Tag Archives: politicians

Beto O’Rourke is running for president. Now about that environmental record …

by CiaraPikegestwd Posted on March 14, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

After a handful of trips across the country, a few shaky Facebook live streams, 10 angst-ridden, stream-of-consciousness Medium posts, at least one trip to the dentist, and a Vanity Fair cover about wanting to be “in it,” Beto O’Rourke is now … in it.

Last night, the former congressman from Texas confirmed to an El Paso TV station that he is running for the White House, and then made the official announcement on Twitter this morning.

In the launch video, O’Rourke called voters “the last great hope of Earth” and said that we’re in a “moment of maximum peril and maximum potential.”

“Perhaps, most importantly of all, because our very existence depends on it, we can unleash the ingenuity and creativity of millions of Americans who want to ensure that we squarely confront the challenge of climate change before it’s too late,” he said.

So what does his presidential bid mean for the environment and tackling climate change? It’s complicated. First, the good news: O’Rourke is no climate denier. Even in deep-red Texas, O’Rourke, who had no name recognition nationally until he launched a grassroots, seat-of-your-pants campaign against Senator Ted Cruz in 2017, was clear from the get-go that climate change is real, that it’s happening now and humans are driving it. O’Rourke also sports a lifetime score of 95 from the League of Conservation Voters.

In his unsuccessful campaign to unseat Cruz, climate change was rarely part of the discussion. Over two debates, Cruz and O’Rourke clashed over energy and climate just once. In response to a question about ExxonMobil acknowledging climate change, O’Rourke said, “Three hundred years after the Enlightenment, we should be able to listen to the scientists.”

In Texas, campaigns are awash in money from Big Oil, and his campaign was no different. Last year, he was taken off a list of politicians who’d signed a “No Fossil Fuel Money” pledge, after he received $430,000 from people working in the oil and gas industry. Three-fourths of the donations were larger than $200 and 29 of them were from oil and gas executives.

When he traveled to parts of Texas dependant on fossil fuel extraction during his Senate campaign, O’Rourke promoted fracking as fundamental to national security. In the heart of the Permian Basin, for instance, he told the Midland Reporter-Telegram that he didn’t want the United States to be dependent on other countries for energy but that fracking should be done “in a responsible, safe way that does not jeopardize the environment.” At a debate with Cruz, he called the decision between renewables and fossil fuels “a false choice.”

Environmental advocates have also been troubled by a handful of votes in favor of the oil and gas industry during his time in Congress. O’Rourke was one of few Democrats in the House to vote to lift the ban on oil exports in 2015. And he backed a Republican bill to fast-track natural gas exports and opposed a bill to limit offshore drilling.

Maybe this campaign will be different. There’s the prominent mention of climate change in the launch video, along with his support for the Green New Deal. In an interview with BuzzFeed last month, O’Rourke said that it’s “the best proposal that I’ve seen to ensure that this planet does not warm another 2 degrees C, after which we may lose the ability to live in places like El Paso.”

Read More – 

Beto O’Rourke is running for president. Now about that environmental record …

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Beto O’Rourke is running for president. Now about that environmental record …

If You’re Reading About "The Circle" on Facebook, It’s Already Too Late

by RoxanneDelarosa Posted on April 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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

The Circle, published in 2013 by the prolific novelist (and McSweeney‘s founder) Dave Eggers, is a dire prophecy for our wireless world. Protagonist Mae, fresh from college, goes to work for the eponymous social network, a hyperdriven mashup of Facebook and Google that won’t stop until it knows everything about everything—and everyone. The story is an unsettling glimpse of a generation trained, like Pavlovian Instagrammers, to crave the rush of a post going viral, and it leaves you asking: How much privacy should we hand over to Silicon Valley? How much knowledge is too much? The movie adaptation, starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, was directed and co-written (with Eggers) by James Ponsoldt—a deft choice given The End of the Tour, his brilliant 2015 film about David Foster Wallace. As an author with a rosier view of technology, I jumped at the chance to chat with Eggers and Ponsoldt about their dystopian vision.

Mother Jones: How did the film project come together?

James Ponsoldt: I’ve been a fan of Dave’s writing since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I loved The Circle and I was terrified by it. My wife and I were on the verge of having our first child, and I recognized that we were both able to have childhoods that were undocumented, for the most part, and I didn’t know if my son would have that luxury. I felt really sad.

MJ: And what made James the right person for the job?

Dave Eggers: The book is about a young woman, and James has always done an amazing job with young actors and actresses. He’s not much older than Mae and has grown up swimming in the same waters she’s in, more so than me—so much of what I was doing was extrapolating what would come, as opposed to describing what is. That combination of expertise in technology and then a deeply humanistic point of view made him seem like a perfect fit.

MJ: Dave, when did you start thinking about the implications of how social media is altering our lives?

DE: For me, it didn’t have much to do with social media, actually.

MJ: Oh!

DE: You always write one book and people read a different one. Laughs. I’ve been in San Francisco since 1992. I saw the Bay Area tech world reinvent itself many times, but it wasn’t until maybe 2007, 2008, 2009 when the concentration of wealth and power started to concern me. Also the surveillance aspect—the inability, increasingly, for us to opt out of being watched. I feel pretty strongly that a citizen under surveillance is not free. We have passively acquiesced to this, to the point where it’s almost a foregone conclusion. I think that was the impetus.

MJ: I’m not even sure we acquiesced so much as happily participated. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes that we were worried about Orwell’s version of surveillance, but it was Aldous Huxley’s that won out because it’s our own desires that have enslaved us. James, tell me about your evolving relationship with technology.

JP: It’s complicated. I was raised by ex-hippies, but I grew up worshipping a television set. I am skeptical of a lot of things, but I was on Myspace and Friendster, and I have a fascination with the new. My wife and I met on Facebook! We were on opposite sides of America, and a mutual love of Vic Chesnutt, a musician from Athens, Georgia, began a conversation. So I certainly can see everything it has to offer—and what we give up in that exchange.

DE: I always say to the college kids I talk to that I have no objection to people posting pictures and sharing stories online. That’s the beauty of the internet. But I try to talk to them about who owns that data and what are they consenting to, and that’s a conversation people don’t want to get into. A funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We’ve turned into this surveillance society and become a race of spies, where we track our kids and we track our spouses and we track our friends. I think very soon there will be an obsolescence of trust, because it’s much easier to access a person’s location than it is to ask—or to trust. When I ask 50 college kids who is conflicted about their technology use, 49 hands go up.

MJ: One of the things that struck me reading The Circle was the nagging burden that the need to participate in the public sphere places on Mae.

DE: Yeah, for 12 years I had a high school class called the Best American Nonrequired Reading. Not all the kids had smartphones, but there was a sense of near-constant social obligation, with fairly high costs for being absent for an hour. In the absence of the “like” there is the implicit “don’t like,” and that becomes a source of angst and want. I saw it happen to friends in their 40s who would say those very sad words—”Like me on Facebook”—to me. I thought, “Something really radical has changed when these dignified, educated people are saying those four sad words.” There are so many phenomenal things about these platforms, and the unintended consequences are either very tragic or very funny. I was trying to balance those two. Twitter has been instrumental in getting the word out about human rights issues or protests, and then you also have it as this horrific platform—a would-be despot in Trump uses it to spout falsities to 26 million people. So you’re giving a very dangerous megaphone to a cretin.

MJ: I’m curious how Silicon Valley folks responded to your book.

DE: I’d say half the people I’ve known here over the last 25 years are in tech, or have been. They found it terrifying in all the right ways.

MJ: What were the challenges in turning this book into a movie?

DE: When you adapt a book, you really have to cut it to the essence. James did an amazing job of finding that essential through-story and then picking and choosing parts to buttress that—because books are just big, baggy monsters full of speculation and a thousand notions. A film is a much more poetic medium.

MJ: James?

JP: For me it was just trying to bottle the way Dave’s book made me feel. I found it insanely funny, darkly funny. I see myself deeply in the protagonist—her occasional pettiness and anxiety and her desire to not want to die anonymous. She’s really complicated and I wanted to do justice to that.

MJ: Will the ending be as bleak as the one in the book?

DE: Laughs. It does not turn the ending around and make it happy—but it’s different. Adaptations are a corollary, but without being dutiful.

MJ: So are we doomed to a future in which corporations increasingly manipulate our behavior and control how we express ourselves?

DE: Well, the bigger and stronger monopolies get, the harder they are to break. That said, none of these companies have been around for very long. James mentioned Friendster and Myspace—it always makes me laugh hearing those words—and then AOL, AltaVista, and on and on. If we look at the history…

JP: Dave’s right. And then, there’s really not a precedent for an industry whose value system is to help facilitate dialogue about how to think, how to find information and share it. Most of my friends in tech are progressive and idealistic, but they’re also making a lot of money. And it’s hard to stop making a lot of money. Companies don’t break themselves up voluntarily.

DE: You also have to look at companies like Facebook and LinkedIn. Their stock price only rises with increased usage and increased frequency of usage. So that creates a very unnatural and I think tyrannical pursuit of what I called in the book “completion.” Which is, these companies are infinitely more valuable the more they can study a complete group of users, without exception. I feel like that is going to be the next dangerous spot we find ourselves in—what companies will do to get all of this demographic, all of that region, all of this occupation, and you see them coming at you 19 different ways. At a certain point growth will stop, and that’s what’s curious. At 2 billion Facebook users, will it be allowed to stop? One of the themes in the movie is making voting mandatory through The Circle, which is very plausible under a privatization scenario. Politicians say, “Well, you have to vote, and you have to vote through The Circle, so you have to have a Circle account.” Not that Trump wants everyone to vote, but you get the idea.

MJ: James, for the past year or so you’ve used Twitter, somewhat presciently, as a platform to tell outrageous lies and crazy stories. Will you be tweeting about The Circle?

JP: Laughs. In some probably indirect way, sure. I’m living aspects of the movie, I guess.

MJ: What about you, Dave? Any chance we’ll ever see you on Twitter?

DE: Awkward silence, then laughter. I don’t think so. It’s really an old-dog-new-tricks kind of thing for me. McSweeney’s tweets. They can do it. I just don’t—no, no plans to.

More:  

If You’re Reading About "The Circle" on Facebook, It’s Already Too Late

Posted in alo, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, Jason, LG, ONA, Oster, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If You’re Reading About "The Circle" on Facebook, It’s Already Too Late

McCabegate Is the Latest Scandal That Will Totally Destroy Hillary Clinton

by stephenagee641 Posted on October 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Today in the category of…oh, forget it. I don’t have the heart for snark. It’s just so goddamn tiresome. The Wall Street Journal headline on the right describes the latest pseudo-scandal in Hillaryland, and it’s obviously intended to make you think there’s yet more fishiness in the Clinton family. In a nutshell, here’s the story:

In early 2015, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe recruited Dr. Jill McCabe to run for state Senate.
Various organizations under McAuliffe’s control donated lots of money to her campaign.
She lost.
Several months later, McCabe’s husband was promoted to deputy director of the FBI. Because of that promotion, he “helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.” This was presumably in addition to the hundreds of other things that a deputy director has oversight responsibility for.

There’s literally nothing here. Not “nothing substantial.” Not “nothing that other politicians don’t do.” Literally nothing. There’s not a single bit of this that’s illegal, unethical, or even the tiniest bit wrong. It’s totally above board and perfectly kosher. And even if there were anything wrong, McAuliffe would have needed a time machine to know it.

Honest to God, I’m so tired of this stuff I could scream. I’ve been joking about it lately by appending gate to every dumb little non-scandal that’s tossed in Hillary’s direction, and I guess I’ll keep doing that. But our illustrious press corps needs to pull its collective head out of its ass. If you’ve got real evidence of Hillary being engaged in something fishy, go to town. I won’t complain. But if all you’ve got is a thrice-removed, physics-challenged gewgaw that proves nothing except that you know how to play Six Degrees of Hillary Clinton,1 then give it a rest. It just makes you look like those monomaniacs with thousands of clippings glued to their wall and spider webs of string tying them all together.

Just stop it.

1Here’s how it works:

  1. Make a list of the entire chain of command that had some oversight over the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server. That’s going to be at least half a dozen people.
  2. Make a list of all their close family and friends. Now you’re up to a hundred people.
  3. Look for a connection between any of those people and the Clintons. Since FBI headquarters is located in Washington DC and the Clintons famously have thousands and thousands of friends, you will find a connection. I guarantee it.
  4. Write a story about it.

See how easy this is? But please don’t try it at home. This is a game for trained professionals only.

Read more:  

McCabegate Is the Latest Scandal That Will Totally Destroy Hillary Clinton

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on McCabegate Is the Latest Scandal That Will Totally Destroy Hillary Clinton

Before Republicans Ran from Donald Trump, They Let Him Win the Nomination

by SolomonToosey Posted on October 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Republican politicians began abandoning Donald Trump in droves Saturday, just hours after an unearthed video from 2005 revealed the Republican nominee crudely bragging about what amounted to sexual assault. After months of demurring while Trump’s offensive comments piled up, dozens of leaders are finally walking away from their party’s nominee. Now, many say they can’t support him. Some are even urging the party to deploy some sort of last-minute maneuver to remove Trump from the GOP ticket.

But as the party engages in a collective weekend meltdown, it’s important to remember that Trump’s nomination wasn’t inevitable. There’s no doubt that Trump tapped into an anti-establishment, grassroots fervor that helped him win the nomination. But there was a months-long slog, during which time Republicans—many of whom are now denouncing him—could have have put up a fight against him. When Trump effectively clinched the nomination by winning the Indiana primary on May 3, the Republican establishment had barely lifted a finger to deprive Trump of the nomination.

Even before Friday’s revelations by The Washington Post, anti-Trump Republican strategists were expressing dismay at how easy it had become for Trump to take over the entire party.

“I was extremely surprised by how easy people rolled over for him,” Tim Miller, a Republican in the Never-Trump camp, told Mother Jones in an interview shortly before the 2005 video was released Friday afternoon. “I never could have imagined, even as late as last year, that the establishment of the Republican Party in Washington would just completely roll over for Trump and there would be minimal objection to his nomination. It just blew me away that there were not mass resignations or very visible objections.”

Miller, an alum of the Republican National Committee, worked as Jeb Bush’s communications director. When Bush dropped out of the primary after the South Carolina primary on February 20, Miller went to work for Our Principles PAC, an anti-Trump effort funded largely by billionaires Joe and Marlene Ricketts.

“There was still plenty of time to slow down Trump and to stop Trump,” Miller recalled. He said the super PAC tried to get Republicans leaders in upcoming primary states to object to Trump, from governors, congressmen, and senators to retired politicians and conservative pundits. His group had almost no luck.

“You know, this was doable,” Miller said. “And because a lot of politicians did not want to take the risk, because a lot of them did not feel like Ted Cruz was that much better—which was BS—nobody stuck their neck out there. And I, you know, I can’t believe it.”

Not only did Republican officials refuse to stick their necks out, neither did more than a handful of Republican donors. “The Ricketts, to their credit, stuck their neck out on this and created this PAC,” Miller said. “After Jeb dropped out there were a few other donors who got on board. But it was a small number of donors who were carrying a big load on this for sure.”

In the end, even that wasn’t enough. The Ricketts later switched sides and gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Trump.

Of course, Trump hasn’t changed in the months since he was just one of 17 candidates. Back then, he was still a birther with a history of misogynist behavior (which he continued during the campaign), spreading fear towards immigrants and Muslims. And yet, as Miller put it, the establishment just “rolled over for him.”

Original source:  

Before Republicans Ran from Donald Trump, They Let Him Win the Nomination

Posted in Bragg, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Before Republicans Ran from Donald Trump, They Let Him Win the Nomination

California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

by ChangFbvhjauy Posted on September 16, 2016

Best coast

California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

By and on Sep 16, 2016Share

California took a giant step to fight climate change last week, passing ambitious legislation to slash its greenhouse gas emissions. Hailed as world-leading, historic, and other excited adjectives, it sets a goal of cutting emissions below 1990 levels by 2030.

If you know about this triple-dog-dare legislation that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law, you’ve probably heard that it’s not only going to continue California’s tradition of feeling smug about how green it is compared to other states, it’s going to usher in a glorious new era of renewable energy innovation. Maybe you also heard that it’s further proof that Californians are crazy, because the state is just too big, hot, and suburban to meet such a formidable challenge.

The thing is, both of these statements may be true. The state had already passed a slightly less ambitious carbon-cutting plan in 2006, targeting 1990 levels by 2020. And California hasn’t hit that goal yet.

Is the state’s climate policy working? Are the new goals realistic? Can it survive political attacks? Is this whole thing equitable? So many important questions! We have answers. Here’s a short primer to help you understand the state’s carbon-cutting plans.

California’s efforts haven’t lowered the state’s emissions any faster than overall U.S. emissions.

Brown effectively doubled down on the state’s climate targets. That raises the question: Is the previous plan working?

“We’re always hearing from California that we are leaders in carbon-dioxide emissions and that we’ve  been leading the U.S. as a whole in policy making,” says James Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University. “But as a whole, our greenhouse gas emissions have been lowering at about the same rate as the U.S.”

Sweeney made the following graph to show what he’s talking about. It’s good for comparing rates of change, and bad for comparing absolute numbers. At first glance, it looks like California is — absurdly — emitting more than the U.S. as a whole. The point here is that, since 2000, the emissions of both have risen and fallen at about the same rate.

James Sweeney

California’s relative averageness is a problem for champions of its climate policy. Are the state’s rules having any effect?

They are, but here’s the thing: Other states have managed deep cuts in emissions by switching from coal to natural gas plants. California was already pretty green to start. It had low-carbon hydroelectricity, cleaner industry, and mild weather, so most of the low-hanging fruit was already picked.

It didn’t help California when drought sapped its hydropower capacity, or when one of the state’s last two nuclear power plants shut down in 2012. “A bunch of dirty power plants were turned on to replace that,” said Greg Dalton, founder of the California climate symposium Climate One.

California Air Resources Board

Dalton also points out that the climate plan, though a decade old, took a while to overcome early obstacles. In the beginning it was slowed by lawsuits, and regulators had to produce reams of documents to figure out how to count carbon. The state only recently phased in its regulations for gasoline, and it’s just starting to look at agriculture.

So the state could pick up momentum and make bigger reductions. Still, California has now said it will drive down emissions much faster than the rest of the United States, and it’s never done that before.

Are California’s goals realistic?

California had already committed to bringing its emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. It’s looking like the state will hit that target, said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. But the new law sets a much more ambitious goal. Can it get there?

It’s possible in theory, according to a model created by Jeffrey Greenblatt of Berkeley Lab. As you can see in this graph from that model, California could dip under its 2030 emission target if it follows the green path:

Greenblatt

But at the moment, it seems California is following the blue path. To get to that “S3” green curve, the state would need to keep its last remaining nuclear power plant running until 2045 (it’s scheduled to shut down in 2025), build 3 gigawatts of batteries and power storage (way more than currently planned), replace 30 percent of gasoline with low-carbon biofuel (still unclear if that will be viable), and do a bunch of other equally tough stuff. If California makes this happen, the state will look very different 15 years from now.

California’s climate plan is popular

Some 70 percent of Californians support the state’s climate regulations. And the rules are not only popular, they are durable. At the depths of the last recession, voters handily defeated a measure that would have suspended regulations until California’s unemployment numbers improved.

The laws don’t appear to have hindered the economy. When California was phasing in transportation fuel rules that increased gas prices about 10 cents a gallon, critics predicted chaos breaking loose at gas stations. “But no one really noticed,” Dalton said.

The policy has survived multiple legal attacks. There’s currently another lawsuit pending against it, and the legislature will need to pass more supporting laws, but if past is prologue California is likely to push past these challenges.

The new law attempts to address concern on the left about the climate plan

Some Democrats and social justice advocates point out that the climate policy could hurt poor people and minorities because it has raised the price of electricity and fuel while allowing pollution to continue in black and Latino neighborhoods.

California’s policy relies on a cap-and-trade system that requires  businesses to clean up their dirty facilities, or keep polluting and buy climate credits to spur emissions reductions elsewhere. That’s the economically efficient way, but it doesn’t help the people who live downwind of a polluting plant and inhale lungfuls of particulate matter often released with carbon. Brentin Mock at City Lab highlights the body of research, including the graph below, that suggests plants are more likely to keep polluting if they are surrounded by non-white people.

Cushing et al.

To address this environmental-justice problem, the legislature has introduced a new provision that directs regulators to crack down on specific polluters. Until now, regulators had just laid out the rules and then stepped back to let the market sort out a response. This new law would allow the government to step in and say, “This facility in this particular neighborhood has to install better filters.”

Of course, concern is not limited to the left. Politicians on both sides of the aisle understand that if regulations become too onerous they would push industry out of the state. Environmentalists share this concern: The policy won’t be a success if it just shifts greenhouse gas production out of state.

Some countries have lowered their emissions by moving manufacturing abroad — the industry and the pollution winds up in poorer countries. That’s a pretty terrible way to reduce carbon because it hurts the economy, dumps pollution on people with fewer resources (though they also get some jobs), and does nothing to slow climate change.

So California is trying to push industries, but not so hard that industries pack up their factories and move them to China. There’s a vigorous ongoing debate over how much the regulations are affecting the economy and the environment (a version of this debate is planned for Sept. 20).

So far California’s manufacturing sector has remained fairly steady as the climate policies have phased in. And the example of Sweden, shows that you can successfully slash emissions while industry grows.

All in all, California’s new climate law is cause for both alarm and celebration. The reality is that California, and the rest of the world, need to clear a bar this high. It’s just what needs to be done. It’s only “ambitious” because the goal is so far out of reach.

A goal this ambitious shows just how far away American cities actually are from cutting carbon emissions to a level that will protect them in the long run. The good news is, now that California is trying to do this impossible-seeming thing, it just might figure it out.

ShareElection Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

Source: 

California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before

by AshelyTrvjb Posted on May 17, 2016

No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before

By on May 17, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

N.B. If this article sounds familiar, it should. This has been happening so frequently I just copied the post for March and updated it.

October. November. December. January. February. March. And now April.

For the sixth seventh month in a row, we’ve had a month that has broken the global high temperature record. And not just broken it, but shattered it, blasting through it like the previous record wasn’t even there.

No human alive has seen a month of

March

April like this before.

NASA GISS

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, March April 2016 was the hottest March April on record, going back 136 years. It was a staggering 1.28 degrees C 1.11 degrees C above average across the planet.* The previous March April record, from 2010, was 0.92 degrees C 0.87 degrees C above average. This year took a huge jump over that.

Welcome to the new normal, and our new world.

As you can see from the map above, much of this incredible heat spike is located in the extreme northern latitudes. That is not good; it’s this region that’s most fragile to heating. Temperatures soaring to 7 degrees C or more above normal means more ice melting, a longer melting season, loss of thinner ice, loss of longer-term ice, and most alarmingly the dumping of billions of tons of fresh water into the saltier ocean which can and will disrupt the Earth’s ability to move that heat around.

What’s going on? El Niño might be the obvious culprit, but in fact it’s only contributing a small amount of overall warming to the globe, probably around 0.1 degrees C or so. That’s not nearly enough to account for this. It’s almost certain that even without El Niño, we’d be experiencing record heat.

Most likely there is a confluence of events going on to produce this huge spike in temperature — latent heat in the Pacific waters, wind patterns distributing it, and more.

The Japanese Meteorological Agency measured similar temperatures as GISS (though it uses a different baseline for the average). Note the trend. See a “pause”? I don’t.

Japanese Meteorological Agency

And underlying it all, stoking the fire, is us. Humans. Climate scientists — experts who have devoted their lives to studying and understanding how this all works — agree to an extraordinary degree that humans are responsible for the heating of our planet.

That’s why we’re seeing so many records lately; El Niño might produce a spike, but that spike is sitting on top of an upward trend, the physical manifestation of human induced global warming, driven mostly by our dumping 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year.

Until our politicians recognize that this is a threat, and a very serious one, things are unlikely to change much. And the way I see it, the only way to get our politicians to recognize that is to change the politicians we have in office.

That’s a new world we need, and one I sincerely hope we make happen.

*GISS uses the temperatures from 1951–1980 to calculate the average. The Japanese Meteorological Agency uses 1981–2010, which gives different anomaly numbers, but the trend remains the same. Realistically, the range GISS uses is better; by 1981 global warming was already causing average temperatures to rise.

Share

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

See more here: 

No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before

India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

by CandelaTonkin Posted on March 29, 2016

India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

By on 29 Mar 2016commentsShare

India has a grandiose vision for its 1.2 billion people to drive only electric vehicles by 2030. And that’s not even the most ambitious part — the government thinks it can do it without spending a dime.

“We are trying to make this program self-financing,” Power Minister Piyush Goyal said at a youth conference this week, according to The Times of India. “We don’t need one rupee of support from the government. We don’t need one rupee of investment from the people of India.”

Goyal noted that a small working group of politicians will meet in early April to hammer out the details of the goal, which could include a program to incentivize buying electric cars by making them zero-down investments. Later on, the money the car owners would have spent on gas could go to paying off the price of the vehicle, according to Goyal.

As far as number of cars owned per household, India ranks low on the list, with just 6 percent of households reporting they own a car. But that number is expected to grow exponentially as the economy expands.

It’s not the first time India has announced sweeping sustainability plans under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sometimes to mixed results. Last October, the world’s third biggest greenhouse gas polluter announced its new climate plan, promising to obtain 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources (primarily solar) by 2030. But earlier this year, the World Trade Organization ruled that provisions of Modi’s solar plan shut out international companies, particularly the U.S., from India’s burgeoning solar market. Most recently, the country levied a 4 percent “green” tax on new passenger vehicle sales, part of an effort to fight air pollution and traffic congestion.

India has no time to waste to tackle its pollution problem as its capital, New Delhi, already has worse air quality than Beijing.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

See the article here:  

India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on India floats ambitious goal: 100 percent electric cars

Bobby Jindal’s Disaster in Louisiana Shows Why You Shouldn’t Bet on Fossil Fuels

by MelodyWdnjv Posted on March 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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

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

The state of Louisiana has fallen on hard times, and its situation offers some hard lessons. First, don’t let a right-wing ideologue cut your budget to the bone. Second, don’t hang your whole economy on fossil fuel extraction.

The Washington Post reports on the state’s budget crisis:

Already, the state of Louisiana had gutted university spending and depleted its rainy-day funds. It had cut 30,000 employees and furloughed others. It had slashed the number of child services staffers…

And then, the state’s new governor, John Bel Edwards (D), came on TV and said the worst was yet to come. …

Despite all the cuts of the previous years, the nation’s second-poorest state still needed nearly $3 billion—almost $650 per person—just to maintain its regular services over the next 16 months. …

A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships. Select hospitals will close. Patients will lose funding for treatment of disabilities. Some reports of child abuse will go uninvestigated.

For eight years, under former Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Louisiana slashed taxes and played tricks to fill budget holes. Jindal claimed that the tax cuts he pushed through would promote miraculous economic growth and make up for the lost revenue. That didn’t work, of course, just as it didn’t work on a national level under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The Post writes:

Many of the state’s economic analysts say a structural budget deficit emerged and then grew under former governor Bobby Jindal, who, during his eight years in office, reduced the state’s revenue by offering tax breaks to the middle class and wealthy. He also created new subsidies aimed at luring and keeping businesses. Those policies, state data show, didn’t deliver the desired economic growth. This year, Louisiana has doled out $210 million more to corporations in the form of credits and subsidies than it has collected from them in taxes.

The current Republican presidential frontrunners are running on a similar program of massive tax cuts tilted towards the wealthy—which would likely lead to a similar budget crisis on a nationwide scale. (Jindal’s ill-fated presidential campaign had its own gigantic regressive tax cut proposal.)

When government budgets collapse, environmental protection takes a big hit. This is particularly worrying in Louisiana. The state is filled with severely climate-threatened low-lying regions such as the Bayou and New Orleans, and its coastline is disappearing under the rising sea, so it should be investing heavily in climate adaptation. The state’s poverty also intensifies its aching need for improved mass transit. Huge spending cuts at the federal or state level, never mind both, are putting the state’s populace at greater risk.

Louisiana’s budget problems also demonstrate that fossil fuel extraction may be less an economic boon than a massive liability. Louisiana, with its oil refineries and offshore rigs, has the third worst poverty rate in the nation—and that is sadly typical of fossil fuel–heavy states. West Virginia and Kentucky, for example, are among the top three states for coal production and among among the 10 poorest states overall. And these states ranked dismally on poverty metrics even when oil, gas, and coal were booming. Now that they’re not, things are even worse.

Politicians from all of these places, even Democrats, argue that fossil fuel production is a needed economic engine. But fossil fuel extraction is inherently temporary: one day, the well will run dry—if the market doesn’t dry up first. Commodity prices are inherently volatile, and when they fall, the first thing you see is a loss of revenue to that industry and a decline in tax revenues. What comes next in many places may be even worse: with lower prices making harder-to-reach deposits unprofitable to extract, the industry cuts back on production. Workers get laid off, and the hard times ripple throughout the economy.

For Louisiana, where the oil and gas is offshore and therefore more expensive to drill than the oil right under the Saudi desert, this is just what has happened. As the Post notes, “The price of oil and natural gas fell off a cliff, causing a retrenchment in an industry that provided the state with jobs and royalties.”

Louisiana is not the only state experiencing this. Declining oil prices have forced Alaska to cut $1 billion in spending from its budget over the last two years. Now it faces a $4 billion deficit. And low coal and natural gas prices have West Virginia facing a $466 million budget gap.

Whole countries are feeling the same pinch. Russia, which depends heavily on gas and oil exports, is looking at a national budget that will be shorn of over $38 billion in income.

Instead of just relying on a short-term, unreliable, and polluting industry, states such as Louisiana need to diversify into industries that draw on human capital—whether it’s computer programming or solar panel manufacturing—and can provide a more stable source of revenue. Microchip prices don’t fluctuate wildly. And the high-tech sector doesn’t just fall apart when demand slackens for current products; companies innovate new ones. Louisiana can&’t innovate its way out of its current problem by inventing a new fossil fuel that just happens to be under its feet.

Perhaps, instead of cutting taxes and education spending, Jindal should have invested in a more educated workforce. But then his support for creationism might not have gone over as well.

Read article here: 

Bobby Jindal’s Disaster in Louisiana Shows Why You Shouldn’t Bet on Fossil Fuels

Posted in Anchor, Bragg, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bobby Jindal’s Disaster in Louisiana Shows Why You Shouldn’t Bet on Fossil Fuels

Three Numbers That Explain the Modern Political Ecosystem

by Rodger31Y3 Posted on March 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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

If you want to understand how politicians manipulate today’s media environment, there are only three numbers you need to know:

Detroit debate viewership (TV plus streaming): 20 million
Daytime cable news viewership: 1-2 million
Print newspaper viewership: 1 million max

The last number is a guesstimate for the number of people who will see Donald Trump’s statement announcing that he’s had a change of heart about ordering the US military to torture prisoners. If anything, it’s generous. A printed statement just isn’t going to make the rounds much. Nor is it going to be a big deal on social media, especially among the Trump demographic.

So here’s what you get:

When Bret Baier asks Trump what would happen if the military refuses his order to torture prisoners, 20 million people hear and see him say, “They won’t refuse….I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
The next day, 2-3 million people read (or hear a network anchor recite) a bloodless statement that says, “I do, however, understand that the United States is bound by laws and treaties and I will not order our military or other officials to violate those laws and will seek their advice on such matters.”

The arithmetic here is pretty simple. There are at least 17 million people who hear Trump insist that he’s going to torture “these animals over in the Middle East” and never see the retraction. For Trump, this is a double win. His base continues to think he’s a tough guy. Elites breathe a small sigh of relief and figure that maybe this means Trump will calm down and listen to his advisors if he wins the presidency.

The exact numbers can vary, but the basic math plays out the same way all the time. Politicians have learned that they can lie without consequence. They tell the lie on television, where lots of people see it, and then count on virtually nobody seeing the earnest fact checks the next day.

Among younger voters, you probably have to factor in social media as well. But you also have to factor in the well-known evidence that fact checks rarely change anyone’s mind. Welcome to 21st century America.

UPDATE: There’s another piece of this that’s worth mentioning. Trump’s retraction was given to the Wall Street Journal, so naturally they’re playing it big on their front page. But I just checked USA Today, Fox, MSNBC, the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and none of them have so much as mentioned this on their home pages. This is not a coincidence. They hate having to acknowledge a competitor, and that causes them to downplay the news.

The one exception is CNN, which has plastered it at the top of their home page and mentioned it repeatedly on air. I don’t quite know why they’re the exception.

More – 

Three Numbers That Explain the Modern Political Ecosystem

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Three Numbers That Explain the Modern Political Ecosystem

Quote of the Day: Marco Rubio Tells Us What Halftime Was Like at the Debate

by AntonettaScherf Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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

If the future of my country weren’t at stake, I’d say that things are getting genuinely entertaining in the Republican primary race. Here is Marco Rubio this morning dishing on Donald Trump:

Let me tell you something, last night in the debate, during one of the breaks — two of the breaks — he went backstage, he was having a meltdown. First he had this little makeup thing applying, like, makeup around his mustache because he had one of those sweat mustaches. Then, then he asked for a full-length mirror. I don’t know why, because the podium goes up to here. But he wanted a full-length mirror. Maybe to make sure his pants weren’t wet — I don’t know.”

Fabulous! I can’t wait for Ted Cruz to join in too.

But if these guys really want to hit Trump where it hurts, there are two things they need to do. First, they have to get under Trump’s skin. Trump favors torturing the families of terrorists, so maybe going after his family will work. Or pointing out repeatedly how badly he got played in his various deals. Or mocking his vanity. Anything that makes him look ridiculous and provokes an atomic reaction. Second, they need to say things that might actually sway Trump’s supporters. This shouldn’t be hard, since both Rubio and Cruz were born and bred in the tea party movement and supposedly know what makes its supporters tick. There’s no point in saying that Trump lies. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying he’s a racist. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying he’s not ideologically pure. They don’t care. There’s no point in saying that he’s an embarrassment. They don’t care.

So what do they care about? That he’s tough. That he’s not PC. That he takes on the politicians and the media. So that’s where to hit him. Show that he’s all hat and no cattle. Show that he’s afraid to really tell the truth. Badger him on his tax returns. Tell stories about how he kowtows to reporters. And above all: whatever you say, say things outrageous enough to force the media to pay attention to you.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s no need to be obsessively truthful in all this. Take Rubio’s little story above. I imagine it’s true. But if it’s exaggerated a wee bit—well, tell it anyway. And lots more like it. That’s what Trump does. If you can make Trump spend all his time denying that he’s a weenie by picking apart tiny details in your stories, you’re on the road to the White House.

POSTSCRIPT: This is just an aside, but am I the only one who finds it a little creepy that apparently Rubio can change his personality on a dime? I mean, he seems to have decided a couple of days ago to become a young Donald Trump, and he’s already doing a bang-up job. I think that even most professional actors would have trouble learning a new part that quickly.

More here: 

Quote of the Day: Marco Rubio Tells Us What Halftime Was Like at the Debate

Posted in Badger, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day: Marco Rubio Tells Us What Halftime Was Like at the Debate