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"Everything Could Be Taken Away From Me": Watch This Woman Bravely Fight an Anti-Transgender Bill

by DarellPinto Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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As Florida lawmakers continue to consider a bill aiming to make it a criminal act for transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice, we’d like to direct your attention to Cindy Sullivan, who spoke out against the bill in incredibly brave and emotional testimony earlier this month.

“I see this bill as effecting not just my business but my partner’s business,” Sullivan said. “If I go to use the restroom, everybody in that restroom has the ability to sue me and my family, affect my child, affect my reputation. Everything could be taken away from me.”

“You could put me in jail for being me!”

As her tears well, Sullivan repeatedly looks behind her shoulder, as the bill’s sponsor, state representative Frank Artiles watches on.

House Bill 583 has already been approved by two subcommittees and is expected to be reviewed by the house judiciary committee later this week. In Kentucky and Texas, lawmakers are attempting to pass similar anti-transgender legislation. All three states have the support and financial backing of the Alliance Defending Freedom, an influential conservative group.

Sullivan, who began her testimony noting she too was a Republican, slammed the bill as “government intrusion at its worst.”

“I’m a throw-away piece of trash, in this country of freedom, and liberty, and respect.”

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"Everything Could Be Taken Away From Me": Watch This Woman Bravely Fight an Anti-Transgender Bill

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7 Normal Snacks With a Crazy Amount of Sugar

by RodrigoMota Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Call us greedy, self-centered, or overly idealistic, but no one should ever accuse Americans of being bitter: We devour more added sugar than people in any other country—30 teaspoons a day by some estimates. (Indians, on the other end of the spectrum, consume just one.)

The reasons go back to the 1960s, when supermarkets proliferated in US cities and readily available corn-syrupy sodas and juice drinks supplanted milk on the dinner table. By 1996, the daily calories we got from added sweeteners had increased by more than 35 percent.

On top of that, during the low-fat frenzy of the 1980s and ’90s, manufacturers replaced the flavorful natural oils in their products with sweeteners. “Now it’s challenging to find a food without added sugar,” says Dr. Andrew Bremer, a pediatric endocrinologist and program director in the diabetes, endocrinology, and metabolic diseases division at the National Institutes of Health. Indeed, today a full three-quarters of the packaged foods that we purchase—including everything from whole-wheat bread and breakfast cereals to salad dressings—contain extra sweeteners.

That’s a problem: Naturally occurring sugars (the kind in fruit, for example) come with fiber, which helps us regulate the absorption of food. Without fiber, sugar can overwhelm your system, eventually leading to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems. Given these risks, experts suggest dramatically cutting your intake of extra sweets. In March, the World Health Organization recommended that 5 percent of your daily energy come from added sugars, which for an adult of average weight comes out to roughly six teaspoons—about 25 grams.

The trouble is that it’s hard to tell how much added sugar you’re actually eating. You’ve probably learned to spot cane juice and corn syrup, but what about barley malt, dextrose, and rice syrup—and the 56 other names for added sweeteners?

What’s more, food companies aren’t required to distinguish on labels between added and naturally occurring sugars. The US Department of Agriculture used to list added sugars in an online nutrient database, but it removed this feature in 2012 after companies claimed that the exact proportion of added sugar was a trade secret.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration proposed changing nutrition labels and requiring companies to display both added and naturally occurring sugars. But industry giants like Hormel and General Mills are objecting—and even if a new label gets approved, it could still be years before packaging changes.

In the graphic above, we crunched the numbers on some everyday snacks and meals to discover just how easy it is to reach six teaspoons.

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7 Normal Snacks With a Crazy Amount of Sugar

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Obama Administration Reveals New Federal Rules on Fracking

by HeribertoMcConn Posted on March 20, 2015

Mother Jones

On Friday, the Obama administration put forth the first major federal standards regulating hydraulic fracturing—the oil and gas extraction technique commonly referred to as fracking. The regulations will, among other things, require companies working on public lands to reveal which chemicals they used in their drilling processes. But as the New York Times notes, the impact of the new rules will be limited since most fracking in the United States takes place on private land. From the Times story:

The regulations, which are to take effect in 90 days, will allow government workers to inspect and validate the safety and integrity of the cement barriers that line fracking wells. They will require companies to publicly disclose the chemicals used in the fracturing process within 30 days of completing fracking operations.

The rules will also set safety standards for how companies can store used fracking chemicals around well sites, and will require companies to submit detailed information on well geology to the Bureau of Land Management, a part of the Interior Department.

Environmentalists aren’t exactly thrilled with the new regulations; many were instead calling for the government to ban fracking on all public lands.

“This fracking rule is merely a continuation of Obama’s harmful all-of-the-above energy policy that emphasizes natural gas development over protection of public health and the environment,” said Friends of the Earth’s Kate DeAngelis in a press release. “This country needs real climate leadership from President Obama, not weak regulations that do nothing to stop the devastating impacts of climate disruption.”

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Obama Administration Reveals New Federal Rules on Fracking

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New Analysis: Giving Consumers Access to Renewable Fuel Yields Environmental Benefits

by Posted on March 20, 2015

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New Analysis: Giving Consumers Access to Renewable Fuel Yields Environmental Benefits

Posted 20 March 2015 in

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A new analysis produced by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s principal research economist Dr. Stefen Mueller found that giving consumers more access to cleaner fuel options like E15 would provide significant environmental benefits. E15 is a cleaner burning, high-octane, high-performance fuel that also costs about 5 cents less per gallon than regular gasoline.

In Kansas, giving consumers the choice to use E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 184,226 metric tons per year.
In North Carolina, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 617,870 metric tons per year.
In Ohio, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 711,179 metric tons per year.
In Michigan, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 661,051 metric tons per year.
In Wisconsin, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 351,272 metric tons per year.
In Iowa, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 220,821 metric tons per year.
In Illinois, offering E15 would reduce carbon pollution by 663,646 metric tons per year.

While regular gasoline contains about 10% ethanol as a way to deliver added octane and limit emissions, E15 fuel contains 15% renewable, American made ethanol — helping to create jobs across the country and lower our dependence on foreign oil.

Because it improves engine performance and burns with fewer emissions, E15 has been adopted throughout professional auto racing.

Under the commonsense, bipartisan Renewable Fuel Standard, clean burning E15 is expected to become more widely available to consumers alongside regular gasoline — giving consumers an additional choice and the opportunity to save money each time they fill up. Maintaining a strong Renewable Fuel Standard is a smart and effective way to substantially reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

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New Analysis: Giving Consumers Access to Renewable Fuel Yields Environmental Benefits

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Obama: It’s ‘Disturbing’ That a Climate Change Denier Chairs Senate Environmental Committee

by Myrna Posted on March 17, 2015

He’s referring to GOP Sen. James Inhofe, who used a snowball to disprove global warming. President Barack Obama told Vice News in an interview released on Monday that it was “disturbing” that the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works denied the existence of climate change. Obama was referring to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who threw a snowball on the Senate floor earlier this month to help make his case that climate change isn’t real. Even though Inhofe cited record low temperatures across the country as evidence that climate change was overplayed, the country has actually been experiencing a warmer than average winter. “That’s disturbing,” Obama said when Vice’s Shane Smith pointed out that the stunt would have been funny if it weren’t for Inhofe’s chairmanship. Read the rest at The Huffington Post. Master image: EdStock/iStock Continued here: Obama: It’s ‘Disturbing’ That a Climate Change Denier Chairs Senate Environmental Committee ; ; ;

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Obama: It’s ‘Disturbing’ That a Climate Change Denier Chairs Senate Environmental Committee

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What Happens When an Eclipse Hits the World’s Most Solar-Powered Country?

by KittyU90zfgqpe Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

On March 20, Europe will experience a total solar eclipse for a few hours in the morning. The last time an eclipse of this scale happened in Europe was in 1999. Back then, Germany got less than 1 percent of its power from solar energy. Today, Germany is the world’s most solar-dependent country, drawing nearly 7 percent of its electricity from the sun. So when the passing moon blots out the sun, will the country’s lights go out too?

Over the last couple months, that question has gotten plenty of attention in the German media. In September, Der Spiegel reported that some power companies were afraid the eclipse would leave the power grid “dangerously unstable.” In February, the business weekly Wirtschafts Woche warned that factories could suddenly lose power if electric supply doesn’t keep pace with demand.

Still, the view among most energy experts is that the eclipse will come and go with no noticeable effect for consumers. That’s because the country’s utility companies have spent months preparing for what is essentially an unprecedented test of the futuristic German grid, which is a model for clean energy advocates in the United States.

“Some of the hype ahead of the eclipse served to focus minds,” said Andreas Kramer, a senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam. Power companies “relish the upcoming opportunity to show how they can handle that challenge professionally.”

So what’s the big deal, exactly? The sun goes down every night, of course, and Germany is quite accustomed to cloudy days (it gets about as much sunshine as Alaska). The difference with a solar eclipse is the speed at which sunlight will disappear from, and then return to, the power system. All electric grids operate on the fundamental principle that supply and demand must always be in perfect equilibrium, second-by-second. That dynamic becomes complicated when so much of your power comes from a source like solar, over which grid operators have zero control. And it’s especially tricky when the fluctuation is so rapid and extreme.

Typically, Germans can rely on coal-fired power plants to pick up the slack at night, when power demand is relatively low anyway. But those can take many hours to fire up, and the eclipse is expected to make solar output dip nearly three times faster than normal, according to a recent analysis by clean energy market research firm Opower.

“It’s fair to say that this is the most dramatic intersection ever between a solar eclipse and solar energy,” Opower analyst Barry Fischer said.

Generally speaking, a byproduct of the clean energy revolution is an increasing need to replace the old grid model—which relied almost exclusively on a small number of big, inflexible power plants—with a highly flexible suite of interconnected options. So the eclipse is a chance to test just how responsive and adaptive Germany’s new grid can be. The outcome will be a valuable lesson for US grid managers who are looking to a much more solar-heavy future.

Take a look at the bite the eclipse will take out of Germany’s solar production, according to Opower:

Opower

The exact change will depend the weather that day; if it’s already cloudy, the drop will be less drastic. (The current forecast for Munich—which is in Bavaria, the province with the most solar—is partly cloudy on that day.)

The temporary hole left by the eclipse will be filled by natural gas plants, which fire up relatively quickly, and possibly by the release of extra hydropower. And utilities have the option of communicating directly with heavy power-users—big manufacturing facilities, for instance—and asking them to slow down production for an hour to ease the burden. It’s a bit like an orchestra conductor calling on an array of instruments in real time to keep up a steady flow of music.

Moreover, Kramer pointed out that the eclipse won’t happen all at once; it’s not like flipping a switch. As the moon’s shadow moves across the country, the impact on solar will be phased in and out geographically.

A final option is energy storage, where solar power from the previous day could be kept in giant batteries and released during the eclipse. Utility-scale storage is still in its infancy, and it won’t be on the table next week. But a spokesperson for Germany’s solar energy trade association said that solution could be up and running in time for the next major eclipse…in 2048.

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What Happens When an Eclipse Hits the World’s Most Solar-Powered Country?

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White Men Are Overdosing on Heroin at a Record Rate

by Juliane84J Posted on March 9, 2015

Mother Jones

A decades-long surge in heroin use has left behind a trail of overdose victims. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released this week found that the number of heroin overdoses quadrupled from 1,842 in 2000 to 8,257 in 2013—with a significant boost among people between the ages of 18 and 44, particularly white men.

Dr. Len Paulozzi, a medical epidemiologist who studies drug overdoses at the CDC’s Injury Center, says that both the growing availability of heroin nationwide and the shift among prescription drug users to heroin use may have contributed to the dramatic rise in deaths. “Thirty years ago, people snorting heroin never used OxyContin or Vicodin before” using heroin, says Paulozzi, who did not contribute to the CDC report. But now the drug’s abusers start with prescription drugs, he says, turning these meds into gateway drugs. A National Survey on Drug Use and Health study found that heroin abuse was 19 times higher among people who had previously abused pain relievers.

The increase in overdoses follows a federal crackdown on prescription painkillers, beginning toward the end of the Clinton era and lasting through the Bush administration, that resulted in a rash of arrests for illegal use during the mid-2000s. While the rate of deaths involving prescription painkillers like OxyContin appears to have leveled off, heroin overdoses have risen 348 percent. Most of the deaths occurred after 2010. That year, a new tamper-resistant form of Oxy hit the market, making it less potent and harder to abuse.

The rate of heroin deaths accelerated among people between the ages of 18 and 24, from 0.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 3.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2013. For people between 25 and 44 years old, the rate jumped from 1.3 deaths per 100,000 people in 2000 to 5.4 per 100,000 in 2013. Among young and middle-aged white people, that death rate reached 7.0 per 100,000 by 2013.

The CDC report also highlighted the stark gender and regional disparities among those who overdose. Deaths among men from heroin overdoses were four times higher than those among women between 2000 and 2013. While heroin overdoses increased throughout the country, the greatest number occurred in the Northeast and Midwest. In those regions, particularly near cities, the Justice Department observed the illicit drug as a rising threat—especially given the reported spike in the use of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid some 30 times more potent than heroin.

According to the Washington Post, the Justice Department predicted the emerging trend in 2002: “As initiatives taken to curb the abuse of OxyContin are successfully implemented, abusers of OxyContin…also may begin to use heroin, especially if it is readily available, pure, and relatively inexpensive.” A flood of heroin from Mexico, the world’s third-largest opium producer, also factored into the drug’s availability in the United States. In 2013, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized 2,196 kilograms of powder and black tar at the US-Mexico border, a nearly 160 percent bump from 2009.

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White Men Are Overdosing on Heroin at a Record Rate

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Republicans Are Already Prepping for Possible Government Shutdown in the Fall

by MattieIAFiyce Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court will rule later this year on the question of whether Obamacare subsidies should be repealed in states that don’t run their own insurance exchanges. That would gut a major portion of the law, and Jonathan Weisman reports today that because of this, “the search for a replacement by Republican lawmakers is finally gaining momentum.”

I’m not quite sure how he could write that with a straight face, since I think we all know just how serious Republicans are about passing health care reform of their own. In any case, I think the real news comes a few paragraphs down:

Aides to senior House Republicans said Thursday that committee chairmen were meeting now to decide whether a budget plan — due out the week of March 16 — will include parliamentary language, known as reconciliation instructions, that would allow much of a Republican health care plan to pass the filibuster-prone Senate with a simple majority.

Representative Tom Price of Georgia, the House Budget Committee chairman, said that reconciliation language would be kept broad enough to allow Republican leaders to use it later in the year however they see fit, whether that is passing health care legislation over a Senate filibuster or focusing on taxes or other matters.

If this is true, it means that Republicans are prepping for yet another government shutdown over Obamacare. Any budget that tried to essentially repeal Obamacare in favor of a Republican “replacement” would obviously be met with a swift veto, and that would lead inevitably to the usual dreary standoff that we’ve seen so often over the past few years.

Of course, this will all be moot if the Supreme Court upholds Obamacare in the way common sense dictates. Still, it’s something of a sign of things to come. Shutdown politics is pretty clearly still alive and well in the GOP ranks.

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Republicans Are Already Prepping for Possible Government Shutdown in the Fall

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The Hack Gap Lives!

by NeilR53gqo Posted on March 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve been following the news a little vaguely over the past few days, but I noticed an interesting confirmation of the hack gap in the treatment of Hillary Clinton’s email affair. Perhaps you noticed too? There was, obviously, a difference in the way liberals and conservatives treated the news that Hillary had used a private email address for all her correspondence while she was Secretary of State. But it was a matter of degree, not attitude.

On the liberal side, I saw a lots of people seriously questioning what had happened. And not just here in the pages of MoJo. I saw it on MSNBC. I saw it in newspaper columns. I saw it in blog posts. Lots of liberals treated this as a legitimate issue and suggested that Hillary had some serious questions to answer. This didn’t just come from a few iconoclasts, either. It came from all over the place, and was generally viewed, at the least, as an example of questionable judgment, if not proof that Hillary is the antichrist we’ve always known she was.

I know the counterfactual game can get a little tiresome sometimes, but still: it’s hard to imagine the same thing happening if a heavy Republican frontrunner had done something like this. The hack gap lives.

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The Hack Gap Lives!

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India slaps taxes on coal, while China uses less of it

by AlbertoI92 Posted on March 3, 2015

India slaps taxes on coal, while China uses less of it

By on 3 Mar 2015 3:41 pmcommentsShare

India is doubling its tax on coal, and will put the revenue toward encouraging clean energy.

Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is increasingly looking toward renewable and nuclear power, the nation remains heavily reliant on coal. Last year, the government said it hoped to double how much domestic coal the country consumes over the next five years. That would be seriously bad news for Indians. In some areas, pollution is already so extreme that it is taking years off millions of people’s lives.

But the new coal tax might signal an intent to push the country’s energy economy in a more sustainable direction. Bloomberg reports:

Coal fires about 60 percent of India’s electricity generation capacity and is among the cheapest sources of power in the country. The higher tax will lead to an increase of as much as 0.06 rupees in coal costs for every kilowatt hour of electricity, [said Kameswara Rao, who oversees energy, utilities and mining at PwC India].

“As the Paris convention approaches, these steps will show the government is serious about climate change,” said Debasish Mishra, a senior director at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. in Mumbai. “We have to take care of the environment, and at the same time use fossil fuel to make sure we have energy at a reasonable cost for our growth. It’s not an either or situation.”

Much of India is incredibly poor; hundreds of millions of people lack electricity, and the Modi government has maintained that, in its quest to develop rural areas, it won’t turn its back on any source of energy. But the new coal tax, along with new taxes on petroleum, show that the government is trying to make the country’s fossil fuel-intensive economy slightly cleaner — without going so far as reining it in. The tax will, in theory, incentivize coal-burning utilities to make their plants more efficient so that they use less fuel. It could also push the country to strengthen its grid system, which loses huge amounts of power.

America and China, the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, took a medium-sized stride toward combating climate change when they announced a pact last November to curb their emissions over the next two decades. India, the world’s third largest emitter, hasn’t made any similar big announcement. But the country is taking smaller steps forward as the world collectively trundles toward a U.N. climate conference in Paris this December, at which diplomats hope nations will sign a global climate deal. The new coal tax is one of them.

And at the same time that India is boosting taxes on coal, China is using less of it. The country cut its coal use 2.9 percent in 2014, and may be on track to continue reducing its dependence on the fossil fuel. If this drop signals the beginning of a trend, China would also be on track to meet its goals of capping coal use by 2020 and peaking its carbon emissions by 2030, as it promised it would in the U.S.-China pact. China also said in the pact that it would try to beat that 2030 deadline. At ThinkProgress, Joe Romm argues that it might actually do that:

[W]hy would China announce with such public fanfare they are going to “make best efforts to peak early” if they didn’t think they could and would? Failure to peak early would show the “best efforts” of the Chinese failed. That is not how China rolls.

So no one should be surprised if China peaks in coal use before 2020 — as that would be key for them to peak CO2 emissions before 2030.

Coal is becoming less and less popular in the U.S. as well. That’s left American coal companies scrambling to ship their product to new markets abroad, like energy-hungry China and India. But now maybe that’s not looking like such a great idea.

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India slaps taxes on coal, while China uses less of it

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