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Typhoon Yutu spurs disaster in a remote U.S. territory

by Greg36271607917 Posted on October 26, 2018

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Far away from the mainland, American citizens are reeling from a direct hit by Super Typhoon Yutu.

During its landfall on Thursday, Yutu lashed the Mariana Islands with more than a foot of rain, coastal flooding in excess of 15 feet, waves the size of five-story apartment buildings, and winds of 180 mph.

Saipan and Tinian are the two most-populated islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the central Pacific Ocean about 8,000 miles from Washington, D.C. — nearly twice as far away as Honolulu. Both islands took a direct hit. About 50,000 people live in the Commonwealth, and after Yutu, they’re fighting for survival.

Most structures have lost their roofs, and even the leaves have been stripped from trees and bushes, local lawmaker Edwin Propst told the Associated Press. Closed circuit video from near the point of landfall showed an entire hotel lobby destroyed in seconds.

Just hours after landfall, local news reports said that food, drinking water, and fuel were already in short supply. “This damage is just horrendous, it’s going to take months and months for us to recover,” Propst said.

If recent history holds, he’ll be right. Yutu is the third tropical cyclone (the scientific term for typhoons and hurricanes) in just over a year to plunge a remote U.S. territory into humanitarian crisis. Last year, Hurricane Irma’s devastation in the U.S. Virgin Islands was eclipsed just days later when Hurricane Maria made a direct hit in Puerto Rico.

In historical context, Yutu is an exceedingly rare disaster, though storms like Yutu are coming with a worrying frequency these days. According to preliminary weather data, Yutu is tied for the fifth-strongest tropical cyclone ever to hit land. Six of the 10 strongest landfalls in world history have occurred this decade.

The United States has borne a particularly damaging share of horrific storms lately. Yutu is the fifth Category 4 or 5 tropical cyclone to make landfall in the past 15 months on U.S. soil. No previous decade has had more than four such strikes on American shorelines, making this an outbreak unseen in nearly 170 years of recorded weather history.

Like so many recent hurricanes, Yutu rapidly strengthened just before landfall, going from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in just 36 hours. Waters near Yutu were 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, consistent with the effects of climate change and a key factor in rapidly strengthening storms.

Despite signing an emergency declaration to help speed the flow of federal aid to the islands, a routine task for a storm of this magnitude, President Trump has yet to publicly comment on the disaster. Mainstream media coverage has also been sparse; The New York Times’ initial story ran on page 16.

“It’s been tough seeing the lack of mainstream coverage for this,” said Steven Johnson, a native of Saipan and marine biologist now studying climate change at Oregon State University, wrote in an email interview with Grist.

Johnson pointed to the round-the-clock coverage of the mail bombs sent to Trump critics in comparison. It “hurts to know that +50K people living on U.S. soil deserve a fraction of the attention of Robert de Niro,” he said.

A lack of media and federal attention could prove deadly in the Marianas, as it did in the aftermath of Maria in Puerto Rico. Despite convincing evidence of a humanitarian catastrophe in Puerto Rico, the federal response was slow. That official neglect, plus logistical bottlenecks, lead to a nearly total breakdown in medical services and contributed to the storm’s outsized death toll, according to an independent study.

Johnson has been trying to bring attention to the storm by tweeting to celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio. He said that communicating with friends and family over social media had turned into a full-time job.

“Growing up on Saipan and Tinian, you go through storms all the time,” Johnson said. “This was the first time I’ve heard family and friends say they feared for their lives.”

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Typhoon Yutu spurs disaster in a remote U.S. territory

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The Nation’s Best Public School System Is Ground Zero in the Fight Over Charters

by Randell46P Posted on November 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Massachusetts’ public school system is widely considered to be the best in the country. Its high test scores and minuscule dropout rates are the envy of the nation. But thanks to a hotly contested ballot initiative, the state has become the latest battleground in the nationwide push for charter schools.

The initiative, known as Question 2, asks voters to decide if the state should lift its charter school cap and allow up to 12 new charter schools (or charter school expansions) every year. Schools opening in low-performing districts would get first priority; new charters and charter expansions would be exempt from limits on the number of charter schools and enrolled students, as well as the amount districts could spend on them.

Supporters argue that privately run, publicly financed charters would offer more choices to students in underperforming school districts. A Brookings Institution study released in September showed that children who attend charters in Massachusetts’ urban areas, particularly those from disadvantaged groups and with special needs, saw improvements in test scores. Kids who attended Boston’s charters were also more likely to take an AP exam and to attend a four-year college than those in traditional public schools.

Critics, however, argue that charters can draw money away from traditional public schools, lack oversight, and underserve students with special needs. MIT professor Parag Pathak told the New York Times that the decision “will send shock waves throughout the United States,” regardless of the outcome. “If the voters reject more urban charters here, then it’s not clear what more the charter movement can do to convince opponents and skeptics,” he told the Times.

The initiative has drawn significant financial investment from interest groups in Massachusetts—and beyond. Both sides have combined to spend more than $34 million, more than any other ballot initiative in the state’s history. Supporters ranging from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Walton family heirs have invested more than $24 million. Opponents, including state and national teachers unions, have pitched in some $14 million.

Support for the measure generally has fallen along party lines: Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has called the measure a “social justice” issue that would expand choice for children, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has supported school vouchers in the past, told the Boston Globe in September she would vote against Question 2.

“I am very concerned about what this specific proposal means for hundreds of thousands of children across our Commonwealth, especially those living in districts with tight budgets where every dime matters,” Warren said. “Education is about creating opportunity for all our children, not about leaving many behind.”

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The Nation’s Best Public School System Is Ground Zero in the Fight Over Charters

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Illegal Immigrant Tries to Kill Donald Trump!

by JarrodCerda Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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An illegal immigrant who is apparently mentally ill tried to grab a policeman’s gun yesterday so that he could shoot Donald Trump. I gather that it was a fairly half-hearted effort, but still: “Illegal Immigrant Tries to Kill Trump”! Where are the headlines? Jim Geraghty comments:

The recent chaos on the Trump campaign, as big a story as it is, shouldn’t cause this event to disappear from the public’s attention. It illuminates the disconcerting fact that once legal temporary immigrants enter the country, the authorities have no real way to keep track of them. And a lot of them take advantage of that fact….We need border security. But even if you completely sealed the southern border, America would still have a significant number of illegal immigrants walking its streets.

Quite so. But forget the media. We all know they’re in thrall to political correctness and won’t print anything that might cast Mexican immigrants in an unfavorable light. But what about Trump? His Twitter feed is empty. Why isn’t he shouting about this from the rooftops? I mean, it totally vindicates his point about building a wall and—

Wait. What? I should read the whole story. Fine. Here’s the BBC:

A British man arrested while trying to grab a policeman’s gun at a Donald Trump rally in Las Vegas has been described in his home town as “a strange one”….Surrey Police said it was “providing family liaison support on behalf of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office”….The BBC understands he lived with his mother Lynne in Dorking, Surrey until about 18 months ago.

Surrey police? Dorking? A British man? What’s that all about?

Ah, I get it. Michael Sandford is white. And he’s from Britain. A wall wouldn’t keep him out. And anyway, Trump’s base doesn’t hate residents of Dorking who overstay their visas. He’s not the right kind of illegal immigrant. So we’ll all ignore him.

POSTSCRIPT: On another note, Geraghty, like many conservatives, complains that we have “no real way to keep track” of visitors who overstay their visas. That’s true. But what exactly do they expect? GPS tracking collars? It’s not as if someone who’s illegally overstaying their visa is going to voluntarily check in at their nearest consulate. And even if we did track them somehow, what good would it do? I’m puzzled by this whole thing.

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Illegal Immigrant Tries to Kill Donald Trump!

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Here’s One Confederate Flag That Shouldn’t Be Taken Down

by JaiThrasher Posted on June 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the wake of the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina, one might not expect to see a Confederate battle flag solemnly hanging in the heart of New York City. But along with reflecting a history of hatred, racism, and violence, this particular flag—on display with tattered, red, white, and blue threads dangling—tells a different story.

Beside it sits the remnants of a separate flag, now reduced to red, white, and blue piles of fabric. The two pieces on display at the Mixed Greens gallery, called “Unraveling” and “Unraveled,” were pulled apart by hand by artist Sonya Clark to symbolize the work needed to be done to undo the legacies of racism, prejudice, and injustice, emblemized by the flags.

“Unraveling” and “Unraveled” on display in New York City

“Sometimes it is really hard to undo cloth and sometimes it is a little easier,” Clark tells Mother Jones. “But no matter what it is slow-going. That seemed to be a fitting metaphor for where we are. It is happening—but it is slow going. It is better now than it was—but it is slow going.”

Clark, a textile artist who serves as the Department Chair of Craft and Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, often tackles issues of race and identity in her work. Compelled by the news of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, Clark was inspired to make a piece that would speak to both the current issues and the long history of racism in America.

Artist Sonya Clark hugs a volunteer in front of “Unraveling”

Then, during a tour of the Museum of the Confederacy in Virginia, she came face to face with one of the original battle flags of the Confederacy. She took a photo of the tattered flag, capturing her own reflection in the protection glass—and it sparked an idea.

On April 9, on the 150 year anniversary of the end of the Civil War, she began pulling apart a Confederate flag. Piece-by-piece, string-by-string, she and her studio assistants undid the heavy woven fabric until it became something unrecognizable. The result, and the act of unraveling, serve as an important metaphor.

“We understand cloth in a way,” she explains. “We are all wearing cloth. But we actually don’t understand how it is made. We live in the United States of America and we are used to a kind of injustice because it is part of the fabric of our nation. There’s a way in which unraveling a cloth—using that metaphor, using that sense that a material that we are so familiar with, but we don’t actually understand how it was constructed. Undoing it helps us understand that.”

The fully undone flag, named “Unraveled,” now reduced to piles of thread, sits next to “Unraveling,” the flag that still remains mostly intact. That piece serves a related but separate purpose. It represents the collective work needed to be done to unravel racism, and the dialog that help will facilitate that work. Starting with a flag that had only partially been unwoven, 50 volunteers joined Clark in pulling apart the heavy cotton threads on opening night of the exhibit. In an hour and a half they were only able to dismantle about an inch, but Clark says the exhibit helped ignite important discussions.

“I don’t think we are going to get far in terms of undoing the deep history of racism and the legacies of prejudice and injustice without having dialog,” she explains. “It allowed me to stand next to people who volunteered, to undo the flag together. One on one. So we were having conversations about the process, about our lives, about ourselves.”

This isn’t the first time Clark has used the divisive image to make a broader point. In 2010 she did her first Confederate-flag piece, to highlight the how the wealth of this nation was built on the backs of slave labor. Threads stitched into a confederate flag painted onto canvas, depict an overlaying American flag in cornrows and bantu knots.

A 2010 piece by Sonya Clark

“I used cornrows because they are of course African diasporic a hairstyling technique that is pretty traditional. But the cornrows themselves also refer to working the land and Bantu knots refer to a group of people that were enslaved and brought across during the transatlantic slave trade,” she explains. “Even in the names of those hairstyles it refers to the people and the working of the land—the free labor that people of African descent provided.”

Now, heartbroken by the news of the Charleston shooting, she hopes to expand the discussion. She already has plans for more “Unraveling” flags to give those interested the opportunity to participate.

“When I made this piece I certainly would not have foretold that there would have been people massacred in South Carolina. I am saddened of course by that fact,” she says with a long pause. “But I do think that what has also happened is that, that awful tragedy has empowered this action of unraveling the confederate flag. It becomes another example of the work that we have to undo.”

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Here’s One Confederate Flag That Shouldn’t Be Taken Down

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Here’s What You Need to Know About the Supreme Court’s Big Abortion Ruling

by ErnestiGoshorn Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a Massachusetts law creating a 35-foot buffer zone around abortion clinics in which protest was forbidden is a violation of the First Amendment. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion, which held that the law was unconstitutional because it blocked peaceful protest on public streets.

The ruling will make it difficult for states to justify laws that establish buffer zones for abortion clinics. In cases where anti-abortion protesters obstruct access to clinics, the court says, states must pursue alternatives, such as court orders to limit protest. A problem with access to a clinic, for example, “could be addressed through a law requiring crowds blocking a clinic entrance to disperse for a limited period when ordered to do so by the police.” Only if those narrower measures fail and a state compiles a long record of problems caused by clinic protests, can the state generally bar clinic protest.

Three states, Massachusetts, Montana, and Colorado, have buffer zone laws on the books. The case, McCullen v. Coakley, was brought by a grandmotherly anti-abortion “sidewalk counselor” named Eleanor McCullen, who argued that the zone violated her First Amendment right to peacefully protest. Massachusetts countered that the law protected a competing right protected by the constitution: the right to obtain an abortion—which prior to the establishment of buffer zones, clinic protesters had endangered through threats, harassment, and physical hindrance.

The court agreed that buffer zones impeded the rights of McCullen and others who wish to “engage in personal, caring, consensual conver­sations with women about various alternatives.”

The fate of a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that permitted states to enact small “floating buffer zones” around people who are entering or leaving abortion clinics is not clear. The Court did not address that case, Hill v. Colorado, in this opinion. But the validity of floating buffer zones now seems in question, according to SCOTUSblog‘s Tom Goldstein. Floating buffer zones have been difficult to enforce, and abortion rights advocates have argued that they provide scant protection from violent protesters.

Here’s more background on the case:
In order for Massachusetts’s buffer zone law to survive a First Amendment challenge, lawyers for the state had to prove that the legislature had a compelling reason to limit speech, that the law wasn’t aimed at suppressing ideas, and that the law didn’t restrain speech more than necessary.

The Supreme Court agreed with Massachusetts that the state had a compelling interest and that the law didn’t target specific ideas. However, Roberts wrote, “The buffer zones burden substantially more speech than necessary to achieve the Commonwealth’s asserted interests.”

The Supreme Court’s decision partially hinged on how serious of a threat protesters posed to abortions rights.

In its argument to the court, Massachusetts noted that it has a history of violent protests at clinics. The state created buffer zones in 2000 in reaction to the 1996 murders of two abortion clinic workers. But the law was also a response to routine protests outside clinics in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, where activists threatened women and physically barred them from entering the clinic. Here is a vivid, but typical example from a clinic worker who testified before the Massachusetts Legislature in 1999 about witnessing a particular protest:

A woman in her mid-20s and her elderly grandfather…were trapped inside the cab for several minutes…Two escorts were able to make their way to the woman’s side as she ran crying into the clinic. Her grandfather, who walked with a cane, was unable to run…In the amount of time it took him to walk from the cab to the clinic entrance, he was shoved and almost fell down twice. He was also forced to endure various insults about his race and remarks about how his handicap was a punishment from God.

Other clinic staff testified that protesters blocked them from going to work, pressed a clinic escort up against a car, and pushed a clinic worker into a moving car.

The Supreme Court issued its guidelines for buffer zones in Hill v. Colorado in 2000, the same year Massachusetts passed its law. Following the court’s lead, Massachusetts created six-foot “floating buffer zones” around any person within 18 feet of an abortion clinic’s entrance or exit. Protesters were still allowed to stand next to a clinic’s doors, and they could approach within six feet of a person with that person’s consent.

The floating buffer zone law proved impossible to enforce. It was unclear to police what constituted an approach, and some protesters interpreted eye contact as consent to approach women and scream in their faces. In 2007, Captain William Evans of the Boston Police Department testified to the Legislature that his officers had probably arrested no more than five protesters in seven years (most for violating laws other than the buffer zone) despite the fact that protesters probably violated the law almost every weekâ&#128;&#139;end.

So that year, Massachusetts abandoned the floating buffer zones sanctioned by the Supreme Court, and established a more ambitious, hard buffer zone of 35 feet surrounding an abortion clinic’s entrance, exit, or driveway.

In oral arguments before the court in January, Mark Rienzi, the attorney for McCullen, dismissed incidents of violence and aggression at abortion clinics as the work of a few bad actors. He focused on McCullen, who plasters her refrigerator with baby photos she says she has received from women she talked out of having abortions.

This tactic worked. Roberts noted, “The record indicates that the problems are limited principally to the Boston clinic on Saturday mornings, and the police there appear perfectly capable of singling out lawbreakers. The petition­ers are not protestors; they seek not merely to express their opposition to abortion,” but to counsel women. “It is thus no answer to say that petitioners can still be seen and heard by women within the buffer zones. If all that the women can see and hear are vocifer­ous opponents of abortion, then the buffer zones have effectively sti­fled petitioners’ message.”

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3 Countries That Are Bailing on Climate Action

by CharoletteWilfo Posted on November 19, 2013

green4us

Japan isn’t the only country walking away from climate promises. When Japan dramatically slashed its plans last week for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, from 25 percent to just 3.8 percent compared to 2005 figures, the international reaction was swift and damning. Britain called it “deeply disappointing.” China’s climate negotiator, Su Wei, said, “I have no way of describing my dismay.” The Alliance of Small Island Nations, which represents islands most at risk of sea level rise, branded the move “a huge step backwards.” The decision was based on the fact that Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors—which had provided about 30 percent of the country’s electricity—are currently shuttered for safety checks after the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, despite the government trying to bring some of them back online. That nuclear energy is largely being replaced by fossil fuels. Japan’s announcement has cast a shadow on this week’s climate negotiations in Warsaw. Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics and a former lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, described the mood as “a downward spiral of ambition” which is “undermining confidence in the process and the ability to move forward.” Elliot Diringer, the Executive Vice President of the DC-based think tank Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, says NGOs and policymakers are feeling frustrated: “There was a great deal of sympathy for Japan in the aftermath of Fukushima,” he says. “And that’s now converted to disappointment.” But Japan isn’t the only industrialized country at Warsaw walking away from previously stated climate goals and attracting criticism for throwing a spanner in the works, an issue also explored here in Grist. Australia and Canada are emerging as strong opponents of more aggressive climate action and are likely to come up short on their commitments to reduce their emissions. Australia guts carbon policy Sweeping to power on a carbon tax backlash in September this year, Australia’s new prime minister, Tony Abbott, has wasted no time in shifting the country’s policy course—and rhetoric—on climate action. The conservative government is dismantling the country’s market-based carbon pricing laws in the parliament as a matter of first priority, and replacing it with its own system, “Direct Action,” a $3 billion plan to fund projects that it says will help lower emissions. The problem is not many people believe it will work. Analysis by Climate Action Tracker, which assesses reduction programs around the world, shows that rather than cutting greenhouse gases by the promised 5 percent, the policy will actually increase emissions by 2020 by 12 percent compared to 2000 levels. Independent modeling shows that even if the government stuck to its 5 percent pledge, it couldn’t be met without coughing up an additional $3.7 billion. Australia’s new policies are ”registering shock,” in Warsaw, says Hare, who also helps run Climate Action Tracker. “It’s being met with disbelief.” At the Warsaw talks, Australia is contributing “to a sense that there’s some unfortunate backsliding among some countries,” Direnger says. Abbott asserted last week that the goal will be met, but he added that no further money would be spent on the program if it wasn’t: “We will achieve it with the Direct Action policy as we’ve announced it and that policy: it’s costed, it’s funded and it’s capped,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Australian Conservation Foundation accused the government of abandoning its promise to scale its original pledge up to 25 percent if there’s stronger global climate action, calling Abbott a “deal wrecker.” The opposition Labor party said the government was allowing ”big polluters open slather in the future.” There are plans to kill three key organs of the previous government’s climate policy entirely: the independent Climate Commission, the Climate Change Authority, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.A flurry of other developments Downunder have helped to cement the new government’s stance at home and abroad: The budget for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency will be slashed by $435 million over the next three years For the first time since the 1997 Kyoto agreement, Australia declined to send its environment minister, Greg Hunt, to this week’s international climate talks talks, saying the business of repealing the carbon legislation in the first two weeks of parliament was too important. Canada unlikely to meet its own targets Australia is among the developed world’s worst polluters in terms of of CO2 per capita. But Canada is not far behind its Commonwealth compatriot. Lately, they seem to be enjoying each other’s company. This week, both conservative governments opposed a push at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka, to establish a green capital fund for small island states and poor African countries to address climate change. Canada recently praised Australia’s decision to repeal its carbon tax: “The Australian prime minister’s decision will be noticed around the world and sends an important message.” Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper. James Park/Xinhua/ZUMA When Canada signed the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, the country committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 (bringing it in line with US goals). But last month, the Harper government admitted it’s going to blow past that target by a wide margin. Environment Canada, the federal ministry that looks after climate policy, issued a report that said that without new government action, the country’s emissions will be 20 percent (or 122 megatons) higher than the country committed to at Copenhagen. This amount is barely below 2005 figures. It’s this trajectory that, in part, led the Climate Action Network Europe and Germanwatch to list Canada as the worst performing country among all industrialized nations in their annual performance index—unchanged from last year’s ranking: “Canada still shows no intention of moving forward with climate policy and therefore remains the worst performer,” the report states. (In December 2011, Canada was the first country to formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol). Reading the tea leaves doesn’t inspire much optimism: All of this is happening against the background of expanding tar sands development. The report from Environment Canada predicts that without a change in policy, CO2-equivalent emissions from oil sands are projected to increase by nearly 200 percent by 2020 over 2005 levels. And on tar sands, the Harper government shows no sign shifting policy direction. The combined effect has an “ultimately corrosive effect on the ability to secure a strong international agreement if the major players aren’t playing,” Hare says.

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3 Countries That Are Bailing on Climate Action

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Australia’s climate-denying prime minister is convinced he’s the authority on climate change

by VedaGLWCow Posted on October 28, 2013

Australia’s climate-denying prime minister is convinced he’s the authority on climate change

By

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Global warming is bringing droughts, heat waves, floods, and fires to Australia. The good news for the land down under, however, is that its new prime minister, Tony Abbott, is the self-declared expert on all things climate related. And he says everything is just fine.

The Australian state of New South Wales has been enduring some of its worst bushfires in recent history, fueled by unseasonably hot and dry spring conditions. Asked by CNN about the fires and global warming, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, explained that there is “absolutely” a link between climate change and wildfires in general: “the science is telling us that there are increasing heat waves in Asia, Europe, and Australia; that these will continue; that they will continue in their intensity and in their frequency.”

Abbott dismissed those comments by saying that Figueres was “talking out of her hat.” (Which might well be true, if her hat was fashioned from her résumé cataloging her many years of international climate policy work.)

When that failed to shut up the journalists who kept connecting the dots between bushfires and climate change, Abbott piled on the rhetoric, describing their coverage as “complete hogwash.”

Andrea Schaffer

Don’t worry about those little bushfires, like this one that spewed smoke over Sydney on Oct. 17.

Meanwhile, Abbott is urging Australia’s senate to pass legislation that would dump the former government’s carbon tax, saying he will replace the tax with something he has called “direct action,” in which the government would pay companies to reduce their carbon footprints. Fairfax Media asked 35 prominent university and business economists whether they thought a price on carbon or “direct action” would be more effective in reducing carbon emissions:

Thirty — or 86 per cent — favoured the existing carbon price scheme. Three rejected both schemes.

Internationally renowned Australian economist Justin Wolfers, of the Washington-based Brookings Institution and the University of Michigan, said he was surprised that any economists would opt for direct action, under which the government will pay for emissions cuts by businesses and farmers from a budget worth $2.88 billion over four years.

Professor Wolfers said direct action would involve more economic disruption but have a lesser environmental pay-off than an emissions trading scheme, under which big emitters must pay for their pollution.

BT Financial’s Dr Chris Caton said any economist who did not opt for emissions trading “should hand his degree back”.

In the face of this blowback, do you suppose Abbott is easing up on his misplaced self-assuredness? Surely not. Instead, he’s sticking to his favored trash-talking approach to politics. He told The Washington Post that the recently ousted Labor Party government — which introduced the carbon tax and other climate change–fighting initiatives that he’s now working to destroy — was “wacko,” “incompetent,” and “embarrassing.”


Source
Tony Abbott says UN climate head is ‘talking through her hat’ about fires, The Guardian
‘Complete hogwash’? When Bolt grilled Abbott, it sure was, Crikey
Tony Abbott’s new direct action sceptics, Canberra Times

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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Australian scientists rescue wildlife by hand from changing climates

by Jacob Thomas Posted on October 17, 2013

Australian scientists rescue wildlife by hand from changing climates

By

Australian Alps collection – Parks Australia

Australian scientists may lend a hand to mountain pygmy possums, which are threatened by climate change.

Australia is among the countries that are being hit the hardest by global warming — and that’s taking a toll on wildlife. So Australian scientists are preparing to evacuate animals from their natural habitats in an effort to stave off extinctions.

Under a new decision-making framework developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, species such as the endangered mountain pygmy possum could be trapped and released into more hospitable environments to help assure their survival.

It’s a controversial idea in a country ravaged by toads and other invasive species that were transplanted from their natural environments in ill-advised efforts to help control pests.

“There’s lots of debate in science whether it is a good idea at all,” framework coauthor Tracy Rout of the University of Queensland told The Guardian:

The key values fed into the formula are the status of the animals to be moved, the prospects of the animals at a new site and their impact on existing species in the new area.

“We’ve ended up with an equation that basically looks at the benefits versus the cost, ecologically speaking,” said Rout. “This should be very helpful in making the judgment whether to move a species, but there also needs to be value judgments taken by the decision-maker.”

Rout said that such relocation efforts would be a measure used only as a “last resort,” but she points out that such an effort is already underway. Scientists are working to rescue western swamp tortoises, which are Australia’s most endangered reptiles, from swamps that are drying out in Perth’s suburbs.


Source
Australian scientists plan to relocate wildlife threatened by climate change, The Guardian

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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Australian scientists rescue wildlife by hand from changing climates

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Coal keeps on selling, lawsuits and bad economics be damned

by Myrna Posted on January 2, 2013

Coal keeps on selling, lawsuits and bad economics be damned

By Philip Bump

Shutterstock

Vile scourge/cheap energy producer.

When I started writing this post, the ticker on the homepage of Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world, indicated that it has sold 970,470 tons of coal so far in 2013. Can’t find the ticker? It’s down there next to the “Environmental Responsibility” box. Yes, really.

An activist group has filed a lawsuit against Emerald Coal Resources, citing extensive pollution in southwestern Pennsylvania. From the Associated Press:

The Center for Coalfield Justice, based in Washington, Pa., filed the federal lawsuit Friday in Pittsburgh against Emerald Coal Resources LP, which operates the Emerald Mine in Waynesburg, Greene County. The citizens’ group is being backed by the Earthrise Law Center in Norwell, Mass.

The lawsuit contends Emerald Coal has violated pollution levels for iron, manganese, aluminum and other pollutants more than 120 times in the past 12 months and more than 400 times in the past five years. The group is basing those claims on violations the company has been self-reporting to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection under Emerald’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Permit as part of the federal Clean Water Act.

The parent company for Emerald is Alpha Natural Resources, which recently announced plans to shut a number of mines.

972,199 tons … 972,283 tons …

In Virginia, meanwhile, a report outlines how the state’s investment in coal energy is not paying off.

From WAMU radio:

Environmentalists have long criticized Virginia coal companies for their impact on air quality, but a new report suggests there are economic reasons to stop mining.

In the report, Appalachian Voices, a nonprofit environmental organization, found Virginia gives coal companies more in tax breaks than the state receives from them in taxes.

Virginia pays a net amount of about $22 million to the coal industry every year, according to Appalachian Voices Director Tom Cormons. The figure takes into account all taxes the industry pays to the state, he said.

The full report [PDF] articulates how the state of Virginia helps keep the state’s remaining mines open.

Coal’s importance for Virginia is not likely to grow in the future based on the declining competitiveness of Virginia coal resulting from the depletion of the lowest-cost coal reserves. Additionally, new regulations and technology requirements related to air emissions and tighter restrictions on surface mining are also likely to impact Virginia coal production, although to what extent is unknown. Should this occur, coal’s contribution to the Commonwealth’s budget and state and local economies will likely diminish.

Strategies

Virginia’s increasingly poor investment in coal.

Peabody Energy sold 8,000 tons of coal in the time it took me to articulate today’s reasons why we shouldn’t be extracting or subsidizing coal at all. Take a look at Peabody’s ticker right now and share the current count in comments below. Then weep. 

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Climate negotiators are betting on improbably deep emissions cuts

by Myrna Posted on November 30, 2012

Climate negotiators are betting on improbably deep emissions cuts

By Philip Bump

It’s the strategy of every bad gambler: If you just keep betting more than you lost, you’ll eventually come out ahead. Lose $10, bet $20. Lose that, bet $30. In a rigged game, though, a game where the odds are tilted however slightly against you, eventually you’ll go broke, making one or two huge bets that don’t pay off.

Which is the situation the U.N. finds itself in during its current climate negotiations in Qatar. When it comes to the carbon dioxide levels we need to maintain in order to avoid catastrophic temperature rises of 2 degrees Celsius, we’re deep in debt, meaning that we’d need steeper and steeper bets in order to win.

From Reuters:

“The possibility of keeping warming to below 2 degrees has almost vanished,” Pep Canadell, head of the Global Carbon Project at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization, told Reuters. …

Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, have risen 50 percent since 1990 and the pace of growth has picked up since 2000, Canadell said. In the past decade, emissions have grown about 3 percent a year despite an economic slowdown, up from 1 percent during the 1990s.

Based on current emissions growth and rapid industrial expansion in developing nations, emissions are expected to keep growing by about 3 percent a year over the next decade.

For the talks to have any chance of success in the long run, emissions must quickly stop rising and then begin to fall. Temperatures have already risen by 0.8 C (1.4 F) since pre-industrial times.

If we can just slash emissions by 3 percent, by 5 percent, by whatever percent next year, we can avoid disaster. Avoid coming up broke.

The Washington Post‘s Brad Plumer makes the same point, using the graph below.

Climate Action Tracker

Click to embiggen.

The graph is from a report by Climate Action Tracker [PDF] that outlines the various mechanisms and strategies under which we could stay below the 2 degree Celsius mark. In other words: the bigger bets we need to make. Ignore the boxes in that graph. Focus on the lines. Steeper and steeper lines mean bigger and bigger bets.

My analogy breaks down in one way. If you’re sitting at a roulette table, trying to break even, to save your shirt, you actually make the bet. In the case of taking action to slow climate change, the world isn’t even in the game.

Source

Is there still time to avoid 2°C of global warming? Yes, but barely, Washington Post
As nations haggle, global carbon cut targets get impossibly deep, Reuters

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Climate negotiators are betting on improbably deep emissions cuts

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