Tag Archives: figure

Here’s an idea for retired coal mines: Turn them into giant batteries.

by NASBrandie Posted on May 26, 2017

A report on the employment practices of green groups finds that the sector, despite its socially progressive reputation, is still overwhelmingly the bastion of white men.

According to the study, released by Green 2.0, roughly 3 out of 10 people at environmental organizations are people of color, but at the senior staff level, the figure drops closer to 1 out of 10. And at all levels, from full-time employees to board members, men make up three-quarters or more of NGO staffs.

Click to embiggen.Green 2.0

The new report, titled “Beyond Diversity: A Roadmap to Building an Inclusive Organization,” relied on more than 85 interviews of executives and HR reps and recruiters at environmental organizations.

Representatives of NGOs and foundations largely agreed on the benefits of having a more diverse workforce, from the added perspectives in addressing environmental problems to a deeper focus on environmental justice to allowing the movement to engage a wider audience.

The most worrisome finding is that fewer than 40 percent of environmental groups even had diversity plans in place to ensure they’re more inclusive. According to the report, “Research shows that diversity plans increases the odds of black men in management positions significantly.”

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Here’s an idea for retired coal mines: Turn them into giant batteries.

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OPEC still just tryin’ to OPEC, but not doing so well at it.

by JosefGrossman Posted on May 25, 2017

A report on the employment practices of green groups finds that the sector, despite its socially progressive reputation, is still overwhelmingly the bastion of white men.

According to the study, released by Green 2.0, roughly 3 out of 10 people at environmental organizations are people of color, but at the senior staff level, the figure drops closer to 1 out of 10. And at all levels, from full-time employees to board members, men make up three-quarters or more of NGO staffs.

Click to embiggen.Green 2.0

The new report, titled “Beyond Diversity: A Roadmap to Building an Inclusive Organization,” relied on more than 85 interviews of executives and HR reps and recruiters at environmental organizations.

Representatives of NGOs and foundations largely agreed on the benefits of having a more diverse workforce, from the added perspectives in addressing environmental problems to a deeper focus on environmental justice to allowing the movement to engage a wider audience.

The most worrisome finding is that fewer than 40 percent of environmental groups even had diversity plans in place to ensure they’re more inclusive. According to the report, “Research shows that diversity plans increases the odds of black men in management positions significantly.”

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OPEC still just tryin’ to OPEC, but not doing so well at it.

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Health Care Systems Are Expensive. Deal With It.

by AdrianaGivens Posted on May 24, 2017

Mother Jones

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How much would a single-payer universal health care system cost in the United States? You don’t need to do anything very complicated to get a ballpark figure. Here’s the arithmetic:

Total spending on health care in the US is $3.2 trillion
Of that, $1.5 trillion is already funded by federal and state programs. That leaves additional required spending of $1.7 trillion.
A universal system will still require some copays and other out-of pocket expenses. Figure $200 billion or so. That leaves $1.5 trillion

So that’s it. A universal health care system in the US would require about $1.5 trillion in additional government spending. If you want to make heroic assumptions about how much a single-payer would save, go ahead. But nobody serious is going to buy it. If we’re lucky, a good single-payer system would slow the growth of health care costs over the long term, but it’s vanishingly unlikely to actually cut current costs.

There was a lot of surprise today about an estimate that a single-payer plan for California would have a net additional cost of about $200 billion. But California has 12 percent of the nation’s population, and 12 percent of $1.5 trillion is $180 billion. So that estimate is right in the ballpark of what you should expect. Short of some kind of legislative miracle, there’s really no way around this. Health care is expensive.

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Health Care Systems Are Expensive. Deal With It.

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The Surprising Green Benefit of Living in the City

by ArlethaRichter Posted on April 27, 2017

Were not in the 60s anymore, Toto. Seems young people these days (aka millennials) no longer dream of moving to the country to try their hand at communal living and organic farming. Instead, they are turning to another way to help green the planetcity living. Huh? Well, unless you live entirely off the grid, most folks have to work for a living, and most jobs tend to be located close to urban cores. City dwelling also offer more cultural diversity, educational institutions, art galleries, museums, and nightlife, often within walking distance. And walking, rather than driving, to work or play is one of the greenest lifestyle changes you could make. Learn more.

Save money.

For families living in suburban communities, the cost of transportation comprises 25 percent of total household expenditures, making it the second largest household expense, exceeded only by the cost of housing itself. Compare this figure to thebudget of urban dwellers, where the percentage allotted for transportation drops to only 9 percent.

Save time.

Theres been a trend over the past 40 years toward what theWashington Postdubs the mega commuteran individual who, in order to get to the job every day, faces a long haul of 90 minutes each way. Do the math and youll see that adds up to an annual total of 31.3 days gobbled up traveling to and from work, an activity that many people rank among their least favorite ways to spend time. One simple solution to an admittedly complex problem is to move closer to your workplace.

Save gasoline.

Although electric cars (and the public charging stations they need in order to drive long distances) are becoming available, most people still rely on gasoline to power their automobiles. Gasoline has a number of drawbacks. To start, gas is expensive. Whats more, as a fossil fuel manufactured from crude oil, it is a non-renewable resource. But the most compelling motivation to reduce gasoline use stems from the fact that it contributes heavily to your carbon footprint. Burning a single gallon of gas produces20 pounds of carbon dioxide.

Save the planet.

In recent years, theres been a lot of buzz about taking steps to make homes more energy-efficient:installing energy-saving HVAC systems, replacing worn-out appliances with Energy Star certified models, and sealing and insulating the house exteriors. However, the Environmental Protection Agency advises thatlocation efficiencyis even more important to the health of our environment thanenergy efficiency. By this logic, the most eco-friendly home of all would combine energy-efficient features with a very walkable location.

Think like a millennial.

Millennials (young adults born between the mid-1980s and the early years of the 21stcentury) prefer walking to driving by a whopping 12 percentage points according tosurvey results. When theyre not driving, they like to bike to their destination, whether it be work, shopping, or entertainment. Compared to older age groups, they are much readier to live in attached housing, rather than the traditional single-family detached home in the suburbs, in order to shorten their commuting time.

Check theWalk Score.

If you are planning a move, consult the Walk Score for any property you might want to rent or buy. Based on accessibility to such facilities as schools, grocery shopping, restaurants, cultural activities, and parks, the score is calculated based on an ideal of 100. Anything over 70 rates as very walkable, while 90 plus is considered a walkers paradise. Not surprisingly, homes in cities tend to score highest on the scale.

Push for green spaces.

Some municipal governments are beginning to fund out-of-the-box oases such as green roofs and linear parks. Push your locality to add more and maybe even create your own community vegetable plot or roadside guerilla garden. Urban green spaces improve the air quality, soak up stormwater, and may evenreduce crime ratesin the area. Besides, they provide a pretty view when youre out walking.

By Laura Firszt, Networx.

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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The Surprising Green Benefit of Living in the City

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Can You Figure Out Today’s Mystery Map?

by GracielaFitzwate Posted on December 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Let’s play a game! What is this a map of?

  1. Popularity of Adele vs. Taylor Swift in 2015
  2. Rain patterns and drought as a consequence of global warming in 2015
  3. Support for Donald Trump among Republicans in 2015
  4. Change in cable TV penetration during 2015
  5. Support for using ground troops against ISIS in 2015

The answer is 3, support for Donald Trump among Republicans. But I tricked you. It’s also a map that shows where racially-charged internet searches are most common. Here is Nate Cohn on Trump’s support:

His geographic pattern of support is not just about demographics — educational attainment, for example. It is not necessarily the typical pattern for a populist, either. In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite of Ross Perot’s support in 1992, which was strongest in the West and New England, and weakest in the South and industrial North.

But it is still a familiar pattern. It is similar to a map of the tendency toward racism by region, according to measures like the prevalence of Google searches for racial slurs and racist jokes, or scores on implicit association tests.

But remember: no fair confusing correlation and causation! This might just be a big coincidence.

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Can You Figure Out Today’s Mystery Map?

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It’s Not Just Middle-Aged Whites Who Are Killing Themselves These Days

by RozellaWinslow Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m not sure why Josh Marshall decided to write about the Case/Deaton mortality study today, but he did. Here’s what he says:

They made a startling discovery. As you would expect, every age and ethnic/racial grouping has continued to see a steady reduction of morbidity (disease) and increase in lifespans for decades. But there’s one major exception: middle aged (45-54) white people. Since roughly 1998, disease and death rates for middle aged white men and women has begun to rise.

….We might assume that a middle aged population group, under some mix of economic and societal stress, would be hit by the classic diseases of life stress: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. But that’s not it. These people are quite simply killing themselves — either directly or indirectly. According to Case and Deaton’s study, the reversal in the overall mortality trend is driven by three causes: drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide and chronic liver disease. In other words, either literal suicide or the slow motion suicide of chronic substance abuse.

I don’t really blame Marshall for saying this, since Case and Deaton go to considerable lengths to focus on this age group. But it’s just not true. Their own data shows that every white age group has seen a big increase in mortality from suicide/alcohol/drugs. I’ve tried to make this clear before, but I’ll try again today with a brand new chart. This is based on Figure 4 from the Case/Deaton paper and it shows the increase in mortality for all age groups.

The biggest increase isn’t from 45-54. It’s from 30-34 and 50-54. In fact, 45-49 saw one of the lower increases.

So why did Case and Deaton focus on the 45-54 age group? They explain it themselves:

The focus of this paper is on changes in mortality and morbidity
for those aged 45–54. However, as Fig. 4 makes clear, all 5-y age
groups between 30–34 and 60–64 have witnessed marked and similar increases in mortality from the sum of drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver disease and cirrhosis over the period 1999–2013; the midlife group is different only in that the sum of these deaths is large enough that the common growth rate changes the direction of all-cause mortality.

That’s it. The 45-54 group doesn’t have the largest increase in death from suicide/alcohol/drugs. The only thing that makes them different is that the increase in these deaths “changes the direction of all-case mortality.” In other words, their line on the chart went from sloping up to sloping down. That’s the only reason to focus on them: because they crossed the zero line.

But that’s purely esthetic. If, say, the mortality rate of one group goes from -3 percent to -1 percent, and the other goes from -1 percent to +1 percent, they’ve both changed by two percentage points. The latter one, however, goes from negative to positive, and that makes for a dramatic chart. But that’s all it does.

I wouldn’t care so much about this except that people are drawing a lot of conclusions about “what’s wrong with middle-aged whites?” without noticing that the answer might very well be “nothing.” A better question is, “what’s wrong with America?” As Case and Deaton show, the mortality of middle-aged US whites did indeed start increasing around 1999, while the mortality rate in other advanced countries continued to decline steadily. I’d like to see that chart for all age groups before I tried to draw any conclusions, but it sure seems like we should be focusing on this, not on middle age. It’s not clear that middle age really has much to do with any of this.

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Is Ben Carson a Liar? Or Does He Just Not Care?

by KashaBenoit8790 Posted on November 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Ben Carson, wandering off topic when the Miami Herald asks him about abuses of our Cuba policy:

“I think the way to fix that is not so much to abolish the act, but dealing with the specific area where the abuse is,” Carson said, noting that Medicare and Medicaid fraud is “huge — half a trillion dollars.”

“We definitely need to focus on that,” he said.

Well, hell, why not say it’s a hundred trillion dollars? Or a gazillion? I mean, if you’re just going to make stuff up, why not go whole hog?

For the record, total Medicare and Medicaid spending last year—state, federal, everything—was $980 billion. So Carson is suggesting that literally half of all spending on these programs is fraudulent.

So where did Carson come up with this figure? Beats me. There are a few possibilities:

It comes from some kind of kooky right-wing conspiracy theory that circulates in newsletters and email lists that the rest of us never see.
Carson read somewhere that Medicare fraud totaled $60 billion out of half a trillion dollars, and the only parts that stuck in his brain were “fraud” and “half a trillion dollars.”
He just made it up.

This stuff is weird. Carson didn’t have to say anything about Medicare fraud. The question was about Cuba policy. He wanted to mention it. Fine. He could have just said that Medicare fraud was a huge problem. Sorry: not good enough. He wanted to toss out a scary number, but he couldn’t be bothered to know what it actually was—or even know enough about Medicare and Medicaid spending to realize that half a trillion dollars couldn’t possibly be right. He just doesn’t care. What kind of person running for president just doesn’t care?

POSTSCRIPT: Couldn’t Carson have just made a mistake? Sure. But here’s the thing: some mistakes are so big they give away the fact that you’re entirely ignorant of the subject at hand. If I told you that Babe Ruth hit 800 home runs in his career, it might just be a brain fart. But if I told you he hit 5,000 home runs, it’s a giveaway that I’m faking. I don’t know the first thing about baseball.

That’s what Carson did here. He’s smart and good with numbers, so if he knew even the basics of Medicare and Medicaid he’d also know intuitively that half a trillion dollars couldn’t be right. But he didn’t. He’s running for president, and hasn’t bothered to learn even the kindergarten basics about two programs that make up nearly a third of the federal budget.

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Is Ben Carson a Liar? Or Does He Just Not Care?

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

by EmeliaRunyan Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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

As climate change increases the intensity and (possibly) the frequency of major coastal storms, what will be the economic consequences?

Answering this question requires two big pieces of information: the economic consequences of such storms (typhoons, hurricanes, and tropical cyclones) and the patterns of those storms in the years ahead. As it turns out, it’s that first bit—the economic consequences of storms—that was difficult to pin down.

For years economists have debated whether destructive storms are even bad for a country’s economy. To a non-economist, the ill effects of a storm might seem intuitive, but economists have a knack for finding plausible counterintuitive explanations. When it comes to a major natural disaster, they had four competing hypotheses: Such a disaster might permanently set a country back; it might temporarily derail growth only to get back on course down the road; it might lead to even greater growth, as new investment pours in to replace destroyed assets; or, possibly, it might yet even better, not only stimulating growth but also ridding the country of whatever outdated infrastructure was holding it back. Woohoo.

Hsiang and Jina

Interesting theories, but time to test them out against some empirical data. And that’s what economists Solomon M. Hsiang of Berkeley and Amir S. Jina of Columbia set out to do in a paper released this week.

Hsiang and Jina looked at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes observed from 1950 to 2008 and the economic fortunes of the countries they struck in the years that followed. With their data, Jina and Hsiang can decisively say: These storms are bad—very bad—for economic growth.

“There is no creative destruction,” Jina told me. “These disasters hit us and their effects sit around for a couple of decades.” He added, “Just demonstrating that that was true was probably the most interesting aspect for me to start with.”

Hsiang and Jina find that such storms (which they group under the umbrella term “cyclones”) can be as bad as some of the worst sorts of man-made economic challenges. A cyclone of a magnitude that a country would expect to see once every few years can slow down an economy on par with “a tax increase equal to one percent of GDP, a currency crisis, or a political crisis in which executive constraints are weakened.” For a really bad storm (a magnitude you’d expect to see around the world only once every 10 years), the damage will be similar “to losses from a banking crisis.” The very worst storms—the top percentile—”have losses that are larger and endure longer than any of those previously studied shocks.”

Here’s a little chart they made comparing these different sorts of disasters:

Hsiang and Jina

The effects are lasting: Overall, they find that “each additional meter per second of annual nationally-averaged wind exposure lowers per capita economic output 0.37 percent 20 years later” (emphasis added). Put simply, economies “do not recover in the long run.”

So what does this mean for a planet with a changing climate?

Projections for storm patterns as the planet’s climate morphs are, as Jina put it, “a very complex area.” How do you choose which model to rely on? You go with, Jina says, “the best”: those of Kerry Emanuel at MIT, world expert on cyclone patterns.

When they meshed their backward-looking empirical calculations with Emanuel’s forward-looking projections, the number they got was startling: $9.7 trillion—the present discounted value “of expected losses due to enhanced cyclone activity” if we don’t take any action to dial back greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the calculation they make at the 95 percent confidence interval, though the figure could range from $3.9 trillion to $15.5 trillion.)

“For me,” Jina says, “it is a very convincing argument to say that we need to mitigate as much climate change as we can.”

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End fossil fuel burning, save $71 trillion — and preserve civilization as we know it

by CurtBourget Posted on May 13, 2014

who likes money?

End fossil fuel burning, save $71 trillion — and preserve civilization as we know it

By

Shutterstock

High gas prices got you down? Your problems are a tiny fraction of those faced by our whole fossil fuel–addicted global society.

A new report from the International Energy Agency considers the cost of remaining hooked on antiquated, polluting, and climate-changing energy sources.

First, here’s what might seem to be bad news from the new report: It would cost the world $44 trillion to end our fossil fuel addiction by 2050 and switch to clean energy. Worse, this figure is $8 trillion higher than the IEA’s last estimate, published two years ago. Expected costs have risen because we’ve delayed the process of switching over to climate-friendly energy sources.

And now the good news: We can save $115 trillion in fuel costs by 2050 if we move away from dirty energy, making for net savings of $71 trillion.

“Growing use of coal globally is overshadowing progress in renewable energy deployment, and the emissions intensity of the electricity system has not changed in 20 years despite some progress in some regions,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven. “A radical change of course at the global level is long overdue.”

Greenpeace put out its own energy report on Monday, in concert with international renewable energy groups. The Energy [R]evolution report, which is focused on the U.S., found that we could save $6 trillion by switching to renewables by 2050. That’s compared with pursuing the unambitious fossil fuel–heavy energy mix forecast by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in its 2013 Annual Energy Outlook.

Sven Teske, one of the authors of the Greenpeace report, told Grist that plummeting prices for solar panels and wind turbines mean that the barriers for an energy revolution of this sort are not financial or technological — they are political. They are the result of fossil fuel industries and outdated utility companies desperately fighting against the forced obsolescence of their assets.

“This is not something that is completely crazy; this is something that’s possible,” Teske said. “In the expert arena, this is accepted. But we realize that we’re not very close to the public opinion right now — especially not in the U.S.”


Source
Energy Technology Perspectives 2014 — Harnessing Electricity’s Potential, International Energy Agency
Energy [R]evolution 2014: A Sustainable USA Energy Outlook, Greenpeace

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Republican’s bill calls for weather forecasting, not climate forecasting

by qiuyz4ye Posted on April 1, 2014

Republican’s bill calls for weather forecasting, not climate forecasting

By

Scott Gentzen

If Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) were a squirrel, he’d have starved over the winter.

Like a maladapted rodent that’s too short-sighted to save any nuts for the lean season ahead, the climate denier is sponsoring legislation that would force NOAA to focus on short-term weather forecasting at the expense of long-term climate modeling. The Hill reports that the bill, which now has 13 Republican and seven Democratic cosponsors, could get its first real hearing this week.

Bridenstine introduced the bill after 48 Oklahomans were killed by a brutal string of tornadoes last spring. “My state has seen all too many times the destructive power of tornadoes and severe weather,” Bridenstine said at the time. Then he staged a bizarre tirade on the House floor in which he demanded that President Barack Obama apologize for spending “30 times as much money on global warming research as he does on weather forecasting and warning.”

That would be quite the funding imbalance, were it true. But it’s not. The figure is just plain wrong.

Scientists have not concluded whether there is a link between climate change and tornadoes, but Stanford University researchers reported last year that climate change could cause the meteorological conditions that would lead to tornadoes and thunderstorms occurring more often.

More research into the potential climate-tornado link could help Bridenstine’s state properly prepare for extreme weather of the future. But the lawmaker seems more interested in squirreling around in the politics of the absurd than in finding out what hazards the future might hold in store for Oklahoma.


Source
GOP: Predict storms, not climate change, The Hill

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Republican’s bill calls for weather forecasting, not climate forecasting

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