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Oil companies want to get in on the action in Cuba

by Rufus08541345975 Posted on March 21, 2016

Oil companies want to get in on the action in Cuba

By on 21 Mar 2016 4:56 pmcommentsShare

It’s a new day for Cuba and the U.S.

A little more than a year after relations between the two nations officially started to thaw, President Obama on Sunday became the first U.S. president to visit the island nation since Calvin Coolidge. During a two-and-a-half-day visit, Obama is meeting with Cuban President Raúl Castro to discuss lifting the 1962 embargo as well as economic opportunities and human rights abuses, according to the White House. He’ll also attend a baseball game.

Obama isn’t the only one interested in Cuba. Big Business, including the oil industry, is eyeing the island nation as well. One hundred and twenty business leaders converged upon the country to discuss offshore oil development last October. While American companies are still barred from owning oil assets in Cuba, U.S. firms can be involved in drilling and safety operations. Cuba might welcome that, as Bloomberg Government reports:

Cheap oil has forced Venezuela to scale back its support for Cuba, and that’s prodding the officially Communist nation to open up to foreign investment and build on its rapprochement with the U.S., according to a Moody’s report in December. And opening up may mean boosting the 50,000 barrels a day of oil now produced there. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated that 4.6 billion barrels of crude oil are lurking in the North Cuba Basin, with most of it within 50 miles of Cuba’s coast; that’s one-fifth of what USGS estimated to exist in the Arctic seas off Alaska. But this oil — if it’s really there — wouldn’t need to be produced in some of the world’s harshest conditions, and would be just a short barge voyage away from U.S. Gulf-area refineries.

Of course, the prospect of more offshore development in Cuban waters isn’t exactly comforting to environmentalists. Drilling could happen as close as 50 miles off the coast of Florida, so a big oil spill there could certainly reach American shores. Plus there’s the whole climate change thing to worry about. Cuba, a low-lying island, is especially vulnerable to sea-level rise.

An official White House fact sheet about Obama’s trip to Cuba mentions climate change and the two countries’ intentions to work together on fighting and adapting to it — and makes no mention of oil or gas. “The United States and Cuba recognize the threats posed by climate change to both our countries,” it reads, “including worsening impacts such as continued sea-level rise, the alarming acidification of our oceans, and the striking incidence of extreme weather events. Cooperative action to address this challenge is more critical than ever.”

Addressing this challenge may be critical, as both Washington and Havana are aware, but as oil companies show an increased interest in Cuba’s oil reserves, we may, once again, see the triumph of profit over progress. It’s happened everywhere else. Why not Cuba as well?

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Oil companies want to get in on the action in Cuba

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It’s Old People Who Have More Debt, Not the Young

by LouisGoldstein Posted on March 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ylan Mui points today to a February note from the New York Fed called “The Graying of American Debt.” Here’s the basic picture:

The student debt story is about what you’d expect: young consumers have more of it, but their total debt load is lower than it was in 2003 because they have lower mortgage debt. Basically, they’re trading student debt for mortgage debt.

But older age groups make up for it with higher debt than they had in 2003. This is especially true at age 65, where total debt is up by about a third over the past decade. So what does it all mean?

The close relationship between credit score and age…reflects an average credit history that is considerably stronger among older borrowers….Further, older borrowers’ income streams are comparatively stable, and they have greater experience with credit. Survey of Consumer Finances data show that net worth levels for households with heads who are age 65 and older in 2013 are quite similar to their 2004-07 levels. This holds despite the evidence, seen in the second chart in this post, that consumers are holding substantially more per capita debt at age 65 and beyond. If history is any guide, then, we expect older borrowers to make more reliable payments. Indeed, our data show no clear trend toward higher delinquency at older ages as average balances at older ages have increased.

Hence the aging of the American borrower bodes well for the stability of outstanding consumer loans. At the same time, the likely combination of muted credit access and lower demand for credit that we observe among our younger borrowers may well have consequences for growth. The graying of American debt that we observe between 2003 and 2015, then, might be interpreted as a shift toward greater balance sheet stability, and away from credit-fueled consumption growth.

More stability, less growth. Just what old people want. But is it good for the country?

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It’s Old People Who Have More Debt, Not the Young

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Venezuela sends country on forced vacation after hydroelectric power dries up

by WoodrowMcCart Posted on March 16, 2016

Venezuela sends country on forced vacation after hydroelectric power dries up

By on 16 Mar 2016commentsShare

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

Venezuela is ordering businesses, factories, government buildings, and offices to shut down for an entire week as an extreme energy-saving measure in an oil-rich country that’s running out of power.

The forced shutdown, which begins next Monday, was announced by President Nicolas Maduro during an “anti-imperialist” rally. Initially, it was ordered for government offices and schools, but on Tuesday it was expanded to most of the private sector.

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Next Thursday and Friday are already national holidays for Easter, but the government’s measure will extend the holiday for a full week — something that many in the business community object to.

“We are talking to our lawyers to see if this applies to us, too,” said Clariana Boccardo, the owner of a bakery in southeastern Caracas. “But it would be very damaging for us, because if those days count as holidays, we’d also have to pay our workers 150 percent more.”

Maduro said the work stop will save the country up to 40 percent in electricity output for the week. The South American nation depends mostly on hydroelectric power, and the government says that dry weather conditions caused by El Niño have seriously affected the nation’s ability to generate its own electricity.

But enjoying the extended holiday might not be so easy. On Margarita Island, one of Venezuela’s more popular vacation spots, hotels have been complaining for weeks that they aren’t getting enough water to operate properly.

One tourist last week posted a picture of a guest at the Lake Plaza Hotel taking water from the swimming pool into his room, because there wasn’t any water in the toilet. “We were there for three days, and there was no [running] water,” said Ruth Segovia, the tourist who posted the photo on Twitter. “We were a group of eight people so we had to do something to keep the bathrooms clean.”

The hotel has since reestablished running water, Segovia said. “But they’ve had to shut down the pool, because there are no means of keeping it clean.”

Opponents of the Maduro administration are blaming the government, not Mother Nature, for this mess. According to them, the Maduro administration has mismanaged both the power grid and local aqueducts, and failed to make key investments to keep utilities running properly in Venezuela.

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Venezuela sends country on forced vacation after hydroelectric power dries up

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Could you be Grist’s newest fellow?

by KelleDeBernales Posted on March 15, 2016

COME WORK WITH US

Could you be Grist’s newest fellow?

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

Are you an early-career journalist, storyteller, or multimedia wizard who digs what we do? Then Grist wants you!

We are now accepting applications for the fall 2016 class of the Grist Fellowship.

Once again we’re inviting writers, editors, and online journalists of every stripe to come work with us for six months. You get to hone your journalistic chops at a national news outlet, deepen your knowledge of environmental issues, and experiment with storytelling. We get to teach you and learn from you and bring your work to our audience. You won’t get rich — but you will get paid.

You’ll work closely with our editors in Seattle on reporting and executing stories for Grist. Our primary subject areas are food, climate and energy, cities, science and technology, pop culture, and environmental justice. If your skills extend into realms like video, audio, and data visualization, all the better.

Our fellows have been up to some stellar work of late. Clayton Aldern brought you the brainy Climate on the Mind series while Raven Rakia explored the environmental quagmire that is Rikers Island. We’re proud of ’em.

For fellowships that begin in August 2016, please submit applications by May 2, 2016. Full application instructions here.

Good luck!

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Could you be Grist’s newest fellow?

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Tech billionaires and Republican leaders use secret retreat to plot against Trump

by BarrettMeares Posted on March 9, 2016

Tech billionaires and Republican leaders use secret retreat to plot against Trump

By on 9 Mar 2016commentsShare

In a last-ditch effort to stop Donald Trump from trampling all over their presidential primary, billionaires, tech leaders, and establishment Republicans met last weekend on a private resort on Sea Island, Georgia, to come up with a plan.

The Huffington Post reports that attendees of the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, political operative Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, several members of Congress, and business luminaries like Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Larry Page, Napster creator Sean Parker, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, and Tesla founder and libertarian clean energy advocate Elon Musk, who really, really hates Donald Trump. Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, was also in attendance at the off-the-record meeting, and he reportedly wrote in an email that “A specter was haunting the World Forum — the specter of Donald Trump.”

While the event is notoriously secretive, the main attraction (beside the spa), according to insiders, was a presentation by Karl Rove, the Bush policy advisor who has nearly as many scandals linked to his name as Trump himself. Rove reportedly used data from focus groups to show that most Americans don’t view Trump as “presidential” or think he should be “anywhere near a nuclear trigger.” We don’t know where Rove got his data, but a quick Google test tells us basically the same thing.

Of course, Trump’s continuing dominance in the polls and primaries shows that some American voters might not actually have a problem with a man they think is a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler — even an orange-tinted reincarnation who thinks climate change is a liberal hoax and talks about his penis on national television. Regardless, Rove argued at the Forum that Trump’s presumed victory could be thwarted if rivals John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio can siphon off enough votes to deny him a plurality at the Republican National Convention. If that happened, Rove would likely throw his considerable weight behind Kasich or Rubio — anyone else, Rove wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, will lose to his presumed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

So did the power players down in Georgia come up with plan? Doubtful.

“Whatever becomes of Trump’s campaign,” wrote Sean Illing in Salon, “this much is certain: the people on that island won’t have a say in it. Trump owes his existence to the angry mob supporting him, and that mob was born of decades of Republican propaganda.”

The men of Sea Island, Rove, McConnell, Ryan, among others, have used their political will to spread this propaganda and divide the nation. Whatever plan did or didn’t come of AEI’s forum, it’s almost uplifting that the Republican party elites have found someone besides Obama and his fellow Democrats to dump their rage upon — and it’s someone of their own creation.

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Tech billionaires and Republican leaders use secret retreat to plot against Trump

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Democratic Congressman: "Free Puerto Rico"

by MiguelLeddy Posted on February 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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On the House floor Thursday, Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) called on the US Congress to “free Puerto Rico so she can solve the problem of her crushing debt without being handcuffed by Congress, its distant and inattentive colonial master.” The speech came as Congress continues to debate what should be done to assist Puerto Rico in coping with its debt crisis.

Gutiérrez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, said that Congress has offered “very little” tangible help for the island as it grapples with its crushing $72 billion debt. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) said in December that Congress would propose a debt relief package by the end of March. Previous legislative proposals have stalled out, whether offered by Democrats, Republicans, or Pedro Pierluisi, the island’s non-voting representative to congress.

The island’s government and public institutions owe money on more than a dozen separate loans involving a number of different lenders, all with competing interests. Since Puerto Rico’s cities and public institutions cannot seek bankruptcy protection in the same way as their counterparts on the mainland, debt restructuring has to be handled by each individual creditor separately, which has made the process slow and unwieldy.

The Obama administration and Congressional Democrats support the idea of amending US law to let Puerto Rico seek bankruptcy protection, but Congressional Republicans have been resistant, arguing that the island’s government must get its financial affairs in order—and honor its debts—before congressional action should be taken. Republican proposals have included the idea of an independent financial oversight board, an idea Gutiérrez blasted on Thursday.

“And now, what is the solution that everyone in Washington is lining up behind? A federal control board,” he said. “Imagine that. An island that cannot determine its own destiny, that has to play an economic game with a stacked deck and all the rules rigged against them, what is the solution in Washington? Take away what little autonomy they have left and add a new layer of Washington control over the colony.”

Continue reading here:  

Democratic Congressman: "Free Puerto Rico"

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The New York Public Library Just Unleashed 180,000 Free Images. We Can’t Stop Looking at Them.

by LoisCraine Posted on January 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, Manhattan Bernice Abbott/The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

The New York Public Library just digitized and made available more than 180,000 high resolution items, which the public can download for free.

The images come from pieces in the library’s collection that have fallen out of copyright or are otherwise in the public domain. This includes botanical illustrations, ancient texts, historical maps–including the incredible Green Book collection of travel guides for African American travelers in mid-1900s. They’ve also released more than 40,000 stereoscopes, Berenice Abbott’s amazing documentation of New York City in 1930s and Lewis Hines’ photos of Ellis Island immigrants, as well as the letters of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among other political figures.

One of the related projects they’ve created with this release is a cool visualization tool that lets you browse every item released.

It’s a true treasure trove and–warning!–a total time suck.

Say goodbye to your afternoon.

Original article – 

The New York Public Library Just Unleashed 180,000 Free Images. We Can’t Stop Looking at Them.

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Climate change will destroy the planet’s circulatory system

by MathiasArndt Posted on September 9, 2015

Spoiler Alert

Climate change will destroy the planet’s circulatory system

By on 8 Sep 2015commentsShare

We can’t have the birds or the bees. We can’t have woolly mammoths. For the love of Gotye, even the red pandas are in danger. And if we keep releasing all these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, soon we won’t even have water that flows in the right direction: A pair of new studies suggests that warming temperatures and melting Arctic ice sheets could have drastic effects on global ocean currents. Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts, where climate change grayscales all the Nyan Cats.

Part of the problem with melting ice, argues the first study, is that it’s mostly freshwater. Don’t get me wrong, I love freshwater — can’t get enough of the stuff — but cold freshwater doesn’t sink the same way cold saltwater does (because it’s not as dense). And part of what helps the currents do their job is the fact that cold water tends to sink. Any disruptions in temperature and salinity are likely to toy with that system in a severely objectionable manner. The Washington Post reports:

“Previous studies have generally had to estimate the amount of melting and then insert the meltwater into the ocean simulation by hand, or haven’t included the feedback between ice sheet melting and ocean salinity at all,” lead scientist Paul Gierz said.

The team’s computer models projected a drop in ocean salinity of about 7 percent in the areas near Greenland’s melting ice sheets, a decline that would alter deep-ocean circulation patterns over time, resulting in “less heat being transported to the high latitudes … which has implications for both North American as well as European weather and climate,” Gierz said.

Because the climate systems tend to respond slowly to environmental changes, the full impacts may not be felt for decades.

But we don’t have to wait for those impacts to kick in to get a feel for them: Another study suggests that there might be a gloomy historical case study for these kinds of ocean circulation changes. By examining ice core records and cave formations like stalagmites, researchers were able to salvage proxy temperature data from upwards of 12,000 years ago. Near the end of the last ice age, the authors write, rising temperatures led to rising sea levels and an influx of freshwater — the same kind of influx that today’s changing climate is expected to produce.

And the result wasn’t pretty: Changes in ocean circulation helped lead, for example, to an 18-degree Fahrenheit drop in Greenland over a period of less than ten years. Some of these changes “lingered for centuries,” writes The Washington Post. We’re talking 1,000-year droughts in the South Pacific.

A modest proposal, then: Start bottling that melting ice water and send it south. They’re going to need it in Vanuatu when the drought strikes. That is, of course, if the island isn’t first swallowed by the sea.

Source:

New studies deepen concerns about a climate-change ‘wild card’

, The Washington Post.

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Climate change will destroy the planet’s circulatory system

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It’s Now Open Season on China

by GitaOov11667597 Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the midst of Trumpmania, it’s good to see that some things never change. Here is Scott Walker today:

Americans are struggling to cope with the fall in today’s markets driven in part by China’s slowing economy and the fact that they actively manipulate their economy….massive cyberattacks….militarization of the South China Sea….economy….persecution of Christians….There’s serious work to be done rather than pomp and circumstance. We need to see some backbone from President Obama on U.S.-China relations.

China bashing is the little black dress of presidential campaigns: always appropriate, always in style.

Of course, Donald “China is killing us!” Trump got there before Walker. And more than that: he not only bashed China, but was able to claim that he’d been warning of this all along. If only we’d sent Carl Icahn over there from the start, things would be OK today.

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It’s Now Open Season on China

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"Crash" vs. "Accident" Doesn’t Seem Like It Matters Very Much

by ThomasSaxton Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Emily Badger passes along news of a group trying to get us all to stop talking about traffic “accidents”:

An “accident” is, by definition, unintentional. We accidentally drop dinner plates, or send e-mails before we’re done writing them. The word also suggests something of the unforeseen — an event that couldn’t have been anticipated, for which no one can be blamed. That second connotation is what irks transportation advocates who want to change how we talk about traffic collisions. When one vehicle careens into another or rounds a corner into a pedestrian — call it a “crash,” they say, not an “accident.”

“Our children did not die in ‘accidents,'” says Amy Cohen, a co-founder of the New York-based group Families for Safe Streets. Her 12-year-old son was hit and killed by a van on the street in front of their home in 2013. “An ‘accident,'” she says, “implies that nothing could have been done to prevent their deaths.”

I remember this from my driver’s ed class 40 years ago. Our instructor told us endlessly that they were “collisions,” not accidents. But we’re still talking about accidents 40 years later, so apparently this is a tough habit to break.

And the truth is that I didn’t really get it back then. I still don’t. “Accident” doesn’t imply that something is unforeseeable, or that no one can be blamed, or that nothing could possibly have been done to prevent it. Here’s the definition:

noun. an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usually results in harm, injury, damage, or loss; casualty; mishap.

“Unintentional” is the key word here. If you drop the dinner dishes, it’s unintentional unless you’re pissed off at your family and deliberately threw the dishes at them. Then it’s not an accident. Ditto for cars. If you deliberately run over someone, it’s not an accident. If it’s not deliberate, it is.

Nearly all “accidents” are foreseeable (lots of people drop dinner dishes); have someone to blame (probably the person who dropped the dishes); and can be prevented (stop carrying the dishes with one hand). The same is true of automobile collisions. Driving while drunk, or texting, or speeding are all things that make accidents more likely. We can work to prevent those things and we can assign blame when accidents happen—and we do.

I have a tendency to use the word “collision” because I was brainwashed 40 years ago, but it’s hard to see that it makes much difference. Here is Caroline Samponaro, deputy director at Transportation Alternatives:

“If we stopped using that word, as individuals, as a city, in a national context, what questions do we have to start asking ourselves about these crashes?” says Caroline Samponaro, deputy director at Transportation Alternatives. How did they happen? Who was to blame? An erratic driver? A faulty vehicle? A perpetually dangerous intersection?

I’m mystified. We already do all that stuff. Collisions are routinely investigated. Fault is determined. The NTSA tracks potential safety problems in vehicles. Municipal traffic departments make changes to intersections. We pass drunk driving laws. We suspend the licenses of dangerous drivers.

So it doesn’t seem to me that use of the word “accident” is either wrong or perilous. If we had a history of ignoring automobile safety because is was common to just shrug and ask “whaddaya gonna do?” you could make a case for this. But we don’t.

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"Crash" vs. "Accident" Doesn’t Seem Like It Matters Very Much

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