Tag Archives: mississippi

Mississippi poised to pass ‘Anti-Bloomberg’ bill banning healthy food regs

by nension Posted on March 12, 2013

Mississippi poised to pass ‘Anti-Bloomberg’ bill banning healthy food regs

By Susie Cagle

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Mississippi is just the kind of place one might expect to find a backlash against the “organic agenda.” Apparently spurred on by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (newly tossed out) pet ban on big sodas, Mississippi is currently on the verge of passing a bill that would bar every local government in the state from requiring that restaurants post calorie counts or cap portion sizes.

A far-reaching, big-government bill to counter other far-reaching, big-government bills? Uh, sure, Mississippi. NPR has the full scary deets:

“The Anti-Bloomberg Bill” garnered wide bipartisan support in both chambers of the legislature in a state where one in three adults is obese, the highest rate in the nation.

The bill is expected to be signed by Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican. It was the subject of intense lobbying by groups including the restaurant association, the small business and beverage group, and the chicken farmers’ lobby.

“The chicken farmers’ lobby” could be a caption for an unfunny New Yorker cartoon, but in Mississippi it’s also apparently a powerful business group — though hardly the only one with skin in this game.

Mike Cashion, executive director the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association, says the bill is a direct reaction to Bloomberg-style government intervention in public health.

“If you look at how menus have changed, whether it be in fast food or family dining, you are seeing more and more healthy options,” Cashion says. “Not because of legislative mandates or regulatory mandates, but because of consumer demand. Our industry has always been one to respond to the marketplace.”

Cashion is on a real free-market trip! But free markets and consumer demands always seem to go hand in hand with business profits, and Cashion’s loyalties are with the restaurants, not with the people who eat at them. The Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association’s website proclaims that the “industry is represented by a team of government affairs experts that is dedicated to protecting you from harmful legislation while promoting legislation that will benefit the industry. We estimate that our Government Affairs victories have saved the average restaurant over $10,000 over the past 4 years.”

This isn’t a story about how Mississippians don’t want to know what they’re eating. It’s yet another example of business buying government — the food business has proven to be pretty good at that over the years. And in that way, it’s hardly news at all.

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Mississippi poised to pass ‘Anti-Bloomberg’ bill banning healthy food regs

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It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

by kx93z6g Posted on February 25, 2013

It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

By John Upton

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It’s getting too hot to get any work done.

Think back to summer. No, no, don’t think about the good times. Instead, try to remember what it was like when it was too stinkin’ hot to get any work done.

Humans don’t work so well when it’s stinking hot. And that means that as the globe warms around us, we’re doing less work. How much less? According to results of a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change, humanity’s summertime productivity has already fallen 10 percent since before the Industrial Revolution. And it’s going to get worse.

Using middle-of-the-road future temperature and humidity projections, experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that our productivity during the hottest months could drop by an additional 10 percentage points by 2050. More extreme warming would lead to more extreme impacts.

From Reuters:

A more extreme scenario of future global warming, which estimated a temperature rise of 10.8 degrees F (6 degrees C), would make it difficult to work in the hottest months in many parts of the world, [lead author John Dunne of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton] said at a telephone briefing.

Labor capacity would be all but eliminated in the lower Mississippi Valley and most of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains would be exposed to heat stress “beyond anything experienced in the world today,” he said.

Under this scenario, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, while in Bahrain, the heat and humidity could cause hyperthermia — potentially dangerous overheating — even in sleeping people who were not working at all.

All of which points to one thing: Less work, more party!

Right?

Oh. The hyperthermia thing.

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It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

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Don’t worry about BP; it’s going to be fine

by f45 Posted on February 6, 2013

Don’t worry about BP; it’s going to be fine

By Philip Bump

BP’s logo is of an offshore rig exploding with money.

“BP” used to stand for “British Petroleum,” presumably until Britain got embarrassed. Well, not really — although British people weren’t very happy about people calling the company British Petroleum after its Gulf rig exploded and leaked and killed mammals of various types.

Anyway, here’s News About BP and Money and the Government, our new feature about BP and money and the government, part one in a series of one.

BP made a lot of money last year.

Big surprise. Annual profits for the company were $11.6 billion, only six or seven times what the average U.S. household makes (over the course of 33,000 years).

And of course we’ll bring back our favorite tool to make this figure hit home:

But not as much as states think it should pay for the Gulf spill.

BP doesn’t want to be rude or disrespectful, of course, but it thinks that the amount of money sought by state and local governments over the Deepwater Horizon disaster is a tad steep. From Reuters:

BP Plc has tallied up claims made by states and local governments on the U.S. Gulf Coast for economic and property damages from the Macondo oil spill, and come up with a figure of $34 billion, which it deems “substantially” overstated. …

The $34 billion total, provided for disclosure reasons with the company’s financial results on Tuesday, is based on claims made last month by Alabama, Mississippi and Florida as well as claims made by Louisiana and others from local governments, BP said.

Citing the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) underpinning the claims, the company said it considers the methods used to calculate them to be “seriously flawed, not supported by the legislation and to substantially overstate the claims.”

I am shocked and you are shocked and everyone is shocked that BP thinks this. But, really, how ungrateful can those states be? Have they already forgotten that the company ran this ad promoting Gulf Coast tourism over and over and over again? That’s like $30 billion worth of effort right there!

The government is doing its best to help BP pay its bills.

You may remember that the feds recently finalized a $4 billion penalty for BP for its role in the Gulf spill. But what the government taketh away, it also giveth, in spades.

From Bloomberg:

BP Plc’s Pentagon contracts have more than doubled since the year of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the biggest in U.S. history.

The company’s awards surged to $2.51 billion in the year ended Sept. 30 from $1.04 billion in fiscal 2010, the year of the oil rig explosion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. BP’s share of the military’s petroleum market jumped to 12 percent from 8.5 percent during the period. …

The Pentagon “greatly rewarded the company for the oil spill,” said Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor and former member of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting. “This is alarming since the billions of dollars of environmental harm by BP make it the worst federal government contractor in history.”

Not sure “alarming” is the best word, but we’ll stick with it for now.

This past November, the EPA suspended BP’s ability to win new government contracts, but didn’t cancel the existing ones.  In fiscal years 2010 and 2011, BP got more than $3.5 billion from the Defense Department alone. It’s safe to assume that over the past year and up to now, the company’s existing government contracts brought in at least $500 million. So the company’s $4 billion fine from the feds will probably be completely covered by money the company got from the feds. The system works.

In summary.

BP should stand for “Bafflingly Profitable,” but only because “Bullshit Professionals” is rated R.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Water use for electricity production set to double globally by 2035

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on January 31, 2013

Water use for electricity production set to double globally by 2035

By Philip Bump

You can’t make electricity without water. I mean, you can, but you have to use things like “solar panels” or “wind turbines,” and who’s going to do that? (Lots of people, I guess, but that doesn’t help my point.) A 2009 study suggested that half of the freshwater we use goes to energy production, boiled to create steam to turn turbines, or used to cool off reactors. When we run low on water — or when the water gets too warm — the ability to generate electricity declines or halts. (Except from wind turbines and solar panels; I’ll just keep pointing that out.)

According to the International Energy Agency, the amount of water we use for energy is about to go up. A lot. From National Geographic:

The amount of fresh water consumed for world energy production is on track to double within the next 25 years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects. …

If today’s policies remain in place, the IEA calculates that water consumed for energy production would increase from 66 billion cubic meters (bcm) today to 135 bcm annually by 2035.

That’s an amount equal to the residential water use of every person in the United States over three years, or 90 days’ discharge of the Mississippi River. It would be four times the volume of the largest U.S. reservoir, Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead.

National Geographic

That 90 days of Mississippi discharge presumably means when the river is at its normal level, not when it has been depleted by drought.

Which is the flip side of this heavy coin. Even as power sector water use doubles globally, the amount of water at hand is expected to drop, as climate change increases the length, frequency, and severity of droughts. A draft government report released earlier this month suggests that the Southwest will see more drought and the Southeast more strain on water supplies as the century continues. During Texas’ drought in 2011, several electricity production facilities came close to shutting down for lack of water.

Interestingly, shifts in power production away from coal and to other sources (excluding solar and wind!) won’t help the trend. The IEA suggests that the increased use of biofuels — renewable, organic material — will be a major source of “water stress,” increasing 242 percent over the next 20 years. Fracking for natural gas, on the other hand, isn’t likely to consume a large share of water. (We’ll see about water contamination.)

Enjoy it while you can, cow.

I could be apocalyptic and suggest that we’ll see some weird, Matrix-y war in 100 years as electricity-dependent robots seize control of dwindling water supplies that humans need to drink. That’s not going to happen. What could happen is that we’ll increasingly need to choose between uses for our water as we need more and have less.

If only there were a way to make electricity while using hardly any water at all.

Source

Water Demand for Energy to Double by 2035, National Geographic

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Feds predict end times for Colorado River water

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 15, 2012

Feds predict end times for Colorado River water

By Susie Cagle

Add another item to the list of things in peril due to climate change: the entire American West.

According to a new study from the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the Colorado River won’t fare well over the next 50 years. Climate change, drought, and population growth all add up to far greater demand for water than the river will be able to supply by 2060.

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A large portion of the American West, especially its cities, rely on the Colorado. Almost 40 million residents of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming depend entirely on the river’s water.

“This study should serve as a call to action,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. But some of the possible actions outlined in the report are, well, nuts. From the Los Angeles Times:

The analysis lists a range of proposed solutions, including some that Interior officials immediately dismissed as politically or technically infeasible. Among them: building a pipeline to import water from the Missouri or Mississippi rivers and towing icebergs to Southern California.

But Salazar said a host of practical steps could be pursued, including desalination of seawater and brackish water, recycling and conservation by both the agricultural and urban sectors.

For states draining the Colorado’s Upper Basin — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico — there is a less insane option, according to National Geographic.

The Bureau of Reclamation study also highlights an opportunity to help water users in the Upper Basin (WY, CO, NM and UT) save water for use in extended droughts while at the same time improving conditions essential to the $26 billion river recreation industry. An Upper Basin water bank is the kind of modern river management that can ensure prosperous farms and ranches, thriving cities, and healthy river flows.

At risk of stating the obvious, predicting the future is hard! Even for the federal government. Some critics said the report overestimates population growth in unsustainable desert towns like Phoenix and Las Vegas that have seen recent real estate and population collapses. From the L.A. Times:

“Some of these demand projections are absurd,” said Michael Cohen, who is based in Colorado and is a senior associate with the Pacific Institute, an Oakland think tank.

He was nonetheless encouraged by the report’s discussion of the potential for conservation by cities and farms. “Those kinds of options are already in practice in the basin and they are cheaper and faster” than building major infrastructure projects such as desalination plants, he said.

Agriculture uses most of the developed water supplies in the West and the future is bound to bring more transfers of water from farms to cities, Cohen said. But that could be largely accomplished by selling the water that is conserved through more efficient irrigation practices rather than by retiring farmland, he said. “There’s a lot of waste in the system in the ag end and the urban end.”

The river’s main allocation goes to California’s Imperial Irrigation District, a chunk of desert and farmland in central southern California. Right now the water barely maintains the area’s toxic Salton Sea, keeping it from drying up and becoming an airborne mass of sand and botulism. Which, yay! But the water will soon be diverted to San Diego, away from the Salton and the area’s agriculture (mainly citrus and dates).

The transfers have been controversial in the district, and Kevin Kelley, the agency’s general manager, warned that carrying out such agreements can be tougher than planning them.

He also worried that his district would come under pressure to make more transfers. “We don’t want to get into a zero-sum game in which one category of user wins and another, chiefly agriculture, has to lose,” he said.

With California agriculture and 40 million people relying on the Colorado, this insatiable demand for water won’t dry up overnight. But there are some changes we can make on the road toward 2060. Might I humbly suggest we start first with dismantling the Palm Springs golf courses?

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Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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