Tag Archives: Kids”

As global temperatures rise, more refugees will flee to Europe.

by GusMcLamb542 Posted on December 21, 2017

Growing up in the ’90s, some of my favorite people in the world were Bill Nye, Cookie Monster, and Wishbone. That definitely did NOT make me one of the cooler kids at school, who got to chat about cable TV shows I knew nothing about.

But hey, my buddy Bill gave me the crazy idea that science was fun. Wishbone instilled in me a love of reading. And Sesame Street legit taught me, a new immigrant kid from the Philippines, how to speak English.

Now I write about the environment, with a special focus on all the nerdy, science-y, but supremely important environmental stuff that impacts kids in marginalized communities. Those are the kids who might rely on things like public broadcasting to close educational gaps — just like I did. It helped me get to where I am today.

So when Bill Nye resurfaced in 2017 in a big way — with a new series on Netflix and in a new documentary about the man behind the bow tie, I was obsessed. In the film, he meets YouTubers taking the torch when it comes to making fun, open-to-anyone educational videos. It’s all part of his quest to protect science education and keep it accessible to kids. And what makes the documentary even cooler for me? It’s on PBS.

Justine Calma is a Grist fellow.

Follow this link: 

As global temperatures rise, more refugees will flee to Europe.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Pines, sustainable energy, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on As global temperatures rise, more refugees will flee to Europe.

We Have Weird Ideas About What’s Appropriate for Kids These Days

by michelmartz136 Posted on March 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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

Peter Holley has this story up today:

The final straw was a little girl using an iPad with the volume on high, a device her parents refused to turn down despite repeated requests from the staff at Caruso’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in Mooresville, N.C….“Finally, we had to ask them to leave,” Nunez told The Washington Post.

“That was the incident that triggered the entire thing.” “The entire thing,” as Nunez puts it, is the restaurant’s strict ban on children under the age of 5. It went into effect in January, drawing passionate applause from some diners online and angry condemnation from others.

So what does everyone think about banning small kids from an upscale restaurant? I am informally banned from commenting on stuff like this because I have no children and am therefore assumed to have no understanding of the vast stresses involved in raising kids.1 Fair enough. I’ll keep my mouth shut.

Except for this. Thirty years ago, this wouldn’t have been an issue. There were places that were appropriate for small children and places that weren’t. McDonald’s? Appropriate. Denny’s? Appropriate. That little Italian place on the corner? Maybe. How well behaved are your kids? Morton’s Steakhouse? Inappropriate. It’s a grownup place.

This distinction seems to have died out, and I’m not sure why. A lot of people think it has to do with this:

As the number of small children has declined, they all become precious snowflakes who deserves constant attention and only the best things in life. For what it’s worth, I don’t buy this. I don’t have any particular reason. It just doesn’t seem right.

And yet, the distinction between places that are appropriate for small children and those that aren’t sure seems to have gotten bolloxed up. At the same time that lots of parents take their toddlers to upscale restaurants and R-rated movies, older children are all but banned from walking alone to a nearby park lest some busybody call the cops to report this obviously reckless parental neglect.

I dunno. I’m not a parent, and my cats don’t do a damn thing I tell them. What’s going on?

1I also have no experience with the vast stresses of running a restaurant, but no one ever seems to care about that.

Source: 

We Have Weird Ideas About What’s Appropriate for Kids These Days

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We Have Weird Ideas About What’s Appropriate for Kids These Days

Surprise: This Republican governor now wants his state to ban fracking.

by Mike Herman Posted on March 20, 2017

U.S. cities are packed with about 5 million medium-sized buildings — schools, churches, community centers, apartment buildings. Most use way more energy than they should. Many also have poor airflow and dirty, out-of-date heating and electrical systems. Those conditions contribute to high inner-city asthma rates and other health concerns.

“These buildings are actually making children sick,” says Donnel Baird, who grew up in such a place. His parents, immigrants from Guyana, raised their kids in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, relying on a cooking stove for heat. Baird eventually moved to the South and then attended Duke University, before returning to New York as a community organizer in 2008.

In 2013, Baird launched BlocPower, which provides engineering and financial know-how to retrofit city buildings. The technical part is cool: Engineers survey structures with sensors and smartphone apps, figuring out the best ways to reduce energy use, like replacing oil boilers with solar hot water. But the financing is critical; BlocPower builds the case for each project and connects owners with lenders. It has already retrofitted more than 500 buildings in New York and is expanding into Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

“The biggest way for us to reduce carbon emissions right now,” Baird says, “is efficiency.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

Excerpt from – 

Surprise: This Republican governor now wants his state to ban fracking.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Surprise: This Republican governor now wants his state to ban fracking.

Prediction: Terrorism in the Middle East Will Decline By Half Between 2020 and 2040

by SaulP27iii Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

You guys are way too smart. I posted my mystery map of the Middle East yesterday morning, and in less than an hour you had figured out what it represented. For the rest of you, here’s the map with its real title:

I’m going to make an obvious point about this, but I want to make it carefully. Ever since I wrote my piece about the link between violent crime and leaded gasoline, I’ve gotten periodic questions about whether lead might be responsible for other things. The most common answer is maybe—but it’s unlikely we’ll ever have the data to prove it. For that reason, I try to stay pretty restrained about exactly what lead might and might not be responsible for.

That said, there’s a lot of evidence that leaded gasoline produced a wave of violent crime between 1960-1990 in the developed world, and that the introduction of unleaded gasoline eliminated that wave and eventually brought crime rates down nearly to 1960 levels. In most developed countries, leaded gasoline was phased out starting around the mid-70s, which benefited children born after that. When those children reached their late teenage years in the early 90s, they were much less prone to impulsiveness and aggression, which led to lower crime rates.

But not every part of the world followed that timetable. In particular, leaded gasoline continued to be used in the Middle East up through the late 90s. Egypt began phasing it out in 1998, and most other countries followed over the next decade or so. Only a few—including Iraq and Afghanistan—still sell significant amounts of leaded gasoline.

Since lead poisoning affects infants, its affects show up about 18-20 years later. What this means is that in the bright red countries, the cohort of kids who reach their late teen years around 2020 should be significantly less aggressive and violent than previous cohorts. Around 2025 the countries in lighter red will join them. Around 2030 the countries in pink will join. By 2040 or so, the process will be complete.

Obviously this means that crime rates in the Middle East should decline steadily between 2020-40. But there’s more. Given the effects of lead, it seems almost certain that reducing lead poisoning in teenagers and young adults should lead to a decline in terrorism as well.

This is where I want to be careful. Obviously terrorism, like crime, has a lot of causes. What’s more, you could eliminate every molecule of lead in the world and you’d still have plenty of crime and plenty of terrorism. But you’d have less. If terrorism follows the path of violent crime, eliminating leaded gasoline could reduce the level of terrorism by 50 percent or more.

It’s also possible—though this is much more speculative—that effective terrorism requires a minimum critical mass of people who are drawn to it. If you fall below that minimum, it might wither away. In other words, it’s possible that removing lead from gasoline could reduce terrorism by even more than 50 percent.

In any case, this leads to a concrete prediction: Between 2020 and 2040, the level of terrorism emanating from the Middle East will drop by at least half. Ditto for violence more generally, including civil wars. In a decade or so, we should begin to get hints of whether this prediction is correct.

Visit source:

Prediction: Terrorism in the Middle East Will Decline By Half Between 2020 and 2040

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Prediction: Terrorism in the Middle East Will Decline By Half Between 2020 and 2040

5 Freaky Ways To Have A Green Halloween

by EdmundoGutierre Posted on October 24, 2016

It can be quite challenging to maintain an eco-friendly lifestyle during holiday seasons, particularly Christmas and Halloween. It requires walking a fine line between successfully maintaining your environmentally conscious values and becoming a grouchy grinch who forbids fun in the name of the greater good.

Over the past few years, I think I’ve successfully refined my approach to major holidays, managing to navigate a happy balance between conscious consumption and celebration. With All Hallows’ Eve approaching, I’ve put together five ways to help you have a green Halloween.

1. Spookily Secondhand

Swapping your kids’ costumes can be a great way to save money and reduce waste. Photo credit: Shutterstock.com

It seems like Halloween costume stores pop up in every empty storefront as soon as the first leaf falls from the tree in September, but despite the allure of these one-stop shops, secondhand stores are actually the best place to shop for a costume — either one you put together yourself or one you choose from a rack of store-bought options that were someone else’s creepy or cute aliases a year before.

These costumes will be a fraction of the price compared with buying new, and reusing a costume means you’ll not only save money, you’ll prevent that wicked witch or swashbuckling pirate from haunting a landfill somewhere.

This tip works especially well for kids’ costumes — often worn for just a few hours before being discarded, they’re usually in great shape and kids will enjoy choosing their own secondhand costume without price limitations.

2. Boo-tiful Reusable Decor

Halloween decor like these wooden blocks can be reused from year to year. Photo credit: Shutterstock.com

Join 24,000+ Recyclers

Here at Earth911 HQ we’re all about living green and clean. If that’s what you’re searching for then you’ll love our weekly email!

This year, eschew disposable decorations like police tape and spray-on cobwebs and opt for well-made decorations that can be used year after year instead (these can be found secondhand, too!). Choosing items made from sturdy materials like wood or cloth instead of plastic or Styrofoam means that they’ll last for years and be less likely to get damaged in storage.

Saving spooktacular decorations from one year to the next also means you can refine your sinister tableaus with each passing year instead of having to reinvent it from scratch each time.

3. Tricky Treats

Organic chocolates wrapped in foil are preferable to candy in plastic packaging. Photo credit: Shutterstock.com

This one is perhaps the most challenging obstacle to overcoming a wasteful or polluting Halloween. Those teeny-tiny chocolate bars and fruit snacks are called “fun sized,” but the environmental impact of all those plastic candy wrappers is anything but — especially when you consider that we buy $2.2 billion in candy each Halloween season. All of those tiny wrappers add up, but handing out a box of raisins is sure to get your house egged — what’s a green ghoul to do?

Thankfully, there is an easy solution that can also help provide a happy Halloween for children with food sensitivities, too. Handing out a non-candy item like Halloween pencils or natural rubber pumpkin erasers allows you to sidestep the individually wrapped treats, but foil-wrapped organic chocolates are a great option, too.

If budget or tradition prohibits either of these options, don’t beat yourself up. It’s one day a year. Give in to the fun of the holiday and purchase normal Halloween candy, but buy a bit less of it (we all know that you end up eating a third of it anyway) and give out one piece per trick-or-treater.

4. Monstrous (in Moderation)

Limiting the number of houses your kids trick-or-treat at can cut down on waste (and sugar overload!). Photo credit: Shutterstock.com

Your kids are going to hate me for this one. (Please apologize to them on my behalf.) But limiting the number of houses your kids collect candy from while trick-or-treating will do a lot to decrease the amount of trash — not to mention nutritional damage — done by all of those chocolate bars and bags of chips.

Again, the goal isn’t to strip any shred of fun from the holiday, so don’t be stingy about it, but do set a limit — either a length of time or a number of street blocks. Parents can make this decision for kids under 5; kids older than 5 can work with you to find a limit that’s acceptable to you both. And rather than an exercise in deprivation, use it as a chance to talk to your kids about moderation, being happy with having “enough” and the effects — environmental and physical — of so much junk food.

5. Eco-Bash

Opt for real plates and utensils at your Halloween party instead of wasteful disposable items. Photo credit: Shutterstock.com

If you’re brave enough to host a Halloween party, remember to avoid one-time-use serving items like plastic utensils and plates, plastic cups, and paper napkins. Investing in a set of inexpensive secondhand dishware and cloth napkins hugely reduces the amount of waste generated by parties and can be stored and reused for any special occasion, meaning you can avoid a truly frightening amount of trash.

From everyone here at Earth911, we wish you a happy, green Halloween!

Stumped on what to do with that jack-o’-lantern? Watch our video “What to Do with That Halloween Pumpkin” for great tips!

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock.com

About
Latest Posts

Madeleine Somerville

Madeleine Somerville is the author of

All You Need Is Less: An Eco-Friendly Guide to Guilt-Free Green Living and Stress-Free Simplicity

. She is a writer, wannabe hippie and lover of soft cheeses. She lives in Edmonton, Canada, with her daughter. You can also find Madeleine at her blog,

Sweet Madeleine

.

Latest posts by Madeleine Somerville (see all)

5 Freaky Ways To Have A Green Halloween – October 24, 2016
4 Brands Doing Clothes Recycling Right – October 18, 2016
Does Being An Environmentalist Require A Certain Look? – September 21, 2016

Join 24,000+ Earthlings

We’ll give you the latest green living news, share our DIY tips, and help you recycle just about anything.

Connect with us:

Recent Posts

Fun (Really!) Alternatives to Halloween Candy
How To Take Eco-Friendly Living To The Next Level
5 Freaky Ways To Have A Green Halloween
The Best Ways To Heat Your Home: Separating Myth From Fact

Read

Connect With Us

Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Pinterest
Google Plus

Advertise With Us

Copyright ©. 2016 Earth911. All Rights Reserved.

Sign Up for Our Newsletter

Sign up for our newsletter for exclusive updates on contests, new products, and more.

Create a Greener Home with the Earth911 Resource Library!

Member Only Cheatsheets & Offers
Exclusive DIY Guides and Resources
Free Printable Resources
x

earth911

Visit site:

5 Freaky Ways To Have A Green Halloween

Posted in Casio, eco-friendly, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, organic, OXO, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 5 Freaky Ways To Have A Green Halloween

Obama gets riled up about Trump and climate change

by KristianNeff Posted on July 6, 2016

Trumped

Obama gets riled up about Trump and climate change

By on Jul 6, 2016Share

President Obama and Hillary Clinton looked more like old friends than old rivals at their first joint campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. Both heaped praise on the other — she’s the most qualified candidate in history; he has a nice smile — and then got down to the business at hand: attacking Donald Trump.

Unlike at a Trump rally, where concern for climate change is considered a character flaw, the issue was front and center at Tuesday’s event. Obama in particular praised Clinton’s work setting the groundwork for the Paris Climate Accord when she was secretary of State, while noting that her opponent wants to pull the U.S. out from the hard-won agreement:

With Secretary Clinton’s help, America ultimately led nearly 200 other nations to an agreement to save this planet for future generations.

Now, maybe — maybe you don’t care about this. Maybe you think 99 percent of scientists are wrong … But the point is, we’re not done with this, so where we go from here is up to you.

You can vote with the climate deniers who want to tear up the agreements we’ve crafted and doom our kids to a more dangerous world, or you can vote to keep putting people back to work building a cleaner energy future for all of us.

It’s a message that may resonate with North Carolina voters: While Democratic presidential candidates have only won the state twice since 1970, a 2014 Sierra Club poll found more than 60 percent of voters wanted action on climate change.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

This article – 

Obama gets riled up about Trump and climate change

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama gets riled up about Trump and climate change

Over half of Antarctica’s badass Adélie penguins could get wiped out by climate change

by AsaBrumbaugh Posted on June 30, 2016

Have An Ice Life

Over half of Antarctica’s badass Adélie penguins could get wiped out by climate change

By on Jun 30, 2016Share

Adélie penguins are kind of the bad bitches of the Antarctic: They regularly fight turf wars with their Emperor penguin nemeses, and are also known to do some pretty serious sexual negotiating.

But climate change is heating up their home, and they’re not happy about it. A warming Antarctic might lead to declines in 60 percent of penguin colonies by 2099, a new study reports. The West Antarctic Peninsula is warming more rapidly than almost anywhere else on the planet — and it’s home to about half the world’s Adélie population. This isn’t the first time we’re hearing of threats to the tuxedo-clad birds — in February, we learned that a colony on Cape Denison had dropped from 160,000 penguins to 10,000.

Now, using a combination of satellite and climate data, the new Scientific Reports study finds that the temperature increase across the West Antarctic Peninsula has reached a tipping point toward a habitat that’s no longer suitable for Adélies. Additionally, warm sea surface temperatures could make chick-rearing particularly difficult for penguin fathers. (Yes, men help raise the kids in Penguinlandia — we said they were bad bitches.)

But there’s some hopeful news: Refugia — areas relatively unaffected by climate — may still exist in Antarctica beyond 2099, preventing a species-wide decimation.

“The Cape Adare region of the Ross Sea… has the largest known Adélie penguin rookery in the world. Though the climate there is expected to warm a bit, it looks like it could be a refugia in the future,” said Megan Cimino, lead author of the study, in a press statement. Understanding the ecology of these halfway homes for penguins is critical to understanding the future of the species.

So stay strong, little fighters. While the Emperors might be glad you’re gone, we won’t be.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Link to original:

Over half of Antarctica’s badass Adélie penguins could get wiped out by climate change

Posted in alo, Anchor, Eureka, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Over half of Antarctica’s badass Adélie penguins could get wiped out by climate change

Chart of the Day: Brexit Would Have Turned Out Very Differently if Kids Turned Out to Vote

by HassanE54kqinqhe Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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

This will come as no surprise, but here’s the fundamental reason that Brexit won:

The younger the voter, the more strongly they voted to remain in the EU. The older the voter, the more likely they were to actually get out and vote. Eventually the kids are going to figure out how badly their elders are screwing them, and maybe then they’ll finally muster the energy to cast a ballot. I wonder what it’s going to take to make that happen?

(Preference via YouGov. Turnout via SkyData.)

Continued: 

Chart of the Day: Brexit Would Have Turned Out Very Differently if Kids Turned Out to Vote

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chart of the Day: Brexit Would Have Turned Out Very Differently if Kids Turned Out to Vote

Weekly Flint Water Report: April 30-May 6

by LatashaBuckingh Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Here is this week’s Flint water report. As usual, I’ve eliminated outlier readings above 2,000 parts per billion, since there are very few of them and they can affect the averages in misleading ways. During the week, DEQ took 397 samples. The average for the past week was 10.91.

Read original article – 

Weekly Flint Water Report: April 30-May 6

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Weekly Flint Water Report: April 30-May 6

There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

by TristaBancks59 Posted on May 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Here’s an interesting thing. I was browsing over at The Corner and came across a post from Veronique de Rugy, who was unhappy about the federal government’s rate of improper payments, which totaled $137 billion last year. That’s fair enough. Here are the six worst programs:

This is the kind of thing that liberals should care about too—in fact, we should care about it more than conservatives if we want people to trust government to handle their tax dollars competently. Still, it got me curious. What exactly does this mean? $137 billion in waste and fraud last year? As it turns out, no. Here’s one interesting methodological tidbit:

Another prevalent misunderstanding is that all improper payments are a loss to the government, but that is not always the case. For example, although most of the $137 billion in improper payments was caused by overpayments (payments that are higher than they should have been), a significant chunk of that total amount was caused by underpayments (payments that are lower than they should have been). The difference between these two amounts (that is, overpayments minus underpayments) equals the net amount of payments that improperly went out the door.

Huh. So if the feds overpay Joe $10 and underpay Jane $10, that counts as $20 in improper payments. This is a reasonable thing to track, since we’d like all the payments to be correct, but it doesn’t give us much insight into how much money we’re losing to improper payments. My guess based on a bit of googling is that underpayments are a smallish part of the whole number, but for some reason there’s no official tally of this. Roughly speaking, though, you can probably shave 10-20 percent off the top and get pretty close.

What else? There’s this:

Also, many of the overpayments are payments that may have been proper, but were labeled improper due to a lack of documentation confirming payment accuracy. We believe that if agencies had this documentation, it would show that many of these overpayments were actually proper and the amount of improper payments actually lost by the government would be even lower than the estimated net loss discussed above.

An entire payment is labeled improper if complete documentation is not available. This appears to account for somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-60 percent of all improper payments. Most likely, though, once the documentation is in place, the vast majority of these payments turn out to be correct.

Put this all together, and the net value of genuinely improper payments is probably about $50 billion or so. Still high, but not quite as outrageous as it seems at first glance.

Something about this whole exercise seems kind of weird to me, though. We’re only a few months into 2016 and we already have numbers for FY2015. That’s fast work—too fast to be anything but a preliminary cut at flagging payments that might be incorrect. But how many of them really are incorrect? Nobody knows. For that, you’d have to wait a year or two and then re-analyze all the payments in the sample.

I’d be a whole lot more interested in that. $137 billion makes for a fine, scary headline—especially when the headline leaves the vague impression that this is all due to fraud and waste—but why don’t we ever get a follow-up number that tells us how much the feds ended up paying improperly once all the documentation is rounded up and the final audits are done? Wouldn’t that be a better number to care about?

View original:  

There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There’s More to "Improper Payments" Than Meets the Eye