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The Lima Climate Talks Actually Produced Something Important: An Idea

by LyndonQuintanil Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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So what should we think about the recently concluded climate talks in Lima? They were, as usual, a dog’s breakfast. Rich countries fought their usual battles with poor ones. The talks nearly foundered completely. Over the weekend the wording of the draft agreement went from “weak to weaker to weakest,” in the words of Sam Smith, chief of climate policy for the environmental group WWF. And in the end, no legally binding limits were set on greenhouse gas emission.

That sounds pretty bad. And yet, something important happened in Lima. As weak as the final language turned out, it does do one thing: it asks every country on the planet to submit a plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. It doesn’t mandate what the plans should be. It doesn’t require any independent review of the plans. It doesn’t set out any timetables. But it does require a plan from everyone.

This is something new. It may not be legally binding, but then, no agreement was ever likely to be. For the first time ever, though, Lima enshrines the idea that every country should have a plan to fight climate change. This is similar to Obamacare, which is flawed in dozens of ways but, for the first time in American history, enshrined in law the idea that everyone should have access to affordable health coverage. Once you do that—once you get that kind of public agreement to an idea—you can use it as a building block. Eventually Obamacare will become universal health care. In the same way, Lima may eventually be the building block that produces a universal agreement to fight climate change on a global scale.

This is a fairly rosy view of the Lima agreement, and I don’t want to oversell it. Still, the mere principle that every country on the globe should have a formal plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is important. Once the plans are in place, they become a concrete starting point for climate activists everywhere. And then they go from weakest to weaker to weak to something that’s actually meaningful. Everywhere.

It’s not enough. But it’s something.

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The Lima Climate Talks Actually Produced Something Important: An Idea

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Don’t Take the April Jobs Numbers Too Seriously

by AdanPrimrose Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the previous post, I mentioned that although the unemployment rate was down in April, this wasn’t so much because lots of people had suddenly found work. It’s mostly because a lot of people dropped out of the labor force and were no longer counted in the statistics. Think of it this way: If 93 people out of a labor force of 100 have jobs, the unemployment rate is 7 percent. But if one of those unemployed people gives up and exits the labor force entirely, then the labor force shrinks to 99 people. Now, 93 out of 99 people have jobs. That’s an unemployment rate of 6 percent even though the exact same number of people have jobs.

The labor force participation rate measures how many people in the total population are part of the labor force (i.e., working or looking for work). That number went way down in April. This produced a smaller labor force, which is the main reason the unemployment rate declined so dramatically. But there are two things to keep in mind: (a) the participation rate has been shrinking steadily for a long time, and (b) it’s a pretty volatile number from month to month. The chart below shows both things. The participation rate has been steadily shrinking since 2000, and it’s been shrinking even faster ever since the end of the Great Recession. And the big drop in April? As you can see from the tail end of the chart, the participation rate hasn’t actually changed since October. It’s just been bouncing up and down.

Bottom line: Don’t take the April numbers too seriously. The long-term trends are important, but there’s so much noise in the month-to-month numbers that you can’t draw too many conclusions from them.

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Don’t Take the April Jobs Numbers Too Seriously

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Maine’s loony Tea Party governor signs GMO-labeling law

by dfdedtcf Posted on January 10, 2014

Maine’s loony Tea Party governor signs GMO-labeling law

By

MaineDOE

Maine on Thursday became the second state in the nation to require food manufacturers to put labels on products containing genetically modified ingredients — sort of.

Gov. Paul LePage (R) signed “An Act To Protect Maine Food Consumers’ Right To Know about Genetically Engineered Food,” which mandates the following:

any food or seed stock offered for retail sale that is genetically engineered must be accompanied by a conspicuous disclosure that states “Produced with Genetic Engineering.”

The law would also prevent any products containing GMOs from being labeled as “natural.” That should seem obvious, but big food manufacturers are currently pressuring the federal government to allow them to use such labels on genetically modified foods.

But Maine’s new law has a catch, similar to the catch in a GMO-labeling law passed in Connecticut last month. The Maine law won’t take effect until at least five nearby states adopt similar rules. That’s because the states are unwilling to go it alone in the courts against Big Ag and Big Food. The Kennebec Journal reports:

Proponents of the bill said the provision would quell concerns about an almost-certain lawsuit by industry groups and Monsanto, which vowed to challenge the laws in Maine and Connecticut on the basis that they violate the free speech and interstate commerce provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

Maine Attorney General Janet Mills told lawmakers last year that the bill was almost certain to face a legal challenge, and said she could not guarantee that her office could defend its constitutionality.

The Journal reports that the bill “brought together such factions as libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats, creating strong support.”

It did more than that: It got approval from “America’s craziest governor,” as Politico called LePage this week, “a man who can make even the most hot-headed conservative talk radio hosts seem reasonable.”

We’ll let you decide whether that’s a good or bad omen for the GMO-labeling movement.


Source
LePage signs bill to label genetically modified food, Kennebec Journal

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Maine’s loony Tea Party governor signs GMO-labeling law

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These Are the 194 Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown

by JeannetteHuddle Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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A year after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mother Jones has analyzed the subsequent deaths of 194 children ages 12 and under who were reported in news accounts to have died in gun accidents, homicides, and suicides. They are spread across 43 states, from inner cities to tiny rural towns.

Roll over the images to see details of each case. Read the story here and see our full special report here.

Produced by Mark Follman, Tasneem Raja, Ben Breedlove, and AJ Vicens.

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These Are the 194 Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown

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Ozone hole could be making global warming worse

by Arkady549e Posted on August 12, 2013

Ozone hole could be making global warming worse

By John Upton

NASA

A record-breaking hole in the ozone layer in September 2000.

It’s like Lord Voldemort joining forces with The Penguin.

Two of the globe’s most epic environmental threats appear to be ganging up on us: The hole in the ozone layer could be hastening global warming.

Yes, the hole in the ozone layer. It still exists, though it has been getting smaller because the world rightly panicked and began phasing out the use of CFCs in the 1980s. It was previously thought that the hole was helping to slow down global warming, but new research published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests the opposite. From Nature:

The team’s models predicted a shift in the southern-hemisphere jet stream — the high-altitude air currents flowing around Antarctica — as a result of ozone depletion. This produced a change in the cloud distribution, with clouds moving towards the South Pole, where they are less effective at reflecting solar radiation. …

The extra net energy absorbed by the Earth would be 0.25 watts per square metre, or roughly a tenth of the greenhouse effect attributed to CO2, [says Kevin Grise, the study’s lead author and an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University]. The result could be a small but non-negligible contribution to global temperature rise.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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