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Chipotle’s new tortillas could be huge news for farmers

by GalenKershaw Posted on June 17, 2015

Chipotle’s new tortillas could be huge news for farmers

By on 17 Jun 2015commentsShare

Chipotle uses more than 800,000 tortillas a day. Right now, those tortillas are made from 11 ingredients. Any cook worth her salt knows that you need just a handful of ingredients (including salt) to make home-made tortillas. The extra ingredients are only required when making tortillas on an industrial scale.

Now, Chipotle wants to change that. The company is teaming up with the Bread Lab — an offshoot of the Washington State University’s ag program that is one part cutting-edge science lab, one part bakery — to come up with a mass-producible tortilla that uses just whole-wheat flour, water, oil, and salt.

Of Chipotle’s recent (sometimes controversial) moves — including offering better employee benefits, going GMO-free, and dropping a pork supplier that didn’t meet the company’s animal welfare standards — this one registers on the good/bad meter as: Hell Yes, Chipotle!

Take it from here, New York Times:

Chipotle wants to raise the nutrition in fast food, so its tortillas are made from whole wheat. Dr. Stephen Jones, a plant geneticist who is the director of the Bread Lab said: “The skilled baker can make the perfect anything with white flour. Whole wheat is more challenging.”

Bethany Econopouly, a doctoral student whose research in wheat breeding is underwritten by the Clif Bar Family Foundation and, now, Chipotle, was enlisted. From the beginning, she understood that there was a certain degree of consumer stealth required. “We’re working with hard, white wheats,” Ms. Econopouly said. “Those are really great because they’re light in color, so people who are naturally averse to whole wheat are less aware of them.”

She has identified a couple of varieties that work well for the tortilla and is evaluating about 100 more in the field now that will be harvested in August.

If the Bread Lab can crack the code, and if Chipotle offers better prices for the winning strain of wheat, this could be huge for wheat farmers.

For more on the Bread Lab, watch our explainer on why it’s on the cutting edge of wheat science:

Source:
Chipotle’s Quest to Develop a Better Tortilla

, New York Times.

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Chipotle’s new tortillas could be huge news for farmers

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Take that, Trans-Pacific Partnership! Enviros celebrate as Obama’s trade agenda takes a blow

by HaiNorrie587230 Posted on June 12, 2015

Take that, Trans-Pacific Partnership! Enviros celebrate as Obama’s trade agenda takes a blow

By on 12 Jun 2015commentsShare

Environmental groups and a host of allies won a major victory on Friday when House Democrats derailed Obama’s “free trade” agenda — at least for now.

Through some congressional maneuvering, House Democrats threw a critical roadblock in front of a plan to give the president trade promotion authority (TPA) that he could use to push through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal that many environmentalists, among others, are deeply skeptical about. (Look out for more acronyms below!) TPA would “fast track” the trade deal, constraining Congress to a “yes” or “no” vote on it and allowing Obama more leeway to negotiate what the deal would contain.

Both TPA and TPP have found favor with most Republicans, but they’ve also brought together a broad coalition in opposition. Tea Partiers who oppose Obama’s authority more or less on principle came together with a whole range of progressives. Many fear the TPP would send domestic jobs overseas — some progressives have called the deal “NAFTA on steroids.” Environmental groups say the agreement would also set back efforts at conservation, tackling climate change, and improving public health. The TPP is currently being negotiated in secret between the U.S. and nearly a dozen other countries along the Pacific Rim.

The Obama administration has been pushing hard for trade promotion authority and the TPP deal. The president himself even turned up to distribute White House–brewed beers and persuade legislators at a congressional baseball game yesterday where Democrats were playing Republicans. Republicans started chanting “TPA! TPA!” when Obama arrived. Yeah, this stuff actually happens. Obama also addressed House Democrats for 45 minutes this morning.

The administration has been saying that the TPP would give the United States the power to write the rules of international trade before China starts doing so. With the reins in America’s hands, the administration argues, globalization might be able to move forward in a manner that TPP’s opponents don’t find quite so odious.

But the opponents are not convinced. In a letter to Congress yesterday, 40 environmental groups urged rejection of the “fast track” TPA bill. “A new model of trade that delivers benefits for most Americans, promotes broadly shared prosperity, and safeguards the environment and public health is possible. To achieve such goals, however, fast track must be replaced with a new system for negotiating and implementing trade agreements,” the letter read. Many of the signatories on yesterday’s letter signed another one, back in April, with 2,000 other groups who opposed fast track authority.

As for the TPP trade deal itself, environmental groups oppose many of the provisions that are rumored to be in it, including ones that would allow foreign corporations to sue governments over their environmental and public health policies. And then there’s the principle of transparency: “After more than five years of negotiation, we still have to rely on WikiLeaks for our information,” Ilana Solomon of the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program told The Guardian.

When it came time for the vote today, Democrats, by a 3-to-1 margin, voted against a provision to provide aid for workers who lose their jobs as a result of trade deals. Though Democrats supported the specific provision, called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA — another acronym!), they chose to vote it down in order to scuttle the entire legislative process on fast track authority. At the last minute, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had not previously been clear about her position, told her follow House members that she would vote against TAA, and some undecided Democrats followed her lead.

When the Senate passed its trade bill last month, it included both TPA and TAA. So if the House bill doesn’t also include TAA, then there’s no final version that can be sent to Obama’s desk. Still, even though the failure to pass TAA made a House vote on TPA a moot point, the Republican leadership decided to press ahead with the vote anyway. TPA passed 219 to 211, and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) asked to bring TAA back up for a vote next week. If TAA passes then, today’s TPA vote will stand.

That means the TPA — “fast track authority” — isn’t quite dead yet. Obama has more time to twist arms in an attempt to get Democrats to do an about-face. But the president would have to change quite a lot of minds, so, for now, advocates are celebrating.

“This is a major victory for everyone who thinks trade should be fair and responsible,” the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune said in a statement. “The era of free trade deals that harm workers and the environment is coming to a close.”

Some of those celebrations are more cautious than others.

“Today’s victory, while important, is not decisive,” said Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica. “Friends of the Earth and others will remain vigilant to ensure that future efforts to pass Fast Track and climate-destroying trade agreements are defeated.”

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Take that, Trans-Pacific Partnership! Enviros celebrate as Obama’s trade agenda takes a blow

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Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

by GeoffreyMullaly Posted on June 5, 2015

Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

By on 5 Jun 2015 2:20 pmcommentsShare

The former chair of Shell is bummed about how the fight against climate change is going. But he’s got a different take on the issue than you might expect, given his CV.

“I find it distressing that 18 years after major oil companies such as Shell and BP acknowledged the threat of climate change and the need for precautionary action, and indeed began to put into place many of the steps needed, the world has made very modest progress in addressing this challenge,” said Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, who hasn’t been involved with the company since 2005. He’s since gone on to chair the mining company Anglo American PLC, and to serve on the board of directors for the consulting firm Accenture, as well as to work with the U.N. Originally trained as a geologist, Moody-Stuart was with Shell for 39 years.

In a speech at an event organized by Carbon Trust, a company that helps organizations reduce their emissions, Moody-Stuart said he also understood where the divestment movement was coming from. According to the British publication Responding to Climate Change:

In contrast to many senior fossil fuel executives he argued the growing divestment campaign was not “without some rationale”, recalling how oil and gas companies ditched coal assets in the 1990s.

“Given the inevitable continued demand for some forms of fossil fuels for some decades to come, divestment of all such holdings is probably not an economically sensible choice for most investors,” he said.

“Selective divestment or portfolio switching certainly is. As in all such choices, timing is critical.”

Oil execs past and present have had a lot to say about climate change lately. Though many oil companies have spent a lot of money to keep governments from enacting a price on carbon, certain players within the oil industry are beginning to strike a different chord. Or, a few different chords: Earlier this week, the CEOs of six major European oil companies, including Shell and BP, sent a letter to the U.N. calling for a price on carbon. But at the same time, Shell is trudging forward with its plans to drill in the Arctic. And many analysts suggested the letter might be more an attempt to nudge coal out of the global energy market — paving the way for more reliance on natural gas, a fuel that oil companies are heavily invested in — than a genuine effort to tackle climate change.

ExxonMobil has called for a carbon tax in past years, but it did not join this week’s letter to the U.N., nor did fellow American oil giants Chevron and ConocoPhillips. Exxon and Chevron have recently been resisting calls from shareholders to avoid tapping more expensive sources of oil in the Arctic, Canadian tar sands, and other unconventional locations. Asked why Exxon was not investing in renewables, CEO Rex Tillerson replied, “We choose not to lose money on purpose.” Ha ha.

So, yeah, oil companies are sort of all over the map on the whole climate-change-is-happening-but-we-can-make-it-less-horrendous-if-we-do-something-now issue. But the discord does seem to indicate that perhaps the ground is shifting. Even so, Moody-Stuart suggested that the momentum was not enough. He predicted the U.N. climate talks will yield some sort of deal later this year, but that it might be too loose to be useful. “This is progress and will doubtless be hailed as an agreement, although one can certainly question whether an agglomeration of diverse commitments can really be hailed as a global agreement,” he said.

Regardless, Moody-Stuart, 74, said, things aren’t changing that quickly. “I am going to be dead well before the end of the oil and gas industry.”

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Even Shell’s former chair says some fossil fuel divestment would make sense

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Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as Big Gas

by SusanaPvzbtr Posted on June 3, 2015

Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as Big Gas

By on 3 Jun 2015 2:42 pmcommentsShare

As the world moves toward a climate change deal this December, the oil industry has dived into an all-out campaign to rebrand itself as the climate-friendly natural gas industry.

On Monday, six of Europe’s largest oil and gas companies wrote to the U.N., saying they stand ready to accept a price on carbon. This kind of market mechanism, they noted, could encourage “the use of natural gas in place of coal.” And if that were to happen, well, they wouldn’t complain.

In fact, most major oil companies have been focusing more on natural gas in recent years in anticipation of a global response to climate change — and they want us to know. “Total is gas, and gas is good,” the CEO of the French oil company said Monday. And on Tuesday, Shell’s CFO argued for leaving coal in the ground but not oil and gas. Both companies produce more gas than oil.

Meanwhile, ExxonMobil and Chevron, two American companies that didn’t sign on to the European companies’ letter calling for a price on carbon, are also pushing gas as the future fossil fuel in Europe and Asia as well as the U.S.

But there’s a big problem with this rebranding effort: Many scientists and economists have found that a switch to natural gas won’t necessarily decrease our carbon footprint. It may, in fact, make it bigger. There are two reasons for this: the methane leaks that come hand-in-hand with natural gas drilling and transportation, and economics.

First, the methane leaks. The gas is 84 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame, but data on how much of it is leaking into the atmosphere from gas drilling operations remains sketchy. In the U.S., the EPA estimated in 2012 that 30 million metric tons were seeping out of pipelines and pumps annually. That accounts for a full 9 percent of the U.S.’s total climate change–causing emissions.

And even if the industry were to completely deal with its methane-leakage problem, a number of studies — some looking at the U.S., some looking at the entire world — have found that the economics of natural gas make it unlikely that the fuel would help the world cut emissions. Natural gas is cheap right now. As oil companies are eagerly pointing out, it’s often even cheaper (and always much cleaner) than coal, which currently accounts for 40 percent of the world’s energy. But natural gas is so cheap that it would also likely undercut the cleanest options, renewables. The low price would also encourage people to use more energy. We would essentially shift from burning coal and oil to burning natural gas — and investment in natural gas infrastructure would displace investment in clean energy and efficiency.

Meanwhile, world population will continue to grow and developing countries will continue to hook more of their citizens up to the grid. Energy production will balloon. And we’d be relying on a fuel that is, yes, cleaner than coal and oil, but that still generates a significant amount of CO2. In the end, many studies show, our carbon footprint wouldn’t be much different than if we just stuck with the less-than-great track we’re on.

So if these oil companies truly “stand ready to play [their] part” in stopping climate change, as they stated in their letter to the U.N., pushing natural gas is not the way to go about it. If they just want to knock their coal industry competitors out of the energy market — well, that’s something a bit different from addressing the climate crisis.

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Big Oil tries to rebrand itself as Big Gas

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Rare-earth mining in Chile could make China look bad

by NicoleIrons Posted on June 2, 2015

Rare-earth elements, including neodymium (back center). Peggy Greb, US Department of Agriculture

Rare-earth mining in Chile could make China look bad

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Your smartphone is a little box-shaped devil that sucks up all your attention, ruins perfectly good conversations, and makes you incapable of turning a corner without first looking up where you are on your GPS. But it’s also a pretty useful tool that’s made of stuff. Ever wonder where that stuff comes from?

Turns out, the rare-earth minerals like neodymium and dysprosium used to make iPhones, cars, wind turbines, Tomahawk cruise missiles, glass, and various other consumer goods come primarily from mines in China, where environmental preservation hasn’t always been a top priority. Now, a Chilean company called Biolantánidos is looking to snatch up some of that market in a much greener way. Here’s more from Bloomberg Business:

While operations in China typically pump ammonium sulfate into the ground and wait for the chemical to seep out with the minerals, at Biolantánidos the plan is to dig out the clay, put it through a tank-leaching process with biodegradable chemicals and return it cleaned to the ground, replanting pine and eucalyptus trees. It may be laborious, but [project leader Arturo] Albornoz is hoping companies such as ThyssenKrupp AG, Apple Inc. and Tomahawk cruise missile maker Raytheon Co. will end up paying a premium, knowing their suppliers aren’t destroying the planet.

Biolantánidos plans to start operations in the city of Concepción about 250 miles south of Santiago by the end of 2016, Bloomberg reports. And with the rights to about 772 square miles of land, the company estimates that it can make about 2,500 metric tons of rare-earth concentrate per year at first and potentially 10,000 tons down the road. About 130,000 tons of rare-earth minerals are churned out globally every year, according to Bloomberg.

Unfortunately, now isn’t the greatest time to get into the rare-earth minerals biz:

Prices have declined in recent years after China said it would comply with an order from the World Trade Organization to end export quotas imposed in 2010. Yttrium for example, which is used in jet engines, has tumbled 33 percent in the past year, while neodymium oxide is down 8 percent and dysprosium oxide is down 2.2 percent, according to prices at the Shanghai Metals Market.

“It’s our big bet on green mining,” Albornoz told Bloomberg. Hopefully, that bet will pay off, and companies will be willing to pay up for a clean conscience. And hey — if they’re strapped for cash, they can always divert some funds from their mega-office park utopias.

Source:
Chileans Bet Apple Will Pay a Premium for Clean Rare Earths

, Bloomberg Business.

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Should oil companies have a seat at the climate negotiating table?

by ShannonDanis Posted on June 2, 2015

Should oil companies have a seat at the climate negotiating table?

By on 2 Jun 2015commentsShare

U.N. negotiators are meeting in Bonn, Germany, this week to continue to hash out the global climate deal that will (hopefully) be signed in Paris later this year. And, just in time for these negotiations, a new coalition is calling on governments to get some carbon-pricing mechanisms in place. This coalition, however, has an unusual membership: CEOs of major, Europe-based oil companies.

Chief executives of the U.K.’s BP and BG Group, British/Dutch Shell, Italy’s Eni, Norway’s Statoil, and France’s Total sent a letter to the U.N. stating that “we need governments across the world to provide us with clear, stable, long-term, ambitious policy frameworks. … We believe that a price on carbon should be a key element of these frameworks.” Earlier in the letter, the six companies “acknowledge that the current trend of greenhouse gas emissions” would fail to “limit the temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.”

“The challenge is how to meet greater energy demand with less CO2,” the letter continues. “We stand ready to play our part.”

Of course, not everyone is eager for the companies who for years resisted regulations like carbon pricing to plop down at the negotiating table.

“I think what these corporations are looking to do is to change the conversation from one of global emissions standards and top-down governmental enforcement of standards to one … where these corporations can buy and sell pollution and find different ways to continue to do what they’re doing, which is contributing to climate change in a very real way,” said Jesse Bragg of Corporate Accountability International, a group that’s trying to keep corporate players away from the climate negotiations.

“We need long-term solutions,” he told Grist. “So the solution here is find ways to keep it in the ground and replace our energy needs with renewables. And any conversation about finding ways to use more natural gas and oil is a distraction from the actual solution.”

CAI and a number of prominent environmental groups, including Greenpeace USA, 350.org, and the League of Conservation Voters, recently petitioned the U.N. to keep polluting corporations away from climate change negotiations. The groups say that the industry “interferes at all levels,” including by providing sponsorship for the talks themselves.

The U.N. climate change leadership, however, has called for more cooperation between polluting industries and proponents of a climate deal. “Bringing them with us has more strength than demonizing them,” Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in May.

Not all green groups are cynical about the intention of the letter; some are enthusiastic about the progress it represents. “This is a symbolic moment, and demonstrates an important if not universal shift,” said Mark Kenber, CEO of The Climate Group, an international NGO. “It helps increase the likelihood of a positive outcome at COP21 by sending a signal to the wider business community, and showing that the direction of travel is towards comprehensive and effective regimes regulating carbon emissions.”

Even CAI sees the letter as an encouraging sign: “Many of the NGOs I’ve spoken with see this as a sign of them running scared, in a way,” said Bragg. “In terms of the movement, this is a good sign because it means that this work is having an effect and creating a need for them to respond and regroup and create a strategy … In that letter, the gas and oil industry took a couple shots at the coal industry, trying to differentiate themselves: ‘At least we’re not coal.’”

Some major oil companies were conspicuously absent from the letter, including U.S.-based ExxonMobil and Chevron. An industry source told Reuters that the two companies knew about the initiative, but didn’t want to sign on. “It’s clear that there is a difference of views on each side of the Atlantic,” Patrick Pouyanne, CEO of the French oil company Total, told reporters. He said the European companies were still chatting with Exxon and Chevron, and hoped they too would sign the letter soon.

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Should oil companies have a seat at the climate negotiating table?

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This weird plant might be the future of Alaskan agriculture

by TammaraRuggieri Posted on May 12, 2015

This weird plant might be the future of Alaskan agriculture

By on 12 May 2015commentsShare

Alaska, the Last Frontier, is not known for its balmy climate or productive agricultural scene. But one new plant on the scene might be shaking up the state:

“I tried killing it—you can’t kill it. That’s my kind of plant,” says [Al] Poindexter. “It can go weeks without water. Moose don’t eat it, rabbits don’t eat it, weather doesn’t seem to bother it. It’s a real easy plant to grow.”

This is Rhodiola rosea—golden root, rose root—a succulent that was used for centuries as folk medicine and once considered something of a Soviet military secret. Decades ago, the Soviets realized that Rhodiola could boost energy and help manage stress. These days, a small group of Alaskan farmers are hoping that it could enter the pantheon of plants (coffee, chocolate, coca) whose powers people take seriously—and, along the way, become Alaska’s most valuable crop

The plant has been known in scientific circles since the 18th century, when Carl Linnaeus named it. Soviet scientists tried to keep it under wraps during the Cold War, using it to  buck up their soldiers and athletes, even the cosmonauts. And while I don’t know what a Rhodiola bar would taste like, nor whether it would help me climb flights of stairs without huffing, I do know that fitting the crop to its climate sounds pretty sensible.

“It’s actually an environment that the plant wants to grow in, as opposed to everything else we grow in Alaska,” says Stephen Brown, a professor and district agriculture agent at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. “It’ll grow in the Arctic and sub-Arctic. It wants our long days. It’s already coming up out of the ground—and the ground’s still frozen.”

It might not be the Fertile Crescent when it comes to corn and potatoes, but south-central Alaska just might be the cradle of the coming Rhodiola renaissance.

Source:
THE SOVIET MILITARY SECRET THAT COULD BECOME ALASKA’S MOST VALUABLE CROP

, Atlas Obscura.

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Shell inches closer to spilling oil all over the Arctic

by MonteDawbin254 Posted on April 1, 2015

Shell inches closer to spilling oil all over the Arctic

By on 1 Apr 2015commentsShare

Shell has passed another hurdle in its push to resume Arctic drilling operations this summer. On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell reaffirmed her department’s 2008 decision to lease part of the Chukchi Sea, off the coast of Alaska, to the company, and accepted a revised environmental impact statement for the lease.

“The Arctic is an important component of the Administration’s national energy strategy, and we remain committed to taking a thoughtful and balanced approach to oil and gas leasing and exploration offshore Alaska,” Jewell said in a statement.

“Thoughtful” might not be the most applicable word to describe Shell’s activities in the Chukchi Sea. The company suspended its Arctic drilling operations in 2012 after a series of screwups and delays that culminated with a drilling rig running aground on New Years Eve. But, undaunted, the company is hoping to resume operations this summer. Shell’s 2015 plans involve working with the same contractor, Noble Drilling, that was hit with eight felony counts for the results of those disastrous few months in 2012.

After the 2012 setbacks, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals put the Chukchi Sea lease on hold in response to a suit filed by Alaskan Natives and environmental groups. The coalition argued that the Department of Interior had underestimated the amount of oil that Shell could get out of the lease, and, thus, the amount of damage that drilling in the sea could cause.

In response, the DOI released a revised environmental impact statement this February. It found that, over the course of Shell’s 77-year lease, there’s a 75 percent chance the company will be responsible for an oil spill of more than 1,000 barrels. The report also forecast 750 smaller spills.

The latest news on DOI’s decision has environmental groups enraged, obviously. “No one in her right mind would trust Shell to deliver a pizza safely across town, so trusting the company to drill in the Arctic is nothing short of negligence,” Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard said in a statement. Earthjustice attorney Eric Grafe, who has coordinated green groups’ legal appeals in their suits against Shell’s Arctic operations, suggested to the Associated Press that the DOI was rushing through the process to help Shell get back to work.

Green groups also noted the irony of the DOI’s announcement coming on the same day the Obama administration affirmed its commitment to a global climate deal under which the U.S. would reduce its emissions by as much as 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. Shell’s leadership also recently affirmed its commitment to engaging seriously in discussions about climate change. Yet the company’s plan to operate in the Chukchi Sea for the next three quarters of a century, and the DOI’s plan to allow it, fly in the face of much-discussed research published in the journal Nature earlier this year which found that all the oil in the Arctic would have to stay put if the world is to avert disastrous climate change. Though the DOI’s environmental impact statement does look at the significant chances of a major oil spill resulting from Shell’s operations, it does not analyse the effect on the environment that burning all of that oil would cause.

In a statement, Earthjustice’s Grafe expressed hope that the DOI would reverse course. “Interior still has time to make a better decision when evaluating Shell’s drilling plan, and we sincerely hope it says no to Shell’s louder, bigger, and dirtier tactics, loaded with potential environmental harm,” he said.

Before drilling can go ahead, Shell will still have to get drilling permits and win approval for its exploration plan from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an agency within the DOI.

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Shell inches closer to spilling oil all over the Arctic

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All oil is bad, but some is worse. Here’s the difference.

by OIEWendiororpg Posted on March 12, 2015

All oil is bad, but some is worse. Here’s the difference.

By on 12 Mar 2015commentsShare

Though all oils are dirty, some are dirtier than others. High-profile case in point: the Canadian tar sands. The fact that tar-sands oil is one of the filthiest oils in the world has helped fuel the debate around the Keystone XL pipeline.

The good folks at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thought someone had better analyze which oils were a bad idea to extract, and which oils were a really, really, really bad idea to extract. CEIP teamed up with Stanford and the University of Calgary to develop an oil-climate index; the result of their work is documented in a new report titled “Know Your Oil.”

The team found that there’s at least an 80 percent difference in greenhouse gas emissions per barrel between the worst oil researchers looked at and the least worse. The worst, by the way, is Suncor Synthetic H — unsurprisingly, a type of tar-sands crude from Alberta. The least damaging oil they looked at is from the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

One particularly carbon-intensive crude comes from California’s Midway Sunset oil field. (“Yes, some of the worst oil for the climate is pumped out of one of America’s greenest states,” Brian Merchant points out at Motherboard. In fact, it’s the top-producing field in the state. Ha! Irony!) This oil needs to be softened with steam before it can be extracted, and the water to make that steam is heated using huge quantities of natural gas. The oil, once flowing, is heavy and waterlogged, and takes an unusual amount of energy to be lifted out of the ground. And after that, it’s complex to refine. “The combination of energy used in extraction and refining means almost half of Midway Sunset’s total greenhouse gas emissions are released before the resource even gets to market,” says the report.

Examples like the Canadian tar sands and California’s Midway Sunset field underscore one of the report’s main points: “The fate of the entire oil barrel is critical to understanding and designing policies that reduce a crude oil’s climate impacts.” When thinking about these oils, it’s not just the oil itself that threatens the environment. It’s the whole process of getting it out of the ground, getting it to a refinery, refining it, and getting it to consumers — all of that spews carbon into the air, contributing significantly to oil’s role in fueling climate change.

Years ago, that wasn’t so much the case. We only dealt with a few types of oil, and they were relatively easy to get at and refine. But now, companies are finding new, energy-intensive ways to get at oil wherever it may be — trapped in shale, mixed with sand or water, sitting in pools deep below the ocean or sheets of ice in the Arctic, or even several miles underground. Rather than cutting off our addiction, we’re researching new ways to squeeze every last drop out of the earth — even as the evidence piles up that the addiction is ultimately fatal.

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All oil is bad, but some is worse. Here’s the difference.

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Google’s plan to prioritize facts ticks off climate deniers

by JosephineCandel Posted on March 10, 2015

Google’s plan to prioritize facts ticks off climate deniers

By on 10 Mar 2015commentsShare

As the internet becomes a greater part of our lives, and information travels more quickly, it’s become easier for people to stumble onto inaccurate info, and for that info to take hold and spread. Consider, for example, the anti-vaccination movement, or the “birthers.” And also, of course, climate denial.

Websites proffering misinformation and farfetched conspiracy theories on global warming are just as easy for the casual googler to pull up as, say, an article about the latest IPCC report. (Try googling “Is climate change real?” or something along those lines, then go ahead and cry.)

But that might change. Last month, Google scientists outlined new research on an algorithm to rank websites according to their trustworthiness. Lily Hay Newman explains the project in Slate:

The strategy isn’t being implemented yet, but the paper presented a method for adapting algorithms such that they would generate a “Knowledge-Based Trust” score for every page. To do this, the algorithm would pick out statements and compare them with Google’s Knowledge Vault, a database of facts. It would also attempt to assess the trustworthiness of the source—for example, a reputable news site versus a newly created WordPress blog. Another component of the strategy involves looking at “topic relevance.” The algorithm scans the name of the site and its “about” section for information on its goals.

Climate deniers are already crying “censorship.” Marc Morano — a prominent denier who’s worked for both Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe, and who now runs the denial website Climate Depot — complained to Fox News, “They’re going to basically say, truth is what a government agency says it is.” (It’s not just the government that disagrees with Morano on climate science. It’s the overwhelming majority of the world’s experts on climate science. But whatever.)

Of course, Google’s algorithm has always been something of a mystery, privileging some sites over others. The engineers who operate it are reluctant to discuss how exactly it works — though the number of times a site is linked to does play a big role. Google points out that the algorithm is constantly evolving as engineers make small tweaks. So if the search giant isn’t currently guilty of censorship, this new tweak won’t make it any more so. It’s sort of like a cable provider deciding what channels appear toward the top of the list, like major networks and C-SPAN, and which ones get relegated to the triple digits.

If climate-denying sites (and other well-linked-to nonsense) get moved from page one of search results to, say, page three, that might do some societal good. And if you don’t agree, there’s always Bing.

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Google’s plan to prioritize facts ticks off climate deniers

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Google’s plan to prioritize facts ticks off climate deniers