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New Study: EPA Inaction Causing an Increase in GHG Emissions

by Posted on September 25, 2014

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New Study: EPA Inaction Causing an Increase in GHG Emissions

Posted 25 September 2014 in

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As world leaders gather in New York for the UN Climate Summit this week, citizens around the globe are looking for leadership to combat climate change. Bringing the climate challenge into sharp relief, a new report from the Biotechnology Industry Organization explains that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are actually expected to increase as a result of EPA inaction on the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) – a turn of events that threatens to undermine President Obama’s clean energy legacy.

The report notes that:

Inaction on the 2014 RFS regulatory rule will lead to increased GHG emissions of 21 million metric tons CO2 equivalent.
The increased GHG emissions are equal to putting an additional 4.4 million cars on the road, or having current cars drive an additional 50 billion miles, or opening 5.5 new coal-fired power plants.
The “blend wall” should not be a consideration for setting the RFS, because the United States is using more transportation fuel in 2014 than previously projected.

Since 2005, the RFS has opened up the market to new fuel sources, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Advanced biofuels, like ethanol made from corn waste, emit 96% fewer greenhouse gases than gasoline and are an important part of our nation’s clean energy economy.

President Obama: Save the Renewable Fuel Standard and your clean energy legacy.

Read the rest of the report.

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New Study: EPA Inaction Causing an Increase in GHG Emissions

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Even Liberia’s Legislature Can’t Escape the Ravages of Ebola

by EdmundHinson Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

Of all the countries doing battle with Ebola, Liberia has been dealt the gravest blow. According to the World Health Organization, the impoverished West African nation now accounts for about half of all documented cases. And more than 1,200 residents are known or suspected to have died from the disease. In late August, the government quarantined an entire neighborhood for twelve days to prevent the outbreak from spreading.

Now the virus is forcing Liberian lawmakers to put their own work on hold.

More MoJo coverage of the Ebola crisis.


Why the World Health Organization Doesn’t Have Enough Funds to Fight Ebola


This Map Shows Why People Are Freaking Out About Ebola’s Arrival in Senegal


New Drugs and Vaccines Can’t Stop This Ebola Outbreak


5 Diseases That Are Scarier Than Ebola


We Are Making Ebola Outbreaks Worse by Cutting Down Forests

On Monday, Liberia’s legislature announced that the House of Representatives had canceled an “extraordinary sitting” to discuss the outbreak because its own chamber had been tainted by “a probable case of Ebola” and was being sprayed down with chlorine. The statement didn’t specify the source of the infection, but it noted that one of the chamber’s doormen had recently died after a “short illness.”

Liberia is ill-equipped to fight off the Ebola outbreak. Its entire national budget for 2013-2014 was $553 million, with only $11 million allotted for health care—about what Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are estimated to have spent on their Bel Air mansion in 2012.

Despite its meager resources, last month Liberia’s legislature allocated $20 million to battle the virus. But the nation had already burned through a quarter of that money by the first week of September. On Tuesday, United Nations officials pleaded with the international community to step up assistance to Liberia and neighboring countries, saying it will take $1 billion in aid to keep the number of cases in the region confined to the “tens of thousands.”

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Even Liberia’s Legislature Can’t Escape the Ravages of Ebola

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3 Ways the Baltimore Ravens Completely Screwed Up the Ray Rice Mess

by RalphIsabel Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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This afternoon, the Baltimore Ravens released running back Ray Rice in response to a video released by TMZ showing Rice knocking his then-fiancée (and current wife) Janay Palmer unconscious in an Atlantic City elevator in February. Rice has been the subject of intense scrutiny since the NFL suspended him for two games—earlier today, it suspended him indefinitely—but some had given the star running back the benefit of the doubt after he claimed he was simply defending himself. (Indeed, both Rice and Palmer were charged with assault following the incident.)

This new footage, though, clearly shows that wasn’t the case, and as outrage mounted today, the Ravens had little choice but to take decisive action against Rice. But we should hardly be praising the team. If anything, the Ravens have been defending Rice and victim-blaming from the very beginning. For example:

1. In May, the Ravens decided it’d be a good idea to sit Rice and Palmer in front of the media and have them publicly address the Atlantic City incident. The result was a complete PR disaster. Rice began by apologizing not to Palmer, but to senior Ravens management and coach John Harbaugh. Rice also chose his words poorly, defining failure as “not getting knocked down, but not getting back up.”

2. Even more tone-deaf than the press conference itself was how the Ravens presented it. The team had a staffer live-tweeting the spectacle, and the team’s official account sent out this unbelievable tweet, straight out of Victim-Blaming 101:

The tweet was deleted today.

3. After Rice’s two-game suspension was handed down in late July, people were outraged that occasional pot smokers got harsher punishments from the NFL. The Ravens PR machine thought it was the perfect time to start rehabilitating Rice’s image, releasing a glowing dispatch from his first major public appearance after the punishment. The article, posted on the team’s website, says Rice got a “standing ovation” from fans who “showed him a lot of love,” even though he had been under “national scrutiny.” After noting that he showed his “usual fun-loving side,” the piece observed with remarkable subtlety that “Rice jerseys sprinkled the crowd, worn by both males and females.”

The NFL has earned much-deserved flak for toughening its domestic-violence penalties only when the national criticism ramped up. Today’s move by the Ravens should be seen in a similar light: Cutting Rice was the right decision, but it’s clear the organization has never taken his offenses all that seriously. It took an even-worse leaked video to make the Ravens finally act.

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3 Ways the Baltimore Ravens Completely Screwed Up the Ray Rice Mess

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No, Obama’s Ukraine Policy Isn’t “Muddled”

by Mohamed43S Posted on September 3, 2014

Mother Jones

Time’s Michael Scherer writes today about President Obama’s foreign policy:

“NATO must send an unmistakable message in support of Ukraine,” Obama said. “Ukraine needs more than words.”

The rhetoric hit its marks. The message, however, was muddled.

As he finished his speaking engagements, several questions remained about how he intends to deal with the multiple foreign policy crises facing his administration. He again condemned Russian incursions into Ukraine, and promised new U.S. and European help to train, modernize and strengthen the Ukrainian military. But his “unmistakable message” of support stopped short of defining or ruling out any additional U.S. military role should Russian aggression continue.

While he pointedly promised to defend those countries in the region who are signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Obama offered no similar assurances to Ukraine, even as he highlighted that country’s voluntary contributions to NATO military efforts. Instead, Obama asked for a focus on a peace process that seems, for the moment, elusive.

“Since ultimately there’s no military solution to this crisis, we will continue to support Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s efforts to achieve peace because, like all independent nations, Ukraine must be free to decide its own destiny,” he said, minutes after the Kremlin denied reports it had reached a ceasefire with Ukraine. As NATO leaders gather to consider imposing additional economic sanctions on Russia, Obama hailed the success of the U.S.-led sanctions regime, which has hurt the Russian economy but without stopping additional Russian military aggression in Ukraine.

This was not the only issue on which he left gray areas.

For excellent reasons, foreign policy statements nearly always include gray areas, so it would hardly be news if that were the case here. But it’s not. In fact Obama’s statement was unusually straightforward. He said the same thing he’s been saying for months about Ukraine, and it’s really pretty clear:

We are committed to the defense of NATO signatories.
Ukraine is not part of NATO, which means we will not defend them militarily.
However, we will continue to seek a peaceful settlement; we will continue to provide military aid to Ukraine; and we will continue to ratchet up sanctions on Russia if they continue their aggression in eastern Ukraine.

You might not like this policy. And maybe it will change in the future. But for now it’s pretty straightforward and easy to understand. The closest Obama came to a gray area is the precise composition of the sanctions Russia faces, but obviously that depends on negotiations with European leaders. You’re not going to get a unilateral laundry list from Obama at a press conference.

The rest of Scherer’s piece is about ISIS, and it’s at least a little fairer to say that policy in this area is still fuzzy. But Obama has been pretty forthright about that, and also pretty clear that a lot depends on negotiations with allies and commitments from the Iraqi government. That’s going to take some time, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I should add that nobody on the planet—not even John McCain!—knows how to destroy ISIS. Everybody wants some kind of magic bullet that will put them out of business without committing any ground troops, but nobody knows what that is. So until one of the blowhard hawks comes up with an actual plan that might actually work, I’ll stick with Obama’s more cautious approach. I figure he’ll do something, but only when politics and military strategy align to provide a plausible chance of success. In the meantime, mindlessly demanding more bombs—the only action that most of Washington’s A-list apparently considers worthy of a commander-in-chief—is just stupid.

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No, Obama’s Ukraine Policy Isn’t “Muddled”

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If You Have Allergies or Asthma, Talk to Your Doctor About Cap and Trade

by Myrna Posted on August 29, 2014

The cost of limiting carbon emissions would pay for itself in human health benefits. LeventKonuk/Thinkstock The polar ice caps feel remote. The threat of orioles permanently leaving Baltimore for cooler climates might be a little more compelling. But researchers are learning that the most effective way around climate-policy ambivalence is to invoke imminent dangers to human health. “What’s killing me today?” with emphasis on killing and me and today. For one, when there is more carbon dioxide in the environment, plants produce more pollen, which is no good for allergies and asthma. Rutgers allergistLeonard Bielory recently warned that pollen counts are projected to double by 2040. Likewise, U.S. foresters recently calculated that trees seem to be averting around $6.8 billion in human health costs annually, largely due to mitigating effects of air pollution (even if they do produce pollen). And already the World Health Organization is warning that air pollution is responsible for one out of every eight human deaths, largely because combustion of fossil fuels results in invisible airborne particles that get lodged in our lungs and suspended in our blood. But is that worth the cost of implementing policies that limit carbon emissions? Some say yes. Yesterday researchers released findings that say an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions stands to pay for itself about 10 times over in near-term human medical benefits, specifically reductions in costs associated with respiratory diseases, like asthma, and premature death. A standard, economy-wide cap and trade program, the MIT-based research team found, would result in a net benefit of $125 billion in human health costs. The work is published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Read the rest at The Atlantic. Source –  If You Have Allergies or Asthma, Talk to Your Doctor About Cap and Trade ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: Accounting for the Expanding Carbon Shadow from Coal-Burning PlantsWorld’s top PR companies rule out working with climate deniersAccounting for the Expanding Carbon Shadow from Coal-Burning Plants ;

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If You Have Allergies or Asthma, Talk to Your Doctor About Cap and Trade

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Forget the climate — cap-and-trade could fix your allergies

by LandonOlmstead Posted on August 26, 2014

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Forget the climate — cap-and-trade could fix your allergies

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26 Aug 2014 6:07 PM

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Forget the climate — cap-and-trade could fix your allergies

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How can we finally get people to care about carbon emissions even a little bit? Focus on how they are directly threatening the amount of time on Earth that we can spend snacking and sexting (clinically proven to be the preferred activities of humans in the 21st century.) Or, as The Atlantic’s James Hamblin puts it:

Researchers are learning that the most effective way around climate-policy ambivalence is to invoke imminent dangers to human health. “What’s killing me today?” with emphasis on killing and me and today.

The answer to that question is — you guessed it! — carbon emissions. As Hamblin reports, for allergy and asthma sufferers, increased carbon dioxide levels boost pollen count. One allergist expects pollen levels to double by 2040. Also fun: Fossil fuel combustion creates minuscule particles that hang around in our lungs and bloodstreams and then kill us. Air pollution caused one in eight deaths in 2012, according to the World Health Organization.

OK – so carbon emissions are threatening lives. But what kind of effect would limiting those emissions have on the economy? Those cap-and-trade programs sure seem costly!

Well, a recent study by a team of MIT researchers, published in Nature Climate Change, found that a cap on carbon emissions would end up saving $125 billion in human health costs – which would cover the projected costs of widespread emissions capping tenfold. Furthermore:

[The study’s authors] write that any cost-benefit analysis of climate policy that omits the health effects of regional air pollution “greatly underestimate[s] benefits.”

“What’s killing me today?” is obviously a far more alarming question than “What’s going to create significant economic costs in the future?” When the answer to both is the same, that could – just a thought! – be cause for action. Something to ponder between snacks and Snapchats.

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If You Have Allergies or Asthma, Talk to Your Doctor About Cap and Trade

, The Atlantic.

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Forget the climate — cap-and-trade could fix your allergies

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Inside the AIDS Conference Reeling From Losses Aboard MH17

by LewisOMahony Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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As news broke last Thursday that Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine, it quickly became known that top-level AIDS researchers and activists were among the dead. Initially it was reported as 100 or more, but that number has now been debunked. At least six are confirmed dead, including the celebrated Dutch AIDS researcher Dr. Joep Lange, 59, who was en route to the world’s largest AIDS conference, held this year in Melbourne, Australia. All 298 people on board the flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur were killed.

Sunday night’s opening ceremony of the 20th International AIDS Conference, a biennial gathering run by the International Aids Society (IAS), was used to pay tribute to the six colleagues, who were honored as some of the brightest minds in the field of HIV research and activism.

“I think it was a touching opening ceremony,” Craig McClure, UNICEF’s top HIV/AIDS advocate told me. “I think for most of us, we’re sill in a state of shock.”

McClure was close friends with Dr. Lange, a former IAS president and world-renowned professor of medicine in Amsterdam, as well as Lange’s partner, Jacqueline van Tongeren, who worked at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development. Both were killed in the attack.

“Joep was really a giant in HIV research,” McClure said. Lange “changed the face of the epidemic”, he said, through his pioneering early work on combination antiretroviral trials that led to a crucial, and hard-won, advancement in the fight against AIDS. Antiretroviral therapy consists of the combination of at least three drugs that act in concert to suppress the HIV virus, slowing its replication in a patient’s body. Deployed in the mid-1990s, this treatment allowed an HIV diagnosis to be viewed as something other than an automatic death sentence.

“His contribution there in the early years was phenomenal,” a clearly emotional McClure told me when I reached him by phone as the conference’s formal schedule kicked off earlier today (Australian time). “But he was also very involved in the early years of work on prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and the role antiretrovirals play there, and pediatric treatment.”

“But he didn’t stop there,” McClure said. Lange would have continued to play a major role in going “that final mile” to end the epidemic in the next decade or so, he said, highlighting Lange’s energetic ability to work across varying fields of policy, medicine, and politics to hammer out responses to the spread of the disease, especially in poor countries.

McClure himself was appointed Executive Director of the International Aids Society in 2004 by Lange when he was president of the organization. “We were very, very close friends,” he said. Of Lange’s partner Jacqueline van Tongeren, McClure added, “They were very much in love. She was as dedicated to the HIV response as he was. It’s a very personal loss.”

Early reports that around 100 delegates were lost aboard MH17—repeated by President Obama on Friday—now appear to have been wrong. IAS has confirmed the names of six advocates who had been scheduled to attend the conference, but said that the number may increase with new information.

“The number that we have confirmed through our contacts with authorities in Australia, in Malaysia, and Dutch authorities as well, is six people,” said IAS president Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. “It may be a little bit more, but not the numbers that have been announced.”

In addition to Lange and van Tongeren, IAS confirmed the deaths of Pim de Kuijer, an AIDS campaigner for Stop Aids Now!; Martine de Schutter, a program manager at the same organization; Lucie van Mens, director of support at the Female Health Company; and Glenn Thomas, a former BBC journalist and spokesman for the World Health Organization.

McClure said it was important the conference go ahead to honor these six lost colleagues. “This community, we’ve lost 35 million people in the last 30 years to AIDS, so we know what it means to lose friends, to lose patients, to lose family members,” he said. “So this is not the first loss, and one of the things that has come together over the years is our collective sense of loss and our anger at the epidemic, and the loss of Joep and Jacqueline and the others on that plane just brings us together again and reminds us of why we’re doing this work, and gives us again that sense of solidarity.”

IAS president Barré-Sinoussi urged delegates to honor their memory by redoubling efforts to fight AIDS. “I strongly believe that all of us being here for the next week to discuss and learn is indeed what our colleagues who are no longer here with us would have wanted,” she said.

Ken Legins, who works with McClure as a senior advisor to UNICEF on HIV among children and adolescents, said Tuesday’s scheduled candle-light vigil in Melbourne’s Federation Square will incorporate memories of those lost aboard MH17, with memories of those taken by AIDS in the last two years. “We’re used to remembering people that die of AIDS, and now I’m going to remember people because they’re shot out of the sky. It just seems unfair but it’s a community that’s used to dealing with things that are unfair,” Legins said.

“With the same passion, caring, and love that we have always drawn upon to adjust to this epidemic, we will adjust to the challenges of managing the loss of the people on that flight,” he said. “I really think you’ll see recovery. But that’s not to say that people are not greatly affected by what happened, it’s just fucking unbelievable.”

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Inside the AIDS Conference Reeling From Losses Aboard MH17

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Supreme Court Now Playing Cute PR Games With Hobby Lobby Decision

by Stanton2314 Posted on July 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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In Monday’s Hobby Lobby ruling, Justice Samuel Alito struck down a government requirement that employer-provided health insurance cover access to contraceptives. Among other things, Alito wrote that any requirement must be the “least restrictive” means for the government to achieve its goals, and the health insurance mandate clearly wasn’t:

HHS itself has demonstrated that it has at its disposal an approach that is less restrictive than requiring employers to fund contraceptive methods that violate their religious beliefs. As we explained above, HHS has already established an accommodation for nonprofit organizations with religious objections. Under that accommodation, the organization can self-certify that it opposes providing coverage for particular contraceptive services. If the organization makes such a certification, the organization’s insurance issuer or third-party administrator must “expressly exclude contraceptive coverage from the group health insurance coverage provided in connection with the group health plan” and “provide separate payments for any contraceptive services required to be covered” without imposing “any cost-sharing requirements . . . on the eligible organization, the group health plan, or plan participants or beneficiaries.”

The obvious implication here is that the court approves of this compromise rule. That is, requiring self-certification is a reasonable means of accomplishing the government’s goal without requiring organizations to directly fund access to contraceptives. Today, however, the court pulled the rug out from under anyone who actually took them at their word:

In Thursday’s order, the court granted Wheaton College, an evangelical Protestant liberal arts school west of Chicago, a temporary injunction allowing it to continue to not comply with the compromise rule….College officials refused even to sign a government form noting their religious objection, saying that to do so would allow the school’s insurance carrier to provide the coverage on its own.

….The unsigned order prompted a sharply worded dissent from the court’s three female members, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.

“I disagree strongly with what the court has done,” Sotomayor wrote in a 16-page dissent. Noting that the court had praised the administration’s position on Monday but was allowing Wheaton to flout it on Thursday, she wrote, “those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.”

For the last few days, there’s been a broad argument about whether the Hobby Lobby ruling was a narrow one—as Alito himself insisted it was—or was merely an opening volley that opened the door to much broader rulings in the future. After Tuesday’s follow-up order—which expanded the original ruling to cover all contraceptives, not just those that the plaintiffs considered abortifacients—and today’s order—which rejected a compromise that the original ruling praised—it sure seems like this argument has been settled. This is just the opening volley. We can expect much more aggressive follow-ups from this court in the future.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s worth noting that quite aside from whether you agree with the Hobby Lobby decision, this is shameful behavior from the conservatives on the court. As near as I can tell, they’re now playing PR games worthy of a seasoned politico, deliberately releasing a seemingly narrow opinion in order to generate a certain kind of coverage, and then following it up later in the sure knowledge that its “revisions” won’t get nearly as much attention.

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Supreme Court Now Playing Cute PR Games With Hobby Lobby Decision

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We Just Experienced the Hottest May on Record

by AntwanHockensmi Posted on June 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Last month was the hottest May globally since records began in 1880, new figures show.

The record heat, combined with increasingly certain predictions of an El Niño, means experts are now speculating whether 2014 could become the hottest year on record.

Data published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday showed the average land and ocean surface temperature last month was 0.74C above the 20th century average of 14.8C, making it the highest on record.

Previously, the warmest May was 2010, followed by 2012, 1998 and 2013.

Worldwide, March-May was the second warmest ever by NOAA’s records—2010 holds the record for that period. April 2014 was also the hottest April ever by NOAA’s records.

There are two other main global temperature records in addition to NOAA’s, one kept by NASA and the other by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in the UK. The three are combined by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, which ranks 2010 as the warmest on record, and says that 13 of the 14 warmest years on record occurred in the 21st century.

Some forecasters are now predicting a 90 percent chance of El Niño—the weather phenomenon that can cause drought in Asia and Australia and lead to higher temperatures—happening this year, opening the possibility that 2014 will be the hottest year yet.

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., told the Guardian‘s environment network partner, ClimateCentral: “I agree that 2014 could well be the warmest on record, and/or 2015, depending on how things play out.”

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We Just Experienced the Hottest May on Record

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Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?

by RemonaNecaise Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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We’re hearing more and more about our pending global El Niño. NOAA now says the odds are 70 percent that we’ll have an El Niño event develop by this summer, and even higher after that. Other experts put the odds higher still. What’s more, the ocean and atmosphere have recently been behaving in a rather El Niño-like manner: Record-breaking Hurricane Amanda recently formed in the northeastern Pacific basin, which tends to be a very active hurricane region in El Niño years.

El Niño, if it develops, will upend everybody’s weather—but it may also have another impact: Driving up global temperatures. El Niño, after all, is a global weather phenomenon whose most notable characteristic is the presence of extra-warm surface water in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific ocean. This tends to unlock greater average global temperatures, notes Joseph Romm of Climate Progress.

Or as climate expert Michael Mann of Penn State helpfully explained by email: “Global temperature variations can be thought of as waves on a rising tide. The rising tide is global warming, which has raised global temperatures nearly a degree C (1.5 F) over the past century. The waves are the shorter-term natural fluctuations related to phenomena like El Niño (or its flip-side, La Niña), which warm (or cool) the globe, respectively, by 0.1-0.2C.”

Here’s a figure, from the World Meteorological Organization, showing global temperature anomalies since 1950, with years that began with an El Niño event already active highlighted in red. As you can see, these are some of the warmest years:

Global temperature anomalies from 1950-2013, with years beginning with El Niño conditions in red, and years beginning with La Niña conditions in blue. Note: some years may have had El Niño conditions develop mid-year, and so would not be colored. World Meteorological Organization.

What’s more, even before the recent news about the likely development of El Niño conditions, climate experts saw a chance for 2014 to be a record temperature year, simply because temperatures continue to tick upwards. “I would have said likely top 5 if asked at the beginning of this year,” says Gavin Schmidt, the newly named director of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the leading scientific agencies that tracks global temperatures and ranks them by year. “And the incipient/potential El Niño strengthens that.”

“We saw record global temperatures in 1998, 2005, and again in 2010 when ongoing global warming was positively reinforced by El Niño events,” adds Mann. “There is a good chance we will see a global temperature record this year or next if a substantial El Niño event takes hold.”

That’s bad news for climate skeptics. After all, by now we’ve all heard the claim that global warming has “stopped” or is “slowing down.”

As we’ve explained before, this misleading assertion relies heavily on the fact that the year 1998 was a very, very warm year, due to a strong El Niño event. If you cherry-pick the beginning of your time series, and start with a very hot year, you can make it look as though global temperatures aren’t rising so fast. But the reality is that, as the World Meteorological Organization notes, “each of the last three decades has been warmer than the previous one, culminating with 2001-2010 as the warmest decade on record.”

But as soon as the globe sets another temperature record, the global warming “slowdown” talking point becomes a lot less compelling. At that point, climate skeptics will have a few options: Either they can finally accept the overwhelming body of evidence that global warming is real, or they can come up with a new cherry-picked counter argument. Want to guess which one they’ll choose?

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Will 2014 Be the Hottest Year on Record?

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