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Wow. The Grand Canyon Is Being Stolen By a Sea of Fog.

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

SKYGLOWPROJECT.COM: KAIBAB ELEGY from Harun Mehmedinovic on Vimeo.

A stunning time-lapse video of the Grand Canyon shows the carved formation as it may have looked millennia ago — but instead of water, it’s filled with what has the appearance of an ocean of fog.

Filmmaker Harun Mehmedinovic has set up his camera at the canyon 30 different times since 2015. During one visit, he managed to witness and film the dramatic changes of a full cloud inversion, which occurs when warm air traps cold air beneath and creates a sea of fog. The inversion lasted the entire day, allowing time for Mehmedinovic to film fog “crashing” on the “shores” of the canyon and swirling through winding passages.

The film made its debut on BBC Earth in early May and has been viewed online millions of times.

The video is part of the Skyglow Project, a crowdfunded operation to record the effects of light pollution from urban areas and contrast them with stunning vistas.

Mehmedinovic is a Bosnian-American who went into hiding in his war-wracked hometown of Sarajevo for three years when he was 9. His family stayed indoors in a cellar of their home to escape the Serbs. He moved to the U.S. when he was 13 and went to film school in Los Angeles.

Check out the Reuters video below for more information about background:

Reuters TV interviews Harun Mehmedinovic from Harun Mehmedinovic on Vimeo.

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Wow. The Grand Canyon Is Being Stolen By a Sea of Fog.

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Obamacare Repeal Is Doomed

Mother Jones

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The current hotness in Republican circles is “repeal and delay.” That is, they want to pass legislation that repeals Obamacare in, say, 2019, but doesn’t replace it with anything. Then they can spend the next couple of years figuring out what should take its place. There’s only one problem with this:

Republicans. Can’t. Repeal. Obamacare.

Oh, they can repeal big parts of it. Anything related to the budget, like taxes and subsidies, can be repealed via the Senate procedure called reconciliation, which needs only 51 votes to pass. But all the other parts can be filibustered, and it takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans don’t have 60 votes in the Senate.1

This leaves quite a few elements of Obamacare that can’t be repealed via reconciliation, but I think Democrats should focus on one: pre-existing conditions. This is the provision of Obamacare that bans insurers from turning down customers or charging them extra for coverage, no matter what kind of pre-existing conditions they have. I tell the whole story here, but there are several reasons this is the best provision to focus on:

It’s an easy thing to understand.
It’s very popular.
Republicans say they favor keeping it.
Donald Trump says he favors keeping it.
It’s not a minor regulation. It is absolutely essential to any health care plan.
It’s fairly easy to explain why repealing Obamacare but leaving in place the pre-existing conditions ban2 would destroy the individual insurance market and leave tens of millions of people with no way to buy insurance.

The last point is the most important. Take me. I’m currently being kept alive by about $100,000 worth of prescriptions drugs each year. If I can go to any insurer and demand that they cover me for $10,000, that’s a certain loss of $90,000. If millions of people like me do this, insurance companies will lose billions. In the employer market, which covers people who work for large companies, this is workable because insurers have lots and lots of healthy, profitable people at each company to make up these losses. In the individual market—after you’ve repealed the individual mandate and the subsidies—they don’t. They will bear huge losses and they know it.

What this means is not just that Obamacare would collapse. It means the entire individual market would collapse. Every insurance company in America would simply stop selling individual policies. It would be political suicide to make this happen, and this means that Democrats have tremendous leverage if they’re willing to use it. It all depends on how well they play their hand.

The current Republican hope is that they can repeal parts of Obamacare, and then hold Democrats hostage: vote for our replacement plan or else the individual insurance market dies. There’s no reason Democrats should do anything but laugh at this. Republicans now control all three branches of government. They’ve been lying to their base about Obamacare repeal for years. Now the chickens have come home to roost, and they’re responsible for whatever happens next. If the Democratic Party is even marginally competent, they can make this stick.

Plenty of Republicans already know this. Some have only recently figured it out. Some are still probably living in denial. It doesn’t matter. Pre-existing conditions is the hammer Democrats can use to either save Obamacare or else demand that any replacement be equally generous. They just have to use it.

1Of course, Republicans do have the alternative of either (a) getting rid of the filibuster or (b) firing the Senate parliamentarian and hiring one who will let them do anything they want. If they do either of those things, then they can repeal all of Obamacare and replace it with anything they want. I don’t think they’ll do either one, but your mileage may vary on this question.

2Just for the record, it’s worth noting that Republicans can’t modify the pre-existing conditions ban either. Democrats can filibuster that too.

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Obamacare Repeal Is Doomed

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Economy Grows Fairly Decently in Q4

Mother Jones

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Economic growth slowed down a bit in Q4, but remained fairly healthy. The BEA announced today that real GDP increased 3.2 percent last quarter, due almost entirely to private sector growth. Slowdowns in federal spending actually cut GDP growth by 0.98 percent—about two-thirds due to cuts in defense spending and one-third due to cuts in domestic spending. This is the price of austerity: if federal spending were growing at a normal rate at this point in a recovery, GDP growth last quarter probably would have stood at around 4.5 percent or so.

Everything else was pretty positive:

The increase in real GDP in the fourth quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, nonresidential fixed investment, private inventory investment, and state and local government spending that were partly offset by negative contributions from federal government spending and residential fixed investment. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

Consumer spending increased decently, and inflation was extremely subdued at 1.2 percent. All in all, a decent report, if not a spectacular one. Now we all get to wait and see if it’s good enough to offset all the turmoil in emerging markets that’s got everyone so jittery.

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Economy Grows Fairly Decently in Q4

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8 Tips for Greening Your Super Bowl Party

Hosting a green Super Bowl party is easy if you follow some of our simple tips. Photo: Shutterstock

The National Football League has taken steps to make Super Bowl XLVIII a green event, including purchasing renewable energy certificates, hosting e-waste recycling events and using biodiesel in outdoor generators.

How can you do your part? If you’re hosting a party for the big game, help green the event by making your gathering as eco-friendly as possible. To help you do so, we’ve put together a list of eight simple tips for planning your green Super Bowl party.

1. Green your TV

Even your TV can be green. Photo: Shutterstock

Having a group of people watch a game together does save some energy, since only one TV will be on instead of many. Still, most people want to see a football game on a big screen. If you’re considering buying a new TV for your party, choose an energy-efficient model. Many televisions are Energy Star certified, and on average these models are 25 percent more energy efficient than other models.

If you do choose to buy a new TV, be sure to donate or recycle your old one. The EPA offers suggestions for where to do this, or you can search for local options here at Earth911.

Next page: Make food at home

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8 Tips for Greening Your Super Bowl Party

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Al Gore: World Is on Brink of "Carbon Bubble"

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world is on the brink of the “largest bubble ever” in finance, because of the undisclosed value of high-carbon assets on companies’ balance sheets, and investment managers who fail to take account of the risks are failing in their fiduciary duty to shareholders and investors, Al Gore and his investment partner, David Blood, have said.

“Stranded carbon assets” such as coal mines, fossil fuel power stations and gas-fuelled vehicle plants represent at least $7 trillion on the books of publicly listed companies, and about twice as much again is owned by private companies, state governments and sovereign wealth funds.

As the danger from climate change intensifies, and as rules on carbon and the introduction of carbon pricing in many parts of the world start to bite, these assets are expected to come under threat, from regulation and from the need to transform the economy on to a low-carbon footing. The “carbon bubble” has been identified by leading thinkers on climate change in recent years, but so far the findings have had little real effect on investor behavior.

Now Gore and Blood, the former US vice-president and ex-chief executive of Goldman Sachs, who are partners in the Generation Investment Management firm, have brought forward a four-point plan that they say will protect future investors. They are calling on companies, investors and regulators to identify the carbon risks in their portfolios; to demand of company managers and boards that the risks should be publicly disclosed; to diversify their investment portfolios to include low-carbon infrastructure such as renewable energy and electric vehicles; and finally to take their money out of fossil fuels and other high-carbon assets, or turn them into low-carbon assets—for instance, by installing carbon capture and storage units on power stations.

Gore told the Guardian: “This is potentially the largest bubble ever. If investors look in a clear-eyed, traditional risk management way, they can be in time to avoid it.” He said it was not feasible to wait for a global agreement on climate change, on the lines of the Kyoto protocol which he helped to forge in 1997, but that investors must take action sooner. He urged individual investors to demand that their pension companies or fund managers should seek to evaluate their exposure to carbon risk.

The highest carbon assets such as tar sands and dirty coal represent the highest immediate risk, but other infrastructure such as transportation and construction is also involved.

If the risks associated with high-carbon assets are not taken into account, Gore warned, the consequences for other assets—in a decade or more—could be dire. Those assets include “real estate, agricultural land and infrastructure” that is all at risk from the effects of climate change, and the value of which could plummet as the effects are increasingly felt in the form of floods, droughts and storms.

Gore compared the carbon bubble to the financial crisis of 2007-08, when the owners of assets such as sub-prime mortgages and credit agreements that were suddenly found to be worthless were “embarrassed that they did not see what was blindingly obvious in retrospect.”

As the risks of climate change have been well known for some years, Blood added that any fund managers failing to take them into account in investment risk strategies were “failing in their fiduciary duty” to their investors and shareholders. This could give rise to lawsuits in the future, though Blood said he hoped that could be avoided, if the report’s recommendations were followed. He said investors were currently finding “a false comfort in the status quo” by failing to factor in carbon risks and climate change.

New regulations on carbon are being brought forward in many countries, such as the US and China, though there have also been withdrawals from climate action, such as the demise of carbon trading in Australia.

The Generation report follows the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change‘s assessment of current global warming science, which set out a “carbon budget” of how much carbon dioxide we can continue to pump into the atmosphere before triggering dangerous levels of warming. By extrapolating from that, other scientists have suggested there could be as little as 30 years of burning fossil fuels before the threshold is reached. This suggests that many of the world’s remaining fossil fuel resources must be left unexploited if the climate is not to be put in danger, and prominent scientific and political leaders are increasingly calling for this to be recognized.

Gore and Blood’s recommendations could take a decade to complete, the partners admit, but they insist that the first steps at least should be undertaken urgently.

Blood said there were an increasing number of investors with a clear understanding of climate change, but added: “There needs to be more engagement.”

Gore and Blood founded Generation Investment Management in 2004, with the aim of pushing forward low-carbon finance and promoting alternatives to the fossil fuel economy.

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Al Gore: World Is on Brink of "Carbon Bubble"

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Open-Access Champion Michael Eisen "Sets Free" NASA’s Paywalled Mars Rover Research

Mother Jones

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Wait, did science publishing maverick Michael Eisen just borrow a tactic from the late internet whiz kid Aaron Swartz?

Why yes, he did.

The headline for my new profile of Eisen wasn’t meant to be taken literally. As I explain in “Steal This Research Paper! (You Already Paid for It.),” Swartz was indicted by the federal government for trying to do just that: He’d gained access to MIT networks to “liberate” millions of copyrighted scientific papers, most of them bankrolled by taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies. Swartz and others in the open-access movement believed that the public should be able to view publicly-funded research without forking over stiff access fees to science publishers. Seems like a no-brainer, huh?

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Open-Access Champion Michael Eisen "Sets Free" NASA’s Paywalled Mars Rover Research

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