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Americans are eating better — well, some Americans

by TrinidadSeitz Posted on September 12, 2014

Americans are eating better — well, some Americans

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12 Sep 2014 5:13 PM

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Income gap! What are you doing here?! We’re trying to have a conversation about food and you just show up uninvited and unannounced, as usual.

Just kidding, obviously — since money is intrinsically tied to every part of our lives, the growing divergence between high- and low-income households can pretty much be expected to show up all the damn time.

A new study examining data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) over the period of 1999 to 2010 found that Americans have somewhat improved our overall dietary quality. We’re eating more fresh produce, whole grains, and fish, and less meat and sugary treats. Great! People are also eating less meat, and when they do they increasingly choose pasture-raised animals.

This increase in overall dietary quality, however, is still modest. Don’t worry, America — you will still love McBrunch, no matter how terrible it is for you.

But — of course! — these modest improvements come with some larger backsliding. Positive changes in dietary health were made largely by folks who earn higher incomes. For lower-income individuals, dietary quality actually decreased from 2006-2010. So, the income gap — which has risen since the 1970s, as the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans earn 22.5 percent of the nation’s income while the bottom 90 percent makes do with less than 50 percent of that — is being paralleled in food choices.

To call it a “choice” however, isn’t entirely fair. The food that’s most accessible to people who make very little money tends to be highly processed, fatty and starchy, and relatively nutritionally vacant. The fact that the quality of food that one eats is so closely tied with income seems pretty intuitive, but that doesn’t mean it’s not alarming as yet another indicator of growing inequality in the U.S.

Ah, America, land of opportunity, liberty, and kale salad — providing you’re already loaded.

Source:
The Rich Are Eating Richer, the Poor Are Eating Poorer

, Mother Jones.

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Forget the climate — cap-and-trade could fix your allergies

by LandonOlmstead Posted on August 26, 2014

young wheezy

Forget the climate — cap-and-trade could fix your allergies

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26 Aug 2014 6:07 PM

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How can we finally get people to care about carbon emissions even a little bit? Focus on how they are directly threatening the amount of time on Earth that we can spend snacking and sexting (clinically proven to be the preferred activities of humans in the 21st century.) Or, as The Atlantic’s James Hamblin puts it:

Researchers are learning that the most effective way around climate-policy ambivalence is to invoke imminent dangers to human health. “What’s killing me today?” with emphasis on killing and me and today.

The answer to that question is — you guessed it! — carbon emissions. As Hamblin reports, for allergy and asthma sufferers, increased carbon dioxide levels boost pollen count. One allergist expects pollen levels to double by 2040. Also fun: Fossil fuel combustion creates minuscule particles that hang around in our lungs and bloodstreams and then kill us. Air pollution caused one in eight deaths in 2012, according to the World Health Organization.

OK – so carbon emissions are threatening lives. But what kind of effect would limiting those emissions have on the economy? Those cap-and-trade programs sure seem costly!

Well, a recent study by a team of MIT researchers, published in Nature Climate Change, found that a cap on carbon emissions would end up saving $125 billion in human health costs – which would cover the projected costs of widespread emissions capping tenfold. Furthermore:

[The study’s authors] write that any cost-benefit analysis of climate policy that omits the health effects of regional air pollution “greatly underestimate[s] benefits.”

“What’s killing me today?” is obviously a far more alarming question than “What’s going to create significant economic costs in the future?” When the answer to both is the same, that could – just a thought! – be cause for action. Something to ponder between snacks and Snapchats.

Source:
If You Have Allergies or Asthma, Talk to Your Doctor About Cap and Trade

, The Atlantic.

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Forget the climate — cap-and-trade could fix your allergies

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The St. Louis Area Has a Long History of Shameful Racial Violence

by BobbyLomas Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
A mob blocks a street car during the East St. Louis Riot of July 1917 University of Massachusetts-Amherst Libraries

The shooting of Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent riots, protests, and police crackdown have highlighted the area’s long history of racial strife. One chapter from that history, a century-old summer riot just fourteen miles away from Ferguson, in East St. Louis, Illinois, shows how black Americans were subjected to racial violence from the moment they arrived in the region.

In 1917, East St. Louis was crowded with factories. Jobs were abundant. But as World War I halted the flow of immigration from Eastern Europe, factory recruiters started looking toward the American South for black workers. Thousands came, and as competition for jobs increased, a labor issue became a racial one.

East St. Louis’ angry white workers found sympathy from the leaders of the local Democratic party, who feared that the influx of black, mostly Republican voters threatened their electoral dominance. In one particularly striking parallel to today’s political landscape, local newspapers warned of voter fraud, alleging that black voters were moving between northern cities to swing local elections as part of a far-reaching conspiracy called “colonization,” according to the documentary series Living in St. Louis.

A cartoon from the time of the riot, lambasting then-president Woodrow Wilson for making the world “safe for democracy” while ignoring the plight of East St. Louis. Wikipedia

That May, a local aluminum plant brought in black workers to replace striking white ones. Soon, crowds of whites gathered downtown, at first protesting the migration, then beating blacks and destroying property. On July 1, a group of white men drove through a black neighborhood, firing a gun out their car window. (The perpetrators were never caught.) A few hours later, another car drove through the neighborhood. Black residents fired at it, killing two police officers.

On July 2, as news of the killings got out, white residents went tearing through black neighborhoods, beating and killing blacks and burning some 300 houses as National Guard troops either failed to respond or fled the scene. The official toll counted 39 black and eight white people dead, but others speculated that more than a hundred people died in what is still considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in twentieth-century America. Afraid for their lives, more than six thousand blacks left the city after the riot.

That the United States was then fighting in Europe to defend democracy while failing to protect its own citizens was not lost on Marcus Garvey, soon to become one of the most famous civil rights leaders of his time: “This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy,” he said to cheers at a speech in Harlem on July 8. “I do not know what special meaning the people who slaughtered the Negroes of East St. Louis have for democracy… but I do know that it has no meaning for me.”

Top image credit: STL250

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The St. Louis Area Has a Long History of Shameful Racial Violence

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Your iPhone is about to get (a little) less toxic

by DesireeHoddle Posted on August 14, 2014

Your iPhone is about to get (a little) less toxic

By

Ian Higgins

Apple is upping its green game in a big way, thanks in no small part to former-EPA-chief-turned-Apple-exec Lisa Jackson. On Wednesday, the company announced an official ban of two toxins from its iPhone and iPad production lines, following a five-month-long “Bad Apple” campaign launched by China Labor Watch and Green America.

Benzene and n-hexane, used primarily to clean and polish electronics during the final stages of production, are known to cause a slew of negative health effects including leukemia and nerve damage. Activist groups harangued the company for its use of the chemicals until it conducted its own investigation of 22 of its plants.

Naturally, Apple’s internal probe found nothing of consequence (the use of the chemicals wasn’t widespread, it insists, and didn’t endanger a single worker; what little it did find fell well within the company’s existing safety standards). In true EPA style, though, Jackson and her team tightened the existing rules to explicitly prohibit the use of benzene and n-hexane in final assembly processes. Although the company will still use a tiny bit during the earlier stages of production, Apple, Jackson writes, “treats any allegations of unsafe working conditions extremely seriously.” Hmm.

From the AP:

“This is doing everything we can think of to do to crack down on chemical exposures and to be responsive to concerns,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental initiatives, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We think it’s really important that we show some leadership and really look toward the future by trying to use greener chemistries.”

Hear, hear. And at least Apple has now released an actual list of the substances it regulates to the public, making world domination by iThings a little more transparent.


Source
Apple Bans Use of 2 Chemicals in iPhone Assembly, Associated Press

Sara Bernard is a Grist fellow, wilderness junkie, and globetrotter. Follow her on Twitter.

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Big Oil’s New Pitch: Fracking Means Never Having to Fear Putin

by Myrna Posted on July 29, 2014

Oil and gas companies want Washington to believe that fracking can save Ukraine from Russia. It can’t. A worker passes by natural gas compressing equipment near the village of Kovalivka, Ukraine. Iren Moroz/AP As Ukraine sinks deeper into crisis, the oil and gas industry is pressing the United States to deploy its abundant natural gas supply as a weapon against Russia—and lawmakers of both parties are lining up behind the proposal. “We have this natural-gas boom,” Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) said last week, after the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet, allegedly by pro-Russian rebels. “We can use this newfound energy as a diplomatic tool to give the European leaders some backbone in standing up to the Russians.” Their enthusiasm is understandable: Roughly half the natural gas Russia ships to Europe flows through Ukraine. During past disputes, Russia has clamped down on the nation’s gas supply, creating turmoil in European energy markets. Many US politicians fear this dynamic could dampen Europe’s response to the Ukraine crisis and have begun looking to the bounty of natural gas from the domestic fracking boom to counter Russia’s energy dominance. As House Speaker John Boehner put it in a March Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, ”The ability to turn the tables and put the Russian leader in check lies right beneath our feet, in the form of vast supplies of natural energy.” Washington has also seen a flurry of proposals to speed up natural gas exports. Last month, following a lobbying blitz by oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Halliburton, and Chevron, the House passed a billrequiring the Department of Energy (DOE) to rule on proposed natural gas export terminals within 90 days. The Senate has weighed similar bills and amendments. While they haven’t managed to bypass the prevailing Senate gridlock, these measures have considerable bipartisan support, and backers are determined to push them through. The fight over expediting natural gas exports helped derail the popular Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill and bogged down negotiations over an aid package for Ukraine. As Congress prepares to adjourn for its August recess, opponents of expanding exports are bracing for a new onslaught. “We are on the lookout, particularly for amendments being slipped into must-pass funding bills,” says one senior Senate staffer. Read the rest at Mother Jones. Original article: Big Oil’s New Pitch: Fracking Means Never Having to Fear Putin Related ArticlesObama’s Coal-Leasing Program Is Costing Taxpayers More Than $50 BillionWhite House: Delaying Climate Action Will Carry Heavy Economic CostThis Huge Corporation Is Tackling Climate Change—Because It’s a Threat to the Bottom Line

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Big Oil’s New Pitch: Fracking Means Never Having to Fear Putin

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No, of course climate change won’t make redheads go extinct

by MakaylaBalog Posted on July 9, 2014

Gingers are here to stay

No, of course climate change won’t make redheads go extinct

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The British media landscape is lighting up with dreadful news for our most fair-skinned friends. If the Independent, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mirror, Weather Network, Huffington Post, and other outlets are to believed, climate change threatens to send red-haired folks into extinction. Extinction!

Fortunately for redheads everywhere, and for everybody who loves them, the news is less credible than a hair product manufacturer’s claim that its dyes won’t fade.

The news coverage is based on interviews by a Daily Record reporter with an anonymous source and with an official at a company that investigates customers’ genetic histories. The newspaper’s claims are based on four assumptions: (1) A single gene mutation codes for red hair and fair skin. (2) Gene mutation evolved to help Europeans soak up more sun, which is needed to produce more vitamin D in cloudy environments. (3) As the climate changes, the world will see fewer clouds. (4) As the clouds disappear, so too will the genes that helped humans adapt to cloudy environments — and the redheads who carry those genes.

But it turns out those four assumptions are either questionable, flat-out wrong, or appear to have been the result of misquotations.

Let’s start with the first claim.

“Although geneticists tend to discover individual genes that play a role in hair color and texture, often many genes play a role,” Rick Potts, a paleoanthropologist who leads the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, told Grist. “So the matter may not be as simple as the decrease in a single recessive gene.”

“Physical traits like hair color can be susceptible to what is called ‘positive assortative mating’ — a complex phrase for physical attraction to those potential mates with similar features. Although it’s interesting to discuss why a particular variation, like blond hair or red hair, may have initially spread, there is almost always an element of like-attracted-to-like that may be even more important in retaining a trait in the population,” Potts said.

Now on to assumption No. 2. Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco recently published research that calls into question the long-held assumption that fair skin evolved in humans as they marched out of Africa as a means of increasing vitamin D production. “Recent studies show that dark-skinned humans make vitamin D after sun exposure as efficiently as lightly-pigmented humans,” UCSF dermatology professor Peter Elias said last month. “Osteoporosis, which can be a sign of vitamin D deficiency, is less common, rather than more common, in darkly pigmented humans.”

Third, there is considerable debate among climate scientists as to what role global warming will play in the formation of clouds.

Fourth, perhaps most importantly, the news coverage assumes, incorrectly, that modern humanity is evolving according to the kinds of environmental pressures that affected our ancient forebears. These days, with vitamin D tablets, sunscreen, roofs, and sombreros readily available, redheads and non-redheads are more or less equally likely to survive, find mates, and have healthy babies that go on to repeat the process.

Oh, and if there’s still any doubt in your mind as to whether reports of impending annihilation of redheads are utter bollocks, here’s the final coup de grâce. The Daily Record‘s sole quoted source was Alistair Moffat, managing director of the company ScotlandsDNA. When we contacted ScotlandsDNA, marketing manager Helen Moffat told us, “Alistair was misquoted in the original interview. We do not have a view on this.”


Source
Climate change could make red hair a thing of the past if Scotland gets sunnier, Daily Record

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

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Federal bill would wash away plastic microbead problem

by PearleneEdmonds Posted on June 19, 2014

out damn spot

Federal bill would wash away plastic microbead problem

By

Eric T. Schneiderman Facebook page

Could America’s bathroom cabinets finally be cleansed of tiny ecosystem-disrupting plastic beads?

Ecologists, activists, and lawmakers in a number of states have grown increasingly alarmed at exfoliating plastic microbeads in products such as face wash, toothpaste, and shampoo, which wash down drains and end up in lakes, rivers, and oceans. Earlier this month, Illinois became the first state to outlaw the manufacture and sale of grooming products containing the microbeads, starting in 2017.

Now microbead worries have simmered up to Congress. Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) on Wednesday introduced a bead-banning bill. From his press release:

The bill would ban the sale or distribution of cosmetics products containing plastic microbeads effective January 1, 2018.

“These tiny plastic particles that are polluting our environment are found in products specifically designed to be washed down shower drains,” said Pallone. “And many people buying these products are unaware of their damaging effects. If we know that these products will eventually reach our waterways, we must make sure that they don’t contain synthetic plastic that does not biodegrade and ultimately pollute our waterways. We have a responsibility to put a stop to this unnecessary plastic pollution.”

The bill is pretty much DOA in the Republican-controlled House. But a solution to the microbead problem could still be in the offing. As the AP notes, the companies that produce these polluting products actually cooperated with Illinois lawmakers in drafting the state’s recent bill. That’s largely because many of them have already announced plans to stop using the plastic ingredients altogether in the coming years.


Source
Pallone Introduces Legislation to Ban Use of Plastic Microbeads in Cosmetics, Pallone website
In Odd Twist, Industry Agrees to Ban ‘Microbeads’, The Associated Press

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

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Illinois becomes first state to ban lake-fouling microbeads

by DanutaSievwrigh Posted on June 10, 2014

The beading edge

Illinois becomes first state to ban lake-fouling microbeads

By

The plastic microbeads found in many facewash, toothpaste, and other personal-care products are making a real mess. The exfoliating beads wash down bathroom drains, into sewers, through water treatment plants, into lakes and oceans, and into the food chain. Underwater layers of microbeads are particularly prevalent in the Great Lakes, which helps explain why New York state lawmakers moved to ban the beads this past winter, prompting Californian politicians to follow suit.

But New York and California have been bested in the race to pinch out the microbead problem by Illinois, which rings the southwestern portion of Lake Michigan. The Chicago Tribune reports:

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation Sunday banning the manufacture and sale of personal care products containing synthetic plastic microbeads.

“Banning microbeads will help ensure clean waters across Illinois and set an example for our nation to follow,” Quinn said. “Lake Michigan and the many rivers and lakes across our state are among our most important natural resources. We must do everything necessary to safeguard them.”

The new law bans the manufacture of personal care products containing microbeads by the end of 2017, the sale of personal care products and the manufacture of over the counter drugs by the end of 2018, and the sale of over the counter drugs by the end of 2019.

Similar bills in New York and California are still pending, and lawmakers in Minnesota and Ohio have introduced versions as well.


Source
Governor signs bill making Illinois first state to ban microbeads, The Chicago Tribune

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

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Illinois becomes first state to ban lake-fouling microbeads

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Fish are great at fighting climate change. Too bad we’re eating them all.

by elvys303 Posted on June 10, 2014

Fish are great at fighting climate change. Too bad we’re eating them all.

By

Hallie Bateman

Climate change may be screwing with your seafood, but it turns out your seafood has been fighting back.

Fish, like Aquaman, might not seem to have a lot of relevance in the world-saving department. Never mind that the world is 99 percent ocean by habitable volume: We’re up here in the 1 percent of living space we care about the most, and they’re stuck breathing through gills and riding around on sea-ponies.

But in a DC Comics-worthy plot twist, a new study shows that fish have been doing a lot more world-saving than we thought, by way of sequestering carbon to stave off climate change — which on the danger scale is up there with supervillain plots like blocking out the sun or moving the moon. The catch (har) is that we can’t eat all our fish and have them save the world, too.

The sea absorbs about half of the billions of tons of CO2 humans emit; if it didn’t, it would already be absorbing quite a few of us. But it’s not like the oceans are just a giant sponge passively sopping up our atmospheric mess. They’re more like a forest — a really, really big one in which plants and animals grow and photosynthesize and eat each other and die, intaking carbon as they go. And a forest is made up of trees, or in this increasingly literal metaphor, phytoplankton and fish and other organisms. You can’t cut down all the fishtrees and expect your oceanforest to keep sucking up carbon.

Though we used to think that phytoplankton near the surface of the ocean did all the work of sequestration on their own, by taking their carbon with them when they died, it it now clear that the process is a little more vigorous than that. Instead of just waiting for carbon-laden plankton to get on their level, certain deep-dwelling, nightmare-inducing predators actually hunt down the tasty upper-level nibbles before swimming back into the extreme depths where all that carbon is effectively trapped for good.

And scientists recently learned that there are 10 to 30 times more of these mid- to deep-sea fish than they thought (and I made sushi jokes about them). Since these elusive fish turn out to make up 95 percent of the biomass in the ocean, they have a lot to do with why the ocean is so good at vacuuming up all our carbon. It goes (roughly) like this: Phytoplankton near the surface gobble up CO2 and are in turn gobbled by mid-level fish who swim up for their nightly buffet. These fish, once they head back to more familiar depths, are then gobbled by even deeper sea fish. It’s the circle of extremely creepy-looking life.

As with any cycle, there is a danger that even small changes can disrupt the whole system. In this case, overfishing scoops up lots of important mid- and deep-sea fish, either as bycatch or in the form of tasty endangered species like orange roughy or Chilean sea bass. A 2008 report on deep-sea fisheries from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea found that the pressure of overfishing on these ecosystems was especially severe:

A large proportion of deep-water trawl catches (upwards of 50 percent) can consist of unpalatable species and numerous small species, including juveniles of the target species, which are usually discarded … The survival of these discards is unknown, but believed to be virtually zero due to fragility of these species and the effects of pressure changes during retrieval … Therefore such fisheries tend to deplete the whole fish community biomass.

So eating lots and lots of fish is good for the climate, but only if you’re a fangtooth cruising the mesopelagic for takeout. The rest of us now have one more reason to check Seafood Watch before digging into that sustainably caught, bycatch-free, preferably local and abundant filet-o’-fish.


Source
Fish can slow down global warming—but not if we keep eating them, Quartz
How fish cool off global warming, Scientific American

Amelia Urry is Grist’s intern. Follow her on Twitter.

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Fish are great at fighting climate change. Too bad we’re eating them all.

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Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

by RonaldDempster Posted on June 9, 2014

Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

By

The White House

President Obama explained his thinking about climate change during a sit-down interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman; it will air Monday night during the final episode of Showtime’s climate series “Years of Living Dangerously.” Friedman also shared lots of the good bits in his Times column on Sunday. Here are some highlights:

Obama would love to make polluters pay for their CO2 emissions:

“[I]f there’s one thing I would like to see, it’d be for us to be able to price the cost of carbon emissions. … We’ve obviously seen resistance from the Republican side of the aisle on that. And out of fairness, there’s some Democrats who’ve been concerned about it as well, because regionally they’re very reliant on heavy industry and old-power plants. … I still believe, though, that the more we can show the price of inaction — that billions and potentially trillions of dollars are going to be lost because we do not do something about it — ultimately leads us to be able to say, ‘Let’s go ahead and help the marketplace discourage this kind of activity.’”

He knows we can’t burn all proven reserves of oil, gas, and coal and still keep warming below 2 degrees C, an internationally agreed-upon target:

“[T]here is no doubt that if we burned all the fossil fuel that’s in the ground right now that the planet’s going to get too hot and the consequences could be dire. … [W]e’re not going to suddenly turn off a switch and suddenly we’re no longer using fossil fuels, but we have to use this time wisely, so that you have a tapering off of fossil fuels replaced by clean energy sources that are not releasing carbon. … But I very much believe in keeping that 2 [degree] Celsius target as a goal.”

Obama recognizes that methane leakage from natural-gas systems is a problem, but he is not necessarily inclined to address it at the national level:

Natural gas, the president said, “is a useful bridge” to span “where we are right now and where we hope to be — where we’ve got entirely clean energy economies based around the world.” Environmentalists, he added, “are right, though, to be concerned if it’s done badly, then you end up having methane gas emitted. And we know how to do it properly. But right now what we’ve got to do is make sure that there are industry standards that everybody is observing.” That doesn’t “necessarily mean that it has to be a national law,” he said. “You could have a series of states working together — and, hopefully, industry working together — to make sure that the extraction of natural gas is done safely.”

He says it’s hard to get our political system to tackle a long-term problem like climate change:

“I don’t always lead with the climate change issue because if you right now are worried about whether you’ve got a job or if you can pay the bills, the first thing you want to hear is how do I meet the immediate problem? One of the hardest things in politics is getting a democracy to deal with something now where the payoff is long term or the price of inaction is decades away.”

He wants to shift public opinion on the issue:

“The person who I consider to be the greatest president of all time, Abraham Lincoln, was pretty consistent in saying, ‘With public opinion there’s nothing I cannot do, and without public opinion there’s nothing I can get done,’ and so part of my job over these next two and a half years and beyond is trying to shift public opinion. And the way to shift public opinion is to really focus in on the fact that if we do nothing our kids are going to be worse off.”

Lastly, Obama warns against cynicism:

“I want to make sure that everybody who’s been watching this program or listening to this interview doesn’t start concluding that, well, we’re all doomed, there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s a lot we can do about it. It’s not going to happen as fast or as smoothly or as elegantly as we like, but, if we are persistent, we will make progress.”

Ezra Klein, are you listening?

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Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

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