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Here’s Why China Cares More About Climate Change Than Congress Does

by HyeMarshall Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

On Tuesday, China and the United States announced an unprecedented plan to work together to fight global warming. The deal includes new trade partnerships and significant new greenhouse gas goals for both countries. The US pledged to cut its emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025, while China agreed that its emissions would peak around 2030 and promised to get one-fifth of its power from non-fossil-fuel energy sources by the same year. Environmental groups have roundly welcomed the plan as an important step. But critics of the deal—including congressional Republicans—say China has been let off lightly and that it won’t follow through with its commitments.

The reality, of course, is far more complex. So I asked experts on US-China relations to explain why this deal was so attractive to the leaders of two countries that have historically locked horns over everything from human rights to lingerie imports. Here’s their explanation of why China really does want to want to act on climate change, and why the bargain makes sense for President Barack Obama, as well:

China has to act on air pollution. If it doesn’t, the country risks political instability. Top Republicans have slammed the US-China deal as ineffective and one-sided. “China won’t have to reduce anything,” complained Sen. Jim Inhofe (Okla.) in a statement, adding that China’s promises were “hollow and not believable.”

Climate Desk

But the assumption that China won’t try to live up to its end of the bargain misses the powerful domestic and global incentives for China to take action. The first, and most pressing, is visible in China’s appalling air quality. President Xi Jinping needs to act now, says Jerome A. Cohen, a leading Chinese law expert at New York University. Why? Because “the environment—not only the climate—is the most serious domestic challenge he confronts.” And Xi has the power to follow through on this “ambitious and necessary commitment,” says Cohen, who notes that the Chinese president will likely be in charge for eight more years and has “no overt opposition to his impressive power.”

Over the past few decades, China has witnessed the fastest and deepest wealth creation in history, hauling millions out of poverty in the space a generation. That growth has been heavily reliant on coal, which makes up roughly 70 percent of the country’s total energy consumption. China is the world’s top coal consumer and producer. All that has come with big cost: toxic air. According to one Lancet study, pollution generated mostly by cars and the country’s 3,000 coal-fired power plants killed 1.2 million Chinese people in 2010.

That’s why, Cohen says, this new announcement is such a big win for Chinese people themselves—it’s a clear demonstration that the country’s leaders are confronting China’s largest crisis. “This is very encouraging progress on a crucial issue of human rights: the right to a nonthreatening environment,” he says.

China’s air has become a major political threat to the Communist Party. As we reported in our yearlong investigation into China’s fracking plans, the country has a daily average of 270 “mass incidents”—unofficial gatherings of 100 or more demonstrators—sparked in part by pollution and environmental degradation. The message is clear. As The New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos put it, if the government doesn’t figure out a way to respond, “then it’s a political crisis, not just an environment crisis.” That’s what my colleague Jaeah Lee and I found when we toured China last year: It’s impossible to escape the scourge of coal. To understand why China wants to act now, you need to understand just how desperate the crisis has become:

The Atlantic‘s James Fallows made this point Wednesday, writing that “when children are developing lung cancer, when people in the capital city are on average dying five years too early because of air pollution, when water and agricultural soil and food supplies are increasingly poisoned, a system just won’t last.”

You can watch Fallows explain just how closely tied China’s environmental crisis is to the fortunes of the Communist Party:

President Xi Jinping wants to be a powerful global player. Another motivation for Chinese action has to do with global politics, says Orville Schell, who directs the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

“Xi Jinping is a very tough, muscular, nationalist leader whose toolbox is taken from earlier Mao periods,” Schell said in a phone interview. According to Schell, Xi’s preference for assertive leadership on the world stage means that China is “going to accept much less hectoring and bullying” from the rest of the world, perceived or otherwise. “They are going to be much more defiant.”

This deal—in which China is appearing on the world stage as an equal partner with the United States—fits into that narrative, explains NYU’s Cohen. The “climate issue is needed to boost sagging and increasingly tense Sino-American relations,” he said. “Xi is pursuing a two-faced policy toward the US: progress on issues of critical importance to him and his party/state, and relentless hostility toward the continuing soft power influence of the US over the Chinese people and China’s neighbors. Xi is facing severe internal challenges. He sees that the US can help him on some and undermine him on others, so, following one of Chairman Mao’s famous maxims, he is ‘walking on two legs.'”

China is actually serious about climate change. It’s not the case that everything is about the machinery of global politics—or even simply about China’s domestic worries over air quality. China’s recent actions suggest that its policymakers are actually attempting to confront global warming. Beijing has committed to gradually shut down coal plants inside the city by 2017. Obama and Xi agreed last year to curb the use of hydrofluorocarbons—powerful greenhouse gases that are used in refrigerants. In September, China announced it was moving forward with plans for a massive, nationwide cap-and-trade program intended to help combat climate change. The program will launch in 2016, but there are already a series of pilot carbon markets across the country.

So what does Obama get out of this deal? Despite Republican criticisms that the deal lets China off the hook, Schell says that Obama gets to own a big foreign policy success—one that actually helps him achieve a major domestic policy goal. Obama’s success with China was born out of failure at home: “He’s had to export his hopes and dreams for some sort of collaborative solution in China,” Schell said. “China, paradoxically, has allowed Obama to say that he has followed through with his earlier commitments to take climate change seriously.”

Cohen warns that opposition to climate action in the US could still undermine the bilateral agreement, but he says he’s hopeful that Obama “can implement the US commitment.”

As for whether the deal could signal a larger breakthrough by the Obama administration in US-China relations, the experts are skeptical. “The two big moments—the breakthrough moments—in US-China relations, were Nixon in ’72 and Carter recognizing China when Deng Xiaoping came to the US in ’79,” says Schell. “This is not the case this time with Obama in China.” Still, Schell says that any agreement with the tough Chinese leadership “does represent some progress.”

After all, he says, Obama “certainly can’t do anything at home.”

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Here’s Why China Cares More About Climate Change Than Congress Does

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How 3,500 Voters in North Dakota Could Put the Brakes on America’s Biggest Fracking Boom

by AdellNewman Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

The run-up to tomorrow’s midterm elections has seen an unprecedented spending surge from environmental groups. Climate and energy issues—from fracking in Colorado to coal mining in Kentucky—have taken center stage. But a far less prominent political fight in North Dakota is poised to have an outsized impact on America’s biggest oil boom.

The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, on the shores of Lake Sakakawea in the northwest part of the state, is home to roughly half of the 14,000 members of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation. The community sits atop roughly one-third of an immense treasure-trove: The Bakken Shale, the oil formation that is home to North Dakota’s ongoing fracking boom. Tomorrow, MHA Nation members will head to the polls to elect a new chairman—the tribal administration’s chief executive. Out of about 8,000 eligible voters, 3,500 are expected to turn up tomorrow, according to a spokesperson for the Tribal Election Board.

Both men vying for the position say they plan to crack down on the oil rush that has brought their nation a complex mix of wealth, environmental degradation, and corruption allegations. Normally, a chairmanship election on a Native American reservation would draw little interest outside the reservation’s borders. But with so much oil development at stake, Fort Berthold is a different story.

Here’s a sense of the scale of Fort Berthold’s petroleum power, from the Bismarck Tribune​:

The reservation has 25 rigs drilling, 1,300 oil wells and produces 333,000 barrels of oil per day. About $25 million in oil tax revenue flows to the tribal treasury each month and the tribes’ annual budget has swelled from a modest $20 million annually to $520 million.

That heap of cash is administered by a tribal council, which is headed by the tribes’ current chairman, Tex Hall. A former oil-field services company executive, Hall was elected in 2010, just as the oil rush was getting underway. Fewer than half of the tribes’ members own mineral rights they can lease to drilling companies, according to Sebastian Braun, head of the Indian Studies department at the University of North Dakota. Since many residents don’t benefit directly from the fracking boom, they depend on the tribal administration to spend the money wisely and to help the residents cope with rising housing and grocery costs and the other ancillary impacts of oil development.

Instead, Braun said, “people felt the money was spent in ways they didn’t understand”—for example, on a helicopter to ferry VIPs to the reservation and a cruise ship for Lake Sakakawea—while the main town has only one stoplight for the increasingly heavy stream of truck traffic. And a report this August commissioned by the tribal council made various allegations about Hall’s financial dealings with oil and gas companies. In September, Hall denied those allegations and, in a statement reported by the Bismarck Tribune, dismissed the report as a “smear campaign.” Hall did not respond to Climate Desk’s request for comment.

The video above shows oil production at work on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Via Lunker Federal 2-33-4H from Georgianne Nienaber on Vimeo.

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How 3,500 Voters in North Dakota Could Put the Brakes on America’s Biggest Fracking Boom

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Almost Everything You’ve Bought Recently Came to You Via This Dirty Industry

by choneqjxs Posted on October 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you’ve recently purchased a new iPhone, or a fancy t-shirt, or a children’s toy… or really virtually any consumer or industrial good, there’s a strong chance that a giant ship ferried it from or through China. China, dubbed “the world’s factory” for pumping out so much of the world’s consumables, now boasts seven of the world’s top ten busiest trading ports. Strung up and down its densely populated eastern coast, China’s ten biggest ports handle nearly 30 percent of the world’s containers each year.

These mega-ports—Shanghai’s is the planet’s busiest—helped China become the biggest trader in the world, eclipsing the US in 2012. China has also become the world’s second largest consumer market—meaning that more and more ships are unloading wares in the country’s ports, not just loading up.

But there’s a big downside for the planet in all that trade, according to a report released Tuesday by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a US-based environmental advocacy group with offices in Beijing. When the country’s brutal smog and worsening air crisis make international headlines, as it did earlier this month after runners in the Beijing marathon donned air masks, coal burning and China’s grid-locked streets get most of the attention. But emissions from China’s vast shipping industry have so far been “very much overlooked” by Chinese leaders, says Barbara Finamore, an author of the report and NRDC’s Asia director.

“Last September, the central government issued a national air control plan and it only mentioned this in passing,” she said in a phone interview from Beijing.

Finamore’s report argues that poor regulation in China means that in a single day one container ship can pollute as much as half a million trucks:

NRDC

That’s because regulations allow China’s oceangoing ships to burn fuel with sulfur levels that are 100 to 3,500 times higher than those permitted for road vehicles, according to the report. This so-called “bunker oil” is extremely dirty and spews toxic exhaust into the air, including harmful diesel particulates, and nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide that cause smog. Those chemicals are known to lead to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses. Shipping is not a small contributor: Two thirds of the sulfur pollution in the Chinese megacity of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, comes from the shipping industry, says Finamore.

The exhaust not only pollutes the air locally, but also carries a powerful climate toll: A portion of the exhaust is “black carbon,” a fine particulate that, after CO2, is the second largest contributor to global warming. The US Environmental Protection Agency says it is particularly potent in melting arctic sea ice. As more ships take polar routes made more hospitable by warming, the black carbon they leave behind may accelerate melting, potentially further opening up once ice-bound lanes for more shipping. “It’s a vicious cycle,” says Finamore.

The report finds that 70 percent of emissions from major shipping routes occur within 400 km (about 250 miles) of a coastline, and that emissions can travel hundreds of miles inland. Stricter rules in North America (especially in California) and Europe mandate cleaner fuel when coming into port, and China is working to implement similar standards. In July, Hong Kong became the first city in China to regulate shipping emissions; other Chinese port cities and coastal regions have begun to introduce other control measures.

What works? According to the NRDC, there are three areas that could help clean up the industry, including moving to natural gas, using cleaner fuels, and powering down ships in ports:

NRDC

In a country where ambient air pollution contributed to an estimated 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010, Finamore says leaders are “scrambling” for solutions.

It’s this kind of pollution—and the public discontent it causes—that has gotten attention from the highest levels of government. Vice Premier Li Keqiang, the second-ranking Chinese official, formally declared a “war on pollution” earlier this year. Another Chinese leader gave a speech at the September UN climate talks in New York pledging that China would reach a peak in emissions “as soon as possible”—an unprecedented promise.

“They are taking it seriously,” Finamore says. “They are doing more than ever before to examine the environmental issues of various plans and sources of energy.”

But in China, she says, “implementation is always a problem.”

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Almost Everything You’ve Bought Recently Came to You Via This Dirty Industry

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The Craziest Things Republican Candidates Have Said About Climate Change In One Video

by Nathan64Pdlnc Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Can the GOP’s 2014 candidates give a straight answer on climate change? It appears not.

Many Republican candidates have offered roundabout answers to climate change questions. Some have said the climate isn’t changing at all, while others have disputed research showing that human activity is driving those changes. Then there’s Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM), who said during a debate this year that he’s confident our climate isn’t changing because he has “Googled this issue.”

Lee Fang of The Republic Report put together a mash-up of Republican candidates’ greatest hits on climate change this year.

Watch it above.

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The Craziest Things Republican Candidates Have Said About Climate Change In One Video

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Environmentalists Don’t Like Europe’s New Climate Plan. Can Obama Do Better?

by Rosemary226 Posted on October 24, 2014

Mother Jones

Environmental groups are warning that a new European agreement to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 sets the bar far too low.

The pact—which was reached early Friday in Brussels—makes the European Union the first major bloc of countries to commit to emissions targets ahead of next year’s crucial climate change talks in Paris. At the Paris meeting, world leaders will attempt to hammer out a global agreement that will keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

The Guardian reports that in addition to their commitment to cut greenhouse emissions by 40 percent, European leaders also agreed to increase the portion of the region’s energy that comes renewable sources to 27 percent by 2030. That provision is legally binding for the EU as a whole, but not on a national level, potentially opening the door to disagreements about how to get there. The third notable part of the pact is a plan to increase energy efficiency by 27 percent, but that target is not legally binding.

Oxfam—the global development NGO—slammed the deal as “insufficient,” saying the targets are too low and not enforceable enough. The group’s Deputy Director of Advocacy and Campaigns, Natalia Alonso, said in a statement: “Today’s deal must set the floor not the ceiling of European action, and they must arrive in Paris with a more serious offer.” Oxfam called for a much for aggressive policy: 55 percent cuts in emissions.

Greenpeace also criticized the deal, saying the EU leaders pulled the “handbrake on clean energy.”

“These targets are too low, slowing down efforts to boost renewable energy and keeping Europe hooked on polluting and expensive fuel,” the group said in a statement.

Greenpeace EU managing director Mahi Sideridou added, “The global fight against climate change needs radical shock treatment, but what the EU is offering is at best a whiff of smelling salts.”

Nevertheless, European leaders hailed the deal as a major breakthrough. “This package is very good news for our fight against climate change,” said Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said the pact “will ensure that Europe will be an important player, will be an important party, in future binding commitments of an international climate agreement.”

World Resources Institute, a leading climate policy research group, struck a more conciliatory tone than other environmental groups, while also calling for more aggressive targets. “Despite facing a dismal recession and difficult internal debate, European leaders demonstrated their resolve by staying the course,” said the institute’s director of climate and energy programs, Jennifer Morgan, in a statement. “At the same time, it is clear that all of the targets could have been—and should have been—more ambitious.”

The deal raises the stakes for other countries to get serious about climate commitments ahead of Paris. According to the Guardian, it contains a clause that would trigger a review of the new targets—potentially torpedoing today’s agreement—if other countries don’t come to the table with comparable proposals next year.

It remains unclear precisely what the US government will seek at next year’s negotiations. Early indications suggest the Obama administration is considering a plan that would require countries to limit emissions according to a specific timetable but wouldn’t dictate to individual countries how deep those cuts would be.

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Environmentalists Don’t Like Europe’s New Climate Plan. Can Obama Do Better?

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Climate Change Is Kicking the Insurance Industry’s Butt

by olikellopas Posted on October 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the months after Hurricane Sandy, insurance companies spooked by rising seas dropped coastal policies in droves.

That could become an increasingly common story, according to the largest-ever survey of how insurance companies are dealing with climate change, released today. Global warming is increasing the risk of damage to lives and property from natural disasters beyond what many insurers are willing to shoulder. And most insurance companies aren’t taking adequate steps to change that trend, the survey found. That’s a problem even if you don’t live by the coast: When private insurers back out, the government is left to pick up much of the damage costs; already, the federal flood insurance program is one of the nation’s largest fiscal liabilities.

Ceres, an environmental nonprofit, evaluated the climate risk management policies of 330 large insurance companies operating in the United States. The results are worrying. Only nine companies, 3 percent of the total, earned the highest ranking.

The insurers that scored highly on the survey (including several of the world’s biggest, such as Munich Re, Swiss Re, and Prudential) were those that have adopted a broad range of climate-conscious products and services, such as rate pricing plans that account for potential climate impacts like storms and fires. Some insurers are also investing in high-end climate modeling software to better understand where their risks really are. Others offer environmentally friendly plans like mileage-based car insurance and encourage their customers to rebuild damaged homes using green technologies. And some insurance companies are making significant efforts to monitor and reduce their own carbon footprint.

However, the report finds that one major way insurance companies are adjusting to climate change is by not insuring properties that are threatened by it, said Washington State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, a lead author of the report.

“As a regulator, it’s very bad to see markets being abandoned because of the threat that exists,” he said.

Certainly the threat is real. Globally, average annual weather-related losses have increased more than tenfold in the last several decades, from $10 billion per year in the period 1974-1983 to $131 billion in 2004-2013, according to the report. The insurance industry is not keeping pace: The proportion of those damages that are insured is steadily declining:

Tim McDonnell

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Climate Change Is Kicking the Insurance Industry’s Butt

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Now Congressional Republicans Are Digging Through Scientists’ Grant Proposals

by HanneloScollen Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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When scientists across the country need money for research projects, one place they often turn is the National Science Foundation. The NSF is an independent federal agency with an annual budget of about $7 billion, which it doles out to fund about a quarter of all federally supported science research.

Of course, the agency doesn’t just give money away to anyone who asks. Proposals have to survive a rigorous review process that includes close scrutiny by a panel of top scientists in the relevant field. Competition is fierce: Of the 49,000 proposals submitted in 2013, only a fifth were ultimately funded. So as far as most scientists are concerned, an NSF grant is about the highest mark of scientific legitimacy a research project can get.

Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas) apparently disagrees. Over the last 18 months, Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has launched an aggressive campaign against what he sees as misguided money management at NSF that fritters funds away on frivolous research. Research on ridiculous things like, you know, climate change.

Smith’s committee is responsible for setting the NSF’s budget. But in the last year, the Congressman has gone to unprecedented lengths to scrutinize the agency’s scientific operations. His staffers are sifting through the archives of NSF grant proposal materials, which are normally kept strictly confidential to preserve scientific objectivity. They’re looking for projects to highlight as evidence that NSF is wasting money on research that, from their view, aren’t in the “national interest.”

A great recent story in Science lays out Smith’s strategy:

Four times this past summer, in a spare room on the top floor of the headquarters of the National Science Foundation (NSF) outside of Washington, D.C., two congressional staffers spent hours poring over material relating to 20 research projects that NSF has funded over the past decade…

The peculiar exercise is part of a long-running and bitter battle that is pitting Smith and many of his panel’s Republican members against Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson the committee’s ranking Democrat and the panel’s Democrats, NSF’s leadership, and the academic research community…

Smith, however, argues he is simply taking seriously Congress’s oversight responsibility. And he promises to stay the course: “Our efforts will continue until NSF agrees to only award grants that are in the national interest,” he wrote in a 2 October e-mail to ScienceInsider.

The tally of projects under scrutiny by Smith’s team has now grown to 47 (a listing of them is linked to in the Science story above). On one hand, that’s a lot. The confidentiality of the NSF review process is a long-established, sacred scientific practice that protects research from bias and makes sure only the cream rises to the top. So any cracks in that firewall, and certainly any whiff of political interference, are of great concern to the scientific community.

On the other hand, the 47 grants represent only a tiny fraction of the NSF’s total operation; together, they amount to about $26 million, or 0.37 percent of NSF’s budget. Which raises the questions of why Smith would (a) throw himself into an investigation of spending that, all things considered, is barely a drop in the federal bucket and (b) pick these specific projects to focus on. A spokesperson from Smith’s committee—who provided a statement on behalf of Smith’s office (the same statement quoted by Science above)—did not respond to these questions.

Many of the studies at issue involve social sciences (a study of caste systems in Ethiopia, for example, and one about rural sanitation in India) that fall outside the core areas of engineering, mathematics, computer science, and biology that Smith, in a press release this spring, singled out as “the primary drivers of our economic future.”

But some of the biggest-ticket items up for public dissection focus on climate change. They include a $3 million grant awarded in 2008 to study how federal agencies can better communicate climate science to the public and a $5.6 million award to a Columbia University team to carry out public education work on the impacts of climate change at the poles. You know, totally frivolous questions that have nothing to do with the “national interest” on things like rising sea levels, epic releases of methane, US military engagement in the Arctic, new areas for offshore oil drilling, and 35,000 stranded walruses. Definitely not stuff you need to worry about, or have our top scientists investigate and explain.

The letters over the past few months between Smith and NSF director France Córdova, an astrophysicist and former president of Purdue University, are a great new entry in the annals of government scientists explaining Science 101 to Republican Congressmen.

“NSF’s investment in meritorious research projects enables new and transformative discoveries within and among those fields and disciplines, resulting in the expansion of our scientific knowledge and understanding,” she wrote to him on May 19.

In other words, basic science shouldn’t be judged by how closely it hews to a predetermined, profitable advance. The Large Hadron Collider probably isn’t ever going to do much for the US economy, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in the “national interest” for us to understand the basic physics of the universe. Sometimes, even research on the mechanics of corkscrew-shaped duck penises can be a worthy investment of taxpayer dollars.

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Now Congressional Republicans Are Digging Through Scientists’ Grant Proposals

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A Place With the Population of West Virginia Just Powered A Work Day Entirely on Clean Energy

by LatriceVaught Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s one for the naysayers who insist renewable energy can’t keep the lights on and power our cities. An entire state in Australia with a population of around 1.7 million people just used renewable energy to meet 100 percent of its electricity needs throughout an entire working day. According to industry news site Energy Business News:

Between 9.30 and 6pm on Tuesday, September 30, a day not unlike most Tuesdays, with business and homes using electricity as usual, the state received the favourable weather conditions allowing solar and wind infrastructure to work side by side to achieve the impressive achievement.

The analysis comes from Pitt & Sherry, an Australian energy consultancy. As the wind picked up, all but two of the state’s coal-fired power generators, and one gas-powered unit, were shut down; the excess power was exported to other regions, according to the report. There were a few moments during the previous days—on September 27 and 28—when the state actually produced more wind power than the state’s total energy demand. Normally, nearly a third of the state’s energy comes from renewable sources, according to figures from 2012 to 2013.

South Australia, home to the city of Adelaide, has almost half of the country’s wind capacity; 25 percent of its households have rooftop solar installations, according to the report. The state is aggressively pursuing green energy goals, upping its 2025 renewable energy commitment from 33 percent to 50 percent, having met its previous goal six years ahead of schedule.

This is despite the conservative federal government under Prime Minister Tony Abbott threatening to gut a national renewable energy target, having already defunded several government agencies responsible for the country’s climate change policies. In July, Australia became the world’s first developed nation to repeal a carbon tax.

All of that policy uncertainty is having an impact on the renewable energy sector in Australia. Investment has virtually frozen in a land famous for being bathed in sun. Recent data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows Australia is on track to record its lowest level of financing for big renewable projects since 2002, dropping the country from the 11th largest investor to 31st in Bloomberg’s rankings. In the third quarter of this year, investment was down 78 percent from the same time last year.

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A Place With the Population of West Virginia Just Powered A Work Day Entirely on Clean Energy

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Walmart is the Biggest Corporate Solar User. Why Are Its Owners Funding Groups That Oppose Solar?

by JanTearlelwk Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Walmart loves solar power—as long as it’s on their roof, and not yours.

That’s the takeaway from a report released today by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which found that between 2010 and 2013 the Walton Family Foundation has donated just under $4.5 million to groups like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, which have worked to impede state-level policies that promote clean energy.

The list of groups that have received funding from the Walton Foundation reads like a who’s who of “the groups who are leading the charge against rooftop solar,” said Stacy Mitchell, who authored the report. Rob Walton, who sits on the Foundation board, is also the chair of Walmart’s board; his family are majority shareholders of Walmart and some of the richest people in America.

The funny thing is that Walmart, the world’s biggest company, is also the world’s biggest commercial solar user. Indeed, solar power is a key aspect of its much-touted green makeover. According to data released last year from the Solar Energy Industries Association, Walmart has 89 megawatts of installed solar capacity on its retail rooftops. That’s twice the capacity of second-ranked Costco and more than the total capacity of 37 individual states. Of course, those figures are less impressive when looked at in a light that better reflects the company’s mind-boggling size: Less than 3 percent of the company’s total power comes from renewables—including solar, wind, and biogas—according to EPA data.

Here’s the list of groups receiving funding from the Walton Foundation that have taken positions against state-level clean energy policies, according to the report:

Courtesy Institute for Local Self-Reliance

The dollar figures in the chart above come from the Walton Family Foundation’s last four annual reports. All the groups listed, Mitchell said, have opposed state-level clean energy policies like renewable portfolio standards or net-metering, both of which are key tools in helping more households go solar.

Clearly the groups listed here are involved in a host of conservative and free-market issues beyond energy, so there’s no direct evidence that the Waltons’ foundation donated to these groups because of their opposition to policies promoting renewables. Indeed, a foundation spokesperson said that the report is misleading because it ignores the foundation’s donations to environmental groups and instead “chooses to focus on a handful of grants none of which were designated for renewable energy-related issues.”

But backing groups like this has a direct impact on the growth of clean energy, Mitchell said.

The upshot, she said, is “not that their vision of the future doesn’t include some solar power. It’s just solar power they own and control.”

Walmart declined to comment on the report.

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Walmart is the Biggest Corporate Solar User. Why Are Its Owners Funding Groups That Oppose Solar?

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Will Climate Change Make Men Extinct?

by Oleksajp9 Posted on October 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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The world is warming. The beasts are dying en masse. The oceans are rising. The deserts are roasting. It’s the survival of the fittest out there, guys. Who’s going to win, evolutionarily speaking?

Men or women?

It turns out that warming temperatures may have a surprising gender bias—in favor of women. That’s the conclusion of a team of Japanese researchers who have discovered a “statistically significant” association between climate change—including rising temperatures and extreme weather events—and the birth rates of boys and girls in Japan. Warmer temperatures have accompanied an increased proportion of female babies in the population, and a decline in males.

The findings, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility—reveal that the proportion of male Japanese newborns has steadily declined since the 1970s. At the same time, the number of male “fetal deaths” during that general period—those that were spontaneously miscarried after 12 weeks of pregnancy—has increased. The researchers see a clear link to Japan’s temperature fluctuations.

This chart shows yearly mean temperature differences in Celsius compared to the male-female ratio of “spontaneous fetal deaths” (after 12 weeks of pregnancy); and the male-female ratio of newborns from 1968 to 2012 in Japan. Fertility and Sterility, 2014.

The team also picked out one very hot summer in 2010—Japan’s warmest since 1898—and one very cold winter in 2011, and found similar trends linked to climactic extremes: more fetal deaths followed by a lower ratio of male to female newborns.

It’s not an open and shut case. The researchers point out that climate change certainly isn’t the only factor affecting the newborn gender ratio—and they stop short of arguing that there’s a causal relationship between increased temperatures and more female offspring.

In general, the birth ratio is fairly constant around the world, with sightly more males born than females. And while the science is far from settled, female fetuses appear to be the tougher of the two when presented with outside stresses. At a population level, the gender mix at birth is thought to be influenced by external factors such as air pollution, chemical exposure, and “extraordinary stresses” like war and economic hardship. The Japanese researchers argue that male fetuses appear “especially vulnerable” to these factors, “including climate changes.”

Their hypotheses are supported by other studies. “The results regarding the association between the increase in annual temperature and the change in sex ratio seem fairly robust,” says Claudia Valeggia, a professor of biological anthropology at Yale University, who did not work on the study, but reviewed the findings at my request. “There seems to be now very strong evidence suggesting that male fetuses are more vulnerable, in general, to sub-optimal conditions—for example maternal malnutrition or stressful situations.”

A study published in The Lancet in 1997, for example, documented a decline in the proportion of male newborns in Denmark between 1951 and 1995, possibly due to environmental hazards. Another study looking at China’s famine during the tumultuous Great Leap Forward—a failed economic program to rapidly modernize the countryside—from 1959 through 1961 and found that women during that period were more likely to give birth to girls.

A more recent Swedish study showed that the temperature shifts expected from climate change could influence which fetuses—male or female—would be more likely to survive pregnancy and succeed in a more extreme world. Natural selection, they argue, tends to favor female babies during times of temperature upheaval, with mothers’ bodies evolutionarily programmed to give birth to girls.

“When you are not 100 percent in top shape, it’s more advantageous, evolutionarily speaking, to carry on with a female fetus pregnancy,” Valeggia says; that’s because women are more stable producers of offspring, so it’s better to have more of them around when times are tough.

And yet similar studies using data sets from Finland and New Zealand failed to produce any compelling connections between temperature and male-to-female sex ratios.

The Japanese researchers, led by Dr. Misao Fukuda, of the M&K Health Institute in Ako, acknowledge the discrepancy, but point out that Finland and New Zealand don’t experience the same enormous shifts in temperature between summer and winter as Japan does. Japan has also warmed at a greater rate than the global average over the last century, which might account for the differences in the results.

Valleggia is less convinced on this point. “I would like to see this repeated in other latitudes, with variations in temperatures in different parts of the world,” she says. Another aspect unaccounted for in the Japanese study, she notes, is that in Japan “most of the population must have some kind of access to shelter from these wide swings in temperature,” due to air-conditioning and central heating. “I would like to have more data on populations in which this is not the case, like developing countries, where you don’t have this kind of manmade shelter from temperature changes.”

So will climate change give rise to a female super-race? No—these birth fluctuations are small ones. Vallegia cautions that this is a study of demographics at a population level, not a study of impacts on individual pregnancies. That is, pregnant women should not take it to mean they should avoid warmer temperatures. So you’re free to enjoy the beach.

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Will Climate Change Make Men Extinct?

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