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Hillary Clinton has a new tune on fracking

by GonzaloTen93 Posted on March 7, 2016

Hillary Clinton has a new tune on fracking

By on 6 Mar 2016commentsShare

A college student asked Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton a simple question at the Flint, Mich., debate on Sunday night: “Do you support fracking?”

And Bernie Sanders had a simple answer: “No, I do not support fracking.”

Hillary Clinton, though, needed more time to outline three conditions in a more nuanced answer on fracking. She’s against it “when any locality or any state is against it,” “when the release of methane or contamination of water is present,” and “unless we can require that anybody who fracks has to tell us exactly what chemicals they are using.”

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Until those conditions are met, “we’ve got to regulate everything that is currently underway, and we have to have a system in place that prevents further fracking.”

“By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place,” she added.

Clinton offered qualified support for fracking well before Sanders even registered in the presidential race. Addressing the National Clean Energy Summit in 2014, Clinton said, “we have to face head-on the legitimate, pressing environmental concerns about some new extraction practices and their impacts on local water, soil, and air supplies. Methane leaks in the production and transportation of natural gas are particularly troubling. So it’s crucial that we put in place smart regulations and enforce them, including deciding not to drill when the risks are too high.”

Yet, she sounded much more rosy on natural gas and fracking years ago than she does now. “With the right safeguards in place, gas is cleaner than coal. And expanding production is creating tens of thousands of new jobs,” she said in 2014. “And lower costs are helping give the United States a big competitive advantage in energy-intensive energies.”

As secretary of state in 2010, Clinton argued in favor of gas as “the cleanest fossil fuel available for power generation today,” and said that “if developed, shale gas could make an important contribution to our region’s energy supply, just as it does now for the United States.” Her office, meanwhile, promoted fracking in developing nations.

After leaving the Obama administration in 2014, Clinton still emphasized the benefits of fracking, implying that strict limits on fracking should be the exception to the rule. In 2016, Clinton has flipped her emphasis, as Sanders has gained an edge from his anti-fracking stance: Now, she suggests it will be a rare, unlikely case when fracking should be allowed.

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Hillary Clinton has a new tune on fracking

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Americans spend 30 billion hours a year commuting. And it’s killing them

by KatrinZachary Posted on February 27, 2016

Americans spend 30 billion hours a year commuting. And it’s killing them

By on 26 Feb 2016commentsShare

Commuting can be one of the most frustrating parts of having a job — a dull, talk-radio-filled, coffee-fueled drive every morning with all the other schmucks on the road.

I experienced it once while living in North Carolina: an awful slog through traffic lights and sprawl that annoyed me so much that I moved. Now, my commute is on foot, an easy mile walk to downtown Seattle, and on a clear day, you can see Mt. Rainer. Rather than dread my commute, I enjoy it. But I am one of the lucky few.

According to a new study, the average American spends 26 minutes traveling to work each way, and for over 80 percent of Americans, that time is spent in a car, usually alone. And the worse part is, it’s only getting longer. The Washington Post reports that 26 minute is:

the longest it’s been since the Census began tracking this data in 1980. Back then the typical commute was only 21.7 minutes. The average American commute has gotten nearly 20 percent longer since then.

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According to the Census, there were a little over 139 million workers commuting in 2014. At an average of 26 minutes each way to work, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that works out to something like a total of 1.8 trillion minutes Americans spent commuting in 2014. Or, if you prefer, call it 29.6 billion hours, 1.2 billion days, or a collective 3.4 million years. With that amount of time, we could have built nearly 300 Wikipedias, or built the Great Pyramid of Giza 26 times — all in 2014 alone.

Instead, we spent those hours sitting in cars and waiting for the bus.

The Post concentrates on the negative effects on the commuter. People with longer commutes are more likely to suffer from obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, back and neck pain, divorce, depression, and death, according the Post, as well as to be less politically engaged, more likely to be poor, miss work, and have other problems. There’s also issues of lost productivity, says the Post: Think of how many more apps we could invent with all those hours! But there’s another issue they didn’t mention. That’s right: climate change.

The vast majority of those nearly 30 billion hours spent commuting every year are by people alone in their gas-powered cars. The carbon footprint of that is just massive, and as commutes grow, it’ll only get worse. It’s a complex problem: Commutes are so long both because cities are so expensive and because mass transit in most American cities is so inadequate.

Take Seattle: If you can’t afford to live close to the city center (or if you’re not willing to live in a studio the size of a jail cell, as I do), you’ll have to contend with either driving yourself to work in the fourth worst traffic in the country, or relying on an often unreliable bus or train.

The current system isn’t working as the myriad of negative effects on both us and the planet show. But until we can figure out how to make cities more affordable and build robust transit systems and carpooling options, the answer may be simply to work from home when it’s possible. We might not be able to teleport yet, but for those who can, there’s always teleworking.

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Americans spend 30 billion hours a year commuting. And it’s killing them

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Antarctica is basically liquefying

by AntonieGlossop Posted on March 27, 2015

Antarctica is basically liquefying

By on 27 Mar 2015commentsShare

Antarctica’s icy edges are melting 70 percent faster in some places than they were a decade ago, according to a new study in the journal Science.

These massive ice shelves serve as a buffer between the continent’s ice-sheet system and the ocean. As they disintegrate, more and more ice will slip into the sea, raising sea levels by potentially huge amounts.

This study is just the latest bit of horrible news from the bottom of the world. Last year, we found out that the West Antarctic ice sheet was in terminal collapse, which could raise sea levels by 10 to 15 feet over a few hundred years. Then, earlier this month, we learned that an enormous glacier on the other side of the continent is in the same state, and could contribute about the same amount to sea-level rise.

This latest research, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, reinforces those findings, adding to the evidence that the continent’s future looks quite grim. Using satellite data, researchers found that “ice-shelf volume change accelerated from negligible loss” between 1994 and 2003 to “rapid loss” between 2003 and 2012. Within a century, a number of ice sheets, which are vanishing by dozens of feet per year, could completely disappear.

Though the geology of east and west Antarctica is different — the ice in the east stretches out over water like a shelf, while the ice in the west is stuck to land below the sea — the entire continent is eroding due to warmer ocean waters and drier weather. The changing water temperature and decreased precipitation speak to broader, long-term changes in climate across the continent, though the west Antarctic is more immediately threatened.

Were Antarctica to melt completely, it would raise sea levels by more than 200 feet. That, of course, would take hundreds of thousands of years. And researchers reiterate that they need more and better data before they understand exactly what’s going on with the continent, and how quickly we can expect it to shrink global coastlines.

But the bad news doesn’t seem likely to stop anytime soon: On Monday and Tuesday, it was a balmy 63 degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom of the world, a record high.

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Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car

by GustavoMorice Posted on December 10, 2014

Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car

By on 10 Dec 2014commentsShare

Here’s a great argument for public transit, in a single image: Check out how gnarly it’d be — and how many dang bridges New York would have to build — if the estimated 2 million-plus people commuting in and out of Manhattan during rush hour each day drove their own cars:

Matt Taylor

According to an analysis by Vancouver-based highway design engineer Matt Taylor, the city would need a whopping 48 additional eight-lane bridges to accommodate such a travesty.

The next step to his analysis — parking — suggests that if as many people also needed off-street parking, there’d be 62 square kilometers (or almost 24 square miles) of parking space, “equivalent to a layer of underground parking underneath the entire island.” If local residents also drove, he estimates, they’d need TWO layers.

Luckily for New York, though, just 16 percent of commuters actually drive their own vehicles to work these days, and few local residents drive: New Yorkers average about 23 cars per 100 residents, compared to about 78 for the rest of the country. (Though maybe it’d get even better if Manhattan went the way of Paris and started banning cars entirely?)

Anyway, thank goodness this is just a rendering; research repeatedly shows that when we build more roads, all we get is more traffic. We shudder to imagine the gridlock.

Source:
An Auto-Oriented Manhattan

, MTaylor Analysis.

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Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car

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How green is the iPhone 6?

by IeshaQirvridew Posted on September 9, 2014

How green is the iPhone 6?

By

9 Sep 2014 7:12 PM

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How green is the iPhone 6?

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The iPhone 6 was released today, as everyone knows (though you can’t actually get your hands on one until September 19), and along with the flurry of tweets and blog posts and news articles came — naturally — a tacit claim about its environmental prowess.

According to today’s live-streamed event in Cupertino, Calif., Apple’s commitment to the environment includes a mercury-free, arsenic-free, and beryllium-free iPhone 6, among other things. This follows the company’s official ban, a few weeks ago, of benxene and n-hexane — two toxic chemicals previously used in the final assembly of Apple products.

Some of the Twitterverse thought all this was, um, great.

Others weren’t so impressed.

Those who speculated we’d be able to charge our phones with their screens are sorely disappointed, too. The much-anticipated iPhone 6 screen — which Apple said today is indeed “laminated to a single crystal of sapphire, the hardest transparent material after diamond” — may be manufactured using solar power. But it isn’t (yet) a built-in solar panel itself.

Wait, the iPhone 6 has millions of pixels and 84 times faster graphics and 128 gigs and DSLR-style camera capabilities and it isn’t powered by embedded solar cells? Yo, Apple — you got nothin’.

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How green is the iPhone 6?

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