Tag Archives: anchor

Bringing Columbia Home – Michael D. Leinbach, Jonathan H. Ward, Robert Crippen & Eileen Collins

by Myrna Posted on April 12, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Bringing Columbia Home

The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

Michael D. Leinbach, Jonathan H. Ward, Robert Crippen & Eileen Collins

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: January 23, 2018

Publisher: Arcade

Seller: SIMON AND SCHUSTER DIGITAL SALES INC


Timed to release for the 15th Anniversary of the Columbia space shuttle disaster, this is the epic true story of one of the most dramatic, unforgettable adventures of our time. On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation’s eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach, Launch Director of the space shuttle program at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history. This comprehensive account is told in four parts: • Parallel Confusion • Courage, Compassion, and Commitment • Picking Up the Pieces • A Bittersweet Victory For the first time, here is the definitive inside story of the Columbia disaster and recovery and the inspiring message it ultimately holds. In the aftermath of tragedy, people and communities came together to help bring home the remains of the crew and nearly 40 percent of shuttle, an effort that was instrumental in piecing together what happened so the shuttle program could return to flight and complete the International Space Station. Bringing Columbia Home shares the deeply personal stories that emerged as NASA employees looked for lost colleagues and searchers overcame immense physical, logistical, and emotional challenges and worked together to accomplish the impossible. Featuring a foreword and epilogue by astronauts Robert Crippen and Eileen Collins, and dedicated to the astronauts and recovery search persons who lost their lives, this is an incredible, compelling narrative about the best of humanity in the darkest of times and about how a failure at the pinnacle of human achievement became a story of cooperation and hope.

Source article:  

Bringing Columbia Home – Michael D. Leinbach, Jonathan H. Ward, Robert Crippen & Eileen Collins

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bringing Columbia Home – Michael D. Leinbach, Jonathan H. Ward, Robert Crippen & Eileen Collins

An easy, cost-effective way to address climate change? Massive reforestation.

by Philome19D Posted on April 11, 2019

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

As the implications of climate change become starker and the world faces up to a biodiversity crisis that threatens humanity’s existence, a group of campaigners from across the world are saying there is one clear way to get us out of this mess, but that governments are ignoring it.

In an open letter published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, the group tells governments that the best and cheapest way to avert a climate catastrophe is to heal nature by restoring and replanting degraded forests and by better conserving the natural world.

“Defending the living world and defending the climate are, in many cases, one and the same. This potential has so far been largely overlooked,” say the 23 signatories to the letter.

“We call on governments to support natural climate solutions with an urgent program of research, funding, and political commitment,” they added.

Vast amounts of carbon can be removed from the air and stored by restoring ecosystems razed by palm oil plantations, cattle ranching and timber, and fish production, the letter says. The 23 signatories include the  teenage school climate strike activist Greta Thunburg, authors Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein, and Philip Pullman, U.S. climate scientist Michael Mann, and environmental campaigner Bill McKibben.

“The world faces two existential crises, developing with terrifying speed: climate breakdown and ecological breakdown. Neither is being addressed with the urgency needed to prevent our life-support systems from spiralling into collapse,” say the signatories.

They call for the defense, restoration and reestablishment of forests, peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, natural seabeds, and other crucial ecosystems, to remove and store large amounts of carbon from the air. The protection and restoration of these ecosystems can help minimize a sixth great extinction, they say.

The group says that nearly a third of the greenhouse gas reductions needed to hold temperatures to a 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) rise can be provided by the restoration of natural habitats. But natural solutions are calculated to have attracted just a small fraction of the funding so far committed, according to journalist and author George Monbiot, one of the signatories.

Technology alone cannot solve climate change, Monbiot wrote in The Guardian. Much of the technology proposed to capture carbon is expensive and could pose problems at scale. The cheapest and surest approach, he wrote, is to restore natural forests and allow native trees to repopulate deforested land.

Regenerating and conserving nature to address climate change is expected to be a central recommendation of next month’s landmark study of the state of the natural world, compiled by hundreds of scientists. The United Nations-backed report is expected to confirm that nature is in rapid decline in many regions, with ecosystems on the point of collapse.

Protecting and restoring natural forests is seen as vital. Trees suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it. Nearly one-quarter of all the emissions reductions pledged by countries in the 2015 Paris agreement could come from tree planting and restoration. The U.N. has challenged countries to restore 865 million acres of farm and forest land by 2030 — an area bigger than India. And countries are responding.

Initiative 20×20, an international effort, hopes to restore 49 million acres by 2020 in Latin America and the Caribbean. And the multicountry African Forest Landscape Restoration initiative intends to restore 247 million acres of degraded forests in Africa by 2030.

Pakistan has just planted 1 billion trees. China plans to create forests totaling the size of Ireland. And in Africa, Ethiopia, Niger, Mali are among countries that strongly back the reforestation of degraded land.

But there’s a snag. A new paper in the scientific journal, Nature, suggests that 45 percent of the land area that nations have so far pledged to allocate for carbon drawdown is being used to for commercial plantations.

There’s a huge difference between restoring natural forests and planting trees for commercial use, for example the large-scale monoculture of oil palms to provide us with the palm oil so ubiquitous in snacks and cosmetics. The latter are less efficient at carbon storage, and in fact release carbon emissions by replacing peatland, as well as being detrimental to wildlife.

These natural solutions also go beyond trees. They include the restoration of peatlands, salt marsh and seagrass. They also mean the protection and recovery of animals like rhinos in Africa, which act as a natural protection against devastating wildfires, and wolves in North America, which some studies suggest could protect forests by controlling populations of animals that feed on plants and trees.

Still, Monbiot cautions: “We don’t want natural climate solutions to be used as a substitute for the rapid and comprehensive decarbonization of our economies. The science tells us both are needed.”

“But,” he continues, “what this thrilling field of study shows is that protecting and rewilding the world’s living systems is not just an aesthetically pleasing thing to do. It is an essential survival strategy.”

Excerpt from: 

An easy, cost-effective way to address climate change? Massive reforestation.

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, ATTRA, Casio, FF, GE, Landmark, LG, Mop, ONA, Smith's, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on An easy, cost-effective way to address climate change? Massive reforestation.

Trump signs executive orders fast-tracking the pipeline approval process

by VaniaMalizia Posted on April 10, 2019

When Donald Trump was campaigning to become president in 2016, he promised to speed up the government review process for “private sector energy infrastructure projects.” On Wednesday, he made good on that pledge by signing two executive orders that would put pipelines on the fast track to success.

In addition to shortening the review process for infrastructure projects, the orders are aimed at limiting states’ power to pause construction and giving the president the final word on permits for cross-border projects, among other things.

“We’re gonna make it easier for you,” Trump said at a press conference on Wednesday. “You know about delays? Where it takes you 20 years to get a permit? Those days are gone.”

To date, oil companies have had a hard time selling their new, big pipeline projects in the court of public opinion. They’ve had an even harder time pushing those projects through the court of … courts. Pipeline company TransCanada, for instance, has been waiting a whole decade to build the northern leg of its Keystone XL extension.

Trump seems willing to go to any lengths necessary to get the job done. Months after a district court judge demanded the government conduct a more thorough environmental review of the potential impacts of the Keystone XL project last November, Trump issued a presidential permit aimed at allowing TransCanada to sidestep the courts.

He announced his new executive orders at an engineer training center in Crosby, Texas, a town near Houston that is still grappling with the fallout from a deadly chemical fire last week. “Smoke from the fires has barely cleared, but President Donald Trump shows no shame in using Texas’ petrochemical corridor as a prop for his misguided and dangerous proposals,” said Stephanie Thomas, an organizer at health and safety group Public Citizen, in a press release.

One of the orders looks to curtail environmental reviews for pipelines nationwide. “It will now take no more than 60 days,” Trump said. “And the president, not the bureaucracy, will have sole authority to make the final decision when we get caught up in problems.”

The other allows the Environmental Protection Agency to limit state powers to pause pipeline construction on the grounds of the Clean Water Act. Previously, regulators in states like New York have halted construction that they argue jeopardizes water resources protected under the act.

“New York is hurting the country because they’re not allowing us to get these pipelines through,” Trump said in the press conference. “They also have a lot of energy under their feet and they refuse to get it,” he said, likely referring to the natural gas trapped in Marcellus shale under the state.

According to the Wall Street Journal, that same executive order also deals with investments, directing the Department of Labor to “scrutinize whether retirement funds that pursue environmental or socially progressive investment strategies are fulfilling their duty to maximize shareholder value.” In other words, Trump is prompting the department to take a magnifying glass to divestment. New York recently moved to divest its multi-billion dollar pension from fossil fuels.

Needless to say, oil and gas companies are pretty enthused about these orders. “Politically-motivated delays and pipeline bottlenecks in the Permian Basin and around the United States are hindering growth, so we appreciate the Administration’s work to bring clarity and certainty to the pipeline construction permitting process,” the Texas Oil and Gas Association said in a press release.

Environment groups? Not so much. “From the Dirty Water Rule to rolling back protections against toxic pollutants from power plants, this is now the next step in the Trump administration’s all-out assault on our clean water,” the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement.

View original article – 

Trump signs executive orders fast-tracking the pipeline approval process

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump signs executive orders fast-tracking the pipeline approval process

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

by IngeKWKdxrhvg Posted on April 9, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

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.”

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

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.

Excerpt from:  

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

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LG, New Chapter, ONA, Radius, The Atlantic, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Nathaniel Rich’s ‘Losing Earth’ tells lost history of our current climate predicament

Are you biased against nuclear power? Yup, say scientists

by GenaRadcliffe Posted on April 8, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

In the 1970s, you couldn’t escape the Pepsi Challenge on TV. Blindfolded men and women took sips of Pepsi and its better-known archrival without knowing which was which and — surprise, surprise — more people preferred Pepsi Cola. The message was clear: Judge the soda on its merits not its reputation.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of California, San Diego recently did something like this but not with soda. In this blind taste test, they gave a bunch of random people accurate information about the benefits and risks that go along with different power sources. When they hid the labels (solar, coal, etc), people showed a greater preference for nuclear power..

On its most basic level, this study demonstrates a well-known fact: Fear of nuclear power looms far larger than the risks. But this didn’t lead the researchers to the conclusion that everybody just needs to be more rational. (If humans were convinced by calls to rationality, we would be well on our way to eliminating carbon emissions by now.) They came up with some suggestions for accepting the reality of nuclear dread, and building it into projections for the future.

Here’s how the study went. Researchers set up a simple online game, where people were asked to come up with a new electricity mix for the United States. As players tried to cut carbon emissions, the game gave them feedback about how many people might die from pollution or power-plant disasters. Using sliders, they picked the amount of electricity they’d like to see coming from solar, wind, coal, coal with carbon capture technology, nuclear, and natural gas. In about half the games, the researchers labeled these energy options as “Technology 1, Technology 2,” and so on, removing the labels and all the associations we have with them. When the names of the power plants were hidden, the players opted to build the equivalent of 40 more nuclear reactors, then the players who could read the labels.

The mini-game researchers designed.Abdulla, et al.

Other researchers might have used these findings as an opportunity to shame people for being scientifically illiterate, or seen this fear of nuclear as a reason to design even safer reactors. But these researchers noted previous studies suggesting that neither approach would work. Pummeling people with facts, or engineering safety tweaks does very little to dispel raw dread. Two of the study’s authors, Ahmed Abdulla and Parth Vaishnav, told me they were just as interested in the squishy social science on how people think about risk as on the hard facts.

“We are both very concerned about the blinders scientists sometimes impose on themselves,” Abdulla said.

Once you take off those blinders, you can see it may be impossible to bridge that gap between the actual risks of nuclear power and the dread it evokes. Accept that dread as a given and it points you toward a more nuanced, but useful path. So, for instance, if you figured out that the cheapest way to slash U.S. carbon emissions was by building 100 nuclear power plants, this finding suggests that you should trim that number by 40 percent, down to 60 plants, to account for the fear factor.

“That suggests that we should be a little less black and white when modeling energy paths, Vaishnav said. “In a lot of the literature researchers say, ‘OK, people don’t like nuclear, let’s model without it.”

But their finding implies that a binary, all or nothing thinking is the wrong approach. Despite their fears, people didn’t abandon nuclear energy altogether. They simply wanted to use less of it.

Continue at source: 

Are you biased against nuclear power? Yup, say scientists

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Safer, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Are you biased against nuclear power? Yup, say scientists

‘Historic breakthrough’: Norway’s giant oil fund dives into renewables

by BeckySnell Posted on April 7, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

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

Norway’s $1 trillion oil fund, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, is to plunge billions of dollars into wind and solar power projects. The decision follows Saudi Arabia’s oil fund selling off its last oil and gas assets.

Other national funds built up from oil profits are also thought to be ramping up their investments in renewables. The moves show that countries that got rich on fossil fuels are diversifying their investments and seeking future profits in the clean energy needed to combat climate change. Analysts say the investments are likely to power faster growth of green energy.

Norway’s government gave the go-ahead on Friday for its fund to invest in renewable energy projects that are not listed on stock markets. Unlisted projects make up more than two-thirds of the whole renewable infrastructure market, which is worth trillions of dollars.

Previously, it had warned that such investments could be at risk from political interference. But now the sum the fund can invest in green projects has been doubled to $14 billion. “Even a fund built on oil is seeing that the future is green,” said Jan Erik Saugestad, CEO of Storebrand Asset Management.

In March, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund said it would dispose of its investments in 134 companies that explore for oil and gas, worth almost $8 billion. But it is retaining stakes in oil firms such as Shell and BP that have renewable energy divisions.

Norway also announced on Friday that the fund would sell off its stakes in more coal companies, having set a new limit for them of 20 million tons of reserves. This may see its investments in giants Glencore and RWE dumped. The fund divested $6.5 billion of coal-related investments in 2015.

Across the world, almost 1,000 institutional investors, managing more than $6 trillion, have now committed to fossil fuel divestment, driven by concerns about global warming and financial losses if climate action cuts the value of coal, oil, and gas investments.

“Unlisted renewable energy is a growth industry,” said Tom Sanzillo at IEEFA. “Investments by Norway’s fund now allow it to take advantage of this growth and to use its resources to develop the market for decades. This is a strong step for the health of the fund and the planet.”

Sverre Thornes, CEO of Norwegian pension fund KLP, said: “This move will most likely expand the market further and faster. Our overall renewables infrastructure rate of return was around 11 percent last year. Clean energy is what will move us away from the dangerous and devastating pathway we are currently on.”

Per Kristian Sbertoli, at the Norwegian climate think tank Zero, said the decision on unlisted renewable infrastructure was a “historic breakthrough” and welcomed the further divestment from coal: “These actions by the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund are noticed and contribute to reducing the cost for renewables, whilst accelerating the global shift away from coal.”

Charlie Kronick, at Greenpeace U.K., said such moves were “genuinely good news” but that all investors would have to follow suit to beat climate change.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund sold its last investment linked to oil and gas last week, with the sale of its $69 billion stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corporation to the nation’s oil company, Aramco.

Other Middle East oil funds are moving to diversify into renewable energy, according to Reuters, but are stopping short of following Norway in shedding oil and gas investments.

Individual sovereign wealth funds make little information public about their investments, but data on total private equity investments involving such funds suggests a strong shift from fossil fuels to renewables.

In 2018, $6.4 billion went into hydrocarbons, compared with $5.8 billion in renewable energy, according to the data firm PitchBook. In 2017, $18.8 billion went into fossil fuel investments, compared with just $0.4 billion into renewables.

Mark Lewis, at BNP Paribas Asset Management, said: “Renewables are the new rust for the oil-and-gas industry, and if the industry does not adapt to this new reality they will corrode its future profits just like rust corrodes oil rigs.”

Original article:  

‘Historic breakthrough’: Norway’s giant oil fund dives into renewables

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on ‘Historic breakthrough’: Norway’s giant oil fund dives into renewables

Trump is about to make the pork industry responsible for inspecting itself

by ElinorO62bp Posted on April 6, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

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

Next time you tuck into a pork chop or a carnitas-filled burrito, spare a thought for the people who work the kill line at hog slaughterhouses. Meatpacking workers incur injury and illness at 2.5 times the national average; and repetitive-motion conditions at a rate nearly seven times as high as that of other private industries. Much has to do with the speed at which they work: Hog carcasses weighing as much as 270 pounds come at workers at an average rate of 977 per hour, or about 16 per minute.

President Donald Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture is close to finalizing a plan that would allow those lines to move even faster, reports the Washington Post’s Kimberly Kindy. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is currently responsible for overseeing the kill line, making sure that tainted meat doesn’t enter the food supply. The plan would partially privatize federal oversight of pork facilities, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees, Kindy adds. In other words, the task of ensuring the safety of the meat supply will largely shift from people paid by the public to people being paid by the meat industry.

Deregulation is on brand for the Trump team, but the idea of semi-privatizing the USDA’s meat inspection dates to former President Bill Clinton, who launched pilot programs for both chicken and pork plants. President Barack Obama was an enthusiast — his USDA approved a similar plan for chicken slaughterhouses in 2014, but declined in the end to let all poultry companies speed up the kill line after fierce pushback by workplace and food safety advocates. In its waning days in 2016, the Obama USDA was close enough to finalizing hog slaughterhouse deregulation that a bipartisan group of 60 Congress members sent a letter to then-USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack urging the the department not to make the move.

The Trump administration appears to be bringing new zeal to the task of reshaping meat inspection. Once it finalizes the new pork inspection, the USDA plans to roll out a similar scheme for the beef industry, Kindy reports. And last fall, the agency announced it would would let some chicken slaughterhouses speed up their kill lines from 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute.

The USDA has long insisted pulling inspectors off the kill line—while also speeding it up—is about “modernization.” “Advances in animal science, market hog production systems, biosecurity, and veterinary medicine have eliminated the vast majority of diseases inspected for under traditional inspection,” the agency claimed in a 2018 explainer.

What does this deregulation mean for the safety of our meat? We already have a sneak preview. For years, a USDA pilot program has allowed five large hog slaughterhouses to operate at higher line speeds with fewer inspectors. A 2013 audit by the USDA’s Office of Inspector General found that the USDA “did not provide adequate oversight” of the pilot facilities over its first 15 years, and as a result, the plants “may have a higher potential for food safety risks.”

According to the OIG report, there are 616 USDA inspected hog plants in the United States, meaning that just 0.8 percent of them are in the pilot program. Yet of the top 10 US hog plants earning the most food safety and animal welfare citations in the period of fiscal years 2008 to 2011, three were enrolled in the pilot program. By far the most-cited slaughterhouse in the United States over that period was a pilot plant — it drew “nearly 50 percent more [citations] than the plant with the next highest number.”

And in 2015, the Government Accountability Project released affidavits from four USDA federal inspectors working in the pilot hog plants. Their reports from the sped-up line, which I wrote about here, don’t make for appetizing reading. Here’s an excerpt.

“Not only are plant supervisors not trained, the employees taking over USDA’s inspection duties have no idea what they are doing. Most of them come into the plant with no knowledge of pathology or the industry in general.”

“Food safety has gone down the drain under HIMP [the acronym for the pilot program]. Even though fecal contamination has increased under the program (though the company does a good job of hiding it), USDA inspectors are encouraged not to stop the line for fecal contamination.”

In Kindy’s recent Washington Post report, Pat Basu, chief veterinarian for the USDA inspection service from 2016 to 2018, makes similar observations. He “refused to sign off on the new pork system because of concerns about safety for both consumers and livestock,” Kindy reports. “The USDA sent the proposed regulations to the Federal Register about a week after Basu left, and they were published less than a month later, according to records and interviews.”

The Trump USDA first announced plans to finalize the new system in February of 2018, but has made no public comments on it since. Kindy reports the changes are imminent, and could be rolled out “as early as May.” The agency did not respond to my request for comment.

See the article here: 

Trump is about to make the pork industry responsible for inspecting itself

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump is about to make the pork industry responsible for inspecting itself

Veggie discs? Seitan slabs? E.U.’s meat fans want to rebrand vegetarian food

by WendellHJJ Posted on April 5, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

The E.U. is turning up the heat on fake meat. At a meeting in Brussels, the E.U. agriculture committee approved regulations that require the rebranding of meat alternatives to avoid confusion with the real thing. This decision, if passed by the rest of the E.U., could have major repercussions on vegetarian food.

Under the new food-labeling amendment, words like burger, hamburger, sausage, steak, and escalopes will be reserved for meat products. Veggie burgers might be called “veggie discs”; seitan steaks could be rebranded as “seitan slabs,” according to the Guardian. (If you’re wondering what an escalope is, it’s a thin slice of boneless meat or fish. Maybe forcing the renaming of “soya escalopes” isn’t the worst thing in the world after all.)

In 2017, the European Court of Justice ruled to protect words associated with dairy products — hence, “soya milk” became “soya drink” and anything marketed as “cheese” turned into “plant-based alternative to cheese.” Proponents for the new amendment cited this law as precedent.

Why the pushback on tofu burgers? Plant-based diets are on the rise in Europe as vegan and vegetarian options go mainstream. A 2018 study found that a third of people in the U.K. have reduced or altogether stopped their meat consumption. Searches for vegan or vegetarian barbecue recipes jumped up 350 percent, reflecting an overall increased interest in meat alternatives.

Some members of parliament suspect the vote might have been influenced by the meat industry. Molly Scott Cato, of the U.K. Green Party, told The Independent that she saw this as a move by meat companies to undermine the growing plant-based diet trend. “It is going to be a bit repulsive if you have to eat something called ‘vegetable protein tube,’” she said.

The E.U. food-labeling amendment would join six state laws in the U.S. that have pushed back against plant-based alternatives using meaty names. Missouri passed a law late last year that would jail producers of fake meats for not clearly representing their products. Watch our video on the strange fight over vegetarian food labels:

Link to original – 

Veggie discs? Seitan slabs? E.U.’s meat fans want to rebrand vegetarian food

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Veggie discs? Seitan slabs? E.U.’s meat fans want to rebrand vegetarian food

Young climate leaders just told a House committee to get its act together

by DGGKatherin Posted on April 4, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

Melody Zhang’s fascination with the environment, “God’s creation,” began when she was a kid and uttered her first words in Chinese: 出去, which means “Go outside.”

Zhang, the climate justice campaign coordinator for Sojourners (a faith-based social justice magazine) and the co-chair for Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, read this anecdote as part of her testimony in front of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis on Thursday morning.

The congressional hearing wasn’t a typical one. In its first-ever hearing, the brand-new committee listened to the voices of young people who are urging policymakers to take action on climate change.

Along with Zhang, three other young leaders gave brief testimonies about their experiences with climate change: Aji Piper, one of the 21 plaintiffs in the youth climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States; Chris Suggs, a student activist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Lindsay Cooper, a political analyst for the Louisiana governor’s office.

18-year-old Suggs grew up in North Carolina, which experienced severe flooding during Hurricane Florence last year. The saddest thing about recurring weather disasters, Suggs said, is that they affect the communities that have already been hit the hardest by all of society’s other problems.

“You have poor, rural communities that are completely underwater or get cut off from their access to food, hospitals, and medical supplies,” he said in his testimony. “Climate change is an extra kick to communities and populations that are already down.”

After hearing the witnesses’ stories, the committee chair, Democrat Kathy Castor of Florida, asked, “Where do you find hope and optimism in the face of such a daunting problem?”

Zhang said she is energized by the creativity and joy that young people bring to the climate movement. She pointed to last month’s Youth Climate Strike, where students at tens of thousands of schools around the world took the streets to demand that leaders act on climate change.

“This level of engagement and activism is one of the best things I have seen in my many years of beating my head against the wall on this issue,” said Representative Jared Huffman from California, a Democrat who joined the Youth Climate Strike.

While most committee members found the youth’s testimonies compelling, Gary Palmer of Alabama and some other Republican representatives expressed an, um, different viewpoint.

“The fundamental principle in addressing these issues is that you have to fundamentally define the problem,” Palmer said. “If you don’t properly define the problem, then the solutions you come up with are generally going to be off the mark.” (He also disparaged the “emphasis on anthropomorphic impact.” Last time we checked the dictionary, “anthropomorphic” means having human-like characteristics. Don’t you mean “anthropogenic,” Mr. Palmer?)

First-time representative Joe Neguse, a Democrat from Colorado, rebuked Palmer’s argument. “I don’t know that this committee needs to necessarily define the problem,” he said. “The scientists and experts [already] defined the problem for us.”

Since he took office three months ago, Neguse said, every meeting he’s had with young people has been about the environment. While he’s worried about the future his 7-month-year-old daughter might inherit, he was reassured by the capable young people in the room. “When my daughter is my age,” he said, “you all will be the leaders running for office, and I have no doubt that given the reality [now], we will truly make progress in this important issue.”

At the end of her testimony, Zhang made one final plea. “As political leaders, especially ones of faith, I implore you to respond faithfully and with full force to love God and neighbor by enacting just, compassionate, and transformative climate policies which rise to the challenge of the climate crisis. That is my prayer for you.”

Originally posted here – 

Young climate leaders just told a House committee to get its act together

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Anker, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Young climate leaders just told a House committee to get its act together

Out of My Later Years – Albert Einstein

by Myrna Posted on April 4, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Out of My Later Years

The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words

Albert Einstein

Genre: Essays

Price: $10.99

Publish Date: September 27, 2011

Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


An inspiring collection of essays, in which Albert Einstein addresses the topics that fascinated him as a scientist, philosopher, and humanitarian Divided by subject matter—“Science,” “Convictions and Beliefs,” “Public Affairs,” etc.—these essays consider everything from the need for a “supranational” governing body to control war in the atomic age to freedom in research and education to Jewish history and Zionism to explanations of the physics and scientific thought that brought Albert Einstein world recognition. Throughout, Einstein’s clear, eloquent voice presents an idealist’s vision and relays complex theories to the layperson. Einstein’s essays share his philosophical beliefs, scientific reasoning, and hopes for a brighter future, and show how one of the greatest minds of all time fully engaged with the changing world around him. This authorized ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Read this article:

Out of My Later Years – Albert Einstein

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Out of My Later Years – Albert Einstein