Tag Archives: canadian

Watch Mike Huckabee Cover Adele in a Campaign Ad

by OsvaldoSkillen4 Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday morning, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign tweeted its latest campaign video—and it’s a cover of pop superstar Adele’s hit song “Hello.”

Instead of talking about strained relationships, Huckabee’s “Hello” focuses on Iowa’s highlights and idiosyncrasies. “Amish chairs, Casey’s jerky, Quad Cities has quite a port,” sings the unnamed, unseen vocalist.

The ad includes dramatizations of text message exchanges with Hillary Clinton and Sen. Ted Cruz—with the latter sending Huckabee a text claiming he is Canadian. There’s really a lot to unpack here. It’s probably best to watch it for yourself.

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Watch Mike Huckabee Cover Adele in a Campaign Ad

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The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

by LoreneTanaka453 Posted on January 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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In November, environmentalists were ecstatic when President Barack Obama decided not to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. But TransCanada, the company behind the project, was not so happy. On Wednesday, it filed a lawsuit against the federal government seeking to overturn the permit rejection. At the same time, it gave notice that it plans to pursue compensation under the North American Free Trade Agreement, to the tune of $15 billion.

In its NAFTA complaint, TransCanada alleges that “the politically-driven denial of Keystone’s application was contrary to all precedent; inconsistent with any reasonable and expected application of the relevant rules and regulations; and arbitrary, discriminatory, and expropriatory.”

In other words, TransCanada thinks it got misled and ripped off by the Obama administration, just to satisfy a wacky cabal of treehuggers. Now, it wants the US Treasury to cough up an apology in cash.

NAFTA is a trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico meant to protect trade between those countries. One provision of the agreement, Chapter 11, allows a corporation in one country to sue the government of another country if it feels that country’s regulations unfairly discriminate against it. It’s a provision that has always been highly controversial with environmentalists, since it provides an avenue for corporations to contest another country’s environmental policies, as TransCanada is doing now.

That strategy is unlikely to succeed, according to David Wirth, a professor of international trade law at Boston College and a leading expert on international environmental disputes. Wirth said he actually used this very question—could TransCanada win a NAFTA case against the United States?—on a recent exam, and the answer was pretty clearly no. First off, although TransCanada claims to have spent around $3 billion preparing to build the Keystone XL pipeline, it’s not clear that this would actually count as an “investment” that was illegally taken from the Canadian company by the US administration.

“They knew that without the permit approval the project wouldn’t go forward,” Wirth said. “So any money spent in advance is purely speculative.”

Second, although the complaint claims that “environmental activists…turned opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline into a litmus test for politicians—including US President Barack Obama,” it’s not clear how that really constitutes a legal problem.

“The president, in making a decision in the national interest, has to weigh a variety of factors, including arguments of environmentalists,” Wirth said. “Just because there was political disagreement doesn’t mean the process was defective.”

But most importantly, Wirth said, TransCanada’s complaint doesn’t distinguish between a bureaucratic trade decision that treated a foreign company unfairly—the kind of action NAFTA is supposed to prevent—and a decision made by the president for the benefit of public health and the environment.

“The intent of NAFTA was not to require governments to pay every time they take an action that’s in the public interest,” Wirth said. “It’s very troubling if every time the president makes a decision in the interest of the people, he’s risking an enormous liability of this sort.”

The US has a good track record on NAFTA suits brought by foreign corporations, having lost just one of 14 since the agreement came into effect in 1994. Wirth said NAFTA tribunals have tended to set a pretty low bar for the minimum standard of treatment foreign companies should expect to receive. In other words, TransCanada would have to prove that it was treated exceptionally unjustly by the Obama administration, not just that it had a frustrating experience.

As for TransCanada’s federal lawsuit seeking to reverse Obama’s ruling, the odds for that aren’t great either, since US courts have previously found that cross-border pipelines really are the president’s decision to make, according to Reuters.

Sorry, TransCanada. Maybe try for the permit again in 2017 if a Republican wins the White House. Until then, you might be out of luck.

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The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

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7 Fascinating Facts About Bats

by Reinaldo97I Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Silhouetted against an orange harvest moon, fluttering out of a haunted house, or circling Count Dracula’s cape: We often think of bats as creepy, especially this time of year.

But actually, these maligned creatures are crucial to many ecosystems—and our economy. What’s more, they’re in trouble. A few important facts to know about our winged, insect-munching friends:

Bats flying at sunset Umkehrer/Shutterstock

Bats save us billions of dollars a year. Bats eat their bodyweight in insects every night. In 2011, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville used modeling techniques to calculate how much bats’ amazing insect-eating abilities are worth to US farmers. The estimates included the value of prevented crop damage from pests that bats eat, as well as the amount of money farmers would have to spend on pesticides to do the same job. They came up with a wide—but staggering—range: between $3 billion and $53 billion dollars a year.

A few years later, Josiah Maine, then a graduate student at Southern Illinois University’s Cooperative Wildlife Research lab, decided to test out those estimates on the most important American crop: corn. Maine’s team set up enclosures around corn fields that let in insects but prevented bats from entering and foraging, and then measured how that corn fared compared with corn in fields where bats could eat insects to their hearts’ desire—and found 50 percent more fungal growth and crop damage in the enclosed corn. They then estimated the cost of damage per acre and extrapolated it across all the acres of corn grown in the world. The total price tag? More than $1 billion per year, not including the cost of downstream environmental damage caused by increased pesticide use.

Long-eared bats eat insects that damage crops. De Meester/ZUMAPRESS

Bats prevent disease. A common misconception is that most bats carry rabies and other diseases. In fact, the vast majority of bats don’t have rabies, and out of more than 1,300 species of bats, only three suck the blood of other animals (and only one of other mammals). On the other hand, bats eat insects that spread diseases we really should be worried about. According to David Blehert, who leads the US Geological Survey’s Wildlife Disease Diagnostics Lab, bats play an important role controlling the spread of West Nile virus.

Without bats, there would be no tequila. Many species of bats pollinate plants. After they use their insanely long tongues to feast on the sweet nectar of flowers, pollen collects on their muzzles, which they spread from the male part of the flower to the female part of the flower.

More than 300 species of plants depend on bats to survive in many tropical and desert ecosystems. These include plants that humans eat, like the agave used to make tequila, as well as banana, peach, and mango trees.

Bats help save forests. Fruit-eating bats also play a crucial role in rejuvenating clear-cut rainforests. After a rainforest ecosystem is decimated, the first step toward rebuilding is the spreading of seeds by the poop of fruit-eating birds, bats, and other animals. But bats, which cover large distances to forage for fruit at night, do the best job at spreading “pioneer” plants, the flora that first begin to grow after clear cutting.

In North America, bats are in big trouble. Bats are dying in unprecedented numbers in the eastern United States and Canada, thanks to a terrifying fungal disease. Nearly 6 millions bats have perished in the past decade, including more than 90 percent of the populations of some species.

The recent bat troubles began about a decade ago, when a nasty fungus called Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd) found its way into caves full of hibernating bats in upstate New York. Unlike bacteria and other pathogens, this fungus thrives in cold temperatures and finds an ideal host in the sleeping bats. It creeps onto their muzzles and spreads on the skin covering their wings, irritating them and causing them to wake and move before they are supposed to. This disrupts their energy conservation and fat storage, causing bats to die before hibernation is over or leave their caves too early and starve outside.

Perhaps most frightening of all, the fungus has spread very quickly: Since 2006 when wildlife biologists first identified it in New York, it has appeared in 26 states and five Canadian provinces. Just last month it arrived in yet another state, Wyoming, although it has yet to claim bat lives there. (Bats don’t start dying until a year or more after the fungus arrives in their caves.) White-nose syndrome has affected half of the 47 bat species in the United States, including the once ubiquitous little brown bat and the northern long-eared bat, which is now a threatened species.

A little brown bat affected by white-nose syndrome US Fish and Wildlife Service

Scientists test the wings of a little brown bat for white-nose syndrome in Tennessee. Amy Smotherman Burgess/ZUMAPRESS

Some researchers are trying are trying to save bats by manipulating their microbiomes. Blehert says scientists have started to make progress preventing white-nose syndrome’s spread. They discovered that once the fungus enters a cave’s soil it persists for long periods of time, allowing it to travel on the shoe of a spelunker or on the wing of a bat. Scientists and recreational cavers have begun to take precautionary measures to decontaminate clothes and equipment.

Researchers are also looking into more dramatic ways to fight the disease, including innovative vaccination efforts and cutting-edge biological control methods that manipulate the microbes on a bat’s skin so its microbiome develops a resistance to the pathogen. Researchers have found that bats’ immune systems, which largely shut down during hibernation, do not notice to the invasion of Pd fungus, allowing the pathogen to easily out-compete the microbes on bats’ skin that normally fight off germs. Scientists are trying to introduce new organisms to bats’ microbiome that could resist the fungus.

Because of white-nose syndrome, the northern long-eared bat is now a threatened species. Bruno Manunza/ZUMAPRESS

The US government is starting to care about bats. The kind of research needed to counteract white-nose syndrome can be extremely complicated and often costly. Organizations like the Nature Conservancy and bat expert Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation International have made funding available to study white-nose syndrome, but the disease is not going away anytime soon and there is always a worry about how sustainable such funding will be.

Luckily, the US government has also stepped in. At the end of last month, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it was giving another $2.5 million in grants for white-nose syndrome research. Since 2008, the agency has donated nearly $24 million to federal, state, and nongovernmental organizations to study and prevent the disease.

Researchers like Blehert and Maine also hope the new findings showing bats’ economic value will encourage support from spheres outside of wildlife conservation. “It’s not only ethical, but there is an economic incentive to conserve bats too,” Maine told me. “For a lot of people, this latter argument is really persuasive.”

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7 Fascinating Facts About Bats

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Country-Rocker Corb Lund Shows Off His Wit and High-Lonesome Voice

by RefugioBathurst Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Corb Lund
Things That Can’t Be Undone
New West

With his flexible, high-lonesome voice and witty songs, Corb Lund makes records that have real staying power. On Things That Can’t Be Undone, his first studio outing in three years, the Canadian country-rocker and his nimble supporting trio, the Hurtin’ Albertans, dispatch sizzling boogie rave-ups and heart-tugging ballads equally well, uncorking a batch of snappy tunes bigger names would be smart to cover. Among the high points: “Weight of the Gun,” a loping tale of regret in the spirit of vintage Johnny Cash, “Washed-Up Rock Star Factory Blues,” a hilarious unofficial sequel to Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” and the haunting war story “Sadr City.” Then again, there’s not a dull or false note to be found on this remarkable and rewarding album.

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Country-Rocker Corb Lund Shows Off His Wit and High-Lonesome Voice

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These Photos Will Make You Want to Quit Your Job and Ride a Mustang From Mexico to Canada

by AllenWaring Posted on September 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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On a midsummer afternoon in 2013, in the wilds of southern Utah, Ben Masters jumped off his horse, tied it to a tree, and watched his three friends ride off into the mountains in the wrong direction. It had been a tough day. They’d already been forced to turn back after trying to scale the Wasatch Plateau, snow-choked at 10,500 feet above sea level; the horses struggled and postholed through thick snowdrifts, and the group could go no farther.

Two of the 16 mustangs Ben Masters and his pals adopted from BLM. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

The setback had wasted precious hours. The four men needed to find, before nightfall, a camp with grass for their 16 horses—including pack animals—to graze. That already looked uncertain. Then, as they made their down from the snowy pass, the mustangs were startled by the thrum of engines from some off-road vehicles in the area. They began to spook and bolt, one after another. Left with just five horses, the friends threw together a hasty plan: Masters would stay put while the others attempted to chase down the runaways.

At that point, the men were two months into a journey that would take them through 3,000 miles of America’s backcountry, primarily public lands, from Mexico to Canada. They still had a long way to go. “What the hell?” Masters remembers thinking after 48 hours of waiting. “This whole thing is going to unravel.”

Masters consults his GPS in the Montana backcountry. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

“That was the lowest point of the journey for me,” he told me, “just waiting, twiddling my thumbs. It’s funny now, but when you’ve put that much time and energy into something and you think the whole trip is being undone—the horses have run off and you’re never going to find them again—it was scary.”

Their epic undertaking, the subject of a photo book and a new documentary film opening this week, was born out of a desire for adventure and freedom, at least for a little while, from societal obligations. Masters had been on one long-distance horse trip before. In 2010, he and two friends decided over tequila to take a semester off college and ride through the state of Colorado. That trip ended with sore legs, wet clothes, cold fingers, empty bellies, and a decision to never endure that kind of suffering again. But just three weeks later, Masters started planning for his next adventure.

Day 5: Southern Arizona. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

This time, one state wasn’t enough. Masters wanted to ride through the longest stretch of contiguous backcountry remaining in America, and he wanted to film it. He found a crew headed by adventure filmmaker Phillip Baribeau and recruited three other friends who knew their way around a horse. These included Jonny Fitzsimons, who grew up on a cattle ranch Thomas Glover, who had once worked at a dude ranch, and Masters’ childhood pal Ben Thamer.

As he’d done the first time around, Masters arranged to adopt a team of unwanted wild mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages more than 50,000 wild horses and burros on public lands in the West. With a mustang population that can double every four years, the BLM offers thousands of horses for sale or adoption, but the demand rarely meets the supply. “I wanted to show that mustangs aren’t the worthless beasts that are currently wasting away in holding pens but are excellent, usable stock,” Masters writes in the book Unbranded: Four Men and Sixteen Mustangs. Three Thousand Miles Across the American West. (The BLM disputes the “holding pen” characterization.) “I hoped to inspire adoptions and educate viewers on the necessity of population control.”

Thamer brews coffee during a freak Arizona snowstorm. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

A trip on horseback from Mexico to Canada wasn’t unprecedented, of course, but there would be some notable differences between Masters’ group and its forebears. Sure, Masters was equipped with modern GPS gadgetry, which he says “tells you more about where you can’t go than where you can go”—revealing sheer cliffs and private land boundaries, for example. Yet the terrain they faced was arguably more challenging than it would have been in those cowboy days of yore: “What separated this journey from Kit Carson, the explorers, or the cavalry is they mainly stuck to the valley bottoms and the easy avenues of travel. There was no reason to go into the mountains. Well, a lot of those valley bottoms and easy places to travel now have golf courses and subdivisions and cities in them. That’s where people settled. What was made public was mainly stuff the early settlers didn’t want.”

Fitzsimons and Thamer in the southern Utah desert. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Back in southern Utah, the men finally managed to round up all their animals, reunite, and journey on. Over the next four months, they wound through the rest of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. They fly-fished, sometimes from horseback and in thunderstorms. They crossed treacherous rivers, cooked over open stoves, and lounged around bonfires. Even with the GPS, they got lost plenty and had to reroute around impossible terrain and territorial ranchers. There were injuries, too: “One guy got kicked in the head,” says Masters. And a cameraman took a good kick to the thigh: “He had this massive bruise and this big blood bubble. He couldn’t walk for about two weeks. We thought he broke his femur.” And Thamer came down with a case of dysentery. “He was a grumpy bastard after that, too,” Masters says, laughing.

From left: Masters, Thamer, Glover, and Fitzsimons. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Eventually, three of the four—for sentimental reasons, Fitzsimons turned around just one mile short of the border—reached Canada. The end of the trip, punctuated by a simple green road sign reading, “LEAVING USA. STOP AND REPORT TO CANADIAN CUSTOMS,” brought with it a strange mix of emotions. There were the bonds the riders had forged with their horses. Despite the setbacks, there was a nagging feeling that maybe their trip wasn’t challenging enough. (Throughout Montana, for example, the men were never more than a few hours drive from their film crew’s base, and safety.) For the last 1,000 miles, the guys had mostly run out of things to say to each other, and they felt confused, even sad, as the trip came to a close. But for Masters, at least, it was all worth it. “I feel as if I get a lot of pressure from school, my family, from society in general, saying, ‘Ben you need to go to college, get a job, get a house, do these things and take the steps to becoming a successful person,'” he says. “And that’s all good, but for six months of my life I wanted to do what I wanted to do. And I did. And I will never regret that.”

You’ll find more stunning images from the adventure, along with details and reflections on the trip, in the book and in Unbranded, the film, which has been winning rave reviews and audience awards at festivals across the United States. It will be showing in select theaters starting this weekend. To whet your appetite, here’s a trailer and some additional photos from the book. Wish you were there.

A river crossing in Wyoming. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Fly fishing, with lightning. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Fitzsimons fords the treacherous Gallatin River in Southern Montana. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Glacier National Park, the last leg before the Canadian border. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

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These Photos Will Make You Want to Quit Your Job and Ride a Mustang From Mexico to Canada

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Scott Walker No Longer Understands His Own Base

by ChanteOakley6 Posted on September 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago Scott Walker refused to answer a question about Syrian refugees because “I’m not president today, and I can’t be president today.” This was a novel take on presidential campaign questions, which are—for obvious reasons—all about what you’d do as president. But apparently Walker decided it was unfair to ask him about that before he actually became president. He left unclear what kinds of questions would be left for reporters to ask him.

Today, unsurprisingly, Walker changed his tune. He decided to “clarify” his answer, which turned out to be simple: he doesn’t want the US to take in any more Syrian refugees. We take in plenty already. Instead, he wants to increase our bombing campaign against ISIS. This would probably make the refugee crisis worse, but whatever.

I say that Walker’s clarification was unsurprising because he’s really made a habit of this. Steve Benen provides the blow-by-blow:

Walker’s pattern of stumbling only reinforces doubts about his strength as a national candidate. TPM’s Caitlin MacNeal noted a series of issues and controversies — Kentucky’s Kim Davis, whether sexual orientation is a choice, evolutionary biology, President Obama’s patriotism and religion — on which Walker couldn’t or wouldn’t share his position publicly.

There are a variety of other issues — birthright citizenship, Boy Scouts, building a Canadian border wall — on which Walker managed to state an opinion, but soon after, that position proved untenable, forcing him to “clarify” his actual beliefs. Asked about Walker last week, an Iowa Republican told Politico, in advance of this week’s incident, “For the last two months Walker hasn’t made a single policy pronouncement that he or his staff hasn’t had to clarify or clear up within two hours.”

When the campaign began, I was pretty bullish on Walker. He seemed to have the right combination of respectability and pit-bull snarl to appeal to a wide variety of voters. And since he’s had a long political career, including four years as Wisconsin governor, he’d have a pretty good handle on campaigning.

But no. It turns out he barely has a clue about campaigning. Has this always been the case, or has the rise of Donald Trump completely flummoxed him? Maybe a bit of both, but I think he’s really let Trump get inside his head. He planned to campaign pretty far to the right, and when Trump took that away from him he didn’t seem to know what to do. Agree with Trump? Then he’s just a follower. Disagree with Trump? But that could be dangerous if the base is really enthralled with the guy. What to do?

The answer, apparently, is to make it clear that he has no considered views of anything and merely wants to say whatever will make the tea partiers happy. But he no longer knows what that is. So he tap dances desperately, but does it so bumblingly that he just embarrasses himself. At this point, it’s not clear if he’ll ever get his act together.

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Scott Walker No Longer Understands His Own Base

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Here’s the Price Tag for CAP’s New Child Care Program: About $100 Billion

by DonnaSidhu928 Posted on September 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Center for American Progress—aka “Hillary’s Think Tank”—has released “A New Vision for Child Care in the United States.” But it’s not really very new. It’s just a tax credit that varies with income. If you’re at the poverty level, you’d get a tax credit of about $13,000 paid directly to the child care facility of your choice. If you make more, the tax credit would be less. The maximum out-of-pocket expense for families would range from 2 percent at the low end to 12 percent at the high end.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it bears a strong family resemblance to Obamacare.

But it might be a good idea regardless of how new it really is. I’m certainly a fan of both preschool and subsidized child care. The big question is going to be how much it costs, and that’s something the authors don’t address. There’s probably a reason for that. My very rough horseback calculation suggests it could run up a tab of $100 billion per year. Maybe more.1See update below.

That’s a lot of money. How’s it going to be paid for? Danielle Paquet asked CAP about this, and was told vaguely that “restructuring the tax system” and “closing wasteful loopholes” might do the trick. I dunno. That’s a lot of wasteful loopholes.

Needless to say, this is one of the downsides of taking public policy seriously. If you’re Donald Trump, you just tell everyone not to worry. “I’m going to be great for the kids,” and he’ll take care of it from there. But if you’re a Democrat, you normally feel obliged to present an actual plan that can actually work in the real world—and that means people can attach a price to it. And that, in turn, means you can be badgered about how you’re going to pay for it.

Politically speaking, this is something that Democrats will need to be careful about. There’s a temptation among liberals to be the anti-Trump, tossing out dozens of detailed white papers to solve all the world’s problems. But this gives conservatives an opening to add up the cost of all those white papers and start bellowing about how their very own proposals prove that Democrats want to bankrupt the country and tax millionaires into insolvency. It’s best to tread carefully here.

On the other hand, maybe Hillary could benefit from a small dose of Trumpism. Maybe she should adopt CAP’s proposal and just declare that she’s going to soak the rich to pay for it. Why pussyfoot around it? After all, polls show that taxing the rich at higher rates is a pretty popular idea. Maybe it’s time to go bullroar populist and just beat the tar out of the malefactors of great wealth.

Then again, maybe not. That doesn’t really sound much like Hillary, does it?

1The program is for kids aged 0-4. My estimate is based on about 20 million kids qualifying, with an average tax credit in the neighborhood of $8,000 each. That’s $160 billion. If two-thirds of all families take advantage of this tax credit, that comes to about $100 billion. Needless to say, more detailed cost estimates are welcome.

UPDATE: I am mistaken. CAP estimates a cost of $40 billion for their proposal, which they believe would not just help working families, but also stimulate the economy:

The economy as a whole benefits from policies that help working families. As an example, the Canadian province of Quebec developed a nearly universal child care assistance program, and economists at the University of Quebec and the University of Sherbrooke estimate that the program boosted women’s labor force participation by nearly 4 percentage points, which in turn boosted GDP by 1.7 percentage points.

I’m habitually skeptical of claims that social programs will recoup all or part of their costs by boosting the economy, but it’s probably true in this case. The effect of increased employment on GDP is pretty straightforward. The policy question, of course, is how much this will offset the program costs. But then, that’s always the policy question, isn’t it?

In any case, I’m not sure how CAP gets to $40 billion, and it strikes me as a little low. But it might be right. It would be interesting to see an estimate from a reliable third-party source.

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Here’s the Price Tag for CAP’s New Child Care Program: About $100 Billion

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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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Literally the Only Good FIFA News You’ll Hear This Week

by DanutaSievwrigh Posted on May 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Electronic Arts, the gaming company that makes the popular FIFA video game franchise, is bringing women to the virtual pitch, adding 12 women’s national teams to FIFA 16 this September.

From the Wall Street Journal:

EA announced Thursday that a dozen women’s international soccer teams will be included in the coming FIFA 16 game scheduled for release in September. EA didn’t say in its announcement why it took so long to mend the gender gap or whether the petition played a role. In an email, EA said it had been considering adding women for years and that it had made the necessary advancements to more accurately represent how the characters run and sprint, for example. The game’s motion capturing tracked four members of the U.S. Women’s National Team: Sydney Leroux, Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, and Megan Rapinoe.

EA’s decision came three years after an online petition called for inclusion—and right before this year’s Women’s World Cup starts next week in Canada. (It also came a day before Sepp Blatter won his fifth term as FIFA president, with the governing body embroiled in the ongoing corruption crisis.)

Last fall, a group of women’s soccer stars, including US forward Abby Wambach, filed a gender discrimination lawsuit claim against FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association over the organization’s decision to play this year’s World Cup games on artificial turf, even though the men’s games are played on grass. The group later withdrew the suit. And in an interview with Time, star US forward Alex Morgan, who will be featured in the new game, said that Blatter didn’t recognize her at the 2012 FIFA Player of the Year event—even though she’d just been named one of the three best women’s players in the world.

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Literally the Only Good FIFA News You’ll Hear This Week

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These Scientists Just Lost Their Lives in the Arctic. They Were Heroes.

by KimberlyHollins Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Early last month, veteran polar explorers and scientists Marc Cornelissen and Philip de Roo set out on skis from Resolute Bay, a remote outpost in the patchwork of islands between Canada and Greenland. Their destination was Bathurst Island, a treacherous 70-mile trek to the northwest across the frozen sea, where they planned to document thinning Arctic sea ice just a few months after NASA reported that the winter ice cover was the lowest on record.

It wasn’t hard to find what they were looking for, according to a dispatch Cornelissen uploaded to Soundcloud on April 28.

“We’re nearing into the coast of Bathurst,” he said. “We think we see thin ice in front of us…Within 15 minutes of skiing it became really warm. In the end it was me skiing in my underwear…I don’t think it looked very nice, and it didn’t feel sexy either, but it was the only way to deal with the heat.”

His next message, a day later, was an emergency distress signal picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. According to the Guardian, a pilot flying over the spot reported seeing open water, scattered equipment, and a lone sled dog sitting on the broken ice. By last Friday, rescuers had called off the search. The pair are presumed to have drowned, victims of the same thin ice they had come to study. Cornelissen was 46; de Roo had just turned 30.

Yesterday, Cold Facts, the nonprofit with whom the pair was working at the time, dispatched a snowmobile expedition to attempt to recover their belongings. You can follow their progress on Twitter here. The dog, Kimnik, was found a few days ago and is doing fine, the group said.

In a blog post on the website of the European Space Agency, Cornelissen was remembered by former colleagues as “an inspirational character, an explorer and a romantic. He had fallen in love with the spellbinding beauty of the poles and had made it a personal mission to highlight the magnitude of the human fingerprint on this last wilderness.”

It’s not clear whether the ice conditions the pair encountered were directly attributable to climate change, according to E&E News:

That the region had thin ice is evident. Perhaps the ice had been thinned by ocean currents that deliver warm water from below, or by the wind, which could generate open water areas. It is difficult to know. Climate change may have played a role, or it may not have…the impacts of the warming on ice thickness regionally can be unpredictable, ESA scientist Mark Drinkwater said.

Still, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth. We rely on the work of scientists like these to know exactly what is happening there and how it will affect those of us who choose to stay safe in warmer, drier places. Their deaths are a testament to the dedication and fearlessness required to stand on the front lines of climate change.

Rest in peace, guys.

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These Scientists Just Lost Their Lives in the Arctic. They Were Heroes.

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