Tag Archives: mexico

These Gory New Hunting Competitions Have Taken the Country By Storm

by ElkeCulpepper Posted on March 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was published by FairWarning, a Los Angeles-based news organization focused on public health, safety and environmental issues.

Standing in a West Texas sporting goods store parking lot on a recent Sunday morning, Margaret Lloyd felt like she’d wandered onto the set of a gory movie. The lot was packed with trucks full of dead coyotes, foxes and the occasional bobcat; one pickup had a cage welded to its bed, and it was crammed with carcasses. “It was one wave of fur, tails on top of ears and ears on top of tails,” she said. “It was just horrifying.”

Around back, participants in the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest were weighing their kill in a competition to see who had shot the biggest bobcat and the most coyotes, gray foxes and bobcats in a 23-hour period. Some $76,000 in prize money was at stake—more than $31,000 went to the team that bagged a 32 pound bobcat. Other jackpot winners were a four-man team that killed 63 foxes, a team that killed 8 bobcats, and another that killed 32 coyotes.

Lloyd, a retired lawyer who lives in Galveston and stopped to take pictures of the bobcat contest while driving from New Mexico back to Texas, grew up in the South among hunters and says she’s not opposed to killing animals for food or to protect a herd.

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These Gory New Hunting Competitions Have Taken the Country By Storm

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A Judge Just Blocked Obama’s Immigration Plans. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Take His Ruling Seriously.

by Karin72Ssuvckt Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

A federal judge in Brownsville, Texas, has issued an injunction against President Obama’s recent immigration actions. I don’t take this even slightly seriously. To see why, all you have to do is read to the end of the New York Times account:

Judge Hanen, who was appointed in 2002 by President George W. Bush, has excoriated the Obama administration’s immigration policies in several unusually outspoken rulings….At a hearing on Jan. 15, Judge Hanen said Brownsville, which sits on the border with Mexico, was an appropriate venue for the suit because its residents see the impact of immigration every day. “Talking to anyone in Brownsville about immigration is like talking to Noah about the flood,” Judge Hanen said.

In a long and colorful opinion last August, Judge Hanen departed from the issue at hand to accuse the Obama administration of adopting a deportation policy that “endangers America” and was “an open invitation to the most dangerous criminals in society.”

The case involved a Salvadoran immigrant with a long criminal record whom Judge Hanen had earlier sent to prison for five years. Instead of deporting the man after he served his sentence, an immigration judge in Los Angeles ordered him released, a decision Judge Hanen found “incredible.” Citing no specific evidence, he surmised that the administration had adopted a broader policy of releasing such criminals.

While acknowledging that he had no jurisdiction to alter policy, Judge Hanen said he relied on his “firsthand, in-the-trenches knowledge of the border situation” and “at least a measurable level of common sense” to reach his conclusions about the case.

Judge Andrew Hanen so obviously hates both Obama and his immigration actions that no one is going to take his decision seriously. It’s a polemic, not a proper court ruling. The case will continue its dreary way through Hanen’s docket, but I imagine an appeals court will stay the injunction pretty quickly, and then overrule his inevitable final ruling in short order. The right-wing plaintiffs in this case may have thought they were being clever in venue shopping to get the case before Hanen, but it won’t do them any good. It might even backfire, given just how transparently political Hanen’s ruling is.

This story makes for a good headline, but it probably means little in real life. At most we’ll have a delay of a few weeks in implementing Obama’s immigration orders.

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A Judge Just Blocked Obama’s Immigration Plans. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Take His Ruling Seriously.

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Stanford Professors Urge Withdrawal From Fossil Fuel Investments

by Myrna Posted on January 20, 2015

Faculty members call on university to recognize urgency of climate change and divest from all oil, coal and gas companies. hanxu1011/Thinkstock Three hundred professors at Stanford, including Nobel laureates and this year’s Fields medal winner, are calling on the university to rid itself of all fossil fuel investments, in a sign that the campus divestment movement is gathering force. In a letter to Stanford’s president, John Hennessy, and the board of trustees, made available exclusively to the Guardian, the faculty members call on the university to recognize the urgency of climate change and divest from all oil, coal and gas companies. Stanford, which controls a $21.4 billion (£14.2 billion) endowment, eliminated direct investments in coalmining companies last May, making it the most prominent university to cut its ties to the industries that cause climate change. Months later, however, the university invested in three oil and gas companies. Read the rest at the Guardian. See the article here: Stanford Professors Urge Withdrawal From Fossil Fuel Investments ; ; ;

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Stanford Professors Urge Withdrawal From Fossil Fuel Investments

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Will Obama Get Answers From Mexico’s President on the Disappearance of 43 Students?

by BartSochab Posted on January 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto arrived in Washington to meet with President Barack Obama. Familiar topics, such as trade and the economy, are high on the leaders’ agenda. But Peña Nieto’s record on security—particularly the 2014 disappearance of 43 Mexican students taken by police and believed to be dead—will likely dominate this week’s meetings. So too will the sheer scope of Mexico’s eight-year drug war: Since 2007, it’s estimated that more than 100,000 Mexicans have been killed and some 20,000 disappeared.

Since taking office in 2012, Peña Nieto has enjoyed an “extraordinarily close” relationship with the Obama administration, and—rhetorically, at least—has sought to move from the militarized response to organized crime that characterized the presidency of his predecessor, Felipe Calderón. Nevertheless, human rights organizations and activist groups are calling on Obama to demand answers from Peña Nieto for the Mexican government’s failures. In a letter to Obama, Human Rights Watch claimed that Peña Nieto’s government “has largely failed to follow through on its own initiatives” to make the country safer, and called on the president to “ask Peña Nieto to explain exactly what steps he is taking to ensure that Mexico prosecutes abuses.”

The students’ disappearance isn’t just a Mexican problem. Under the Merida Initiative, a joint security partnership, the United States has given more than $2 billion to Mexican security forces since 2008. The funding—provided by American taxpayers—come with conditions, including that Mexico investigate police abuses. “Despite unequivocal evidence—including cases documented in the State Department’s own reports—that Mexico has failed to meet these requirements, your administration has repeatedly allowed the funds to be released,” Human Rights Watch wrote in the letter.

In a Monday press release, a senior White House official expressed the administration’s “strong belief” that those responsible for the students’ disappearance will be brought to justice, and nodded at the Mexican government’s arrest of more than 70 suspects. “I’m certain that this will be a part of the conversation tomorrow,” the official said.

The Obama administration’s assurances did not mollify the dozens of protesters who greeted Peña Nieto at the White House on Tuesday morning. Andrea Adum, who made the trip from Staten Island, said she wanted to see a stronger response, including reconsideration of Merida and the ousting of Peña Nieto’s government. “We know the government did nothing” to investigate the students’ disappearance, she said. The 70 arrested, she claimed, were “people the government were looking to blame, to try to calm the protesters down.” Protester Arnoldo Borja was pessimistic too: Nothing constructive will happen between the two leaders, he predicted. “It’s been massacre after massacre” in Mexico, he said. “After this, then what?”

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Will Obama Get Answers From Mexico’s President on the Disappearance of 43 Students?

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Climate Negotiators Are Working on History’s Most Important Mad Lib

by KeithMercer Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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The latest round of United Nations climate negotiations kicked off today in Lima, Peru. For the next two weeks, delegates from 195 countries will hash out the framework for what they hope will become a major international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when negotiators reconvene in Paris next year. The Lima meeting will also be a chance to hear how far some major carbon-polluters—Brazil, India, Mexico, and more—are willing to go to slow global warming.

The goal of the Lima talks is to set a standard for how countries will formally submit their proposed emissions pledges in preparation for next year’s big summit. You can think of it like a climate action Mad Lib, where the story outline is now being drafted in Lima, and each country will fill in its blanks (but with emissions goals instead of nouns and verbs) before Paris. One of the big debates prior to Paris will be whether developed and developing countries will be required to meet the same criteria for setting those goals, and whether the goals will be legally binding.

This month’s talks will also be the first key test of President Obama’s climate pact with China, which was announced last month. The deal was important for a few key reasons. It set new carbon reductions goals: The US will reduce carbon emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, while China promised to peak its emissions by 2030. It includes a plan to jump-start clean energy trade between the two countries. But perhaps most importantly, it could be a powerful incentive for other countries to create their own ambitious targets.

“The mood music will change,” said Michael Jacobs, a former environmental advisor to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Jacobs, who is in Lima this week with a climate economics think tank run by former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, added, “I think we will see…that if the US and China are both committed, then other countries will not want to look like they aren’t coming to the table.”

That’s a big deal, because widespread political participation is a prerequisite for the kind of global accord UN officials are hoping for in Paris. And it’s a big shift from past climate summits, like the 2009 one in Copenhagen, which have fallen apart thanks to a lack of cooperation from the US and China. Those two countries, the world’s top carbon emitters, have traditionally dragged their feet when it comes to global warming. Neither one of them ratified the last international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

But climate hawks are optimistic that the US-China accord has already advanced the future Paris negotiations into uncharted waters. As the Harvard economist Robert Stavins pointed out, the Kyoto Protocol covered only about 14 percent of global carbon emissions. But the Paris agreement will be structured differently. Instead of a single unified treaty that every country is expected to sign on to (an approach seen as a political dead end), the Paris agreement will be built around a patchwork of “nationally-determined contributions.” The US-China pact essentially serves as both countries’ commitment, and combined with the European Union commitment announced in October, already more than 50 percent of global carbon emissions are covered.

Negotiators in Lima are also designing a system for the international community to review countries’ proposed contributions to ensure that their proposed carbon cuts are sufficiently aggressive and that their calculations make sense. This would be the first time a peer review process is used in international climate talks, said Jennifer Morgan, a senior analyst at the World Resources Institute. Pushing for a strong review framework is a top priority of the US delegation, she said, speaking this morning from Lima.

Countries have until the spring to announce their emissions reduction pledges, so it’s not yet clear if there will be more announcements from Lima. Many eyes are on India, the world’s third-biggest carbon polluter, whose emissions are projected by WRI to climb 70 percent above 2000 levels by 2025. Without cooperation from India, a global accord would be much weaker; Narendra Modi, the country’s new prime minister, has so far been lukewarm on climate action.

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Climate Negotiators Are Working on History’s Most Important Mad Lib

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Mexico’s National Palace Burns As Protesters Demand Justice for Missing Students

by YongDelvalle Posted on November 10, 2014

Mother Jones

Mexican officials announced Friday that they now believe the 43 college students who went missing September 26 after clashing with police in the southwestern state of Guerrero were shot, killed, and burned by narcos from an area drug cartel. Authorities suspect that Jose Luis Abarca, the mayor of the city of Iguala, and his wife ordered local police to confront the students at the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinpa for fear that they’d disrupt an event she was holding that night. Jesús Murillo Karam, Mexico’s attorney general, announced the government’s findings and then took questions, eventually calling an abrupt end to the press conference with the words “Ya me cansé,” or “I’ve had enough.” The phrase—along with #estoycansado—”I’m tired”—has been trending on Twitter and was a major part of this weekend’s mostly nonviolent protests, which included the burning of the front gate of Mexico City’s National Palace.

Protesters at Mexico City’s National Palace Pedro Mera/Xinhua/ZUMA

Protesters at the palace allegedly set delivery vans on fire. El Universal/ZUMA

The phrase “Queremos Justicia” (“We Want Justice”) can be seen on the burning truck. El Universal/ZUMA

El Universal/ZUMA

David De La Paz/Xinhua/ZUMA

Alejandro Ayala/Xinhua/ZUMA

Alejandro Ayala/Xinhua/ZUMA

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Mexico’s National Palace Burns As Protesters Demand Justice for Missing Students

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In U.S. Cleanup Efforts, Accident at Nuclear Site Points to Cost of Lapses

by Myrna Posted on October 29, 2014

As the United States aims to correct years of mishandling radioactive materials, the price of reopening a New Mexico waste repository could top $551 million. Jump to original:   In U.S. Cleanup Efforts, Accident at Nuclear Site Points to Cost of Lapses ; ; ;

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In U.S. Cleanup Efforts, Accident at Nuclear Site Points to Cost of Lapses

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Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

by ArielO42brir Posted on October 24, 2014

Always low standards. Always.

Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

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24 Oct 2014 1:32 PM

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Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

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Please don’t mistake Walmart’s bigness for greenness. Thank you.

On Tuesday, Slate proclaimed that “Walmart is killing the rest of corporate America in solar power adoption” because the company leads the nation in total “installed capacity” — in essence, it has installed more solar panels than anyone else. In reality, Wally World is a greenwashed clean-energy laggard owned by a family that funds anti-solar groups.

Slate’s data, which shows that Walmart has more than double the megawatts than second-place Kohl’s, comes from the Solar Energy Industry Association, a U.S. trade group. But in that same report, Walmart ranked 11th (out of an undisclosed list of megacorporations) in the proportion of facilities with solar power, at just 5 percent. (For comparison, a small business with one facility and one solar installation would score 100 on that test.)

In all, solar, wind, and biomass accounts for just 3 percent of Walmart’s total U.S. electricity use, according to data from the EPA’s Green Power Partnership. And less than one-fifth of the renewable energy the company purchases from offsite is third-party certified, meaning we just have to take Walmart’s word for it. More than 200 organizations in the EPA program meet 100 percent of their electricity use with green sources, including fellow retail giants Whole Foods, Staples, and Kohl’s.

“The idea that Walmart is a major driver behind the growth of solar is pretty ludicrous,” says Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “Last year, Walmart installed about 16 megawatts of solar power. Homeowners installed about 800 megawatts of solar power,” according to this report.

Then there’s the Walton family, Walmart’s majority owner, which is actively undermining renewables. A recent report from ILSR finds that family members have donated nearly $4.5 million to two dozen organizations — including the infamous lobbying outfit ALEC — that lead the charge against clean energy policy.

The family actually owns a company called Solar First, that builds big arrays for big utilities. But while that may seem like a good thing, it means that the Waltons want us all to remain captive utility customers, not produce our own power. The family has worked to block rooftop solar, even scoring a tiny victory in Arizona last year. It’s a typical family strategy: Walmart tried to pay workers in Mexico with store vouchers.

Solar First, which manufactures its panels mostly in Malaysia, is even working via through the World Trade Organization — the enforcer of globalized free-marketism — to repeal solar incentives in several U.S. states simply because those policies give preference to local producers. Thanks, Walton clan.

In short, the super-rich Waltons and their exorbitantly profitable superstore empire won’t spend an extra dime on green energy if it means foregoing all-out profit maximization. The company’s 2013 Global Responsibility Report apologizes for a decline in renewable energy use thusly: “Walmart U.S. was unable to renegotiate an expiring [renewable power] contract with competitive pricing.”

Money above social responsibility. It’s the Walmart way!

Source:
Walmart Is Killing the Rest of Corporate America in Solar Power Adoption

, Slate.

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Walmart isn’t really green, just really big

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In Just 15 Years, Wind Could Provide A Fifth Of The World’s Electricity

by DorethaRoden Posted on October 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Up to one fifth of the world’s electricity supply could come from wind turbines by 2030, according to a new report released this week by Greenpeace and the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). That would be an increase of 530 percent compared to the end of last year.

The report says the coming global boom in wind power will be driven largely by China’s rebounding wind energy market—and a continued trend of high levels of Chinese green energy investment—as well as by steady growth in the United States and new large-scale projects in Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa.

The report, called the “Global Wind Energy Outlook,” explains how wind energy could provide 2,000 gigawatts of electricity by 2030, which would account for 17 to 19 percent of global electricity. And by 2050, wind’s share of the electricity market could reach 30 percent. That’s a huge jump from the end of 2013, when wind provided around 3 percent of electricity worldwide.

The report is an annually produced industry digest co-authored by the GWEC, which represents 1,500 wind power producers. It examines three “energy scenarios” based on projections used by the International Energy Agency. The “New Policies” scenario attempts to capture the direction and intentions of international climate policy, even if some of these policies have yet to be fully implemented. From there, GWEC has fashioned two other scenarios—”moderate” and “advanced”—which reflect two different ways nations might cut carbon and keep their commitments to global climate change policies. In the most ambitious scenario, “advanced,” wind could help slash more than 3 billion tons of climate-warning carbon dioxide emissions each year. The following chart has been adapted and simplified from the report:

In the best case scenario, China leads the way in 2020 and in 2030:

But as the report’s authors note, there is still substantial uncertainty in the market. “There is much that we don’t know about the future,” they write, “and there will no doubt be unforeseen shifts and shocks in the global economy as well as political ups and downs.” The more optimistic results contained in the report are dependent on whether the global community is going to respond “proactively to the threat of climate change, or try to do damage control after the fact,” the report says.

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In Just 15 Years, Wind Could Provide A Fifth Of The World’s Electricity

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It’s Now Illegal to Kill Wolves in Wyoming

by BeulahWinchcomb Posted on September 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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For the past two years, killing a wolf in Wyoming was pretty simple. In a trophy game area near the border of Yellowstone, licensed hunters were allowed to take a certain number of gray wolves. In the rest of the state, or about 80 percent of Wyoming’s land, anyone could kill a limitless number of them on sight.

Read “10 Reasons We Need Wolves”

But that’s about to change. A judge ruled Tuesday that the animals’ delisting in 2012, which handed management of the species over to the Wyoming government, was “arbitrary and capricious,” and that the state isn’t ready to manage wolf populations on its own. The move has wolf activists breathing a sigh of relief; Wyoming’s management plan, as Sierra Club’s Bonnie Rice put it, could have potentially taken wolves “back to the brink of extinction.” Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not challenge the previous finding that wolves had recovered and that the species “is not endangered or threatened within a significant portion of its range.” But even so, her ruling means that Wyoming’s wolves will again enjoy protections under the Endangered Species Act and can no longer be hunted—at least in the short term.

While as many as 2 million gray wolves once roamed North America, the carnivores were nearly wiped out by humans by the early 1900s. Roughly 5,500 remain today, though an uptick in laws permitting wolf hunting in states like Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, and Idaho all threaten to keep the animals scarce. Wyoming’s hunting and “kill-on-sight” policies, for instance, meant 219 wolves were gunned down since 2012, according to Earthjustice.

In part because wolves were reintroduced in Wyoming, whether to kill or protect this predator remains a very polarizing issue in the state. Wolves kill farm animals and pets, pissing off ranchers and rural landowners alike and feeding into the attitude that the canids are just a deadly nuisance. A Facebook photo posted last year by hunting outfitters, for instance, shows a group of hunters posing with a dead wolf with blood covering its paws and mouth. The caption reads “Wyoming if FED up.” Commenters responded with notes like “the only good Canadian gray wolf to me is a dead Canadian gray wolf” and “Keep on killing guys!”

But scientists and conservationists have fought hard to restore this species into the North American ecosystem. Studies have shown that wolves maintain balance in the environment: they prey on other large mammals like moose and elk, whose populations (and eating habits) can get out of control without a predator to keep them in check; their hunting helps feed scavengers like wolverines, bald eagles, and mountain lions; their predation can force elk to hang out in smaller groups, thereby reducing the spread of diseases; and they’ve even been found to be good for the soil.

By restoring protections to gray wolves, states Rice in a press release, “the court has rightly recognized the deep flaws in Wyoming’s wolf management plan.” She argues that the state needs to reevaluate how it treats the animal and develop “a science-based management plan that recognizes the many benefits wolves bring to the region.”

The conservation groups that sued after the wolves were delisted in 2012 include Earthjustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity. Though yesterday’s news comes as a victory to these groups, a bigger hurdle lies ahead: The US Fish and Wildlife has proposed to remove the gray wolf from the federal Endangered Species list altogether based on the animals’ perceived recovery. A final decision is expected later this year.

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It’s Now Illegal to Kill Wolves in Wyoming

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