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Photos of San Francisco Before the Silicon Valley Bros Invaded

by I ambit Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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San Francisco’s housing market became the nation’s priciest this year, with a median rent of $3,414 across all units. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably come across a media report—or a lament, or a tirade—about what’s been happening in the City by the Bay as it increasingly becomes a bedroom community for Silicon Valley and a tech center in its own right. Namely: a 170 percent increase in Ellis Act evictions, an 8 percent rent hike during a single quarter this year, runaway gentrification, techie elitism, class warfare, and the end of everything artistic and independent as we know it.

South of Market, or SoMa, is one of the neighborhoods most affected by San Francisco’s post-millennial boom. Once a nondescript refuge for working-class families, SoMa has recently transformed into an epicenter for startups, luxury condos, tony restaurants and breweries, boutique shops, and lofts. It’s emblematic of both the city’s encroaching corporatism and America’s ever-widening income inequality. For many native San Franciscans, it’s also a harbinger of worse to come.

Janet Delaney’s new book, South of Market, is a photographic record of SoMa’s first great makeover, which began in the 1960s. That’s when the city announced plans to build a 300,000-square-foot convention center—named for slain San Francisco Mayor George Moscone—in the heart of SoMa. Poor and elderly residents protested, accurately, saying that they’d be displaced; the city nonetheless approved the construction, and by 1981 Moscone Center occupied 10 acres of prime downtown real estate. To make room for this gleaming testament to civic pride, scores of low-income housing units—including several historic residential hotels—were bulldozed. Nearby rents swelled almost 300 percent. A mini-exodus to the picturesque Tenderloin and points west ensued. Once the dust settled, it was clear the neighborhood had permanently changed. No longer affordable, it began its long second act as a playground for entrepreneurs and real-estate salespeople.

Delaney began documenting the neighborhood in 1978. Her book chronicles a city in flux, but it’s not unequivocally bleak. For every photo of a demolished hotel or evicted family, there’s an elegantly composed shot of children skipping rope, business owners posing proudly in their shops, and streetscapes of hushed, now elegiac, beauty. Her interviews with longtime residents reveal outrage at the city’s indifference and anxiety about climbing rents, along with fear of a new soullessness. “There’s a lot of people here that weren’t here yesterday,” says one, and we can see in Delaney’s photos a new architecture of privilege as well. “You’ll find a great deal of the present in the past,” Delaney told me.

Bobby Washington and her daughter Ayana, 28 Langton Street Janet Delaney

Park Hotel, 429 Folsom Street Janet Delaney

Longtime neighbors, Langton at Folsom Street Janet Delaney

Greyhound Bus Depot, 7th Street between Mission and Market Janet Delaney

Flag Makers, Natoma at 3rd Street Janet Delaney

Saturday afternoon, Howard between 3rd and 4th streets Janet Delaney

Langton Park, Langton and Howard streets Janet Delaney

Remains of a five-alarm fire on Hallam Street Janet Delaney

Market at 2nd Street Janet Delaney

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Photos of San Francisco Before the Silicon Valley Bros Invaded

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Why the Renewable Fuel Standard is Good for the Climate

by Posted on December 12, 2013

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Why the Renewable Fuel Standard is Good for the Climate

Posted 12 December 2013 in

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Despite well-financed opposition from the oil industry, the Renewable Fuel Standard enjoys strong support across the political spectrum, from conservative lawmakers like Senator Chuck Grassley to progressive groups like the Center for American Progress (CAP). Yesterday, CAP published a new issue brief making the environmental case for the Renewable Fuel Standard. As they note:

The RFS is a valuable policy that is creating a market for cleaner-burning biofuels that will reduce carbon pollution in the transportation sector and help address the urgent threat of climate change.

CAP also recognizes the importance of the RFS for sustaining investment in advanced biofuels like cellulosic ethanol:

The development of advanced biofuels will only continue with the market certainty provided by the RFS, which enables companies to invest in the development and commercialization of cellulosic and advanced biofuels that are half as dirty as conventional fuels. Without the RFS, the diversification of fuel sources, the investment in advanced biofuels, and the effectiveness of U.S. climate policy will be severely limited.

Despite this clear evidence that the RFS is a vital part of our climate policy, the Obama Administration has proposed scaling back on renewable fuel in 2014. If you agree that this is the wrong decision, take one minute to send a letter to President Obama in support of the Renewable Fuel Standard.

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BPA Sales Are Booming

by Kennith30E Posted on December 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Bisphenol A, a chemical used in can linings and plastic bottles, is pretty nasty stuff. The Food and Drug Administration recently banished it from baby bottles (at the behest of the chemical industry itself, after baby bottle producers had already phased it out under consumer pressure). BPA, as it’s known, is an endocrine-disrupting chemical, meaning that it likely causes hormonal damage at extremely low levels. The packaging industry uses it to make plastics more flexible and to delay spoilage in canned foods.

You might think that such a substance would lose popularity as evidence of its likely harms piles up and up. Instead, however, the global market for it will boom over the next six years, according to a proprietary, paywall-protected report from the consultancy Transparency Market Research. The group expects global BPA sales to reach $18.8 billion by 2019, from $13.1 billion this year—about a 44 percent jump.

TMR researchers declined to be interviewed by me and wouldn’t give me access to a full copy of their report. But they did send me a heavily redacted sample. One of the few trends I could glean from it is that the “steady growth” in global BPA consumption is driven by “increasing demand in the Asia-Pacific region.” (According to this 2012 paper by Hong Kong researchers, Chinese BPA production and consumption have both “grown rapidly” in recent years, meaning “much more BPA contamination” for the nation’s environment and citizens.) As for the United States, the report says that North America is the globe’s “third largest regional market for BPA,” behind Asia and Europe. North American BPA consumption is growing, but a “at a very slow rate,” the report states. As a result, our share of the global BPA is expected to experience a “slight decline” by 2019. Not exactly comforting.

The sample that Transparency Market Research sent me blacked out its analysis of which companies have what share of the global BPA market. This 2012 US Department of Agriculture report claims that just two companies, German chemical giant Bayer and its US rival Dow, “produce the bulk of BPA in the world.” Another major producer is Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a company 70 percent owned by the Saudi government. This charming corporate crew looks set to cash in on handsomely on the ongoing BPA boom.

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BPA Sales Are Booming

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The Final Frontier: 500 Microseconds Between Wall Street and Chicago

by DeannaDeal Posted on November 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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A couple of months ago, there was a big scandal over the fact that someone apparently learned about a Fed decision sooner than they should have. It takes seven milliseconds for a signal to travel from Washington DC to Chicago over a fiber optic cable, but a couple of big orders were placed on the Chicago exchange a mere couple of milliseconds after the Fed announcement. Shazam!

But if an advantage of a few milliseconds is so important, why bother with fiber optic cables? Why not mount repeaters on blimps or something, and then relay wireless signals? At the speed of light, it would only take about four milliseconds from DC to Chicago.

I suppose I should have guessed, but naturally someone is doing this:

Ari Rubenstein, a “Star Trek” fan who counts physics as a hobby….heads Strike Technologies, a New York company that’s part of a budding cottage industry racing to build networks of ultra-fast microwave radio transmitters linking the world’s financial hubs.

….Strike, whose ranks include academics as well as former U.S. and Israeli military engineers, hoisted a 6-foot white dish on a tower rising 280 feet above the Nasdaq Stock Market’s data center in Carteret, N.J., just outside New York City.

Through a series of microwave towers, the dish beams market data 734 miles to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s computer warehouse in Aurora, Ill., in 4.13 milliseconds, or about 95% of the theoretical speed of light, according to the company.

Remember that Keynes thing about goosing the economy by burying money in landfills and letting people dig it up? In terms of social utility, this strikes as about the same thing. It’s hard to imagine millions of dollars being spent more uselessly. Even gold plated toilet seats probably have more value to society than this.

In any case, I still think my idea for a neutrino communications network that transmits directly through the earth is a better bet. Sure, you’d need a million gallons of chlorine or heavy water or something to act as the detector, but that seems pretty trivial in order to save another 500 microsceconds. Who’s going to be the first to do this?

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The Final Frontier: 500 Microseconds Between Wall Street and Chicago

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Wasted food is a huge climate problem

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on September 16, 2013

Wasted food is a huge climate problem

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Global warmer.

If wasted food became its own pungent country, it would be the world’s third biggest contributor to climate change.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had previously determined that roughly one-third of food is wasted around the world. Now it has used those figures to calculate the environmental impacts of farming food that is never eaten, along with the climate-changing effects of the methane that escapes from food as it rots.

The results, published in a new report [PDF], were as nauseating as a grub-infested apple:

Without accounting for [greenhouse gas] emissions from land use change, the carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated to 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2 equivalent: as such, food wastage ranks as the third top emitter after USA and China. Globally, the blue water footprint (i.e. the consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food wastage is about 250 km3, which is equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva. Finally, produced but uneaten food vainly occupies almost 1.4 billion hectares of land; this represents close to 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land area.

In the West, most of our food waste occurs because we toss out leftovers and unused ingredients — and because stores won’t sell ugly produce. The FAO found that some farmers dump 20 to 40 percent of their harvest because it “doesn’t meet retailer’s cosmetic specifications.” In developing countries, by contrast, most of the wasted food rots somewhere between the field and the market because of insufficient refrigeration and inefficient supply chains.

The FAO estimates that when we throw away more than 1 gigaton of food every year, we are throwing away $750 billion with it — an estimate that doesn’t include wasted seafood and bycatch.

“All of us — farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers — must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a statement. “We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day.”

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

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There’s arsenic in your rice, but don’t worry about it, says FDA

by d2wk58 Posted on September 10, 2013

There’s arsenic in your rice, but don’t worry about it, says FDA

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Rice grows in water, which is often contaminated with arsenic.

Whenever you eat rice, a prevalent but poisonous element is all over your meal like, well, white on rice.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration tested 1,300 samples of rice and rice-based products and found that they all contained very low levels of arsenic [PDF].

Grains of rice tested had average levels of inorganic arsenic ranging from 2.6 to 7.2 micrograms per serve. Tragically, instant rice contained the least amount of arsenic and brown rice had the most. Products containing rice ingredients also contained arsenic.

That isn’t much arsenic — a microgram is one-millionth of a gram, and there are 28 grams in an ounce. But is it dangerous?

In the short term, the FDA says no. “These amounts of detectable arsenic are not high enough to cause any immediate or short-term adverse health effects,” the agency wrote on its website. In the long run? Nobody’s really sure. “The FDA intends to conduct a risk assessment considering how much arsenic is consumed from rice and rice products, and whether there are variations in health effects for certain segments of the population.”

Can you get your rice without arsenic? Apparently not. From The Christian Science Monitor:

FDA toxicologist Suzanne C. Fitzpatrick said that because arsenic is naturally occurring it is going to be in food, and because rice is grown in water it will always have higher levels.

“It’s not something that we can just pull off the market,” she said.

The rice industry said Friday that it is working with the FDA and is encouraged by the results of the study. The industry has been conducting several of its own studies to try to figure out how to reduce arsenic levels, including investigating different ways to manage the water in which rice is grown and looking at processing and rinsing methods to see if there are ways to reduce arsenic levels.

Meanwhile, the FDA suggests that you balance a mix of grains and other foods in your diet to help water down any risks.

Read more about arsenic in rice — and how it got there. 

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.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

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Clean energy law reducing electricity costs in Ohio

by DenaeTina858 Posted on September 6, 2013

Clean energy law reducing electricity costs in Ohio

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Ohio is getting greener, and that’s reducing the cost of power.

More than 1,000 renewable energy projects have been built in Ohio during the past five years — part of a scramble by utilities to comply with the state’s renewable energy standard. The biggest project, a wind farm, cost $600 million.

So how much are the state’s electricity customers being forced to fork out for this flurry of climate-friendly construction activity?

Nada. Not even nada — less than nada. An analysis [PDF] by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio concludes that all those green energy projects have actually reduced the price of wholesale power in the state, albeit just a little bit.

It’s true that such projects cost money to build. But, unlike fossil fuel–powered plants, their fuels — solar radiation and wind — are free. The lower long-term energy costs of all those clean power facilities has “suppressed” the market rate for dirtier forms of electricity in Ohio, the study found.

“[C]onsistent with theoretical expectations, Ohioans are already benefiting from renewable resource additions through downward pressure on wholesale market prices and reduced emissions,” says the report, written by PUC economist Tim Benedict. Midwest Energy News fleshes out the findings:

According to Benedict’s calculations, the renewable generators now producing power have reduced the cost of wholesale power by about 0.15 percent. When his study looked at the projected power from all renewable projects that the state has approved, including those not yet operational, the figure is closer to 0.5 percent.

“This confirms what other studies have found,” said Rebecca Stanfield, a deputy director for policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “As we add renewables, the wholesale price of electricity goes down.”

And while a wholesale price cut of half a percent may not sound like much, it’s important to keep in mind that only about 1 percent of Ohio’s power currently comes from renewable sources. The renewable standard passed in 2008 requires that that proportion gradually increase to 12.5 percent in 2025. And as the contribution from renewable power grows, so, presumably, will the savings from a falling wholesale price of fuel.

The report was published as state Sen. Bill Steitz (R) pushes, yet again, to roll back elements of Ohio’s renewable energy mandate, which he has compared to “Joseph Stalin’s five-year plan.” Fortunately for consumers and the climate, similar efforts backed by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to kill renewable energy mandates in states across the nation have been flopping.

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

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Forget solar panels, here come building-integrated photovoltaics

by lqr8rg5rr Posted on July 24, 2013

Forget solar panels, here come building-integrated photovoltaics

By John Upton

Ben West

This roof doesn’t have solar panels — it has solar shingles.

Solar panels are becoming passé. Why put solar panels on top of building construction materials when you could just tap the power of the sun directly through the construction materials themselves?

Bloomberg reports on the rapid growth in building-integrated photovoltaics, or BIPV. These are solar power–harvesting cells that are incorporated into the walls, roofs, and windows of buildings — integrated seamlessly instead of being bolted onto a finished building as an apparent afterthought:

From stadiums in Brazil to a bank headquarters in Britain, architects led by Norman Foster are integrating solar cells into the skin of buildings, helping the market for the technology triple within two years. …

The market for solar laid onto buildings and into building materials is expected to grow to $7.5 billion by 2015 from about $2.1 billion, according to Accenture Plc, citing research from NanoMarkets. Sales of solar glass are expected to reach as much as $4.2 billion by 2015, with walls integrating solar cells at $830 million. About $1.5 billion is expected to be generated from solar tiles and shingles.

The technology provides a respite for solar manufacturers, opening the way for them to charge a premium for products. Traditional solar panel prices have fallen 90 percent since 2008 due to oversupply, cutting margins and pushing more than 30 companies including Q-Cells SE and a unit of Suntech Power Holdings Co. into bankruptcy.

The industry is already well established in the U.S., where Dow Chemical Co. (DOW), the country’s largest chemical maker by sales, is selling in more than a dozen states solar shingles that look like regular roofing material.

Expect green buildings of the future to look a lot more blue.

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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Electric vehicle sales are skyrocketing

by Cindy Holman Posted on July 22, 2013

Electric vehicle sales are skyrocketing

By John Upton

Chevrolet

Chevy Volt

Americans bought 40,000 new electric vehicles in the first six months of this year — more than twice the number purchased during the same period last year. And that was after sales of plug-in cars tripled from 17,000 in 2011 to 52,000 last year.

Why are Americans so gung-ho on EVs? Caring about the environment is one reason. But the Energy Department highlighted another good reason on Friday when it released the plug-in sales data. From a department press release:

The eGallon, a quick and simple way for consumers to compare the costs of fueling electric vehicles vs. driving on gasoline, rose slightly to $1.18 from $1.14 in the latest monthly numbers, but remains far below the $3.49 cost of a gallon of gasoline.

“More and more Americans are taking advantage of the low and stable price of electricity as a transportation fuel, and that’s very good news for our economy as well as the environment,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. “As the market continues to grow, electric vehicles will play a key role in our effort to reduce air pollution and slow the effects of climate change.”

If you live in an area with low electricity prices, you’ll save even more by driving an EV. In Washington state, an eGallon costs just 84 cents.

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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China plans a major solar spree

by Abby Bath Posted on July 16, 2013

China plans a major solar spree

By John Upton

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It’s time to get these out of Chinese warehouses and put to good use.

A solar-panel manufacturing blitz by Chinese companies has left a glut in the market, driving down prices for photovoltaic systems.

And China thinks that’s a pretty good excuse to throw itself a huge solar party.

The government has announced plans to add 10 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for three years. That would take advantage of cheap prices and help the country’s manufacturers move product in a difficult market. From Reuters:

China aims to more than quadruple solar power generating capacity to 35 gigawatts by 2015 in an apparent bid to ease a massive glut in the domestic solar panel industry.

The target has been stated previously by the State Grid, which manages the country’s electricity distribution, but now has the official backing of the State Council, the country’s cabinet and its top governing body.

The sector has been hit hard by the excess capacity, falling government subsidies and trade disputes. Manufacturers have been hemorrhaging cash and struggling with mounting debts as panel prices fell by two thirds over the past couple of years.

Moving stockpiled panels out of warehouses and putting them to use providing clean energy should be a win-win. And if the move helps alleviate the global panel glut that’s been plaguing the solar industry, then make that a win-win-win.

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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