Tag Archives: place

5 Products Made From Trees to Stop Buying Now

by MarcelMahmood Posted on May 13, 2017

The more products we consume that come from the world’s forests, the more trees that need to be cut down to meet the demands of a consumer-driven world. While new trees can certainly be planted to grow in their place, the rate at which we’re cutting down our trees exceeds the rate at which new trees can grow and replace the ones that were cut down.

According to The World Counts, only 10 percent of the world’s rainforests may be left by the year 2030. As a result, as many as 28,000 wildlife species may be extinct in the next 25 years due to deforestation.

It’s up to all of us to become more conscious of what we consume so that we don’t mistakenly support companies that contribute to deforestation. Here are just five types of products to consider scaling back on or avoiding altogether.

1. Paper products like books, stationery, envelopes, notepads,folders, notepads and printer paper.

If it’s made of paper, then it came from a tree. While it may be impossible to completely cut out paper products given that even product packaging is made from paper, there are at least some betteralternatives. More companies are now offering “tree free” alternatives to their paper products, such as products made from post-consumer waste (a.k.a. recycled paper). Other materials to look for in tree-free paper product alternatives include hemp, bamboo, kenaf, organic cotton and agri-pulp.

2. Food and beauty productsthat contain palm oil.

Asthemost efficient vegetable oil source, the profitability of palm oil has contributed to immense deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. You’ll need to check the ingredients on any food or cosmetic you buy to look for signs of palm oil. Check out this list of all the common ingredient names used to describe palm oil, including food and cosmetic brands known to use palm oil in their products.

3. Food products that containwood pulp.

In addition to being used to make paper products and textiles, wood pulp also goes by the name of cellulose, which is added to popular food products. It’s a cheap filler with no nutritional value that can typically be easily identified in the ingredients of any food product. You may want to have a look at these 15 food companies and a list of their products that contain cellulose so you’ll know to avoid them.

4. Furniture or other wood products made from over-harvested trees.

If you’ve got interior or exterior design on the mind, it can be tempting to look for products made of teak, walnut, mahogany and other over-harvested wood types.A more environmentally friendly approach would be to look for used furniture (such as from garage sales or antique shops) andtake advantage ofreclaimed wood in your woodworking projects (such as wood from demolished barns, wine barrels or shipping crates).

5. Chocolate and other cocoa products.

It’s a sad fact that cocoa farming has led to the vastdeforestation of forested areas in West Africa. On the bright side, 12 of the world’s largest cocoa manufacturers including Mars, Nestle and Ferrero have recently all agreed to come up with a plan by this November to stop cocoa farmers from having to cutdown so many trees. In the meantime, there are lots of places both online and offline that you can find ethically-sourced chocolate and cocoa products, which use cocoa that comes from outside West Africa and is almost always ethically grown.

Related Articles
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Could Microwaving Tea Be the Key to Greater Antioxidant Benefits?

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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5 Products Made From Trees to Stop Buying Now

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Urban vs. Rural Recovery From the Great Recession: Another Look

by KandyMais35749 Posted on April 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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Thomas Edsall writes that as we recovered from the Great Recession, big cities did pretty well but rural areas didn’t. “The fact that people living outside big cities were battered so acutely by the recession goes a long way toward explaining President Trump’s victory in the last election,” he says, which he illustrates with this chart:

I don’t think there’s much question that Edsall is right in general, but this particular chart seemed off somehow. It combines both population growth and employment rate in a confusing way, and it covers the whole country, so it doesn’t account for the way different states responded to the recession. I pondered for a while what I’d rather see, and decided to examine the unemployment rate in California counties. California has a good mix of big cities and rural counties, including a lot of farming counties that voted heavily for Trump, and every county benefited from identical state policies since they’re all in the same state. Here’s the chart, which compares unemployment at the peak of the last expansion to today:

There are four points I can make about this:

If you draw an overall trend line (light gray line), it turns out that that unemployment declined a bit more in smaller counties than in larger counties.
The big cities (purple) all fall into a very small cluster, showing declines between about -1 percent and 0. The smaller counties (orange) are scattered all over the place, from -3 percent all the way up to +4 percent.
The average drop in unemployment is roughly the same in both big cities and the rest of the state. Big cities (-0.39 percent) did marginally better than everyone else (-0.25 percent).
The main farming counties have done poorly. Their unemployment rate has increased by +1.0 percent.

This is just one state, and I’m not trying to pretend that this data offers anything conclusive. What’s more, Edsall has some other facts and figures to back up his point. Still, I’ll toss out two guesses:

Big cities may have recovered better than rural areas, but only modestly. The difference isn’t huge, and by itself doesn’t really explain why Trump won.
The large effect Edsall sees may be due to differing state responses to the recession. I suspect that rural red states shot themselves in the foot by adopting conservative policies (cut taxes, slash spending) that hurt their recovery. This may have been an especially big factor in the 2008-09 recession, since the federal government did less than usual to cushion the blow.

I don’t know if anyone with real econometric chops has tested my second guess. If I find anything, I’ll follow up.

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Urban vs. Rural Recovery From the Great Recession: Another Look

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26 Words of a Trump Tweet, Fully Dissected

by JanisMir82 Posted on December 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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This is hardly earthshaking, I know, but take a look at this Donald Trump tweet from Monday evening:

No hope! But put the narcissism and egotism aside.1 In a mere 26 words Trump has managed to mislead his audience in three separate ways without quite lying about anything. First, no matter how many times the press pushes this meme, the world was not especially gloomy before he won. Nor was America. Consumer sentiment has been steadily rising since 2011 and personal satisfaction is near its all-time high:

Second, the stock market is indeed up, but it’s been rising steadily for President Obama’s entire term. That “nearly 10 percent” uptick—actually 6 percent since Election Day, and mostly driven by big banks, but who’s counting?—is that teensy blip at the very end of the chart:

Finally, retail sales have been rising steadily during Obama’s entire term, and so has holiday spending. The National Retail Federation forecasts that holiday spending will increase 3.6 percent this year (1.9 percent in real terms), and will finish up not at “over a trillion dollars,” but at $655 billion:

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. But it’s still a fascinating little insight into how Trump gaslights his followers and the nation into believing that he’s the savior of the country. Most people have no idea about any of these numbers, so he can say anything he wants and he’s likely to be believed. Nor will fact-checking change this even a tiny bit. Politics has always been about exaggeration and cherry picking, but we’re now living through an era in which the truth flatly doesn’t matter. At this point, I’m pretty sure Trump’s followers would believe him if he said that Obama had tried to give Alaska back to the Russians but he managed to stop it. Then the press would stroke its collective chin and write careful pieces about how Trump was really talking about some rocky shoal that nobody cared about but had been officially disputed since Seward bought the place. Nuance, you see.

1Though I suppose we shouldn’t. What kind of person writes stuff like this?

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26 Words of a Trump Tweet, Fully Dissected

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A bundle of food-related measures passed on Tuesday.

by MadgeEltham Posted on November 9, 2016

Protestors with forest advocacy group Stand erected a giant, cardinal-red coffee cup in Seattle’s Westlake Center on Thursday, pressuring Starbucks to make its holiday cups recyclable.

Starbucks has struggled with reinventing its disposable products for years. It aimed to make all of its cups reusable or recyclable by 2015, but that hasn’t happened yet.

The night before, Westlake Center had been the site of a large protest against Donald Trump, who promises to gut existing measures to fight climate change.

So why focus on cups? Stand’s U.S. Campaign Director Ross Hammond told us: “Where we can make change is forcing companies to do things they should be doing but don’t want to do.”

Patrons of the original Starbucks store in Pike Place Market — a few blocks from the protest — had a different take:

“I don’t know how we can go from the [Trump] protests last night … to protesting red cups,” said Steph K., 28, of Los Angeles. We have a national identity crisis, she said, and “this is what we’re talking about?”

Starbucks told Grist that it is “committed to reducing the impact of waste generated in our stores,” and that its cups are recyclable in some places, like Seattle, already.

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A bundle of food-related measures passed on Tuesday.

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Calculating the Cosmos – Ian Stewart

by Myrna Posted on October 23, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Calculating the Cosmos
How Mathematics Unveils the Universe
Ian Stewart

Genre: Mathematics

Price: $18.99

Expected Publish Date: October 25, 2016

Publisher: Basic Books

Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC


Mathematics has informed our understanding of the cosmos on every scale: from the origin and motion of the Moon, to the intricacies of asteroids, comets, and Kuiper Belt objects. Math has taught us how interactions with Jupiter can fling asteroids toward Mars, and how a planet’s rings can spit out moons. In Calculating the Cosmos , Ian Stewart takes us on an astonishing journey—from the formation of the Earth and its Moon, to the planets and asteroids of the solar system, and from there out into the galaxy and the universe. He describes the architecture of space and time; dark matter and dark energy; how galaxies, stars, and planets form; why stars implode; how everything began; and how it’s all going to end. In his characteristically accessible and engaging style, Stewart uses math to explain our extraordinary universe and our place within it.

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Calculating the Cosmos – Ian Stewart

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The Olympics Should Be Permanently Hosted In….Los Angeles

by RichelleButterf Posted on August 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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Grecophile Paul Glastris thinks we should stop moving the Olympics around and hold them permanently in Athens:

Part the reason for Greece’s debt crisis—and the continuing Depression-level economic hardships Greece is suffering under the jackboot of its European lenders, especially Germany—is the billions it borrowed to host the 2004 Olympics….Shifting the games every four years is also a colossal waste of human capital, as Christina Larson noted in the Washington Monthly back in 2004.

….In her article, Larson argued for going back to the original idea: pick a permanent place to host the Olympics. Greece, she said, was the obvious choice. (The first modern Olympics, in 1896, were in fact held in Athens, but in 1900, the founder of the modern games, Pierre de Coubertin, moved them in his native Paris, inaugurating the tradition of travelling games.)

Larson is right: there is an obvious choice. But it’s not Athens, which, as Paul concedes, couldn’t truly afford the games in 2004 and didn’t exactly electrify the world with its hosting. The truly obvious choice is the city that has twice demonstrated it can host the Olympics both competently and on a reasonable budget: Los Angeles. It’s a multicultural kind of place. It’s midway between Asia and Europe. It has great weather. It’s both a sports mecca and a show biz mecca. It has lots of great venues already available. And Angelenos are proud of their ability to put on a great Olympics spectacle without breaking the bank.

So LA it is. Now then: what city should permanently host the Winter Olympics?

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The Olympics Should Be Permanently Hosted In….Los Angeles

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 July 2016

by PenneyMcfall Posted on July 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Let’s give Hopper the spotlight again. She deserves two weeks in a row, doesn’t she? Here she is in one of her favorite places: plonked down against my arm when I’m lying on the couch. I do this frequently, using my tablet to peruse the web for news in order to minimize my time at the desk. The less time at the desk, the better my arm and wrist feel.

Needless to say, perusing the web on my tablet is a lot easier when there’s not a cat plonked on my stomach, but them’s the breaks. She usually doesn’t stay very long. Unfortunately, when she leaves, Hilbert often takes her place. Blogging is a tough life.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 July 2016

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Did the Stagflation of the 70s Ever Exist In the First Place?

by ErickaFontenot Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a conversation with Dean Baker recently, I learned something interesting. This won’t be new to anyone deeply familiar with inflation statistics, but it was new to me. Maybe it will be new to you too.

The general subject is the stagflation of the 70s, which ushered in supply-side economics and the Reagan era. More specifically, the issue is the measurement of inflation during part of this era. Housing costs are incorporated into the CPI by measuring rents, but prior to 1982 it was done by directly measuring the price of buying a house. In an era when interest rates were steady, this didn’t matter much, but when interest rates went crazy in the mid-70s it made a big difference, overstating inflation by about two percentage points. If you correct for this, and also take a look at exactly when the worst periods of stagflation occurred, you get this:

If you correct the inflation figures and account for the two oil shocks of the 70s, the period from 1970-85 looks remarkably steady. Inflation and GDP growth are both running at about 4 percent for nearly the entire time.

I don’t have the chops to relitigate this, but the question it raises is: Did stagflation ever even exist? Was there anything seriously wrong with the economy of the 70s other than a pair of oil shocks we had no control over? Would the economy have recovered normally after the second oil shock even if Paul Volcker hadn’t created a huge recession? Feel free to litigate in comments.

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Did the Stagflation of the 70s Ever Exist In the First Place?

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Marco Rubio Lashes Out Against Call For Religious Toleration

by GlindaHaight Posted on February 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Obama, during a speech today at a Baltimore mosque:

If we’re serious about freedom of religion — and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country — we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths. And when any religious group is targeted, we all have a responsibility to speak up. And we have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.

Marco Rubio, commenting a couple of hours later on Obama’s speech:

Always pitting people against each other. Always. Look at today: he gave a speech at a mosque. Oh, you know, basically implying that America is discriminating against Muslims….It’s this constant pitting people against each other that I can’t stand.

There you have it. Ask Christians to reject the politics of bigotry, and you’re pitting people against each other. And Marco Rubio, for one, will have no part of that.

UPDATE: Revised to include exact quote from Rubio.

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Marco Rubio Lashes Out Against Call For Religious Toleration

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Yet Another Look at BernieCare

by SteviePillinger Posted on February 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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I hope you’ll pardon a bit of real-time navel-gazing. It won’t take long. A couple of weeks ago Bernie Sanders released an outline of his single-payer health plan, and I pronounced it “pretty good.” A week later, Emory’s Kenneth Thorpe took a detailed look at Sanders’ plan and basically concluded that it was fantasy. Why the huge difference between us?

It has little to do with the details of the Sanders plan. We’re both looking primarily at the financing. Here was my reasoning:

Total health care outlays in the United States come to about $3 trillion.
The federal government already spends $1 trillion.
Sanders would spend $1.4 trillion more. That comes to $2.4 trillion, which means Sanders is figuring his plan will save about $600 billion, or 20 percent of total outlays.
I doubt that. I’ll buy the idea that a single-payer plan can cut costs, but not that much. I might find $1.7 or $1.8 trillion in extra revenue credible, which means that Sanders is probably lowballing by $300 billion or so—which, by the standards of most campaign promises, is actually not that bad. I’d be delighted if a single Republican were that honest about the revenue effects of whatever tax plan they’re hawking at the moment.

But Thorpe says Sanders is off by a whopping $1.1 trillion. Yikes! Where does that come from? There are several places where Thorpe suggests the Sanders plan will cost more than Sanders thinks, but the main difference is shown in the table on the right. Thorpe, it turns out, thinks the Sanders plan would cost an additional $1.9 trillion in the first year. So he and I are roughly on the same page.

But I stopped there. I basically assumed that both costs and revenues would increase each year at about the same rate, and that was that. Thorpe, however, figures costs will increase substantially each year but tax revenues will increase hardly at all. So that means an increasing gap between revenue and spending, which averages out to $1.1 trillion over ten years.

Other details aside, then, this is the big difference. If Sanders’ new taxes fall further and further behind each year as health care costs rise, then he’s got a big funding gap that he would have to make up with higher tax rates. But if he can keep cost growth down to about the same level as his tax revenue growth, his plan is in decent shape.

So which is it? Beats me. This is the kind of thing where the devil really is in the details, and even a small difference in assumptions can add up to a lot over ten years. Still, I was curious to see why Thorpe and I seemed to diverge so strongly, and this is it. Take it for what it’s worth.

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Yet Another Look at BernieCare

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