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The Latest Court Case Didn’t End the NCAA As We Know It. The Next One Might.

by FlorianSmithers Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, a federal judge made college sports history when she ruled that the NCAA could not deny players from profiting from the use of their likenesses on TV or in video games. In doing so, Judge Claudia Wilken laid down two rules: (1) Schools can put up to $5,000 a year in a trust for athletes; and (2) they can offer more comprehensive scholarships that cover the full cost of attending college.

Many NCAA watchers have argued that the ruling in O’Bannon v. NCAA doesn’t change much, contrary to what some thought a year ago. For example, schools in the rich, successful power conferences already were moving to beef up scholarships. In the sense that the NCAA suffered a manageable setback, some have argued that it actually came out on top. But, they say, the NCAA might not be so lucky the next time around.

That’s because its upcoming legal battle could kill the governing body as we know it. Representing four former college athletes, big-time sports labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler is targeting the NCAA and its five biggest conferences—the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pacific 12, and the Southeastern—in an effort to dismantle the NCAA’s “amateur” system entirely. In a powerfully worded claim, he writes that the defendants “have lost their way far down the road of commercialism,” adding that their refusal to pay student-athletes is “illegal,” “pernicious,” and has brought “substantial damages…upon a host of college athletes whose services have yielded riches only for others.” The offering of scholarship money, he writes, is not nearly enough. “This class action is necessary to end the NCAA’s unlawful cartel, which is inconsistent with the most fundamental principles of antitrust law.”

The athletes represented in Jenkins v. NCAA—all onetime Division I basketball and football players—aren’t seeking damages, but rather an injunction that would make the status quo illegal, open up athlete compensation to market forces, and basically blow up the NCAA as currently constructed.

Michael McCann, director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire, finds that outcome unlikely. “My personal belief is that none of these cases are going to be a death blow to the NCAA,” he said over the phone. If anything, he says, the outcome of O’Bannon boosts the NCAA’s chances in the Jenkins case, especially since Wilken’s decision highlighted the limits of antitrust law and didn’t come out in favor of endorsement deals for high-profile players. “My instinct is that the NCAA probably feels better about winning the Jenkins case than it did before the O’Bannon decision.”

Still, Jenkins is by far the broadest and boldest challenge to the NCAA’s amateurism system yet, and Kessler’s involvement is an enormous boost to the cause. He’s a giant of sports law, having won the fight to secure free agency for NFL players in 1992, and his clients have included the players’ associations of the NFL and NBA, Tom Brady, and Michael Jordan. The NCAA, not to be outdone, has spent $240,000 on its congressional lobbying efforts this year, already shattering past spending records with months left to go in 2014.

Sports Illustrated‘s Andy Staples figures that the outcome of Jenkins, and the future of the NCAA, will come down to the “lifeline” Wilken tossed the NCAA: her opinion that paying college athletes more than a small amount (like $5,000 per year) could harm college sports. If the NCAA’s lawyers can make the case that fans would abandon college sports if athletes were paid pro-level salaries, the association will likely survive. If Kessler can persuade otherwise, then the NCAA as we know it could be history. “The ultimate winner,” Staples writes, “will be the one with best lawyers.”

McCann suggests, however, it may not even come to that. “This is the kind of case that could get settled,” he says. “Maybe it is resolved internally. Maybe the NCAA and conferences will get together and make some changes. The O’Bannon case took five years. This case was filed earlier this year…There may not be a resolution on this for a long time.”

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The Latest Court Case Didn’t End the NCAA As We Know It. The Next One Might.

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Read the Emails in the Hilarious Monsanto/Mo Rocca/Condé Nast Meltdown

by AllisonL87 Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, Gawker uncovered a hapless tie-up between genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto and Condé Nast Media—publisher of The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, GQ, Self, Details, and other magazines—to produce “an exciting video series” on the “topics of food, food chains and sustainability.”

Since then, I’ve learned that Condé Nast’s Strategic Partnerships division dangled cash before several high-profile food politics writers, in unsuccessful attempt to convince them to participate.

Marion Nestle, author of the classic book Food Politics and a professor at New York University, told me she was offered $5,000 to participate for a single afternoon. Nestle almost accepted, because at first she didn’t know Monsanto was involved—the initial email she received only referred to the company in attachments that she didn’t open, she said.

“It wasn’t until we were at the end of the discussion about how much time I would allow (they wanted a full day) that they mentioned the honorarium,” she wrote in an email. “I was so shocked at the amount that I had sense enough to ask who was paying for it. Monsanto. End of discussion.”

James McWillams, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly and a pundit on food issues whose work appears in The Atlantic and other publications, got offered even more. “They were not evasive or misleading” about Monsanto’s involvement, he told me, “just not immediately forthcoming … within a question or two it was clear that this was a PR project.”

He wouldn’t tell me on the record how much they dangled, but described it as “more money than I’ve ever been paid to talk” and “considerably north” of Nestle’s offer. He declined.

Apparently, the infamous gender gap in pay lives on, even in the market for corporate flackery. I would have thought that snagging Nestle, a long-time industry critic, would be worth much more than bagging McWilliams, who has written favorably about GMOs. Nestle, who is quoted frequently in major-media articles on food topics, also arguably has a considerably higher public profile than does McWilliams.

Then there’s Anna Lappé, author of the book Diet for a Hot Planet and prominent critic of the agrichemical industry. She forwarded me an Aug. 4 email a representative of her Small Planet Foundation received from Jillian Nichols, identified of as “Senior Director, Strategic Alliances, the Condé Nast Media Group.” The email, printed below, invited Lappé to participate in an “exciting video series being promoted on our brand websites i.e: Self, Epicurious, Bon Appetit, GQ & Details) and living on a custom YouTube channel,” centered on “food, food chains and sustainability.” It didn’t mention Monsanto, but added that “compensation will be provided, along with travel two/from the shoot location.” It contained no mention of Monsanto, or specifics on the compensation offer.

Coincidentally, Lappé was already wise to the Monsanto/Condé Nast tie-up. Back in June, she had been forwarded an email about a forthcoming web-based TV show sponsored by Monsanto and produced by Condé Nast, in search of experts to appear as talking heads. Lappé wrote critically about the project in an Al Jazeera America column published Aug. 1, just days before the Condé Nast rep approached her. “I guess they didn’t read the column,” Lappé says.

She replied to Condé Nast’s Nichols on August 7, complaining that “it was misleading to approach me about participating without divulging the series is being funded by Monsanto.” She never heard back.

That same day, Gawker came out with its post, which contained a leaked email from another Condé Nast employee to unnamed charity group, which contains similar language to the one Lappé received. “We are contacting you to see if there might be a person at charity group who could speak to one or two of the episode subject,” the email states. (The email also names documentary film maker Lori Silverbush as someone Condé Nast hoped would be part of the panel. Silverbush’s husband, the famed New York City chef Tom Colicchio, later tweeted, “Lori declined the Monsanto ‘opportunity’ when it was first offered, for reasons you can imagine.”)

The series’ host, the email continued, would be Mo Rocca, a famed comedian and correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. Lappé, McWilliams, and Nestle were also informed that Rocca would appear as the show’s host. “When I looked up Mo Rocca, he sounded like fun,” Nestle told me.

Soon after the Gawker item appeared, Rocca wrote a note to the publication denying his involvement. “Yes, I was pitched that project but before I gave my answer a letter went out suggesting I was signed on,” he wrote. “That’s not the case. I’m not involved with it.”

I’ve reached out to Condé Nast for comment, and will update this post if the company gets back.

Here’s the email Lappé’s associate got from Condé Nast:

And here’s Lappé’s response:

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Read the Emails in the Hilarious Monsanto/Mo Rocca/Condé Nast Meltdown

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

by EmeliaRunyan Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on the Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As climate change increases the intensity and (possibly) the frequency of major coastal storms, what will be the economic consequences?

Answering this question requires two big pieces of information: the economic consequences of such storms (typhoons, hurricanes, and tropical cyclones) and the patterns of those storms in the years ahead. As it turns out, it’s that first bit—the economic consequences of storms—that was difficult to pin down.

For years economists have debated whether destructive storms are even bad for a country’s economy. To a non-economist, the ill effects of a storm might seem intuitive, but economists have a knack for finding plausible counterintuitive explanations. When it comes to a major natural disaster, they had four competing hypotheses: Such a disaster might permanently set a country back; it might temporarily derail growth only to get back on course down the road; it might lead to even greater growth, as new investment pours in to replace destroyed assets; or, possibly, it might yet even better, not only stimulating growth but also ridding the country of whatever outdated infrastructure was holding it back. Woohoo.

Hsiang and Jina

Interesting theories, but time to test them out against some empirical data. And that’s what economists Solomon M. Hsiang of Berkeley and Amir S. Jina of Columbia set out to do in a paper released this week.

Hsiang and Jina looked at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes observed from 1950 to 2008 and the economic fortunes of the countries they struck in the years that followed. With their data, Jina and Hsiang can decisively say: These storms are bad—very bad—for economic growth.

“There is no creative destruction,” Jina told me. “These disasters hit us and their effects sit around for a couple of decades.” He added, “Just demonstrating that that was true was probably the most interesting aspect for me to start with.”

Hsiang and Jina find that such storms (which they group under the umbrella term “cyclones”) can be as bad as some of the worst sorts of man-made economic challenges. A cyclone of a magnitude that a country would expect to see once every few years can slow down an economy on par with “a tax increase equal to one percent of GDP, a currency crisis, or a political crisis in which executive constraints are weakened.” For a really bad storm (a magnitude you’d expect to see around the world only once every 10 years), the damage will be similar “to losses from a banking crisis.” The very worst storms—the top percentile—”have losses that are larger and endure longer than any of those previously studied shocks.”

Here’s a little chart they made comparing these different sorts of disasters:

Hsiang and Jina

The effects are lasting: Overall, they find that “each additional meter per second of annual nationally-averaged wind exposure lowers per capita economic output 0.37 percent 20 years later” (emphasis added). Put simply, economies “do not recover in the long run.”

So what does this mean for a planet with a changing climate?

Projections for storm patterns as the planet’s climate morphs are, as Jina put it, “a very complex area.” How do you choose which model to rely on? You go with, Jina says, “the best”: those of Kerry Emanuel at MIT, world expert on cyclone patterns.

When they meshed their backward-looking empirical calculations with Emanuel’s forward-looking projections, the number they got was startling: $9.7 trillion—the present discounted value “of expected losses due to enhanced cyclone activity” if we don’t take any action to dial back greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the calculation they make at the 95 percent confidence interval, though the figure could range from $3.9 trillion to $15.5 trillion.)

“For me,” Jina says, “it is a very convincing argument to say that we need to mitigate as much climate change as we can.”

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

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Farming bluefin tuna might be out of our depths

by MargoSXSUpjc Posted on July 31, 2014

Tuna-ed Out

Farming bluefin tuna might be out of our depths

By

Shutterstock

Close your eyes. Think fish. Do you envision half a ton of laminated muscle rocketing through the sea as fast as you drive your automobile? Do you envision a peaceful warrior capable of killing you unintentionally with a whack of its tail? These giant tuna strain the concept of fish.

– Carl Safina, Song for the Blue Ocean

When most of us think tuna, the image we conjure is more along the lines of a friendly looking tin of Starkist than a voracious top predator. But Atlantic bluefin — not actually the tuna you’d likely find in a can, but the type that ends up as expensive sushi — are just that. Because sushimongers’ insatiable appetites for bluefin are wiping the fish out of oceans, some scientists hope that aquaculture can relieve the pressure from the wild stocks. Turns out, that’s a hard thing to do.

Why? Well, think about it for a second: Would it ever sound like a good idea to farm tigers?

If you actually thought about that question, posited by journalist Paul Greenberg on NPR, I hope you answered “no.” Because, without even mentioning the structural complexities I imagine are involved in raising large, wild beasts, eating from the top of the food chain is incredibly inefficient.

From NPR:

A tuna’s natural diet consists of other fish. Lots of other fish. Right now, there are tuna “ranches” that capture young tuna in the ocean and then fatten them up in big net-pens. According to Greenberg, those ranches feed their tuna about 15 pounds of fish such as sardines or mackerel for each addition pound of tuna that can be sold to consumers. That kind of tuna production is environmentally costly.

We’re talking about a fish that can grow up to 1,000 pounds and swim up to 45 miles per hour across entire oceans here! Impressive, yes, but it takes a lot of energy to be able to do.

Of course it would be great if we could reduce demand for wild-caught bluefin. But here’s another idea: Why don’t we eat something else, instead? As they say, there are other fish in the sea.


Source
Farming The Bluefin Tuna, Tiger Of The Ocean, Is Not Without A Price, NPR

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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Farming bluefin tuna might be out of our depths

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Dot Earth Blog: The New Oil Patch: Rail Lines in Albany and Elsewhere

by Myrna Posted on July 25, 2014

The oil boom in the West is creating traffic jams of oil trains in New York’s Hudson Valley. Credit – Dot Earth Blog: The New Oil Patch: Rail Lines in Albany and Elsewhere Related ArticlesDrones on a Different MissionWhite House Opens Door to Exploring Atlantic for OilNo good deed… California couple tries to conserve water during drought, gets $500 fine for brown lawn

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Dot Earth Blog: The New Oil Patch: Rail Lines in Albany and Elsewhere

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Archive Dive: When Halibut Was Plentiful

by Myrna Posted on July 2, 2014

A fish praised for its flavor has virtually vanished from the Atlantic Ocean, and the Pacific catch is on a downward trend. Original article: Archive Dive: When Halibut Was Plentiful Related ArticlesU.S. Catfish Program Could Stymie Pacific Trade Pact, 10 Nations SayAsh Forests After Emerald Ash Borers Destroy ThemBiology: City Smells Confound Flower-Seeking Moths

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Archive Dive: When Halibut Was Plentiful

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American Southwest heating faster than rest of nation

by gammak Posted on June 5, 2014

How do you like your state cooked?

American Southwest heating faster than rest of nation

By

Shutterstock

Stick a fork in the American Southwest. The ranches there are broiled.

Separate analyses published this week both found that the region has heated up more than any other in the U.S. in recent decades as global warming’s most prominent effect — warming — has taken hold. The first analysis came from Climate Central, which looked at summertime heat:

Climate Central

From Climate Central’s article:

Nationwide, the summer warming trend averages out to a little more than 0.4°F per decade since 1970. The places warming the fastest also happen to be some of the hottest places in the country, with a large chunk of the Southwest and all of Texas warming more than 1°F per decade.

The notable blue spot in a sea of red is the Upper Midwest, where substantial parts of Iowa and the Dakotas have seen a slight cooling trend since 1970. Interestingly, that region is actually home to some of the fastest-warming states when you look at the change in annual average temperatures. Winters in particular have warmed dramatically there over the past 40 years.

On that note, the AP analyzed average year-round temperatures, reaching these conclusions:

The United States is warming fastest at two of its corners, in the Northeast and the Southwest, an analysis of federal temperature records shows. …

The Southwest warming, especially in the summer, seems to be driven by dryness, because when there is little water the air and ground warm up faster, said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

“Heat and drought are a vicious cycle that has been hitting the Southwest hard in recent years,” Hayhoe said.

And in the Northeast, the temperatures are pushed up by milder winters and warm water in the North Atlantic, said Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And less snow on the ground over the winter often means warmer temperatures, said Alan Betts, a climate scientist at Atmospheric Research in Pittsford, Vermont.

The Southeast and Northwest were among the places that warmed the least. In the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, industrial sulfur particle pollutants from coal burning may be reflecting sunlight, thus countering heating caused by coal’s carbon dioxide emissions, said Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann.

Of course, warming isn’t the only impact that’s being felt from climate change. Another prominent impact is rising seas. And The Washington Post recently reported that high tides have risen by 1.5 feet during the past decade in Norfolk, Va., where water levels have been rising faster than anywhere else on the East Coast.


Source
Here’s How Much U.S. Summers Have Warmed Since 1970, Climate Central
What states are warming the fastest?, The Associated Press
In Norfolk, evidence of climate change is in the streets at high tide, The Washington Post

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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American Southwest heating faster than rest of nation

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Hurricane Amanda Just Set an Ominous New Record

by RJIDinahhonbocu Posted on May 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Usually, people living in the United States don’t pay much attention to hurricanes in the eastern Pacific, the other basin where megastorms that can affect North America are formed. Mostly, these storms wallop Mexico, or travel harmlessly out to sea. So, given the standard myopia of the media, we rarely hear much about them.

But this year, perhaps, we ought to be paying more attention. The eastern Pacific hurricane season started on May 15, and already, with its first storm, it has set an ominous record. The hurricane in question, named Amanda, spun up south of the Baja California peninsula Thursday, and on Sunday it attained maximum sustained wind speeds of 155 miles per hour—just below Category 5 status. Or as National Hurricane Center forecaster Stacy Stewart put it when the storm reached its peak strength: “Amanda is now the strongest May hurricane on record in the eastern Pacific basin during the satellite era.”

This record is notable for two reasons. First of all, even though there remains a great deal of uncertainty and debate about the relationship between hurricanes and global warming, the fact is that in many hurricane basins across the world, new storm intensity records have been set just since the year 2000. Amanda therefore fits into this broader pattern.

Second, there is growing evidence that El Niño conditions—characterized by an eastward shift of warm water across the great Pacific Ocean, with global weather ramifications—are developing in the Pacific right now. The latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now gives us a greater than 65 percent chance that El Niño conditions will develop by this summer.

In El Niño years, we tend to see a great firing of hurricane activity in the eastern Pacific, and a suppression of these storms in the Atlantic. In fact, the strongest storm ever recorded in the eastern Pacific, Category 5 Hurricane Linda in 1997, occurred during the last super-strong El Niño year.

So if El Nino does occur, Amanda may not be the strongest storm that we see in the Eastern Pacific this year. That’s potentially bad news for Mexico. In fact, there is even a tiny possibility that during an El Niño year, a storm might be able to travel as far north as Southern California (albeit in a pretty weakened state), as Hurricane Linda was at one point forecast to do. In fact, recent historical work on past hurricanes has revealed that in 1858, San Diego was struck by what appears to have been a Category 1 hurricane.

As of now, Hurricane Amanda has weakened and is not expected to affect land in a serious way. But this is definitely a storm whose significance extends well beyond its immediate impact.

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Hurricane Amanda Just Set an Ominous New Record

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Wall Street Wants to Lend You Money to Fight Climate Change

by berrywood1 Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The latest series of reports from the United Nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in stark terms the catastrophic consequences of the world’s governments’ decades-long foot-dragging on limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

But what can you do? For one thing, fix up your damn house. That furnace, from the Reagan era, the inefficient water heater, the drafty windows? They’re directly contributing to climate change. Homes consume 22 percent of the US’s energy and, along with commercial buildings, account for 10 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions.

The chances of the US government enacting a carbon tax, emissions trading scheme or taking other sweeping action to tackle climate change may be next to nil. But thanks to an innovative new initiative from financial conglomerate Citi, the Pennsylvania state treasury and non-profits, homeowners across the country soon will be able to tap a $100 million fund to instantly secure low-cost loans to do everything from installing solar panels on their roof to replacing that roof. Contractors will authorized to offer the loans, meaning no need to deal with state or local bureaucrats who will administer the program.

It’s just another example of how financial innovation has become key to getting the green tech innovations dreamed up in Silicon Valley into the hands of homeowners as well as prompting them to undertake low-tech efforts like insulating their attics.

“There’s no question that energy efficiency technology has outpaced the financial technology,” Cisco DeVries, chief executive of Renewable Funding, an Oakland, California, company that designs green energy-financing programs, told The Atlantic.

Renewable Funding later this year will begin to securitize the loans–called Warehouse for Energy Efficiency Loans, or WHEEL–and sell the securities to pension funds and other investors. That will generate a cash flow to fund further energy efficiency improvements.

“What we’ve set up is an indefinitely scalable program,” says DeVries. “We can purchase loans and securitize them and the more we do it, the cheaper the funds become. This has no limit to its capacity.”

It will certainly need to scale. According to a 2009 McKinsey study it’ll take $229 billion to cut home energy use by about a third.

Still, until WHEEL most homeowners faced with spending five figures on just replacing their windows either had to tap home equity lines or their high-interest credit cards to pay for such improvements. And people tend to make energy efficiency fixes piece-meal, replacing the hot water heater when it breaks, for instance.

The availability of a five, seven or 10-year loan would encourage people to obtain energy audits and comprehensive upgrades to their homes. The payoff is lower energy bills that would help pay back the loans.

Three years in the works, WHEEL is based on a successful Pennsylvania program and initially is available in that state and Kentucky. DeVries expects California and other states to be added by the end of 2014 with nationwide coverage in 2015.

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Did Slavery Create Modern Medicine?

by kx0bq6uuw Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble—as many as 300,000 died—when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been “under the heel of the French” but they “got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.'”

A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne.

Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property—their slaves (that is, themselves)—or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80 percent of the government budget was still going to service this debt.

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Did Slavery Create Modern Medicine?

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