Tag Archives: germany

Trump admin asked for public comment on the $70 park fee. THE PEOPLE RESPONDED.

Common guesses include China, which is spending trillions to clean up transit, power plants, and factories. Or Germany, which has gone all-in on renewable energy. But the best answer might be the United Kingdom.

China’s emissions are still rising, and Germany’s are down 23 percent since 1990. Meanwhile, Britain has driven down its emissions by 43 percent since 1990, according to provisional data released Thursday. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Scott Burger helpfully turned the data into a graph:

So, has the U.K. simply moved its emissions to China by closing down the Sheffield steel plants and buying imported steel? Not quite — its overall emissions based on import consumption are down as well. (Though it’s true that the country’s traditional manufacturing sector has taken a hit, as you would know if you’ve seen The Full Monty.)

Of course, having low carbon emissions in the first place is better than polluting a bunch and making big improvements after the fact. All rich countries have pumped more than their share of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But the Brits have provided a model for maintaining all the modern creature comforts while kicking their carbon habit.

How did they do it? Basically, clean energy replaced a lot of coal, industry put a lid on super pollutants, and dumps captured more methane.

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Trump admin asked for public comment on the $70 park fee. THE PEOPLE RESPONDED.

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Seven Elements That Changed the World – John Browne

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Seven Elements That Changed the World

An Adventure of Ingenuity and Discovery

John Browne

Genre: History

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: February 4, 2014

Publisher: Pegasus Books

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


From iron to uranium, titanium to silicon, this is “a wide-ranging look at scientific progress. It’s also a lot of fun” ( The Wall Street Journal). Iron. Carbon. Gold. Silver. Uranium. Titanium. Silicon. These elements of the periodic table have shaped our lives and our world, in ways both good and bad. Combining history, science, and politics, this “lively, educational examination of civilization’s building blocks” reveals the fascinating story ( Publishers Weekly ). With carbon, we can access heat, light, and mobility at the flick of a switch. Silicon enables us to communicate across the globe in an instant. Uranium is both productive (nuclear power) and destructive (nuclear bombs). Iron is the bloody weapon of war, but also the economic tool of peace. And our desire for alluring gold is the foundation of global trade—but it has also led to the death of millions. Explaining how titanium pervades modern consumer culture and how an innovative new form of carbon could be starting a technology revolution,  Seven Elements That Changed the World  is an adventure in human passion, ingenuity, and discovery—and the latest chapter in a journey that is far from over. “The human quest for knowledge has led to extraordinary progress. This book forces us to confront these realities and does so in a unique and fascinating way. It weaves science and humanity together in a way that gives us new insight. This is an expertly crafted book by a unique thinker.” —Tony Blair “John Browne uses seven elements, the building blocks of the physical world, to explore a multitude of worlds beyond. A lively story that enables us to see the essential elements of modern life in a new and highly engaging way.” —Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Quest “Part popular science, part history, part memoir, these pages are infused with insight and lifted by the innate optimism of a scientist.” —Brian Cox, physicist, broadcaster, and author of The Quantum Universe “An admirable popular science account of how iron, carbon, gold, silver, uranium, titanium, and silicon affect our lives . . . An expert on carbon (i.e., oil), Browne relies on the public library for much information but mixes in his travels and anecdotes from an impressive career to produce a lively, educational examination of civilization’s building blocks.” — Publishers Weekly John Browne was born in Germany in 1948 and joined BP as a university apprentice in 1966, rising to group chief executive from 1995 to 2007, where he built a reputation as a visionary leader, regularly voted the most admired businessman by his peers. This is his first book.

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Seven Elements That Changed the World – John Browne

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Can Angela Merkel hold the Paris Agreement together? The pope hopes so.

This week, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office announced a new initiative to combat climate change–augmented extreme heat in the city. It comes down to: Plant a tree! Make a palThose are actually not bad ideas. 

The $106 million package — dubbed Cool Neighborhoods NYC, which, yikes — will largely go to tree-planting across more heatwave-endangered communities in the South Bronx, Northern Manhattan, and Central Brooklyn. Funding will also further develop the unpronounceable NYC °CoolRoofs program, which aims to cover 2.7 million square feet of city roofs with foliage.

But, to me, the more noteworthy component of the plan is Be A Buddy NYC — again, yikes — which “promotes community cohesion” as a means of climate resilience.

“A heat emergency is not the time to identify vulnerable residents,” explains the Mayor’s Office’s report. “Rather, it is important to build social networks that can help share life-saving information prior to such an emergency, and can reach out to at-risk neighbors during an extreme heat event.”

The new policy supports the argument that this whole community engagement thing is a crucial tactic in the fight against climate change.

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Can Angela Merkel hold the Paris Agreement together? The pope hopes so.

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Charles Murray Still Convinced That Whites Are Smarter Than Blacks

Mother Jones

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I didn’t realize that Charles Murray was still talking about his belief that African-Americans are genetically less intelligent than whites. But he is. Over at Vox, Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett report on a two-hour podcast he did recently with Sam Harris:

The consensus, he says, is that IQ exists; that it is extraordinarily important to life outcomes of all sorts; that it is largely heritable; and that we don’t know of any interventions that can improve the part that is not heritable. The consensus also includes the observation that the IQs of black Americans are lower, on average, than that of whites, and — most contentiously — that this and other differences among racial groups is based at least in part in genetics.

I’ve read The Bell Curve, so I’m not just talking out of my ass about it. And it’s a weird book. The vast bulk of it is about the first five bolded items above, which really are part of the scientific consensus. You can argue the details, but it’s safe to say that intelligence is real; it’s important; it’s partly genetically heritable; it’s difficult to change; and blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites. The evidence in The Bell Curve on these scores is fine. But then the book gets to a couple of chapters about the genetic basis of the black-white IQ gap, and suddenly the evidence gets very, very fuzzy. In fact, I want to share a brief boxed item included on page 310:

The German Story

One of the intriguing studies arguing against a large genetic component to IQ differences came about thanks to the Allied occupation of Germany following World War II, when about 4,000 illegitimate children of mixed racial origin were born to German women. A German researcher tracked down 264 children of black servicemen and constructed a comparison group of 83 illegitimate offspring of white occupation troops. The results showed no overall difference in average IQ. The actual IQs of the fathers were unknown, and therefore a variety of selection factors cannot be ruled out. The study is inconclusive but certainly consistent with the suggestion the B/W difference is largely environmental.

In one sense, I applaud Murray and his co-author for including this. At the same time, they spend no time engaging with it in the text of the book. But they should: it’s only one study, and as they suggest, it has some missing pieces. Still, it’s one of the very few studies of African-American and white American children raised in middle-class environments outside of America. The fact that it shows no difference between black and white children is pretty significant—especially since it’s highly unlikely that any of these children received any kind of special treatment.

I don’t want to pretend that this study is definitive. It’s not. But a single disconfirming case is all you need to demonstrate that the black-white IQ gap is entirely non-biological, and this one is pretty close.

It’s not impossible that there’s a biological difference in intelligence between blacks and whites. That’s fundamentally a scientific question, and it hasn’t been conclusively proven one way or the other. But the effect of American culture on blacks is so toxic that it’s all but impossible to believe that any conclusions drawn in a study of Americans can ever be free of environmental contamination. After all, the Irish used to have low IQs. Jews used to have low IQs. And everyone was quite sure it was due to biology. But when anti-Irish and anti-Semitic animus died out, their IQs increased to normal levels. Amazing, isn’t it?

Maybe eventually Murray will find his long-sought gene complexes for cognitive ability, and will be able to show that there really is a genetic difference between blacks and whites. But I doubt it. The evidence just doesn’t point in that direction. Maybe in ten or twenty years we’ll know for sure.

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Charles Murray Still Convinced That Whites Are Smarter Than Blacks

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The New York Times Has Imported the Ethics of the Wall Street Journal

Mother Jones

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As you may know, the New York Times hired Bret Stephens a couple of weeks ago as a new columnist on their op-ed page. Stephens is a conservative who previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, and he’s a climate…something. Climate denier? Climate skeptic? In the past he was probably closer to being a denier, but these days he’s softened and is now a skeptic.

In any case, his hiring set off a wave of outrage among progressives. But I sort of shrugged. The guy’s a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all, and being a climate skeptic is practically a guild requirement among conservatives. If you don’t allow climate skeptics on your op-ed page, you’re going to have a hard time finding any conservative voices.

Then he wrote his first column, and he jumped straight into the maw. It was a pretty bad column, basically saying that, hey, scientists have been wrong before, so maybe they’re wrong this time. That was it—except for a single factual statement, which he botched and had to have corrected. I sighed. Can’t we just change the subject to how tax cuts always pay for themselves?

No we can’t. Stephens’ second column was about climate change again. It was essentially a variant of the first column: sometimes scientists have been wrong about how to reduce greenhouse gases, so maybe they’re still wrong and we don’t even know how to do it. This is tedious, lazy, and sloppy, but it turns out it was more than that. One of his exhibits was Germany’s nationwide effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s been a failure:

Yikes. As Stephens says, “emissions are almost exactly what they were in 2009.”

But wait. Remember those global warming charts that carefully started in the year 1998, an unusually warm El Niño year, to show that warming had stopped dead in its tracks? That was literally the only starting year that gave this illusion, and climate deniers gleefully used it for over a decade until they finally had to stop thanks to the warming of the past few years, which smashed past all the old records.

Well, James Wimberley points out that Stephens did the same thing: he started with the Great Recession year of 2009, when GHG emissions were unusually low. Here’s the full run of data since 1990:

As you can see, 2009 is literally the only year that gives the illusion of Germany making no progress. So that’s the year he used. This is yahoo hucksterism at its worst.

It’s also something that columnists imbibe with the drinking water at the Journal editorial page. Hardly a piece goes by that doesn’t include some kind of egregious statistical flim-flam. This points toward the real mistake the New York Times made. It’s not that they hired a climate skeptic. You can hardly avoid that among conservatives these days. The real mistake is that they imported the ethics of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I don’t know if you can train that out of a person once they’ve spent more than a decade there.

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The New York Times Has Imported the Ethics of the Wall Street Journal

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This GIF Compares Trump’s Overseas Travel With That of Previous Presidents

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump has been dubbed the “homebody” president. In his first 100 days in office, he has visited his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida seven times but has rarely ventured elsewhere—and certainly not overseas. Not only has he traveled less domestically than the past two presidents, he hasn’t left the country once since becoming president, taking his “America First” approach quite literally.

For comparison, the animation above shows all of the last four presidents visited at least one country within their first 100 days in office. President Barack Obama made an appearance in nine countries, and George H.W. Bush went to four, according to the Office of the Historian, a government office within the State Department.

Here’s where the presidents went:

George H.W. Bush

Canada
Japan
China
Korea

Bill Clinton

Canada

George W. Bush

Mexico
Canada

Barack Obama

Canada
United Kingdom
France
Germany
Czech Republic
Turkey
Iraq
Mexico
Trinidad and Tobago

But, the drought is soon to break. Trump is planning his first international trip as president in May for a NATO meeting in Brussels. Considering he previously said the organization was “obsolete,” before saying it wasn’t, Trump’s first trip overseas will hardly be a cakewalk.

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This GIF Compares Trump’s Overseas Travel With That of Previous Presidents

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We just hit 410 ppm of CO2. Welcome to a whole new world.

That’s as much as Germany’s yearly emissions.

It’s hardly the first example of a business charging ahead on climate change mitigation while governments dither. Pretty much every giant corporation has made a commitment to reduce its emissions: food titan Unilever, everything maker General Electric, and IKEA (where you get your OMLOPPs), and on and on.

But what Walmart does matters. The company is such a behemoth that its policy changes trigger transformation around the globe. Walmart is the 10th largest economic entity in the world, after Canada, so this effort, dubbed “Project Gigaton,” is akin to every Canadian signing on to a strict sustainability plan.

Most of Walmart’s environmental footprint comes from other businesses extracting raw materials to manufacture Walmart’s products. So it will be pushing its suppliers to clean up their act, aiming to slash a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain.

The Environmental Defense Fund has been working with Walmart to cut its emissions for years, and so there’s a track record here. In 2010, Walmart pledged to cut 28 million metric tons (like removing 6 million cars from the road), then surpassed that goal in five years. Now, they’re aiming to meet a goal 35 times larger, by 2030.

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We just hit 410 ppm of CO2. Welcome to a whole new world.

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Walmart just pledged to eliminate a billion tons of greenhouse gas.

That’s as much as Germany’s yearly emissions.

It’s hardly the first example of a business charging ahead on climate change mitigation while governments dither. Pretty much every giant corporation has made a commitment to reduce its emissions: food titan Unilever, everything maker General Electric, and IKEA (where you get your OMLOPPs), and on and on.

But what Walmart does matters. The company is such a behemoth that its policy changes trigger transformation around the globe. Walmart is the 10th largest economic entity in the world, after Canada, so this effort, dubbed “Project Gigaton,” is akin to every Canadian signing on to a strict sustainability plan.

Most of Walmart’s environmental footprint comes from other businesses extracting raw materials to manufacture Walmart’s products. So it will be pushing its suppliers to clean up their act, aiming to slash a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain.

The Environmental Defense Fund has been working with Walmart to cut its emissions for years, and so there’s a track record here. In 2010, Walmart pledged to cut 28 million metric tons (like removing 6 million cars from the road), then surpassed that goal in five years. Now, they’re aiming to meet a goal 35 times larger, by 2030.

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Walmart just pledged to eliminate a billion tons of greenhouse gas.

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Germany Unhappy Over New Steel Tariffs

Mother Jones

Germany is upset at new tariffs on carbon and alloy steel cut-to-length plate:

Germany’s foreign minister on Friday morning said the Trump administration is taking a “dangerous step” after the Commerce Department announced a tariff on imports of foreign steel, indicating the tax could become a new source of conflict with the powerful U.S. ally and trading partner.

….“The U.S. Government is apparently prepared to provide American companies with unfair competitive advantages over European and other producers, even if such action violates international trade law,” Gabriel’s statement read. “I very much fail to comprehend the decision.”

FWIW, none of this is really a Trump thing. The International Trade Commission began investigating dumping claims against Austria, Belgium, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, and Turkey in early 2016, and finished up its work before Trump took office. The vote determining that these countries were dumping product in the US below cost was unanimous.

I don’t know what the Obama or Clinton administrations would have done if they’d had the final decision on this, but my guess is that they would have done the same thing as Trump, and the targets of the tariffs would have complained and threatened to take the case to the WTO. So there’s nothing much new here. It’s just another steel tariff. Because, you know, all the previous ones over the past four decades have been so successful.

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Germany Unhappy Over New Steel Tariffs

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In Private, It Turns Out That Trump Is Pretty Much the Same

Mother Jones

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Roger Cohen writes about the Trump-Merkel meeting a couple of weeks ago:

When Donald Trump met Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany earlier this month, he put on one of his most truculent and ignorant performances. He wanted money—piles of it—for Germany’s defense, raged about the financial killing China was making from last year’s Paris climate accord and kept “frequently and brutally changing the subject when not interested, which was the case with the European Union.”

…Trump’s preparedness was roughly that of a fourth grader…Trump knew nothing of the proposed European-American deal known as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, little about Russian aggression in Ukraine or the Minsk agreements, and was so scatterbrained that German officials concluded that the president’s daughter Ivanka, who had no formal reason to be there, was the more prepared and helpful.

Merkel is not one to fuss. But Trump’s behavior appalled her entourage and reinforced a conclusion already reached about this presidency in several European capitals: It is possible to do business with Trump’s national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, but these officials are flying blind because above them at the White House rages a whirlwind of incompetence and ignorance.

I’m sure glad that Republicans are restoring the respect for America that we lost after eight years of that empty suit Barack Obama.

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In Private, It Turns Out That Trump Is Pretty Much the Same

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