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Here Is a Video of 25-Year-Old Jon Hamm Being Super Awkward on a Dating Show

by stevenjakoby Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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So, you’re walking down a street and you see a sign or a building or a landmark and it triggers some long forgotten memory from your past and you’re swept up in it and a wistful smile crawls across your face and you look up to the sky and put your hands on your hips and then you look down to the ground, then finally straight ahead, and you chuckle and my God, you were so young and stupid—but wasn’t it good to be young?—but then you stop chuckling because you think about the memory more and you remember it in detail and my God, what were you doing, did you really act like that, did you really say that, my God, did you really look like that, and boom boom boom is the sound of your heart pounding and your anxiety is rising and you recall vividly that you didn’t think you looked ridiculous when you were on this street corner when you were young and now you worry all of a sudden that you actually thought at that time—gasp!—that you were cool and fun and neat and attractive, and people liked you, you thought, but they couldn’t have liked this person you’re remembering because this person you’re remembering, young you, is objectively humiliating, and now you begin doubting everything—is north north?—but especially yourself, that is what you doubt the most, because if you thought you were cool then and you were wrong, maybe you’re wrong about thinking you’re cool now, and maybe it’s all a lie, everything you tell yourself about yourself, maybe you’re not really very cool, maybe you’re not really very happy, maybe you’ll never be very cool, maybe you’ll never be very happy, maybe your hands still sweat, and your lip still quivers, and your hair still looks all a mess, and oh God, dear God, blessed God, it’s true, you think: you’re still the same silly shamefully awkward 25-year-old you never wanted to be in the first place.

Don’t worry. Jon Hamm was a super awkward 25-year-old as well and look at him! You’re probably cool now, too.

(via Slate)

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Here Is a Video of 25-Year-Old Jon Hamm Being Super Awkward on a Dating Show

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Obama’s new gaseous release: A strategy to cut back on methane

by mr2ql Posted on March 28, 2014

Pass on Gas

Obama’s new gaseous release: A strategy to cut back on methane

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The White House released its strategy to cut methane emissions this morning — President Obama’s latest sashay around Congress to pursue climate action (as part of the plan he announced in June).

Methane isn’t the most ubiquitous of greenhouse gases (that’d be good ‘ol CO2), but it is a potent one: The same amount of methane as CO2 has 20 times the impact in terms of future global warming over a 100-year period. While methane emissions have decreased by 11 percent since 1990, we’re still not in good shape: 50 percent more methane is leaking from oil and gas sites than previously thought and, without action, methane emissions are expected to increase through 2030 – mostly thanks to fracking. So far the oil and gas industry has balked at the idea of regulating its methane leaks, saying that it might slow production down (we’ve all heard it before, but, man, frack you!).

Obama’s plan looks at culling methane emissions from four big sources: landfills (methane gets released when all of our biodegradable trash breaks down), leaks from oil and natural gas production, coal mining, and cow farts. The report details how the White House will delegate government agencies to come up with and enforce better standards, i.e. the EPA will manage landfills while the Department of the Interior will handle methane leaks on public lands. It also focuses on ways to capture methane to reuse it for clean energy, such as biogas systems, which can convert cattle waste into fuel. So while we’re not going to replace our cows with less-farty kangaroos, it at least offers options for putting all those bovine leavings to good use.

All of these steps are pretty minor in the face of battling climate change, but the plan overall does have people excited. “Curbing methane is … a big step in the right direction,” David Doniger, director of the Climate and Clean Air Program at NRDC, said in a recent press release. And from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse: “As climate change continues to harm American communities from the Heartland to the coasts, we must use every tool at our disposal to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing it … I applaud the President for his ongoing commitment to public health and the environment.”

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Obama’s new gaseous release: A strategy to cut back on methane

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What These Historical Kings and Marauders Can Teach Our Leaders About Climate Change

by ReinaPalmerston Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones

There are no two ways about it: Humankind is, for the first time in our recorded history, living through a massive global climate shift of our own making. Science paints today’s crisis as unprecedented in scope and consequence. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t historical cases of societies that have enjoyed the highs and endured the lows of natural climatic changes—from civilization-busting droughts to empire-building stretches of gorgeous sunshine.

Whether they’re commanding marauding armies or struggling with dramatic temperature shifts, today’s leaders have a variety of historical role models they can learn from:

Should Governor Jerry Brown—confronted by California’s 500-year drought—be mindful of the policy mistakes made by the last Ming Emperor?

Will President Obama learn lessons from Ponhea Yat, the last king of the sacred city of Angkor Wat, when planning how to safeguard America’s critical infrastructure against extreme weather?

Will Vladimir Putin channel his inner Genghis Khan as Russia seeks new territories in the melting Arctic? (He’s already got the horse-riding thing on lock down.)

Here are four historical figures whose triumphs and defeats were related, at least in part, to major changes in their climates.

A new study published this week argues that Genghis Khan, the massively successful Mongol overlord who stitched together the biggest contiguous land empire in world history, may have had a secret weapon: really nice weather.

The paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents evidence from tree ring data collected in present-day Mongolia. It shows that when Genghis Khan was building his empire, the usually frigid steppes of central Asia were at their mildest and wettest in more than 1,000 years. This potentially favored “the formation of Mongol political and military power,” the paper says.

The researchers, led by Neil Pederson, a tree-ring scientist at Columbia University, discovered 15 consecutive years of above-average moisture in Mongolia. This was great, politically speaking, for nomad types: “The warm and consistently wet conditions of the early 13th century would have led to high grassland productivity and allowed for increases in domesticated livestock, including horses,” the authors write. If you’ve seen any cheesy historical reenactments of Khan, you’ll know horses were key to expansion, in the same way that icebreakers are becoming all-important in today’s race for shipping routes—and geopolitical influence—in the melting Arctic.

Genghis Khan and his hoard may have had successful romps across the warm climes of Central Asia, but the scientists say the weather was temporary, and their analysis reveals worrying trends for the future. Tree rings show that the early 21st century drought that afflicted Central Asia was the worst in Mongolia in over 1000 years, and made harsher by the higher temperatures consistent with manmade global warming. As temperatures here rise more than the global mean in coming decades, the authors say we could witness repeated instances of mass migration and livestock die-off: “If future warming overwhelms increased precipitation, episodic heat droughts and their social, economic, and political consequences will likely become more common in Mongolia and Inner Asia.”

For three centuries, China’s Ming Dynasty was a superpower that, among other things, invented the bristle-headed toothbrush. But from around 1630, the country was ravaged by a record-breaking drought that was caused by some of the weakest monsoons of the last 2,000 years, which in turn sparked mass civil unrest. Anthropologist Brian Fagan writes in his book, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850, that these events in China were “far more threatening than any contemporary disorders in Europe.” By the time of the fall of the Ming Dynasty in the mid-1600s, Fagan writes, the usually fertile Yangtze Valley had suffered from catastrophic epidemics, floods and famine that drove political discord and left the state vulnerable to attack.

Temperatures were at an all-time low. In China, “it was colder in the mid-seventeenth century than at any other time from 1370 to the present,” writes Emory University historian Tonio Andrade in his 2011 book, Lost Colony. “It was also drier. 1640 was the driest year for north China recorded during the last five centuries.”

The Forbidden City is perhaps the most famous Ming Dynasty structure, and Chongzhen’s final fortress. kallgan/Wikimedia Commons

As Andrade writes, even “the best government would be tried by such conditions.” And Chongzhen’s government was hardly the best. As crop yields collapsed, the response from the emperor’s already fragile regime exacerbated the crisis. Zero tax relief meant starving farmers “now abandoned their land and joined the outlaws,” writes Geoffery Parker in Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. The hermit-like emperor in Beijing walled himself off in the Forbidden City, the most famous Ming Dynasty symbol of power, distrustful of lawmakers and bureaucrats who were themselves absorbed in bitter factional disputes. (Sound familiar?) Instead of keeping law and order in the provinces, the emperor withdrew his troops to the capital, basically ceding his empire to the disaffected packs of bandits that were growing in number every day; and he shut down one-third of the “courier network” that he relied on for communications, leaving him blind to worsening developments.

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Click to embiggen: Temperatures during the Ming Dynasty plummeted. Adapted from “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century,” by Geoffrey Parker.

Meanwhile, the Manchus were ravaging the north, driven by their own drought. It all became too much for Chongzhen. “Under the cumulative pressure of so many catastrophes in so many areas,” writes Parker, “the social fabric of Ming China began to unravel.” Forced to choose between abandoning the north for the southern capital, Nanjing, or standing his ground, “on the morning of 25 April 1644, abandoned by his officials, the last Ming emperor climbed part-way up the hill behind the forbidden city and hanged himself,” writes the University of North Texas’s Harold Miles Tanner in China: A History.

The Manchus eventually sacked Beijing and started the Qing dynasty.

According to author and environmental commentator Fred Pearce, the balmy days of the 10th and 11th century favored the creation of Viking settlements in Greenland under Erik the Red. His son, Leif Erikson was the gallant Viking king credited with the first European discovery of North America, at Newfoundland, in the late 10th century. But the period of great adventure and productivity Erikson initiated in Greenland was soon under threat from increasingly cold weather.

“The settlement on the southern tip of the Arctic island thrived for 400 years, but by the mid-fifteenth century, crops were failing and sea ice cut off any chance of food aid from Europe,” writes Pearce in his book, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change. It was a failure of adaptation more than anything else, Pearce argues. The Vikings stubbornly continued to farm chickens and grains—warmer weather practices—instead of hunting seals and polar bears, and as a result, “creeping starvation had cut the average height of a Greenland Viking from a sturdy five feet nine inches to a stunted five feet.”

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What These Historical Kings and Marauders Can Teach Our Leaders About Climate Change

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You’re Drinking the Wrong Kind of Milk

by JeroldNRPB Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

When my in-laws moved from India to the United States some 35 years ago, they couldn’t believe the low cost and abundance of our milk—until they developed digestive problems. They’ll now tell you the same thing I’ve heard a lot of immigrants say: American milk will make you sick.

It takes HOW much water to make a glass of milk?!

It turns out that they could be onto something. An emerging body of research suggests that many of the 1 in 4 Americans who exhibit symptoms of lactose intolerance could instead be unable to digest A1, a protein most often found in milk from the high-producing Holstein cows favored by American and some European industrial dairies. The A1 protein is much less prevalent in milk from Jersey, Guernsey, and most Asian and African cow breeds, where, instead, the A2 protein predominates.

“We’ve got a huge amount of observational evidence that a lot of people can digest the A2 but not the A1,” says Keith Woodford, a professor of farm management and agribusiness at New Zealand’s Lincoln University who wrote the 2007 book Devil in the Milk: Illness, Health, and the Politics of A1 and A2 Milk. “More than 100 studies suggest links between the A1 protein and a whole range of health conditions”—everything from heart disease to diabetes to autism, Woodford says, though the evidence is far from conclusive.

Holsteins, the most common dairy-cow breed in the United States, typically produce A1 milk. Sarahluv/Flickr

For more than a decade, an Auckland-based company called A2 Corporation has been selling a brand of A2 milk in New Zealand and Australia; it now accounts for 8 percent of Australia’s dairy market. In 2012, A2 Corp. introduced its milk in the United Kingdom through the Tesco chain, where a two-liter bottle sells for about 18 percent more than conventional milk.

But critics write off the success of A2 Corp. as a victory of marketing over science. Indeed, a 2009 review by the European Food Safety Authority found no link between the consumption of A1 milk and health and digestive problems. So far, much of the research on the matter is funded by A2 Corp., which holds a patent for the only genetic test that can separate A1 from A2 cows. And in 2004, the same year that A2 Corp. went public on the New Zealand Stock Exchange, Australia’s Queensland Health Department fined its marketers $15,000 for making false and misleading claims about the health benefits of its milk.

The A1/A2 debate has raged for years in Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, but it is still virtually unheard of across the pond. That could soon change: A2 Corp. recently announced plans to offer its milk in the United States in coming months. In a letter to investors, the company claims that “consumer research in Los Angeles confirms the attractiveness of the A2 proposition.”

The difference between A1 and A2 proteins is subtle: They are different forms of beta-casein, a part of the curds (i.e., milk solids ) that make up about 30 percent of the protein content in milk. The A2 variety of beta-casein mutated into the A1 version several thousand years ago in some European dairy herds. Two genes code for beta-casein, so modern cows can either be purely A2, A1/A2 hybrids, or purely A1. Milk from goats and humans contains only the A2 beta-casein, yet not everyone likes the flavor of goat milk, which also contains comparatively less vitamin B-12—a nutrient essential for creating red blood cells.

About 65 percent of Jersey cows exclusively produce A2 milk. langleyo/Flickr

The A1 milk hypothesis was devised in 1993 by Bob Elliott, a professor of child health research at the University of Auckland. Elliott believed that consumption of A1 milk could account for the unusually high incidence of type-1 diabetes among Samoan children growing up in New Zealand. He and a colleague, Corran McLachlan, later compared the per capita consumption of A1 milk to the prevalence of diabetes and heart disease in 20 countries and came up with strong correlations.

Critics argued that the relationships could be explained away by other factors, such as diet, lifestyle, and latitude-dependent exposure to vitamin D in sunlight—and in any case started to fall apart when more countries were included.

African cows also tend to produce A2 milk. United Nations Photo/Flickr

Yet a 1997 study by Elliott published by the International Dairy Federation showed A1 beta-casein caused mice to develop diabetes, lending support to the hypothesis, and McLachlan remained convinced. In 2000, he partnered with entrepreneur Howard Paterson, then regarded as the wealthiest man on New Zealand’s South Island, to found the A2 Corporation.

Starting in 2003, A2 Corp. sold milk in the United States through a licensing agreement, but pulled out in 2007 after it failed to catch on. Massasso blamed mistakes by the company’s US partner, but declined to elaborate. But now the market dynamics may be changing in A2 Corp.’s favor as compelling new research on the A1/A2 debate grabs headlines in the Australian and UK press.

When digested, A1 beta-casein (but not the A2 variety) releases beta-casomorphin7 (BCM7), an opioid with a structure similar to that of morphine. Studies increasingly point to BCM7 as a troublemaker. Numerous recent tests, for example, have shown that blood from people with autism and schizophrenia contains higher-than-average amounts the BCM7. In a recent study, Richard Deth, a professor of pharmacology at Northeastern University in Boston, and his postdoctoral fellow, Malav Trivedi, showed in cell cultures that the presence of similarly high amounts of BCM7 in gut cells causes a chain reaction that creates a shortage of antioxidants in neural cells, a condition that other research has tied to autism. The study, underwritten in part by A2 Corp., is now undergoing peer review in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.

Nearly 80 percent of Guernsey cows tested in the US are pure A2, the highest percentage of any traditional breed, according to the American Guernsey Association. Jean/Flickr

The results suggest that drinking A2 milk instead of A1 milk could reduce the symptoms of autism, Trivedi says, but, he adds: “There’s a lot more research that needs to be done to support these claims.”

Researchers without ties to A2 Corp. are also lending increasing support to the A1 hypothesis. One peer-reviewed study conducted at the National Dairy Research Institute in India, published in October in the European Journal of Nutrition, found that mice fed A1 beta-casein overproduced enzymes and immune regulators that other studies have linked to heart disease and autoimmune conditions such as eczema and asthma.

The leading explanation for why some people but not others may react poorly to A1 milk implicates leaky gut syndrome—a concept that got its start in alternative medicine circles but has been gaining wider traction in the medical establishment. The idea is that that loose connections in the gut, like tears in a coffee filter, allow rogue proteins such as BCM7 to enter the body and run amok. The body brings in immune cells to fight them off, creating inflammation that manifests as swelling and pain—a telltale symptom of autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and diabetes, and autism.

The A2-producing Normande is a popular breed in France. dominiqueb/Flickr

Though many adults may suffer from leaky guts, the condition is normal in babies less than a year old, who naturally have semi-permeable intestines. This may pose a problem when they’re fed typical cow-milk formula. A 2009 study documented that formula-fed infants developed muscle tone and psychomotor skills more slowly than infants that were fed (A2-only) breast milk. Researchers in Russia, Poland, and the Czech Republic have suggested links between BCM7 in cow milk formula and childhood health issues. A 2011 study implicates BCM7 in sudden infant death syndrome: the blood serum of some infants that experienced a “near-miss SIDS” incident contained more BCM7 than of healthy infants the same age. Capitalizing on those findings, A2 Corp. also sells an A2-only infant formula, a2PLATINUM, in Australia, New Zealand, and China.

The mainstream dairy industry in the United States may be more interested in the A1/A2 debate than it lets on. For example, US companies that sell cow semen for breeding purposes maintain information on the exact A1/A2 genetics of all of their offerings. And breeders have already developed A2 Holsteins to replace the A1 varieties typically used in confined agricultural feeding operations. “There is absolutely no problem in moving across to A2 and still having these high-production cows,” says Woodford, the Devil in the Milk author, who has in more recent years worked as a consultant for A2 Corp.

But the transition to A2 milk would take a bit of money and a lot of time—probably about a decade, Woodford believes. “The mainstream industry has always seen it as a threat,” he says, “whereas another way of looking at it is, hey, this can actually bring more people to drinking milk.”

Indian cows produce A2 milk. Poi Photography/Flickr

For now, here in the United States, the best way to get milk with a higher-than-average A2 content is to buy it from a dairy that uses A2-dominant cow breeds such as the Jersey, the Guernsey, or the Normande. In Northern California, for example, Sonoma County’s Saint Benoit Creamery specifies on its milk labels that it uses “pastured Jersey cows.”

The heirloom A2 cow breeds tend to be hardy animals adapted to living on the open range and not producing a ton of milk, but what they do produce is comparatively thicker, creamier, and, many people say, a lot tastier than what you’ll typically find at the supermarket.

“People taste our milk and they say: ‘Oh my gosh, I haven’t tasted milk like this since I left home,'” and came to America, says owner Warren Taylor, the owner of Ohio’s Snowville Creamery, which has been phasing out A1 cows from its herds. For the time being, the switch to A2 milk “is going to be for the small producers—people like us,” he adds. “It’s just a part of our responsibility.”

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You’re Drinking the Wrong Kind of Milk

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Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

by LauraFore Posted on February 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This week, when Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni approved a harsh new bill making “aggravated homosexuality” a crime punishable by life in prison, he cited a recent report from the Ugandan Ministry of Health’s Committee on Homosexuality, which concluded that same-sex attraction is mostly a learned impulse. “Since nurture is the main cause of homosexuality, then society can do something about it to discourage the trends,” Museveni said. “That is why I have agreed to sign the bill.”

This pronouncement creates a quandary for the United States. American officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, have vehemently condemned Museveni’s decision. Yet millions of US taxpayer dollars are flowing to the agency that the Ugandan leader used to justify the legislation, according to records from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gay rights activist argue that the Committee on Homosexuality report was engineered to ensure the bill’s passage, and at least one committee member—a physician named Eugene Kinyanda—refused to sign his name to it because the process had “taken a very political” direction. “I will not be used to justify the passing of a bill which as a doctor I do not fully understand,” he wrote in an email to a fellow committee member, which was reprinted on the blog Patheos.

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Did American Taxpayers Help Push Through Uganda’s Anti-Gay Law?

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Do Movies Make Us Stupid About Prisons?

by SeleneTierney Posted on February 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Keith Humphreys recently attended a dinner party where everyone he talked to seemed quite sure they knew everything there is to know about prisons. Most of them were dead wrong:

Nobody is informed about all areas of public policy. And most people don’t have trouble admitting that they don’t know anything about, say, the US-Brazil diplomatic relationship, Libor rate management, or sugar subsidies. But for a subset of public policy issues, a large number of completely ignorant people are dead sure they have all the facts….Prison is one of those areas, and I strongly suspect it is because there is so much fictionalization of it. If I were bored, I am sure I could easily list a hundred movies set in prisons. The Big House is also a common backdrop for TV shows, novels and comic books.

I suppose that’s part of it. But here’s a different theory: When it comes to issues of general public interest (i.e., not Libor or sugar subsidies), the less people know about something the more confident they are in their opinions. Everyone with the manual dexterity to hoist a beer can regale you with confident answers to all the ills of society, while in the very next breath insisting that you don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to subject X. That’s a lot more complicated than you think.

Subject X, of course, is something they happen to know a lot about, probably because they work in the field. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that they’ve learned to be cautious about the one field they know the most about doesn’t stop them from assuming that every other field is pretty simple and tractable.

I am, of course, a professional in this kind of behavior. But lemme tell you, this blogging stuff is a lot trickier than you’d think. There are no easy answers to doing it right and attracting a large audience.

As for prisons, click the link if you want to learn five things that you might not know. But since you read this blog and are obviously smarter than the average bear, I will be disappointed if you don’t already know at least one or two of them. You do know that the prison population is shrinking, don’t you?

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Do Movies Make Us Stupid About Prisons?

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Why It Makes Sense to Kill Baby Giraffes (Sorry, Internet)

by CesarColmenero Posted on February 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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A second Danish zoo has announced that it might kill a male giraffe. The news comes just days after the internet exploded with outrage when Marius the 18-month old giraffe was dispatched with a bolt gun and dissected in front of an audience that included children, before being fed to the lions at the Copenhagen Zoo. In a dark twist, the next potential euthanasia candidate, at the Jyllands Park zoo, is also named Marius.

The media circus began with protestors outside the Copenhagen Zoo on Sunday and a petition signed by 27,000 people to rehouse Marius in one of several zoos that had already indicated that their doors were open.

Then came the death threats to Bengt Holst, the zoo’s director of research and conservation. And the emotional opinion pieces.

As this debate rages, it’s crucial to remember that Marius was not just an exotic attraction: he was part of a larger conservation program that breeds animals with the specific goal of maintaining the diversity of each species’ gene pool.

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Why It Makes Sense to Kill Baby Giraffes (Sorry, Internet)

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The Amazing, Hypnotic Appeal of Rand Paul

by Rosaura19L Posted on February 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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So Rand Paul filed a lawsuit yesterday against the NSA’s phone record collection program, and he’s already getting flack for parachuting in and trying to steal the limelight from a guy who filed a similar suit months ago. Some other awkward questions are being raised too, including one from Steve Benen, who wonders why this entire effort is being run through his campaign operation instead of his Senate office.

I think the answer to that is pretty obvious, but it also gives me a chance to mention something: Is anyone in Congress right now more of a genius at self-promotion than Rand Paul? Sure, Ted Cruz gets some attention for being an asshole, but that’s ephemeral. Nobody’s really very interested in Cruz.

But despite the fact that Paul’s political views make him wildly implausible as a candidate for higher office, everyone finds him endlessly fascinating. He mounts a meaningless “filibuster” and suddenly everyone wants to Stand With Rand. He wants to end the Fed and the tea partiers go gaga. He starts talking about Monica Lewinsky and it prompts a thousand thumbsuckers in the Beltway media. He opposes foreign interventions and somehow manages to hypnotize the punditocracy into thinking that maybe dovishness represents the future foreign policy of the Republican Party. He gets caught plagiarizing and shakes it off. He gets caught hiring an aide who turns out to be a former radio shock jock who specialized in neo-Confederate rants, and it just adds color to his resume.

It’s remarkable. Is he just an amazing, intuitive self-promoter, like Sarah Palin? Is he a case study in how being a nice guy (which apparently he is) gets you way more sympathetic coverage than being a lout (which apparently Ted Cruz really is)? Is this just an example of how bored the media is and how desperate they are for even small bits of sideshow amusement?

Beats me. But backbench senators sure don’t normally attract the kind of coverage that Rand Paul gets unless they’re legitimate presidential prospects. Which Paul isn’t. Not by a million miles, and everyone knows it. Don’t make me waste my time by pretending otherwise and demanding that I explain why he’s obviously unelectable.

But he sure does have the knack of entertaining bored reporters.

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The Amazing, Hypnotic Appeal of Rand Paul

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Step right up, Big Coal, for America’s Big Coal Giveaway

by WalkerMcIntyre Posted on February 5, 2014

Step right up, Big Coal, for America’s Big Coal Giveaway

By

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It’s bad enough that the federal government leases out public lands to private companies to be torn up and mined for coal. Even worse is that the feds are ripping off taxpayers in the process, leasing the coal tracts at way-below-market prices, through a totally inept program, according to a new federal study.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has leased 107 coal-laden tracts of land to mining companies since 1990, recently generating about $1 billion a year for federal coffers. Coal mining on federal land accounts for two-fifths of the 1 billion tons of coal mined every year in the U.S. Less coal is being burned in the U.S. these days, but it still produces about 40 percent of the nation’s electricity. Meanwhile, coal exports are growing.

Auctions for the coal-tract leases attract few bidders, and a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office is the latest reminder that the feds are selling the public short by accepting lowball offers.

Of the 107 coal-tract leases, 96 were sold to the only bidder — often to a company that was already mining for coal nearby:

GAO

The government is under no obligation to accept the lowball bids, but it appears to be doing so anyway because of systemic failures within BLM to properly estimate fair market value. The GAO found that some bureau offices failed to follow procedures, seek independent advice, or consider future market conditions when estimating market value. And when the bureau sold America’s assets at fire-sale prices, it “did not consistently document the rationale for accepting bids that were initially below the fair market value,” according to the report.

“Taxpayers are likely losing out so that coal companies can reap a windfall,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who asked the GAO to conduct the study. Markey’s office estimates that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars may have been lost to coal companies through these bargain leases.

Following publication of the GAO report on Tuesday, Markey and environmentalists called on the federal government to suspend new coal leases until it can be sure it will get fair prices for them.

Of course, it would be even better for the U.S. to stop coal mining on federal land entirely — something that President Obama might consider were he to take his own rhetoric about climate change seriously.

On that note, here’s how Rolling Stone describes the administration’s muddled coal policy in a must-read article titled “How the U.S. Exports Global Warming”:

With the freefall in domestic [coal] demand, industry giants like Peabody are desperate to turn American coal into a global export — targeting booming Asian economies that are powering their growth with dirty fuel. China now consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined, and its demand is projected to grow by nearly 40 percent by the end of the decade. “China’s demand,” according to William Durbin, head of global markets for the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, “will almost single-handedly propel the growth of coal.”

Since Obama took office, American coal exports are up more than 50 percent. … [T]he administration opened up more than 300 million tons of coal in the Powder River Basin to bidding by the coal companies last year. The coal is on government land; it belongs to the public. Yet the leasing practices of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are so flawed that one independent study estimates that taxpayers have been fleeced of $30 billion over the past three decades. In the past, that stealth subsidy to Big Coal at least helped create cheap power for American homes and businesses. Today, the administration has put American taxpayers in the position of subsidizing coal destined to fuel the growth of our nation’s fiercest, and carbon-filthiest, economic rival.

In an era of climatic craziness and growing clean energy capacity, the last thing Americans should be subsidizing is coal mining.


Source
BLM Could Enhance Appraisal Process, More Explicitly Consider Coal Exports, and Provide More Public Information, GAO
How the U.S. Exports Global Warming, Rolling Stone

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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Step right up, Big Coal, for America’s Big Coal Giveaway

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Why We Need To Triple Clean Energy Investment

by Hortense57O Posted on January 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published in the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk initiative. The video was produced by Climate Desk’s Tim McDonnell.

The United Nations climate chief has urged global financial institutions to triple their investments in clean energy to reach the $1 trillion a year mark that would help avert a climate catastrophe.

In an interview with the Guardian, the UN’s Christiana Figueres urged institutions to begin building the foundations of a clean-energy economy by scaling up their investments.

Global investment in clean technologies is running at about $300 billion a year—but that is nowhere where it needs to be, Figueres said.

“From where we are to where we need to be, we need to triple, and we need to do that—over the next 5 to 10 years would be best—but certainly by 2030,” she said.

The International Energy Agency said four years ago it would take $1 trillion a year in new infrastructure projects by 2030 to make the shift from a coal– and oil-based economy to the cleaner fuels and technologies that would help keep warming below the dangerous threshold of 3.6 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

But investment has lagged far behind. “What we need to have invested in the energy sector and in the green infrastructure in order to make the transformation that we need in order to stay within 2C is $1 trillion a year, and we are way, way behind that,” Figueres said.

Figueres and leading Wall Street figures will urge global investors to step up their clean-energy investments at a meeting at the United Nations on Wednesday organized by the Ceres investment network.

The biggest investors—pension funds, insurance companies, foundations, and investment managers—control about $76 trillion in assets, according to OECD figures.

But by Figueres’ estimate, those institutional investors were committing less than 2 percent of the funds under their control to clean-energy infrastructure—compared to the 10 percent or 15 percent that was still going into coal and oil.

“Last year, we had $300 billion, and in the same year we had double that amount invested in exploration and mining in fossil fuels. So you can see that the ratio is not where it needs to be. We need to be at the opposite ratio.”

The UN climate official said she hoped to make her case by showing the opportunities in clean-tech investment—but also the financial risks of sticking with coal and oil.

The UN’s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said for the first time in its blockbuster climate report last September that there was a finite amount of carbon that could be burnt to stay within 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

About half of that carbon budget is already spent—which means much of the remaining coal and oil can not be burned without crossing into dangerous warming.

“There is no doubt that most of the fossil fuel reserves we have worldwide will have to stay in the ground” to avoid warming beyond 2C, Figueres said.

“Two-thirds of the fossil fuels we have will have to stay in the ground.”

She argued those realities would eventually erode the value of oil and coal holdings. Climate experts have already taken to referring to such carbon stores as “stranded assets.”

“There is study after study coming out saying, ‘Beware: We are invested in assets that are already and will soon be losing value,” she said.

Diplomats hope this week’s investor summit will energize efforts to reach a global emissions-cutting deal in 2015.

The gathering is the first of a number of big climate-themed gatherings set for 2014, culminating with an invitation to world leaders by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to a summit in September to try to get the outlines of that deal in place.

In Washington, meanwhile, President Barack Obama is expected to finalize new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants—a critical step if the United States is to reach its pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020.

But global investment is still not keeping place. Bloomberg New Energy Finance put global investment in clean technology at just $281 billion in 2012—and the figures for 2013, due for release at the investor summit on Wednesday, are expected to fall even lower.

That would mean a quadrupling of clean tech investment—instead of the tripling in investment that Figueres estimates.

“Cost-competitive renewable technologies and attractive investment opportunities exist right now, but we’re still not seeing clean-energy deployment at the scale we need to put a dent in climate change,” said Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres.

“We need to find a way to get more institutional investor capital into this space.”

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Why We Need To Triple Clean Energy Investment

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