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Big Corporations Are Using a Record Amount of Clean Energy

by DeloresMerritt Posted on November 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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On November 30, world leaders will flock to Paris to hammer out an international agreement to slow global warming. The agreement is likely to give a boost to the clean energy industry, as countries around the world pour money into wind and solar projects as a way to cut their greenhouse gas footprints.

In the United States clean energy is already a booming business. Solar is the fastest-growing energy source in the country, and in 2015 total investment in renewable energy projects here reached nearly $40 billion. Here’s some more good news: Big corporations are signing up for a record amount of clean energy for their offices, data centers, warehouses, and other facilities, according to a new analysis by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit environmental research outfit.

RMI tracked publicly announced contracts between corporations and large-scale wind and solar farms and found that in 2015 the total reached 2,100 megawatts, roughly equal to 525,000 home rooftop solar systems. That’s 75 percent higher than what RMI measured last year, and it includes more than a dozen companies with new contracts. New contracts this year include Dow Chemical, General Motors, Walmart, and Kaiser Permanente. It’s also a big win for the climate: Electricity accounts for one-third of US greenhouse gas emissions, and more than one-third of electricity goes to commercial users. So if big companies are clamoring for clean energy, that can have a significant, near-term impact on reducing the nation’s greenhouse gas footprint.

“The pressure is mounting for corporate executives to take action” on climate change, said Hervé Touati, RMI’s managing director. “What they realize is that signing these large deals is the best way to say you are addressing your sustainability agenda.”

In most cases, the contracts are “power purchase agreements,” where the company agrees to buy a certain amount of power from a wind or solar farm at a fixed price for 10 to 20 years. These contracts are mutually beneficial, Touati explained: They give renewable energy developers the guaranteed revenue they need to finance big new projects, and give the companies long-term certainty about one of their biggest expenses, electricity.

Tech companies such as Google and Facebook were early adopters of large-scale clean energy, thanks to the sky-high electricity consumption at data centers. Last year, Apple announced that 94 percent of its operations are powered by clean energy, including a massive solar array outside its data center in North Carolina. Now, Touati said, a more diverse mix of corporations is getting in on the act, including hospitals, hotels, and shipping companies.

That trend is driven by a confluence of factors that have made clean energy contracts seem like low-hanging fruit to top corporate financial officers. The cost of clean energy is continuing to plummet—solar power could soon be cheaper than conventional grid electricity in all 50 states. Meanwhile, customers and investors are increasingly conscientious about companies’ impact on the environment. A recent survey by the World Resources Institute found that half of all Fortune 500 companies have implemented specific goals to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewables.

The only losers in this arrangement, Touati said, are traditional electric utilities, which more cling to fossil fuel-fired power plants. For those power companies, the loss of big corporate customers is harder to brush off than losing a few homes to rooftop solar. That could motivate them to clean up their act more quickly.

“When we come with Google and Facebook and those big names and we tell electric utilities that these big corporations want this, then they start to listen,” he said. “This trend is going to be difficult to stop.”

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Big Corporations Are Using a Record Amount of Clean Energy

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This Chart Shows Which Countries Are the Most Screwed by Climate Change

by SiobhanSez Posted on November 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Verisk Maplecroft

One of the cruel ironies of climate change is that its impacts tend to fall hardest on the countries least equipped to manage them.

When drought or sea level rise strike the United States, communities at least have access to federal aid, top scientific expertise, public investment in expensive climate-ready infrastructure, and the like. But some of the most extreme effects of global warming are headed for developing countries—drought wiping out crops in East Africa, or catastrophic hurricanes pounding Southeast Asia—that don’t have access to those resources.

New research from Maplecroft, a UK-based risk consultancy, paints a pictures of where vulnerability to climate change is most pressing. Their analysis drew on three criteria: exposure to extreme events, based on the latest meteorological science; sensitivity to impacts (i.e., does a country have other sources of income and food supply if agriculture takes a hit?); and adaptive capacity—are the country’s government and social institutions prepared to work under adverse climate conditions and help citizens adapt to them?

Unsurprisingly, Africa and Southeast Asia ranked the lowest, while Scandinavian countries ranked the highest. (While definitely at risk from sea level rise, countries such as Norway and Sweden have rich, highly functional governments to manage adaptation.) The major global climate talks in Paris are coming up in just a couple weeks; the chart above makes it clear why it’s so important for big players like the US and China to work closely with delegations from developing countries on solutions that will provide immediate support and relief.

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This Chart Shows Which Countries Are the Most Screwed by Climate Change

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Indonesia Fires Seen From a Million Miles Away

by Myrna Posted on October 29, 2015

Yikes. NASA Normally, I think pictures of Earth from space are among the most beautiful of all astronomical photos. Our home is gorgeous, especially when seen from afar. But Monday, NASA tweeted a picture of our world whose ugliness made me literally gasp when I understood what I was seeing. The photo above is from the Earth-observing DSCOVR satellite, which sits 1.5 million km (almost a million miles) over our planet, taking full-disk images every hour, which are then put online for the public to view. That shot was taken on Oct. 25 at 05:37 UTC. NASA put the picture on Twitter to point out the three tropical low systems developing in the Indian Ocean. Which is great, and very cool. But what caught my eye was the huge grayish hazy patch over Indonesia, over to the right a bit. Read the rest at Slate. From: Indonesia Fires Seen From a Million Miles Away ; ; ;

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Indonesia Fires Seen From a Million Miles Away

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California Is on Fire. This Map Shows Where.

by Myrna Posted on August 18, 2015

On the two-year anniversary of the Rim Fire, the state confronts more vicious blazes. A wildfire burning near Clearlake, Calif., earlier this month. Josh Edelson/AP On August 17, 2013—two years ago today—a deer hunter near California’s Yosemite National Park ignored a campfire ban and burned trash from his dinner. The embers blew into dry brush, starting the third worst wildfire in the state’s history. All told, the Rim Fire, as it came to be called, burned 257,314 acres in and around Yosemite. No wildfires of that scale have occurred since, but, thanks to drought and climate change, California is far from out of the woods. In fact, in 2015, 4,382 wildfires have already scorched a total of 117,960 acres, more than double the 5 year average for this time of year. Firefighters have finally controlled the largest two fires, in Northern California’s Jerusalem Valley, but not before the blazes razed nearly 100,000 acres. Read the rest at Mother Jones. Continued here:   California Is on Fire. This Map Shows Where. ; ; ;

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California Is on Fire. This Map Shows Where.

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Obama Will Use Veto to Defend Climate Change Plan If Necessary

by Myrna Posted on July 30, 2015

President will use all powers available to push through Clean Power Plan to cut carbon emissions from power stations, says White House. Drop of Light/Shutterstock Barack Obama will use all of his powers – including his veto – to defend his plan to fight climate change, the White House said, on the eve of new rules cutting carbon pollution from power plants. Obama is expected to unveil the new rules as early as Monday, according to those familiar with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plan. The final version will give states and electricity companies an extra two years – until 2022 – before they need to start cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Read the rest at the Guardian. See the article here –  Obama Will Use Veto to Defend Climate Change Plan If Necessary ; ; ;

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Obama Will Use Veto to Defend Climate Change Plan If Necessary

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

by Pilar2325h Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley made an astute observation about ISIS in an interview with Bloomberg.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria, the rise of ISIS, was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the…conditions of extreme poverty that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” said the former Maryland governor.

Republicans were quick to seize on the comment as an indication of O’Malley’s weak grasp of foreign policy. Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said the suggestion of a link between ISIS’s rise to power and climate change was “absurd” and a sign that “no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe.”

Here’s the thing, though: O’Malley is totally right. As we’ve reported here many times, Syria’s civil war is the best-understood and least ambiguous example of a case where an impact of climate change—in this case, an unprecedented drought that devastated rural farmers—directly contributed to violent conflict and political upheaval. There is no shortage of high-quality, peer-reviewed research explicating this link. As O’Malley said, the drought made it more difficult for rural families to survive off of farming. So they moved to cities in huge numbers, where they were confronted with urban poverty and an intransigent, autocratic government. Those elements clearly existed regardless of the drought. But the drought was the final straw, the factor that brought all the others to a boiling point.

Does this mean that America’s greenhouse gas emissions are solely responsible for ISIS’s rise to power? Obviously not. But it does mean that, without accounting for climate change, you have an incomplete picture of the current military situation in the Middle East. And without that understanding, it will be very difficult for a prospective commander-in-chief to predict where terrorist threats might emerge in the future.

The link between climate and security isn’t particularly controversial in the defense community. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama called climate change an “urgent and growing threat” to national security. A recent review by the Defense Department concluded that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that exacerbates other precursors to war, while the Center for Naval Analysis found that climate change-induced drought is already leading to conflict across Africa and the Middle East.

In other words, O’Malley’s comment is completely on-point. If Priebus and his party are serious about defeating ISIS and preventing future terrorist uprisings, they can’t continue to dismiss the role of climate change.

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

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Do Small Businesses Deserve Exemptions From the Minimum Wage?

by RubyeMcCants Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Hibbs, a Mother Jones reader and owner of Comix Experience, wrote in to object to San Francisco’s plan to raise its minimum wage. Conservatives who argue against the minimum wage often point to jobs lost and heavy burdens on small businesses, and progressives largely brush off those arguments as so much Chamber of Commerce propaganda. And then you have guys like Hibbs. Read what he has to say, and then we’ll discuss.

I own two comic book stores in SF, and while we’re a profitable business and have been for 26 years, we’re only modestly profitable, y’know? When you calculate my own salary on a per-hour basis, given that 70-hour weeks are not at all uncommon for me, I don’t make much more than the high-end of SF’s new minimum wage law.

Raising the minimum wage by 43 percent (from $11.05 today to $15 in 2018) means that we need to generate at least another 80 grand in revenue. Eighty grand. I don’t personally make eighty grand in a year. I’m not some kind of fat cat getting rich off the exploitation of my workers or something. And look, if I did manage to increase sales by that amount, I’d sure be hoping that I got to keep a tiny little percentage of it myself.

Just so we’re clear: The hole I find myself soon facing isn’t one created by escalating San Francisco rents (my landlord is awesome!), or because of competition from the internet (in fact, our sales consistently grow year-over-year, and sales growth has accelerated since the introduction of digital comics), but one solely and entirely created by the increase of the minimum wage.

I’m a progressive; I support fair labor practices, and I try, above all else, to give the folks who work for me absolute agency in their jobs. I have multiple employees who quit higher paying jobs for corporate owners to come work for me, because I actively valued their passions. I don’t own a comic book store to make money as my primary goal, right? The primary goal is to wake up the morning and be excited by what you do, to feel like you’re spreading your passion, that you’re promoting art, and creators and joy—and my staff feels much the same way.

I have staff who are supported by a spouse and are working for me to essentially make pocket money; I have staff who want to be full-time artists, and this helps them get closer to their goal by exposing them to the form and helping them make contacts. I have staff who are actively working toward having their own stores, and I’m basically paying them to get a master’s class (though I am fine with that!). I have staff who are full-time students living at home.

I’m not exploiting any of them, I don’t think. They all have options, and they all work for me because they want to.

If I can’t increase sales by $80,000—which is not something that seems likely, given historical year-over-year gains—then I have to start firing people, or trimming hours of operation. We don’t run extravagant overlaps—nearly 60 percent of the hours the stores are open we only have one person on deck; nor do we have a lot of waste or absurd inventory or anything like that. I’ve survived in a kind of marginal business for 26 years by being a savvy businessperson, and a relatively nimble and predictive one. But firing people, cutting hours…how does that help the employees? How does that help the business expand so I can eventually hire more people?

I have the largest staff of any SF comics business (because I have two locations), and, in point of fact, my two closest competitors have zero employees. Not being impacted by this mandate, they’d have no reason to raise prices in tandem…and really, every reason to not do so. If I raised prices by, let’s say, 10 percent to meet this mandate, I’m absolutely positive we’d lose at least 20 percent of our business to stores that didn’t raise their prices—thereby putting us at a net negative.

We’re trying to solve this problem by growing our way out of it with a new national, curated Graphic-Novel-of-the-Month Club, but I think that if we’re able to succeed from that (and I am not at all sure we will) it will be because of years of building our exceptional reputation. As a result, I do not at all think that this type of solution is scalable for the average small business. The City of San Francisco’s own Office of Economic Analysis believes the minimum wage hike will cost 15,270 jobs, or 2 percent of the private workforce!

Honestly, if San Francisco had voted for “Minimum Wage must be at least equal to X percent of your net profit” or “Every person in America gets a guaranteed income of $20,000/year paid for by progressive taxes” or some other scheme where you know that people being asked to contribute more can afford it, then maybe we’d be on sounder ideological ground…But I think that the higher minimum wage, the higher you’re making the barriers for low-income people and marginal-but-promising businesses to even have a chance to enter the marketplace and to survive in the first place, let alone legacy businesses like ours.

Here’s my personal take: It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Hibbs, yet it would be a mistake to take his situation as a case for abolishing or making exceptions to the city’s minimum wage law. As I’ve noted elsewhere, raising the minimum wage doesn’t tend to decrease overall employment; in general, businesses find new efficiencies and their workers find themselves with more disposable income to spend on things like comics.

Of course, that’s probably little comfort to Hibbs, who faces competition from smaller comics stores whose sole proprietors are the ones manning the cash registers. Hibbs may well be able to keep his doors open by downsizing, bringing in volunteers, or drumming up donations from devoted customers (as one local bookstore has done), but when it comes down to it, there simply may not be much of a future for bricks-and-mortar comics stores in a city with astronomical real estate prices.

“I super commiserate with him because we are in almost the identical situation,” says Lew Prince, a member of the group Business for a Fair Minimum Wage and the owner of Vintage Vinyl, a record store in St. Louis. Dwindling sales and rising labor costs forced Prince to consolidate his two Vintage Vinyl locations into one. He nonetheless supports increasing Missouri’s minimum wage from $7.65 to $12 an hour because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. “The job of the business owner is to prepare for the future,” he told me. “I have great empathy and sympathy for Hibbs, but you have to do the job every day, and sometimes the marketplace defeats you.”

But maybe that point of view is too harsh. I’d love to hear, in the comments, what Kevin’s readers think about all of this.

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Do Small Businesses Deserve Exemptions From the Minimum Wage?

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We’re in the Process of Decimating 1 in 6 Species on Earth

by GitaBuckner Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Plants and animals around the world are already suffering from the negative impacts of manmade global warming—including shrinking habitats and the spread of disease. A great number are also facing the ultimate demise—outright extinction—among them the iconic polar bear, some fish species, coral, trees… the list goes on.

While most of the research on this topic so far has been piecemeal, one species at a time, a new study out today in Science offers the most comprehensive view to date of the future of extinction. The outlook is pretty grim.

The research, conducted by evolutionary biologist Mark Urban of the University of Connecticut, analyzes 131 other scientific papers for clues about how climate change is affecting the overall rate of species extinction. The result is alarming: One out of every six species could face extinction if global warming continues on its current path. The picture is less dire if we manage to curb climate change, dropping to only 5.2 percent of species if warming is kept within the internationally-agreed upon target of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The analysis makes clear that the climate change threat isn’t necessarily a separate issue from things like habitat loss and disease; indeed, it’s often climate change that is the driving force behind those impacts. The risk appears to be spread evenly across all types of plants and animals (i.e., trees, amphibians, mammals, etc.), but is more severe in geographic ares where there are more unique species and exposure to climate impacts.

South America takes the lead, with up to 23 percent of its species threatened. One classic case study there is the golden toad, a native of mountaintop rain forests that was last seen in 1989. The toad was driven to extinction in part due to an epidemic of chytrid fungus (which is wiping out amphibians worldwide), and because climate change-related drought is destroying the forests they called home. Australia and New Zealand also ranked highly at risk, with up to 14 percent:

Urban, Science 2015

Urban’s paper offers perhaps the most comprehensive scientific companion to a terrifying narrative made popular last year in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Sixth Extinction,” by Elizabeth Kolbert. The New Yorker journalist argued that when you look at the combined toll that pollution, habitat destruction, and climate change is taking on the planet’s biodiversity, humans are driving extinction on a scale only preceded in the geologic record by cataclysmic natural disasters (like the meteor that likely brought about the demise of the dinosaurs). Never before has one species been responsible for the demise of so many others. (Check out our interview with Kolbert here).

Still, Urban’s study makes clear that many species that avoid extinction still face grave threats from climate change:

“Extinction risks are likely much smaller than the total number of species influenced by climate change,” Urban writes. “Even species not threatened directly by extinction could experience substantial changes in abundances, distributions, and species interactions, which in turn could affect ecosystems and their services to humans.”

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We’re in the Process of Decimating 1 in 6 Species on Earth

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Our Meat Obsession May Kill Us. But Not How You Think.

by JosephOUPB Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The world is using more antibiotics than ever before—and showing no signs of stopping. A new analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science predicts that worldwide consumption of the drugs will grow 67 percent by 2030. Over the same period of time, in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the authors expect that antibiotic use will double.

The reason for the dramatic increase in antibiotic use, say the authors, mostly has to do with the planet’s ever-increasing appetite for meat. Since the 1970s, meat producers have been dosing livestock with regular, low doses of antibiotics. For reasons not entirely understood, this regimen helps animals grow bigger. In the United States, 80 percent of all antibiotics already go to livestock, and the practice is becoming the norm the world over. This map shows the current global antibiotic consumption in livestock (in milligrams per 10 square kilometer pixels):

Map courtesy of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

As the middle class in the developing world grows, demand for meat—and use of the antibiotics to grow that meat cheaply and quickly—is expected to rise as well.

To get a sense of how quickly our global appetite for meat is growing, take a look at China. There, livestock producers are buying record amounts of corn and soy to feed a growing number of animals:

Jaeah Lee

As antibiotic use skyrockets, experts expect that germs will evolve to resist them. That’s scary, considering that some of the same drugs we use on livestock are also our best defense against infections in humans. And suberbugs, several recent studies have shown, can and do jump from animals to people. In fact, another recent study predicted that antibiotic resistant infections will kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

There’s also evidence that antibiotics might soon stop working the way that meat producers want them to: A recent analysis concluded that the drugs are no longer making pigs bigger.

The good news: Despite loose federal regulations around antibiotic use on farms, American consumers are beginning to favor meat grown without drugs. And manufacturers are taking notice: Earlier this month, McDonald’s pledged to serve only chicken raised without antibiotics, and Costco quickly followed suit.

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Our Meat Obsession May Kill Us. But Not How You Think.

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How One Community Is Kicking The Koch Brothers’ Harmful Black Dust Out Of Their Neighborhood

by Myrna Posted on March 6, 2015

The fight over petcoke on Chicago’s southeast side. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP It’s not easy to take on a wealthy, multi-national corporation and win. Especially for residents of Chicago’s struggling southeast side. But that’s exactly what’s happening on the banks of the Calumet River, where the steel plants that used to give residents of a mostly Hispanic neighborhood access to a middle-class lifestyle were replaced, nearly two years ago, with black dust called petroleum coke (“petcoke”) piled five or six stories tall. The piles of petcoke—a byproduct of the oil refining process—belong to KCBX Terminals, owned by the conservative billionaire Koch Brothers. The piles have been roiling area residents ever since the black dust of mostly carbon and sulfur began blowing into the backyards, playgrounds and neighborhood parks. It blackens skies and leaves behind a sticky residue, raising concerns about aggravated asthma and other health issues. Read the rest at The Huffington Post. Link: How One Community Is Kicking The Koch Brothers’ Harmful Black Dust Out Of Their Neighborhood

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How One Community Is Kicking The Koch Brothers’ Harmful Black Dust Out Of Their Neighborhood

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