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Terrifying Video Shows Black Man "With His Hands Raised" Shot To Death By New Jersey Cop

Mother Jones

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A newly released dashcam recording shows a New Jersey police officer fatally shooting a black man whose hands were raised in the air.

The fatal encounter stems from a routine traffic stop on December 30, in which Bridgeton officers Braheme Days and Roger Worley pulled over a vehicle for running through a stop sign.

While questioning the two men, Leroy Tutt and Jerame Reid, the video shows Days suddenly shouting to his partner, “We’ve got a gun in his glove compartment!”

“Show me your fucking hands,” Days, who appears to recognize Reid as he his heard calling him by his first name, warns. “He’s reaching for something!”

As the situation intensifies, Reid can be heard telling the officers, “I’m not reaching for nothing. I ain’t got no reason to reach for nothing.” He then tells Days, “I’m getting out and getting on the ground.”

Reid gets up and exits the car with his hands raised. Then the two officers fire at least six shots, killing Reid.

“The video speaks for itself that at no point was Jerame Reid a threat and he possessed no weapon on his person,” Walter Hudson of the civil rights group National Awareness Alliance said Wednesday.

According to records, Reid was in prison for 13 years for shooting at a state trooper when he was a teenager.

On Tuesday, the Bridgeton Police Department expressed its disappointment over the video’s release “out of respect for the family.” An investigation into the fatal shooting is being conducted.

The recording comes amid reports the Ferguson police officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown will be cleared of federal civil rights charges. The August shooting sparked massive protests around the country with the chant, “Hands up, don’t shoot” serving as a symbolic call for justice in Brown’s death.

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Obama on Climate Change: “No Challenge Poses a Greater Threat to Future Generations”

Mother Jones

In his State of the Union address tonight, President Obama issued a direct rebuke to climate change deniers and to members of Congress who seek to block action to slow global warming.

“I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act,” he said, referring to talking points that are popular among Republican politicians. “Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But…I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate.”

The president referenced a report issued last week by NASA and NOAA that officially designated 2014 as the hottest year on record. He also cited the country’s ongoing clean energy boom, his bilateral climate agreement with China, and warnings from the Pentagon the global warming poses a national security threat.

Obama also took a shot at supporters of the Keystone XL pipeline. Republicans in Congress, along with some Democrats, have made approving the pipeline a top priority. The Senate is set to vote on a bill to approve the project later this week, but Obama has promised to veto it should it pass. “Let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline,” he said. “Let’s pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan that could create more than 30 times as many jobs per year.”

The president walked a fine line between calling for bipartisan action and castigating his opponents on climate issues, said Elgie Holstein, senior director for strategic planning at the Environmental Defense Fund.

“I didn’t see the president’s remarks as defiance, so much as resolve,” Holstein said. “Sending a very clear message to Congress that he is resolved to stand by his position.”

The speech tended toward broad themes rather than specific policy proposals. For example, no mention was made of a new plan to cut back on emissions of methane from oil and gas operations that the White House announced last week. Still, Holstein said he thought the environmental community got what it was hoping for tonight.

Here are Obama’s full remarks on climate and energy issues, as prepared for delivery and released a few minutes before the speech began.

We believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil and protect our planet. And today, America is number one in oil and gas. America is number one in wind power. Every three weeks, we bring online as much solar power as we did in all of 2008. And thanks to lower gas prices and higher fuel standards, the typical family this year should save $750 at the pump…

So let’s set our sights higher than a single oil pipeline. Let’s pass a bipartisan infrastructure plan that could create more than thirty times as many jobs per year, and make this country stronger for decades to come…

And no challenge—no challenge—poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.

2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record. Now, one year doesn’t make a trend, but this does—14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century.

I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what—I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

That’s why, over the past six years, we’ve done more than ever before to combat climate change, from the way we produce energy, to the way we use it. That’s why we’ve set aside more public lands and waters than any administration in history. And that’s why I will not let this Congress endanger the health of our children by turning back the clock on our efforts. I am determined to make sure American leadership drives international action. In Beijing, we made an historic announcement—the United States will double the pace at which we cut carbon pollution, and China committed, for the first time, to limiting their emissions. And because the world’s two largest economies came together, other nations are now stepping up, and offering hope that, this year, the world will finally reach an agreement to protect the one planet we’ve got.

This story has been updated.

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Obama on Climate Change: “No Challenge Poses a Greater Threat to Future Generations”

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2014: A Banner Year for Renewable Fuel

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2014: A Banner Year for Renewable Fuel

Posted 19 January 2015 in

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With record ethanol production and the lowest gas prices in years, 2014 was a banner year for the renewable fuel industry. This is good news for the farmers, small business owners, and workers who rely upon this growing sector for their livelihoods. As the new Congress gets to work, it’s important for them to know that:

In 2014, biofuels production reached 14.4 billion gallons — a record — in the United States. As biofuels production soared, U.S. gas prices fell to their lowest levels since 2008 and 2009.
The renewable fuel industry now supports more than 852,000 jobs and $184.5 billion in economic output across the country. This means that more jobs than ever are supported by renewable fuels — especially in America’s rural economies. These are homegrown American jobs that can’t be outsourced.
In 2014, three new commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol facilities came online in America’s Heartland. They will produce the world’s cleanest motor fuel from agricultural waste like corncobs.

All of this progress has been made possible by the Renewable Fuel Standard. At a time of crisis and instability around the globe, we have achieved unprecedented levels of energy independence.

With so much on the line, the United States can’t afford to turn its back on renewable fuels. Congress, the President, and the EPA should keep the progress going and support a strong Renewable Fuel Standard.

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2014: A Banner Year for Renewable Fuel

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Finally Some Good News About Clean Energy Investment

Mother Jones

Clean energy investment around the world is rebounding after a three-year decline, according to new figures released today by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Globally, the total amount of clean energy investment jumped 16 percent in 2014, to $310 billion. That number is just shy of the record amount of investment set in 2011.

BNEF produces quarterly reports that track how much money governments and the private sector are pouring into wind, solar, biofuels and other green energy projects. In 2014, the United States enjoyed its biggest investments since 2012, but it was China that once again drove the numbers. China’s clean energy spending shot up 32 percent to a record $89.5 billion, cementing its place as the world’s top market for green investment. (You can get a sense of just how impressive Chinese investment is by peaking inside the the world’s biggest solar manufacturing factory, which is run by Chinese company Yingli.)

Solar is getting the lion’s share of investment around the world, according to the figures. Almost half the money spent on clean energy this year—just shy of $150 billion—was in the solar industry. Wind investment also reached record levels—$19.4 billion globally—thanks in part to offshore projects in Europe.

There was one darker patch in the numbers: Australia, where the government is trying to slash the country’s Renewable Energy Target, a policy that creates mandates for the amount of clean energy in the electricity mix. Bucking the global trend, investments there fell by 35 percent.

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Finally Some Good News About Clean Energy Investment

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Brazil’s new science minister is a climate denier

Brazil’s new science minister is a climate denier

By on 7 Jan 2015commentsShare

Science advocates and environmentalists are expressing alarm after Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff picked a hardcore climate-change denier, Aldo Rebelo, as her minister of science, technology and innovation.

Brazil, because of its large population, its (until recently) fast-growing economy, and its vast rainforests, is a key player in the struggle to confront climate change. The issue figured prominently in the country’s recent election, when Rousseff, the incumbent, defeated climate hawk Marina Silva, who challenged Rousseff’s environmental record on issues such as deforestation.

Nonetheless, Rousseff has recognized the country’s responsibility to tackle global warming, saying at the U.N. Climate Summit in New York in September that “[c]limate change is one of the greatest challenges of our times” and should be confronted with “a sense of urgency” and “political courage.” So her choice to head the science ministry was unexpected.

Simon Romero writes in The New York Times:

Calling Aldo Rebelo a climate-change skeptic would be putting it mildly. In his days as a fiery legislator in the Communist Party of Brazil, he railed against those who say human activity is warming the globe and called the international environmental movement “nothing less, in its geopolitical essence, than the bridgehead of imperialism.”

Though many Brazilians have grown used to such pronouncements from Mr. Rebelo, 58, his appointment this month as minister of science by President Dilma Rousseff is causing alarm among climate scientists and environmentalists here, a country that has been seeking to assert leadership in global climate talks.

“At first I thought this was some sort of mistake, that he was playing musical chairs and landed in the wrong chair,” said Márcio Santilli, a founder of Instituto Socioambiental, one of Brazil’s leading environmental groups. “Unfortunately, there he is, overseeing Brazilian science at a very delicate juncture when Brazil’s carbon emissions are on the rise again.”

In a blog post, Steve Schwartzman, director of tropical forest policy for the Environmental Defense Fund, noted that, ironically, Rebelo, an “old-line Communist” fan of Marx and Engels, “is on exactly the same page on climate science as the hardest of the hard-core tea partiers in the United States: it’s all speculation – ‘scientism’ – not real science.” Schwartzmann also pointed to Rousseff’s appointment for minister of Agriculture as another “bad choice” that will help Rousseff’s party in the legislature but will hurt the environment.

The new Minister of Agriculture Katia Abreu was the president of the National Confederation of Agriculture (the national association of large and middle-size landowners and ranchers). As senator, she led the Congress’ powerful anti-environmental, anti-indigenous “bancada ruralista”, or large landowners’, caucus and earned the title among environmentalists of “chainsaw queen.”

Rebelo and Abreu worked together on a 2012 overhaul of the country’s forest protection laws that was opposed by environmental and science groups, including the National Academy of Sciences.

Their appointment comes at a critical time: In recent months, evidence has indicated that deforestation is again on the rise in a country that had once succeeded in cutting it back. This is bad news for those hoping to fight climate change. Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions are also on the rise after falling from 2004 to 2012 — in part because of deforestation, but also because of the country’s increasing reliance on fossil fuels. Advocates worry that Rousseff’s decisions to appoint Rebelo and Abreu indicate she is not seriously committed to reversing those trends.

Source:
Climatologists Balk as Brazil Picks Skeptic for Key Post

, The New York Times.

Climate change denier named Brazil’s Science Minister

, Environmental Defense Fund.

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Could the GOP-controlled Congress actually raise the gas tax?

Could the GOP-controlled Congress actually raise the gas tax?

By on 6 Jan 2015commentsShare

Thanks to low gasoline prices, the average American family is expected to spend at least $550 less on gasoline this year than in 2014. Meanwhile, our country’s transportation infrastructure is crumbling after years of underfunding. Why not use some of Americans’ savings on gas to make repairs to the roads they’re using that cheap gas to drive on?

That’s the idea behind raising the federal gas tax, a concept being cautiously floated by a few politicians of both parties and a number of advocacy groups on the left and right. America hasn’t raised it since 1993, when it was set at 18.4 cents a gallon and not pegged to inflation. The tax is supposed to fund the U.S. Highway Trust Fund, but it isn’t bringing in enough money, so general treasury funds have been used to partially plug the hole while tens of billions of dollars of needed maintenance work has gone undone. Right now, infrastructure is funded through a short-term fix, implemented last summer, which expires in May.

Republican Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) is proposing to increase the tax by 12 cents a gallon over two years, and then index it to inflation. The tax hike would be offset by a decrease in income taxes, or some other means to make the change “revenue-neutral.” Sen. Jim Thune (R-S.D.) told Fox News Sunday that he’s open to at least considering the idea: “I don’t favor increasing any tax. But I think we have to look at all options. … It is important that we fund infrastructure.”

Many business-friendly groups, like the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce, favor a gas-tax increase to pay for infrastructure. The Chamber’s Janet Kavinoky told The New York Times that many in Congress are closeted supporters of the tax, but fear retribution if they come out and support the policy publicly.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it last month, raising the gas tax would be “a hard political choice” but “a win for the climate, our country and our kids.” There’s increasing talk about raising gas taxes at the state level too.

The president isn’t anxious to raise the federal gas tax, though, as USA Today reports:

The White House is declining to endorse calls for gas tax hikes to pay for new road and bridge construction, but will look at anything Congress approves.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest says the administration wants to stick with its original plan to finance new infrastructure spending with revenue to be gained by closing tax loopholes that favor the wealthy.

And some politicians on the right continue to vehemently oppose a gas-tax hike, whether it’s offset or not. They say it would be fine to let the Highway Trust Fund go bankrupt, arguing that infrastructure maintenance should be left up to state and local governments, not the feds.

So a gas-tax increase might be more likely now than it was a few months ago, but not a lot more likely.

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It’s Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record

Mother Jones

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Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)

For many Americans, 2014 will be remembered for its multiple blasts of Arctic air and bitter winters. And this week, another bout of freezing temperatures is marching east across the country, in the first major thermometer plunge of the season.

But as cold as you may have been last year, it’s now official that 2014 was actually the hottest year globally since record-keeping began. So confirmed the Japan Meteorological Agency in preliminary data released Monday.

The Japanese government agency monitors and records the long-term change of the global average surface temperatures and found that 2014 was far warmer than previous years. How much warmer? 2014 exceeded the 1981-2010 temperature average by 0.27 degrees Celsius (or 0.49 degrees Fahrenheit). There was unusually warm weather all around the world, from a record-breaking heat wave in Australia to the hottest European summer in 500 years.

The data shows that four out of the five hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade: In second place is 1998, then 2010 and 2013 tied for third, and 2005 in fifth place. The new numbers reveal that the world has been warming at an average rate of 0.7 degrees Celsius (or 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit) per century since records began.

Two US government agencies, NOAA and NASA, are expected to confirm the results of the Japanese observations in the coming weeks.

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It’s Official: 2014 Was the Hottest Year on Record

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Without Fox News, There Would Have Been No Iraq War

Mother Jones

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Max Ehrenfreund points to an interesting tidbit this morning. A pair of researchers have released a working paper that attempts to figure out if watching Fox News makes you more conservative. They do this by exploiting the fact that channel numbers on cable systems are placed fairly randomly throughout the country, and people tend to watch channels with lower numbers. Thus, in areas where Fox has a low channel number, it gets watched a little bit more in a way that has nothing to do with whether the local viewers were more conservative in the first place.

So does randomly surfing over to Fox News tend to make you more right-wing? Yes indeed! “We estimate that Fox News increases the likelihood of voting Republican by 0.9 points among viewers induced into watching four additional minutes per week by differential channel positions.” And this in turn means that we owe the Iraq War to Fox News: “We estimate that removing Fox News from cable television during the 2000 election cycle would have reduced the average county’s Republican vote share by 1.6 percentage points.”

And what about MSNBC? It had no effect until the 2008 election, after it had made the switch to liberal prime-time programming. At that point, it becomes pretty similar to Fox in the opposite direction. But the effect is subtly different:

The largest elasticity magnitudes are on individuals from the opposite ideology of the channel, with Fox generally better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans. This last feature is consistent with the regression result that the IV effect of Fox is greater than the corresponding effect for MSNBC.

….Table 16 shows the estimated persuasion rates of the channels at converting votes from one party to the other. The numerator here is the number of, for example, Fox News viewers who are initially Democrats but by the end of an election cycle change to supporting the Republican party. The denominator is the number of Fox News viewers who are initially Democrats. Again, Fox is more effective at converting viewers than is MSNBC.

The difference in persuasion rates is significant: the study finds that in the 2008 election, a full 50 percent of Fox’s left-of-center viewers switched to supporting Republicans. For MSNBC, the number of switchers was only 30 percent. That’s a big difference.

Now, in real-world terms this is still a smallish effect since neither channel has a lot of regular viewers from the opposite ends of their ideological spectrums in the first place. Still, this is interesting. I’ve always believed that conservatives in general, and Fox in particular, are better persuaders than liberals, and this study seems to confirm that. But why? Is Fox’s conservatism simply more consistent throughout the day, thus making it more effective? Is there something about the particular way Fox pushes hot buttons that makes it more effective at persuading folks near the center? Or is Fox just average, and MSNBC is unusually poor at persuading people? I can easily believe, for example, that Rachel Maddow’s snark-based approach persuades very few conservative leaners to switch sides.

Anyway, fascinating stuff, even if none of it comes as a big surprise. Fox really has had a big effect on Republican fortunes over the past two decades.

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Without Fox News, There Would Have Been No Iraq War

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Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car

Behold the nightmare Manhattan would become if everyone commuted by car

By on 10 Dec 2014commentsShare

Here’s a great argument for public transit, in a single image: Check out how gnarly it’d be — and how many dang bridges New York would have to build — if the estimated 2 million-plus people commuting in and out of Manhattan during rush hour each day drove their own cars:

Matt Taylor

According to an analysis by Vancouver-based highway design engineer Matt Taylor, the city would need a whopping 48 additional eight-lane bridges to accommodate such a travesty.

The next step to his analysis — parking — suggests that if as many people also needed off-street parking, there’d be 62 square kilometers (or almost 24 square miles) of parking space, “equivalent to a layer of underground parking underneath the entire island.” If local residents also drove, he estimates, they’d need TWO layers.

Luckily for New York, though, just 16 percent of commuters actually drive their own vehicles to work these days, and few local residents drive: New Yorkers average about 23 cars per 100 residents, compared to about 78 for the rest of the country. (Though maybe it’d get even better if Manhattan went the way of Paris and started banning cars entirely?)

Anyway, thank goodness this is just a rendering; research repeatedly shows that when we build more roads, all we get is more traffic. We shudder to imagine the gridlock.

Source:
An Auto-Oriented Manhattan

, MTaylor Analysis.

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Meet the Family Behind Latin America’s Version of Planned Parenthood

Mother Jones

People in the United States have been going to Planned Parenthood for nearly a century, ever since Margaret Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916. But it wasn’t until 1977, after the US had already celebrated Roe v. Wade, that Colombian women had any equivalent organization to turn to. That was the year Dr. Jorge Villarreal started Oriéntame, a women’s reproductive health clinic now credited with inspiring more than 600 outposts across Latin America “and for reshaping abortion politics across the continent,” writes Joshua Lang in a story about the Villarreal family, out today in California Sunday.

Jorge Villarreal Mejía graduated from medical school in 1952 and soon took the reigns of the obstetrics department at Colombia’s national university. During that time, botched abortions caused nearly 40 percent of the country’s maternal deaths. “Women in slum areas were putting the sonda (catheter) inside of them without any sonography,” his daughter Cristina Villarreal told Lang. “They used ganchas de ropa (coat hangers), anything.” When these women showed up at general hospitals, they were shamed and quickly given basic medical attention at most.

So in 1977, Jorge opened a stand-alone health clinic in Bogotá called Oriéntame. Abortions were illegal, so Oriéntame had to focus on helping women who were already suffering from bad abortion attempts, or “incomplete abortions.” Colombians had to wait another thirty years before their mostly Catholic country legalized abortion, under pressure from a coalition that included Cristina Villarreal. (Abortion is now legal in Colombia when a mother’s physical or emotional health is in danger.) In the meantime, Oriéntame continued its mission to heal and empower women, using a sliding-scale payment model in order to reach poorer clients. In 1994, Cristina assumed leadership of the organization, which had grown to include a second nonprofit to help doctors around Latin America open their own Oriéntame clinics.

Lang’s story, an eye-opening and educational read, details the Villarreals’ persistence in the face of police and priests, health administration raids, legal battles, money troubles, and social stigma. Not unlike the volatile abortion politics in the US, across Latin America, writes Lang, “for every political action, there seems to be an equal but opposite reaction,” making Oriéntame’s success “all the more unlikely.” Today, the organization continues to struggle for funding. But fortunately for the estimated 4.5 million women seeking abortions every year across Latin America, and countless others looking for reproductive guidance, Oriéntame’s network has already laced together a much-needed safety net that will be difficult to undo.

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