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This herb could be the secret to curbing cows’ climate-changing burps

by BennieEsparza Posted on May 13, 2016

This herb could be the secret to curbing cows’ climate-changing burps

By on May 13, 2016 3:50 pmShare

Oregano may seem like an unlikely ingredient in the fight against climate change. But this modest herb could make cows’ methane-heavy belches — a big contributor to the warming of our planet — a little less potent.

Oregano’s essential oil contains carvacrol, an antimicrobial that kills off some of the methane-producing bacteria in the cow’s rumen. Danish researchers who are investigating oregano’s methane-suppressing abilities hope that it could reduce cows’ methane emissions by a quarter. Nearly 15 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to livestock, and 65 percent of that total comes from raising beef and dairy cattle.

NPR points out that oregano oil isn’t the only solution to cutting down cows’ ballooning emissions. Scientists have explored unpronounceable alternatives like 3-nitrooxypopanal, a methane-inhibiting chemical. But those may not be compatible with organic guidelines, and many of the people who care about cows’ methane emissions are the same ones who buy organic milk.

We could just eat less dairy and beef. But while some Americans are starting to shift away from meat, that change may not happen soon enough. It might behoove us to get our cows chewing oregano cud, since that could be one small solution we could implement fast.

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This herb could be the secret to curbing cows’ climate-changing burps

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Three Sentences About the Cocoon

by JoshuaDadson Posted on May 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sentence #1: Drew Altman on whether people are satisfied or not with their Obamacare coverage:

In the Kaiser survey, which will be published next week, 29% of Republicans in marketplace plans (i.e., Obamacare) say they have benefited from the ACA compared with 75% of Democrats, a 46-point difference.

This is now so common that it makes top-line polling almost useless. How’s the economy doing? It depends on your party. Do you believe in climate change? It depends on your party. In unemployment up or down? It depends on your party. We’re accustomed to opinions about things like abortion depending on party ID, but more and more, views of objective reality depend on party ID too. Why?

Sentence #2: Ezra Klein on why Facebook is likely to become more biased, not less:

Before the web…it was possible to cocoon yourself inside an echo chamber, but you really had to work at it. Then came cable news…. Constructing an echo chamber became easier….But now we have personalized search results, handcrafted Twitter feeds, and a Facebook algorithm based on likes. Now you can end up in an echo chamber without even knowing it.

Aha. The cocoon. This is why the objective state of the world depends so much on party ID. If you watch Fox News and read the Drudge Report, you get exposed to more than just different spins compared to people who listen to NPR and read Mother Jones. You get exposed to an entirely different set of stories. Conservatives and liberals these days are increasingly exercised by issues that their opposites barely even know exist.

Sentence #3: Todd VanDerWerff on the ultimate hollowness of the latest George Clooney vehicle, Money Monster:

Hollywood used to excel at telling stories of people who lived and worked in the lower classes….Whether it was The Grapes of Wrath or Raging Bull, filmmakers used to treat the concerns and hopes of the working class as worthy of consideration. That happens less and less now.

The cocoon again! Back in the day, plenty of screenwriters and film directors came from working-class backgrounds. Today they all have degrees from the USC film school and live in Silver Lake. They get their news from Variety and the LA Times, not drive-time radio and People. In this cocoon, the working class is something to make money from via transparently condescending TV shows, not real people with real problems.

Years ago, I used to think that everyone who did the kind of thing I do—blather about public policy from the perch of an upper-middle-class existence—should read the National Enquirer weekly to get a better sense of what kinds of news shaped the views of ordinary people. I don’t think the Enquirer fills that bill anymore, but what does? The media-verse is so fragmented these days that I’m not sure there’s any single outlet you can count on anymore. Suggestions?

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Three Sentences About the Cocoon

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Cities ask residents to snitch on illegal Airbnb rentals

by MitziPaspalis79 Posted on May 13, 2016

Cities ask residents to snitch on illegal Airbnb rentals

By on May 13, 2016 12:44 pmShare

Rental services like Airbnb and VRBO take up valuable real estate for short-term stays. This can mean that housing supply goes down, rent goes up, and residents get displaced by visitors, as we noted last week. That’s a big enough problem that now at least two German cities are asking their citizens to snitch on neighbors who are illegally renting homes to tourists.

Berlin, which has banned most vacation apartment rentals, has a website that enables people to anonymously inform on law-breaking landlords. And now Munich, which has also introduced laws cracking down on short-term rentals, is considering launching a snitch site as well, CityLab’s Feargus O’Sullivan reports. Even before the city’s leaders started talking about setting up such a site, the Munich Renters’ Association publicized an email address that people can use to tattle on their neighbors.

It’s an interesting concept, but one O’Sullivan finds problematic. “The plan to create a special website for informing on your neighbors might ultimately help the city become an easier place for permanent residents to find a home,” he writes. But, “It might also, in its own modest, quiet way, make Munich a place in which some would shudder to live.”

Personally, I see nothing wrong with tattling on scofflaw landlords, who probably deserve it. Cities aren’t just built for visitors, after all; they’re built for the people who live in them.

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Cities ask residents to snitch on illegal Airbnb rentals

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Gates Foundation quietly dumps all of its BP stock

by 2Gofman3 Posted on May 12, 2016

Gates Foundation quietly dumps all of its BP stock

By on May 12, 2016 5:16 pmShare

Has the world’s largest charitable foundation started shifting away from fossil fuels?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sold off its $187 million stake in the oil giant BP sometime between September and December of 2015, according to a recent filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The move came after the foundation sold off $824 million in ExxonMobil stock, as disclosed last fall.

The foundation has been under pressure from climate activists demanding that it drop all investments in fossil fuel companies. The Guardian’s “Keep It in the Ground” campaign and the Gates Divest campaign have both been particularly dogged in focusing on Gates.

But the foundation has refused to comment on its investment decisions, so the significance of these recent oil-stock sell-offs is unclear. Bill Gates, the billionaire cofounder of Microsoft, has been skeptical of the fossil-fuel divestment movement and last year called it a “false solution.”

According to public records, the Gates Foundation held about $1.4 billion of investments in coal, oil, and gas companies at the start of 2014. Now it holds only about $200 million of those stocks, according to the Guardian — though it may have made new fossil fuel investments that haven’t been publicly disclosed.

Given the big troubles the coal industry is facing right now, and the volatility in the oil and gas sector, it’s the perfect time for investors like Gates to get out.

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Gates Foundation quietly dumps all of its BP stock

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Keystone pipeline still a pain in nation’s butt

by LeonelSouthern Posted on May 11, 2016

Keystone pipeline still a pain in nation’s butt

By on May 11, 2016Share

Will it ever end?

Six months after President Obama nixed the Keystone XL pipeline — a decision it took him seven years to reach — Keystone is back in the news.

The Hill reports that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — along with Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Texas — filed briefs this week in support of a lawsuit against the Obama administration. Pipeline company TransCanada filed the suit in federal court in January, arguing that Obama exceeded his constitutional authority when he denied a permit for Keystone. (Also in January, TransCanada filed a separate claim under NAFTA arguing that the U.S. should pay the company more than $15 billion to compensate it for “costs and damages that it has suffered” because of Obama’s decision. Boo hoo.)

In the newly filed briefs, the states argue that by rejecting the pipeline, the president dampened employment opportunities. These so-called “employment opportunities” were an oft-cited argument in favor of building the pipeline, but the State Department estimated that Keystone would have created as few as 20 permanent jobs.

Maybe the states could just open one Arby’s and call it even.

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Keystone pipeline still a pain in nation’s butt

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Rainbow satellite image shows Antarctica’s ice fleeing into the ocean

by SueStilwell9 Posted on May 11, 2016

Rainbow satellite image shows Antarctica’s ice fleeing into the ocean

By on May 11, 2016Share

Hello, Antarctica, you’re looking more colorful than ever! But wait — you’re ice, and colorful ice seems bad.

European Space Agency

It is. The colors on this satellite image from the European Space Agency (ESA) correspond to the speed at which Antarctica’s ice is shifting. The warmer the color, the faster that ice is breaking off and floating away. Red indicates movement of up to three feet per day, whereas blue indicates about an inch per day.

Thanks to the pull of our old friend gravity, ice sheets are constantly in motion. But warmer ice is weaker, and weaker ice moves faster. Take a look at the peninsula’s coasts, where higher temperatures have increased melt and sped up glacial movement, causing ice to slip into the sea.

Looks like we’ve got an Antarctica on the rocks. (That sounds like a pretty good drink, actually.)

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Rainbow satellite image shows Antarctica’s ice fleeing into the ocean

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BP takes Colorado to court and wins millions in tax breaks

by GiseleUrquhart Posted on May 11, 2016

BP takes Colorado to court and wins millions in tax breaks

By on May 11, 2016Share

It’s not too often one comes across a brand-new fossil fuel handout in 2016, but the Colorado Supreme Court just delivered the oil and gas industry a fat one. In a case pitting BP against the state’s Department of Revenue, the Court decided in late April to authorize some hefty tax deductions for the oil and gas giant. Taxpayers are now on the hook for up to $100 million in payments to BP and other companies this year — and since the ruling sets a precedent, they’ll take the hit in perpetuity.

As a company extracting natural resources in Colorado, BP must pay a severance tax to the state. However, natural gas extractors are allowed to deduct costs they can attribute to “transportation, manufacturing, and processing.” In the case, originally filed in 2005, BP argued that foregone dollars that the company “could have earned had they invested in other ventures rather than in building transportation and processing facilities” should count as these types of costs.

In other words, BP alleged that the money they theoretically could have earned, had they spent it elsewhere, represented a deductible cost to the company. And the Colorado Supreme Court agreed.

“It is absolutely a subsidy,” said Jessica Goad, communications director at Conservation Colorado. But Colorado is by no means alone in offering breaks to oil and gas companies. The United States spends some $20 billion in national fossil fuel production subsidies annually.

Colorado already has the lowest effective severance tax in the West. Under state law, oil and gas companies are able to count property taxes against severance tax payments.

In a last-ditch effort to disallow this kind of deduction under state law, Colorado House Democrats introduced a bill on Monday — but it died a procedural death on Tuesday night. Colorado’s legislative session ends on Wednesday. “It’s hard to write a brand new bill that solves a brand new problem in three days,” said Goad.

BP and others will continue to collect this windfall unless the legislature returns to the issue next session.

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BP takes Colorado to court and wins millions in tax breaks

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Liberals Are Picking On Conservatives Again and John Thune Wants Them to Stop It

by IsabellErnest Posted on May 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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The latest micro-flap for conservatives to feel victimized by is an allegation by one guy that the Facebook team that selects “trending” topics is staffed by a bunch of Ivy League 20-something liberals:

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

That was yesterday. Here is today:

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, led by Republican Sen. John Thune, has launched an inquiry in response to recent news that Facebook was reportedly suppressing conservative news items in the “trending” section of the site. The committee, which oversees Internet communication and media issues, drafted a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking about the curated section, telling the tech giant to “arrange for your staff including employees responsible for trending topics to brief committee staff on this issue.” Thune signed the letter, which also asks for “a list of all news stories removed from or injected into the Trending Topics section since January 2014.”

Here’s my question: Even if the allegations are true, in what way is this the business of the United States Senate? Facebook is a private entity and it can highlight any kind of news it wants. Ditto for the Drudge Report, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Mother Jones. Thune should take a closer look at the First Amendment before he goes any further.

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Liberals Are Picking On Conservatives Again and John Thune Wants Them to Stop It

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4 reasons Alberta’s wildfire is such a nightmare

by Karissa9237 Posted on May 10, 2016

4 reasons Alberta’s wildfire is such a nightmare

By on May 10, 2016Share

Officials say the massive wildfire raging across Canada’s oil capital of Alberta will take months to extinguish. The fire has already destroyed 24,000 buildings in Fort McMurray and forced nearly 90,000 people to flee their homes, but what’s making it so hard to control?

It seems the “perfect storm” trope is appropriate here. Or, as Slate’s Eric Holthaus wrote, there’s a “messy mix of factors” behind the fire:

Land temperature anomalies from NASA satellite data April 26 to May 3, 2016.

  1. Humans. High temperatures, little rain help fuel a longer and larger-than-life wildfire season, and each are symptoms of climate change. But it’s possible the fire itself was manmade: Though the exact cause is unknown, according to The Canadian Press, “the fire’s proximity to the city, as well as data that shows there were no lightning strikes in the area” led a fire researcher to believe that human activity set off the initial spark.
  2. El Niño. The region’s exceptionally dry winter and prolonged drought is linked to a major El Niño, which turned the forests around Fort McMurray into a “tinderbox.” Of course, climate change exacerbates El Niño extremes.
  3. The forest. Fort McMurray is best known for its proximity to tar sands oil fields (which drove up its population in the last decade, during the oil boom). It is also surrounded by boreal forests that are really, really dry after the last few years. How could that get even worse? Well, by the species of trees that populate the area — black and white spruce — which are especially prone to spreading fire, reports the The Globe & Mail.
  4. The wind. Winds of 37 miles per hour over almost doubled the size of the blaze last weekend.

If there’s one thing that didn’t cause this fire, it’s karma. Seriously, why would anyone gloat that an oil town in tar sands country is getting leveled by a climate-induced disaster? As The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert notes, “we’ve all contributed to the latest inferno” because we all guzzle oil, not to mention gas and coal.

The irony is while entire communities have been destroyed by the fire, oil sands and energy facilities have remained pretty much intact.

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4 reasons Alberta’s wildfire is such a nightmare

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Trump and his hairspray leave cloud of weird in coal country

by Ebony72Mlar Posted on May 9, 2016

Trump and his hairspray leave cloud of weird in coal country

By on May 9, 2016Share

Donald “Climate Change Is a Hoax” Trump told voters in West Virginia last week not to bother going to the polls for the state’s primary on Tuesday. “You don’t have to vote anymore, save your vote for the general election, forget this one, the primary’s done,” Trump told the crowd at a campaign stop in the state’s capital, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reports. That doesn’t sound like a comment from a politician — what kind of candidate tells people not to vote? — but of course, Trump isn’t one.

Still, it was not the most bizarre occurrence at the Charleston rally: That honor is reserved for the moment Trump donned a hard hat and did a little working-in-the-coal-mine dance.

The coal-loving crowd ate it right up. Many of them stood in the audience holding “Trump digs coal” signs.

“I’ll tell you what, folks, you’re amazing people,” Trump said. “The courage of the miners and the way the miners love what they do, they love what they do. If I win we’re going to bring those miners back.”

As the Gazette-Mail points out, this is quite a change of attitude toward the mining community. In 1990, Trump told Playboy, “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination — or whatever — to leave their mine. They don’t have it.”

Trump, naturally, blames the coal industry’s troubles on the EPA, an agency he plans to shut down. But the reality is that coal is suffering because natural gas is beating it in the marketplace and demand from China is declining — trends a President Trump would be unlikely to reverse.

The Charleston rally also included an off-the-wall, off-the-script hairspray rant, detailed by The Intercept:

“My hair look okay?” Trump asked the crowd. “Got a little spray — give me a little spray.”

“You know, you’re not allowed to use hairspray anymore because if affects the ozone. You know that, right?” he said to laughter. “I said, ‘You mean to tell me’ — ’cause you know hairspray’s not like it used to be, it used to be real good,” he added, to more laughs. “Give me a mirror. But no, in the old days, you put the hairspray on, it was good. Today, you put the hairspray on, it’s good for 12 minutes, right?”

“I said, ‘Wait a minute — so if I take hairspray and if I spray it in my apartment, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer?’” “‘Yes.’” I say, no way, folks. No way!”

“No way!” he added to cheers. “That’s like a lot of the rules and regulations you people have in the mines, right? It’s the same kind of stuff.”

Bemoaning the ineffectiveness of modern-day hairspray may seem like an odd way to relate to miners, but, hey, Trump’s shtick is clearly working for him.

After the rally, Trump said the crowd in Charleston numbered 28,000. The fire marshal’s count, says the Gazette-Mail, was 11,600.

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Trump and his hairspray leave cloud of weird in coal country

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