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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

by JackMurrell231 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the past few years, sexual harassment in the sciences has become an increasingly visible problem. Disturbing allegations about the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, and the former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have all made headlines. So have a number of cases involving prominent university professors.

On the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Kishore Hari talks to Sarah Ballard, an accomplished exoplanet researcher who was also a complainant in one of the most high-profile recent harassment controversies. Last year, Buzzfeed reported that Geoff Marcy, a renowned astronomer at the University of California-Berkeley, had faced sexual harassment accusations. A report produced by the university found that Marcy had “violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies”; it cited allegations that he had inappropriately touched students. Initially, Marcy was placed on probation; he was instructed by the university to comply with its sexual harassment policies and to avoid physical contact with students (except to shake their hands).

But the Buzzfeed story sparked a national outcry, and many began demanding a more severe punishment. Marcy posted an apology on his website, though he denies some of the allegations in the report and says that his actions didn’t harm his students’ professional lives. He ultimately retired under pressure from faculty at the university.

On Inquiring Minds, Ballard depicts Marcy as a professor who praised her talent yet abused her trust. She first met him when she was an undergraduate student in one of his classes, but her excitement to work with one of the world’s foremost experts on exoplanets soon took a dark turn. On one occasion, Marcy told Ballard a detailed story about his sexual history. On another occasion, she says, he attempted to massage her neck after driving her home.

After that, Ballard agonized over whether to confront Marcy about his behavior, ultimately deciding to do so. As described in the Berkeley report, this prospect caused “great anxiety” for Ballard, “in part because she believed such a confrontation would effectively forfeit any opportunity of receiving a letter of recommendation” from Marcy. But it never came to that. Ballard says Marcy’s behavior suddenly changed and the harassment stopped. She later found out that a graduate student had confronted Marcy about unwelcome behavior Marcy had allegedly exhibited toward a different student.

Marcy didn’t deny Ballard’s allegations—though he does deny some of the other allegations in Berkeley’s report. (According to the Berkeley report, he told the university investigator that he didn’t recall touching Ballard in the car but that it was possible he did.) In an interview with Mother Jones, Marcy’s attorney, Elizabeth Grossman, argued that Marcy’s actions weren’t serious enough to justify the backlash he’s experienced. “There is not a single allegation of sexual assault against Marcy,” said Grossman. “There is not a single allegation of soliciting sex, of requesting sex in exchange for academic favor. There is not a single suggestion of his interfering with anyone’s ability to thrive on campus.”

Ballard, however, says she was deeply affected by her interactions with Marcy. “To have Marcy say, ‘You are talented, you are full of promise’— that is so compelling,” she explains. “And then to have all of the sudden the knowledge that…that message might not have been delivered in good faith: You feel like the rug has been pulled out under you. So does that mean that I’m not promising? Does that mean that all of it was a lie?…It was profoundly rattling to my nascent sense of self as an astronomer, as a scientist.”

Years later, when Ballard heard that allegations against Marcy were going to become public, she made the decision to come forward and identify herself as one of the victims. She hopes that by doing so, she’ll make things easier for other women.

“There was one principle which helped me to unravel the tangled knot of my feelings that I could always return to…and that was you have to be the woman you needed then,” says Ballard. “You couldn’t protect yourself then, but you can protect younger you today, and you can protect women who are 20 today.”

Ballard went on to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard (she notes that Marcy wrote a recommendation letter that helped her get into the prestigious university). She now researches exoplanets at MIT. But across the country, many other women have left the sciences. That’s partly because of widespread sexual harassment, argues Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Indeed, a 2014 study found that roughly two-thirds of female scientists surveyed said they had experienced harassment while doing field research.

In January, Speier gave a speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives recounting the allegations against Timothy Slater, who taught astronomy at the University of Arizona and is now a professor at the University of Wyoming. Speier had obtained the results of a confidential 2005 investigation conducted by the University of Arizona. “Dr. Slater himself admitted that he gave an employee a vegetable-shaped vibrator and that he frequently commented to his employees and students about the appearance of women,” said Speier on the House floor. “My staff spoke with one female grad student who was required to attend a strip club in order to discuss her academic work with Dr. Slater. The woman has since left the field of astronomy.” After reading the report, “I was physically sickened,” Speier says on Inquiring Minds.

Slater declined to answer specific questions from Mother Jones about the allegations, though he did provide a letter his lawyers had sent to the University of Arizona threatening to sue the university for defamation and breach of privacy over the release of the report. In the letter, Slater’s attorneys said the university’s report “contains numerous false and misleading allegations, which Rep. Speier and the media has reported as fact.” Specifically, the attorneys state that Slater “never gave a vibrator” to “any graduate student, ever” and that Slater “denies that he ever pressured anyone to go to the strip club or that anyone ever complained about going to strip club.”

Speier proposes one solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the sciences. The federal government has the power under Title IX to fight harassment, she notes. Because so many universities, even private ones, rely on federal dollars, they could lose federal funding in the form of grants or student loans if they violate the law. Last week, she introduced legislation requiring universities to inform federal grant-making institutions when they determine a professor has engaged in sexual harassment.

Speier isn’t optimistic that the bill will pass in the current Congress, but she wants harassment victims to know they have an advocate on Capitol Hill. Her message to them? “They’ve been heard.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

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What the Candidates Might Say Tonight About the World’s Most Important Issue

by PilarErtel48 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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People pause near a bus adorned with large photos of candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump before the first presidential debate. Mary Altaffer/AP

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Climate change is a grave threat to our future, but it probably won’t come up at Monday’s presidential debate. Topics for the event include “Securing America,” and although you’d think issues of national security might involve climate change (the military certainly does), if history is any indication, it likely won’t get mentioned at all.

But if it does get the attention it deserves, here’s where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand:

Dirty energy: Clinton supports some natural gas extraction on public lands, is against offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic, and has pledged $30 billion to provide suffering coal communities with health care, education, and job retraining as we move away from coal as a source of energy.

Trump has promised to boost coal production, ease environmental regulations, open federal lands to oil and gas extraction, and increase permits for oil pipelines. He also is considering appointing an oil executive to head the Department of Interior and a fracking mogul to lead the Department of Energy.

Clean energy: Clinton has said she would install more than half a billion solar panels in the United States by the end of her first term, and that under her presidency, we will generate enough clean energy to power every home in America by 2027.

Trump has said wind power is a great killer of birds (it’s not) and that solar is too expensive to be a viable source of energy, despite the fact that the cost of solar has now reached record lows—and with proper government investment, it would get even cheaper. Trump also objects to Obama’s signature environmental legislation, the Clean Power Plan, as well as the Paris Climate Accord, which he says he would cancel.

Environmental justice: After a debate in Flint, Michigan, in April, Clinton said she would require federal agencies to devise plans to deal with lead poisoning and other environmental justice issues, and she pledged to clean up more than 450,000 polluted sites around the United States.

Trump, on the other hand, mocked the Democratic National Committee for including climate justice in the party’s platform, and has previously vowed to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency—or, as he calls it, “the Department of Environmental”—although he’s recently backtracked on that particular idea.

Fossil fuel donations: While Republican presidential candidates can usually count on generous support from the fossil fuel industry, this year is the exception. Between both individual and corporation donations, Clinton has taken nearly twice as much from Big Oil as Trump, and some oil execs may even vote for her. Looks like we can add this to the list of things the great race of 2016 has upended.

Third and fourth party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson won’t be at the debate Monday night, which is too bad, because they tend to have the most interesting answers on climate change…and everything else.

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What the Candidates Might Say Tonight About the World’s Most Important Issue

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There was another brutal attack on an indigenous environmental activist.

by AshleeStricklin Posted on September 21, 2016

This weekend, Máxima Acuña, winner of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, was assaulted on her property in Peru. Since 2011, Acuña has resisted the development of the Conga gold mine by U.S.-based Newmont Mining by refusing to vacate her home — and, for that, has faced both legal prosecution and physical intimidation.

As a result of the attack, allegedly perpetrated by agents of Minera Yanacocha (Newmont’s Peruvian subsidiary), Acuña is now in the hospital and her family’s crops are destroyed, according to Amnesty International.

Nor, tragically, is this attack an isolated instance of violence against indigenous women protecting their land. Earlier this year, Berta Cáceres — winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts in blocking hydroelectric developments on Lenca land in Honduras — was murdered at home, allegedly by employees of DESA, the developer behind the proposed dams.

When we spoke to Acuña in April, she told us, with eerie foresight: “Because these businesses are very powerful, I don’t know what awaits me when I get back [home]. But this isn’t a cause of fear for me – it’s not a motive for us to stop fighting, to stop defending.”

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There was another brutal attack on an indigenous environmental activist.

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Wave power has finally come to the United States.

by EssieCajigas Posted on September 21, 2016

This weekend, Máxima Acuña, winner of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize, was assaulted on her property in Peru. Since 2011, Acuña has resisted the development of the Conga gold mine by U.S.-based Newmont Mining by refusing to vacate her home — and, for that, has faced both legal prosecution and physical intimidation.

As a result of the attack, allegedly perpetrated by agents of Minera Yanacocha (Newmont’s Peruvian subsidiary), Acuña is now in the hospital and her family’s crops are destroyed, according to Amnesty International.

Nor, tragically, is this attack an isolated instance of violence against indigenous women protecting their land. Earlier this year, Berta Cáceres — winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts in blocking hydroelectric developments on Lenca land in Honduras — was murdered at home, allegedly by employees of DESA, the developer behind the proposed dams.

When we spoke to Acuña in April, she told us, with eerie foresight: “Because these businesses are very powerful, I don’t know what awaits me when I get back [home]. But this isn’t a cause of fear for me – it’s not a motive for us to stop fighting, to stop defending.”

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Wave power has finally come to the United States.

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Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

by MartyMulkey Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like a jittery upstart on The Apprentice, Donald Trump is looking like an unlikely contender for the prize he’s groping for. To beat the long odds stacked against him in the presidential election, the mercurial reality TV star will have to conquer a chunk of real estate quite distinct from the vast gambling dens and condo castles he’s used to: Iowa.

While the US corn, soybean, and hog capital isn’t a big enough prize on its own to push the GOP nominee to victory, “there is no realistic path to the presidency for Trump without Iowa’s six electoral votes,” as the Washington Post recently reported. Ohio, too, has emerged as a necessary but insufficient piece of the electoral map for Trump.

So the lifelong urbanite is plunging those famous fingers of his into the muck of farm-state politics. Trump reportedly declined to mount a Harley and participate in the ride portion of Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” event at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines last week, but he did deliver a red-meat speech pandering to some of the baser urges of the Corn Belt’s agribusiness interests.

Here are some highlights:

• He thundered against government regulation of farming practices—a highly contentious topic in a state where waterways and drinking water are routinely polluted by runoff from farms. “We are going to end the EPA intrusion into your family homes and into your family farms, for no reason—what they’re doing to you is a disgrace,” he declared, adding without citing evidence the unlikely claim that “many” Iowans have lost their farms to overzealous enforcement of environmental standards.

• To the crowd’s delight, Trump vowed to revoke the Obama administration’s Waters of the US Rule, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency greater authority to regulate water pollution. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, “wants to shut down family farms just like she wants to shut down the miners and the steelworkers… through radical regulation,” he warned.

• Yet Trump pledged support for an infamous federal government boondoggle: a 2007 law that mandates that a huge portion of the US corn crop be diverted into ethanol production. “President Obama lied to you about his support for the Renewable Fuel Standard, and you can trust Hillary Clinton even less,” he said. In reality, Obama has never wavered in his support for the corn-ethanol mandate, and Clinton, too, supports it—as does one of her main ag policy advisers, USDA chief Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa.

• Trump promised to “end double taxation of family farms at death”—a reference to the estate tax. Repealing the so-called death tax is a perennial applause line for GOP politicians, and Trump’s proclamation drew an enthusiastic response. It’s hard to figure out why the issue still resonates with farm audiences—after years of rollbacks, the tax now applies only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher, and affects fewer than 1 percent of US family-owned farm operations, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

On two other issues, Trump declined to pander to the ag crowd during his Iowa speech. On immigration, the candidate has maneuvered himself into a tight corner. Anti-migrant rants fueled Trump’s blitz through the primaries, appealing to the nativist impulses of the GOP base. But Big Ag relies heavily on immigrants for labor, from the fruit and vegetable fields of California and Florida to Iowa’s industrial-scale hog slaughterhouses. Perhaps in deference to such business interests, Trump has on some recent occasions softened his stance on immigration. Underlining these tensions, several members of Trumps 64-person ag policy committee support a much softer stance on migration, the Washington Post recently reported. But in his Iowa speech, Trump for some reason reverted to old ways, fulminating against “criminal illegal immigrants” and vowing yet again to “build a great border wall.”

The other issue is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade deal championed by President Barack Obama and prized by Big Ag because it pries open Asian markets for US-grown seeds, grain, and meat. Trump has been denouncing the TPP on nativist grounds since he launched his campaign. Perhaps because Iowa stands second only to California in agricultural exports, Trump held his tongue on the TPP during his speech, declining to mention trade at all.

Perhaps to smooth over those immigration and trade rough spots with the Big Ag community, the Trump campaign deployed the chairman of its Rural Advisory Committee, Charles Herbster, to address the Ohio Cattlemen’s Association’s annual roundup in Jackson, Ohio, last Saturday. Herbster, a Nebraska rancher and multilevel-marketing magnate, did not return calls asking for details of his presentation. According to Elizabeth Harsh, executive director of the OCA, Herbster “answered many questions from OCA members,” ranging from “trade and TPP to health care and immigration.” She added, “OCA’s members were very interested and engaged in the discussion,” but she declined to say more.

In a brief interview a month ago, Herbster acknowledged that he’d been getting calls from farmers concerned about Trump’s crusade against the TPP, and insisted that a President Trump would renegotiate trade deals in a way that keeps ag exports booming.

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Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

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Monsanto Just Made a Massive Mistake

by LeanneMeehan Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it had gotten an “unusually high number of reports of crop damage that appear related to misuse of herbicides containing the active ingredient dicamba.” Complaints of drooping and often dead crops appeared in no fewer than 10 states, the EPA reports. In Missouri alone, the agency says it has gotten 117 complaints “alleging misuse of pesticide products containing dicamba,” affecting more than 42,000 acres of crops, including peaches, tomatoes, cantaloupes, watermelons, rice, peas, peanuts, alfalfa, cotton, and soybeans.

The state’s largest peach farm, which lies near soybean-and-cotton country, has suffered massive and potentially permanent damage this year—and suspects dicamba drift as the culprit, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

What gives?

The trouble appears to stem from decisions made by the Missouri-based seed and pesticide giant Monsanto. Back in April, the company bet big on dicamba, announcing a $975 million expansion of its production facility in Luling, Louisiana. The chemical is the reason the company launched its new Roundup Ready Xtend soybean and cotton seeds, genetically engineered to withstand both dicamba and Monsanto’s old flagship herbicide, glyphosate (brand name: Roundup). Within a decade, the company wrote, the new GM crops will proliferate from the US Midwest all the way to Brazil and points south, covering as much as 250 million acres of farmland (a combined land mass equal to about two and a half times the acreage of California)—and moving lots of dicamba.

The plan is off to a rough start—which brings us back to those drooping crops in soybean and cotton country. The company elected to release Roundup Ready Xtend soybean and cotton seeds this spring, even though the EPA has not yet signed off on a new herbicide product that combines glyphosate and a new dicamba formulation. That was a momentous decision, because the dicamba products currently on the market are highly volatile—that is, they have a well-documented tendency to vaporize in the air and drift far away from the land they’re applied on, killing other crops. Monsanto’s new dicamba, tweaked with what the company calls “VaporGrip” technology, is supposedly much less volatile.

The trouble is that farmers have been planting glyphosate-tolerant cotton and soybeans for years, and as a result, are dealing with a mounting tide of weeds that have evolved to resist that ubiquitous weed killer. So they jumped at the new seeds, and evidently began dousing crops with old dicamba formulations as a way to knock out those glyphosate-tolerant weeds. Oops.

For its part, Monsanto says it expects the EPA to approve the new, improved dicamba formulation in time for the 2017 growing season, and that it never expected farmers to use old dicamba formulations on the dicamba-tolerant crops it released this year. If the VaporGrip formulation does indeed control volatization as promised, the drift incidents of 2016 will likely soon just be a painful memory for affected farmers. If not, they portend yet more trouble ahead for the PR-challenged ag giant.

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Monsanto Just Made a Massive Mistake

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How Oyster Farming is Cleaning Our Water

by pauletteguajardo Posted on August 10, 2016

American palates are becoming more and more refined these days, with trends like pescetarianism and the farm-to-table movement increasing the demand for locally raised fish and shellfish. Overfishing remains a huge problem and so do contaminated waterwaysbut there may be a simple, natural solution on the horizon: oysters.

Increased Demand for Local Shellfish

Oyster farming on the East Coast has doubled in the past six years, according to NPR, and its no mystery why. Americans who can afford to do so are becoming increasingly interested in where their food comes from. They want local, sustainable, organic, antibiotic-free food and this desire has made a big mark in both foodie culture and agriculture.

“As much food as possibly can go on my plate at the least amount of money I can spend used to be the way things were,” says Jimmy Parks, a chef and owner of the Butcher Station in Winchester, Virginia. “Now people are getting away from that, and they’re gravitating toward … cleaner sources.”

For some species, like salmon and tuna, this trend may be alarming. Fish farms are notoriously dirty and bad for the planet, with antibiotics, unnatural fish feed, overpopulation and huge amounts of waste putting a strain on oceanic and river ecosystems.

Oysters, however, are a different story.

Oysters as Natural Water Filters

For one thing, oyster farming has an extremely low carbon footprint. According to the environmental news blog Grist, oysters are one of the cleanest animal protein sources you can eat in terms of carbon emissions.

Additionally, oysters act as natural water purifiers. According to The Nature Conservancy, roughly 40 percent of U.S. waterways are currently considered too polluted for swimming or fishing. Oysters can help change that. Grist reports that a mature oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water every day. That means that just one acre of populated oyster territory can filter 140 million gallons of water per day.

The mighty bivalves are ocean filters, Grist reports. Oysters soak up nitrogen through their flesh, turning the nutrient into a benign gas. They absorb nitrogen into their shells, too, and can store it there for decades, or even centuries, long after the little creature inside its shell is dead. At their most plentiful, the Chesapeakes oysters were capable of filtering all 18 trillion tons of bay water in about a week, rendering it nearly crystal clear.

Gulnihal Ozbay, an oyster researcher at the University of Delaware, told NPR that oysters not meant for consumption could be added to polluted waterways to help purify them, hopefully making them more appropriate for swimming, drinkingand fishing down the road.

Rebuilding Ecosystems and Economies

Finally, oysters stand to improve the health of some very important ecosystems: those of local waterways and our own human economies.

“The coolest thing is within our cages we see these little shrimp-like creatures that actually eat the pseudofeces of the oysters, Tim Devine, a Maryland-based oyster farmer, tellsNPR. And then things like seahorses and crabs and other things eat those little guys, and then the food chain has begun.”

This helps create a reef-like ecosystem within the waterway, bolstering aquatic populations and filtering water to boot.

From a human population perspective, these mighty little mollusks also play a strong role in maintaining balanced local economies. For years, Chesapeake Bay fisherman survived on proceeds from oyster hunting and sales. When oyster populations collapsed due to overfishing, many oystermen considered making career changes.

I tell you, there was nothing left, fisherman Johnny Shockley told Grist. We knew every spot there was in this river that was a good oyster bottom, and they were all gone.”

Maryland only legalized aquaculture (oyster and clam farming) as recently as 2009. Since then, the economy around oysters and other shellfish has begun to recover, to the relief of many local fisherman and their families.

Oysters are small creatures, but they sure can make a big impact, and its tiny steps that could add up to big changes for our oceans and waterways.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How Oyster Farming is Cleaning Our Water

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A Whole Lot of Millennials See No Difference Between Clinton and Trump

by EarleneSynnot Posted on August 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

One presidential candidate says scientists who work on climate change are “practically calling it a hoax” and wants to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. The other calls climate change “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time.” And yet about four out of 10 millennials in battleground states think there is no difference between those candidates’ views on the issue.

Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate group released polling at the Democratic National Convention last week focused on millennials in 11 battleground states, conducted by Global Strategy Group in June and early July.

According to the poll, 21 percent of millennials are Bernie Sanders supporters who are so disillusioned with Clinton that they wouldn’t plan to vote for her in a general election if there are third-party candidates, as well.

Young voters are one of the more unpredictable factors in the 2016 election, because they’re more likely than other age groups to support Sanders and less likely to vote in general. Democrats run the risk of losing Sanders holdouts to a third-party candidate. Nearly seven out of 10 Sanders supporters believe there’s no daylight between Trump and Clinton on the issues they care about.

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

That is alarming news for Clinton. But the numbers could change. NextGen’s findings suggest that if Democrats emphasize climate change and clean energy, they could make progress in winning over this demographic.

Young voters polled, including pro-Sanders voters, rank clean air and water and switching to renewable energy as high priorities. Three-quarters are more likely to support a candidate who wants to transition the United States away from fossil fuels. On the flip side, Trump’s position on the EPA could hurt him. Millennials like the EPA, the polling found—about as much as they like Beyoncé

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

But this may not help Clinton much because young voters don’t recognize how different she is from Trump. Forty-four percent say there’s no distinction between the two candidates on transitioning away from fossil fuels, and 43 percent say there’s no distinction on protecting air and water.

Maybe that’s in part because Sanders hammered Clinton over her positions on fracking and fossil fuel extraction during the primaries. “On the ground, students just don’t know the difference between the candidates,” Heather Hargreaves, NextGen’s vice president, said at a briefing on the poll.

“It’s not just ignorance,” added Andrew Baumann of Global Strategy Group. “They assume she’s more conservative than she is.” He continued, “I think part of the goal is to educate” voters and reintroduce Clinton.

But if her convention speech was any indication, Clinton isn’t interested in focusing much more on this issue, beyond the usual applause lines. She mentioned in passing how clean energy will lead to job creation, but she didn’t dwell on it. She left the task of drawing a contrast between her climate policies and Trump’s to speakers like California Gov. Jerry Brown and League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski.

Even if Clinton isn’t going to be heavily focused on climate, Steyer and his group plan to press the issue on her behalf. NextGen is putting $25 million into efforts to turn out young voters who are concerned about climate change, including at more than 200 college campuses. The group’s hope is that young voters will understand that the stakes are so high for climate change that they will vote for Clinton even if they don’t love her.

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A Whole Lot of Millennials See No Difference Between Clinton and Trump

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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

by marques458 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump churns out strong opinions like McDonald’s produces Big Macs. But save for the odd eruption—like declaring the supremacy of Trump Tower Grill’s “taco bowls” or blaming the California drought on environmentalists to the delight of the state’s agribusiness interests—he has been relatively quiet about food. At last month’s Republican National Convention, the real-estate developer/reality TV star took a step toward filling out his food and farm policy by tapping Nebraska agribusiness owner and cattleman Charles Herbster as the chairman of his Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee.

Like Trump, Herbster is an unconventional business titan with political ambitions.

He and his wife own Conklin, a Kansas City-based company with an odd mix of product lines: from pesticide additives called adjuvents to fertilizers for farms and lawns to probiotics for livestock, pets, and even people to industrial roof coatings to motor oils for “everything from semis to farm equipment to race cars.” In addition, he owns a cattle-breeding company called Herbster Angus Farms as well as farmland in Nebraska and Colorado, for which he received a total of $196,757 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. (That’s not a particularly high number—many Nebraska farm operators got much more over that time frame.)

Before he took the reins of Trump’s ag-policy team, Herbster was best known for his aborted 2013 campaign for Nebraska’s governorship, as Politico’s Ian Kullgren recently noted. Soon after exiting the race, Herbster donated $860,000 to the campaign of another Republican gubernatorial candidate, Beau McCoy, a Nebraska state senator. Herbster ultimately donated a total of $2.7 million to McCoy’s campaign, “nearly his entire war chest,” The Omaha World-Herald reported. McCoy lost the race. Last year, Herbster hired McCoy to run marketing for Conklin’s building-supply business. Another one-time Nebraska officeholder, former Gov. Dave Heineman, joined Conklin’s board of directors last year.

Herbster’s largesse to politicians hasn’t been limited to McCoy’s failed bid. Politico notes he “has given $336,000 to Republican candidates and ag-related PACs since 2012.”

He is a major funder of Ag America, which describes itself as a “Federal Super PAC active in local, state, and federal elections.” Herbster sits on the Ag America steering committee, and according to the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets, he donated $60,000 to it in 2015. Other recent contributors include Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and several other agribusiness giants.

In public documents, Ag America pushes a a fairly standard agribiz policy agenda: The next president must subject (unnamed) federal ag regulations to “rigorous cost-benefit analyses” and pursue free trade agreements “across the globe to open markets for America’s agricultural products.”

That last bit would seem to contradict Trump’s oft-stated antipathy to the the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending trade deals that was hotly supported by the agribusiness lobby.

And that appears to be where Herbster comes in—reassuring farm interests that a Trump presidency wouldn’t mean reduced access to foreign markets.

On a recent afternoon, I caught up with Herbster by phone on a corn field on his Nebraska farm after calling a number I found on the website of Herbster Angus Farms. I was quite surprised when the man himself answered the phone. After volunteering that “I’ve been friends with Donald J. Trump for more than 10 years,” Herbster told me that he’s been getting calls from farmers “concerned about issues of trade.” Herbster said he reassures them that Trump “is not against trade in any way”—it’s “just that we wants trade to be fair,” and that means renegotiating trade deals. Herbster acknowledged that “trade for agriculture in the Midwest has probably been pretty good for the past few years,” but that it “hasn’t been good for small manufacturers in middle America and the coasts.” Trump, he suggested, would make trade great again for everyone.

He then mentioned reducing the inheritance tax (applied only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher) as a “big issue,” and said that rolling back regulation would be “at the forefront” of a Trump’s first 100 days as president. “We regulate, regulate, regulate,” he complained. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, he added that “if it moves, the government’s response is to tax it; if it keeps moving, the response is to regulate it; and if it stops moving, the response is to try to control it and subsidize it.”

I asked him to specify what regulations he sought to dismantle. “We’re not gonna pinpoint and try to detail the minutiae of all of those, because the first thing we have to do is we have to win,” he said. “I believe we are gonna win, but I’ve always said, until you win, all of the great ideas in the world aren’t going to help you, because you have to win to implement ’em.”

Rather than sweat policy details, “my focus .. is to make sure we get rural America out to vote, that we raise as much money as possible,” he said, adding that “it’s gonna take a lot of money for this campaign, because we saw what happened with Romney versus Obama.”

Meanwhile, Herbster said, he’s working to assemble a group of people to serve with him on Trump’s ag-policy committee, which will be announced the first week of August. “Everyone’s gonna pretty well know the names on that list—we have some governors, we have some former governors … we’ve put together a really great list.”

I pressed him for more policy details, but he politely hustled me off the phone. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got concrete being laid at the farm,” he said.

Taken from – 

Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

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Many young voters don’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump on climate

by mamieisabelle68 Posted on July 31, 2016

The poll shebang

Many young voters don’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump on climate

By on Jul 31, 2016 9:30 amShare

PHILADELPHIA — One presidential candidate says that scientists who work on climate change are “practically calling it a hoax” and wants to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. The other calls climate change “an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time.” And about four out of 10 millennials in battleground states think there is no difference between their views on the issue.

Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate group released polling at the Democratic National Convention this past week focused on millennials in 11 battleground states, conducted by Global Strategy Group in June and early July.

According to the poll, 21 percent of millennials are Bernie Sanders supporters who are so disillusioned with Clinton that they wouldn’t plan to vote for her in a general election if there are third-party candidates as well. Young voters are one of the more unpredictable factors in the 2016 election, because they’re more likely than other age groups to support Sanders and less likely to vote in general. Democrats run the risk of losing Sanders holdouts to a third-party candidate. Nearly seven out of 10 Sanders supporters believe there’s no daylight between Trump and Clinton on the issues they care about.

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

That is alarming news for Clinton. But the numbers could change. NextGen’s findings suggest that if Democrats emphasize climate change and clean energy, they could make progress in winning over this demographic.

Young voters polled, including pro-Sanders voters, rank clean air and water and switching to renewable energy as high priorities. Three-quarters are more likely to support a candidate who wants to transition the U.S. away from fossil fuels. On the flip side, Trump’s position on the EPA could hurt him. Millennials like the EPA, the polling found — about as much as they like Beyoncé.

NextGen Climate/Project New America Battleground Millennial Survey

But this may not help Clinton much because young voters don’t recognize how different she is from Trump. Forty-four percent say there’s no distinction between the two candidates on transitioning away from fossil fuels, and 43 percent say there’s no distinction on protecting air and water.

Maybe that’s in part because Sanders hammered Clinton over her positions on fracking and fossil fuel extraction during the primaries.“ On the ground, students just don’t know the difference between the candidates,” Heather Hargreaves, NextGen’s vice president, said at a briefing on the poll.

“It’s not just ignorance,” added Andrew Baumann of Global Strategy Group. “They assume she’s more conservative than she is.” He continued, “I think part of the goal is to educate” voters and reintroduce Clinton.

But if her convention speech was any indication, Clinton isn’t interested in focusing much more on this issue, beyond the usual applause lines. She mentioned in passing how clean energy will lead to job creation, but she didn’t dwell on it. She left the task of drawing a contrast between her climate policies and Trump’s to speakers like California Gov. Jerry Brown and League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski.

Even if Clinton isn’t going to be heavily focused on climate, Steyer and his group plan to press the issue on her behalf. NextGen is putting $25 million into efforts to turn out young voters who are concerned about climate change, including at more than 200 college campuses. The group’s hope is that young voters will understand that the stakes are so high for climate change that they will vote for Clinton even if they don’t love her.

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Many young voters don’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump on climate

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