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Hobby Drones: Not as Cute and Cuddly As You Think

by MyrnaLigertwood Posted on August 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Somebody at the FAA leaked several hundred rogue-drone reports to the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock:

Before last year, close encounters with rogue drones were unheard of. But as a result of a sales boom, small, largely unregulated remote-control aircraft are clogging U.S. airspace, snarling air traffic and giving the FAA fits.

Pilots have reported a surge in close calls with drones: nearly 700 incidents so far this year, according to FAA statistics, about triple the number recorded for all of 2014. The agency has acknowledged growing concern about the problem and its inability to do much to tame it.

And we saw something similar a few weeks ago, when private drones interfered with firefighting in California.

This is the reason I’m more skeptical about a laissez faire attitude toward drones than many people. Once they’re out there, they’re out there, and all the new regulations in the world won’t put the genie back in the bottle. Conversely, if you regulate them more tightly and ease up slowly as the consequences become clearer, we can avoid things like drones bringing down a 747 about to land at LaGuardia.

Nobody likes the idea of the government getting in the way of cool new technology. I get that. But governments regulate driverless cars for an obvious reason: they’re dangerous. Drones probably ought to be more tightly regulated for the same reason. When one person in 10,000 owned one, they seemed harmless. When one person in a hundred owns one, it suddenly becomes clear that a sky full of hobby drones might not be such a great idea. When the day comes that everyone has one, it will be too late.

This is true of a lot of things. When they’re rare, they seem harmless. And they are! But you need to think about what happens when they get cheap and ubiquitous. In the case of drones, we might not like what we get.

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Hobby Drones: Not as Cute and Cuddly As You Think

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These Kids Are Fed Up and They’re Not Going to Take It Anymore

by AbelSVBXuzcfe Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Twenty-one young people from around the country filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on Tuesday accusing the federal government of violating their rights by contributing to climate change through the promotion of fossil fuels.

The plaintiffs, who range in age from 8 to 19, filed their complaint in US District Court in Oregon. The complaint lists numerous defendants, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Defendants have for decades ignored their own plans for stopping the dangerous destabilization of our nation’s climate system,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint, which was filed with the help of the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children’s Trust. “Defendants have known of the unusually dangerous risk of harm to human life, liberty, and property that would be caused by continued fossil fuel use and increase carbon dioxide emissions.”

While setting new policies to reduce carbon emissions, the Obama administration has often touted an “all of the above” approach to energy policy that includes oil, natural gas, coal and renewable energy, the complaint continues. By continuing to promote the development and use of fossil fuels, the federal government violated their constitutional rights, the young plaintiffs allege.

“What we are providing is an opportunity for them to participate in the civic democratic process and go to the branch of government that can most protect their rights,” said Julia Olson, the lead counsel on the case.

Olson, a public interest attorney, has been working closely with plaintiff Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 15, since 2011. It was Martinez who originally asked Olson to prepare the case against the United States government.

Martinez, who serves as the youth director for Earth Guardians, spoke before the United Nations General Assembly in June and demanded world leaders take action against climate change. It was his third time addressing the United Nations.

Climate change threatens the forests surrounding Martinez’s home in Boulder, Colorado, and will lead to a scarcity of water, the complaint says. Another plaintiff, 18-year-old Alexander Lozak, said that extreme drought conditions are threatening the Oregon land that his great, great, great, great, grandmother first farmed.

“The health and bodily integrity of his family and their farm, which they rely on for food and as a source of income—as well as for their personal well-being—increasingly are harmed by climate change caused by Defendants,” the complaint says.

The youngest plaintiff, 8-year-old Levi Draheim, said he can no longer swim in the river near his home in Indialantic, Florida, because of an increase in bacteria and fish die-offs.

In response to the complaint, the Environmental Protection Agency defended its work to confront climate change, which it described as “the biggest environmental challenge we face.”

“That’s why President Obama launched the Climate Action Plan and why EPA is taking action with our Clean Power Plan: to give our kids and grandkids the cleaner, safer future they deserve,” Laura Allen, deputy press secretary for the EPA, said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “We have a moral obligation to leave a healthy planet for future generations.”

“A child born today will turn fifteen in the year 2030—the year when the full benefits of the Clean Power Plan will be realized,” Allen added. “The actions we take now will clear the way for that child—and kids everywhere—to learn, play, and grow up in a world that’s not only clean and safe, but full of opportunity.”

In early August, Obama called climate change “one of the key challenges of our lifetime.”

“We’re the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it,” the president told an audience at an event in the White House’s East Room, where he unveiled new regulations on emissions from power plants.

But in the eyes of Olson and the plaintiffs, that’s not enough. They are asking for a court order to force Obama to immediately implement a national plan to decrease atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million—a level many scientists agree is the highest safe concentration permissible—by the end of this century. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already hit 400 parts per million.

“It’s really important that the court step in and do their jobs when there’s such intense violation of constitutional rights happening,” Olson said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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These Kids Are Fed Up and They’re Not Going to Take It Anymore

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The State Department Is About to Ruin Reporters’ Weekend Plans With Another Clinton Email Dump

by ElliotLockhart Posted on July 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Are you a reporter working the Hillary Clinton beat? Hope you didn’t have plans for Friday evening, because chances are you’ll be spending a late night at the office going through thousands of new Clinton emails on the US State Department’s clunky Freedom of Information Act site. The agency confirmed to Mother Jones that the next batch of emails from her time as secretary of state is due to be released tomorrow. Subsequent batches will be released on the last business day of the month.

The emails slated for release are part of the more than 55,000 pages of correspondence that the Democratic presidential candidate turned over to the State Department and that had been stored on her private email server. A federal judge ruled in May that the agency had to make the emails public on a rolling basis as it vetted them for sensitive information instead of releasing the whole trove of messages in January 2016, as the agency had originally proposed. Shortly after the ruling, about 300 emails were released in May, and another 1,900 were released at the end of June.

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The State Department Is About to Ruin Reporters’ Weekend Plans With Another Clinton Email Dump

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Here’s How the Iran Nuclear Deal Is Supposed to Work

by MackenzLuq Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Apparently this is Let’s Make a Deal week. First the Greeks, now the Iranians. The deal with Iran restricts their supply of uranium, cuts down the number of centrifuges they can run, forces them to account for past activity, and puts in place strict verification measures. So when does it take effect: Here’s the Washington Post:

The agreement will not take effect until Iran is certified to have met its terms — something Iran says will happen in a matter of weeks but that Western diplomats have said could take at least until the end of the year.

Hmmm. That’s not necessarily a good start. So when will sanctions be lifted?

From the Post: A senior Obama administration official said that, until Iranian compliance is verified, an 18-month old interim agreement restricting Iran’s activities, and sanctions, will remain in place.

From the New York Times: Diplomats also came up with unusual procedure to “snap back” the sanctions against Iran if an eight-member panel determines that Tehran is violating the nuclear provisions.

The members of the panel are Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, the European Union and Iran itself. A majority vote is required, meaning that Russia, China and Iran could not collectively block action. The investigation and referral process calls for a time schedule of 65 days, tight compared to the years the atomic energy agency has taken to pursue suspicious activity.

And here’s the Guardian with a bullet list of the main points of the agreement:

Iran will reduce its enrichment capacity by two-thirds. It will stop using its underground facility at Fordow for enriching uranium.
Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium will be reduced to 300kg, a 96% reduction. It will achieve this reduction either by diluting it or shipping it out of the country.
The core of the heavy water reactor in Arak will be removed, and it will be redesigned in such a way that it will not produce significant amounts of plutonium.
Iran will allow UN inspectors to enter sites, including military sites, when the inspectors have grounds to believe undeclared nuclear activity is being carried out there. It can object but a multinational commission can override any objections by majority vote. After that Iran will have three days to comply. Inspectors will only come from countries with diplomatic relations with Iran, so no Americans.
Once the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has verified that Iran has taken steps to shrink its programme, UN, US and EU sanctions will be lifted.
Restrictions on trade in conventional weapons will last another five years, and eight years in the case of ballistic missile technology.
If there are allegations that Iran has not met its obligations, a joint commission will seek to resolve the dispute for 30 days. If that effort fails it would be referred to the UN security council, which would have to vote to continue sanctions relief. A veto by a permanent member would mean that sanctions are reimposed. The whole process would take 65 days.

Overall, the deal seems to address most of the issues brought up by skeptics. Sanctions won’t be lifted right away. There’s an expedited process to reimpose them if Iran cheats. Military sites will be open to inspectors. Conventional weapons bans will continue for five years.

Benjamin Netanyahu is nevertheless apoplectic, of course, but who cares? He would be no matter what the deal looked like. At first glance, though, it looks reasonable. And since President Obama can—and will—veto any congressional attempt to disapprove the agreement, it will take a two-thirds vote to torpedo it. Presumably Obama can manage to scrape up at least a third of Congress to support it, so it should be pretty safe. That vote will take place in about two months.

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Here’s How the Iran Nuclear Deal Is Supposed to Work

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Climate change leaves trees out to dry

by Stacey2648 Posted on July 6, 2015

spoiler alert

Climate change leaves trees out to dry

By on 6 Jul 2015commentsShare

The drought may be killing lawns, but whatever — they’re useless. When drought starts going after trees, however, that’s another matter. As year four of California’s drought rolls around, the magical, shade-providing carbon sinks are starting to perish, thanks to a lack of rain and a more recent lack of lawn irrigation.

It turns out all that profligate sprinkling was feeding California’s trees — and when cities cracked down on turf, they inadvertently starved out the more useful urban greenery. And while this one’s partly on us — maybe we should have realized that all those trees need to drink, too — we can give climate change (which is ultimately on us as well) a lot of the credit for this fun development. Climate change, you’ve done it again! Everyone else: Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts.

Here’s the story from Al Jazeera:

Nature has already killed an estimated 12 million trees in California’s forests since the drought began four years ago — most falling victim to an outbreak of the bark beetle pests that attack trees weakened by drought.

Now, trees in city parks, along boulevards and in residential neighborhoods are dying because homeowners, businesses and municipalities have stopped watering.

“The reaction was to turn off irrigation in many locations,” said John Melvin, urban forester at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “If you do that, you lose a long-lived community asset. A tree is not something that can be easily replaced.”

Trees are a big part of what makes a city green — literally, but also figuratively, thanks to the energy they save on AC:

A recent report by the U.S Department of Agriculture Forest Service show that the number of street trees in California have not kept up with population growth. The 9.1 million street trees make up 10 percent to 20 percent of the state’s total urban forest. The report also found that tree density has declined 30 percent since 1988 “as cities added more streets than trees.” Tree density fell from 105.5 trees per mile to 75 trees per mile in that period.

Despite that, the agency estimates that California street trees save the amount of electricity equivalent to what’s required to air condition 530,000 households every year.

The conclusion? Radically simple, says Melvin:

“It’s OK to appropriately water trees.”

Source:
Trees are latest victims of California’s four-year drought

, Al Jazeera America.

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Climate change leaves trees out to dry

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Shell will be allowed to pester walruses in the Arctic, but not as much as it would like

by EddyAtfxhxwqthx Posted on July 1, 2015

goo goo g’ joob

Shell will be allowed to pester walruses in the Arctic, but not as much as it would like

By on 1 Jul 2015 1:01 amcommentsShare

Nobody’s happy with the Obama administration’s ruling on how Shell is to treat the walruses and polar bears that will be hanging out and watching as the company drills in the Arctic.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a letter on Tuesday that it would allow Shell to interfere with Arctic mammals during its drilling, including incidentally “taking” or killing a few. But the agency also said, citing a 2013 wildlife protection regulation, that the company could not place drilling rigs within 15 miles of one another. Shell had planned to drill wells closer together than that, and in pairs.

Fuel Fix, a publication that chronicles the energy industry, characterized the news as a “big blow” to Shell’s plans.

Environmental groups, on the other hand, decried the decision from Fish and Wildlife as another shrug of the shoulders from an administration that has already been incredibly permissive about drilling in the Arctic’s delicate ecosystems. “Today’s authorization takes us one step closer to letting Shell turn the pristine American Arctic Ocean into an oil and gas sacrifice zone,” Friends of the Earth campaigner Marissa Knodel said in a statement.

Even as other oil companies have put on hold their plans to drill in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea, Shell’s efforts in the adjacent Chukchi Sea have inched forward over the course of 2015. That’s inspired significant angst from activists who have turned out in kayaks to protest, citing a litany of minor disasters in Shell’s Arctic drilling record and the threat to the climate from extreme oil exploration.

Regardless, Shell confirmed to Fuel Fix that it would move forward with its drilling plans. The company still needs additional permits, but if it gets them, its Arctic operations could begin this July.

Source:
Obama administration puts Arctic drilling at risk

, The Hill.

Obama administration delivers big blow to Shell’s Arctic drilling plans

, Fuel Fix.

Shell Secures New Authorization in Pursuing Arctic Drilling

, ABC News.

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Shell will be allowed to pester walruses in the Arctic, but not as much as it would like

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It’s Time for Another Obama Apology Tour

by DemetriCzc Posted on June 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s our latest “crisis”:

French President Francois Hollande held a crisis meeting of the country’s Defense Council on Wednesday after newspapers published WikiLeaks documents showing that the United States eavesdropped on him and two predecessors.

After the meeting, the council issued a statement lambasting U.S. spying as “unacceptable” and declaring that France had demanded two years ago that the National Security Agency stop snooping on its leaders. The latest WikiLeaks revelations, published by the daily newspaper Liberation and the investigative news website Mediapart, claim the NSA eavesdropped on telephone conversations of former Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy as well as Hollande.

Look, can’t we just assume the NSA has been spying on every world leader around the globe? Clearly, the answer is for President Obama to put this finally to rest by embarking on an apology tour of the entire planet—except for leaders we don’t like and plan to keep spying on. This will accomplish two things: (a) it will take care of the whole spying thing all at once, instead of having it dribble out every month or two, and (b) Obama really would go on an apology tour, which would make Republicans deliriously happy. Finally they’d be able to accuse him of going on an apology tour and they wouldn’t even have to lie about it. How cool is that?

Then, when it’s all over, we can go back to spying on everyone, except more carefully. I mean, you didn’t really think we were going to stop spying on these guys, did you?

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It’s Time for Another Obama Apology Tour

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We Could Save 2 Million Lives Globally by Cleaning Up the Air

by Annetta86X Posted on June 17, 2015

Mother Jones

Nations around the world could save more than 2 million lives every year by cleaning up their air, a new study has found. Researchers identified major potential public-health gains not only in the most polluted places like China, but also in the United States and Europe.

If China and India alone met pollution targets set by the World Health Organization, they could avoid about 1.4 million premature deaths annually, according to a study published Tuesday in Environmental Science & Technology. (For comparison, that would be nearly as many lives saved as if we cured everyone in the world who dies from an HIV-related illness every year.)

To do that, these countries would need to meet the WHO’s guidelines for a type of pollutant known as fine particles, which were linked to about 3.2 million premature deaths globally in 2010, the researchers found. Fine particles, which are about 28 times finer than a strand of human hair, enter the lungs and travel into the bloodstream, wreaking havoc on the body: Exposure to the particles—which can come from fires, coal-fired power plants, cars and trucks, and agricultural and industrial emissions—have been linked with increased risk of heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular diseases, as well as respiratory illnesses and cancers.

Most people around the world live in polluted places where their annual exposure to fine particles far exceeds the WHO’s guideline of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air, the study says, and in some parts of China and India, people may be exposed to 10 times that amount.

Even in less polluted countries, air pollution has taken a major toll. “We were surprised to find the importance of cleaning air not just in the dirtiest parts of the world—which we expected to find—but also in cleaner environments like the U.S., Canada and Europe,” Julian Marshall, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the study, said in a statement. Indeed, if these relatively clean regions met WHO guidelines, reducing annual exposure to fine particles by between one and four micrograms per cubic meter of air, they could avoid hundreds of thousands of premature deaths per year, the study found.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency also has guidelines for fine particle pollution, but they aren’t quite as strict as the WHO guidelines. “If we only meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, we aren’t fully addressing the problem,” said Marshall.

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We Could Save 2 Million Lives Globally by Cleaning Up the Air

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Maps: The Poorest Areas in America Are Often the Most Polluted

by NateOrmiston Posted on June 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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The environmental justice movement has been fighting the hazards and toxins disproportionately affecting poor communities of color for decades. Now it has a new tool.

The US Environmental Protection Agency recently made public an interactive map that allows people to see how their communities’ exposure to hazardous waste, air pollution, and other environmental risks stack up with the rest of the country. “EJSCREEN” combines demographic data and environmental factors to create an “environmental justice index.” Environmental data includes vulnerability to air toxins and high particulate levels, exposure to lead-based paint, and proximity to chemical and hazardous waste treatment centers.

We started to explore the map, focusing on a few major cities. Not surprisingly, notoriously impoverished neighborhoods like West Oakland, the Bronx, and East New Orleans have the worst environmental justice indexes in many cases:

Hazardous waste:

New York City:

EPA EJSCREEN

San Francisco Bay Area:

Air pollution:

New York City:

EPA EJSCREEN

San Francisco Bay Area:

EPA EJSCREEN

Water discharge facilities:

New York City:

EPA EJSCREEN

New Orleans:

EPA EJSCREEN

Lead-based paint exposure:

New York City:

EPA EJSCREEN

San Francisco Bay Area:

EPA EJSCREEN

EPA EJSCREEN

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Maps: The Poorest Areas in America Are Often the Most Polluted

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EPA: Fracking Doesn’t Pose "Widespread, Systemic" Danger to Drinking Water

by RosalinSimms Posted on June 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Environmental Protection Agency today released a long-awaited draft report on the impact of fracking on drinking water supplies. The analysis, which drew on peer-reviewed studies as well as state and federal databases, found that activities associated with fracking do “have the potential to impact drinking water resources.” But it concluded that in the United States, these impacts have been few and far between.

The report identifies several possible areas of concern, including: “water withdrawals in times of, or in areas with, low water availability; spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water; fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources; below ground migration of liquids and gases; and inadequate treatment and discharge of water.”

However, the report says, “We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.”

The report considered not only the hydraulic fracturing action itself, but all of the water-related steps necessary to drill, from acquiring water to disposing of it. Here’s an illustration from the report:

EPA

The report, which the Obama administration had hoped would provide a definitive answer to a core question about the controversial drilling technique, has been five years in the making. During that time, the EPA has faced numerous battles with the oil and gas industry to procure necessary data. Even before the report was released, some scientists voiced skepticism about its findings because of gaps in the data regarding what types of chemicals were present in water supplies prior to fracking activities.

As Inside Climate News explains:

For the study’s findings to be definitive, the EPA needed prospective, or baseline, studies. Scientists consider prospective water studies essential because they provide chemical snapshots of water immediately before and after fracking and then for a year or two afterward. This would be the most reliable way to determine whether oil and gas development contaminates surface water and nearby aquifers, and the findings could highlight industry practices that protect water. In other studies that found toxic chemicals or hydrocarbons in water wells, the industry argued that the substances were present before oil and gas development began.

Prospective studies were included in the EPA project’s final plan in 2010 and were still described as a possibility in a December 2012 progress report to Congress. But the EPA couldn’t legally force cooperation by oil and gas companies, almost all of which refused when the agency tried to persuade them.

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EPA: Fracking Doesn’t Pose "Widespread, Systemic" Danger to Drinking Water

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