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Tom’s Kitchen: Raw Root-Veggie Slaw

by greenenergy4 Posted on March 27, 2013

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In most areas of the country, late March is one of those awkward times to shop at the farmers market. Glamorous spring vegetables like asparagus and artichokes aren’t in yet; winter staples like beets, carrots, and radishes are still coming out, but you’re starting to get bored of them. That’s the exact situation now playing out in Central Texas, with the added annoyance that my favorite veggies of all, leafy greens, are already on the way out, laid low by the fast-warming weather.

Even so, I was able to coax a fresh, fun dish out of what was abundant at the farmers market: beets, kohlrabi (a bulbous relative of broccoli, cabbage, and the rest of the brassica family), carrots, and spring onions. What inspired me was a gadget that has been stuck on a low shelf of my kitchen, unused, for years: a mandoline. I had always thought of mandolines as fancy devices that I would never be able to afford. When my mom gave me this inexpensive, plastic Japanese-brand model as a gift a few years ago, I never got around to trying it out. As an experiment, I decided to subject my market bounty to its razor-sharp blades, and came away impressed: a zippy, crunchy salad that tasted like spring on a salad plate, not winter warmed over.

You can make a very similar, slightly less attractive salad by simply grating the veggies, or slicing them as thinly as possible. Use any combo of winter veggies—except, of course, for ones that really need to be cooked to be enjoyed, like potatoes. The combo I used brought together sweet (carrots), earthiness (beets), and spice (kohlrabi), as well as a great clash of colors. A radish or two would also have been nice. It’s also important to brighten the dish with plenty of herbs—parsley and mint work great—as well as a tart dressing.

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Tom’s Kitchen: Raw Root-Veggie Slaw

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Donglegate: How One Brogrammer’s Sexist Joke Led to Death Threats and Firings

by Shelby Morris Posted on March 22, 2013

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Another day, another boneheaded sexist misstep igniting a blamestorm in the tech world. The latest incident played out at the annual Python developer conference, which ended yesterday with multiple people getting fired, a woman of color enduring hundreds of violent and racist threats, apparent DDoS attacks knee-capping at least one website, and tech community outrage that’s attracted national attention.

It all started on Sunday at the PyCon event in Santa Clara, California, when Adria Richards, a female conference-goer and a technology consultant, overheard a conversation with a guy seated behind her at a panel. Richards claims their otherwise unremarkable techie chat turned sour when a neighboring guy joined in with a couple of jokes. They had to do with “forking” (copying someone else’s code) and “dongles” (little pieces of hardware), but in a way Richards found suggestive and inappropriate. Richards snapped a picture of the guys making the jokes, and posted it to Twitter. PlayHaven, a mobile-gaming site, confirmed to Mother Jones that both of the men photographed by Richards were PlayHaven employees at the time.

Richards also tweeted her seat location, a plea for someone to come by and talk to the guys in question, and a link to the PyCon Code of Conduct page, which defines unacceptable behavior at the conference (more on this later). Minutes later, a PyCon staffer came by and Richards spoke with him and a few other staffers in private. There are conflicting accounts of what happened next. In a blog post Richards posted the next day, she writes that staffers “wanted to pull the people in question from the main ballroom” and that they were escorted out. She doesn’t mention seeing them again. It was later widely reported across Twitter and tech forums that the two guys Richards pointed out to staffers were kicked out of the conference. Not so, lead conference organizer Jesse Noller told us in an email: “They were pulled aside, spoken with, and then returned to their seats to the knowledge of the staff and myself.” Noller says no one was removed from the conference due to this incident; someone was kicked for using drugs in public, indoors, but that was two weeks ago, and no one’s been removed since.â&#128;&#139;

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Donglegate: How One Brogrammer’s Sexist Joke Led to Death Threats and Firings

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Can San Jose’s green vision live up to its hype?

by donkorleone842 Posted on March 21, 2013

Can San Jose’s green vision live up to its hype?

By Susie Cagle

Clean technology is being developed in Silicon Valley, but we aren’t exactly looking to that low-rise beigey sprawl for leadership when it comes to green urban innovation. But maybe we should? And I don’t mean in a let’s-build-a-dense-tech-worker-utopia kind of way.

Sprawling San Jose, Calif.

San Jose, Calif., the valley’s largest city and the 10th biggest in the country, launched its 15-year green plan in 2007, and so far it’s coming along swimmingly. This past October, the first Clean Tech Index named the city No. 1 in the country for its clean green (mean?) innovations. From LED street lights to the soon-to-open CleanTech Demonstration Center to a goal of running entirely on renewable energy (it’s at 20 percent now), San Jose is thinking big when it’s thinking green, KQED reports.

“[The renewables goal is] going to mean radical changes, but this is a valley that does things in radical ways,” says Carl Guardino, president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG), which represents hundreds of local businesses.

“Silicon Valley and San Jose Mayor [Chuck] Reed sets audacious goals,” adds Guardino. “If we fall a little short, just think of how far we would have come.”

San Jose has helped change national standards for LED street lights and is now saving thousands of dollars using efficient, dimmable street lights. Yet it’s only replaced 4% of its 62,000 lights.

Despite making progress, it’s been a tough road through the recession. Like most U.S. cities, San Jose has faced severe budget constraints and was forced to be innovative in funding its green vision.

The city has managed to leverage more than $100 million in federal tax credits and private and public funds to move forward.

“I said from the beginning that the key to being able to succeed with our green vision was to work with other people’s money,” says Mayor Reed, who is known for his pragmatism.

It’s easier to work with other people’s money when you’re surrounded by the multi-billion-dollar likes of Google, Facebook, etc. But environmental activist Megan Medeiros wishes San Jose were thinking smaller: retrofitting existing buildings, planting trees, and building bike paths.

If it did that, it could be attracting a lot of younger people who, Medeiros says, are “flocking to San Francisco” because it provides them with a better quality of life.

You’re still No. 1, San Jose, but getting the tech workers who commute many miles to your town every day to actually stay and live there could end up being the very best long-term clean-green strategy. Just because you build some light rail does not mean they will come. This doesn’t need to be utopia, though — I bet they’d be happy with some lofts, community gardens, and artisanal pubs. Oh, and bike lanes, obvs.

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Can San Jose’s green vision live up to its hype?

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Single-Parent Families and the Decline of Men

by LeannqOsborn Posted on March 20, 2013

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The participation of men in the workforce has been declining for decades, and along with it so have male wages. David Autor has written a new paper suggesting that part of the reason might be the rise of single-parent households:

In this telling, the economic struggles of male workers are both a cause and an effect of the breakdown of traditional households. Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so women are choosing to raise children by themselves, producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners.

“A vicious cycle may ensue,” wrote Professor Autor and his co-author, Melanie Wasserman, a graduate student, “with the poor economic prospects of less educated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons, thus potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.”

….Professor Autor said in an interview that he was intrigued by evidence suggesting the consequences were larger for boys than girls, including one study finding that single mothers spent an hour less per week with their sons than their daughters. Another study of households where the father had less education, or was absent entirely, found the female children were 10 to 14 percent more likely to complete college. A third study of single-parent homes found boys were less likely than girls to enroll in college.

“It’s very clear that kids from single-parent households fare worse in terms of years of education,” he said. “The gender difference, the idea that boys do even worse again, is less clear cut. We’re pointing this out as an important hypothesis that needs further exploration. But there’s intriguing evidence in that direction.”

I’ve only skimmed through the paper itself, but it looks like Autor’s evidence is indeed no more than suggestive. The growing gap between men and women is unquestionable, but the association between this gap and the rise of single-parent households is considerably less firm.

Still, it’s intriguing, and Autor is a guy to take seriously. I’ll try to have more later on this after I’ve read the paper more carefully.

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Single-Parent Families and the Decline of Men

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The Slow Death of the Driver’s License

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on March 16, 2013

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It’s pretty common knowledge by now that teenagers don’t drive cars nearly as much as they did back when I was growing up. Partly that’s because getting a license is more onerous, partly it’s because parents are more willing to be chauffeurs, and partly it’s because social media has made it more attractive to spend time at home.

But I was a little surprised to read in the LA Times this morning that this has already had a significant downstream effect. Even among 30-year-olds, the number of people with driver’s licenses is down from 96 percent to 89 percent. That’s a surprisingly large drop. I suppose part of this could be explained by the increasing population of large metro areas with decent transit, but I’m not sure that fits the facts. The population of rural areas has shrunk over the past few decades, but I think most of the corresponding population growth has been in small cities and suburbs, which are tough to get around in without a car.

So….I’m not sure what’s going on. Zipcar and similar services are nowhere near big enough to explain it. I suppose Google has the answers somewhere, but it’s Saturday and I don’t feel like spending the time to find out. I’m going to go toss some frisbees around instead.

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The Slow Death of the Driver’s License

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Renewable fuel industry applauds nomination of Gina McCarthy to head EPA

by Posted on March 4, 2013

Renewable fuel industry applauds nomination of Gina McCarthy to head EPA

Posted 4 March 2013 in

National

President Obama’s nomination today of Gina McCarthy as the next Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency was met with praise from leaders in the renewable fuel industry.

Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy, noted that “Gina McCarthy has been a strong supporter of biofuels” and said that he looks forward to “working with her to bring sustainable, clean, homegrown American fuels to the consumer.”

According to RFA President Bob Dineen, McCarthy “knows the EPA inside and out and has typically approached challenges with a common-sense determination to resolve them in a timely manner.”

Brooke Coleman of the Advanced Ethanol Council called McCarthy the “perfect choice” and commended her deep engagement on the “development of the cellulosic biofuels industry and the administration of the Renewable Fuel Standard.”

Fuels America wishes Gina McCarthy all the best in her new position and is hopeful that she will continue to support policies like the Renewable Fuel Standard to promote oil alternatives, protect the environment and save consumers’ money at the pump.

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Meet Obama’s energy secretary pick: Ernest Moniz

by xntaw2b Posted on March 4, 2013

Meet Obama’s energy secretary pick: Ernest Moniz

By Grist staff

MIT

Here’s Ernest.

Today President Obama nominated Ernest Moniz to head the Department of Energy, as widely expected. If confirmed, he’ll replace outgoing Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Moniz, like Chu, is a super-brainy physicist.

Here’s what Philip Bump wrote about Moniz last month on the pages of Grist:

Who is Ernest Moniz?

Here’s who he is, as articulated by Reuters:

Moniz, a former undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration, is director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Energy Initiative, a research group that gets funding from industry heavyweights including BP, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco for academic work on projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gases.

Ha ha. Sounds great! We will come back to this part, obviously.

At MIT, Moniz led intensive studies about the future of coal, nuclear energy and natural gas, and he helped attract funding and research momentum to energy projects on campus.

People familiar with Moniz’s work said, if chosen, he would bring his own energy and pragmatism to the job. …

Moniz earned kudos for a pragmatic approach toward using research to find ways to reduce carbon pollution from fossil fuels and transition to cleaner forms of energy.

We’ll come back to this, too.

What does he look like?

As you can see above, he kind of looks like a Founding Father who teaches high-school English in New Hampshire.

Has he ever been in any movies?

No. According to IMDB, he’s only ever been on Frontline. Put those autograph books away!

What’s his actual, non-summarized background?

Here’s part of his bio at MIT:

Professor Moniz received a Bachelor of Science degree summa cum laude in physics from Boston College, a doctorate in theoretical physics from Stanford University, and honorary doctorates from the University of Athens, the University of Erlangen-Nurenburg, and Michigan State University. He was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Saclay, France, and at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Moniz is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Humboldt Foundation, and the American Physical Society and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received the 1998 Seymour Cray HPCC Industry Recognition Award for vision and leadership in advancing scientific simulation and, in 2008, the Grand Cross of the Order of Makarios III for contributions to development of research, technology and education in Cyprus and the wider region.

(Honestly, “the Grand Cross of the Order of Makarios III” sounds made up.)

I would like to hear him in his own words, please.

Fine. Here you go, via Switch Energy Project, as pointed out to us by D. Ray Long.

How do environmental groups feel about his nomination?

A charitable way to describe how they feel would be: mixed.

As noted above, his program at MIT receives a lot of money from fossil fuel interests. And Moniz has been unabashed in his advocacy of the use of natural gas as a “bridge” fuel and even some expansion of nuclear power. (You can read his thoughts on the latter here.)

The Hill has a small collection of quotes from disaffected greens, but the better overview comes from Inside Climate News, which has a good article on Moniz’s background. It starts with his thoughts on natural gas.

In December, while speaking at the University of Texas at Austin, Moniz warned that while natural gas could reduce carbon emissions by displacing coal-fired electricity, its increasing use could also slow growth in the clean energy sector.

“When it comes to carbon, [natural] gas is part of our solution at least for some time,” said Moniz, who served as undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration. “And we should take advantage of the time to innovate and bring down the cost of renewables. The worst thing w[ould] be is to get time and not use it. And that I’m afraid is where we are.”

This isn’t incorrect, mind you — natural gas has spurred a drop in carbon emissions and is certainly going to be part of the mix. But it’s not something that most environmental organizations are currently championing, especially given the process usually used to extract that gas: fracking.

Moniz has accepted fracking as a necessary-but-unnecessarily-polluting evil. In 2011, Moniz presented a report from his MIT group to the Senate, saying:

“Regulation of shale (and other oil and gas) activity is generally controlled at the state level, meaning that acceptable practices can vary between shale plays,” Moniz wrote in his prepared testimony. “The MIT study recommends that in order to minimize environmental impacts, current best practice regulation and oversight should be applied uniformly to all shales.”

Moniz didn’t elaborate on how to standardize regulations and oversight …

“Prior to carrying out our analysis, we had an open mind as to whether natural gas would indeed be a ‘bridge’ to a low-carbon future,” he told the committee. “In broad terms, we find that, given the large amounts of natural gas available in the U.S. at moderate cost … natural gas can indeed play an important role over the next couple of decades (together with demand management) in economically advancing a clean energy system.”

At the same time, however, the report projected that natural gas will “eventually become too carbon intensive” and should be phased out around 2050.

Moniz’s record also demonstrates commitment to renewable energy development.

As a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, he helped write a 2010 report that recommended a federal investment of $16 billion per year for clean energy innovation — about triple the 2010 investment. Some of that money could come from the private sector, the report said. For example, “we use about 200 billion gallons of transportation fuel annually, so a two cents per gallon charge would … generate about $4 billion per year.” It said the same amount of money could be raised by charging a fee for the electricity used nationwide — a suggestion Moniz reiterated at the Texas conference.

Expect this to come up during confirmation hearings.

So, will he be confirmed by the Senate?

Well, given the drawn-out, ridiculous path Republican Chuck Hagel was forced to crawl to become secretary of defense, God only knows. Granted, defense is a more high-profile Cabinet position, but it seems clear that his nomination happened under the belief that confirmation would be easier than it has been.

Also read about Obama’s nominee to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy.

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Meet Obama’s energy secretary pick: Ernest Moniz

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NASA Scientists Are Turning LA Into One Big Climate-Change Lab

by pitery Posted on March 1, 2013

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This story first appeared on The Atlantic Cities website as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Southern California’s Mount Wilson is a lonesome, hostile peak—prone to sudden rock falls, sometimes ringed by wildfire—that nevertheless has attracted some of the greatest minds in modern science.


City 2.0: Buy the Ebook

George Ellery Hale, one of the godfathers of astrophysics, founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904 and divined that sunspots were magnetic. His acolyte Edwin Hubble used a huge telescope, dragged up by mule train, to prove the universe was expanding. Even Albert Einstein made a pilgrimage in the 1930s to hobnob with the astronomers (and suffered a terrible hair day, a photo shows).

Today, Mount Wilson is the site of a more terrestrial but no less ambitious endeavor. Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and elsewhere are turning the entire Los Angeles metro region into a state-of-the-art climate laboratory. From the ridgeline, they deploy a mechanical lung that senses airborne chemicals and a unique sunbeam analyzer that scans the skies over the Los Angeles Basin. At a sister site at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), researchers slice the clouds with a shimmering green laser, trap air samples in glass flasks, and stare at the sun with a massive mirrored contraption that looks like God’s own microscope.

These folks are the foot soldiers in an ambitious, interagency initiative called the Megacities Carbon Project. They’ve been probing L.A.’s airspace for more than a year, with the help of big-name sponsors like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and the California Air Resources Board. If all goes well, by 2015 the Megacities crew and colleagues working on smaller cities such as Indianapolis and Boston will have pinned down a slippery piece of climate science: an empirical measurement of a city’s carbon footprint.

If that doesn’t sound like something Einstein would scarf down energy bars and hoof up a mountain to check out, give it time. It promises to be a groundbreaking development in the worldwide fight against global warming.

Part of the Megacities team at the CLARS facility in Pasadena. Left to right: Thomas Pongetti, Riley Duren, Eric Kort, Stan Sander. John Metcalfe

Historically, researchers have tried to understand anthropogenic global warming by looking at it from the big picture—first across the planet, then by regions and countries. But two things happened in the past few years that turned their frame of reference. First, they realized that the emissions of a large landmass are extremely difficult to measure. The signal from fossil fuels gets tangled up in a bunch of other things, such as byproducts from the natural ecosystem and agriculture.

Second, they encountered a rash of enthusiasm-killing gridlock in the United States government, with the 2009 Copenhagen climate talks ending in a muddle and a 2010 cap-and-trade bill dying in the Senate. It became clear to environmental stakeholders that if any policy was going to happen on cutting emissions, it was going to be at the scale of states and cities.

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NASA Scientists Are Turning LA Into One Big Climate-Change Lab

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State by State, US Ethanol Industry Creating Jobs & Economic Opportunities

by Posted on February 21, 2013

State by State, US Ethanol Industry Creating Jobs & Economic Opportunities

Posted 21 February 2013 in

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State by State, US Ethanol Industry Creating Jobs & Economic Opportunities

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We applaud President Obama’s commitment to getting America off oil

by Posted on February 13, 2013

We applaud President Obama’s commitment to getting America off oil

Posted 13 February 2013 in

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Tonight, President Obama laid out an agenda that includes cutting our dependence on oil, fighting climate change and creating jobs. The current administration has been a long-time supporter of renewable fuel, which can help meet all three of these goals.

The Renewable Fuel Standard is an essential policy that is already helping to wean us from oil and that, if left intact, can do even more to benefit America. The RFS has been crucial in encouraging investment in oil alternatives, driving innovation in advanced biofuels and opening up markets so that Americans have a choice at the gas pump.

Last year, 13 billion gallons of renewable fuel were added to our fuel supply. That production supported jobs for and employed more than 380,000 Americans while reducing the need for imported oil by more than 462 million barrels. A secure, domestic and clean fuel source, renewable fuel increasingly shields our country from volatile global oil markets, lowers gas prices – by $1.09 per gallon on average in recent years – and reduces harmful emissions that contribute to climate change. In 2012, using renewable fuel slashed greenhouse gas emissions by 33.4 million metric tons.

Renewable fuel has an important role to play in supporting President Obama’s energy agenda and job-creation goals. The companies of the renewable fuel sector stand ready to help make those goals a reality.

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