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Kiribati climate refugees fighting to stay in New Zealand

by Danielzhg Posted on October 2, 2013

Kiribati climate refugees fighting to stay in New Zealand

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A Kiribati couple and their children have left their island home for New Zealand, seeking refuge from rising seas — and the fate of their immigration case could shape the future for thousands of other climate refugees.

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Kiribati looks like a tough place to leave — but some of its citizens driven from their homeland by rising seas are telling New Zealand that they had no choice.

We told you last year that the 100,000 people who live on the low-lying Pacific Ocean archipelago are desperately seeking new homes, with waves already submerging some of its 32 carol atolls. Now, attention has turned to the case of a 37-year-old and his wife and kids who are seeking asylum in New Zealand after fleeing six years ago.

Here’s the story the man told New Zealand’s immigration tribunal, via the AP:

The man said that around 1998, king tides began regularly breaching the sea walls around his village, which was overcrowded and had no sewerage system. He said the fouled drinking water would make people vomit, and that there was no higher ground that would allow villagers to escape the knee-deep water.

He said returning to the island would endanger the lives of his two youngest children.

“There’s no future for us when we go back to Kiribati,” he told the tribunal, according to the transcript. “Especially for my children. There’s nothing for us there.”

The tribunal rejected their pleas to stay, saying it has seen no evidence that the family would face imminent danger if they returned home, and pointing out that there are no laws on the country’s books opening its borders to refugees driven there by rising seas. The case now goes to New Zealand’s High Court, which is due to hear an appeal on Oct. 16.

An attorney representing the husband argues that his client was the victim of an indirect form of persecution, because climate change is caused by humans. A constitutional law expert interviewed by the AP said he did not expect that argument to convince the court. Nonetheless, he believes that the case will help increase pressure on countries like New Zealand and Australia to take in climate refugees from nearby islands.


Source
‘Climate refugee’ fighting to stay in New Zealand, AP

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Can Someone Please Shut Down the US Customs Agency?

by SelenaKil Posted on October 1, 2013

Mother Jones

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I woke up in the middle of last night enraged by this story. I do not thank Ta-Nehisi Coates for bringing it to my attention and ruining my night, but as long as he did, I’m going to ruin yours too.

Thanks to a combination of executive branch policy and Supreme Court indifference in the post-9/11 era, US Customs and Border Protection has become a rogue agency, answerable to no one and run by sociopaths who take grim pleasure in harassing and torturing citizens they disapprove of just because they can. The evidence for this is now legion. If Congress actually wanted to do something useful, that’s what they’d spend this week working on.

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Can Someone Please Shut Down the US Customs Agency?

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The NSA Isn’t the Only Government Agency Destroying Your Right to Privacy

by Margherit Posted on September 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with “burner” phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents “are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide.

You’re probably assuming that we’re talking about another blanket National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program focused on the communications of innocent Americans, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. We could be, but we’re not. We’re talking about a program of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a domestic law enforcement agency.

While in these last months the NSA has cast a long, dark shadow over American privacy, don’t for a second imagine that it’s the only government agency systematically and often secretly intruding on our lives. In fact, a remarkable traffic jam of local, state, and federal government authorities turn out to be exploiting technology to wriggle into the most intimate crevices of our lives, take notes, use them for their own purposes, or simply file them away for years on end.

“Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up,” the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt told a tech conference in March. “It’s moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.”

Hunt’s right. The American public and the legal system have been left in the dust when it comes to infringements and intrusions on privacy. In one way, however, he was undoubtedly being coy. After all, the government is an active, eager, and early adopter of intrusive technologies that make citizens’ lives transparent on demand.

Increasingly, the relationship between Americans and their government has come to resemble a one-way mirror dividing an interrogation room. Its operatives and agents can see us whenever they want, while we can never quite be sure if there’s someone on the other side of the glass watching and recording what we say or what we do—and many within local, state, and federal government want to ensure that no one ever flicks on the light on their side of the glass.

So here’s a beginner’s guide to some of what’s happening on the other side of that mirror.

You Won’t Need a Warrant for That

Have no doubt: the Fourth Amendment is fast becoming an artifact of a paper-based world.

The core idea behind that amendment, which prohibits the government from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” is that its representatives only get to invade people’s private space—their “persons, houses, papers, and effects”—after it convinces a judge that they’re up to no good. The technological advances of the last few decades have, however, seriously undermined this core constitutional protection against overzealous government agents, because more and more people don’t store their private information in their homes or offices, but on company servers.

Consider email.

In a series of rulings from the 1970’s, the Supreme Court created “the third-party doctrine.” Simply stated, information shared with third parties like banks and doctors no longer enjoys protection under the Fourth Amendment. After all, the court reasoned, if you shared that information with someone else, you must not have meant to keep it private, right? But online almost everything is shared with third parties, particularly your private e-mail.

Back in 1986, Congress recognized that this was going to be a problem. In response, it passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). That law was forward-looking for its day, protecting the privacy of electronic communications transmitted by computer. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged well.

Nearly three decades ago, Congress couldn’t decide if email was more like a letter or a phone call (that is, permanent or transitory), so it split the baby and decreed that communications which remain on a third party’s server—think Google—for longer than 180 days are considered abandoned and lose any expectation of privacy. After six months are up, all the police have to do is issue an administrative subpoena—a legal request a judge never sees—demanding the emails it wants from the service provider, because under ECPA they’re considered junk.

This made some sense back when people downloaded important emails to their home or office computers and deleted the rest since storage was expensive. If, at the time, the police had wanted to look at someone’s email, a judge would have had to give them the okay to search the computer where the emails were stored.

Email doesn’t work like that anymore. People’s emails containing their most personal information now reside on company computers forever or, in geek speak, “in the cloud.” As a result, the ECPA has become a dangerous anachronism. For instance, Google’s email service, Gmail, is nearly a decade old. Under that law, without a judge’s stamp of approval or the user ever knowing, the government can now demand from Google access to years of a Gmail user’s correspondence, containing political rants, love letters, embarrassing personal details, sensitive financial and health records, and more.

And that shouldn’t be acceptable now that email has become an intimate repository of information detailing who we are, what we believe, who we associate with, who we make love to, where we work, and where we pray. That’s why commonsense legislative reforms to the ECPA, such as treating email like a piece of mail, are so necessary. Then the police would be held to the same standard electronically as in the paper-based world: prove to a judge that a suspect’s email probably contains evidence of a crime or hands off.

Law enforcement, of course, remains opposed to any such changes for a reason as understandable as it is undemocratic: it makes investigators’ jobs easier. There’s no good reason why a letter sitting in a desk and an email stored on Google’s servers don’t deserve the same privacy protections, and law enforcement knows it, which is why fear-mongering is regularly called upon to stall such an easy fix to antiquated privacy laws.

As Department of Justice Associate Deputy Attorney General James Baker put it in April 2011, “Congress should also recognize that raising the standard for obtaining information under ECPA may substantially slow criminal and national security investigations.” In other words, ECPA reform would do exactly what the Fourth Amendment intended: prevent police from unnecessarily intruding into our lives.

Nowhere to Hide

“You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off,” the CIA’s Hunt explained to the audience at that tech conference. “You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should.”

You have to hand it to Hunt; his talk wasn’t your typical stale government presentation. At times, he sounded like Big Brother with a grin.

And it’s true: the smartphone in your pocket is a tracking device that also happens to allow you to make calls, read email, and tweet. Several times every minute, your mobile phone lets your cell-phone provider know where you are, producing a detail-rich history of where you have been for months, if not years, on end. GPS-enabled applications do the same. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell for sure how long the companies hang onto such location data because they won’t disclose that information.

We do know, however, that law enforcement regularly feasts on these meaty databases, easily obtaining a person’s location history and other subscriber information. All that’s needed to allow the police to know someone’s whereabouts over an extended period is an officer’s word to a judge that the records sought would aid an ongoing investigation. Judges overwhelmingly comply with such police requests, forcing companies to turn over their customers’ location data. The reason behind this is a familiar one: law enforcement argues that the public has no reasonable expectation of privacy because location data is freely shared with service or app providers. Customers, the argument goes, have already waived their privacy rights by voluntarily choosing to use their mobile phone or app.

Police also use cell-phone signals and GPS-enabled devices to track people in real time. Not surprisingly, there is relatively little clarity about when police do this, thanks in part to purposeful obfuscation by the government. Since 2007, the Department of Justice has recommended that its US attorneys get a warrant for real-time location tracking using GPS and cell signals transmitted by suspects’ phones. But such “recommendations” aren’t considered binding, so many US Attorneys simply ignore them.

The Supreme Court has begun to weigh in but the issue is far from settled. In United States v. Jones, the justices ruled that, when officers attach a GPS tracking device to a car to monitor a suspect’s movements, the police are indeed conducting a “search” under the Fourth Amendment. The court, however, stopped there, deciding not to rule on whether the use of tracking devices was unreasonable without a judge’s say so.

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Did US Intelligence Help Pinochet’s Junta Murder My Brother?

by JoanSanderz Posted on September 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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On September 21, 1973, a 24-year-old U.S. citizen named Frank Teruggi Jr. was executed in the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, one of the first of thousands of victims of General Augusto Pinochet’s murderous 17-year military dictatorship. In the wake of the U.S.-backed coup that cost Frank, and so many others, their lives, I lost my older brother. Forty years after his death, my family is still seeking a modicum of truth and justice for his murder.

The story of Frank’s experience in Chile is not well-known. He was an anti-Vietnam war activist from Chicago—as a student at CalTech, he started an SDS chapter there—who enrolled in the University of Chile in early 1972, drawn by the promise of Salvador Allende’s “peaceful road to socialism.” Along with a group of North American expats that included Charles Horman, the other U.S. citizen killed in the stadium, Frank worked at a small newsletter called FIN (Fuente de Informacion Norteamericano) translating and distributing articles on the activities of the U.S. government and corporations in Chile.

During the last 20 months of his life, he sent letters home every two weeks keeping us up-to-date on his activities, as well as the increasingly dangerous political situation. When some of his letters didn’t arrive, he wrote, presciently: “Perhaps the FBI is intercepting my mail.” In another letter he cautioned, “When you get calls from people wanting my address, tell them you don’t have it. This is just a reasonable precaution in case some agency starts checking up on people in Chile. From what we read in papers down here about Watergate, Nixon’s not above doing anything or spying on anyone.”

Frank actually planned on returning home in the early summer of 1973. But a failed coup attempt in late June set off public demonstrations in support of Allende. During one march, Frank suffered a bullet wound to his ankle that required time for healing. He then decided to stay in Santiago a little longer to help establish an anti-imperialism research center at the University of Chile.

In August, his final letters arrived describing the escalating political instability in Chile. “If we all woke up tomorrow to another attempted coup, few people would be surprised. You get used to the tension, but it makes it very hard to plan my return,” he explained. “It depends on events totally beyond my control (and perhaps imagination).”

But he expressed confidence that being a U.S. citizen would somehow protect him. As he wrote in one of his last letters: “My personal position here is one of relative safety…as a foreigner, I should have little trouble leaving the country if the situation should ever get so bad that it be necessary.”

** ** **

On September 20th, 9 days after a military junta had seized power, police raided Frank’s group house on Hernan Cortes street and detained him and his American roommate, David Hathaway. They were then taken to the stadium, which Pinochet’s military had transformed into a massive detention, torture, and death camp.

For reasons that remain unclear, David was released the next day; Frank was not. Two days later my brother’s body was delivered to the city morgue bearing signs of torture and gunshot wounds. Among hundreds of other bloodied bodies, he lay there for two weeks while my family frantically contacted the U.S. Embassy to find out where he was and what had happened to him. On October 2, we received the terrible news in a phone call from a friend of Frank’s who had identified his body at the morgue.

Since that day, a 40-year-long pursuit of truth and justice for Frank has taken a dogged route. My father, Frank Sr., then a retired typesetter, was thrust into a role that he was not prepared for, but humbly embraced: to discover the truth about his son’s death. He kept Frank’s cause alive in the press, and, until his own death in 1995, pursued a 22-year-long letter writing campaign seeking answers and accountability.

In February 1974, my father flew to Santiago to find out why his son had been murdered and who had murdered him. He was accompanied by 11 prominent citizens from the Chicago area—including church leaders, politicians, union officials and lawyers. We had hoped his mission to Santiago would bring some clarity, but neither U.S. nor Chilean officials showed any interest in advancing the truth, let alone holding anyone accountable. “

“In all honesty I cannot be very optimistic about getting a fuller story at this date and after this lapse of time,” the U.S. Ambassador, David Popper, told the delegation. My father noted that the U.S. government did not seem to be making any major effort to find the truth about Frank: “It is difficult for my family to understand how the U.S. Government can be helping the Government of Chile when they don’t even answer our questions” about a murdered American.

Without any help from the Embassy, at the end of his stay in Chile my father did obtain signed testimony from a fellow prisoner that Frank had been badly tortured and killed at the National Stadium. A Belgian man imprisoned at the stadium, Andre Van Lancker, subsequently came forward to tell us that Frank had been executed by a Chilean officer who used the codename “Alfa-1 or Sigma-1” and that the military had sought to cover up Frank’s presence at the Stadium so as not to have “troubles with the government of the U.S.A.”

The Pinochet regime need not have worried. Although Ambassador Popper promised my father that they would try to “determine the facts” in Frank’s death, the Embassy soon advised the State Department, according to a declassified memorandum, that “they believe further pressure in this regard will be of no avail and merely further exacerbate bilateral relations for no benefit.”

In the name of good relations with the Pinochet regime, the U.S. government assisted a coverup of the circumstances of my brother’s death. A Chilean diplomatic note claimed, falsely, that Frank had been detained for curfew violations on September 20th and released for “lack of merit” the next day. A Chilean intelligence officer informed one U.S. official that he believed “Teruggi was picked up by his leftist friends and ultimately disposed of.” The Chilean military officially transmitted to the U.S. government their conclusion that Frank had been associated with “extreme leftist movements” in Chile and involved with some unidentified “organization” that had carried out “a campaign to discredit the Junta del Gobierno.”

My family always wondered how the Chilean military had arrived at this conclusion. NEven U.S. State Department officials later asserted that this statement “may have been based on information provided by U.S. intelligence.”

The issue of what role, if any, U.S. intelligence officials who collaborated in the coup might have played in both Frank and Charles Horman’s death remains the key mystery of this tragedy. The Academy Award-winning 1982 movie Missing, postulated that Charles had been killed because he had stumbled across information of a covert U.S. role in the coup. Among thousands of U.S. documents on Chile declassified by the Clinton administration in 1999 there is an August 1976 State Department document stating that there was “circumstantial evidence to suggest U.S. intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman’s death”—a conclusion that pertained to Frank’s case as well.

The Clinton administration also declassified a series of FBI reports which revealed that, in fact, the U.S. intelligence community had been monitoring Frank’s mail, and, as he feared, had obtained his address in Chile. In 1972, West German intelligence agents intercepted a letter Frank had sent from Chile to an anti-war dissident living in Heidelberg who was under surveillance; the Germans passed the letter and Frank’s address to the CIA and to a U.S. Army intelligence unit in Munich. The CIA subsequently provided Frank’s address in Santiago to the FBI. The FBI opened a file with documents titled, “Frank Teruggi—Subversive,” on my brother and ordered its Chicago office to begin investigating him. Whether the information they gathered was ever passed to U.S. officials in Chile, and from them to the Chilean military, remains the outstanding question in my brother’s case.

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9 Ridiculous Things in That BuzzFeed Post About Stopping Mass Shootings

by Unique Article Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Oh, BuzzFeed, we love your serious reporting and we also love when you try to make ridiculous memes win the internets. But when you inadvertently help tenuous gun-lobby talking points go viral? Not so much.


10 Crazy Gun Laws Introduced Since Newtown


More Than Half of Mass Shooters Used Assault Weapons and High-Capacity Magazines


The Showdown Over Gun Laws From Coast to Coast


Newtown “Changed America,” But Will Congress Change Gun Laws?


Under Obama, Feds Holster Gun Cases


A Guide to Mass Shootings in America


10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down


Want to Buy a Gun Without a Background Check? Armslist Can Help

See our full special report on gun laws and the rise of mass shootings in America.

Yesterday BuzzFeed staff writer Ryan Broderick posted a listicle titled “9 Potential Mass Shootings That Were Stopped By Someone With A Personally Owned Firearm.” That’s a pretty definitive headline for a post that can’t back up its claims.

“Can law-abiding citizens with guns combat mass shootings?” Broderick asks by way of introduction. That’s it—there’s no attempt to define his terms or explain the scope of his reporting. What exactly constitutes a “law-abiding citizen” or a “personally owned firearm”? And how do you define a mass shooting? Broderick doesn’t answer these potentially inconvenient questions, letting his post suggest that armed civilians are responsible for stopping nine mass shootings that were either in progress or about to start.

Contrast that with what my colleague Mark Follman has found in his extensive reporting on mass shootings (which is based on an clear explanation of the terms and criteria being used.) While pro-gun advocates claim that courageous gun owners have routinely stopped mass shootings, the reality is that armed civilians rarely respond to shooting rampages—and those who have are rarely, if ever, successful. Most of the examples they cite are either ambiguous or involve trained law enforcement or military personnel—not the ordinary citizens with personal firearms that Broderick alludes to in his clicktastic headline and just-asking-a-question subhead.

Here are the nine incidents listed in Broderick’s post and why they deserve a click on BuzzFeed‘s trademark “FAIL” button:

1. The Pearl High School shooting: In this case, a 16-year-old who’d killed two people and wounded seven was subdued by an assistant principal who retrieved a handgun from his truck. However, the shooting may have already been over when the assistant principal arrived. And he wasn’t an ordinary civilian: He was an Army reservist. All this is explained in issue of People whose image is in Broderick’s post. However, his sole link goes to David Horowitz’s Frontpage Mag (motto: “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out”).

2. The Parker Middle School dance shooting: Another case where a teenaged shooter may have already finished his rampage, which killed one person and wounded three, when an armed adult showed up. Yet Broderick says definitively that the shooting “was ended” when a man with a shotgun intervened.

3. The Appalachian School of Law shooting: Another deadly incident in which trained law-enforcement personnel stepped in. From a New York Times article Broderick links to:

Mr. Odighizuwa was subdued by three law students who were experienced police officers, the authorities said.

”We’re trained to run into the situation instead away from it,” said one of the three, Mikael Gross, 34, of Charlotte, N.C., who ran to his car for his bulletproof vest and service pistol before tackling the suspect.

Though the article notes that Gross grabbed his service pistol, Broderick vaguely describes it as a “personally owned firearm,” suggesting that he carried it for personal use.

4. The New Life Church shooting: Broderick makes it sound like this shooting, which killed two people and wounded three, was stopped by “a former police officer” who just happened to be at church that day. In fact, she was a church security officer.

5. The Trolley Square shooting: Yet another incident where a off-duty cop got involved. The officer who confronted the shooter during this Salt Lake City shooting was “well-trained for such an event,” according to the local news article Broderick cites.

6. The Golden Market shooting: “The details are murky,” writes Broderick, “but according to reports, a man entered a Golden Market in Virginia in 2009 and began firing a gun.” The “reports” he links to are a breathless post on AmmoLand and a pro-gun op-ed in the Collegiate Times. The Richmond Times-Dispatch‘s account of the incident makes it sound like a botched robbery, not a thwarted mass shooting.

7. The New York Mills AT&T store shooting: A good example of a planned mass shooting being averted—by a cop. In this 2010 incident, a 79-year-old man with a handgun walked into an AT&T store, wounded one employee and apparently planned to kill several others whose names were on a list in his pocket. An off-duty police officer who was in the store shot and killed the shooter.

8. The Clackamas Town Center shooting: Nick Meli, an off-duty security guard, drew his concealed handgun on the shooter during this 2012 rampage that left three dead at an Oregon mall. Broderick doesn’t mention that Meli was a guard, but asserts that shooter Jacob Roberts “retreated” after seeing Meli produce his weapon, which he did not fire for fear of hitting a bystander. It’s not clear if Meli affected the outcome of the incident, which ended with Roberts killing himself. After a 926-page investigative report on the shooting was released, a sheriff’s spokesman told The Oregonian, “We have no information that the suspect’s—Roberts’—actions were ever influenced by anything Mr. Meli did. But I also can’t deny it.”

9. The San Antonio Theater shooting: In December 2012, a 19-year old opened fire at a San Antonio restaurant where he and his ex-girlfriend worked. He then shot at a police car and headed into an adjacent cinema, where he wounded one person. He was pursued and wounded by a security guard who was an off-duty sheriff. Breitbart described it as a would-be “mass shooting,” and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze suggested that the suspect had intended to shoot up a crowded theater. Yet the shooting appears to have been sparked by the breakup and it’s unclear how many people the suspect intended to kill. Broderick doesn’t acknowledge this uncertainty, adding more fodder to the questionable premise that more “good guys with guns” can stop the next mass shooting before it happens.

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9 Ridiculous Things in That BuzzFeed Post About Stopping Mass Shootings

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Bills will make it easier for Californians to buy and sell solar power

by Kyung Wilhoite Posted on September 16, 2013

Bills will make it easier for Californians to buy and sell solar power

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The sun always shines in Los Angeles — and soon more residents will be able to take advantage of that fact.

No rooftop? No yard? No problem!

All Californians will be able to invest in solar and wind projects to reduce their power costs and their carbon footprints under a bill awaiting Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) signature.

“SB 43 will allow the millions of Californians who cannot install their own solar unit, windmill, or other renewable power generation system to obtain renewable energy through their utility,” said one of the bill’s authors, state Sen. Lois Wolk (D).

The legislation establishes the largest shared renewables program in the U.S. The Daily Democrat explains:

SB 43 establishes the Green Tariff Shared Renewables Program, a 600 Megawatt statewide program that will allow the customers of investor-owned utilities — including local governments, businesses, schools, homeowners, municipal customers, and renters — to purchase up to 100 percent of their electricity from a renewable energy facility. The program would sunset in 2019.

Among those to benefit from SB 43 would be the state’s millions of renters as well as business owners who lease their stores or offices. The bill will also provide access to disadvantaged communities disproportionately affected by environmental pollution and other hazards that can harm the public’s health — as well as homeowners unable to finance installation of a renewable power generation system.

The bill comfortably passed both chambers of California’s legislature last week, and Brown is expected to sign it into law.

Passage of separate legislation last week means that it isn’t just going to get easier for Californians to buy solar power — it’s going to get easier for them to sell it.

The lawmakers sent a separate bill to Brown that would ease the way for citizens to sell their excess solar power (and other types of renewable energy) onto the grid. AB 327 caps the monthly charge for customers participating in a so-called net-metering program at $10. It also increases the amount of renewable power that state regulators can compel the utilities to buy from their customers.

The votes again demonstrated the Golden State’s leadership on solar energy. California is a hub for the industry, and solar installations continued to grow in the second quarter of this year despite shrinking funds available through a state incentive program. From a report published last week by the Solar Energy Industries Association:

California’s PV market has seen continued growth amidst the dwindling incentives offered by the California Solar Initiative. Q2 2013 ranks as the strongest second quarter in the state’s history, with installations up 78% in the residential market and 26% in the non-residential market year-over-year. For residential and non-residential projects, higher retail rates have enabled project developers to secure a growing number of customers based purely on net metering (NEM), the federal 30% Investment Tax Credit, and accelerated depreciation. …

In the second half of 2013, our highest expectations for growth lie in the California and Arizona residential markets and in the California, Massachusetts and New York commercial markets.

SEIA

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John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Bills will make it easier for Californians to buy and sell solar power

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Your Half-Eaten Sandwich’s Dirty Secret

by Justin Thomas Posted on September 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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A full third of the world’s food is wasted. According to a new report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, discarded food accounts for a staggering amount of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, if food waste was a country, its 3.3 gigatonnes of emissions would make it the third highest-emitting country in the world, after China and the United States:

All charts reproduced with permission from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

(LULUCF refers to “land use, land-use change, and forestry”—so this chart doesn’t take into account all of the carbon emitted when a rainforest is converted to a farm, for example.)

What exactly makes all that waste and its emissions? It’s not just consumers throwing dinner scraps away. Some food spoils before farmers can harvest it, other food goes bad on its way from the farm to the market, and still more food ends up rotting on supermarket shelves. Looking at emissions of uneaten food from farm to table, the researchers found that food wasted at the consumer phase had the highest carbon footprint. That’s because by the time food gets to that stage, it’s already accumulated emissions from production, harvest, and distribution. In other words, when chuck food that you buy at the supermarket, you’re throwing away every part of the process that has gotten it there, as well:

Some kinds of food waste create more emissions than others. Wasted fruit, for example, has a relatively small ratio of food waste to carbon emitted. Meat’s ratio is much larger. That’s because meat production is exceptionally carbon intensive.

Food waste and emissions also vary by region. This graph shows that industrialized Asia (China, Japan, and South Korea) is far and away the largest contributor to both food waste and carbon emissions in the world:

But if you look at food waste’s carbon footprint per person, North America and Oceania (United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) is the winner—meaning the uneaten food produced by each citizen of North America and Oceania is responsible for more carbon emissions than that of each person in industrialized Asia. The report authors don’t go into the reasons for this, but I’m guessing it has to do with the fact that North Americans waste more food overall—especially in the carbon-instensive consumer phase—than people most other regions.

Of course, carbon emissions are not the only way in which wasted food harms the environment. The report finds that wasted food consumes an amount of water almost three times as large as Switzerland’s Lake Geneva—that’s 60 percent more than Lake Tahoe. The authors also note that uneaten food could cover nearly 30 percent of the world’s arable land.

And that’s to say nothing of the human impact of all this food waste. By 2020, the global population is expected to hit 8 billion. How are we going to feed everyone? Some argue that we should use biotechnology to design higher yielding crops, while others believe that we simply must redistribute the food we already grow—enough to feed 12 billion people, my colleague Tom Philpott reports—more evenly. But surely figuring out how to eat the food that we produce instead of throwing it away would help, too.

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Your Half-Eaten Sandwich’s Dirty Secret

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Everyone Is Happy About the Surveillance Debate

by Abe Johnson Posted on September 13, 2013

Mother Jones

Here is James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, talking about the disclosure of NSA surveillance programs by Edward Snowden:

I think it’s clear that some of the conversations this has generated, some of the debate, actually needed to happen.

And here is FISA judge Dennis Saylor, ordering the government to conduct a declassification review of court rulings related to the NSA’s phone records program:

The unauthorized disclosure in June 2013 of a Section 215 order, and government statements in response to that disclosure, have engendered considerable public interest and debate about Section 215. Publication of FISC opinions relating to this provision would contribute to an informed debate….Publication would also assure citizens of the integrity of this Court’s proceedings.

And, of course, here is President Obama shortly after the first Snowden disclosures:

I welcome this debate. And I think it’s healthy for our democracy.

It’s unanimous! Everyone thinks that Snowden’s disclosures have generated a useful and much needed debate. So when do we actually get to have this debate?

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Everyone Is Happy About the Surveillance Debate

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Saying No to Syria Matters (and it’s Not About Syria)

by f3x43zg0 Posted on September 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Once again, we find ourselves at the day after 9/11, and this time America stands alone. Alone not only in our abandonment even by our closest ally, Great Britain, but in facing a crossroads no less significant than the one we woke up to on September 12, 2001. The past 12 years have not been good ones. Our leaders consistently let the missiles and bombs fly, resorting to military force and legal abominations in what passed for a foreign policy, and then acted surprised as they looked up at the sky from an ever-deeper hole.

At every significant moment in those years, our presidents opted for more, not less, violence, and our Congress agreed—or simply sat on its hands—as ever more moral isolation took the place of ever less diplomacy. Now, those same questions loom over Syria. Facing a likely defeat in Congress, Obama appears to be grasping—without any sense of irony—at the straw Russian President Vladimir Putin (backed by China and Iran) has held out in the wake of Secretary of State John Kerry’s off-the-cuff proposal that put the White House into a corner. After claiming days ago that the U.N. was not an option, the White House now seems to be throwing its problem to that body to resolve. Gone, literally in the course of an afternoon, were the administration demands for immediate action, the shots across the Syrian bow, and all that. Congress, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle, seems to be breathing a collective sigh of relief that it may not be forced to take a stand. The Senate has put off voting; perhaps a vote in the House will be delayed indefinitely, or maybe this will all blow over somehow and Congress can return to its usual partisan differences over health care and debt ceilings.

And yet a non-vote by Congress would be as wrong as the yes vote that seems no longer in the cards. What happens, in fact, if Congress doesn’t say no?

A History Lesson

The “Global War on Terror” was upon us in an instant. Acting out of a sense that 9/11 threw open the doors to every neocon fantasy of a future Middle Eastern and global Pax Americana, the White House quickly sought an arena to lash out in. Congress, acting out of fear and anger, gave the executive what was essentially a blank check to do anything it cared to do. Though the perpetrators of 9/11 were mostly Saudis, as was Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda itself sought refuge in largely Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. So be it. The first shots of the War on Terror were fired there.

George W. Bush’s top officials, sure that this was their moment of opportunity, quickly slid destroying al-Qaeda as an organization into a secondary slot, invaded Afghanistan, and turned the campaign into a crusade to replace the Taliban and control the Greater Middle East. Largely through passivity, Congress said yes as, even in its earliest stages, the imperial nature of America’s global strategy revealed itself plain as day. The escape of Osama bin-Laden and much of al-Qaeda into Pakistan became little more than an afterthought as Washington set up what was essentially a puppet government in post-Taliban Afghanistan, occupied the country, and began to build permanent military bases there as staging grounds for more of the same.

Some two years later, a series of administration fantasies and lies that, in retrospect, seem at best tragicomic ushered the United States into an invasion and occupation of Iraq. Its autocratic leader and our former staunch ally in the region, Saddam Hussein, ruled a country that would have been geopolitically meaningless had it not sat on what Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called “a sea of oil”—and next to that future target of neocon dreams of conquest, Iran. Once again, Congress set off on a frenzied rush to yes, and a second war commenced out of the ashes of 9/11.

With the mighty American military now on their eastern and western borders and evidently not planning on leaving any time soon, Iranian officials desperately sought out American diplomats looking for some kind of rapprochement. They offered to assist in Afghanistan and, it was believed, to ensure that any American pilots shot down by accident over Iranian territory would be repatriated quickly. Channels to do so were reportedly established by the State Department and it was rumored that broader talks had begun. However, expecting a triumph in Iraq and feeling that the Iranians wouldn’t stand a chance against the “greatest force for liberation the world has ever known” (aka the US military), a deeply overconfident White House snubbed them, dismissing them as part of the “Axis of Evil.” Congress, well briefed on the administration’s futuristic fantasies of domination, sat by quietly, offering another passive yes.

Congress also turned a blind eye to the setting up of a global network of “black sites” for the incarceration, abuse, and torture of “terror suspects,” listened to torture briefings, read about CIA rendition (i.e., kidnapping) operations, continued to fund Guantanamo, and did not challenge the devolving wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Its members sat quietly by while a new weapon, armed drones, at the personal command of the president alone, crisscrossed the world assassinating people, including American citizens, within previously sovereign national boundaries. As a new president came into office and expanded the war in Afghanistan, ramped up the drone attacks, made war against Libya, did nothing to aid the Arab Spring, and allowed Guantanamo to fester, Congress said yes. Or, at least, not no, never no.

The World Today

Twelve years later, the dreams of global domination are in ruins and the world America changed for the worse is a very rough place. This country has remarkably few friends and only a handful of largely silent semi-allies. Even the once gung-ho president of France has been backing off his pledges of military cooperation in Syria in the face of growing popular opposition and is now calling for U.N. action. No longer does anyone cite the United States as a moral beacon in the world. If you want a measure of this, consider that Vladimir Putin seemed to win the Syria debate at the recent G20 summit as easily as he now has captured the moral high ground on Syria by calling for peace and a deal on Assad’s chemical weapons.

The most likely American a majority of global citizens will encounter is a soldier. Large swaths of the planet are now off-limits to American tourists and businesspeople, far too dangerous for all but the most foolhardy to venture into. The State Department even warns tourists to Western Europe that they might fall victim to al-Qaeda. In the coming years, few Americans will see the pyramids or the ruins of ancient Babylon in person, nor will they sunbathe, among other places, on the pristine beaches of the southern Philippines. Forget about large portions of Africa or most of the rest of the Middle East. Americans now fall victim to pirates on the high seas, as if it were the nineteenth century all over again.

After 12 disastrous years in the Greater Middle East, during which the missiles flew, the bombs dropped, doors were repeatedly kicked in, and IEDs went off, our lives, even at home, have changed. Terrorism, real and imagined, has turned our airports into giant human traffic jams and sites of humiliation, with lines that resemble a Stasi version of Disney World. Our freedoms, not to speak of the Fourth Amendment right to privacy, have been systematically stripped away in the name of American “safety,” “security,” and fear. Congress said yes to all of that, too, even naming the crucial initial piece of legislation that began the process the PATRIOT Act without the slightest sense of irony.

When I spoke with Special Forces personnel in Iraq, I was told that nearly every “bad guy” they killed or captured carried images of American torture and abuse from Abu Ghraib on his cellphone—as inspiration. As the victims of America’s violence grew, so did the armies of kin, those inheritors of “collateral damage,” seeking revenge. The acts of the past 12 years have even, in a few cases, inspired American citizens to commit acts of homegrown terrorism.

Until this week, Washington had abandoned the far-from-perfect-but-better-than-the-alternatives United Nations. Missiles and bombs have sufficed for our “credibility,” or so Washington continues to believe. While pursuing the most aggressive stance abroad in its history, intervening everywhere from Libya and Yemen to the Philippines, seeking out monsters to destroy and, when not enough could be found, creating them, the United States has become ever more isolated globally.

Our Choice

The horror show of the last 12 years wasn’t happenstance. Each instance of war was a choice by Washington, not thrust upon us by a series of Pearl Harbors. Our Congress always said yes (or least avoided ever saying no). Many who should have known better went on to join the yes men. In regard to Iran and George W. Bush, then-candidate for president Senator Joe Biden, for instance, said in 2007, “I was Chairman of the Judiciary Committee for 17 years. I teach separation of powers in constitutional law. This is something I know. So I brought a group of constitutional scholars together to write a piece that I’m going to deliver to the whole United States Senate pointing out that the president has no constitutional authority to take this country to war against a country of 70 million people unless we’re attacked or unless there is proof that we are about to be attacked. And if he does, I would move to impeach him. The House obviously has to do that, but I would lead an effort to impeach him.”

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Saying No to Syria Matters (and it’s Not About Syria)

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NSA Shares Raw Surveillance Data With Israel

by wjtydf3g Posted on September 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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Another day, another Snowden document released by the Guardian. But this one involves Israeli intelligence, which should guarantee an extra frisson of outrage, especially given the context: starting in 2009, the NSA began to routinely hand over raw data—some of which includes surveillance of U.S. citizens—to the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (INSU).

The memo that confirmed this arrangement is crystal clear that Israeli use of NSA data must be “consistent with the requirements placed upon NSA by U.S. law and Executive Order to establish safeguards protecting the rights of U.S. persons under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” There follow numerous paragraphs setting out the rules of the road, which basically say that Israel isn’t permitted to use this data to target U.S. persons in any way. Whether this comforts you probably depends on whether you think Israel takes these rules seriously, or whether it was strictly a wink-wink-nudge-nudge sort of arrangement, where everyone knows perfectly well that once it has its hands on this stuff the Israelis will use it any way they please. It’s not as if they’re famous for their reluctance to spy on Americans, after all. In fact, another document seen by the Guardian noted that “A NIE National Intelligence Estimate ranked them as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”

As for me, I’m just going to straight-up admit that this stuff is coming too fast and furious for me to truly digest it all. On the one hand, it’s not as if it comes as any surprise that we share intelligence with friendly countries. On the other hand, raw, unminimized intelligence? With a country whose previous efforts to spy on America are pretty well known? I honestly have no idea how seriously to take the promises in this memo that NSA’s raw data will never, ever be used to target Americans, cross our hearts and hope to die. I wonder if NSA deliberately inserts test cases in the data they hand over just to find out if INSU reports them back, as they’re supposed to?

For now, then, I’ll just highlight the part of the memo below. Note that Israel is allowed to hold files that contain the identities of U.S. persons for a year. But files that contain the identities of government officials? Incinerate on contact and salt the earth behind them. Priorities, priorities.

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NSA Shares Raw Surveillance Data With Israel

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