Tag Archives: north

Donald Trump Has Lost Between $1 and $6 Billion Over His Business Career

by tfem31x Posted on September 2, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This post is about Donald Trump—sorry!—but the topic is something I’ve been a little curious about for a while: how much of Trump’s wealth is inherited vs. earned? The basics are easy: Trump’s father turned over control of the family real estate business to him in 1974. At the time, it was worth about $200 million. Trump would eventually inherit one-fifth of this, so his share of the company was worth about $40 million to start with.

Over at National Journal, Shirish Dáte estimates that if Trump had put that money into an index fund of S&P 500 stocks, it would be worth about $3 billion today. If he’d taken the $200 million he was reportedly worth in 1982 and done the same, he’d be worth $8 billion. So how does that compare to Trump’s actual net worth? Here’s Dáte:

“Every year, Trump shares a lot of information with us that helps us get to the figures we publish. But he also consistently pushes for a higher net worth—especially when it comes to the value of his personal brand,” Forbes reporter Erin Carlyle wrote this June, explaining the magazine’s assessment that Trump was worth $4.1 billion, less than half of his claimed net worth. A subsequent review by Bloomberg found he was worth $2.9 billion.

….Perhaps the most deeply researched account of his wealth is a decade old: the book TrumpNation, by former New York Times journalist Tim O’Brien, who found three sources close to Trump who estimated that he was worth between $150 million and $250 million….Trump wound up suing O’Brien for defamation, claiming his book had damaged his business. The suit was eventually dismissed, but not before Trump sat for a deposition in which he admitted that he routinely exaggerated the values of his properties.

….That 2007 deposition also revealed that in 2005, two separate banks had assessed Trump’s assets and liabilities before agreeing to lend him money. One, North Fork Bank, decided he was worth $1.2 billion, while Deutsche Bank found he was worth no more than $788 million.

So….at a guess, Trump is worth somewhere in the neighborhood $2 billion in 2015. Anything above that is based on valuations of his personal brand—which might be worth something in theory, but buys no jet fuel or campaign ads. In terms of actual, tangible net worth, he’s worth considerably less than the $3 billion (or $8 billion) he’d be worth if he’d just dumped his share of the family fortune into a Vanguard fund.

In other words, over the course of the past four decades, Trump’s business acumen has netted him somewhere between -$1 billion and -$6 billion. Ouch. Virtually every person in America can claim a better financial record than that.

Now, in fairness, Dáte’s numbers assume that all dividends are reinvested, which would mean Trump had no income to live on. Obviously he spends a fair amount every year, and if you take that into account the Vanguard strategy wouldn’t look as good. Plus, of course, there’s the fact that Dáte is a THIRD-RATE LOSER who is JEALOUS of Trump’s BRILLIANT CAREER and does anything he can to DEMEAN Trump’s SUCCESS. So take him with a grain of salt.

View original post here: 

Donald Trump Has Lost Between $1 and $6 Billion Over His Business Career

Posted in alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Donald Trump Has Lost Between $1 and $6 Billion Over His Business Career

Ohio Republicans Are Freaking Out About the Denali Name Change

by MakaylaAsher Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Sunday, President Barack Obama announced that the official name for the highest peak in North America, Alaska’s Mount McKinley, would formally be changed to its Athabascan name: Denali. This makes a lot of sense. The mountain was known as Denali long before a gold prospector dubbed it McKinley after reading a newspaper headline in 1896, and it has officially been known as “Denali” in Alaska for about a century, according to the state’s board for geographic names. The state and its Republican legislature have been asking Washington to call the mountain Denali for decades. And for decades, the major obstacle to getting this done has been Ohio, McKinley’s home state.

We need not spend much time discussing Ohio in this space, but suffice it to say that Ohioans are a very proud, if sometimes misinformed, people, and the birthplace of mediocre presidents won’t just take the marginalization of those mediocre presidents lying down. It will fight! To wit, the state’s congressional delegation has decided to show off that old Ohio fighting spirit by condemning the decision in sternly worded press releases and tweets. Here’s GOP Sen. Rob Portman:

No it wasn’t! McKinley was assassinated in 1901. The mountain was named McKinley in 1896, by a random gold prospector who had just returned from the Alaskan Range to find that the governor of Ohio had won the Republican presidential nomination. This is like naming the highest point in the continent after Mitt Romney. Is Portman suggesting that the fix was in as early as 1896? Did Czolgosz really act alone? Was Teddy Roosevelt in on it? My God! Congress did pass a law in 1917 formally recognizing McKinley as the mountain’s name, but that was really just paperwork.

Let’s see what else they’ve got:

The Spanish-American War hadn’t happened yet in 1896—William Randolph Hearst wouldn’t start that for another two years! Okay. Here’s GOP Rep. Bob Gibbs, all but engraving his sternly worded response on obsidian:

Job-killing name change!

I haven’t seen this much loathing directed at Denali since the last time I went on Yelp.

Read More: 

Ohio Republicans Are Freaking Out About the Denali Name Change

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ohio Republicans Are Freaking Out About the Denali Name Change

Oil Field Workers Keep Dying, and the Feds Want to Know Why

by RaleighCasner Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Journalism and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The oil boom in North Dakota and elsewhere has helped the US become the world’s leading energy provider and has captured the attention of Hollywood producers. It also has claimed the lives of dozens of oil field workers.

Now, that fallout from the boom is drawing renewed attention from government scientists.

In the largest study of its kind, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates the causes of workplace health problems, said it intends to examine the factors that cause injuries and accidents in the oil fields in an effort to improve safety.

Scientists from the institute will distribute questionnaires starting next year to 500 oil field workers in North Dakota, Texas and one other state that will be determined in the coming months.

“This is a high-hazard industry, and different states have different levels of maturity when it comes to safety and health for this workforce,” said Kyla Retzer, a Denver-based epidemiologist with the institute’s oil and gas program, which will be administering the study.

A recent investigation by Reveal showed how major oil companies avoid accountability for workers’ deaths in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota and Montana. On average, someone dies about every six weeks from an accident in the Bakken—at least 74 since 2006, according to the first comprehensive accounting of such deaths using data obtained from Canadian and US regulators. The number of deaths is likely higher because federal regulators don’t have a systematic way to record oil- and gas-related deaths, and the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t include certain fatalities.

In response to Reveal’s investigation, the federal agency pledged to step up enforcement against major oil companies and scrutinize speed bonuses in the Bakken, which some critics fear undermine safety.

As part of the new study, workers will be asked the hours they work and whether they wear protective gear as well as whether employers typically provide written safety policies and make their employees aware of their right to stop a job when they spot a potential safety hazard. Truck drivers in the industry will be asked whether they are paid by the hour or the load and whether their employers require that they drive in bad weather. The institute is collecting comments from the public on the forthcoming survey through Sept. 8.

Scientists plan to ask energy companies for permission to invite workers at man camps, which house laborers; trucking centers and other facilities to participate in the survey. The results of the study, which will be finished by early 2017, will be published in peer-reviewed health and safety journals. In addition, scientists intend to share their findings with federal OSHA officials and make specific recommendations on potential improvements at safety or oil and gas industry conferences.

“Sometimes, health and safety is not a top priority,” Retzer said. “We haven’t had a lot of opportunities to talk to workers directly. We want to better understand what their concerns are and how we can address them.”

Kari Cutting, vice president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, dismissed the institute’s focus on hazards in the oil fields.

“I do not have any facts that would lead me to the conclusion that there are major concerns,” said Cutting, whose council represents more than 550 companies in the oil and gas industry. “I think North Dakota is very much in line with other states as far as putting safety as priority one. Gathering that kind of (survey) information will go a long way to pointing out the fact that the industry has a robust safety culture.”

Visit link: 

Oil Field Workers Keep Dying, and the Feds Want to Know Why

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Oil Field Workers Keep Dying, and the Feds Want to Know Why

Lifting the crude oil export ban would be terrible for the climate

by JanisBurrell Posted on August 21, 2015

Lifting the crude oil export ban would be terrible for the climate

By on 21 Aug 2015commentsShare

Since 1975, the U.S. has restricted the export of crude oil in the name of energy security, and somehow that dirty protectionism even managed to make it through the Reagan era. But perhaps no longer. Republicans in Congress are pushing to allow oil companies to export crude to overseas refineries, and they could put the issue to a vote as soon as next month.

Ending the crude oil export ban would represent one of the largest tweaks in U.S. energy policy in decades, and, from an environmental perspective, not a positive one.

On Friday, the Center for American Progress (CAP) released an analysis pleading for congressional consideration of the broader risks at play, especially as they relate to the environment. The authors argue that the policy change would lead to more oil drilling in the U.S., resulting in an increase in annual carbon and methane emissions, the loss of open lands and wildlife habitats, and risks related to production and transportation like increased prevalence of crude oil train derailment and air quality problems for those living near drilling operations. This is to say nothing of the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground if we’re to fight off climate change.

Why export in the first place? Aside from the fact that it means oil companies get a larger (more competitive) refinery market, it’s a function of our crusty pals supply and demand. In 2009, U.S. crude oil production started to grow for the first time in decades, and continues to do so today. Most of that growth comes from “tight oil” — the kind you can get at by fracking — and most of that tight oil comes from North Dakota and Texas:

Energy Information Administration

A growing crude oil sector means there’s an increase in supply, which is sometimes grounds to consider exporting surplus to clean up any inefficiencies in the market. But something else tends to happen when you open up a market: Foreign demand increases. This increase means that domestic production of crude oil will have to bump up accordingly (at a faster rate than it’s already growing) to keep up with foreign buyers. As the authors of the CAP analysis write, this makes for a lot more oil wells:

According to data from IHS CERA’s study that was provided to CAP, oil companies would drill an average of 26,385 new oil wells in the United States every year between 2016 and 2030 if the crude oil export ban is lifted, or approximately 7,600 more wells on average per year than if the ban remains in place.

… If these development patterns continue, IHS CERA’s forecasts of new drilling activity suggest that increased oil exports would alone result in the loss of as much as 2,054 square miles of land between 2016 and 2030, or an area larger than the state of Delaware. This means the United States would lose approximately 137 square miles of land to oil infrastructure per year, or an area larger than Arches National Park in Utah, simply to feed foreign demand for U.S. crude oil.

Writing as someone who has gotten lost in Arches National Park, that’s a lot of land. Aside from the environmental reasons to stick with the status quo, the CAP authors make an economic case, too:

[M]any oil refiners argue that the U.S. refinery sector is capable of absorbing any new supply, making it unnecessary to lift export restrictions to balance the market. The AFL-CIO has expressed concern that lifting the export ban would scuttle plans to invest in and expand U.S. refining infrastructure. The United Steelworkers union has communicated similar concerns to Congress. According to a recent study by the Energy Information Administration, or EIA, allowing more crude oil exports could result in $8.7 billion less investment in U.S. refining capacity over the next 10 years.

Put that all together and the argument for lifting the ban falters. “A hasty decision to outsource U.S. refinery capacity might boost oil company profits, but it would also carry a high environmental price tag and create uncertainty for consumers,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, a senior fellow at CAP and an author of the analysis, in a statement. It’s a price tag we can’t afford.

Source:

The Environmental Impacts of Exporting More American Crude Oil

, Center for American Progress.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

A Grist Special Series

Oceans 15


This surfer is committed to saving sharks — even though he lost his leg to one of themMike Coots lost his leg in a shark attack. Then he joined the group Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation, and started fighting to save SHARKS from US.


This scuba diver wants everyone — black, white, or brown — to feel at home in the oceanKramer Wimberley knows what it’s like to feel unwelcome in the water. As a dive instructor and ocean-lover, he tries to make sure no one else does.


This chef built her reputation on seafood. How’s she feeling about the ocean now?Seattle chef Renee Erickson weighs in on the world’s changing waters, and how they might change her menu.


How do you study an underwater volcano? Build an underwater laboratoryJohn Delaney is taking the internet underwater, and bringing the deep ocean to the public.


Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

Get Grist in your inbox

Advertisement

See the original post:  

Lifting the crude oil export ban would be terrible for the climate

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lifting the crude oil export ban would be terrible for the climate

The Pentagon Just Realized It Gave Too Much Military Equipment To The Ferguson Police

by FerminDresdner Posted on August 12, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As new clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri revive concerns about the growing use of military-type gear by local cops, the Pentagon has ordered Ferguson to return two Humvees that came straight off the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan.

But it’s not because of the way Ferguson police have responded to the demonstrators, government officials say—it’s a paperwork issue.

The Guardian, which broke the story, reports that the government is repossessing the vehicles because Missouri’s state coordinator for the Pentagon’s controversial 1033 program gave Ferguson four Humvees when it was only authorized to give two.

Established in the 1990’s, the 1033 program has stocked local police arsenals with $5.6 billion in combat equipment leftover from two foreign wars. Protests in Ferguson over the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, thrust the program into the spotlight last summer after officers responded to the demonstrators with a militarized show of force, including mine resistant vehicles, combat-style assault rifles, and gas masks.

At protests to mark the one-year anniversary of Brown’s killing, the police show of force has been only a little less aggressive.

Civil liberties advocates have called for curtailing or ending the program, and for cutting off other, larger funding streams that help local cops buy combat equipment, as a way to strengthen the line between police and soldiers. But the Pentagon’s move to take away two war-ready Humvees is does not demilitarize Ferguson’s police force. Ferguson acquired four Humvees through the 1033 program; the Pentagon is only forcing the return of two vehicles. And the Pentagon is not suspending or expelling the city of Ferguson from the 1033 program, the Guardian reports.

What’s more, officers are streaming into the community from law enforcement agencies all over St. Louis County, bringing with them their own departments’ combat gear.

The Obama administration has announced several changes to the controversial 1033 program since the chaos of last year. Civil rights advocates hope that a new White House requirement—for police to receive community approval before acquiring an armored tactical vehicle—will stanch the flow of some of the most intimidating vehicles. Mine resistant, ambush protected trucks, for example, are routinely made available through the program.

But the changes do not apply to weapons, equipment, and vehicles that are already in police armories across the country. And as Radley Balko, the top reporter covering police militarization today, noted in the Washington Post last year, very little of Ferguson’s military-type vehicles, assault weapons, and protective gear actually came from the 1033 program:

Most of the militarization today happens outside the 1033 Program. As the Heritage Foundation reported last year, few of the weapons we saw in those iconic images coming out of Ferguson were obtained through 1033. That program created the thirst for militarization, but police agencies can now quench that thirst elsewhere. Since 2003, for example, the Department of Homeland Security has been giving grants to police departments around the country to purchase new military-grade gear. That program now dwarfs the 1033 Program. It has also given rise to a cottage industry of companies that build gear in exchange for those DHS checks.

Communities that decide on their own to get rid of 1033 program equipment often have a lot of trouble doing so. The Pentagon technically has a process for returning unwanted equipment. But in reality, as I reported last year, police departments across the country have found that process doesn’t always work.

Online law enforcement message boards brim with complaints that the Pentagon refuses to take back unwanted guns and vehicles—like this one, about a pair of M14 rifles that have survived attempts by two sheriffs to get rid of them.

“The federal government is just not interested in getting this stuff back,” says Davis Trimmer, a lieutenant with the Hillsborough, North Carolina, police department. Local law enforcement officials and Pentagon liaisons interviewed by Mother Jones all agree that the Defense Department always prefers to keep working equipment in circulation over warehousing it. Trimmer has twice requested permission to return three M14 rifles that are too heavy for practical use. But the North Carolina point person for the Pentagon insists that Hillsborough can’t get rid of the firearms until another police department volunteers to take them. Police in Woodfin, North Carolina, are facing the same problem as they try to return the town’s grenade launcher.

Ultimately, police and sheriffs have found, the easiest way to offload their combat gear is to transfer it to another local law enforcement agency—an option that obviously troubles local officials who wish to get rid of the gear on principal.

In fact, the Pentagon has already said that the two extra Ferguson Humvees may go to another police department in Missouri. And they could end up with one of the many departments sending officers and equipment to scene of these protests—meaning these very same vehicles could roam the streets of Ferguson once again.

This article:

The Pentagon Just Realized It Gave Too Much Military Equipment To The Ferguson Police

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Pentagon Just Realized It Gave Too Much Military Equipment To The Ferguson Police

Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People

by AzucenaLander0 Posted on July 30, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In April, several days after North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him, the usual cable-news transmogrification of victim into superpredator ran into problems. The dash cam showed Scott being pulled over while traveling at a nerdy rate of speed, using his left turn signal to pull into a parking lot and having an amiable conversation with Slager until he realized he’d probably get popped for nonpayment of child support. At which point he bolted out of the car and hobbled off. Slager then shot him. Why didn’t the cop just jog up and grab him? Calling what the obese 50-year-old Scott was doing “running” really stretches the bounds of literary license.

But maybe the question to ask is: Why did Scott run? The answer came when the New York Times revealed Scott to be a man of modest means trapped in an exhausting hamster wheel: He would get a low-paying job, make some child support payments, fall behind on them, get fined, miss a payment, get jailed for a few weeks, lose that job due to absence, and then start over at a lower-paying job. From all apparent evidence, he was a decent schlub trying to make things work in a system engineered to make his life miserable and recast his best efforts as criminal behavior.

More MoJo coverage on policing:


Video Shows Arrest of Sandra Bland Prior to Her Death in Texas Jail


How Cleveland Police May Have Botched a 911 Call Just Before Killing Tamir Rice


Native Americans Get Shot By Cops at an Astonishing Rate


Here Are 13 Killings by Police Captured on Video in the Past Year


The Walter Scott Shooting Video Shows Why Police Accounts Are Hard to Trust


Itâ&#128;&#153;s Been 6 Months Since Tamir Rice Died, and the Cop Who Killed Him Still Hasn’t Been Questioned


Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?


The Cop Who Choked Eric Garner to Death Won’t Pay a Dime


A Mentally Ill Woman’s “Sudden Death” at the Hands of Cleveland Police

Recently, two more deaths of African Americans that have blown up in the media follow a pattern similar to Scott’s. Sandra Bland in Texas and Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati were each stopped for minor traffic infractions (failing to use turn signal, missing front license plate), followed by immediate escalation by the officer into rage, and then an official story that is obviously contradicted by the video (that the officer tried to “de-escalate” the tension with Bland; that the officer was dragged by DuBose’s car). In both cases, the perpetrator of a minor traffic offense died.

When incidents of police violence come to light, the usual defense is that we should not tarnish all the good cops just because of “a few bad apples.” No one can argue with that. But what is usually implied in that phrase is that the “bad” officers’ intentions are malevolent—that they are morally corrupt and racist. And that may be true, but they are also bad in the job-performance sense. These men are crummy cops, sometimes profoundly so. Slager had a record for gratuitously using his Taser. Timothy Leohmann, who leapt from his car and instantly killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, had been deemed “weepy” and unable to “emotionally function” by a supervisor at his previous PD job, who added: “I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies.” Ferguson’s Darren Wilson was also fired from his previous job—actually, the entire police force of Jennings, Missouri, was disbanded for being awful.

Continue Reading »

Read original article: 

Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People

Posted in Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People

Watch What It’s Like to Live Amidst Industrial Hog Farms

by BetteKershaw Posted on July 29, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As I showed recently, the United States is emerging as the world’s hog farm—the country where massive foreign meat companies like Brazil’s JBS and China’s WH Group (formerly Shuanghui) alight when they want to take advantage of rising global demand for pork. (If JBS’s recent deal to buy Cargill’s US hog operations goes through, JBS and WH Group together will slaughter 45 percent of hogs grown in the United States.)

A recent piece by Lily Kuo in Quartz (companion video above) documents what our status as the world’s source of cheap pork means for the people who live in industrial-hog country. It focuses on Duplin County in eastern North Carolina, which houses “about 530 hog operations with capacity for over 2 million pigs ….one of the highest concentrations of large, tightly-controlled indoor hog operations, also known as CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) in the world.” In Duplin, “hogs outnumber humans almost 32 to 1,” Kuo reports. And that means living amid lots and lots of pig shit—the county’s hog facilities generate twice the annual waste of the entire population of New York City.

As I’ve shown before, the hog industry doesn’t build wealth in the communities where it operates—the opposite, in fact. “Almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, making Duplin County one of the poorest counties in North Carolina,” Kuo writes. “It is also disproportionately black and Hispanic compared to the rest of the state.”

More:  

Watch What It’s Like to Live Amidst Industrial Hog Farms

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch What It’s Like to Live Amidst Industrial Hog Farms

Obama’s power plant rules could cut your electricity bill

by FeliciaStill Posted on July 24, 2015

Obama’s power plant rules could cut your electricity bill

By on 24 Jul 2015commentsShare

What will happen to your electric bill after the Obama administration starts limiting CO2 emissions from power plants? It could come down quite a bit, a new report finds — if your state leaders are smart.

Republican lawmakers have claimed that residential electricity bills will rise by up to $200 annually under Obama’s Clean Power Plan, based on a study put out in May 2014 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While the study has been widely discredited, opponents of Obama’s plan continue to cite it.

Now, a report by consulting firm Synapse Energy Economics suggests that state compliance with the plan — paired with investment in renewables and energy efficiency initiatives — could actually lead to big reductions in what Americans pay for power. The key? Early action.

Two of the report’s authors lay out the logic in EcoWatch:

By investing in high levels of clean energy and energy efficiency, every state can see significant savings with a total of $40 billion saved nationwide in 2030 … However, consumers will typically see the largest savings in states that build renewable resources early. Under the Clean Power Plan, these first movers will profit by becoming net exporters of electricity to states that are slower to respond. States that keep operating coal plants well into the future will tend to become importers after those plants retire, and energy consumers in those states will miss out on substantial benefits of clean energy and energy efficiency.

According to the report, if two-thirds of consumers participate in energy efficiency programs, electricity bills could be $35 cheaper per month than a “business-as-usual” scenario would predict for 2030. In fact, bills would be cheaper than they were in 2012, write the authors. The firm projects that the $35 savings would leave household electric bills at an average of $91 per month in 2030. (The EPA also expects household electric bills to drop under the plan, but the agency estimates they would be $8 lower per month.)

Keep in mind, though, that Synapse’s $35 figure is averaged across the U.S. as a whole. Since electricity prices already vary widely around the country, and the Clean Power Plan will be implemented differently by different states, the projected savings are subject to some massive variance. North Dakota residents, for example, could save $94 per month if their leaders are aggressive with renewable energy and efficiency.

But so far six governors have said they won’t draw up strategies for implementing the Clean Power Plan — so don’t expect early action from their states. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote an op-ed in March calling for states to defy the Obama administration over the power plant rules.

While the Synapse report wasn’t funded by a group with an obvious financial interest in the outcome (like, say, the corporate-backed Chamber of Commerce), it was supported by a group with a viewpoint: the Energy Foundation, “a partnership of major foundations with a mission to promote the transition to a sustainable energy future.” Which is something we can get behind.

Source:
A Clean Energy Future: Why It Pays to Get There First

, EcoWatch.

Climate rule to bring lower energy bills, report says

, The Hill.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work. A Grist Special Series

Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next

Get Grist in your inbox

View original:  

Obama’s power plant rules could cut your electricity bill

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, sustainable energy, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama’s power plant rules could cut your electricity bill

Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

by MinnieCourtice Posted on July 13, 2015

Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

By on 13 Jul 2015commentsShare

To most people, hopping on a plane from Hawaii to the East Coast and getting in way earlier than expected is just a stroke of luck — little more than an excuse for a self-congratulatory coffee from one of the 200 Starbucks lining the airport terminal. But to Hannah Barkley, a PhD student in oceanography at MIT who is about to put you to shame, it’s a scientific phenomenon worth investigating.

Barkley enjoyed one of these lucky trips on her way back from doing field work in Hawaii not too long ago. Back on campus, she asked Kris Karnauskas, a researcher in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Geology and Geophysics Department, why her flight was so off, and the two subsequently got lost in decades worth of wind speed data and flight times between Honolulu and major West Coast cities. Long story short: There’s a strong link between those lucky flights and fluctuations in climate.

In a paper published today in Nature Climate Change, Karnauskas, Barkley, and two of their colleagues report that about 88 percent of the variability in domestic flight times is linked to variability in atmospheric circulation. This is largely thanks to a combination of El Niño events — those annoyingly irregular bouts of high Pacific Ocean temperatures — and the so-called Arctic Oscillations — winds that circulate the North Pole, periodically confining the cold arctic air to the pole or letting it escape down to the mid-latitudes.

As the climate changes, both of these atmospheric factors will likely change, meaning the average length of a flight could change, too — which, in turn, could have a real impact on climate change. (Phew, that’s a lotta “change.”) Here’re the numbers from a press release:

According to the study, there are approximately 30,000 commercial flights per day in the U.S. If the total round–trip flying time changed by an average of one minute, the amount of time commercial jets would spend in the air would change by approximately 300,000 hours per year. This translates to approximately 1 billion gallons of jet fuel, which is approximately $3 billion in fuel cost, and 10 billion kilograms of CO2 emitted, per year.

“We already know that as you add CO2 to the atmosphere and the global mean temperature rises, the wind circulation changes as well—and in less obvious ways,” says Karnauskas.

Depending on whether that change is an increase or a decrease in average flight times, this could be good news or bad news for the rest of us, climactically speaking. Karnauskas eventually wants to look at all global flights, according to the press release. In the mean time, perhaps domestic airlines should take note:

In reflecting on the findings of this project and the simple question Barkley had initially asked, Karnauskas says one of the biggest surprises is that the airline industry doesn’t seem to be aware of the flight time patterns beyond the day-to-day.

“The airline industry keeps a close eye on the day-to-day weather patterns, but they don’t seem to be addressing cycles occurring over a year or longer,” he says. “They never say, ‘Dear customer, there’s an El Niño brewing, so we’ve lengthened your estimated flight duration by 30 minutes.’ I’ve never seen that.”

Maybe you haven’t noticed, Karnauskas, but we humans aren’t the best at planning for — or even acknowledging — climate variability.

Source:
Air Travel and Climate: A Potential New Feedback?

, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work. A Grist Special Series

Meat: What’s smart, what’s right, what’s next

Get Grist in your inbox

See original article here: 

Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Plant !t, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Your plane’s ETA is wrong, and it’s the climate’s fault

It’s Not Just the Flags. All These Public Schools Are Named After Notorious Racists

by OuidaCarrigan Posted on July 1, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The Confederate flag is hardly the only symbol of the South’s racist history that has yet to go away. Indeed, public schools nationwide still bear the names of long-dead champions of a white-supremacist state.

The good news is that several of those schools have reconsidered their loaded names. Last year, the Nathan B. Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Florida, became Westside High School. Forrest was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. And Aycock Hall at Duke University, named for former North Carolina Gov. Charles Aycock, an avowed white supremacist, became East Residence Hall. This move prompted East Carolina University eight months later to rename its own Aycock Hall as Heritage Hall. Last May, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill changed Saunders Hall to Carolina Hall to shed its association with Klan leader William Saunders.

Last week, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, who formerly served as San Antonio’s mayor, posted a message on his personal Facebook page calling on that city’s North East Independent School District to rename Robert E. Lee High School. “There are other, more appropriate individuals to honor and spotlight as role models for our young people,” Castro wrote.

But scores of American schools still bear the monikers of Confederate brass. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, we put together a map of some of those schools below. It includes more than 60 schools—mostly in the South, not surprisingly—and there are undoubtedly others, between private schools and public schools, that have changed names recently in the opposite direction. And then there are the schools located on streets named for Confederate figures, such as the ironically named Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School on Mosby Street in Richmond, Virginia. John Singleton Mosby, a.k.a. “the Gray Ghost,” was a Confederate colonel who reportedly wrote to a colleague, “I’ve always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about.…I’ve never heard of any other cause than slavery.

Source article:  

It’s Not Just the Flags. All These Public Schools Are Named After Notorious Racists

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It’s Not Just the Flags. All These Public Schools Are Named After Notorious Racists