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60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

by SFGJrg Posted on May 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sixty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The changes required by Brown v. Board of Education decision were not immediate, but they were profound and lasting. Today, schools in the South are the least segregated for black students in the nation.

Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story. In honor of the Brown anniversary, UCLA’s Civil Rights Project released a report that analyzes the progress of desegregation since 1954. According to the report, starting in the 1980s, schools began to ditch integration efforts and shift focus to universal education standards as a way to level the playing field for students in unequal schools. In 1991, when the Supreme Court ruled that school districts could end their desegregation plans, it put the nail in integration’s coffin.

Black students integrating a Clinton, Tennessee, school in 1956 Thomas J. O’Halloran/Library of Congress

Today, the picture of American schools is far different than what the 1954 ruling seemed to portend. The UCLA report notes that Latino students are the most segregated in the country. In major and mid-sized cities, where housing discrimination historically separated neighborhoods along racial lines, black and Latino students are often almost entirely isolated from white and Asian students—about 12 percent of black and Latino students in major cities have any exposure to white students. Half of the students who attend 91-100 percent black and Latino schools (which make up 13 percent of all US public schools) are also in schools that are 90 percent low-income—a phenomenon known as “double segregation.” And the Northeast holds the special distinction of having more black children in intensely segregated schools (where school populations are 90-100 percent minority) in 2011 than it did in 1968. In New York state, for instance, 65 percent of black students attend schools that are intensely segregated, as do 57 percent of Latinos students.

Bused to a white school, New York City children face parent protests in 1965. Dick DeMarsico/Library of Congress

Even in the South, where Brown made such a profound difference, school integration is being rolled back. The chart below shows the percentage of black students attending majority white schools in the South over the last 60 years. You can see the progress made after Brown—and how rapidly it’s dissolving.

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60 Years Ago Today, The Supreme Court Told Schools to Desegregate. Here’s How Fast We’re Backsliding.

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CHART: The Bulk of Federal Welfare Spending Is Not Going to the People Who Need It Most

by EmmaAlcala Posted on May 7, 2014

Mother Jones

Johns Hopkins University

In his past several budget proposals, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has called for big cuts to the federal safety net, especially to the food stamps program. He’d like to see the food assistance program, which helps 46 million people, turned over to the states and reformed the way welfare was in the 1990s, with the imposition of stiff time limits on benefits and work requirements for recipients. But according to a new study, that focus on tying benefits to work has contributed to a major shift in federal welfare spending away from the people who need it most.

Robert Moffitt, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University, has found that over the past 30 years federal safety net spending has increased dramatically, as Republicans often allege. But that spending hasn’t gone to help the people who need it most. Instead, the additional funding has shifted to help people who aren’t exactly wealthy, but who aren’t doing quite as badly as those at the bottom, largely because they work for some part of the year. The resulting policy shift means that in 2014, a family of four earning $11,925 a year—50 percent of the official poverty line—likely receives less aid than a similar family earning $47,700.

That’s a big change from 1983, when 56 percent of all safety net payments (all major social insurance programs except Medicaid and Medicare) went to families living below 200 percent of the federal poverty line. By 2004, that figure had dropped to 32 percent. Moffitt says the data indicates that even among the poor, inequality is increasing as federal funds have been redistributed from the worst-off families to those doing somewhat better. Federal safety net benefits to single parents living below 50 percent of the poverty line have plummeted 35 percent since 1983.

Some demographic groups have fared better than others, namely the elderly and the disabled. Moffitt notes that families headed by someone over the age of 62 have seen their benefits rise by 19 percent over the past 30 years. Meanwhile, those taking the biggest hit are single mothers, who have been disproportionately affected by changes to the welfare system in 1996 that cut off most cash aid to anyone who wasn’t working. Moffitt says the disparity is also the result of large increases in programs that benefit specific groups of low-income people, as the Earned Income Tax Credit does. While the credit lifted more than 3 million children out of poverty in 2012, it’s largest impact is on people who earn at least $10,000 a year or more.

While he doesn’t say it in his presentation, all of these trends are one reason why the number of Americans living on less than $2 a day has doubled since 1996. American politicians’ obsession with helping the “deserving poor” has meant that the people who aren’t so deserving or who are trying and not making it are getting more screwed than ever. “You would think that the government would offer the most support to those who have the lowest incomes and provide less help to those with higher incomes,” Moffitt observed. “But that is not the case.”

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CHART: The Bulk of Federal Welfare Spending Is Not Going to the People Who Need It Most

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Hemp Bound: A playbook for the next US agricultural revolution

by Sherri20Cxlfidz Posted on May 7, 2014

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw

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The Home Organizing Workbook – Meryl Starr

Failing the Mary Poppins’ snap-the-fingers approach to cleaning, here’s the next best thing: an utterly practical handbook that offers lasting results for anyone looking to banish clutter from every room in the house. Home organizer par excellence Meryl Starr offers up her hardworking organizing solutions in The Home Organizing Workbook, a straight

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Same Place, More Space – Karl Champley

Master carpenter and DIY Network host Karl Champley offers 50 home improvement projects to maximize space in any dwelling, no matter how big or small. Keeping an eye on style and economy, Champley outlines tools, materials, and techniques for searching out and using hidden-away space to achieve incredible results. Readers will learn how to carve out shelving

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How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend – Monks of New Skete

For nearly a quarter century, How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend has been the standard against which all other dog-training books have been measured. This new, expanded edition, with a fresh new design and new photographs throughout, preserves the best features of the original classic while bringing the book fully up-to-date. The result: the ultimate trai

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Warhammer: Wood Elves – Games Workshop

For millennia, the Wood Elves have dwelt beneath the leaves of Athel Loren, defending their greenwood home from the perils of the world. When the King in the Woods sounds his horn, longbows are strung and spears are sharpened as the hosts of Athel Loren assemble beneath ancestral banners. In the depths of the forests, enchantresses sing songs of awakening, r

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Backyard Vegetable Gardening Guide – Larry Stebbins

This monthly organic vegetable gardening guide leads the beginner and veteran gardener through the seasons. It begins with how to plan and design a garden to many other tips and suggestions that will ensure a bountiful harvest. Although it was written primarily for the Colorado front range, it is widely applicable to most mid to northern states. 

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White Dwarf Issue 14: 3 May 2014 – White Dwarf

The Wild Riders charge forth! The Wood Elves get reinforcements this issue, and we put them to the test in the Battle of Fell Glade, a battle report against the vile Beastmen. We’re also proud to present a brand-new minigame for the new Treeman miniature called ‘The Defence of Athel Loren’. About this Series: White Dwarf is Games Workshop

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From Seed to Skillet – Susan Heeger & Jimmy Williams

Jimmy Williams learned all about vegetable gardening at the knee of his grandmother, a South Carolina native from a traditional Gullah community whose members were descendents of Caribbean slaves. He pays homage to his family history in this inspiring step-by-step guide to designing and planting a backyard vegetable garden and growing one’s own food. Wi

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes,

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The Cannabis Grow Bible – Greg Green

The definitive guide to growing marijuana just got better! Greg Green’s original Cannabis Grow Bible set a new standard for handbooks on cannabis horticulture and established Green as the leading authority in the field. Green’s comprehensive and professionally presented work on how to cultivate superior cannabis struck a chord with beginner, amateur and prof

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Hemp Bound: A playbook for the next US agricultural revolution

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What if Everyone in the World Became a Vegetarian?

by Alica91Oyfwp Posted on May 1, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The meat industry is one of the top contributors to climate change, directly and indirectly producing about 14.5 percent of the world’s anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and global meat consumption is on the rise. People generally like eating meat—when poor people start making more money, they almost invariably start buying more meat. As the population grows and eats more animal products, the consequences for climate change, pollution, and land use could be catastrophic.

Attempts to reduce meat consumption usually focus on baby steps—Meatless Monday and “vegan before 6,” passable fake chicken, and in vitro burgers. If the world is going to eat less meat, it’s going to have to be coaxed and cajoled into doing it, according to conventional wisdom.

But what if the convincing were the easy part? Suppose everyone in the world voluntarily stopped eating meat, en masse. I know it’s not actually going to happen. But the best-case scenario from a climate perspective would be if all 7 billion of us woke up one day and realized that PETA was right all along. If this collective change of spirit came to pass, like Peter Singer‘s dearest fantasy come true, what would the ramifications be?

At least one research team has run the numbers on what global veganism would mean for the planet. In 2009 researchers from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency published their projections of the greenhouse gas consequences if humanity came to eat less meat, no meat, or no animal products at all. The researchers predicted that universal veganism would reduce agriculture-related carbon emissions by 17 percent, methane emissions by 24 percent, and nitrous oxide emissions by 21 percent by 2050. Universal vegetarianism would result in similarly impressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, the Dutch researchers found that worldwide vegetarianism or veganism would achieve these gains at a much lower cost than a purely energy-focused intervention involving carbon taxes and renewable energy technology. The upshot: Universal eschewal of meat wouldn’t single-handedly stave off global warming, but it would go a long way toward mitigating climate change.

The Dutch researchers didn’t take into account what else might happen if everyone gave up meat. “In this scenario study we have ignored possible socio-economic implications such as the effect of health changes on GDP and population numbers,” wrote Elke Stehfest and her colleagues. “We have not analyzed the agro-economic consequences of the dietary changes and its implications; such consequences might not only involve transition costs, but also impacts on land prices. The costs that are associated with this transition might obviously offset some of the gains discussed here.”

Indeed. If the world actually did collectively go vegetarian or vegan over the course of a decade or two, it’s reasonable to think the economy would tank. According to “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the influential 2006 U.N. report about meat’s devastating environmental effects, livestock production accounts for 1.4 percent of the world’s total GDP. The production and sale of animal products account for 1.3 billion people’s jobs, and 987 million of those people are poor. If demand for meat were to disappear overnight, those people’s livelihoods would disappear, and they would have to find new ways of making money. Now, some of them—like the industrial farmers who grow the corn that currently goes to feed animals on factory farms—would be in a position to adapt by shifting to in-demand plant-based food production. Others, namely the “huge number of people involved in livestock for lack of an alternative, particularly in Africa and Asia,” would probably be out of luck. (Things would be better for the global poor involved in the livestock trade if everyone continued to consume other animal products, such as eggs, milk, and wool, than if everyone decided to go vegan.) As the economy adjusted to the sudden lack of demand for meat products, we would expect to see widespread suffering and social unrest.

A second major ramification of global vegetarianism would be expanses of new land available. Currently, grazing land for ruminants—cows and their kin—accounts for a staggering 26 percent of the world’s ice-free land surface. The Dutch scientists predict that 2.7 billion hectares (about 10.4 million square miles) of that grazing land would be freed up by global vegetarianism, along with 100 million hectares (about 386,000 square miles) of land that’s currently used to grow crops for livestock. Not all of this land would be suitable for humans, but surely it stands to reason that this sudden influx of new territory would make land much cheaper on the whole.

A third major ramification of global vegetarianism would be that the risk of antibiotic-resistant infections would plummet. Currently, the routine use of antibiotics in animal farming to promote weight gain and prevent illness in unsanitary conditions is a major contributor to antibiotic resistance. Last year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that at least 2 million Americans fall ill from antibiotic-resistant pathogens every year and declared that “much of antibiotic use in animals is unnecessary and inappropriate and makes everyone less safe.” The overprescription of antibiotics for humans plays a big role in antibiotic resistance, but eradicating the factory farms from which many antibiotic-resistant bacteria emerge would make it more likely that we could continue to count on antibiotics to cure serious illnesses. (For a sense of what a “post-antibiotics future” would look like, read Maryn McKenna’s amazing article on the topic for Medium and her story about a possible solution for chicken farming in Slate.)

So what would be the result, in an all-vegetarian world, of the combination of widespread unemployment and economic disruption, millions of square miles of available land, and a lowered risk of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea? I can only conclude that people would band together to form communes in order to escape capitalism’s ruthlessness, squat on the former pasture land, and adopt a lifestyle of free love.

I kid. Mostly. It’s easy to get carried away when you’re speculating about unlikely scenarios—and sudden intercontinental vegetarianism is very much an unlikely scenario.

But if the result of a worldwide shift to a plant-based diet sounds like a right-winger’s worst nightmare, it’s worth pointing out that continuing to eat as much meat as we currently do promises to result in a left-winger’s worst nightmare: In a world of untrammeled global warming, where disastrous weather events are routine, global conflicts will increase, only the wealthy will thrive, and the poor will suffer.

Let’s try a middle path. We’re not all going to become vegetarians, but most of us can stop giving our money to factory farms—the biggest and worst offenders, from a pollution and public health perspective. We can eat less meat than we currently do, especially meat from methane-releasing ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats, etc.). Just because a sudden global conversion to vegetarianism would have jarring effects doesn’t mean we can’t gradually reduce our consumption of meat, giving the market time to adjust. We not only can; we must. After all, with the world’s population slated to grow to 9 billion by 2050, we’ll be needing to take some of the 25 percent of the world’s land area back from the cows.

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What if Everyone in the World Became a Vegetarian?

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US Supreme Court Endorses EPA’s Efforts to Reduce Cross-State Pollution

by LaureneIngalls Posted on April 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on the Guardian‘s website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The US supreme court endorsed the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to deal with air pollution blowing across state lines on Tuesday, in an important victory for the Obama administration as well as downwind states.

The court’s 6-2 decision unblocks a 2011 rule requiring 28 eastern states to reduce power-plant emissions that carry smog and soot particles across state lines, hurting the air quality in downwind states.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing the court’s majority opinion, said the EPA’s formula for dealing with cross-state air pollution was “permissable, workable and equitable”.

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US Supreme Court Endorses EPA’s Efforts to Reduce Cross-State Pollution

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No, New York Times, Keystone XL Is Not a "Rounding Error"

by slodka_elkra Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim McDonnell

The New York Times had an interesting story earlier this week that aimed to put the carbon footprint of the Keystone XL pipeline, widely derided by environmentalists as the coup de grâce for climate change, in a broader context. The main takeaway was that even if the pipeline gets built, the carbon emissions from the oil it will carry will be such a small slice of the global pie as to be practically negligible; one analyst quoted in the story dismisses Keystone’s carbon footprint as a “rounding error.”

The story is right about a couple things: For the Obama administration to take a strong stance on climate change, finalizing and enforcing tough new limits on emissions from cars and coal-fired power plants will likely have a much bigger impact than blocking this one pipeline (a final decision on the pipeline was delayed once again by the State Department last Friday). And in any case, according to the State Department’s latest environmental assessment, most of the Canadian oil that the pipe would carry is going to get dug up and burned one way or another, so blocking the pipeline won’t necessarily be a win for the climate.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that, as the chart above shows, the footprint of this one infrastructure project is much less than that of the entire US economy. But that doesn’t mean we should write off all that oil’s carbon footprint altogether. In fact, the Times story’s own such chart dramatically understates what that footprint will really be, using a statistic out of context that’s an order of magnitude lower than the latest official estimate.

The Times writes that the pipeline will be responsible for an annual 18.7 million metric tons of emissions, citing a 2013 letter from a top EPA administrator to senior State Department officials offering feedback on their environmental review of the pipeline. But in the letter, that figure isn’t presented as an estimate of the pipeline’s total footprint. Instead, it’s an estimate of how much greater the emissions will be as a result of the pipeline carrying oil sands crude, the exceptionally carbon-heavy oil that will run in the pipe, as opposed to an equivalent volume of conventional crude oil.

In other words, 18.7 million metric tons is only the difference between conventional and oil sands oil, the extra carbon boost that comes from using a dirtier fossil fuel, what the EPA letter calls “incremental emissions.”

The real number to look at is from the State Department’s final environmental analysis (last paragraph on page ES-15) released in January, and it’s much higher. According to that report, over its full lifecycle (from production to refinement to burning) the oil carried by the pipeline will emit 147-168 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually—more than the whole nation of Pakistan, according to Energy Information Administration statistics, and about as much as 41 coal-fired power plants.

The Times analysis is also problematic because it makes an erroneous apples-to-oranges comparison between country-level emissions data from the Energy Information Administration that counts only carbon dioxide, and Keystone emissions estimates that are given in terms of “carbon dioxide equivalent” and thus count other greenhouse gases like methane (although CO2 still accounts for the lion’s share). For a better apples-to-apples comparison, I only included the US in my chart (and not the other nations included in the Times chart), because an official estimate of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions is only available for that country.

Although even the State Department Keystone estimate is a small-ish chunk of total US emissions, it’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, especially when President Obama has repeatedly linked approval of the pipeline to a finding that it won’t have a major impact on climate change.

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No, New York Times, Keystone XL Is Not a "Rounding Error"

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Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

by FelixHuddleston Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jared Diamond didn’t start out as the globe-romping author of massive, bestselling books about the precarious state of our civilization. Rather, after a Cambridge training in physiology, he at first embarked on a career in medical research. By the mid-1980s, he had become recognized as the world’s foremost expert on, of all things, the transport of sodium in the human gall bladder.

But then in 1987, something happened: his twin sons were born. “I concluded that gall bladders were not going to save the world,” remembers Diamond on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “I realized that the future of my sons was not going to depend upon the wills that my wife and I were drawing up for our sons, but on whether there was going to be a world worth living in in the year 2050.”

The result was Diamond’s first popular book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. It’s the book that came before his mega-bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it very much lays the groundwork for that work, as well as for Diamond’s 2005’s ecological jeremiad Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a sense, The Third Chimpanzee ties together Diamond’s thinking: It’s a sweeping survey of who we humans are—evolutionarily speaking, that is—and what that says about whether we can solve the “various messes that we’re making now,” in Diamond’s words. And this month, The Third Chimpanzee has been released in a new, shortened and illustrated edition for young adults, underscoring Diamond’s view that our entire future now depends on “enabling young people to make better decisions than their parents.”

In other words, if you want to boil down Diamond’s message these days to its essence, it would be something like this: Go forth, young chimpanzees, and clean up the mess we made. (Or else.) For Diamond, the story of who we are is also the story of what we must do. The younger among us, anyway.

Jared Diamond’s new edition of The Third Chimpanzee is directed at all the young chimpanzees out there, who had better be wiser than their parents. GlobalP/Thinkstock

So who are we? From the perspective of genetics, we are clearly the third species of chimpanzee. Our DNA is only 1.6 percent different from that of either chimps or pygmy chimpanzees (today more commonly called bonobos). “The reason why you and I are talking, and we’re not locked up in cages—whereas chimpanzees are not talking, and are locked up in cages—all that lies in 2 percent of our DNA,” explained Diamond on Inquiring Minds.

In fact, as Diamond emphasizes in his book, we are more genetically similar to chimps than many other closely related species are to one another. Gorillas and chimps, for instance, are 2.3 percent different, which means that chimps are considerably closer to us than to their other nearest primate relatives. Or, consider two very closely related songbird species: the red-eyed and white-eyed vireo. They are 2.9 percent different, notes Diamond.

So what makes humans so seemingly special? Until pretty recently, we weren’t. All the way up to 80,000 years ago, we were just “glorified chimpanzees,” in Diamond’s words. But then, something changed. Diamond calls it the “Great Leap Forward.” “The first art appears, necklaces, pierced ostrich shells,” says Diamond. “There’s rapid invention of tools, implying that even though our brains had been big for hundreds of thousands of years, we were not doing much interesting with these big brains—at least nothing that showed up preserved in the fossil record.”

We’re still not sure what brought on the Great Leap Forward. There wasn’t any big environmental change that drove us to adapt; all this happened in the middle of an Ice Age. Diamond’s hypothesis is that it was the development and perfection of spoken language that catapulted us forward, making possible teamwork, collaboration, planning, long-distance trade, and much more. Whether for lack of vocal capacity, brain development, or some other reason, chimps never made this leap. “A baby chimpanzee that was brought up in the home of a clinical psychologist couple, along with their baby, by age two, the chimpanzee could pronounce only four consonants and vowels, and it never got better,” says Diamond. “But if all you can say is, bi, ba, di, do, that doesn’t get you Shakespeare, and it also doesn’t let you discuss how to construct atomic bombs and bows and arrows.”

7 Stories.

In this view, the downstream consequences of language acquisition are, basically, everything that stands out about human civilization. That ranges from the highly beneficial—the dramatic growth in life expectancy—to the mixed: technologies that have significant benefits but also huge costs (like, say, devices to exploit fossil fuels for energy). And most of all, it includes environmental despoilment and resource depletion. “At present, we, humans, are operating worldwide on a non-sustainable economy,” says Diamond. “We’re exploiting resources, water, energy sources, fisheries, forests, at a rate such that most of these resources will get seriously depleted within a few decades.”

As a result, Diamond believes that our big brains are now setting us up for a major fall—a Great Leap Backward, if you will. “We are now reversing our progress much more rapidly than we created it,” writes Diamond in the new The Third Chimpanzee. “Our power threatens our own existence.”

In our interview, host Indre Viskontas asked Diamond where he thought humanity would be 100 years from now. What’s striking is that he wasn’t positive that the modern world, as we know it, would be around at all. It all depends, he says, on where we are at 2050:

DIAMOND: Either by the year 2050 we’ve succeeded in developing a sustainable economy, in which case we can then ask your question about 100 years from now, because there will be 100 years from now; or by 2050 we’ve failed to develop a sustainable economy, which means that there will no longer be first world living conditions, and there either won’t be humans 100 years from now, or those humans 100 years from now will have lifestyles similar of those of Cro-Magnons 40,000 years ago, because we’ve already stripped away the surface copper and the surface iron. If we knock ourselves out of the first world, we’re not going to be able to rebuild a first world.

In 2005’s Collapse, Diamond provided a great deal more detail on how ecological despoilment led to the collapse of other societies, such as the Easter Islanders, who cut down all their trees. The difference now, however, is that globalization causes our peril to be more widely distributed, kind of like a house of cards. “In this globalized world,” says Diamond, “it’s no longer possible for societies to collapse one by one. A collapse that we face, if there is going to be a collapse, it will be a global collapse.”

And yet despite all of this, Diamond says he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the future of humanity. What exactly does that mean? “My estimate for the chances that we will master our problems and have a happy future, I would say the chances are 51 percent,” explains Diamond. “And the chances of a bad ending are only 49 percent,” he adds.

Not everybody agrees with Diamond that we’re in such a perilous state, of course. But there is perhaps no more celebrated chronicler of why civilizations rise, and why they fall. That is, after all, why we read him. So when Diamond says we’ve got maybe 50 years to turn it around, we should at least consider the possibility that he might actually be right. For if he is, the consequences are so intolerable that anything possible should be done to avert them.

Which brings us back to his book for young people—or, perhaps more accurately, for young chimpanzees. “This is the spirit in which I dedicate this book to my young sons and their generation,” writes Diamond in the new edition. “If we learn from the past that I have traced, our future may be brighter than that of the other two chimpanzees.”

To listen to the full interview with Jared Diamond, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of the science (and superstition) behind this week’s “blood moon,” and the case of K.C., the late amnesiac patient who taught us so much about the nature of human memory.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Mindsvia iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Jared Diamond: We Could Be Living in a New Stone Age by 2114

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Should You Be Worried About Your E-Cigarette Exploding?

by al36olu Posted on April 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, an 18-year-old bartender in North Yorkshire, England, was serving drinks when a colleague’s electronic cigarette exploded, setting the bartender’s dress on fire. This was not the first reported incident of an e-cigarette exploding—over the past few years, there have been more than a dozen similar reports.

Specifically, it’s e-cigarettes’ lithium-ion batteries that combust. These batteries are also found in laptops and cellphones. But with e-cigarettes, the batteries are especially prone to overheating because smokers use incompatible chargers, overcharge the e-cigarettes, or don’t take sufficient safety precautions. For example, many e-cigarettes are made to plug into a USB port, which smokers may take to mean the devices can be safely charged with a computer or iPad charger. But if left too long in a common USB port, some e-cigarette batteries can fry.

The industry acknowledges that explosions are a possibility. “I’m aware of 10 failures in the last year,” Thomas Kiklas, who represents the Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Association, told NBC Chicago last October. “When you charge them, they are 99.9 percent safe, but occasionally there will be failures.”

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees tobacco products, does not currently regulate e-cigarettes. An FDA spokesperson says the agency is working to change that.

Here is a brief history of notable e-cigarette explosions and fires:

Niceville, Florida, February 2012
A 57-year-old Vietnam veteran was smoking an e-cigarette when it exploded in his face, knocking out his teeth and part of his tongue, according to ABC News. A fire chief told the news outlet that the accident was most likely caused by a faulty lithium battery, which exploded like a “bottle rocket.”

Muskogee, Oklahoma, April 2012
Shona Bear Clark bought an NJOY e-cigarette from Walmart to help her cut back on smoking half a pack a day. Clark says it exploded when she tried to remove it from its package. “It was as loud as firing a gun, but a gun fired right in your face,” she recalled.

Corona, California, March 2013
Jennifer Ries and her husband, Xavier, were driving to the airport, with their VapCigs e-cig charging in the car. “I looked around and I saw the battery to the e-cigarette dripping,” she told CBS Los Angeles. “I went to unscrew it and the battery started shooting fire toward me and then exploded and shot the metal pieces onto my lap…A blowtorch type of fire and then an explosion.” Ries suffered second-degree burns, and the the couple later sued the e-cig manufacturer.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 2013
Kyle Czeschin’s e-cig was plugged into his laptop. Guess what happened next? “Everything was on fire, my laptop was on fire, my lamp was on fire, the shades,” he told News On 6.

Sherman, Texas, July 2013
Wes Sloan wanted to kick his habit, so bought what he assumed would be a safer, electric alternative to cigarettes. “The battery was into about a two-hour charge and it exploded and shot across the room like a Roman candle,” he said. Sloan was charging the e-cig in the USB port of a Macbook. He says he suffered second- and third-degree burns, and that he and his wife, Cathy, were treated for smoke inhalation.

Mount Pleasant, Utah, September 2013
A Utah mom was charging her e-cigarette in her car when she said there was “a big bang, and kind of a flash, and smoke everywhere,” according to Fox 13 News. The e-cigarette reportedly released a hot copper coil that landed in her son’s car seat, burning the boy. The mom was finally able to put the fire out with an iced coffee. A fire marshal told the news outlet that the mom’s charger was standard and factory-issued, and it was a “catastrophic failure of the device.” He also noted this was the second e-cigarette explosion he’d investigated recently in the region.

Atlanta, September 2013

A woman in Grant Park plugged her e-cigarette into her computer to charge it, according to WSB-TV Atlanta. Fortunately, she was home when she says it began to shoot four-foot flames across the living room. (A screenshot in the above link shows the rag that the woman used to unplug the e-cigarette as it was burning.) “If I hadn’t had been home, I would have lost my dogs, I would have lost my cats, I would have lost my house,” she told the news station.

La Crosse, Wisconsin, September 2013
The La Crosse Fire Department explains how they’re learning to deal with e-cig fires:

Blaine, Minnesota, October 2013
A man was charging his e-cigarette through his computer when his wife noticed that it was “sparking like a fountain firework,” according to KMSP Fox 9. The device then “shot out like a missile” from the computer, she said. The owner of a nearby e-cigarette business told the news outlet that the battery didn’t have overcharge protection, and that’s likely why it overheated.

Kootenai County, Idaho, November 2013
An e-cigarette started a fire in an Idaho household’s living room while the family of four slept. The device, which was charging through a laptop, overheated and exploded. “If that smoke alarm didn’t go off, none of us would have woken up, you know, none of us would have been able to get to the door, ’cause it would have been blocked by the flames and we would have all died,” the son said.

Queen Creek, Arizona, November 2013
Just four days after Kyler Lawson bought his Crown Seven Gladiator e-cigarette, it exploded while charging. “It shot out like a bullet, hit the window, dropped from the window to the carpet,” he said. “Caught the carpet on fire…If you’re going to charge it, be there. Be present when you’re charging it because you never know what can happen.”

Eugene, Oregon, November 2013
Judy Timmons had been charging her e-cig in her car for two hours when it exploded. “I’m just glad my grandkids weren’t in the backseat because it could have exploded at any time,” she said. “It had enough power and momentum to shoot all the way to the backseat,” Larry, her husband, said.

Colorado Springs, Colorado, November 2013

KRDO

A man in Colorado Springs was charging his e-cigarette when it exploded, setting his bed on fire, according to KRDO NewsChannel 13. He used a blanket to smother the flames, suffering burns on his body and face. The manufacturer of “Foos” e-cigarettes told the news outlet that this was the first time he’d heard of their products malfunctioning. The man said that nonetheless, “I’m back on normal cigarettes now.”

Sneads Ferry, North Carolina, January 2014
A North Carolina man who spent over 20 years working as a firefighter was injured after his e-cigarette exploded in his face. He described the incident to the Jacksonville Daily News as feeling like “a bunch of hot oil hit my face.” After spending the night in the hospital, the newspaper reported that he continues to suffer from the incident: “The bottom of his left eyeball is sensitive to light, hard to see out of, and will need to be looked at by an optometrist.”

Springfield, Missouri, January 2014
Last Christmas Eve, Chantz Mondragon was sitting in bed with his wife when his e-cig overheated and burst into flames. The device was charging via a USB port on his laptop. He described the explosion as “a searing hot blinding light like a magnesium sparkler, like whenever you see a person welding.” Mondragon also said the fire burned through his bed, and caused second-degree burns on his leg and foot.

North Yorkshire, England, April, 2014
Eighteen-year-old Laura Baty was serving a customer at the Buck Inn Hotel when her coworker’s charging e-cigarette exploded behind the bar. “I started crying hysterically and my arm was all black,” she told the Press. “My dress caught on fire as I ran away, and I just didn’t know what was happening.”

London, April 2014

A woman who used an incompatible charger to charge her e-cigarette caused a major fire that took about 40 minutes to get under control, according to the London Evening Standard. A member of the London Fire Brigade told the paper that, “As with all rechargeable electrical equipment, it’s vitally important that people use the correct type of charger for their e-cigs to prevent fires which can be serious and could even result in death.”

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Should You Be Worried About Your E-Cigarette Exploding?

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Weather-related blackouts in U.S. doubled in 10 years

by wqds234der Posted on April 11, 2014

Weather-related blackouts in U.S. doubled in 10 years

By

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The current U.S. electrical grid is a far cry from smart. Climate change and aging infrastructure are leading to an increasing number of blackouts across the country.

A new analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central found that the number of outages affecting 50,000 or more people for at least an hour doubled during the decade up to 2012.  Most of the blackouts were triggered when extreme weather damaged large transmission lines and substations. Michigan had the most outages, followed by Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

Severe rainstorms, which are growing more tempestuous as the globe warms, were blamed for the majority of the weather-related outages.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

The researchers listed two main drivers of the trend:

Climate change is, at most, partially responsible for this recent increase in major power outages, which is a product of an aging grid serving greater electricity demand, and an increase in storms and extreme weather events that damage this system. But a warming planet provides more fuel for increasingly intense and violent storms, heat waves, and wildfires, which in turn will continue to strain, and too often breach, our highly vulnerable electrical infrastructure. …

Since 1990, heavy downpours and flooding have increased in most parts of the country, and the trend is most dramatic in the Northeast and Midwest. Some of this heavy rain is likely to be associated with high winds and thunderstorm activity. Researchers have found that these regions have already seen a 30 percent increase in heavy downpours compared to the 1901-1960 average.

Climate CentralClick to embiggen.

Solutions to the problem include more small wind and solar power installations built close to where the electricity is needed — and an overhaul of the country’s overburdened and outmoded grid system.

This research won’t come as a surprise inside the White House. The Obama administration put out a call for more spending on grid infrastructure last year when it published similar findings in its own report.


Source
Weather-Related Blackouts Doubled Since 2003: Report, Climate Central

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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Hillary Clinton Blasts the Supreme Court for Ruining Campaign Finance

by Gustavo Stanfield Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton isn’t a fan of the Supreme Court’s recent penchant for eroding campaign finance law. At an event in Portland, Oregon, earlier this week Clinton joked that, if the conservative majority on the Supreme Court continues on its current path, all elections would soon be decided by a handful of wealthy benefactors.

“With the rate the Supreme Court is going, there will only be three or four people in the whole country that have to finance our entire political system by the time they are done,” she said, according to CNN, after being asked about the public perception of Congress. “Understand,” she added, “that you can be a liberal, you can be a conservative, but you want to vote for someone who understands, respects, and cherishes the Democratic process.”

Clinton’s critique of the Supreme Court was a clear reference to the justices’ ruling last week on McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. In that 5-4 decision, the court’s conservative justices tossed out the rules on aggregate limits—a total cap on the amount a donor can contribute to federal campaigns or political committees during a two-year window. While there are still limitations on donations to individual candidates, the big-time spenders are now free to cast a wide net and send money to as many candidates as they please. That decision builds off Citizens United, the marquee campaign-finance case of Chief Justice John Roberts’ tenure, that began when an outside group created an anti-Clinton film during the 2008 campaign.

She may dislike the new rules, but Clinton has certainly benefited from the loosened campaign finance regulations that allow wealthy donors to inject ever more money into the political system. Clinton is, at least publicly, still weighing whether to run for president. “I am thinking about it,” Clinton said during a talk in San Francisco on Tuesday, “but I am going to continue to think about it for a while.” While Clinton waits to make up her mind, a vast infrastructure of super PACs has sprung up to prepare the way for her likely run. There’s Ready for Hillary, a group that’s hauled in just shy of $6 million over the past year to build a network of on-the-ground activists when Clinton launches her campaign. Priorities USA, a super PAC that originated to boost President Obama’s reelection, is preparing to blitzing the airwaves with pro-Clinton ads. That group is poised to be the outlet for Democratic donors who want to channel millions to Clinton’s cause beyond the normal restrictions. And Correct the Record, a branch of the super PAC American Bridge, is drawing funds from major donors like Steve Bing and Susie Tompkins Buell to run an opposition research and rapid response operation.

This vast shadow campaign has corralled the biggest names in Democratic fundraising into Clinton’s corner far in advance of the next presidential election. As my colleague Andy Kroll described it, Democratic politics is stuck in the Hillary Clinton Cash Freeze. Other Democrats who might want to try their hand at running for president have been shut out before they can even contemplate 2016. Hillary might not be a fan of the Supreme Court’s decisions to eviscerate campaign finance rules, but her supporters have no qualms with embracing the new wild west of money-in-politics to pave the way for her next presidential run.

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