Tag Archives: Safer:

Want a Safer City? Keep Daylight Savings Time Year Round!

by EleanoreTenney4 Posted on October 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Tonight we bid sadly adieu to daylight savings time. That means this is also the time of year for a spate of stories about whether daylight savings time makes sense. Sure, you get more daylight, which cuts down on lighting bills, but it’s colder in the morning, which increases heating bills. But wait! There’s more time for golf, and that helps the economy. Etc. Economists have conducted ever more sophisticated natural experiments about this, and the ultimate answer is….meh. Maybe it’s a tiny economic benefit, maybe it’s a tiny economic loss. Who knows?

But now we have a new study. The authors ditch the whole economic benefit argument and instead justify DST based on lower crime rates:

They found that “when DST begins in the spring, robbery rates for the entire day fall an average of 7 percent, with a much larger 27 percent drop during the evening hour that gained some extra sunlight.” The mechanism that might cause this drop is fairly simple: “Most street crime occurs in the evening around common commuting hours of 5 to 8 PM,” the authors write, “and more ambient light during typical high-crime hours makes it easier for victims and passers-by to see potential threats and later identify wrongdoers.”

Moreover, according to the paper, the drop in crime during evening hours wasn’t accompanied by a rise in crime during the morning hours. Criminals aren’t morning people, as it turns out. In addition to the decrease in robbery rates, the researchers found “suggestive evidence” of a decrease in the incidence of rape during the evening hours, as well.

The authors do provide an estimate of the economic benefit of this reduction in crime, and they peg it at several billion dollars per year. They’re economists, after all, so I guess they feel obligated.

But forget that. The DST haters will just come up with some reason why making kids wait for the school bus in the dark costs several billion dollars. Nobody will ever win this game. Instead, just focus on the crime. Everybody wants less crime, and the anti-DST forces are never going to come up with an answer to this. What kind of crime could possible go up because of daylight savings time? White collar theft?

So we win! Assuming “we” are all the righteous lovers of year-round DST. More daylight savings time, less crime. It’s a winner.

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Want a Safer City? Keep Daylight Savings Time Year Round!

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What a New Poll About Mass Shootings in America Gets Dangerously Wrong

by MandyLienhop Posted on October 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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A Washington Post-ABC News poll on gun violence published Monday included a stark finding: “By a more than 2-to-1 margin, more people say mass shootings reflect problems identifying and treating people with mental health problems rather than inadequate gun control laws.” Sixty-three percent of respondents blamed a deficient mental health care system as the prime reason for America’s incessant gun massacres, while 23 percent pointed to weak gun regulations.

What’s most troubling about these results and the question that prompted them is that they perpetuate a dangerous stigmatization. The vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. I wrote about this in my recent Mother Jones cover story on threat assessment, a growing strategy for stopping mass shooters that relies on collaboration between mental health and law enforcement experts:

We know that many mass shooters are young white men with acute mental health issues. The problem is, such broad traits do little to help threat assessment teams identify who will actually attack. Legions of young men love violent movies or first-person shooter games, get angry about school, jobs, or relationships, and suffer from mental health afflictions. The number who seek to commit mass murder is tiny. Decades of research have shown that the link between mental disorders and violent behavior is small and not useful for predicting violent acts. (People with severe mental disorders are in fact far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.)

Then there is the role of guns. As a top forensic psychologist described it to me at a recent summit of more than 700 threat assessment professionals in Southern California, “One of the first things you focus on with this process is access to weapons.” Guns obviously are no more a sole cause of mass shootings than schizophrenia or suicidal depression are. But their role in such crimes is self-evident:

Can they be prevented from striking?

Possession of a firearm, of course, is not a meaningful predictor of targeted violence. But at the conference in Disneyland, virtually everyone I spoke with agreed that guns make these crimes a lot easier to commit—and a lot more lethal. “There are so many firearms out there, you just assume everybody has one,” Scalora says. “It’s safer to assume that than the opposite.” The presence of more than 300 million guns in the United States—and the lack of political will to regulate their sale or use more effectively—is a stark reality with which threat assessment experts must contend, and why many believe their approach may be the best hope for combating what has become a painfully normal American problem.

The Washington Post-ABC News poll furthered a misleading stereotype about a broad population of Americans by presenting a false choice between mental health and gun policy. The chart above shows that only 10 percent of respondents recognized that solving mass shootings is more complicated than checking one box or the other. Any solution deeply involves both, and a whole lot more.

Originally posted here: 

What a New Poll About Mass Shootings in America Gets Dangerously Wrong

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Obamacare Can Help Keep People Off Disability

by HelaineCopley Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Lydia DePillis tells us today about Paul Khouri, who has a rare and expensive medical condition. After steadily losing hours at his job, he finally lost his health insurance:

So instead of going out and trying to support himself with another job, Khouri took the safer option: Applying for Social Security disability insurance and Medicaid. It was a long process, requiring visits to doctor after doctor. Finally getting approved brought some relief — until he realized that returning to work would bring new complications. If he earned more than about $1,000 every month, he would quickly lose the medical assistance he desperately needed.

“It’s really scary when you’re worried about how much money you can make, because you don’t want to make too much,” Khouri says. “But at the same time, the benefits aren’t enough.” The average federal disability check is about $1,200 a month, which puts people right around the poverty line; Khouri is staying in his parents’ house to save on rent.

The prospect of falling over the “cash cliff,” as the sudden dropoff in disability insurance is known, is part of what’s keeping people with disabilities out of the workforce, despite many programs put in place over the years to reduce that disincentive.

DePillis spins this out as a way of explaining some problems with the Social Security disability program, but this is a little unclear. Khouri was apparently able to get a new job that paid $30,000 per year, but couldn’t accept the full salary because he wanted to stay eligible for Medicaid benefits. But he can’t be turned down for Obamacare, so why not sign up for that? With an expensive condition, Khouri would likely pay the full $2,000 annual premium plus the $6,600 out-of-pocket max every year, but that would still leave him with $21,400. Even after taxes, this is more than he gets from disability payments, and he wouldn’t have to limit his future promotions.

Maybe I’m missing something. It’s true that Medicaid is more reliable, since you can’t lose it regardless of whether you have any income. More generally, this stuff can be tricky and there are sometimes details that aren’t obvious from the outside. Still, while a better, more universal health care system would certainly help here, even Obamacare seems like it would help a lot.

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Obamacare Can Help Keep People Off Disability

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Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

by SungKincheloe2 Posted on October 5, 2015

Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

By on 5 Oct 2015commentsShare

Polystyrene foam, aka the devil’s clamshell, aka the indestructible insulator, aka green public enemy No. 1 (or maybe 500 — environmentalists have a lot of enemies), may have finally met its match: mealworms. (Polystyrene and “Styrofoam” are regularly — and incorrectly — used interchangeably. Styrofoam is a kind of polystyrene, but not the kind you’re thinking of.)

That’s right. It turns out, those squirmy little grubs are more than just a hot menu item for entomophagy enthusiasts. They, too, have quite an appetite, and according to the Environmental News Network (ENN), that appetite happens to include Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene:

While this diet doesn’t sound remotely healthy for the worms, researchers have yet to identify any adverse effects. In comparison studies, mealworms that ate exclusively Styrofoam were equally as healthy as those that ate a more standard diet of bran. Researchers are currently in the process of verifying that families of worms that consume only plastic are still healthy generations from now. Additionally, they want to confirm that predators that eat mealworms remain healthy after consuming worms that eat Styrofoam.

Styrofoam and other polystyrene foam are poisonous to a lot of animals, so mealworms’ ability to digest them came as quite a surprise to scientists. “There’s a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places,” Stanford researcher Craig Criddle said in a press release. “Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock.”

Half of the Styrofoam that mealworms eat turns into carbon dioxide, but half of whatever mealworms usually eat turns into carbon dioxide, ENN reports. The other half of the Styrofoam turns into “non-toxic poop pellets” that are safe to use as fertilizer. So as long as the mealworms remain healthy, and everything that eats the mealworms remains healthy, then this seems like a win-win-win.

Still, we’re not about to have a bunch of mealworm factories breaking down all the world’s polystyrene into piles and piles of poop pellets. One hundred mealworm can only eat between 35 and 39 milligrams of Styrofoam in a day, according to the press release. That means it would take thousands of mealworms to eat through just a penny’s weight of the stuff.

The real benefit of this research will come when scientists figure out what combination of gut bacteria give mealworms this ability to digest what we humans find so difficult to break down in a cheap and efficient way. Maybe then we’ll be able create giant mealworm gut factories that do break Styrofoam down into piles and piles of poop pellets!

But that’s just the beginning. Criddle and his colleagues also plan to look at whether mealworms and other insects can digest other kinds of plastics, including microbeads and polypropylene — a material commonly used in textiles and car components.

In the mean time, hip entomophagists take note: For your next underground supper club, consider serving polystyrene-fed mealworm tacos with a side of cricket fries and ant salad. Just remember: Skip the home-brewed beer — you don’t want alcohol clouding the natural high that your diners will get from eating a (questionably) sustainable protein source and ridding the Earth of the devil’s clamshell.

Source:

Could Mealworms Help Solve our Styrofoam Waste Problem?

, Environmental News Network.

Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste, Stanford researchers discover

, Stanford University.

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Mealworms munch on Styrofoam without dying, shock scientists

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These Kids Are Fed Up and They’re Not Going to Take It Anymore

by AbelSVBXuzcfe Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Twenty-one young people from around the country filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration on Tuesday accusing the federal government of violating their rights by contributing to climate change through the promotion of fossil fuels.

The plaintiffs, who range in age from 8 to 19, filed their complaint in US District Court in Oregon. The complaint lists numerous defendants, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Defendants have for decades ignored their own plans for stopping the dangerous destabilization of our nation’s climate system,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint, which was filed with the help of the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children’s Trust. “Defendants have known of the unusually dangerous risk of harm to human life, liberty, and property that would be caused by continued fossil fuel use and increase carbon dioxide emissions.”

While setting new policies to reduce carbon emissions, the Obama administration has often touted an “all of the above” approach to energy policy that includes oil, natural gas, coal and renewable energy, the complaint continues. By continuing to promote the development and use of fossil fuels, the federal government violated their constitutional rights, the young plaintiffs allege.

“What we are providing is an opportunity for them to participate in the civic democratic process and go to the branch of government that can most protect their rights,” said Julia Olson, the lead counsel on the case.

Olson, a public interest attorney, has been working closely with plaintiff Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 15, since 2011. It was Martinez who originally asked Olson to prepare the case against the United States government.

Martinez, who serves as the youth director for Earth Guardians, spoke before the United Nations General Assembly in June and demanded world leaders take action against climate change. It was his third time addressing the United Nations.

Climate change threatens the forests surrounding Martinez’s home in Boulder, Colorado, and will lead to a scarcity of water, the complaint says. Another plaintiff, 18-year-old Alexander Lozak, said that extreme drought conditions are threatening the Oregon land that his great, great, great, great, grandmother first farmed.

“The health and bodily integrity of his family and their farm, which they rely on for food and as a source of income—as well as for their personal well-being—increasingly are harmed by climate change caused by Defendants,” the complaint says.

The youngest plaintiff, 8-year-old Levi Draheim, said he can no longer swim in the river near his home in Indialantic, Florida, because of an increase in bacteria and fish die-offs.

In response to the complaint, the Environmental Protection Agency defended its work to confront climate change, which it described as “the biggest environmental challenge we face.”

“That’s why President Obama launched the Climate Action Plan and why EPA is taking action with our Clean Power Plan: to give our kids and grandkids the cleaner, safer future they deserve,” Laura Allen, deputy press secretary for the EPA, said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “We have a moral obligation to leave a healthy planet for future generations.”

“A child born today will turn fifteen in the year 2030—the year when the full benefits of the Clean Power Plan will be realized,” Allen added. “The actions we take now will clear the way for that child—and kids everywhere—to learn, play, and grow up in a world that’s not only clean and safe, but full of opportunity.”

In early August, Obama called climate change “one of the key challenges of our lifetime.”

“We’re the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it,” the president told an audience at an event in the White House’s East Room, where he unveiled new regulations on emissions from power plants.

But in the eyes of Olson and the plaintiffs, that’s not enough. They are asking for a court order to force Obama to immediately implement a national plan to decrease atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million—a level many scientists agree is the highest safe concentration permissible—by the end of this century. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already hit 400 parts per million.

“It’s really important that the court step in and do their jobs when there’s such intense violation of constitutional rights happening,” Olson said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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These Kids Are Fed Up and They’re Not Going to Take It Anymore

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Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

by LynwoodDevlin Posted on July 10, 2015

Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

By on 10 Jul 2015 3:26 pmcommentsShare

There’s an increasingly energetic fight brewing in Florida — one that has odd battle lines, bringing Tea Party activists and environmentalists together against monopoly utilities and big-money right-wing groups like Americans for Prosperity, and turning city governments against neighboring city governments.

The issue at stake? Whether state law should be amended to allow organizations other than utilities to sell electricity, which would clear the way for more rooftop solar power.

Florida is one of only five states in the country that actively bars third parties from selling electricity. (Another 20-plus states don’t explicitly bar it, but don’t allow it either — what this means for solar companies is unclear, one group that tracks the issue told PolitiFact.) So Floridian homeowners aren’t allowed to buy energy from companies that install solar panels on their roofs.

The state’s utilities, at the moment, only draw 1 percent of their electricity from solar, despite the fact that the state ranks third in the country in terms of potential to generate solar energy, and despite the fact that solar energy has become cost competitive with fossil fuels and is often a safer investment for utilities.

A growing coalition — including environmentalists, the League of Women Voters, the Christian Coalition, and Tea Party activists who see the ban as meddling in the free market — is pushing to get rid of the third-party electricity ban. They’ve been gathering signatures to put an initiative on the 2016 ballot, called the Solar Choice amendment, that would allow businesses and individuals to sell up to two megawatts of solar power.

The utility companies have asked the Florida Supreme Court to throw out the ballot amendment, even before signature gathering is done. They have found allies in shadowy out-of-state, pro-big-business groups, but also recently won the support of the Florida League of Cities, a group of municipal governments. Last month, the league filed a brief with the Supreme Court in support of the utilities’ position, arguing that member cities would lose tax revenue.

But then a number of members of the league dissented, calling the brief “alarmist, unsupported and speculative” and asking for it be withdrawn. These dissenting city officials wrote:

The substantive arguments in The League’s brief are aggressive, speculative, and some are well outside the League’s scope or expertise. For instance, the brief argues that the amendment might create inequitable rate structures between solar and non-solar customers. When did the League’s interest include utility regulatory ratemaking design and policy?

“There’s a number of city leaders who are pretty disgusted with the league,’’ South Miami Mayor Philip Stoddard told The Miami Herald. “It feels like a really parochial organization that’s been co-opted by Florida Power & Light.”

One side effect of all this is that Florida’s utilities, which had seemed content to shrug off the state’s solar potential, are announcing new solar projects. But leaders of the rooftop solar movement told the Tampa Bay Times back in May that this was a cynical move aimed at quieting their rising voices.

The next big development in this saga will come when the state Supreme Court rules on the ballot measure. The court has scheduled a hearing on the issue for Sept. 1.

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Enviros, Tea Partiers, and the Christian Coalition all agree: Florida needs more rooftop solar

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Food Irradiation: Great Technology, Lousy Name.

by LynnTruscott Posted on July 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Roberto Ferdman interviews Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University, about why the public’s aversion to GMO foods has stayed strong even as the scientific consensus has become nearly unanimous that GMO foods are safe. Toward the end, though, he finally get to my hot button food issue:

Can you think of other forms of technology that have overcome consumer fears?

A perfect example is pasteurization in milk. At first it was very strange to people, and no one knew what to think about it. But today it’s widely accepted and viewed as improving the safety of milk.

Another one is microwaves. Everyone has them in their home today, but back in the 1970s it was close to zero. It took a bit for them to catch on, for people to warm up to them.

But then there are things like food irradiation that are perfectly safe but people seem to be permanently skeptical of.

Food irradiation! Dammit, Lusk is right: despite the fact that it includes the word “radiation,” food irradiation is completely harmless. It’s also really effective at killing the pathogens that cause all those periodic outbreaks of food poisoning you hear so much about. Irradiate your hamburger and you can safely cook it medium rare if you want. Irradiate your lettuce and worries about e. coli are a thing of the past. I wish someone made a cheap, personal food irradiation machine. I’d irradiate everything I ate. Unfortunately, irradiation machines tend to be the size of a dump truck and cost several million dollars, so that’s not in the cards.

Maybe the Japanese should get in on this. They’re pretty good at miniaturizing things; they’re pretty good at selling consumer tech; and they’ve got a huge domestic market of people who are gadget and technology crazy and probably aren’t afraid of irradiated food. Although I could be wrong about that, what with Hiroshima in their past and Fukushima in their present.

Anyway, food irradiation. It’s cheap on an industrial scale, totally harmless, and makes your food safer. What’s not to like?

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Food Irradiation: Great Technology, Lousy Name.

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Prescription Alternatives:Hundreds of Safe, Natural, Prescription-Free Remedies to Restore and Maintain Your Health, Fourth Edition – Earl Mindell…

by Myrna Posted on June 3, 2015

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Prescription Alternatives:Hundreds of Safe, Natural, Prescription-Free Remedies to Restore and Maintain Your Health, Fourth Edition

Earl Mindell & Virginia Hopkins

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: July 22, 2009

Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education

Seller: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.


“For those who need to know what doctors and pharmaceutical companies are doing to people&apos;s health . . . this belongs in the library of every home.” — Lendon H. Smith, M.D., author of Feed Your Body Right Prescription Alternatives is an easy-to-use, immediate reference for all the information you need about how medications affect your body, what you can do to counteract imbalances, and what alternative treatments work best. “FDA approved” doesn&apos;t mean it&apos;s safe! Prescription drugs can deplete the body of essential vitamins and minerals Studies show that H2 blockers for heartburn can cause bone loss Drugs to treat diabetes can increase risk of heart disease and death Covering the major prescription drugs in use today and their dangerous side effects, natural health expert Dr. Earl Mindell lays the foundation for a sound body with safer alternatives to these medicines. New drugs and natural alternatives for: Heart disease Diabetes Obesity-related ailments Asthma ADD

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Prescription Alternatives:Hundreds of Safe, Natural, Prescription-Free Remedies to Restore and Maintain Your Health, Fourth Edition – Earl Mindell…

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These Photos of Sea Creatures Soaked by Oil in California Will Break Your Heart

by weask Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Volunteers fill buckets with oil near Refugio State Beach. Michael A. Mariant/AP

On Tuesday, an oil pipeline burst near Refugio State Beach west of Santa Barbara, California, sending an estimated 105,000 gallons of oil onto the beach. Up to a fifth of that oil is believed to have reached the ocean, Reuters reports.

Now, volunteers and private contractors are racing to clean up the oil. About 6,000 gallons have been collected so far, according to the AP. But damage has already been done. At least two pelicans have been found dead, and five more pelicans and one sea lion were sent for rehabilitation. Biologists have also found many dead fish and lobsters. Local officials have closed the beach at least through Memorial Day, and possibly for “many weeks” after that, one scientist at the scene said.

A young female sea lion affected by the Santa Barbara oil spill receives treatment from the SeaWorld California animal rescue team. Rex Features/AP

The company that owned the pipeline, Plains All American, has one of the country’s worst environmental safety records. An analysis by the Los Angeles Times found that the company’s rate of incidents per mile of pipeline is more than three times the national average. A spokesperson said the company deeply “regrets this release,” but it remains unclear what penalties it could face for this latest accident.

It could be years before the full impact is truly understood, since damage to the ecosystem can sometimes take a while to manifest. Five years after the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, biologists are still tallying the damage.

Here are some of the latest images coming in from the scene:

Refugio State Beach Santa Barbara News-Press/ZUMA

A small crab covered in oil Troy Harvey/ZUMA

Two whales surfaced near an oil slick off Refugio State Beach. Michael A. Mariant/AP

A dead lobster covered in oil on the shoreline Troy Harvey/ZUMA

Clean-up workers remove a dead octopus from the beach. Mike Eliason/ZUMA

Crews from Patriot Environmental Services collect oil-covered seaweed and sand. Michael A. Mariant/AP

A helicopter coordinates ships below pulling booms to collect oil from the spill. Michael A. Mariant/AP

Clean-up workers monitor the site of the underground oil pipeline break. Michael A. Mariant/AP

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These Photos of Sea Creatures Soaked by Oil in California Will Break Your Heart

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Florida officials banned from talking about climate change

by AnnettaNesbitt Posted on March 9, 2015

The Issue That Must Not Be Named

Florida officials banned from talking about climate change

By on 9 Mar 2015 11:10 amcommentsShare

Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) administration has apparently instituted a ban on using the term “climate change” when making policy. Tristram Korten reports for the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting that state Department of Environmental Protection employees “have been ordered not to use the term ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ in any official communications, emails, or reports.”

This unwritten policy went into effect after Gov. Rick Scott took office in 2011 and appointed Herschel Vinyard Jr. as the DEP’s director, according to former DEP employees. Gov. Scott, who won a second term in November, has repeatedly said he is not convinced that climate change is caused by human activity, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. …

But four former DEP employees from offices around the state say the order was well known and distributed verbally statewide.

One former DEP employee who worked in Tallahassee during Scott’s first term in office, and asked not to be identified because of an ongoing business relationship with the department, said staffers were warned that using the terms in reports would bring unwanted attention to their projects.

“We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can’t reference it,” the former employee said.

Even the term “sea-level rise” — referring to an issue that will hit Florida particularly hard in coming years — was banned for a time, according to former state employees who spoke with Korten. “Sea-level rise was to be referred to as ‘nuisance flooding,’” one former DEP employee told Korten, describing a meeting she had with a supervisor in 2014.

This kind of thing is not just happening in Florida. North Carolina, another state that will be hard-hit by rising seas, has banned some state employees from considering sea-level science. Specifically, as of 2012, the state is not allowed to account for new scientific predictions about sea-level rise when making policies that affect coastal communities. Instead, policymakers must stick to more moderate “historical data,” and ignore a 2011 report by the state’s Coastal Resources Commission that predicts 39 inches of sea-level rise by the end of the century. (This policy from the GOP legislature was in part a concession to real-estate industry lobbyists who feared, reasonably, that if prospective buyers knew beachfront homes would end up being swallowed by the ocean, they would probably avoid buying them.)

In fact, across America, lower-level officials have found that the most expedient way of making policy to address climate change is to not admit that the policy is designed to address climate change. Instead, when planning for higher temperatures, higher seas, and stronger storms, they use euphemisms — “sustainability” or “resilience” — to prepare for the Issue That Must Not Be Named. Unfortunately, in Florida, even the word “sustainability” is off-limits, according to one former DEP employee.

This ridiculous situation, and Scott’s policy, would be funny were the stakes for Americans not so high. People are continuing to move to low-lying areas of Florida, even as the scientific community continues to toss out dire predictions about the surging seas they will face as climate change moves forward. With state officials muzzled by order of the governor, Floridians are not likely to see any policy that realistically deals with the threat anytime soon.

Source:
In Florida, Officials Ban Term ‘Climate Change’

, Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

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Florida officials banned from talking about climate change

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