bad Either

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Our Response to the 2008 Financial Crisis Wasn’t Great, But it Wasn’t That Bad Either