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Tree simple tricks for making our cities cooler

by KathrinPascal Posted on February 2, 2015

Tree simple tricks for making our cities cooler

By on 2 Feb 2015commentsShare

Melbourne, Australia, is burnin’ up. In recent years, summer temperatures have peaked at about 113 degrees F — and the mercury is projected to keep rising, thanks to climate change. But now the city has a plan to beat back the heat: Plant more trees.

CityLab reports that, in Melbourne, things had to get worse before they got better. Since the mid-’90s, Southeastern Australia has been wracked with an epic drought, a debilitating water shortage, and a heatwave that ignited wildfires and caused a number of heat-related deaths.

The city suffered more than other areas because of the urban heat island effect, when the dense, concrete center gets considerably hotter than surrounding areas. (The fact that Melbourne sits on the world’s largest heat island probably doesn’t help.) And the city’s immune system — its trees, which provide shade, cooler temperatures, and clean air — were the first to suffer. When water supplies ran low, city officials cut them off, and trees suffered the consequences.

Melbourne still clings to approximately 70,000 trees, but according to the city’s website, it is expected to lose 27 percent of its remaining tree population within 10 years, and 44 percent within 20. Crikey.

Not to worry: City leaders have read The Lorax enough times to know there’s always an “unless.” Melbourne will plant 30,000 trees in the city’s central business district, increasing canopy cover from 22 percent to 40 percent by 2040. It also has a genius plan to keep them watered, even during dry times. Here’s CityLab:

Complementing the massive tree-planting scheme are more resilient methods of watering them. One such project, in Darling Street on the central city’s eastern fringe, was launched two years ago. The street was identified as an ideal experimental site: downhill, with parkland adjacent and located within the area that had borne the brunt of the drought.

The wider stormwater harvesting network now helps capture 25 percent of the water required to feed the landscape annually. That’s just the beginning. “We aim to source 50 percent of our water requirements from non-potable sources by 2030,” [said Councillor Arron Wood, chair of the city’s environment portfolio.] “Even during future drought. This network will provide us with water security in a cost-effective manner.”

This is all part of a climate change-fighting strategy is known as “urban canopy.” If this plan works, city officials think they could cool the city by 7 degrees. That’s big. The idea is delightfully, yet deceptively, simple — which makes us wonder, “Why didn’t we think of that?” Well, here’s a pleasant surprise: We did!

Many U.S. cities already have plans, or are in the midst, or adopting urban canopy plans, including Baltimore, Tampa, Palo Alto, Portland, Seattle, and plenty others. Plus, get this: In Baltimore, the increase of trees not only provided much-needed shade, but also improved air quality and cut crime levels. What’s more, Yale researchers have concluded that urban forests foster community engagement and neighborly love.

So when it comes to saving our cities from urban heat, it’s either love ‘em or leaf ‘em. (Sorry.)

Source:
Can Melbourne Lower Its Temperature by 7 degrees?

, CityLab.

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Tree simple tricks for making our cities cooler

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How Newt Gingrich’s Language Guru Helped Rebrand the Kochs’ Message

by CarmineGraebner Posted on December 8, 2014

Mother Jones

For the Koch brothers’ donor network, the 2012 elections were a keen disappointment. Not only did they lose what Charles Koch had famously billed as the “mother of all wars” to oust Barack Obama, but they poured some $400 million into electoral and advocacy efforts with, at best, lackluster results in federal and state races, leaving a number of their investors and operatives unhappy.

Fast-forward to 2014, and the Koch network seems to be riding high. Having budgeted nearly $300 million for advocacy and political drives, with a bigger field operation and better data to mobilize conservative voters, the network helped the GOP capture the Senate, expand the House majority, and re-elect Koch-favored politicians like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Three of the new GOP senators—Arkansas’ Tom Cotton, Colorado’s Cory Gardner and Iowa’s Joni Ernst—recently attended Koch policy and fundraising retreats; at the network’s Dana Point, California confab this past June, all three heaped praise on the assembled donors and Koch operatives.

What changed? Of course, the Koch network—and the GOP generally—capitalized on public dissatisfaction with President Obama, the “six year itch” most two-term presidents face, and a bad electoral landscape for Democratic Senate candidates. But the Kochs and their allies also learned from their past mistakes. They’ve used the last two years to adapt, refine, and expand their operations with an eye to sharpening their anti-big government messages to appeal to more voters. The Koch network, one donor told me, has been focused laser-like on “trying to perfect their language.” For help, they have turned to an A list of conservative political consultants including the man best known for selling the nation on Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America: Pollster and spinmeister Frank Luntz.

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How Newt Gingrich’s Language Guru Helped Rebrand the Kochs’ Message

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Why We’re In A Golden Age of Global Investigative Journalism

by BernieSeidel Posted on August 26, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In our world, the news about the news is often grim. Newspapers are shrinking, folding up, or being cut loose by their parent companies. Layoffs are up and staffs are down. That investigative reporter who covered the state capitol—she’s not there anymore. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune have suffered from multiple rounds of layoffs over the years. You know the story and it would be easy enough to imagine that it was the world’s story as well. But despite a long run of journalistic tough times, the loss of advertising dollars, and the challenge of the Internet, there’s been a blossoming of investigative journalism across the globe from Honduras to Myanmar, New Zealand to Indonesia.

Woodward and Bernstein may be a fading memory in this country, but journalists with names largely unknown in the US like Khadija Ismayilova, Rafael Marques, and Gianina Segnina are breaking one blockbuster story after another, exposing corrupt government officials and their crony corporate pals in Azerbaijan, Angola, and Costa Rica. As I travel the world, I’m energized by the journalists I meet who are taking great risks to shine much needed light on shadowy wrongdoing.

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Why We’re In A Golden Age of Global Investigative Journalism

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The Meltdown of the Anti-Immigration Minuteman Militia

by AntwanHockensmi Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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In early July, Chris Davis issued a call to arms. “You see an illegal, you point your gun right dead at them, right between the eyes, and say ‘Get back across the border, or you will be shot,'” the Texas-based militia commander said in a YouTube video heralding Operation Secure Our Border-Laredo Sector, a plan to block the wave of undocumented migrants coming into his state. “If you get any flak from sheriffs, city, or feds, Border Patrol, tell them, ‘Look—this is our birthright. We have a right to secure our own land. This is our land.'”

Davis’ video was publicized by local newspapers and the Los Angeles Times. But the militia never materialized in Laredo, and Davis walked back his comments. (The video has been taken down.) Over the last few weeks, a smaller force under Davis’ watch has appeared along the southern border, spread thinly across three states. The fizzling of this grand mobilization was another reminder that the current immigration crisis has been missing a key ingredient of recent border showdowns: Bands of the heavily-armed self-appointed border guardians known as Minutemen.

During the past four years, the Minuteman groups that defined conservative immigration policy during the mid- to late-2000s have mostly self-destructed—sometimes spectacularly so. Founding Minuteman leaders are in prison, facing criminal charges, dead, or sidelined. “It really attracted a lot of people that had some pretty extreme issues,” says Juanita Molina, executive director of the Border Action Network, an advocacy group that provides aid to migrants in the desert. “We saw the movement implode on itself mostly because of that.” An analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors right-wing extremist groups, found that the number of Minuteman groups in the Southwest had declined from 310 to 38 between 2010 and 2012.

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The Meltdown of the Anti-Immigration Minuteman Militia

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This Is How The Right Will Try to Destroy Chris Christie

by KathieArriola Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This week, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is crisscrossing Iowa. Officially, the visit is a fundraising trip tied to his side job as chairman of the Republican Governors Association. But like most any big-time politician choosing to spend some of the summer in the first caucus state, the visit is drawing the kind of speculation—and attacks—befitting a potential presidential contender.

Take the Judicial Crisis Network, which has seized the chance to target him with online ads and a website criticizing him for failing to turn the New Jersey Supreme Court into a bastion of right-wing judicial activism. JCN has established itself as significant player in judicial nomination fights and elections over the past several years, and has strong ties to conservative factions that don’t trust the governor’s record on social issues—and who would prefer a 2016 nominee more in line with the evangelical strain of the GOP.

The online ads take Christie to task for reappointing—gasp!—a Democrat as the chief justice of the state’s supreme court, and criticize him for failing to live up to earlier campaign promises to remake the court as a conservative body.

The gripes about Christie’s judicial appointments are pretty bogus. He’s a Republican governor of a democratic state, and he’s been thwarted again and again in his attempts to install conservatives on the high court: only three of his six nominees have been able to get past the Democratic controlled state legislature’s judiciary committee. One of those nominees only got through because Christie agreed to a deal where he re-nominated the aforementioned sitting chief justice, a Democrat.

In a response to the ads, one of Christie’s top advisers has argued that JCN is a Johnny-come-lately to New Jersey’s nomination battles, suggesting that they don’t really care about the composition of the court—but care plenty about dissing Christie. “This group has been noticeably absent from any judicial fight we’ve had in New Jersey, showing up only to criticize after the fights are over,” Mike DuHaime said in a CNN appearance.

As DuHaime’s complaint suggests, the Judicial Crisis Network’s campaign is likely just another shot across the bow by social conservatives who think Christie is too liberal on issues like gay marriage and abortion, and don’t want to see him become the GOP nominee for president in 2016. Indeed, the people behind the organization seem like just the sort who would much rather see a President Rick Santorum than a President Christie.

The JCN was founded by Gary Marx, who wooed family values voters for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, organizing church-sponsored voter drives in Ohio. According to Right Wing Watch, he was encouraged to start the organization, originally called the Judicial Confirmation Network, by Jay Sekulow, a veteran Christian soldier. As president of the American Center for Law and Justice, Sekulow has litigated numerous church-state cases before the US Supreme Court, including a recent one that allowed a Utah park to keep a Ten Commandments statute installed.

In 2004, Marx joined with Wendy Long, a former clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to set up the Judicial Confirmation Network to bolster President Bush’s efforts to install staunch social conservatives on the federal bench. When Obama was elected, the group changed its name and focus to blocking the new president’s nominees. (Marx now leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative evangelical group founded by Ralph Reed. Long left the JCN in 2012 to pursue an unsuccessful GOP Senate campaign against New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat.)

JCN also has close ties to the anti-gay marriage movement, sharing a treasurer with the National Organization for Marriage. Indeed, in a piece published this week by the National Review Online in coordination with the campaign bashing Christie’s judges, the Judicial Crisis Network’s current director, Carrie Severino, wrote that Christie’s “conservative” justices took part in the court’s unanimous decision last year to allow same-sex marriage in New Jersey. She also contends that Christie’s most recent nominee has a record of being pro-choice. Severino—who is also a former Thomas clerk—concludes, “If these are Christie’s conservative nominees, then Christie’s definition of a conservative sounds an awful lot like a liberal.”

Christie is likely to see similar attacks as he makes further steps towards a 2016 campaign after the ignominy of Bridgegate. He’ll be in New Hampshire later this month.

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This Is How The Right Will Try to Destroy Chris Christie

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Caribbean Coral Reefs “Will Be Lost Within 20 Years” Without Protection

by JeanneMinaya Posted on July 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Most Caribbean coral reefs will disappear within the next 20 years unless action is taken to protect them, primarily due to the decline of grazers such as sea urchins and parrotfish, a new report has warned.

A comprehensive analysis by 90 experts of more than 35,000 surveys conducted at nearly 100 Caribbean locations since 1970 shows that the region’s corals have declined by more than 50 percent.

But restoring key fish populations and improving protection from overfishing and pollution could help the reefs recover and make them more resilient to the impacts of climate change, according to the study from the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the United Nations Environment Program.

While climate change and the resulting ocean acidification and coral bleaching does pose a major threat to the region, the report—Status and Trends of Caribbean Coral Reefs: 1970-2012—found that local pressures such as tourism, overfishing and pollution posed the biggest problems.

And these factors have made the loss of the two main grazer species, the parrotfish and sea urchin, the key driver of coral decline in the Caribbean.

Grazers are important fish in the marine ecosystem as they eat the algae that can smother corals. An unidentified disease led to a mass mortality of the sea urchin in 1983 and overfishing throughout the 20th century has brought the parrotfish population to the brink of extinction in some regions, according to the report.

Reefs where parrotfish are not protected have suffered significant declines, including Jamaica, the entire Florida reef tract from Miami to Key West, and the US Virgin Islands. At the same time, the report showed that some of the healthiest Caribbean coral reefs are those that are home to big populations of grazing parrotfish. These include the US Flower Garden Banks national marine sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and Bonaire—all of which have restricted or banned fishing practices that harm parrotfish.

The Caribbean is home to 9 percent of the world’s coral reefs, but only around one-sixth of the original coral cover remains. The reefs, which span 38 countries, are vital to the region’s economy and support the more than 43 million people, generating more than $3 billion annually from tourism and fisheries and much more in other goods and services.

According to the authors, restoring parrotfish populations and improving other management strategies could help the reefs recover. “The rate at which the Caribbean corals have been declining is truly alarming,” said Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of IUCN’s global marine and polar program. “But this study brings some very encouraging news: the fate of Caribbean corals is not beyond our control and there are some very concrete steps that we can take to help them recover.”

Reefs that are protected from overfishing, as well as other threats such as excessive coastal pollution, tourism and coastal development, are more resilient to pressures from climate change, according to the authors.

“Even if we could somehow make climate change disappear tomorrow, these reefs would continue their decline,” said Jeremy Jackson, lead author of the report and IUCN’s senior adviser on coral reefs. “We must immediately address the grazing problem for the reefs to stand any chance of surviving future climate shifts.”

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Caribbean Coral Reefs “Will Be Lost Within 20 Years” Without Protection

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The IRS Is Coming For Your Offshore Bank Account

by AugustFrewin Posted on July 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s always been a pretty simple arrangement for America’s superrich: Park your money in a country whose banks know how to keep a secret and then underreport your assets to the IRS. Without a way to independently verify how much money you have abroad, the taxman had to take your word for how much money you had stashed in a Swiss vault or in a sunny haven like the Cayman Islands. But as of yesterday, the US government will require foreign banks to report their American clients’ assets, or face 30 percent tax penalties on some offshore deposits.

The move is part of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which was introduced in 2010. Since then, more than 80 countries have agreed to open their ledger books to the feds. After some complicated last-minute negotiations, even Russia and China have started to cooperate.

Companies and individuals have long used offshore banking to keep their taxes low: Last year, American multinationals kept an estimated $2 trillion (yes, with a “t”) abroad, according to a Bloomberg analysis. In recent years, tech companies have become some of the most enthusiastic offshore depositors. Between 2010 and 2013, Microsoft more than doubled its foreign stockpile to $76.4 billion, while Apple increased its pot abroad more than fourfold to $54.4 billion.

But while big US companies have stowed a massive pile of cash abroad, US banks hold even more money for foreign clients. According to Tax Justice Network, a British-based advocacy and research group, out of the $21 to $32 trillion kept offshore globally, about 22 percent is kept in the United States—a fact that’s not lost on countries complying with FATCA, some of whom are embracing the law because it means they’ll get to learn a few things about their own citizens’ holdings in the US.

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The IRS Is Coming For Your Offshore Bank Account

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The RNC’s Newest Anti-Hillary Weapon Is a Giant Orange Squirrel

by BlytheGorsuch Posted on June 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is speaking in DC Friday night on the campus of George Washington University. The visit was to promote her new book, Hard Choices, but had the air of a campaign event: The line to get in snaked around the block, with attendees sporting “Ready for Hillary” stickers on their shirts. Network TV cameras lined the back of the lower mezzanine. Secret Service agents trolled through the aisles.

And the Republican National Committee was there to respond. Rival political factions turning up at events isn’t a rare occurrence, but the RNC unveiled a new strategy with an…interesting bent. It was the debut of the HRC Squirrel: A person walking around in a bright orange squirrel suit. Tailed by four RNC staffers, the squirrel wandered around giving high-fives to the folks in line, who generally seemed to get a kick out of the odd scene. The squirrel has a Twitter handle and a donation page where anti-Clintonites can get bumper stickers that say “Another Clinton in the White House is Nuts.”

That nutty joke was the gist of the attack, making it a little unclear that the furry was there to rebuke the attendees’ favorite Democrat.

High Five! Patrick Caldwell/Mother Jones

The plainclothes staffers followed the squirrel around, handing out an information sheet with bullet points attacking Clinton. Bold statements include “Benghazi is Still the Defining Moment of Clinton’s Tenure,” and “Clinton’s Russia Reset Has Failed.” One of the staffers, an RNC deputy press secretary, said that the squirrel would be making appearances at subsequent Clinton book signings.

Welcome to 2016!

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The RNC’s Newest Anti-Hillary Weapon Is a Giant Orange Squirrel

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China’s Global Search for Energy

by Myrna Posted on May 21, 2014

China has an insatiable appetite for energy and it has made deals with nations like Russia, Iraq, Nigeria, Ecuador and Venezuela to keep its people warm and the lights on. Link: China’s Global Search for Energy Related ArticlesJane Kleeb vs. the Keystone PipelineOutlasting Dynasties, Now Emerging From SootMatter: When Predators Vanish, So Does the Ecosystem

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China’s Global Search for Energy

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World Briefing: Groups Pool Funds to Protect More of Amazon Rain Forest

by Myrna Posted on May 21, 2014

An agreement between government and private partners will allow for an additional 34,000 square miles of Brazilian rain forest to be added to a conservation program. Original post: World Briefing: Groups Pool Funds to Protect More of Amazon Rain Forest Related ArticlesNote to Olympic Sailors: Don’t Fall in Rio’s WaterThe Science Behind Forest FiresCatastrophic Floods Hit Balkans, Raising Fears for Land Mines and Power Plants

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World Briefing: Groups Pool Funds to Protect More of Amazon Rain Forest

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