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Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

by Kandace86G Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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At exactly 10 a.m. on Monday, hundreds of school cafeteria professionals ran hooting and clapping down an escalator into an exhibition hall that looked like a cross between a mall food court and the set of Barney. Pharrell blared over loudspeakers. The Pillsbury Doughboy was on hand for photo ops, as was Chester the Cheetah (the Cheetos mascot) and a dancing corn dog on a stick. Attendees queued up to be contestants in a quiz show called “Do You Eat Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” and flocked toward trays groaning with every kind of kid food one could imagine: tater tots, PB&Js with crusts pre-removed, toaster waffles with built-in syrup, and endless variations on the theme of breaded poultry: chicken tenders, chicken bites, chicken rings, chicken patties, and of course chicken nuggets.

I was at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the professional group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food workers, and the biggest draw of the event—the exhibition hall—had just opened for business. More than 400 vendors vied for the attention of the conference’s 6,500 attendees, who had descended on the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center with one main goal: to find new foods to serve at their schools.

Many of the vendors were household names: Sara Lee, Kraft, Perdue, Uno, and Pizza Hut, to name a few. Among the corporate sponsors who collectively put up about $200,000 to help stage the affair were Domino’s Pizza, PepsiCo, Tyson, General Mills, and AdvancePierre Foods, which bills itself as “the No. 1 provider of fully-cooked protein and assembled sandwiches to school systems across the country.”

The Pizza Hut booth. Kiera Butler

To be sure, you won’t find most of the items on exhibit in supermarkets or restaurants. That’s because they are specially made to conform to the new federal school nutrition standards, some of which took effect July 1. There are new fruit and vegetable requirements; limits on calories, sodium, and saturated fats; and a mandate that more than half of the grains in products be whole grains. The rules—which I’ll cover in more detail in a subsequent post—are contentious, and the SNA opposes some of them. Politico‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reported that after First Lady Michelle Obama spoke out in favor of the rules, organizers told the White House that its senior advisor for nutrition policy, Sam Kass, would not be allowed to speak at the conference.

Politics aside, the vendors were armed with newly formulated products designed to conform to the rules. At the Kraft booth, a rep gushed about the virtues of the company’s new flavored cream cheeses, available in milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and caramel, “with half the calories of Nutella.” She told me they were designed as dips for fruits with the new produce rule in mind. “Nowadays, it’s the only way to get kids to eat anything that’s good for them,” she said.

The Smuckers “Uncrustables” mascot and his disaffected handler.

Indeed, the exhibitors’ guiding principle seemed to be something like: “Whatever you do, don’t tell them it’s healthy.” I watched as a Sara Lee rep promised a cafeteria director from Louisiana that her students wouldn’t be able to detect the whole-grain flour in her company’s chocolate muffin. The PepsiCo booth stocked a flier (below) informing attendees that newly formulated Cheetos fit with the guidelines. When I sampled a vitamin-fortified, low-cal Slush Puppy, the rep asked me, “Doesn’t that taste just as good as a regular slushy?” (It didn’t.) A food service company rep promised me that his funnel cake was “plenty sweet,” even though it fit within the calorie limits. (It was.)

I picked up this flier from the PepsiCo booth.

While the exhibitors were eager to show off their products’ nutritional stats, few offered actual ingredients lists. When I asked the rep at the Uno pizza booth why ingredients weren’t included on his nutrition information sheet, he told me the list wouldn’t fit on the page.

“Don’t the school nutritionists ask you what’s in this?” I asked. Nope, he said. Most of them just wanted to know whether the product met the legal guidelines. He offered to email me the list later. When he did, I learned that Uno’s Whole Grain Low Sodium Sweet Potato Crust Pepperoni Pizza contained nearly 50 ingredients, including sodium nitrite, which has been linked to cancer. I also persuaded the Domino’s rep to email me a list of ingredients in his company’s specially formulated school pizza, SmartSlice. It was also nearly 50 items long, and included silicone dioxide, otherwise known as sand.

After wandering through most of the 180,000 square feet of exhibits, I came across an earnest gray-haired woman in the back of the cavernous room selling frozen “pulses”—mostly lentils and chickpeas—to stir into soups and sauces. I was the only one at her booth. Had she noticed that everyone seemed drawn to the big-name foods up front? She responded that she hoped attendees would consider fortifying their name-brand meals with some of her lentils. “If you add a pulse product to a potato salad, it steps up the nutrition,” she offered hopefully.

But the attendees would have to find her first, and that would be a tall order: Corporations such as PepsiCo and General Mills had rented out multiple exhibit spaces ($2,400 to $2,600 a pop) in the high-traffic front and central aisles of the exhibit floor. Some big booths even had café-style seating areas where attendees chatted as they gobbled up samples. “You have to go in the far corners to find the more interesting stuff,” says Steve Marinelli, who runs the food program for a rural Vermont school district and told me he was having trouble locating the wholesome foods he wanted. “Someone was selling this really cool hummus, but you really had to look hard to find it.”

The lentil lady didn’t stand a chance.

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Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

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Don’t Call Them "Climate Deniers." Call them "Climate Optimists."

by ThorsteTalarico Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Las Vegas is parched. A 14-year drought has left Lake Mead, the local water source, dangerously low. It has dropped 100 feet in the past decade. If it drops 12 more feet, federal water rationing rules will kick in. Some climate scientists predict that will happen in the next year. And most believe the situation will only worsen over time.

The view from inside Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, however, is considerably rosier. That’s where scientists, activists, and bloggers have assembled this week for the Heartland Institute’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change, which I’ve been following via live stream. It’s the world’s largest gathering of “climate skeptics”—people who believe, for one reason or another, that the climate change crisis is overblown.

It’s tempting to find irony in the spectacle of hundreds of climate change deniers staging their convention amid a drought of historic proportions. But, as the conference organizers are quick to tell you, they aren’t actually climate change deniers. The majority of this year’s speakers readily acknowledge that the climate is changing. Some­ will even concede that human emissions are playing a role. They just think the solutions are likely to be far worse than the problem.

“I don’t think anybody in this room denies climate change,” the Heartland Institute’s James M. Taylor said in his opening remarks Monday. “We recognize it, but we’re looking more at the causes, and more importantly, the consequences.” Those consequences, Taylor and his colleagues are convinced, are unlikely to be catastrophic—and they might even turn out to be beneficial.

Don’t call them climate deniers. Call them climate optimists.

They aren’t an entirely new phenomenon. Fossil-fuel advocates have been touting the advantages of climate change since at least 1992, when the Western Fuels Association put out a pro­–global warming video called “The Greening of Planet Earth.” (It was a big hit with key figures in the George W. Bush administration.) Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt, traces this line of thinking even further back, to a 1983 report in which physicist Bill Nierenberg argued that humans would have no trouble adapting to a warmer world.

As global warming became more politically polarized, however, coal lobbyists and their shills largely discarded the “global warming is good” approach in favor of questioning the science behind climate change models. These days the liberal stereotype of the climate change denier sounds more like James Inhofe, the Republican senator from Oklahoma who dismisses “the global warming thing” as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” (He still appears to believe that.)

There are still a good number of Inhofe types at the Heartland Institute’s conferences. But the pendulum of conservative sentiment may be swinging away from such conspiracy theories. Over the past few years, a concerted campaign by climate scientists and environmentalists, backed by mountains of evidence, has largely succeeded in branding climate change denial as “anti-science” and pushing it to the margins of public discourse. Leading news outlets no longer feel compelled to “balance” every climate change story with quotes from cranks who don’t believe in it. Last month, the president of the United States mocked climate deniers as a “radical fringe” that might as well believe the moon is “made of cheese.”

The backlash to the anti-science movement has left Republican leaders unsure of their ground. As Jonathan Chait pointed out in New York magazine, their default response to climate change questions has become, “I’m not a scientist.”

It’s a clever stalling tactic, allowing the speaker to convey respect for science without accepting the scientific consensus. But it’s also a cop-out, and it seems unlikely either to appease the right-wing base or to persuade the majority of Americans who have no trouble believing that the climate is changing despite not being scientists themselves. At last count, 57 percent told Gallup they believe human activities are to blame for rising global temperatures. That’s up from a low of 50 percent in 2010.

Eventually, then, top Republicans are going to need a stronger answer. And they might find it in the pro-science, anti-alarmist rhetoric exemplified by the climate optimists. Those include Richard Lindzen, the ex-MIT meteorology professor who spoke at the institute’s 2009 conference and is now a fellow at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

In a 2012 New York Times profile, Lindzen affirmed that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and called those who dispute the point “nutty.” But he predicts that negative feedback loops in the atmosphere will counteract its warming effects. The climate, he insists, is less sensitive to human emissions than environmentalists fear.

Fellow climate scientists have found serious flaws in his work. Yet it retains currency at events such as the Heartland conference, where skeptics’ findings tend not to be subjected to much skepticism themselves. (While several of the speakers are in fact scientists, few are climate scientists, and their diverse academic backgrounds make it difficult for them to engage directly with one another’s research methods.)

And the idea that the Earth’s climate is too powerful a system for us puny humans to upset holds a certain folksy—not to mention religious—appeal. Still, the Heartland crowd is careful to frame its arguments in terms of science and skepticism rather than dogma.

The climate-optimist cause has been aided immeasurably by a recent slowdown in the rise of the Earth’s average surface temperatures. There are several potential explanations for the apparent “pause,” and most climate scientists anticipate that it will be short-lived. But it has been a godsend for those looking for holes in the prevailing models of catastrophic future warming.

“Skeptics believe what they see,” said Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast. “They look at the data and see no warming for 17 years, no increase in storms, no increase in the rate of sea-level rise, no new extinctions attributable to climate change—in short, no climate crisis.”

Meanwhile, the optimists point out, more carbon in the atmosphere means greater plant productivity and new opportunities for agriculture. In fact, Heartland communications director Jim Lakely told me in a phone interview, “The net benefits of warming are going to far outweigh any negative effects.” Indeed, the institute recently published a study arguing just that.

The climate-optimist credo aligns neatly with public-opinion polls that show most Americans believe climate change is real and humans are causing it—they just don’t view it as a top priority compared with more tangible problems like health care costs. You can imagine how eager they are to be reassured that their complacency won’t be punished.

Again, not everyone at the Heartland conference is a climate optimist. Many are still focused on disputing the basic link between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. As I watched the conference, it became clear that some have little trouble flipping between the two viewpoints. “This is what they always do,” Oreskes told me in an email. “As the debate shifts, they shift.”

That makes it easy for liberals to dismiss self-professed climate skeptics as industry shills in scientists’ clothing, especially since many of them, like the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, do in fact receive funding from the fossil-fuel industry. For their part, the Heartland academics tend to view most mainstream climate scientists as conflicted by their reliance on government grants.

In fact, it’s not unreasonable to see the climate fight as part of a much broader ideological war in American society, says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. The debate over causes is often a proxy for a debate over solutions, which are likely to require global cooperation and government intervention in people’s lives. Leiserowitz’s research shows that climate deniers tend to be committed to values like individualism and small government while those most concerned about climate change are more likely to hold egalitarian and community-oriented political views.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the evidence on both sides is equal. There’s a reason the climate deniers are losing the scientific debate, and it isn’t because academia is better funded than the energy industry. All of which helps to explain how climate optimism might be a more appealing approach these days than climate denial. Models of how climate change will impact society and the economy are subject to far more uncertainty than the science that links greenhouse gas emissions to the 20th-century warming trend. The costs of mitigating those emissions are more readily grasped: higher energy bills, government spending on alternative energy projects, lost jobs at coal plants.

There are, however, a few pitfalls for conservatives who would embrace climate optimism as an alternative to climate change denial. Touting the recent slowdown in global average surface temperatures, for example, implies that such temperatures do in fact tell us a lot about the health of the climate. That will become an awkward stance in a hurry if the temperatures soon resume their climb.

More broadly, shifting the climate change debate from causes to outcomes will put the “skeptics” in the Panglossian position of continually downplaying the costs of extreme weather events—like, say, the Las Vegas drought—even as their constituents are suffering from them. In the Heartland conference’s opening keynote speech, meteorologist Joe Bastardi scoffed at the devastating wildfires that have swept across the Southwest far earlier than usual this season. “We had the wildfires in San Diego, right?” he said in a derisive tone. “I think it destroyed 80 houses, 90 houses. They had a wildfire back in October 2007 that took out 1,500 houses…When people tell me things are worse now, I say, ‘You can’t be looking at what has happened before.'”

It’s one thing to tell people global warming isn’t the source of their misery. It’s a lot harder to look them in the eye and tell them their problems aren’t that bad—especially if you’re relying on them to vote you into public office.

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Don’t Call Them "Climate Deniers." Call them "Climate Optimists."

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Silicon Valley’s Gender Problem, Explained in 2 Photos

by fuirpycf Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last year, CNET’s Dan Ackerman tweeted a photo of the restroom lines at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The message: Silicon Valley is mostly men.

Today was the WWDC 2014 keynote and Ackerman revisited the scene.

Behold: Some ladies! Not many though. In fact, basically none. Silicon Valley’s very real woman problem remains.

We will not be happy until these lines are equal in length.

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Silicon Valley’s Gender Problem, Explained in 2 Photos

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CPAC Celebrates Free-Market Entrepreneurship With CEO Whose Company Was Built On Federally Backed Loans

by AshleySherriff Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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The conservatives who organize the annual Conservative Political Action Convention are big on touting free-market solutions and sticking to their ideals of smaller government and lower taxes. They believe that if the government would just get out of the way, enterprising entrepreneurs and other businessmen would create wealth that would in turn trickle down to even the poorest of the poor. But when it comes to finding business leaders who embody that spirit, the conference organizers seem to have come up a little short this year.

Donald Trump, of course, is in the house. The Koch brothers have been there in spirit, with Koch Industries underwriting the conference’s “Radio Row.” But for a panel this afternoon called “And Entrepreneurship Shall Set You Free: How to Celebrate Free Market Capitalism in the Popular Culture,” CPAC organizers managed to scare up a think-tank fellow, a couple of unknown state legislators, and Gary Heavin, the former CEO of Curves, the fitness clubs for women.

Heavin is not exactly a great example of the virtues of free-market capitalism. He first started running a chain of gyms in his early 20s that ultimately failed. He filed bankruptcy and ended up so broke that he ended up going to jail for failing to pay child support. While incarcerated, he reportedly became a born-again Christian, and went on to later found Curves. The company got off to a pretty good start by catering to overweight women in small towns with strip-mall gym outlets. The chain took off and expanded so rapidly that by 2005, it had about 8,000 outlets worldwide.

But within just a few years, the chain tanked. It was plagued with bad publicity when news broke that Heavin had been donating large sums of money to an anti-abortion group, a move that troubled members of gyms that had been touted as a sort of girrl-power outfit. Some of the franchises cut their ties to the company because of the donations. By 2011, half of its franchises had closed. (Heavin, meanwhile, did a stint on ABC’s “Secret Millionaire” that year.)

In stark contradiction with the self-reliant, anti-government principles CPACers tout, much of the Curves’ early success was built using federally-guaranteed loans from the US Small Business Administration, which were given to franchise buyers. By 2010, Curves franchisees were bailing on those federal loans in droves, with 16 percent of the loans going into default, the fourth-highest rate of any franchise in the country.

Franchisees complained that the company had abandoned them and was bilking them in ways that hurt their outlets, such as forging partnerships with General Mills to sell lucrative Curves snack bars that franchisees had to purchase at inflated rates. Heavin became a billionaire, but his company faced lawsuits from hundreds of franchisees who alleged that the company deceived them about the potential profits from a Curves franchise and who were ruined financially after buying into the concept. (When a Curves franchise failed, the parent company often sued the owner to recoup lost royalties.) Franchisees alleged that the company had engaged in deceptive business practices, fraud, and that it had violated a host of state consumer protection laws in marketing its outlets. The cases eventually settled quietly for undisclosed sums, and Heavin was personally dismissed as a defendant from one of the larger ones, but the complaints and bad will didn’t help the company’s prospects.

Heavin was sued for $20 million by former business associates who claimed that they had sacrificed deeply to help him launch Curves—mortgaging their houses, going into debt, even sleeping in their cars—only to have Heavin stiff them on profits they were owed once the company took off. Heavin called the suit frivolous and it eventually settled for an undisclosed amount, but it didn’t paint a pretty picture of his business practices. In 2012, with the company floundering, Heavin sold it for an undisclosed sum and moved on to, well, doing panels at CPAC apparently.

For a movement so devoted to promoting the free market, you’d think CPAC organizers could do better.

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CPAC Celebrates Free-Market Entrepreneurship With CEO Whose Company Was Built On Federally Backed Loans

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Ralph Reed Compares Barack Obama to George Wallace

by BernardoWinstea Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Top social-conservative strategist Ralph Reed compared President Barack Obama to segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace on Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

“Fifty years ago George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door and said that African-Americans couldn’t come in,” said Reed, the founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, in response to the Department of Justice’s attempt to block Louisiana’s school voucher program. “Today, the Obama administration stands in that same door and says those children can’t leave. It was wrong then and it was wrong now and we say to President Obama, ‘Let those children go.'”

Remarkably, Reed wasn’t the first speaker at CPAC to compare the Obama administration’s policies to the Jim Crow South.

On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal made the same comparison in his address to the conference. “We’ve got Eric Holder and the Department of Justice trying to stand in the schoolhouse door,” he said.

But as I reported in a new profile of Jindal, Louisiana isn’t exactly a pillar of inclusiveness. Some schools that receive state funding under the voucher program promise to immediately expel any student who is found to be a homosexual—or to be promoting homosexuality in any form.

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Ralph Reed Compares Barack Obama to George Wallace

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Green Jobs Event Challenges Companies to ‘Repair America’

by Justina74L Posted on February 2, 2014

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who spoke at the 2013 Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference, said, “The formula of good jobs, green jobs not only protects the environment, it grows the economy.” Photo: Keith Mellnick/Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference

With our constant demand for instantaneous delivery of digital communications through smartphones, tablets, high-tech watches, Google Glass and, coming soon, The Internet of Things,  it’s not surprising that the United States is second only to China in the world’s electricity consumption.

Global energy use will increase by 35 percent in the next 25 years, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Clean Energy program. Unmitigated, worldwide energy use contributes to roughly 70 percent of global carbon emissions.

In light of these concerns, a growing number of organizations and industries have taken interest in the “clean economy”: a sector of the economy that produces goods and services with the goal of bettering the environment.

The annual Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference, now in its seventh year, has become a leading forum for growing a clean economy with jobs that preserve America’s economic and environmental integrity. The 2014 conference will take place Feb. 10 and 11 in Washington, D.C. This year’s conference theme is “Repair America,” with a focus on fixing what conference director Samantha Sewell calls “the backbone of our country” — the infrastructure and systems we rely on for energy, water, emergency assistance, public education and more.

Repairing these systems can ensure the health and safety of workplaces and reduce our dependence on nonrenewable energy, in turn creating jobs and helping America remain competitive in the global economy.

Panel discussions on the conference schedule include America’s infrastructure deficit, how trade agreements can undermine our communities and our environment, and understanding the National Infrastructure Development Bank Act of 2013. Featured keynote speakers include Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation, and Richard L. Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).

Ninety-minute workshops will cover topics such as building green schools, sustainability and the bottom line, making a living in a sustainable economy, advanced fossil fuels and their role in a lower-carbon future, and much more.

Perhaps most importantly, the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference offers the chance to rub elbows with like-minded movers and shakers.

“Every year, I come away from the conference having met people that inspired me with the work they are doing in their home states and cities to build a better future for all of us,” wrote Sewell in a recent post for the Talking Union blog. “The networking reception — and the many other breaks, workshops and events — [offers] opportunities to meet new people and become inspired, or just catch up with old friends.”

earth911

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Green Jobs Event Challenges Companies to ‘Repair America’

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ALEC Boots Mother Jones From Its Annual Conference

by KianHeinrich Posted on December 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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Starting Wednesday, hundreds of state lawmakers descended on downtown Washington, DC, for a big three-day confab hosted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative advocacy group that that brings together lawmakers and representatives of major corporations to draft model legislation on issues such as taxes, energy, workers’ rights, education, and agriculture. These bills are then introduced in state legislatures around the country—in some cases, lawmakers pass ALEC-inspired bills without changing a word.

There were dozens of press credentials laid out on ALEC conference’s check-in table when I arrived Thursday morning. Mother Jones‘ was not among them. ALEC’s board of directors had refused my request for credentials, according to spokesman Bill Meierling.

More MoJo reporting on the American Legislative Exchange Council.


ALEC’s Campaign Against Renewable Energy


ALEC Boots Mother Jones From Its Annual Conference


What Kind of Crazy Anti-Environment Bills Is ALEC Pushing Now?


Study: ALEC Is Bad for the Economy


Forced to Work Sick? That’s Fine With ALEC


ALEC in 1985: S&M Accidents Cause 10 Percent of San Francisco’s Homicides

When asked why I’d been turned away, Meierling pointed to our previous coverage of ALEC and said it’s clear that Mother Jones “fundamentally hates” ALEC. We’ve covered ALEC for more than a decade—a 2002 exposé titled “Ghostwriting the Law,” coverage of the group’s proposals regarding voting rights and workers’ rights, and more recently the departures of big-name corporate members.

At the same time he was explaining why I couldn’t attend, Meierling stressed to me that ALEC is “moving toward transparency.” To his credit, he acknowledged the irony.

If ALEC had given me a press credential, the only events I would’ve been allowed to cover were keynote speeches by Republican luminaries Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, and Grover Norquist. But the real action at ALEC conferences, the meat-and-potatoes work, happens at the meetings of the group’s many task forces—the environment and energy task force led by American Electric Power, the tax and fiscal policy task force led by tobacco giant Altria, and the international relations task force run by tobacco company Philip Morris. Meierling says that even credentialed reporters can’t cover those meetings. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank learned this firsthand on Wednesday, when DC police and ALEC staff stopped him from attending the group’s private task force meetings.

It’s been a tough week for ALEC. On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that the group faced a “funding crisis” after 40 of its corporate members and hundreds of state lawmakers ditched ALEC in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s killing last year. Those members fled after it was revealed that ALEC’s model legislation included the same Stand Your Ground law invoked by George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed Martin. ALEC has since eliminated its gun-related advocacy and, with a narrower fiscal focus, is trying to woo its erstwhile members to back into the fold.

Given the organization’s recent struggles, I can understand why ALEC would be feeling defensive. Meierling, the ALEC spokesman, was polite throughout our conversation. We traded business cards before I left and promised to get a drink to talk more about Mother Jones. Fingers crossed for next year.

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ALEC Boots Mother Jones From Its Annual Conference

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U.N. climate talks will be all about the Benjamins

by Mstyslava7ju Posted on November 8, 2013

U.N. climate talks will be all about the Benjamins

By

PaulPaladin

To slow climate change and protect the world’s vulnerable poor from the effects of global warming, the West is going to have to give developing nations a hand. And that hand will need to come in the form of cold, hard cash.

Unfortunately, not a lot of that is on offer right now. That fact will take center stage during international climate talks in Poland over the next two weeks.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change’s next Conference of the Parties, commonly known as a COP, begins Monday in Warsaw. Officials representing nearly 200 countries will bicker and beg as they try to move forward in the quest for a new agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol. That deal was struck way back in 1997. The U.S. never ratified it, Canada ultimately walked away from it, and the agreement expired last year. It’s been sticky-taped together through amendments to extend its life until a new agreement can be reached.

During COP talks in Durban, South Africa, in 2011, delegates struck a deal to strike a deal: They agreed to finalize an agreement by 2015 to replace the Kyoto Protocol. The new agreement would cap warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.7 Fahrenheit) and begin to take force in 2020 — and that’s under a best-case scenario. Which is also a horrible-case scenario, given that the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise every year.

The issue of equity is always one of the biggest sticking points in U.N. climate talks. How much should rich countries sacrifice and how much should developing countries sacrifice as they try to curb emissions together? It was during the talks in Durban that a solution to this conundrum was concocted: Rich countries would provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries reduce emissions and adapt to the warming world.

Guess how that’s going.

So far, the Green Climate Fund is nearly as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard: It has received $7.5 million to spread around to the entire developing world. Not only that, but some developed countries are starting to hem and haw about whether they should even contribute to the fund. At a conference held ahead of the Warsaw talks, a British representative suggested that businesses could be more involved and that the agreement could be more of a private-public-partnership type thing, as Responding to Climate Change reports: 

“I believe we need a new business partnership to tackle climate change, that does so with its eyes wide open, mindful of the costs and careful to catch the opportunities,” [said Greg Barker, minister of state for energy and climate change in the U.K.].

“We can only decarbonise the economy if business comes with us, as an active participant, and at least cost for consumers.”

But others expressed doubt that this system was an adequate response to the urgency of climate change, and urged the UN to push for a more top-down approach in order to mobilise the level of action needed.

The Green Climate Fund is a really big deal for the developing world. If it slumps, so too could hopes of worldwide cooperation on climate change.

($100 billion a year sounds like a lot of money, but compare that with the $500 billion a year that the world’s richest countries are spending on fossil fuel subsidies every year.)

India is a developing country that recently overtook Russia to become the world’s fourth-largest climate polluter — after China, the U.S., and the European Union. Just ask that country how cooperative it will be in curbing emissions from its fast-growing economy if the climate fund remains unfunded. Of course, you can’t ask an entire nation a question — let alone one that is home to 1.2 billion people speaking a cacophony of languages. But The Hindu newspaper found the right Indian to ask. Here’s what the country’s environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, hopes to see at the Warsaw meetings:

The most important milestone would be climate finance and capitalisation of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which has not happened at all. Developed countries that made a commitment earlier have now started talking of alternative sources of funding. Whereas in our view these are commitments of the parties to the COP. While others and alternate sources need not be excluded, I think the fundamental commitment is the provision of finance.

In other words, “show us the money.” It’s a call that many developing countries are making as we head into next week’s talks.

Thomson Reuters Foundation reports on another financial issue that will be front and center at the conference:

Developing countries and climate experts are calling for U.N. climate talks, which begin in Warsaw on Monday, to set up an international mechanism to deal with losses and damage linked to climate change, which a new report says are already harming vulnerable people.

The question of whether to establish a new global body was controversial at last year’s negotiations in Doha, with richer nations fearing it could be used to make them pay compensation for the consequences of their planet-warming emissions to poorer countries suffering the worst impacts of more extreme weather and rising seas.

After fierce last-minute wrangling, it was agreed the upcoming 2013 climate conference in Poland would “establish … institutional arrangements, such as an international mechanism … to address loss and damage associated with the impacts of climate change in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change”.

Quamrul Chowdhury, a lead negotiator for the group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs), told Thomson Reuters Foundation creating a mechanism is of “paramount importance” at the Nov. 11-22 Warsaw talks.

The world’s poor countries couldn’t be more clear: Rich countries started this problem, they say, and rich countries can best afford to fix it. It’s time to cough up the money. The next two weeks should provide a hint as to whether that is ever likely to happen.


Source
Warsaw climate talks expected to deliver loss and damage mechanism, Thomson Reuters Foundation
‘India is not a nay-sayer on climate change’, The Hindu
UN climate chief underlines Green Climate Fund concerns, Responding to Climate Change

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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U.N. climate talks will be all about the Benjamins

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What does it mean to protect a wave?

by Myrna Posted on May 7, 2013

“Protecting a wave” can mean a lot of things. Continue at source –  What does it mean to protect a wave? ; ;Related ArticlesSurfers are canaries in the coal mine regarding dirty waterGlobal Wave Conference this weekend in Baja, MexicoScientist at Work Blog: Empty Nets on the Mekong ;

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What does it mean to protect a wave?

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How Thatcher Made the Conservative Case for Climate Action

by jp19gkx Posted on April 8, 2013

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In her later years, Margaret Thatcher tried to water down her climate legacy, but as prime minister, she rallied the world behind global action. Thatcher at the UN in 1990. United Nations The year: 1990. The venue: Palais des Nations, Geneva. The star: Margaret Thatcher, conservative icon in the final month of her prime ministership. The topic: global warming. Thatcher went to the Second World Climate Conference to heap praise on the then-infant Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and to sound, again, the alarm over global warming. Not only that, her speech laid out a simple conservative argument for taking environmental action: “It may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now,” she said, “than to wait and find we have to pay much more later.” Global warming was, she argued, “real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.” The Iron Lady’s speech makes for fascinating reading in the context of 2013′s climate acrimony, drenched as it is in party politics. In the speech, she questioned the very meaning of human progress: booming industrial advances since the Age of Enlightenment could no longer be sustained in the context of environmental damage. We must, she argued, redress the imbalance with nature wrought by development. “Remember our duty to Nature before it is too late,” she warned. “That duty is constant. It is never completed. It lives on as we breathe.” On climate change, Margaret Thatcher, who died on Monday aged 87, was characteristically steadfast, eloquent and divisive. “The right always forget this part of her legacy,” Lord Deben, a member of the House of Lords and Chairman of the UK’s independent Committee on Climate Change, told Climate Desk on Monday. Lord Deben served in the Thatcher government and said she was crucial in raising the profile of climate negotiations around the world, even when it was deeply unpopular amongst her colleagues. “She was determined to take this high profile position,” he said. “She believed it was her duty as a scientist.” (Thatcher studied science while at Oxford University). Barring a few members, “the rest of the cabinet were not convinced,” he said. Thatcher also played an instrumental role in bringing the topic to the US, said Lord Deben. “It was fair to say she got George Bush [Snr] to go to Rio,” he said of Thatcher’s high-profile entreaties to convince the then-US president to attend climate talks in 1992. “She saw it as her duty to blow the trumpet.” The Geneva appearance wasn’t her only speech about the need for strong international action. It was something of a theme across the latter years of her leadership. A year before, she shocked the UN general assembly in New York by issuing a challenge: “The evidence is there. The damage is being done. What do we, the International Community, do about it?” The news story in the New York Times ran with the headline: “Thatcher Urges Pact On Climate.” She called for the UN to ratify a treaty by… 1992. She also had a domestic plan. Thatcher told British parliament that her government would cut carbon emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2005. This was met by skepticism by the opposition at the time (female politicians of all eras might be familiar with one such quip from the opposition benches: “The Prime Minister may talk green—she may even dress green—but there are the same old blue policies underneath.”) Lord Deben painted a picture to Climate Desk of cabinet discord over one of Thatcher’s decisions to allow for funds to protect military operations from rising sea levels. “She didn’t convince her Chancellor,” he said. Thatcher even took denialists to task, telling a Royal Society dinner in March 1990 that the evidence is “undisputed.” I think that most of us accept this diagnosis yet hardly had I got back when I found that there are researchers who argue—and some were quoted in our newspapers last week—that temperature changes over the last hundred years have less to do with man-made greenhouse effect than with changes in solar activity, something over which we have no control at all. She thoroughly repudiated this, positing instead a sophisticated understanding of the greenhouse gas effect and the role of CO2 emissions. But then in 2003, Thatcher, perhaps seeing the conservative tide turning against her climate legacy, watered down the statements she made two decades earlier, calling climate action a “marvelous excuse for supra-national socialism,” and accusing Al Gore—who gained worldwide recognition for similar calls for global cooperation—of “apocalyptic hyperbole.” She wrote in her 2003 book Statecraft that “a new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-center governing classes.” She praised President George W. Bush for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, despite her earlier rallying cry for environmental diplomacy. Bob Ward of the Guardian points out that Thatcher’s latter day revisionism is peppered with information from free market think tanks from the US, “such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.” Even so, Thatcher is invoked time and time again as someone who used her position to speak passionately about the need for action from the conservative classes. Lord Deben said American politicians should imitate Thatcher’s classic conservative approach to climate change: “You hand on something better to your children than you received yourself. And she was committed to that.” He warned of the “pure populism” of the American brand of climate denial. “It’s a sort of hillbilly approach to the world,” he said. “I’m afraid is attractive to quite a large portion of the American population.”

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How Thatcher Made the Conservative Case for Climate Action

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