Tag Archives: given

Report: Repeal or “Reform” of the Renewable Fuel Standard Would Doom Advanced Biofuels

by Posted on April 2, 2015

back

Report: Repeal or “Reform” of the Renewable Fuel Standard Would Doom Advanced Biofuels

Posted 2 April 2015 in

National

After years of innovation and investment, the cellulosic biofuels industry is now deploying the lowest carbon, most innovative fuel in the world at commercial scale. A new report from Third Way details the promise and progress of this growing sector, and warns that attempts to repeal or “reform” the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) could stifle innovation and threaten a potentially transformative industry.

Since its passage, the Renewable Fuel Standard has encouraged billions of dollars in R&D as well as additional investments into cellulosic biofuels, the next generation of clean, renewable fuel.

The widespread production of cellulosic biofuels, made from fibrous, non-edible plant material, would allow the U.S. to lower its greenhouse gas emissions, reduce its reliance on oil, and create new opportunities for growth in the agriculture and technology sectors.

While the federal government has aggressively encouraged the development of cellulosic biofuels for the past decade, this emerging sector has recently reached the cusp of success.

Key to this progress has been the existing corn ethanol industry. As the report notes, the corn ethanol industry has helped overcome the technological and economic challenges that have stifled many cellulosic projects. Efforts to alter the eligibility of corn-based biofuels for meeting the requirements of the RFS would be damaging to the emerging advanced biofuels sector. The report notes that:

“While proposals to gut only the corn section of the RFS may not be intended to endanger the development of cellulosic ethanol, this is exactly what would occur. Given the nuances of current fuel markets and how they interact with the RFS, these proposals will discourage cellulosic ethanol investment by companies with a large stake in corn ethanol — the very companies that are helping to commercialize this long-sought fuel.”

The Third Way report offers yet another example of how the RFS is a key part of building an energy policy that encourages innovation, creates jobs, and enhances our national security.

Read the full report.

Fuels America News & Stories

Fuels
Credit: 

Report: Repeal or “Reform” of the Renewable Fuel Standard Would Doom Advanced Biofuels

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Report: Repeal or “Reform” of the Renewable Fuel Standard Would Doom Advanced Biofuels

Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

by PhilDrechsler Posted on March 27, 2015

Mother Jones

Outlet Creek watershed in Northern California’s Mendocino County. Scott Bauer

Northern California pot farmers are using up all of the water that normally supports key populations of the region’s federally protected salmon and steelhead trout.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a new study, published last week in the journal PLOS One, that examined four California watersheds where salmon and trout are known to spawn. In the three watersheds with intensive pot cultivation, illegal marijuana farms literally sucked up all of the water during the streams’ summer low-flow period, leaving nothing to support the fish.

Author Scott Bauer, a biologist with the state department of fish and wildlife, estimated the size and location of outdoor and greenhouse pot farms by looking at Google Earth images and accompanying drug enforcement officers on raids. He did not include “indoor” grows—marijuana grown under lamps in buildings.

After visiting 32 marijuana greenhouses in eight locations and averaging the results, Bauer extrapolated his findings to all greenhouses in the study area—virtually nothing else is grown in greenhouses in this part of the country. The sites contained marijuana plants at a density of about one per square meter, with each plant (taking waste and other factors into account) using about six gallons of water a day. Overall, he calculated, pot operations within the study yielded 112,000 plants, and consumed 673,000 gallons of water every day.

And that is water the area’s fish badly need. The Coho salmon population is listed as threatened under both state and federal Endangered Species Acts, and is designated as a key population to maintain or improve as part of the state’s recovery plan.

Bauer collected his data last year, at a time when California’s drought had already become its worst in more than 1,200 years. When I spoke to him at the time, he told me that pot farming had surpassed logging and development to become the single biggest threat to the area’s salmon. Now that that the drought is expected to extend into a fourth year, the same streams could run dry again this summer, and remain so for an even longer period of time.

Overall, the outdoor and greenhouse grows consume more than 60 million gallons of water a day during the growing season—50 percent more than is used by all the residents of San Francisco.

“Clearly, water demands for the existing level of marijuana cultivation in many Northern California watersheds are unsustainable and are likely contributing to the decline of sensitive aquatic species in the region,” Bauer’s study concludes. “Given the specter of climate change”—and the attendant rise of megadroughts—”the current scale of marijuana cultivation in Northern California could be catastrophic for aquatic species.”

Source: 

Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Illegal Pot Farms Are Literally Sucking California Salmon Streams Dry

Why Is Closed Captioning So Bad?

by BridgetYGFX Posted on March 22, 2015

Mother Jones

Over at Marginal Revolution, commenter Jan A. asks:

Why is the (global) state of subtitling and closed captioning so bad?

a/ Subtitling and closed captioning are extremely efficient ways of learning new languages, for example for immigrants wanting to learn the language of their new country.

b/ Furthermore video is now offered on phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, televisions… but very frequently these videos cannot be played with sound on (a phone on public transport, a laptop in public places, televisions in busy places like bars or shops,…).

c/ And most importantly of all, it is crucial for the deaf and hard of hearing.

So why is it so disappointingly bad? Is it just the price (lots of manual work still, despite assistive speech-to-text technologies)? Or don’t producers care?

I use closed captioning all the time even though I’m not really hard of hearing. I just have a hard time picking out dialog when there’s a lot of ambient noise in the soundtrack—which is pretty routine these days. So I have a vested interest in higher quality closed captioning. My beef, however, isn’t so much with the text itself, which is usually pretty close to the dialog, but with the fact that there are multiple closed captioning standards and sometimes none of them work properly, with the captions either being way out of sync with the dialog or else only partially available. (That is, about one sentence out of three actually gets captioned.)

Given the (a) technical simplicity and low bandwidth required for proper closed captions, and (b) the rather large audience of viewers with hearing difficulties, it surprises me that these problems are so common. I don’t suppose that captioning problems cost TV stations a ton of viewers, but they surely cost them a few here and there. Why is it so hard to get right?

POSTSCRIPT: Note that I’m not talking here about real-time captioning, as in live news and sports programming. I understand why it’s difficult to do that well.

View the original here: 

Why Is Closed Captioning So Bad?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Is Closed Captioning So Bad?

What the Broadband Industry Really Needs Isn’t Net Neutrality. It Needs Competition.

by QJYBerthafcqn Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

Will strong net neutrality rules reduce the incentive for cable companies to invest in high-speed network infrastructure? Maybe, though similar rules certainly haven’t had that effect in the cell phone market. Of course, the cell phone market is intensely competitive, and that’s probably the real difference between the two. As Tim Lee notes today, Comcast’s cable division is immensely profitable—certainly profitable enough to fund plenty of new high-speed infrastructure. But why should they bother?

Comcast’s high profits are evidence of high barriers to entry in the broadband industry. Ordinarily, a company that consistently made billions of dollars in profits would attract new competitors seeking to capture a piece of the market.

But with a few exceptions — such as Google’s projects in Kansas City and elsewhere — this hasn’t really happened. In most parts of Comcast’s service territory, consumers’ only alternative for broadband service is the local phone company.

Conversely, Comcast doesn’t seem interested in trying to steal market share from rivals. Comcast could expand into the service territory of neighboring cable companies or it could spend money building a next-generation fiber optic network the way Verizon and Google have done. Instead, they’ve chosen to spend more money rewarding shareholders than investing in their networks.

Given current political realities, strong net neutrality rules are a good idea. But an even better idea would be to forget about net neutrality and open up local markets to real competition. I think we’d find out pretty quickly that broadband suppliers have plenty of money for infrastructure upgrades if the alternative is a steadily shrinking market share as competitors start eating their lunch.

Competition is good. Big companies don’t like it, and our approach to antitrust enforcement has unfortunately lost sight of competition as a sufficient raison d’être. That’s too bad. It’s the cure for a lot of ills and a way to keep the rest of the regulatory state relatively light. It’s well past time for us to rediscover this.

Credit: 

What the Broadband Industry Really Needs Isn’t Net Neutrality. It Needs Competition.

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, oven, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What the Broadband Industry Really Needs Isn’t Net Neutrality. It Needs Competition.

When Will China Finally Get Tired of Propping Up North Korea?

by Lazaro7386 Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

The United States might not have much leverage over North Korea, but China does. Virtually all of North Korea’s external trade is with China, and Chinese support is pretty much all that keeps North Korea from collapsing. This means that when the United States wants to pressure Pyongyang, it has limited options as long as Chinese support of the regime remains strong. But how long will that support last? Over the weekend, Jane Perlez of the New York Times reported that it might finally be faltering:

When a retired Chinese general with impeccable Communist Party credentials recently wrote a scathing account of North Korea as a recalcitrant ally headed for collapse and unworthy of support, he exposed a roiling debate in China about how to deal with the country’s young leader, Kim Jong-un.

….The parlous state of the relationship between North Korea and China was on display again Wednesday when Pyongyang commemorated the third anniversary of the death of Kim Jong-il, the father of the current leader, Kim Jong-un, and failed to invite a senior Chinese official.

The last time a Chinese leader visited North Korea was in July 2013 when Vice President Li Yuanchao tried to patch up relations, and pressed North Korea, after its third nuclear test in February 2013, to slow down its nuclear weapons program. Mr. Li failed in that quest….After the vice president’s visit, relations plummeted further, entering the icebox last December when China’s main conduit within the North Korean government, Jang Song-thaek, a senior official and the uncle of Kim Jong-un, was executed in a purge. In July, President Xi Jinping snubbed North Korea, visiting South Korea instead. Mr. Xi has yet to visit North Korea, and is said to have been infuriated by a third nuclear test by North Korea in February 2013, soon after Kim Jong-un came to power.

So does this mean that China might help us out in our current dispute with North Korea over the Sony hack? Probably not—or not much, anyway. North Korea’s very weakness is also its greatest strength: if it collapses, two things would probably happen. First, there would be a flood of refugees trying to cross the border into China. Second, the Korean peninsula would likely become unified and China would find itself with a US ally right smack on its border. Given the current state of Sino-American relations, that’s simply not something China is willing to risk.

Not yet, anyway. But who knows? There are worse things in the world than a refugee crisis, and relations with the US have the potential to warm up in the future. One of these days North Korea may simply become too large a liability for China to protect. If that ever happens, North Korea’s lifespan can probably be measured in years or months.

Original article: 

When Will China Finally Get Tired of Propping Up North Korea?

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on When Will China Finally Get Tired of Propping Up North Korea?

Another Side Effect of Climate Change and El Niño Events? Shorter Kids.

by NidiaMathews Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

The weather pattern known as El Niño could be stunting kids’ growth—even years after the extreme storms abate, a new study finds. Researchers at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health, led by assistant professor of medicine and international health William Checkley, say they have conducted the first study on the long-term health consequences of El Niño weather systems. According to the paper published today in BioMed Central, children born around the time of the severe 1997-’98 El Niño living in coastal Peru, one of the regions hardest hit by the weather pattern, are significantly shorter for their age than children born before El Niño hit.

El Niño weather patterns occur in the equatorial Pacific region, often off the northern coasts of Peru and Ecuador. During El Niño patterns, the region’s warm water, which is usually skimmed away by the wind and pushed towards Asia and Australia, doesn’t circulate like it’s meant to. Instead, it builds up and heats the air above it, creating clouds. The changes in water temperatures and cloud formations lead to higher chances of torrential rains, inhospitably warm fish habitats, and intense flooding in the Americas. This tends to happen every three to seven years, and begins slowly in the summer, peaking in the winter.

Recent findings suggest that climate change will not necessarily disrupt this cycle, but might increase the intensity of the weather events when they do occur. Checkley noted that climate change was not a focus in the study, but confirmed that its impact may worsen future El Niño events.

Which is bad news for children living in coastal areas heavily affected by El Niño weather events. That’s because this extreme weather can make food hard to come by, and increase the likelihood of infection. “Lack of food, food insecurity and increased infections are all likely drivers to a decreased growth in children,” Checkley told me. The study zeroed in on children living in rural villages in coastal Peru, where food insecurity and poverty are at much higher levels than in places like California, where El Niño weather patterns can also settle.

The team measured the height, weight, and fat, and muscle of a random sample of 2,095 children born between 1991 and 2001 in Tumbes, Peru—a city on the northwestern coast. A decade after the extreme ’97 El Niño, in November and December of 2008 and 2009, they found that, on average, the children born during and shortly after El Niño were shorter and had less lean mass, or body weight minus fat, than children born before the event.

The study mentions that in years following the extreme weather patterns, some children were able to gradually recover losses in height, but that children in homes that were heavily flooded were not able to catch up. “Even three years after the initial disaster, it still affected children’s nutritional status,” reads a press release about the study.

Epidemiologists consider stature a “surrogate measure” of chronic malnutrition and disease for certain age groups and genders; stunted growth can be an early predictor of delayed motor skills, cognitive impairment, and higher risk pregnancies later in life. “Just as rings act as indicators of natural disaster experienced by a tree throughout its life, exposure to severe adverse weather events in utero or in early life can leave a long-lasting mark on growth and development in young children,” the study reads.

According to Madeleine Thompson, a scientist specializing in climate and health at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, it is “highly likely” that these results are “indicative of a large scale impact of an El Niño related disaster.” She linked these results to a 2004 study of an El Niño related malaria epidemic in areas of Tanzania, where there was a “very significant impact” on infants’ birth weights as a result of the disease—an immediate health impact of El Niño.

Of course, the results are still too preliminary to indicate that El Niño alone stunted children’s growth. But the authors note that in interviews with focus groups, “community members did not cite other events occurring during the same period as El Niño that had such a destructive impact on their lives.” Checkley told me that his research squares with past studies of the public health consequences of El Niño events, which include increased risk of infection and social and emotional stress. Flooding and higher temperatures often lead to increased risk of contracting infectious diarrheal and respiratory diseases, especially in poor, overcrowded communities. These illnesses could prevent children from developing properly.

The researchers emphasize the need for further study, especially in light of climate change and the possibility of more and more intense El Niño cycles. The researchers believe that these studies can better help aid workers develop prevention strategies and target aid and response during these types of events. “Given El Niño’s cyclical nature this phenomenon may continue to negatively impact future generations,” said Checkley.

Excerpt from:

Another Side Effect of Climate Change and El Niño Events? Shorter Kids.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Another Side Effect of Climate Change and El Niño Events? Shorter Kids.

To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument

by WilliamBeaurega Posted on October 31, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Obamacare opponents outside the Supreme Court in March, 2014 Jay Mallin/ZUMA

The Supreme Court today is considering whether to hear a challenge to Obamacare that could deprive 8 million people of their newly acquired health insurance. If the court does decide to take the case, though, it will be buying into a legal argument that is frequently deployed by a different group of anti-Obama litigants—those who are trying to challenge the president’s citizenship.

The case, King v. Burwell, is one of a pair of lawsuits (the other is Halbig v. Burwell) seeking to strike a blow to the heart of the Affordable Care Act. As I explained last year:

The argument goes something like this: When Congress wrote the ACA, it said that premium subsidies would be available for certain qualifying citizens who were “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” (Emphasis added.) The law doesn’t say that those subsidies are available to people in the 34 states that declined to set up exchanges, where residents must utilize the now-infamously buggy Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange.

That’s where Obamacare opponents see a fatal flaw in the law. The plaintiffs in Halbig claim that they won’t be eligible for tax credits because their states didn’t start an exchange, so they won’t be able to afford insurance. As a result, they argue that they’ll be subject to the fine for not buying insurance, or to avoid the fine, they’ll have to pay a lot for insurance they don’t want. They want the court to block the IRS from implementing the law.

It’s a pretty audacious claim from a bunch of people who are, in fact, being helped quite a bit by Obamacare. One of the plaintiffs in Halbig is actually complaining about being forced to buy insurance that, with the subsidy, costs him $21 a year.

Putting those issues aside, though, the question for the Supreme Court today is whether to take up the King case. Obamacare opponents lost this case in July after it was argued before the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. The court found that the issues raised by the plaintiffs were indeed serious, and that the statute is vague because of what is essentially a drafting error in the text. But Supreme Court precedent, the judges said, requires them to give deference to regulatory agencies’ interpretation of laws passed by Congress. Those agencies, namely the IRS, have taken the view that Congress intended for everyone to be able to access subsidies, regardless of which exchange they use to buy insurance. (Most of the law’s drafters have endorsed that argument in amicus briefs.)

The Halbig case, however, was heard by a three-judge panel from a different appellate court, in Washington, DC. That panel, which included two conservative GOP appointees, rejected the IRS’s interpretation of the law by and ruled, in a 2-1 vote, that Congress’ screw-up makes the federal health care subsidies unlawful. Generally speaking, when appellate courts disagree in similar cases like this, it’s up to the US Supreme Court to resolve the conflict, and that’s exactly what the King plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to do.

But not long after the decision in Halbig, the full DC Circuit set aside the panel decision and agreed to hear the case en banc—meaning that every judge on the circuit will will have a vote. The case is set to be argued in December, and many observers believe the full court, which now includes several Obama appointees, will overturn the lower court ruling and agree with the 4th Circuit that the subsidies are permissible. So technically, there is no circuit split at the moment for the high court to resolve—an argument the government has made in its briefs to the court opposing a high court review.

But the King plaintiffs are arguing that the Supreme Court should take up the case now anyway—because, well, they think it’s really, really important to stop health care reform from moving forward in case it eventually turns out to be illegal. (They’re also arguing that the original DC Circuit panel decision creates a circuit split, but plenty of lawyers disagree with them.)

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the King plaintiffs write, “Given the self-evident enormous importance of the IRS Rule to the ongoing implementation of the ACA, to the immediate economic decisions of millions of Americans and thousands of businesses, and to the currently flowing billions of dollars in expenditures that the D.C. Circuit ruled illegal, the need for this Court’s review is plainly and uniquely urgent.”

That dire language, though, bears some resemblance to the legal rhetoric frequently employed by some of the nation’s most dogged litigators: the birthers—those people who’ve spent the past six years filing lawsuits trying to prove that President Obama is not an American citizen. In years of legal filings, they’ve repeatedly begged the court to rule on Obama’s “legitimacy”—even though every lower court has rejected their claims—because, you know, if it turns out that he’s not really a citizen, that’s a problem the court should fix right away.

Here’s just one example, from the Supreme Court petition in Charles Kerchner v. Barack Hussein Obama II:

If the President and Commander in Chief is ineligible for those offices, both our civilian and military sector need to know that as soon as possible. The President is the Commander in Chief of our military forces. Whether he is legitimate is also vital in maintaining the proper chain of command in our military and in giving legality to all military orders that emanate from him.

Since the President signs all acts passed by Congress into law, it is vitally important that the President be legitimately in power so as to give those laws domestic and international legality.

Ian Millhiser, a constitutional policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, says this sort of argument is common among not just birthers, but also tax protesters and other fringe litigants looking to kill off government programs. The Halbig and King plaintiffs, he says, are essentially saying, “Because we have created this crisis whereby filing this lawsuit we have raised the possibility that all of this disruption has happened, it is therefore imperative that you, Supreme Court, take this case to end all this disruption we have created.”

The problem with this line of argument, of course, is that it could be applied to any lawsuit, no matter how frivolous. That’s why Millhiser doesn’t think the Supreme Court is likely to take up the case, at least not until the full DC Circuit delivers its own ruling. A case doesn’t become worthy of Supreme Court review, he says, simply because the plaintiffs have cooked up a legal attack strategy that, if successful, “could lead to catastrophic consequences.” He’ll likely find out if he’s right on Monday, when the court could announce whether it’s taking the case.

Continue reading:

To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument

Sorry, Raw Sugar Is No Better For You Than Refined

by ShannaQuintero Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Along with plain white refined sugar, most hip coffee shops now offer “raw” sugar. I usually go with raw: The golden crystals and brown paper packets somehow make me think it’s more wholesome than the conventional white stuff, which, as highlighted in a previous Mother Jones investigation, many scientists now believe is far worse for you than the industry would have us think.

Sugar in the Raw, a leading raw sugar brand, suggests on its Frequently Asked Questions page that its product is indeed more wholesome. “White sugar is obtained by refining the sugarcane crystals to remove the molasses (and with that, trace nutrients),” it states. “Some nutritionists believe that the small amount of micronutrients retained in Sugar In The Raw® provides advantages over refined white sugar.” Raw sugar is also more expensive: On Amazon, a four-pound bag of Sugar in the Raw retails for $12.99, versus $3.25 for regular.

So is the raw stuff really more virtuous? Sugar in the Raw could not be reached for comment, but a spokeswoman for the Wholesome Sweeteners brand of raw sugar explained to me that, like refined sugar, raw—technically called Turbinado—sugar comes from sugarcane (refined sugar can also be derived from beets). The main difference between the two is in the boiling of the cane juice: The juice for refined sugar is boiled several times to remove all the molasses, whereas Turbinado sugar is boiled only once.

The residual molasses gives Turbinado sugar “some flavor and texture other than just sweetness,” says Katherine Zeratski, a registered dietitian with Mayo Clinic. But it doesn’t provide any significant nutrition. Refined and raw sugar are “calorically identical,” Zeratski notes. And while Turbinado sugar does contain calcium, iron, and potassium, it contains them in trace amounts. We used the USDA’s National Nutrient Database to calculate a few comparisons:

By Katie Rose Quandt

While one 2012 study found that molasses from sugar cane acted as an antioxidant in laboratory cell cultures, Kimber Stanhope, a University of California-Davis microbiologist who focuses on sugars, said she was unable to find any research suggesting the same effect for cells in the body. She emails: “Given the lack of scientific evidence that consumption of molasses has any health benefits in humans, and the fact that the molasses content of Turbinado sugar is very low, it is certainly a stretch to suggest that Turbinado sugar is healthier than refined sugar.”

There goes my virtuous latte.

View post:

Sorry, Raw Sugar Is No Better For You Than Refined

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sorry, Raw Sugar Is No Better For You Than Refined

Bad News For Obama: Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal

by FletcheBrandow Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

If you’re a politician, science is a bitch; it resists spin. And a new set of studies—about, of all things, a simple molecule known as CH4—show that President Obama’s climate change strategy is starting to unravel even as it’s being knit. To be specific: most of the administration’s theoretical gains in the fight against global warming have come from substituting natural gas for coal. But it looks now as if that doesn’t really help.

In a very real sense it’s not entirely the president’s fault. When Obama took office in 2008 he decided to deal with health care before climate change, in essence tackling the biggest remaining problem of the 20th century before teeing up the biggest challenge of the 21st. His team told environmentalists that they wouldn’t be talking about global warming, focusing instead on ‘green jobs.’ Obama did seize the opportunity offered by the auto industry bailout to demand higher mileage standards—a useful move, but one that will pay off slowly over the decades. Other than that, faced with a hostile Congress, he spent no political capital on climate.

Continue Reading »

More: 

Bad News For Obama: Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, Hagen, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized, Venta, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bad News For Obama: Fracking May Be Worse Than Burning Coal

The U.S. firefighting budget is almost gone, but the forests are still burning

by MyraWetter Posted on August 6, 2014

The U.S. firefighting budget is almost gone, but the forests are still burning

By

On Tuesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said we’ll likely use up our annual budget for fighting wildfires by the end of August, months before the fiscal year ends in October.

As apocalyptic as the fires that have raged in California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho this year may seem, it isn’t the first time we’ve found ourselves in this lamentable spot. In fact, it’s the seventh time we’ve burned through the budget over the past twelve years. And yet, the budget has stayed the same.

Which means that we’ve had to dip into the funds reserved for preventing fires. Which, along with climate change, means that we’re seeing bigger and bigger fires. Which means that fires end up costing more to put out. Which means … well, you get the picture. We’re creating a feedback loop that only serves to screw us over.

Given that wildfires are predicted to get bigger and badder, if we don’t rethink the budget now, that cycle will only intensify.

From Vox:

There are a couple of reasons why wildfires might be growing. Poor forest management has arguably played a role. In some areas, managers have suppressed smaller fires to protect nearby homes and let brush build up — making the forests more susceptible to massive blazes. Inadequate budgets are another big factor.

But the researchers noted that global warming is also a likely culprit, not least because wildfires are growing in virtually every region in the West.

“The really amazing thing is that we don’t just see an increase in one or two regions,” lead author Philip Dennison, a geographer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, told me in May. “We’re seeing it almost everywhere — in the mountain regions, in the Southwest. That tells us that something bigger is going on, and that thing appears to be climate change.”

But, as Grist’s Greg Hanscom wrote, “it’s more than just climate change that’s stoking these flames.”

More than a century of logging turned forests that were built to survive fires into tinderboxes of small, tightly packed trees. And many of our fire fighting efforts have only exacerbated the problem by allowing the fuels to build up further. Add a few hots days, a spark, and a little wind, and all hell breaks loose.

Given the rising costs of managing fires, Obama and some members of Congress have proposed that we prioritize preventing fires over extinguishing them. One thing is sure: If we don’t properly budget and manage our forests now, we’re only borrowing from our future.


Source
The US Forest Service is running out of money to fight wildfires, Vox

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

,

Politics

Read this article:

The U.S. firefighting budget is almost gone, but the forests are still burning

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The U.S. firefighting budget is almost gone, but the forests are still burning