Tag Archives: blue marble

Bad Man Wants to Ban Bag Bans

by ChunNicastro Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Columbia, Mo., is considering a ban on plastic shopping bags. This is good. Plastic bags are wasteful and bad for the environment and generally terrible. They create tons of nasty litter on city streets and can block up recycling facilities. So there’s really no reason why grocery stores and other retail outlets should hand out trillions of them for free. Tons of local, regional, and national governments around the world have already figured this out, and implemented bans.

But Missouri state Representative Dan Shaul, a Republican from the suburbs of St. Louis, disagrees. That’s why he wants to ban bag bans, with a bill going before committee in the state’s legislature this week.

From the St. Louis Riverfront Times:

Shaul, a sixteen-year member of the Missouri Grocers Association, is trying to stop bag bans outright. He says he doesn’t want to burden shoppers with an additional fee at the grocery store.

“If they choose to tax the bag, it’s going to hurt the people who need that the most: the consumer,” especially the poor, Shaul says. “My goal when I go to the grocery store with a $100 bill is to get $100 worth of groceries.”

But a ten-cents-per-bag fee for forgetting your reusable bag? “That adds up pretty quick.”

Here’s the thing, though: Ban bags are actually really good for local economies, because they reduce costs for retailers and cleanup costs for governments. California, which became the first US state to ban bags last fall, previously spent $25 million per year picking them up and landfilling them.

So instead of bag ban bans, a better bill would be a ban on bag ban bans.

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Bad Man Wants to Ban Bag Bans

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One Perfect Tweet Sums Up Why Climate Denial in Congress Is So Dangerous

by GabrielDerose Posted on January 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s the good news: Yesterday the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of an amendment to the Keystone XL bill that says “climate change is real and not a hoax.” Good work, ladies and gentlemen! Glad we got that on the record, only 25 years after scientists agreed on it.

Here’s the bad news: Turns out the vote was just an excuse for James Inhofe (Okla.) to say, as he has many times before: Sure, climate change is real. The climate changes all the time. But humans aren’t the cause.

His evidence for this dismissal of the mainstream scientific consensus? The bible.

Oy vey.

Now here’s the really bad news: This same gentleman from Oklahoma recently became the chairman of the very Senate committee that oversees environmental policy. And two of his climate change-denying peers will chair other subcommittees that oversee vital climate science.

In case it isn’t self-evident why these facts are so terrible, we have our lovely readers to sum it up:

Thanks, Sharon Dennis!

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One Perfect Tweet Sums Up Why Climate Denial in Congress Is So Dangerous

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No, You Shouldn’t Let Fears of a Scary Nervous System Disease Stop You From Getting a Flu Shot

by LamontLeGrand Posted on January 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Despite abundant evidence that flu vaccines are safe and effective, only about a third of Americans get the shots each season. Public health experts believe that one reason for the low immunization rates is misinformation about side effects of the vaccine. One is the belief that the vaccine can actually give you the flu (false); another is that it can cause autism in children (also false, as we’ve said many times).

Add that to the worry that it will cause a rare but serious nervous-system disorder called Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the nervous system, resulting in muscle weakness, or even temporary paralysis. This fear is not completely unfounded—several studies, including a recent one by Italian researchers about the 2010-2011 vaccine—have found that getting a flu shot can indeed very slightly elevate one’s risk of contracting the disease, by about one additional case per million people.

But here’s where things get complicated: While it’s true that the flu vaccine can raise your GBS risk, so can the flu itself. So which is more likely to lead to GBS: Getting the vaccine or getting the flu?

That’s the question that Steven Hawken and Kumanan Wilson, epidemiologists from The Ottawa Hospital, set out to answer. The researchers developed a calculator that took into account baseline GBS risk (overall, it’s about 10 in a million, though it varies with age and sex—GBS affects more men than women and more elderly people than young adults and children), vaccine effectiveness, and overall incidence of flu. Their findings: For most people, in a flu season where the flu incidence is greater than 5 percent and the vaccine is more than 60 percent effective, says Wilson, “your risk of GBS actually goes down when you get the vaccine because it prevents the flu.”

That’s good news in most years, when the flu vaccine is well over 60 percent effective. Here’s the problem: This year’s flu vaccine is only about 23 percent effective. Still, according to Wilson, while this year’s total flu incidence isn’t yet known, it appears to be greater than that of an average year—much higher than 5 percent. That means that even with the reduced effectiveness of the vaccine, the overall GBS risk is likely still greater for people who contract the flu than for those who get immunized, says Wilson.

What’s more, he adds, it’s important to keep in mind that the risk of serious complications from the flu outweighs that of acquiring GBS. Last year, according to the CDC, 9,635 people were hospitalized with the flu in the United States. According to the CDC there are between 3,000-6,000 cases of GBS annually (though no hospitalization data is available). Most of those cases aren’t caused by flu vaccines or the flu itself; the most common cause of GBS is infection with the bacterium Campylobacter jejeuni, usually the result of eating contaminated food.

The takeaway: The GBS risk from the flu itself is most likely greater than that of the vaccine. And while GBS can be a scary disease, it’s much less common than scary complications FROM the flu.

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No, You Shouldn’t Let Fears of a Scary Nervous System Disease Stop You From Getting a Flu Shot

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Obama’s Crackdown on Methane Emissions Is a Really Big Deal

by Velma36Gqylkyuhv Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning the White House announced a new plan to crack down on the oil and gas industry’s emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The move is the last major piece of President Obama’s domestic climate agenda, following in the footsteps of tougher standards for vehicle emissions and a sweeping plan to curb carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Like the power plant plan, the methane standards will rely on the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act. The new rules will regulate the amount of methane that oil and gas producers are allow vent or leak from their wells, pipelines, and other equipment. Ultimately, according to the White House, the rules will slash methane emissions 40 to 45 percent by 2025. The proposal announced today is intended to be finalized before Obama leaves office, but it’s certain to take a battering along the way from congressional Republicans and fossil fuel interest groups.

Methane makes up a much smaller slice of America’s greenhouse gas footprint than carbon dioxide—the volume of methane released in a year is roughly 10 times smaller than the volume of CO2—so the proposal might seem like small potatoes. But it’s actually a pretty huge deal, for a few reasons.

Locking in climate protection: An underlying assumption of Obama’s carbon emissions plan is that many power plants will switch from burning coal to burning natural gas. That’s great, if your only concern is carbon dioxide. But methane, the principal emission of natural gas consumption, is 20 times more powerful than CO2 over a 100-year timespan. The problem is less with natural gas-burning power plants themselves, but with the infrastructure (pipes, compressors, etc.) needed to get gas from where it’s drilled to where it’s burned—and also with venting, the burning of excess gas from wells. So far, those bits and pieces have proven to be exceptionally leaky—some studies have found up to 7.9 percent of the methane from natural gas production simply escapes into the air.

So if we replace our coal with natural gas but let methane go unchecked, we won’t be much closer to meaningfully mitigating climate change, said Mark Brownstein of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Leak rates as low as 1 to 3 percent undo much of the benefit of going from coal to gas,” he added. (Some climate scientists disagree with this assessment, arguing that CO2 from coal is significantly more damaging over the long run than methane leaks from natural gas operations.) The plan proposed today will focus on plugging leaks and will help ensure that the quest to curb carbon emissions doesn’t simply shift our climate impact to another gas.

Saving money and energy: Methane leaks aren’t just bad for the climate, they’re also bad for business. Every year, according to a recent New York University analysis, between 1 and 3 percent of all US natural gas production is lost to leaks and venting, enough to heat more 6 million homes. A separate study from the World Resources Institute put the price tag for all that lost gas at $1.5 billion per year. Plugging leaks and limiting venting from drilling sites would keep more gas on the market.

The industry doesn’t deny that leaks are a problem for its bottom line; the dispute is over whether intervention from the federal government is required and whether the cost to fix the leaks is worth it. Today the president of the American Petroleum Institute called the methane proposal “another layer of burdensome requirements that could actually slow down industry progress to reduce methane emissions.” While it’s true that overall methane emissions have been on a modest decline over the past several years, Brownstein said much more is needed to meet the nation’s climate goals. And the oil and gas sector is the single biggest source of methane.

Cleaning up fracking: Behind any conversation about natural gas is always the specter of fracking. Of course, there are many concerns about fracking that have nothing to do with methane emissions: Public health issues related to water contamination, for example, or earthquakes. But stringent methane rules could alleviate some of the climate-related concerns about the fracking boom and could help refocus the debate around local pollution and land rights issues. These rules are also an opportunity, Brownstein said, for the gas industry to show good faith. “If the industry resists basic regulation for a relatively simple issue to solve, what is the public to think about the industry’s willingness to solve more complex issues,” he said. “This is a moment of truth.”

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Obama’s Crackdown on Methane Emissions Is a Really Big Deal

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72 Percent of Republican Senators Are Climate Deniers

by MartinMccarter Posted on January 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offered a simple amendment to the controversial bill that would authorize construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Sanders’ measure, which he proposed to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, would have declared it the “sense of Congress” that climate change is real; that it is caused by humans; that it has already caused significant problems; and that the United States needs to shift its economy away from fossil fuels.

Sanders’ amendment went nowhere. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the chair of the committee, used the opportunity to take a shot at climate science. “I do believe that our climate is changing,” she said. “I don’t agree that all the changes are necessarily due solely to human activity.” Murkowski didn’t elaborate on her current thinking about the causes of global warming, but in the past she’s advanced a bizarre theory involving a volcano in Iceland.

Sanders will get another chance next week, when the full Senate debates the Keystone bill—but he’s likely to run into stiff resistance from GOP climate deniers. As Climate Progress revealed Thursday, more than half of the Republican members of the new Congress “deny or question” the overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. If you just look at the Senate, the numbers are even more disturbing. Thirty-nine GOP Senators reject the science on climate change—that’s 72 percent of the Senate Republican caucus.

The list includes veteran lawmakers like James Inhofe (Okla.), who is the incoming chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) and has written a book titled, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. And it includes new senators like Steve Daines (Mont.), who thinks climate change might be caused by solar cycles. (For a great interactive map showing exactly how many climate deniers represent your state in Congress, click here.)

What’s more, the Climate Progress analysis shows that many of the congressional committees that deal with climate and energy issues are loaded with global warming deniers:

…68 percent of the Republican leadership in both House and Senate deny human-caused climate change. On the committee level, 13 out of 21 Republican members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, or 62 percent, reject the science behind human-caused global warming, joined by 67 percent, or 21 out of 31 Republican members, of the House Energy and Commerce Committee…In addition to Inhofe, 10 out of 11, or 91 percent, of Republicans on EPW have said climate change is not happening or that humans do not cause it.

All this could have serious policy consequences: Republicans are threatening to use their majority to cut the EPA’s budget and derail the power plant regulations at the heart of President Barack Obama’s signature climate initiative.

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72 Percent of Republican Senators Are Climate Deniers

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Mickey Mouse Exposed to Measles, Thanks to the Anti-Vaxxers

by AugustDreyer Posted on January 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, instead of cherishing freshly made memories of mouse ears or trying to get the song “A Pirate’s Life for Me” to stop looping in their heads, nine Disneyland visitors were left battling a potentially deadly disease. As The LA Times reports, the California Department of Public Health has confirmed and is investigating 12 likely Measles cases in California and Utah (nine are confirmed), after families visited the California theme park late in December.

The highly infectious disease, which is transmitted through the air, can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and sometimes death in children. In 2000, the US Centers for Disease Control declared it eliminated in the United States, thanks in large part to an effective vaccine. But because of anti-vaccination hysteria, fueled by discredited claims about links between vaccines and autism, many parents have opted out of vaccinating their kids, leaving them—and others, including children too young to be vaccinated—vulnerable. And while some children do react badly to vaccines, it’s important to remember that the diseases we vaccinate against are killers. The vaccines save countless lives.

Of the seven California cases, six hadn’t been vaccinated—two because they were underage. (Doctors administer the vaccine twice after the child is 12 months old.)

This outbreak is part of an ongoing trend. Measles rates have risen dramatically over the past few years. As my colleague Julia Lurie pointed out last May, the CDC reported record numbers in 2014, due in large part to gaps in vaccinations. According to a CDC press release, “90 percent of all measles cases in the United States were in people who were not vaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. Among the U.S. residents who were not vaccinated, 85 percent were religious, philosophical or personal reasons.”

In the following video, my colleague Kiera Butler interviews a Marin County pediatrician who caters to anti-vaxxer parents:

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Mickey Mouse Exposed to Measles, Thanks to the Anti-Vaxxers

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There’s a Big Coal Giveaway in the Cromnibus Bill

by HalinaT79pr Posted on December 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally was originally published by The Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The 1,000-page omnibus spending package released Tuesday night is reigniting a fight over rules for U.S. financing of coal plants abroad.

In October 2013, the Treasury Department announced that it would stop providing funding for conventional coal plants abroad, except in “very rare” cases. And in December 2013, the Export-Import Bank announced a new policy that would restrict financing for most new coal-fired power plants abroad. The bank, often called Ex-Im, exists to provide financial support to projects that spur the export of U.S. products and services. The change in coal policy aligned with President Barack Obama’s June 2013 call to end US funding of fossil fuel energy projects abroad unless the products include carbon capture technology.

But the language in the omnibus blocks both Ex-Im and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the US’s development finance institution, from using any funds in the bill to enforce these new restrictions on coal projects.

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), chair of the House Committee on Appropriations, touted this prohibition in his statement on the spending package. He said the measure would help “to increase exports of US goods and services.” Rogers told The Hill that coal exports “are just about the only bright light in the coal business these days.”

Environmental groups have fought for years to get the government’s financial institutions to stop funding fossil fuel projects abroad, including a number of coal-fired power plants, mines, pipelines and natural gas export terminals. Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica said in a statement that including this rider in the omnibus “undercuts one of the most important contributions President Obama has made to climate policy internationally.”

“This continued desperate attempt by Republicans to prop up the moribund coal industry is a fools errand,” Justin Guay, associate director of the international climate program at the Sierra Club, told The Huffington Post. “The coal industry is a dead man walking; it’s time to align our economy with an industry that actually has a future.”

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There’s a Big Coal Giveaway in the Cromnibus Bill

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Video: A Drone Shoots Hauntingly Beautiful Footage of Buffalo’s Snowstorm

by AddieQMTNrgs Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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James Grimaldi/YouTube

Flying personal camera-equipped drones directly over big events like the Hong Kong protests and Independence Day fireworks is becoming commonplace. Now come these amazing aerial images of Buffalo, New York, besieged by snow for the third day in a row. The Buffalo area was coated with up to six feet of snow on Wednesday and there’s been even more today. The eighth storm-related death was annouced this morning.

When the storm first set in, James Grimaldi of West Seneca, New York, sent his drone into the blizzard to film a bizarre world drained of color, and uploaded the stunning results to his YouTube channel. (Grimaldi has also posted his drone videos to his CNN’s iReport page.)

Grimaldi’s second-day video reveals the vast extent of the snow, the result of a massive “lake-effect snowfall event“. The houses now look like giant mushrooms:

And finally, posted today, a new storm bearing down on Grimaldi’s suburb:

This weekend’s forecasted rain won’t help recovery efforts. “We’re going to have a lot of water running off quickly,” the Weather Channel’s Wayne Verno told NBC News. “We’ll more than likely see some flooding.”

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Video: A Drone Shoots Hauntingly Beautiful Footage of Buffalo’s Snowstorm

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Watch a Wall of Snow Consume Buffalo, N.Y.

by KristinWhitton Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

Today it is literally freezing in every state in America. But no where has been hit harder than Buffalo, New York, which yesterday got buried under 70 inches of snow. Yeah, seven-zero, as in nearly six feet. At least six people there have died, and one hundred are still trapped.

The video below, from Buffalo-based producer Joseph DeBenedictis, shows yesterday’s apocalyptic storm sweeping across the city. The insane snowfall was brought on by something called the “lake effect,” which could grow more severe with global warming—our friend Eric Holthaus at Slate has the details on that.

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Watch a Wall of Snow Consume Buffalo, N.Y.

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Will Snow Ruin Your Halloween?

by anunturigratuiteautoro Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

The snow forecast from today through the weekend. This data represents a worst-case scenario; there’s a 95 percent change there will be less snow than this. National Weather Service

Happy Halloween! Hope you have a good costume lined up that isn’t this horrible “sexy Ebola nurse” one. Anyway, this year the weather seems pretty determined to mess with your trick-or-treating plans: We’ve already seen pumpkin prices spike thanks to the ongoing drought in California. And now it seems that a snowstorm is headed for the Midwest and East Coast. But fear not: It’s unlikely that the goblins and witches in NYC, DC, and other eastern cities will get hit too hard tomorrow night.

The map above is the most recent snow accumulation forecast from the National Weather Service, a prediction of how many inches of snow are expected to fall between today and Sunday. It looks worse than it probably will be; this is the 95th-percentile estimate, meaning snowfall is 95 percent likely to be less severe than what is shown here. AccuWeather has a good map showing the trajectory of snowfall over the weekend, as it moves from the Appalachians on Friday up to Maine by Sunday. And the Weather Channel has a useful daily breakdown here. The upshot is that Midwesterners should plan to bundle up, and Mainers could have snow by the end of the weekend, but East Coasters don’t need to worry too much about snow-proofing their Halloween costumes.

That said, even without snow it could still be cold and blustery, as our friend Eric Holthaus at Slate points out. The NASA satellite imagery below depicts the Nor’easter currently straddling the eastern seaboard, which the latest NOAA forecast says will bring “much colder weather” and possibly some showers by Saturday. So whatever ridiculous “sexy” costume you decide to wear tomorrow, probably pack a sweater.

NASA

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Will Snow Ruin Your Halloween?

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