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Why Facebook, Netflix, and Tesla are getting climate-shamed by investors

by jack.greenfield69902008 Posted on June 9, 2020

In late March, the British banking giant Barclays announced its ambition to become a net-zero bank by 2050. While the fine print of how one of the biggest lenders to fossil fuel companies will make this transition is yet to be determined, one of the other key underlying challenges is that it’s impossible for the bank to accomplish this on its own. It will need every company it lends to to disclose data on their carbon accounting.

A surprising number of companies — more than 8,400 — already report this kind of data to CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), an international nonprofit that runs a public environmental disclosure database. CDP asks companies to disclose data about their environmental footprint on behalf of investors who are concerned about climate change and the financial risks associated with it. But some companies refuse to participate, even after repeated requests from investors themselves.

In a sign of just how serious investors are getting about this, in recent years CDP’s investor partners have agreed to release a sort of shit list outing the companies that turned their disclosure requests down. This year’s list includes 1,051 companies, including fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron, media companies like Netflix and Facebook, and ostensibly climate-friendly businesses like Tesla. The companies on the list are estimated to collectively emit more than 4,800 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, which is equal to the amount emitted by the U.S. in 2017.

Not every company that refused to disclose is on CDP’s list — only the ones that investors wanted to put in the spotlight. The hope is that this public shaming will spur companies to disclose in the future. The 707 companies targeted by last year’s campaign were more than twice as likely to increase their disclosure this year.

To be fair, disclosure is not an easy ask. “No one person can sit down and, like, do their homework last minute,” Emily Kreps, global director of capital markets at CDP, told Grist. CDP collects data across three categories — climate change, deforestation, and water security. The reporting process requires going into every part of a company’s value chain, from the sourcing of raw materials all the way to the end use of its products. Kreps said the disclosure reports from CDP’s top-rated companies usually come out to between 60 and 70 pages long. Sometimes it takes a few years for a company to get the information together.

Some companies on CDP’s nondisclosure list used to participate and stopped. Exxon, for example, disclosed with CDP until 2018. At that point CDP changed its questionnaire for oil and gas companies to include more specific questions around fuel reserve levels and inventory, and Exxon decided it would release its own disclosure reports instead. “The report that Exxon put out on their own is not helpful, necessarily, in addressing all of the environmental points that investors are looking for,” said Kreps.

The CDP’s reporting process was designed to align with the recommendations of a group called the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), which was started in 2015 by Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The TCFD provides a widely applicable framework to help financial-sector organizations understand how the companies in their portfolios assess climate-related risks and opportunities. It suggests four areas for disclosure — governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets — but it doesn’t dictate exactly what to disclose or how. What CDP has done is take TCFD’s recommendations and translate them into a 26-question reporting sheet. “We’re trying to standardize the indicators and data points that people look for year after year to track progress,” said Kreps.

Kreps emphasized that what’s critical about CDP’s disclosure process is that it helps companies look at both risks and opportunity. There is money to be made in the transition to a low carbon economy, she said, and those opportunities are illuminated by the reporting process. If some of the 1,051 companies that avoided disclosure this year decide to get on board, they could benefit in the long run.

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Why Facebook, Netflix, and Tesla are getting climate-shamed by investors

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Did BP really just pledge to become a net-zero company? It’s complicated.

by floystegall7 Posted on February 13, 2020

Net-zero promises from companies and governments are popping up as often as new Netflix shows, and just like those algorithmically driven hours of entertainment, not all clean energy commitments are created equal. The language used to describe these targets has become as meaningless as the “natural” label on your package of Perdue chicken: “Clean energy” and “net zero” can signify any number of things, and even “renewable” changes depending on who you ask.

The point is, when a fossil fuel major like BP announces its ambition to become a net-zero company by 2050, as it did on Wednesday, it’s important to read the fine print.

To start, “net-zero emissions” is different from plain old “zero emissions” in that it allows for things like carbon offsets, carbon capture technology, and natural solutions like tree-planting to make up for continued emissions. In this case, BP’s net-zero target does not mean it will stop exploring new reserves, extracting oil and gas, or selling it at the pump. Confusingly, it doesn’t even mean the emissions from all the oil and gas products BP sells will be net-zero in 2050.

But all of that aside, the company’s plan does contain significantly more aggressive goals than its peers.

“Depending on the details, it has the potential to be the most comprehensive climate strategy of any of the major oil companies,” said Andrew Logan, senior director of oil and gas at Ceres, a sustainable business nonprofit. But like Logan said, it depends on the details, because while BP’s dreams are big, the company has disclosed few details on how it will achieve them.

BP

One of BP’s targets is to reduce emissions from all of its company operations, which it says is about 55 million tons of CO2 equivalent, to net zero. That includes emissions from things like gas flaring at the wellhead, company cars, and the electricity it buys to keep the lights on. BP’s goal here is somewhat par for the course these days — most of the major oil and gas companies have some kind of emissions reduction target for their operations (though not all of them are net zero).

What’s noteworthy, said Kathy Mulvey, the fossil fuel accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is that BP says it will measure and reduce its methane footprint at all of its oil and gas sites. “That points to the reality that BP doesn’t actually know exactly how much methane its operations are emitting,” she said.

Critics of these plans say that operational emissions are small potatoes, and that fossil fuel companies should be responsible for the emissions from the oil and gas products they produce and sell to customers, known as scope 3 emissions. This is where BP’s plan really stands out. The company aspires to zero-out the carbon emissions from the eventual combustion of all of the oil and gas it pulls out of the ground by 2050. Right now that amounts to about 360 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year.

BP

In a speech about the plan on Wednesday, new CEO Bernard Looney tried to anticipate questions about this. He said that yes, this does mean BP’s oil and gas production will probably decline over time. “Does that mean we’ll be producing and refining hydrocarbons” — that’s fossil fuel industry–speak for fossil fuels — “in 2050? Yes, very likely,” he said. “Does that mean we’ll be producing and refining less of them in 2050? Yes, almost certainly. And our aim is that any residual hydrocarbons will be decarbonized.”

To date, only one other fossil fuel company has made this kind of commitment, the small Spanish company Repsol. But unlike Repsol, which has set near-term goals to gradually reduce emissions over time, and hinted at some of the strategies it will use to get there, BP offered no benchmarks or blueprints. Looney said the company would share more information on the “how” of its transition in September.

But there’s one key caveat to BP’s scope 3 target. The oil and gas that the company extracts is only a portion of its business. During a Q&A session after his speech, Looney broke down how they are thinking about scope 3 on a whiteboard.

BP sells a lot more oil and gas than it digs out of the ground, he said, because it also buys these products from other companies. So while it plans to zero-out emissions from the products BP itself extracts, it’s aiming for a 50 percent reduction in carbon intensity from all the products it sells, including those it’s just a middleman for.

That leaves open the possibility for the total emissions from BP’s sold products to continue to rise, as long as the amount emitted per unit of energy decreases. In his speech, Looney estimated that right now, total emissions from all the products it sells are about 1 gigaton per year.

Ultimately, with a goal of reducing its footprint by 415 million tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050, BP’s new plan is worlds away from companies like Exxon and Chevron, which still claim they are not responsible for the emissions from customers using their products.

BP’s vision also includes a goal to increase the proportion of money it invests into non-oil and gas energy sources, like solar and wind, over time. Right now, that’s only about 3 percent of BP’s investments. But Looney declined to quantify the company’s target in this arena. “We don’t plan to commit to an arbitrary or preset number,” he said.

While critics have already leapt on the vagueness of the plan, Ed Clowes, a business journalist for the Telegraph, described BP’s dilemma aptly on Twitter. On the one hand, BP could stop selling oil and gas and self-destruct. But if it did, another company would step in to fill the gap, because right now, the world still (mostly) runs on oil. “BP has to be in the game to change it,” Clowes wrote.

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Did BP really just pledge to become a net-zero company? It’s complicated.

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Jane Fonda gets arrested for climate protest, plans to do it again

by Salina60Xmqo Posted on October 11, 2019

Jane Fonda has joined many a protest in her eight decades on God’s green earth. She has marched with working mothers, supported the Black Panthers, and sat on an anti-aircraft gun in Vietnam. Now, the star of Barbarella, Monster-In-Law, and dozens more movies, TV shows, and exercise videos is lending her voice and influence in a new way to an old cause: climate change.

For the next 13 Fridays, the 81-year-old Academy Award winner will demonstrate on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to ask lawmakers to put an end to fossil fuel drilling. She’ll have to stop protesting in December so she can start filming the seventh season of Grace and Frankie, her Netflix comedy series.

Fonda is calling the protests “Fire Drill Fridays,” and they’re like a combination of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future protests and the activist group Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience. Fonda says she plans to protest each week until she is arrested. “I’m going to take my body, which is kind of famous and popular right now because of the [television] series and I’m going to go to D.C. and I’m going to have a rally every Friday,” the actress said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Greta said we have to behave like it’s a crisis,” she added. “We have to behave like our houses are on fire.”

True to her word, Fonda, sporting a red pea coat and a spiffy checkered cap, was arrested alongside other protesters on the steps of the Capitol building on Friday.

Assuming she’s released in time, Fonda will host online teach-ins on Thursday evenings that will include lectures from climate scientists and discussions about how environmental concerns overlap with social issues, in addition to her Friday protests, which will start every week at 11 a.m.

The eight-time Golden Globe winner has protested in the name of climate change before, at Standing Rock in 2016 and at regional protests on the West Coast, including the climate rally in Los Angeles last month. Now, her number one priority is “cutting all funding and permits for new developments for fossil fuel and exports and processing and refining.”

Celebrities are often keen to wade into activism, but it doesn’t always have the intended effect (and the media has a tendency to bungle the message). Yahoo News covered actress Shailene Woodley’s protests at Standing Rock thusly: “Shailene Woodley’s Mug Shot Is as Beautiful as Her Message.” Other celebs have advocated for eliminating straws but seem to have no problem flying private jets all over the damn place, a great way to fry the planet, reusable straws and all.

But Fonda’s multi-pronged approach, which pairs civil disobedience with education and raises awareness about student strikes, seems to be in line with what a bunch of experts told Grist is the right way for a celebrity to support environmental activists. As Barbarella herself would say, “Decarbonize or I’ll melt your face!”

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Jane Fonda gets arrested for climate protest, plans to do it again

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Georgia could have put an end to nuclear plant construction in the U.S., but it didn’t.

by JanelleCuller6 Posted on December 21, 2017

Growing up in the ’90s, some of my favorite people in the world were Bill Nye, Cookie Monster, and Wishbone. That definitely did NOT make me one of the cooler kids at school, who got to chat about cable TV shows I knew nothing about.

But hey, my buddy Bill gave me the crazy idea that science was fun. Wishbone instilled in me a love of reading. And Sesame Street legit taught me, a new immigrant kid from the Philippines, how to speak English.

Now I write about the environment, with a special focus on all the nerdy, science-y, but supremely important environmental stuff that impacts kids in marginalized communities. Those are the kids who might rely on things like public broadcasting to close educational gaps — just like I did. It helped me get to where I am today.

So when Bill Nye resurfaced in 2017 in a big way — with a new series on Netflix and in a new documentary about the man behind the bow tie, I was obsessed. In the film, he meets YouTubers taking the torch when it comes to making fun, open-to-anyone educational videos. It’s all part of his quest to protect science education and keep it accessible to kids. And what makes the documentary even cooler for me? It’s on PBS.

Justine Calma is a Grist fellow.

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Georgia could have put an end to nuclear plant construction in the U.S., but it didn’t.

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As global temperatures rise, more refugees will flee to Europe.

by GusMcLamb542 Posted on December 21, 2017

Growing up in the ’90s, some of my favorite people in the world were Bill Nye, Cookie Monster, and Wishbone. That definitely did NOT make me one of the cooler kids at school, who got to chat about cable TV shows I knew nothing about.

But hey, my buddy Bill gave me the crazy idea that science was fun. Wishbone instilled in me a love of reading. And Sesame Street legit taught me, a new immigrant kid from the Philippines, how to speak English.

Now I write about the environment, with a special focus on all the nerdy, science-y, but supremely important environmental stuff that impacts kids in marginalized communities. Those are the kids who might rely on things like public broadcasting to close educational gaps — just like I did. It helped me get to where I am today.

So when Bill Nye resurfaced in 2017 in a big way — with a new series on Netflix and in a new documentary about the man behind the bow tie, I was obsessed. In the film, he meets YouTubers taking the torch when it comes to making fun, open-to-anyone educational videos. It’s all part of his quest to protect science education and keep it accessible to kids. And what makes the documentary even cooler for me? It’s on PBS.

Justine Calma is a Grist fellow.

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As global temperatures rise, more refugees will flee to Europe.

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Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data – Charles Wheelan

by Myrna Posted on September 7, 2017

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

Charles Wheelan

Genre: Mathematics

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: January 7, 2013

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W. W. Norton


“Brilliant, funny . . . the best math teacher you never had.”—San Francisco Chronicle Once considered tedious, the field of statistics is rapidly evolving into a discipline Hal Varian, chief economist at Google, has actually called “sexy.” From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you’ll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more. For those who slept through Stats 101, this book is a lifesaver. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis. He clarifies key concepts such as inference, correlation, and regression analysis, reveals how biased or careless parties can manipulate or misrepresent data, and shows us how brilliant and creative researchers are exploiting the valuable data from natural experiments to tackle thorny questions. And in Wheelan’s trademark style, there’s not a dull page in sight. You’ll encounter clever Schlitz Beer marketers leveraging basic probability, an International Sausage Festival illuminating the tenets of the central limit theorem, and a head-scratching choice from the famous game show Let’s Make a Deal—and you’ll come away with insights each time. With the wit, accessibility, and sheer fun that turned Naked Economics into a bestseller, Wheelan defies the odds yet again by bringing another essential, formerly unglamorous discipline to life.

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Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data – Charles Wheelan

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White People, Please Stop Asking People of Color Dumb Questions

by JacelynPittard Posted on May 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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Scaachi Koul‘s writing has it all—a gut-busting sense of humor, clear-eyed honesty, and striking introspection that she jokes is a symptom of narcissism.

In her debut book, a collection of essays titled One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Koul, a culture writer for BuzzFeed, applies her sharp wit to tricky issues of race, culture and identity: what it means to be “lighter” than other Indians on a family trip to India, for example, and how she balances her life with her conservative South Asian parents’ expectations. I called Koul and we had entirely too much fun talking about women’s words, finding boldness, and pubic hair, of course.

Mother Jones: Part of what you talk about in the book is existing in spaces where you feel unwelcome in. It seems like you manage to be really outspoken in those spaces—where do you find that sort of boldness?

Scaachi Koul: I have the unfortunate inability to be quiet, and it did not serve me very well when I was a kid. I used to get in trouble all the time for…actually, the same stuff I get in trouble for as an adult. In my later life, it’s been beneficial, but when I was younger I didn’t know how to control it or what to do with it. I’m not sure it’s so much about finding boldness as it is about retaining control at this point, because being mouthy has never been my problem. That’s very easy for me. But now I think a lot about when it’s worth it and what I’m doing it for. When you’re a kid, it’s really obnoxious because you’re just being a dick all the time. I think that’s probably the same case with being bold or bossy or mouthy. Those things are great to have, but if they are uncontrolled and wild, it can hurt you in the long term.

MJ: It must be kind of gratifying to be able to turn your obnoxious qualities from childhood into a way to make money as an adult.

SK: Yeah, why not, right? Listen, I would also like to buy a boat. So why not try to make a profit?

MJ: What made you decide to write the book?

SK: It’s a delicate balance of narcissism and self-interest and money and the hope that you can write something and other people understand it. I write for the internet all the time, but there is something very different about writing a book that you’re asking people to buy. It feels like a different beast. But you hope that you write this thing that appeals to people in this really meaningful way. I grew up on the internet, but the things that formed my understanding of the world and made me feel less isolated were books. That’s the altruistic answer, and then the other version is, “Oh, I’m obsessed with myself.”

MJ: I feel like I’ve been reading more and more books that are memoirs or essay collections from really incredible women—I don’t know if more are being produced or if it’s just what I’ve been hungry for, so it’s what I’ve been feeding myself. Have you been reading that sort of thing, or have you been feeling intimidated or empowered by those works?

SK: While I was writing the book I avoided other memoirs, because I don’t want to get distracted or pick up somebody else’s voice. So for the year that I was working on it really heavily, I didn’t read anything else, and that was actually around the time that Lena Dunham and Jessica Valenti’s books had come out. I know that right now it feels like there’s so many memoirs by young women in particular. I don’t know if it’s that there’s more—I think there’s just been a shift on the way we talk about them, and I think the internet has shaped that. I also find that for every dude who’s really dismissive of what I’ve written, there are five women who are like, “No, I get it. Don’t worry about it. It makes sense to me.”

MJ: The book is really vulnerable in places. Did you grapple with a lot of anxiety while you were writing it?

SK: I had some anxieties about my family reading it. For one, I don’t really want my parents to read about my weird, gross body. My brother read it and he immediately was like, “This is gross. There’s so much about your vagina in here.” I’m like, “Yeah, tough. Deal with it.”

MJ: Men have been writing like that for a long time.

SK: Exactly. I have had to listen to you talk about your penis for 30 years. Get over it.

MJ: I saw your tweet about your parents having read the book.

SK: My mom read it and she was appropriately sad and confused. We didn’t talk details or anything. She said she liked it, but she was clearly quite bummed out about portions of it. My dad hasn’t read it, because he knows that it’ll give him a heart attack, and I don’t think his body can take it. So he’s making a wise decision. I abide by that policy of writing about your family as if they’re all dead. So with the exception of changing some names, that’s pretty much how I handle things, in that I can’t control your perception of what you think happened. I only have my version. I’m sure there’s stuff in there that they disagree with, but I don’t think there’s anything in there that’s libelous. I don’t think they’re going to sue me.

MJ: You also write quite a bit about existing as a woman on the internet. Any advice for outspoken ladies who want to use Twitter without losing their minds?

SK: It’s so tricky. I don’t know of a social-media entity that’s really invested in how women and girls are treated. I can only speak to media Twitter, which is a very specific section of the internet. But for the women that I talk to who are in media and who use Twitter, I always hear from them that they have this anxiety about going private because they feel like it’s antithetical to the point of it. I don’t understand that at all. If you feel like you don’t want to play, don’t play. Go private. Don’t use it. You don’t need to really use it at any great capacity if you just want to tweet your work and go home, that’s fine. I like the format. I think it’s fun sometimes. But I also recognize that it can be deeply unfun, and I had a year of really not understanding why I was using it at all. I could not see any benefit. I was exclusively getting yelled at and I didn’t feel like my work was getting promoted in any way. It was just like people had access to me in this really awful way.

I have friends who do not really use the internet beyond like Google and recipes or sometimes they read the news on it and I guess they have Netflix. And that to me is so weird. Because I use it for everything. And they go to the bank. That’s crazy to me. They go to the bank? Adorable.

MJ: That’s quaint.

SK: It doesn’t make any sense. But you should have people like that in your life, because when you go to them and you’re like, “Oh my God. I just found out that there’s like some text thread going on about one bad tweet that I sent,” they look at you like you have landed from another planet. They will bring you a perspective that will give you some comfort. Which doesn’t mean that the abuse you’re dealing with isn’t real. And it doesn’t mean it’s not serious, but at the same time it can give you some comfort, because there are people everywhere who are not using the internet like we are using it.

MJ: I also really appreciate your style of clapping back at trolls.

SK: That’s something else that like sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s really not. There are days where they say things and it cuts you to the quick and you don’t have anything funny or witty or cute to say in response. It took me a while to remember that I didn’t actually have to answer all of them. Sometimes when I have responded to them, I have felt myself starting to unravel. I’ve had friends send me notes being like, “Hey, you sound crazy.” This was like funny or whatever, but you sound insane.” And then I have to go back and I’ll read it again and be like, “Yeah, this is nuts.” Get off the internet. Leave your phone at home and go outside and go do something in the tangible world, where nobody knows what your Twitter handle is.

MJ: It’s a good friend that will tell you when you’re being crazy on Twitter, though.

SK: You need those people who tell you to like shut your pie hole.

MJ: Let’s talk about the things you wish you didn’t have to say to white people.

SK: Oh, god. I could write a second book about the things I wish I didn’t have to explain to white people. I wish I didn’t have to explain why they have to pronounce my name correctly or spell it correctly. I’m very tired of explaining that making jokes about my name sounding like Sriracha isn’t funny because it actually doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not funny. I don’t get it. I would really love to stop explaining why it’s obnoxious when they ask me where I’m from and I say, “Calgary” and they say, “No, where are you really from?” I would love to not have to explain where Kashmir is because they will press me and ask me again, and I’ll say that’s where my family’s from and that’s also not satisfying. I would love to stop explaining why I don’t really enjoy Indian weddings. I would like to not have to tell people that I don’t know how to thread eyebrows. They think all brown girls know how. By the way, I’ve never even gotten my eyebrows threaded. My mother went straight to waxing because my brows are formidable. There was no like, “Oh, we’ll use this gentle threading process.” No, no, no. We’ve got to use chemicals.

MJ: Your niece has such a major presence in the book. What do you hope she’ll gain from it if she reads it when she’s older?

SK: I signed it for her, assuming she will read it when she’s like 65. Her mother said she would give it to her when she’s 16, which is probably a better, more realistic age. But that’s only in 10 years. I hope she gets some context about our family that she won’t otherwise have. It feels so weird. I feel like I gave her my diary and I was like, “Good luck.” I don’t know how eager my 17-year-old niece will be to read about like my pussy hair, but I guess she should have that option.

MJ: I mean, presumably she’ll have some too.

SK: To be honest she’s seven and I’m already talking about my pubic hair with her, so at this point I don’t think it’s going to be that much of a shock. She asked when it came out if it was about her and I was like, “Yeah, pretty much.”

MJ: Smart kid.

SK: Well, she, like her aunt is a narcissist, so we’ve just got to make sure everything’s about us. I hope it gives her some understanding of a portion of her. I’m very curious about what her life is going to look like. I worry a lot about her growing up to be self-loathing the way I was. I was really self-loathing about being brown when I was a kid. I really resented it. And I hope that she doesn’t feel like that about herself as she gets older. My parents are there and they sort of pull her into this version of her identity. I hope she doesn’t hate that. And if she does, then hopefully the book will help reverse some of it or give her something to like.

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White People, Please Stop Asking People of Color Dumb Questions

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Bill Nye’s "Sick Ice Cream Orgy" Is Causing a Conservative Meltdown

by LuellaHayman Posted on April 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, everyone’s favorite childhood “science guy” debuted his new show: Bill Nye Saves the World, an unabashedly political Netflix series for adults that aims to debunk anti-scientific claims. Nye has come back into the national spotlight with force in recent years, vocally supporting scientific realities that shouldn’t be controversial but for some reason are, namely climate change and evolution. He’s become a favorite of the left thanks to nostalgia and his support of, well, science. Last week, Nye protested against the Trump administration as one of the public faces of the March for Science, telling the crowd that “science must shape policy.”

Nye may be a beloved cultural figure, but reviews of his new show have characterized it as mediocre at best, with some arguing that it’s too preachy and heavy-handed. In a Gizmodo review, Maddie Stone pulls no punches. “Like Nye, I’m outraged to see anti-science beliefs promulgated at the highest levels of our government,” she writes. “Nye and I are on the same team—and yet I still felt like I was being talked down to throughout his show. How will the average viewer feel?”

While parts of the show seem to be missing that mark, not all criticisms of it are equally valid—and there have certainly been some high points. Nye truly seems to delight in provoking conservatives, and there’s one episode in particular, titled “The Sexual Spectrum,” that has caused right-leaning commentators to lose their collective minds.

“This is the episode where Bill Nye jumps off the deep end into the leftist view on gender, an empirically bankrupt position only defended by postmodernists and social theorists,” writes a Breitbart columnist.

So what has conservatives so riled up? The episode, which comes across as something of a gender and sexuality 101 workshop, explains that—in contrast to what many of us grew up believing—gender really isn’t binary. “There are people who identify as both genders or neither gender or a combination of the two,” Nye points out. He even goes on to explain how gender identity isn’t necessarily static. “By 3 or 4, most kids identify with a gender, and it doesn’t always match the sex they were assigned at birth, and a person’s gender identity may change over their lifetime,” he explains.

In a particularly charming segment being denounced as a “Sick Ice Cream Orgy” that promotes lust as a virtue, the show takes aim at conversion therapy—the discredited practice of trying to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity through counseling. In the segment, a vanilla ice cream cone tells all the other ice cream flavors they need to become vanilla, too. “I just think if you want to get right with the big ice cream in the sky, change your flavor by wishing to be vanilla,” it says. (Oh, and there actually is an ice cream orgy—so enjoy!)

Conservative bloggers are especially horrified by what’s been dubbed a “vulgarity-laced, transgender manifesto,” sung by Crazy Ex-Girlfriend star Rachel Bloom. The freakout over Bloom’s supposed “transgender anthem” is doubly bizarre, because it’s a clear misunderstanding of her lyrics; the song is about sexual preference and doesn’t really mention gender identity. “This world of ours is so full of choice,” sings Bloom. “But must I choose between only John or Joyce? Are my options only hard or moist? My vagina has its own voice.”

To be fair, it’s a pretty terrible song, and the segment is hard to watch without cringing. But after reading all the moral panic, it’s become even harder to watch without laughing.

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Bill Nye’s "Sick Ice Cream Orgy" Is Causing a Conservative Meltdown

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FX Series "Atlanta" Is Like the Black "Master of None"

by PorterBignold Posted on September 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Triple threat Donald Glover—writer, actor, and rapper—can now tuck another feather into his cap, as showrunner of Atlanta, a worthy new series premiering September 6 on FX. The 32-year-old Glover, known for his portrayal of the lovable Troy on Community, opted to leave that series after five seasons to pursue a show of his own. With Atlanta, he looked to his own roots on the periphery of the Atlanta drug scene who attended an elite northeastern college to bring a bit of realism to a fictional story.

Glover, a native of Stone Mountain, Georgia, and a graduate of NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, plays Earn (Ernest), a Princeton dropout and a young dad who is “technically homeless” but at the moment is living with Vanessa (Zazie Beets), his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his daughter. Earn’s job selling travel deals at the airport only pays him on commission, which means his finances are constantly in disarray—at times he gets so desperate he has to borrow $20 just to take Van, whom he’s struggling to win back, to dinner. Discouraged and at his wit’s end, Earn approaches his rapper cousin Alfred (a.k.a. Paper Boi, played by Brian Tyree Henry) whose career is beginning to take off locally, and asks if he can be Alfred’s manager.

As is the case with most dramedies, many of the jokes here aren’t laugh-out-loud funny, even though Glover, during a previous three-year stint as a writer for 30 Rock, gave us many of Tracy Morgan’s absurd lines. Rather, Atlanta has a similar feel to Aziz Ansari’s Netflix hit Master of None. It provides an introspective look into the lives of millennial men navigating work, romance, and their own shortcomings as they become painfully aware of the people they’ve grown up to be.

Glover largely trades in his sillier comedic sensibilities for a more nuanced approach, while bringing much of the same charming awkwardness to Earn that he brought to Troy on Community. As a writer, Glover saves his most humorous lines for Darius (Keith Stanfield), Paper Boi’s hilariously enigmatic right-hand man.

What makes Atlanta particularly unique in the world of half-hour comedies is that fact that all its writers are black, and many are rookies in the writers’ room. “I wanted to show white people, you don’t know everything about black culture,” Glover told Vulture last month. The premise of exploring race in a comedic format is compelling enough, but Atlanta also manages to tackle gun violence, mass incarceration, sexual identity, and authoritarian abuse in the Black community (all within the first four episodes). Glover relies on humor, not preaching, to get his serious points across.

In the debut episode, Earn runs into a (presumably) old friend, a white man around his age. The friend uses the N-word while telling Earn a story about a party he’d attended, but he doesn’t use it when he tells the story to Paper Boi—a discrepancy highlighting flawed notions of whether, when, and with whom it’s appropriate for a white person to use the word.

In another episode, Paper Boi, now a rising star, spots a child playing outside with a toy gun pretending to shoot another child and proclaiming he’s “just like Paper Boi.” The rapper’s efforts to set the kid straight are lost on the child, thwarted by Paper Bio’s public persona. Elsewhere, as Earn awaits bond after being on a weapons charge after pulling a gun from his cousin’s glove compartment, another man in the jail’s holding area (where most are black) runs into his ex, a trans woman, who’s also awaiting bond. In this uncomfortable scene, the other men ridicule the man as a “faggot.” Glover then breaks the tension with humor: “Sexuality is a spectrum,” he stage-whispers to the distraught guy. “You can really do whatever you want.”

But then our attention is then drawn to a mentally unstable man clad in a hospital gown. Earn asks a guard why the man is even there—”He looks like he needs help”—and is told to shut up. Then, after the unhinged man spits some toilet water he’s been drinking on a guard, he is repaid with a beatdown.

Social issues aside, the show gives a dreamlike window into Earn’s personal growth (or lack thereof) and his life, which seems to consist of one obstacle after another. “I just keep losing,” Earn tells a wise stranger on a city bus. Yet if Atlanta maintains its careful balance of laughs and gritty reality, the show could well prove to be a winner.

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FX Series "Atlanta" Is Like the Black "Master of None"

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Take a hint, “clean coal.” The world is so over you

by NatishaMaur4838 Posted on December 4, 2015

Take a hint, “clean coal.” The world is so over you

By on 4 Dec 2015 4:05 pmcommentsShare

Like that old classmate still hanging around your hometown pub, playing pool, and talking about the great business idea that he had back in high school, clean coal is about to sidle up to the world’s barstool and — in a slightly slurred and defeated voice — tell you that, despite a few setbacks, it could still work.

You’ll smile and nod and pretend to be interested, but in truth, a lot’s happened since your days of joyriding around the suburbs and late-night Kmart runs. It’s 2015, and an old Volkswagen bus-turned-mobile Blockbuster just doesn’t seem like a lucrative idea anymore. Likewise, the promise of guilt-free fossil fuels in a time of dropping renewable energy prices and mounting clean coal disappointments seems a bit passe.

For a quick refresher, the basic idea behind clean coal is this: Instead of pumping CO2 directly into the atmosphere, coal plants equipped with carbon capture technology would just grab that CO2 on its way out of the plant and shove it back into the ground from whence it came. Simple, right? Well, not really. Here’s more from the AP:

In 2013, Norway pulled the plug on a major carbon capture project it had likened to the moon landing, citing spiraling costs. Another big setback came on Nov. 25, just days ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Paris, when Britain abruptly canceled 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) in funding for carbon capture technology, raising doubts about the fate of two projects competing for the money.

There’s currently only one clean coal plant up and running — the Boundary Dam power station in Saskatchewan, Canada — that was designed to capture about 1 million tons of CO2 annually, but managed less than half that during its first year, the AP reports.

Not to be left out, the U.S. has been working on its own clean coal plant down in Mississippi for almost a decade. Check out this Grist Special Report from former Grist fellow Sara Bernard for an in-depth look at that whole mess. The project has been mired in construction delays and unexpected costs since it was first proposed in 2006. Its initial price tag of $1.8 billion has risen to about $6.5 billion, and its construction, which began in 2010 and was supposed to be done by now, still trudges on.

According to the International Energy Agency and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, carbon capture technology on its own — as in, not necessarily attached to a power plant — might be a necessary tool in avoiding a 2-degree Celsius temperature rise. Fortunately, the independent technology has had somewhat more success than its clean coal application, although not by much. Here’s more from the AP:

There are 13 large-scale carbon capture projects in the world, collecting 26 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the International Energy Agency. But that’s less than one one-thousandth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“There’s activity out there, but it’s not what various organizations would have hoped for,” said Juho Lipponen, who heads the IEA’s carbon capture unit.

In Paris, only eight of the 170 action plans submitted by individual nations point to carbon capture technology as a necessary mitigation tool, the AP reports:

Bill Hare, who heads the Climate Analytics institute in Berlin, said carbon capture may have missed its moment when investments didn’t take off despite a lot of “hype” a decade ago. Now, he said, the falling costs of renewable energy mean carbon capture has a lot of catching up to do.

“It’s probably harder to get this moving now than 10 years ago,” Hare said.

Likewise, Netflix and that VW emissions scandal will probably make your old buddy’s Blockbuster bus a harder sell today than it was 10 years ago. Although, let’s be real, it was a pretty killer idea back then.

Source:

‘Clean coal’ technology fails to capture world’s attention

, The Associated Press.

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Take a hint, “clean coal.” The world is so over you

Posted in Anchor, Brita, FF, GE, ONA, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Take a hint, “clean coal.” The world is so over you