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Is Bolsonaro the Trump of the Tropics or is Trump the Bolsonaro of the States?

by AndraAntoine Posted on April 10, 2019

A document released earlier this week revealed that the Brazilian government is considering axing its current Environment Council and replacing it with political appointees from far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, also known as the “Trump of the Tropics.” The current Environment Council, known as CONAMA, is the policymaking body tasked with protecting 60 percent of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.

CONAMA has nearly 100 members from all levels of government and society. Supporters of the plan say CONAMA is a “confusing” body that “acts emotionally, without due technique, being subjected to ideological interference.

“This is a profoundly ironic statement coming from members of the Bolsonaro regime,” Christian Poirier, a program director with the nonprofit Amazon Watch, told Grist. “The very same contention can be made about their form of government, which is deeply confusing, emotional, and ideological.”

It’s been just over a hundred days since Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, known as the “Trump of the Tropics,” took office. As a candidate, Bolsonaro often questioned the reality of climate change and claimed environmental protections restrained Brazil’s economic growth by holding back mining and agriculture. Since he’s been in power, he’s spent the bulk of his time weakening environmental restrictions, prioritizing industry interests, and cracking down on environmental activists. In other words, he’s not exactly the kind of guy environmentalists are keen to make more political appointments related to Amazonian protections.

“Bolsonaro’s environmental policy can be Orwellian to the extreme,” Poirer said.

Bolsonaro is well on his way to following through with his promises to rip up protected areas in the Amazon and gut other areas protected for Indigenous communities. The deforestation numbers from his first two months in office are already concerning. According to Instituto Socioambiental, a Brazilian advocacy group, there has been a 54 percent rise in deforestation in the Amazon-Xingu basin since Bolsonaro took power — the equivalent of 170,000 trees found a day. (Given that January and February are high rainfall months, it’s difficult to determine the full extent of the damage at this time.)

One of Bolsonaro’s first acts as president was to strip the country’s National Indian Foundation of much of its authority to demarcate and declare protected territory for Indigenous reserves. That authority has instead shifted to the Ministry of Agriculture, run by Bolsonaro appointee Ricardo Salles, who has called climate change “secondary” and says that agribusiness is “under threat.”

Bolsonaro has promised that he will not “give the Indians another inch of land.” And his rhetoric hasn’t stopped there — he took a particular interest in MST aka The Landless Worker’s Movement, a group that advocates for small landholders and subsistence farmers, referring to them as terrorists. “These red outlaws will be banished from our homeland,” Bolsonaro said in an address last November. “It will be a clean up the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history.”

Brazil is known as the deadliest place in the world for environmental defenders, many of whom are a part of indigenous communities.

Indigenous groups are, naturally, concerned. Dinamã Tuxá, Coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples, told Amazon Watch, “[Bolsonaro’s] discourse gives those who live around indigenous lands the right to practice violence without any sort of accountability. Those who invade indigenous lands and kill our people will be esteemed. He represents an institutionalization of genocide in Brazil.”

During the Fourth Session of the United Nations Environmental Assembly in Nairobi, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles said Brazil could neither support nor sign environmental agreements that went against the country’s agribusiness sector. Salles claimed Brazil’s carbon emissions have fallen by about 72 percent since 2004, but failed to mention that that decline stopped in 2012.

It’s no surprise Bolsonaro’s appointees are pushing for industry interests. Bolsonaro is backed by some of the most powerful political players in Brazil: the ruralista bloc. The ruralistas are a political group linked to agribusiness and contend that environmental regulations in the country are too stringent, instead proposing agribusiness should be allowed to expand unrestricted.

Bolsonaro’s time in office has gotten a fair bit of U.S. coverage, with many stories focusing on the danger he and his administration poses to the Amazon rainforest, one of the world’s biggest carbon sinks. But lest Americans get too greener-than-thou, it’s important to note just how much Bolsonaro’s actions have drawn inspiration from our own Commander-in-Chief.

President Trump has signed several executive orders to reduce the size of national monuments and protected areas (some of which are considered sacred lands by indigenous groups) in order to allow for industry to open them up to oil and gas drilling and rake in the profits. Before taking office, Trump described the Environmental Protection Agency as a “disgrace” that should largely be dismantled. Moreover, former EPA head Scott Pruitt was an oil and gas industry man who has drawn parallels to Brazil’s Ricardo Salles, a convicted environmental criminal running the Brazilian Environmental Ministry. One of Pruitt’s appointees, Tony Cox, recently recommended the EPA dismiss the vast majority of evidence air pollution is bad for human health as it reassesses its national air quality standards.

There’s little doubt the two anti-environmental world leaders are fans of each other. When Bolsonaro threatened to jettison the Paris Climate Agreement, he was following Trump’s lead (though some speculate Bolsonaro has since backtracked from this promise). And yes, Bolsonaro has been a guest at Trump’s White House.

So, is Bolsonaro the Trump of the Tropics or is Trump the Bolsonaro of the States?

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Is Bolsonaro the Trump of the Tropics or is Trump the Bolsonaro of the States?

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Just how bad for you is breathing in air pollution? Well, it depends whom you ask.

by HalinaB96qaetmh Posted on April 10, 2019

Ask almost any scientist how bad air pollution is for people, and the answer is likely, pretty darn bad. Last week, a global report published by the Health Effects Institute found that breathing dirty air shortens the average expected lifespan of a child born today’s by 20 months, compared to how long they would live in the absence of air pollution. Robert O’Keefe, Vice President of the Institute, said in a statement that the research is part of “a growing worldwide consensus – among the World Health Organization, World Bank, International Energy Agency and others – that air pollution poses a major global public health challenge.”

But if you listen to Tony Cox, chair of the Chartered Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and appointee of former Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, you’ll hear a completely different message. During a public meeting in late March, Cox said he is “actually appalled” with what he considers a limited body of evidence that links particulate matter in the air with premature death.

Not surprisingly, Cox’s statements have landed him in hot water with prominent scientists and public health advocates who say he could wind up undermining decades of work to clean up America’s air since Cox’s committee has been charged with advising the Environmental Protection Agency on its air quality standards.

The EPA is in the midst of reassessing its national air quality standards, which it does every five years to ensure that it is reviewing the latest scientific evidence available. It recently submitted a 1,800-page ‘Integrated Science Assessment’ compiling research on the health impacts of particulate matter pollution to the Chartered Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which is independent of the EPA but influential in their final decision. That committee will give its recommendations on whether to strengthen or adjust existing federal standards.

Under the Trump administration, the Chartered Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee has undergone somewhat of a scientific makeunder. For one, the committee is much smaller than it has been in the past, once boasting 28 members and now staffed only by its minimum of seven. Environmental organizations contend that former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and other members of Trump’s administration appointed largely pro-fossil fuel industry members, including Cox — who has previously worked as a consultant for the American Petroleum Institute and the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association. The EPA also disbanded a Particulate Matter Review Panel that previously weighed in Integrated Science Assessment alongside Cox’s committee.

As head of the committee advising the EPA on air quality, Cox has recommended that the agency only consider studies that make a causal link between air pollution and health outcomes through a scientific approach called manipulative causality — essentially a way of determining a potential hazard’s effect on health by looking at what happens when exposure stops. But limiting the scientific evidence under consideration to one methodology versus what scientists call a “weight of evidence approach” would exclude the vast body of research on air pollution.

Jonathan Samet, the former chair of the Chartered Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, explained to Grist that using the weight of evidence method has been the practice for policy decisions for half a century. “This is the kind of approach used to decide that smoking causes lung cancer or that smoking causes heart disease,” Samet said.“These are constructs that are broad and holistic and have long been in place,” he said.

Samet compared manipulative causality to waiting to see whether a smoker’s health improves once they quit the habit. The approach can be prohibitively time-consuming, and it’s just one way of assessing the broad health implications of a potential toxin. And importantly for the EPA’s upcoming air quality decision, there aren’t many studies published already that fall within this framework.

In a scathing article published last week in the journal Science, research director Gretchen Goldman of the Center for Science and Democracy and the Union of Concerned Scientists and Harvard biostatistician Francesca Dominici wrote that “a requirement of manipulative causation fails to recognize the full depth and robustness of existing approaches in epidemiology, statistics, and causal inference and the degree to which they deal with confounding factors.”

A separate statement by the Union of Concerned Scientists contended that if the EPA adopts Cox’s recommendation via the Chartered Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee for limiting studies to the much narrower approach, “It will be virtually impossible to prove particle pollution harms public health, despite the vast array of studies that show otherwise.”

In an email to Grist, a spokesperson for the EPA wrote that “Administrator Wheeler thanks the CASAC for all their efforts and will take all the CASAC advice under consideration.”

Vijay Limaye is a fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council who previously worked at the EPA and helped write the Integrated Science Assessment that Cox’s committee is now scrutinizing. Limaye says the vast majority of the evidence it considers, as well as the research compiled in this week’s State of the Global Air, would be “pushed to the side” under Cox’s approach. “It would basically rob the EPA of a number of tools it’s already been using to characterize the harmful effects of air pollutants.”

The Chartered Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee will finalize its particulate matter review of the EPA’s assessment in the coming weeks.

Continued: 

Just how bad for you is breathing in air pollution? Well, it depends whom you ask.

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Republicans attack Puerto Rico’s plan to go 100 percent renewable: ‘It’s just unrealistic’

by RosellaSchmid Posted on April 10, 2019

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

Republicans on Tuesday pilloried Puerto Rico’s plan to stop burning imported fossil fuels to generate electricity, calling the proposal senseless and opening a new front in an increasingly bitter partisan battle over the storm-ravaged island’s struggle to recover.

At a House Natural Resources Committee hearing, GOP lawmakers dismissed the Puerto Rican legislature’s vote last month to approve an ambitious bill mandating 100 percent renewable power by 2050 as “political interference” and accused the territory’s legislators of squandering an opportunity to reap the spoils of the American fracking boom.

“It’s just unrealistic,” Utah Repbulican representative Rob Bishop said. “Yet there’s still legislation.”

The nine-term congressman, who’s received more from the oil and gas industry than any other donor since taking office, last month became the chief antagonist of Democrats’ Green New Deal resolution, which outlines the first climate proposal scientists say is on the scale of what’s needed to combat the global warming crisis. Bishop falsely claimed the Green New Deal banned hamburgers, and performatively gobbled one at a news conference. Later, he suggested the Green New Deal was tantamount to “genocide.”

Yet, on Tuesday, he blamed Puerto Rico lawmakers for playing politics with the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.

“PREPA has been hamstrung by political demands,” he said. “One of the problems of PREPA in the past is political interference when your primary goal is [to] provide abundant and affordable energy.”

At least 13 states have passed or are considering plans that set 100 percent clean-electricity targets, according to a report last month by the consultancy EQ Research. But Puerto Rico’s circumstance is unique. In September 2017, hurricanes Irma and Maria shredded the island’s aging electrical grid, leaving millions without power in the second-longest blackout in world history.

Puerto Rico imports oil and gas for more than 80 percent of its electricity needs, saddling ratepayers with prices roughly twice the American average and a toxic legacy of pollution. Renewables made up just 2 percent of the electricity mix as of two years ago.

To some, the disaster, widely seen as a glimpse of what’s to come as climate change worsens, presented an opportunity to equip Puerto Rico to harvest its plentiful sun and wind for power. But Republicans instead proposed a shock-doctrine approach that promised to make Puerto Rico a reliable market for U.S.-produced gas and oil.

At a November 2017 hearing before the same committee, Colorado Republican representative Doug Lamborn asked at the time “which environmental regulation waivers” were required to jump-start efforts to import more natural gas to Puerto Rico. Last July, Republican representative Tom McClintock  of California wondered why anyone would consider wind and solar favorable options for Puerto Rico at all.

He doubled down on those queries on Tuesday.

“They’re intermittent,” McClintock said. “They require reliable generators that are running at ready status so that if a cloud passes over or the wind drops off, they can instantly come on.”

It’s an argument President Donald Trump routinely deploys, albeit in less sophisticated terms, to deride renewables. But renewables are typically paired with battery systems that store excess solar or wind power for use when the sky is dark or the air is still. Solar panels paired with batteries provided oases of electricity during Puerto Rico’s monthslong blackout. Indeed, the 100 percent renewables bill exempts energy storage systems from sales tax and eliminates rules that barred Puerto Ricans from installing battery units without permission from PREPA.

Yet batteries barely came up at the hearing, except when one lawmaker pointed out that the technology can be expensive.

The hearing came amid a renewed fight over Puerto Rican disaster relief. Trump repeatedly threatened to cut funding to the battered island, which is still struggling to rebuild as federal aid trickles in slowly. Last week, the president falsely claimed Puerto Rico received $91 billion in relief. In reality, of the $41 billion approved to aid Puerto Rico, only about $11 billion has flowed from federal coffers. Another $50 billion is expected to be delivered, but over a period the Associated Press said “could span decades.”

The Senate failed last week to advance two separate aid bills as Democrats demanded additional funding for Puerto Rico to which Republican leaders said Trump would never agree. Negotiations broke down Tuesday as Congress headed for a two-week recess.

Disaster funding hasn’t halted the natural gas industry’s progress. Last July, the Department of Energy proposed easing shipping rules for liquefied natural gas. By reclassifying tankers as “small scale,” the ships could circumvent more robust federal environmental reviews, according to a report by the watchdog site The Real News.

“The finalization of this rule will expedite the permitting of certain small-scale exports of natural gas,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in a press release at the time. “The so-called ‘small-scale rule’ will further unleash American energy by reducing the regulatory burden on American businesses while also providing significant benefits to our trading partners in the Caribbean, Central America and South America.”

There have been hiccups. In December, Texas-based Excelerate Energy abandoned plans to build a $400 million natural gas terminal on the southern shore of Puerto Rico.

But last month, New York-based New Fortress Energy signed a five-year deal with PREPA to supply natural gas to the utility’s power plant in San Juan. On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Energy Information Administration published its latest figures showing Puerto Rico’s liquefied natural gas imports bounced back to pre-storm levels as of late 2018.

Energy Department electricity chief Bruce Walker, a Trump appointee, testified Tuesday that attempting to rebuild Puerto Rico with non-fossil sources after the storm would have slowed the recovery.

“There are some significant engineering concerns,” he said. “It’s not technically possible today to convert that island to 100 percent renewable.”

PREPA CEO José Ortiz Vázquez agreed, but said the debate was over how heavily to invest in imported gas to carry the island through to its eventual goal of 100 percent clean electricity.

“Some groups favor going straight up with maximum capacity of renewables and keep burning natural gas to get us through to 2050, while other groups have a different opinion, where we should make a big bet now on natural gas and slowly work on the renewable issue,” he said.

Asked how long it would take to convert Puerto Rico’s entire electricity supply, a panel of experts in the second half of the hearing offered answers ranging from “within a decade” to 25 years to “well before the 2050 deadline,” if implemented “under a well-managed, professional system.”

There is a real disagreement over the feasibility of going 100 percent renewable on the national level. A paper published in 2017 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued a better plan was to aim for 80 percent renewables by the middle of the century, with nuclear plants and fossil fuel stations equipped with carbon capture and storage technology making up the rest. But studies released in 2015 made the case that the rapid strides in clean energy made it practical and financially sound to completely transition all 50 states and 139 countries to 100 percent renewable starting immediately.

Yet profits are at the heart of Puerto Rico’s dispute. Last year, the Puerto Rican legislature approved a plan to privatize PREPA. It’s a controversial decision that some say will help the bankrupt utility to dig itself out of debt and make the improvements it needs to lower electricity prices. But others fear a PREPA beholden to investors will lock in high rates and transfer control of a public good into the hands of the rich, establishing yet another way the downtrodden U.S. colony generates wealth for those back on the mainland.

“It’s not possible for PREPA to immediately convert to 100 percent renewable energy. There will be a transition period. We recognize that,” said Democratic representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who presided over Tuesday’s hearing as committee chairman. “But there are concerns that the current plan to focus on natural gas instead of maximizing and doing promotion around solar generation will lock us into an infrastructure that will soon be dated, an infrastructure that will be dependent on importation. Am I correct?”

Marla Pérez Lugo, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, said the question captured “the essence of the problem.”

“We’re still thinking that what’s good for PREPA is good for Puerto Rico,” she said. “And that is not necessarily so.”

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Republicans attack Puerto Rico’s plan to go 100 percent renewable: ‘It’s just unrealistic’

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Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing – Laura J. Snyder

by Myrna Posted on April 10, 2019

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Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing

Laura J. Snyder

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: March 16, 2015

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


The remarkable story of how an artist and a scientist in seventeenth-century Holland transformed the way we see the world. On a summer day in 1674, in the small Dutch city of Delft, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek—a cloth salesman, local bureaucrat, and self-taught natural philosopher—gazed through a tiny lens set into a brass holder and discovered a never-before imagined world of microscopic life. At the same time, in a nearby attic, the painter Johannes Vermeer was using another optical device, a camera obscura, to experiment with light and create the most luminous pictures ever beheld. “See for yourself!” was the clarion call of the 1600s. Scientists peered at nature through microscopes and telescopes, making the discoveries in astronomy, physics, chemistry, and anatomy that ignited the Scientific Revolution. Artists investigated nature with lenses, mirrors, and camera obscuras, creating extraordinarily detailed paintings of flowers and insects, and scenes filled with realistic effects of light, shadow, and color. By extending the reach of sight the new optical instruments prompted the realization that there is more than meets the eye. But they also raised questions about how we see and what it means to see. In answering these questions, scientists and artists in Delft changed how we perceive the world. In Eye of the Beholder, Laura J. Snyder transports us to the streets, inns, and guildhalls of seventeenth-century Holland, where artists and scientists gathered, and to their studios and laboratories, where they mixed paints and prepared canvases, ground and polished lenses, examined and dissected insects and other animals, and invented the modern notion of seeing. With charm and narrative flair Snyder brings Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek—and the men and women around them—vividly to life. The story of these two geniuses and the transformation they engendered shows us why we see the world—and our place within it—as we do today. Eye of the Beholder was named "A Best Art Book of the Year" by Christie's and "A Best Read of the Year" by New Scientist in 2015.

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Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing – Laura J. Snyder

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The Snow Leopard – Peter Matthiessen & Pico Iyer

by Myrna Posted on April 10, 2019

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The Snow Leopard

Peter Matthiessen & Pico Iyer

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: September 30, 2008

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), the National Book Award-winning author of the new novel In Paradise In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by acclaimed travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

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The Snow Leopard – Peter Matthiessen & Pico Iyer

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The latest House climate hearing went about as well as you’d expect

by DeneseLamble Posted on April 9, 2019

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John Kerry deserves some kind of award (in addition to his Purple Hearts) for responding to a slew of truly dumb questions on Tuesday with his signature composure.

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform held its first climate hearing on Tuesday and, hoo boy, it was a doozy. The former secretary of state, alongside former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagle, fielded questions from Republican and Democratic representatives — ostensibly on the subject of climate change and national security — for a good four hours. I know what you’re thinking: “Four hours of testimony? Count me out.” But this wasn’t your typical congressional snoozefest, I promise.

Despite some off-the-wall questions, Kerry only lost his cool (read: appeared vaguely exasperated) a few times. Exhibit A: when Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie asked a series of increasingly inane questions that culminated in: “Did geology stop when we got on the planet?”

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Rather than taking the time to explain that geological change is, in fact, ongoing, Kerry responded: “This is just not a serious conversation.” Zing!

Not to be outdone, Paul Gosar of Arizona — the same Republican representative who suggested that photosynthesis discredits climate change — asked Kerry whether he supports a ban on plastic straws. An important national security question!

“It would be great to provide a way to move to a biodegradable straw, frankly,” Kerry replied, bemused. Then, Gosar picked up a dark gray ball of what he described as “rare earth … from the Mojave Desert” as a prop to demonstrate his point that the U.S. needs to be more aggressive about mining rare earth metals if it wants to develop renewable technology.

Kerry described the stunt as “a five-minute presentation on all the reasons we can’t do this or that without any legitimate question or dialogue.” Another zinger!

On the Democratic side, representatives Ro Khanna of California and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York focused on the need for swift action, promoting the progressive climate proposal called the Green New Deal. Ocasio-Cortez asked the bipartisan committee to read the contents of the 14-page resolution, which she co-introduced in February, in full. “We don’t need CliffsNotes,” she quipped.

Now that Democrats are back in control of the House, there have been more and more climate change hearings happening. But after four hours of questioning on Tuesday, the committee didn’t have much to work with. That’s a hard pill to swallow, even with the aid of a biodegradable straw.

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The latest House climate hearing went about as well as you’d expect

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Amazon accused of abandoning 100 percent renewable energy goal

by IndiraRxm3 Posted on April 9, 2019

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

Amazon has been accused of abandoning a much-publicized goal of running its data centers on 100 percent renewable energy — instead focusing its attention on winning business from the oil and gas industry.

According to a Greenpeace report released earlier this year, some of Amazon’s most important data centers in Virginia, where the company has committed to building its second HQ, are powered by only 12 percent renewable energy. Across the company as a whole, Amazon reached 50 percent renewable usage in 2018, and has not issued any updates since.

This week, a report from the tech news site Gizmodo suggested one reason for the slowdown was Amazon’s increasing focus on bringing on board large oil and gas companies as Amazon Web Service customers.

The figures represent slow progress towards the goal, first announced in 2014, to power the entire company using renewables, and have led some to accuse Amazon of abandoning the goal entirely.

Alongside the organization’s report, Greenpeace’s Elizabeth Jardim said: “Despite Amazon’s public commitment to renewable energy, the world’s largest cloud computing company is hoping no one will notice that it’s still powering its corner of the internet with dirty energy.

“Unless Amazon and other cloud giants in Virginia change course, our growing use of the internet could lead to more pipelines, more pollution and more problems for our climate.”

Gizmodo’s report cited Andrew Jassy, the AWS chief executive, who told an oil and gas conference in Houston last month: “A lot of the things that we have built and released recently have been very much informed by conversations with our oil and gas customers and partners.”

Gizmodo contrasted his statement with another, reported in December, from the AWS executive Peter DeSantis, who “told colleagues inside the company that renewable energy projects are too costly and don’t help it win business.”

Amazon’s renewables record is in stark contrast to some of its competitors, most notably Google, which reported success in reaching 100 percent renewables use in 2017. “Our engineers have spent years perfecting Google’s data centers, making them 50 percent more energy-efficient than the industry average,” the company’s head of technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, said at the time.

“But we still need a lot of energy to process trillions of Google searches every year, play more than 400 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute and power the products and services that our users depend on. That’s why we began purchasing renewable energy – to reduce our carbon footprint and address climate change. But it also makes business sense.”

A year later, Apple declared its “retail stores, offices, data centers and co-located facilities in 43 countries” were powered by 100 percent clean energy. Facebook has committed to do the same by 2020.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Amazon accused of abandoning 100 percent renewable energy goal

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Nathaniel Rich’s ‘Losing Earth’ tells lost history of our current climate predicament

by IngeKWKdxrhvg Posted on April 9, 2019

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Nathaniel Rich published his 30,000-word account of the years between 1979 and 1989 — the decade humanity missed its chance to fix climate change — in the New York Times Magazine last August. The response to the piece was so staggering that Rich put aside his other projects and started turning it into a book the very next week. Losing Earth: A Recent History is out on the shelves April 9, just eight months after the magazine version hit newsstands.

Our near-constant companion throughout the whole sordid tale is an environmental lobbyist by the name of Rafe Pomerance. In 1979, when the story begins, Pomerance happened upon a report warning that continued use of fossil fuels would cause “significant and damaging” changes to the planet’s atmosphere in the span of a few decades. Alarmed, Pomerance, with the aid of a geophysicist named Gordon MacDonald, decided to try to bring the issue to the attention of the U.S. government.

At first, serious progress appeared to be underway. The Carter administration commissioned a report to ascertain whether the issue was really as dire as some scientists were saying. (It was.) But when a team of scientists, policy experts, and government officials convened at a hotel in Florida to craft a framework for addressing the problem, they couldn’t even agree on what the opening paragraph of their statement should say. Thus began an excruciating decade of indecision, delay, and obstruction.

Pan Macmillan, 2019

If you finished the marathon task of reading the original magazine article, you’ll find the plotline more or less familiar, though there are some new chapters. And this time around, Rich addresses something many readers, including this one, were left wondering: What do we make of this history?

“We can realize that all this talk about the fate of Earth has nothing to do with the planet’s tolerance for higher temperatures and everything to do with our species’ tolerance for self-delusion,” he writes in the afterword. “And we can understand that when we speak about things like fuel efficiency standards or gasoline taxes or methane flaring, we are speaking about nothing less than all we love and all we are.”

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Grist caught up with Rich to talk about his new book and what we can make of the agonizing history he unearthed. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q.Did you plan to turn your article into a book?

A.As soon as the piece was published, I realized there were some very large questions that arose from the history. I felt some obligation to try to answer those questions more explicitly than I was able to do in the article. I wrote a new afterword that’s essentially a stand-alone essay. I also wanted to go into a little more depth and bring the story up to date from 1989 to the present. Despite the length of the magazine piece, there was actually a lot I had to leave out. And so I was excited for the opportunity to publish a definitive version of the story that I think is fuller, more comprehensive, and more complete as a work of writing.

Q.I’m curious about some of the criticism your article received. Robinson Meyer of the Atlantic wrote that you let “fossil-fuel interests off the hook entirely,” and Naomi Klein argued that you overlooked the role capitalism played in dooming us all. How did you respond to that?

A.I was very surprised at some of those criticisms. As you said, there was this accusation, and usually it was expressed very viciously, that I had downplayed the oil and gas industry’s role in blocking climate policy during that decade. At first I was worried. I thought maybe — in my two-year survey and my interviews with like 100 people — maybe I did miss something.

The [oil and gas] industry wasn’t helping matters, as I write about in detail. Of course, they were aware of the science, just like the government, just like anybody who was following the issue, and made little effort to publicize it or anything else. They made no efforts to pass laws to limit emissions — that would be sort of a ridiculous expectation.

No one is disputing what happened since 1988 and ’89, but the suggestion was that there was a coordinated effort to stop climate policy earlier than that, and nobody in their attacks on the piece was able to come up with a single example.

Q.Why did you choose to tell the story this way, through the lens of a single decade in American history?

A.I felt that the story from 1989 to the present has been extraordinarily well told, and exhaustively told. And I didn’t feel like I had much to add to the story of industry involvement, the corruption of politicians, the corruption of scientists, the Republican Party’s embrace of, first, disinformation propaganda fed to it by oil and gas industry, and then the metastasizing of that into the full-fledged fantasy world of denialism.

What I felt was not understood very well, including by me when I first started researching it, was how we got to that point: the pre-history of our current paralysis. Paralysis not only in the political process but in some sense the dialogue, the public conversation about the subject. It’s been relatively unchanged since the 1990s. So there was this opportunity to tell the story of exactly a decade, from the establishment of scientific consensus about the nature of the problem and the birth of this movement to try to bring about a solution. That was the story that I feel like has been forgotten, including by a lot of people who are on the front lines of the climate change conversation.

A lot of activists and advocates are still under the impression that the problem started with James Hansen speaking before Congress in 1988. Even New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the other day was giving an extraordinarily passionate, eloquent speech on the floor of the House about how we need to take action on climate, and she said that the government has known about this since 1989. I don’t mean to single her out, but even people on the leading edge of this are still essentially taking for granted the industry talking point that this is a new problem, something that has just come to light as recently as the 1980s. Of course, the government knew about it in the 1950s. And scientists knew about it decades before that. The amount of public amnesia around the issue is staggering.

Q.A few times throughout the decade you focus on in your book, the United States was on the precipice of real climate action. It never materialized. Now, it feels like parts of the public are mobilizing toward action again. Could this time be different?

A.What’s changed really in recent months in the public conversation is that the young leaders are now bringing new momentum to the issue. They’re saying things like, “our lives are at stake, you people in positions of power are robbing our future from us.” They’re also making very emphatic connections in the way they talk about how the climate crisis is inextricable from almost every issue of social injustice in the U.S. and globally. When you hear Ocasio-Cortez or Greta Thunberg talk about it, they’re making a moral argument that I think is frankly stronger and more profound, and ultimately more politically effective, than making only the logical argument. There’s a moral tenor to the way they’re talking about it that I don’t think was present and couldn’t have been present in the 1980s.

It’s a transformation of the dialogue that I think was inevitable, but it’s heartening to see it happening now. It’s extremely powerful and it will only become more so. I also think it’s a more honest way of speaking about the problem, as something that is a threat to our very humanity and the way we view ourselves. That’s why I went back to this period [between 1979 and 1989] because I think it’s a way of writing about this story in human terms, before the poisoning of the dialogue.

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Nathaniel Rich’s ‘Losing Earth’ tells lost history of our current climate predicament

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Losing Earth – Nathaniel Rich

by Myrna Posted on April 9, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Losing Earth

A Recent History

Nathaniel Rich

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $11.99

Expected Publish Date: April 9, 2019

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Seller: Macmillan


By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change—including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story, and ours. The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon—the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight. Now expanded into book form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The book carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves. Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth , Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here, and how we must go forward.

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Losing Earth – Nathaniel Rich

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2019′s Dirty Dozen: Which Foods Have the Most Pesticides?

by IssacSeaman327 Posted on April 8, 2019

Beware the ?Dirty Dozen.? The Environmental Working Group has released its annual list of fruits and vegetables most likely to be contaminated with pesticides, based on testing from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And this year?s Dirty Dozen ? as the produce is nicknamed ? has some unsettling surprises.

?Overall, the USDA found 225 different pesticides and pesticide breakdown products on popular fruits and vegetables Americans eat every day,? according to an Environmental Working Group news release. ?Before testing, all produce was washed and peeled, just as people would prepare food for themselves.? And the results for one particular trendy food were eye-opening. ?The most surprising news from the USDA tests reveals that the popular health food kale is among the most contaminated fruits and vegetables,? the news release says.

So which conventionally grown fruits and vegetables (as opposed to organic) should you avoid if you want to limit the pesticides in your diet? Here is 2019?s Dirty Dozen.

12. Potatoes

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The Environmental Working Group does point out that eating plenty of fruits and vegetables is critical for a healthy diet. But to make sure you?re maximizing the benefits, try to consume pesticide-free, organic varieties as often as possible. Potatoes, for instance, have numerous health benefits ? as long as you?re not solely consuming them in chip form. One baked potato has about 145 calories, 2 grams of fiber and 3 grams of protein. It also contains many vitamins and minerals ? including several B vitamins, 10 percent of the recommended daily intake of magnesium, 17 percent of potassium, 13 percent of manganese and 17 percent of copper.

11. Celery

Have you joined the celery juice bandwagon? If you don?t want to be sipping or crunching on pesticides, aim to go the organic route. One cup of chopped celery contains just 16 calories with 2 grams of fiber and a gram of protein. And it still offers a fair amount of nutrients ? including 9 percent of the recommended vitamin A intake, 37 percent of vitamin K, 9 percent of folate and 8 percent of potassium. Plus, according to Healthline, celery is full of antioxidants and can help reduce inflammation and aid digestion.

10. Tomatoes

Tomatoes are great to grow in your home garden, where you can prevent pesticides and other chemicals from coming in contact with your food. A cup of chopped tomatoes has only 32 calories with 2 grams of fiber and 2 grams of protein. Plus, the serving provides you with 30 percent of your daily vitamin A, 38 percent of vitamin C, 18 percent of vitamin K and 12 percent of potassium, among other nutrients. Tomatoes are especially known for their lycopene, which gives them their red pigment. ?Lycopene has been linked to health benefits ranging from heart health to protection against sunburns and certain types of cancers,? according to Healthline.

9. Pears

A medium pear is a substantial snack ? containing about 100 calories, 6 grams of fiber and a gram of protein. It also offers some vitamins and minerals, including 12 percent of the recommended vitamin C intake, 10 percent of vitamin K, 6 percent of potassium and 7 percent of copper. Still, even though a pear?s skin helps to make it a great source of fiber, it doesn?t keep the pesticides out. So make sure you?re consuming clean varieties of this fruit.

8. Cherries

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More than 90 percent of the cherry samples the Environmental Working Group analyzed tested positive for two or more pesticides. So for the full health-boosting potential of this tart little fruit, go organic. A cup of cherries has about 87 calories, 3 grams of fiber and 1 gram of protein. It also gives you a good amount of vitamin C, B vitamins and several minerals. Plus, according to Healthline, cherries are full of antioxidants and phytochemicals that can protect your body against diseases and reduce inflammation.

7. Peaches

The thin skin of peaches doesn?t offer them much protection against pesticides. But it will contribute some fiber to your diet. One medium peach has about 60 calories, 2 grams of fiber and a gram of protein. It also contains several B vitamins, about 10 percent of the recommended vitamin A intake, 17 percent of vitamin C, 5 percent of vitamin K and 8 percent of potassium. And according to Healthline, peaches can be considered a low-sugar fruit with a little less than 13 grams of natural sugars.

6. Grapes

If you take pesticides out of the equation, grapes can be a very healthy addition to your diet. A cup of red or green grapes has roughly 100 calories and a gram of fiber. And it provides you with 27 percent of the recommended vitamin C intake, 28 percent of vitamin K, 8 percent of potassium and 10 percent of copper, among other nutrients. According to Healthline, the potent antioxidants in grapes can help fight several diseases, such as diabetes and cancer. Plus, grapes also might help to improve heart health and lower cholesterol.

5. Apples

Just like with cherries, more than 90 percent of the apple samples carried two or more pesticides. ?Apples are generally near the top of EWG?s Dirty Dozen list because they contain an average of 4.4 pesticide residues, including some at high concentrations,? according to the Environmental Working Group. And there?s one chemical in particular that?s especially controversial. ?Most conventionally grown apples are drenched in diphenylamine, an antioxidant chemical treatment used to prevent the skin of apples in cold storage from developing brown or black patches,? the Environmental Working Group says. U.S. growers and regulators say the chemical poses no risk, but European regulators feel there isn?t enough evidence to prove its safety.

4. Nectarines

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Nectarines also are among the fruits and vegetables that had more than 90 percent of their samples test positive for two or more pesticides. But sans pesticides, nectarines are a healthy way to get several nutrients. A medium nectarine has about 62 calories ? most of those coming from its natural sugars. Plus, it contains 2 grams of fiber and 2 grams of protein. It also offers multiple B vitamins, 9 percent of the recommended vitamin A intake, 13 percent of vitamin C, 8 percent of potassium and 6 percent of copper.

3. Kale

The Department of Agriculture hadn?t included kale in its pesticide tests since 2009. At that time, it ranked eighth on the Dirty Dozen list. But since its popularity has skyrocketed, so has the pesticide use. ?More than 92 percent of kale samples had two or more pesticide residues detected, and a single sample could contain up to 18 different residues,? according to the Environmental Working Group news release. Especially alarming was the presence of the pesticide DCPA, or Dacthal, which showed up in roughly 60 percent of the kale samples. Since 1995, the EPA has classified DCPA as a possible carcinogen ? specifically citing liver and thyroid tumors ? and the European Union banned it in 2009. Yet it?s still legal to use on U.S. crops ? including kale.

2. Spinach

?Federal data shows that conventionally grown spinach has more pesticide residues by weight than all other produce tested,? according to the Environmental Working Group. There were an average of 7.1 different pesticides on every spinach sample. And more than three-quarters of the samples contained one particularly scary ?neurotoxic bug killer? called permethrin. ?At high doses, permethrin overwhelms the nervous system and causes tremors and seizures,? the Environmental Working Group says. ?But several studies also found a link between lower-level exposure to permethrin-type insecticides and neurological effects in children.? Europe banned permethrin in 2000, but the EPA is still assessing its risks.

1. Strawberries

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Sweet, juicy, pesticide-filled strawberries took the top spot on 2019?s Dirty Dozen. ?Conventionally grown strawberries ? contained an average of 7.8 different pesticides per sample, compared to 2.2 pesticides per sample for all other produce,? according to the Environmental Working Group. ?? What?s worse, strawberry growers use jaw-dropping volumes of poisonous gases to sterilize their fields before planting, killing every pest, weed and other living thing in the soil.? Of all the samples, 99 percent contained at least one pesticide ? and 30 percent had 10 or more pesticides. Some of these chemicals have been linked to cancer, reproductive issues, hormone disruption, neurological problems and more. So if you?re not keen on putting that in your body, stick to the organic varieties.

Bonus: Hot peppers

The Environmental Working Group expanded 2019?s Dirty Dozen to include hot peppers, which don?t meet its traditional ranking criteria but nonetheless should have their contaminants exposed. ?The USDA tests of 739 samples of hot peppers in 2010 and 2011 found residues of three highly toxic insecticides ? acephate, chlorpyrifos and oxamyl ? on a portion of sampled peppers at concentrations high enough to cause concern,? according to the Environmental Working Group news release. ?These insecticides are banned on some crops but still allowed on hot peppers.? So buy organic hot peppers whenever possible. But if you can?t, washing and cooking them can somewhat diminish the pesticide levels.

Main image credit: 4nadia/Getty Images

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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2019′s Dirty Dozen: Which Foods Have the Most Pesticides?

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