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Mitch McConnell Is Now Telling States To Ignore Obama’s Climate Rules

by YMKNildadcbtfzo Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

It’s no secret that Republicans leaders hate President Barack Obama’s flagship climate initiative, which aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. So far, the main opposition has been at the state level. The new rules require every state to submit a plan for cleaning up its power sector, and a host of bills have cropped up—primarily in coal-dependent Southern states—to screw with those plans. These bills tend to be backed by GOP state lawmakers, the coal industry, and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.

The thrust of much of this legislation is to effectively stonewall the Environmental Protection Agency and hope that the rules get killed by the Supreme Court. It’s a long shot, given the Court’s long history of siding with the EPA. And the longer states delay in coming up with their own plan, the more likely they’ll be to have one forced on them by the feds.

But in a column for Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) threw his weight behind this obstructionist strategy:

This proposed regulation would have a negligible effect on global climate but a profoundly negative impact on countless American families already struggling…

Don’t be complicit in the administration’s attack on the middle class. Think twice before submitting a state plan—which could lock you in to federal enforcement and expose you to lawsuits—when the administration is standing on shaky legal ground and when, without your support, it won’t be able to demonstrate the capacity to carry out such political extremism.

Refusing to go along at this time with such an extreme proposed regulation would give the courts time to figure out if it is even legal, and it would give Congress more time to fight back. We’re devising strategies now to do just that.

There’s plenty to take issue with in McConnell’s analysis. For starters, the EPA rules are unlikely to cause any problems with blackouts or sky-high electric bills, as the senator implies. But I’m sure it’ll make good ammunition for state lawmakers and fossil fuel interests as battles over this thing play out this year.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/03/03/3725288_states-should-reject-obama-mandate.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/03/03/3725288_states-should-reject-obama-mandate.html#storylink=cpy

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Mitch McConnell Is Now Telling States To Ignore Obama’s Climate Rules

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“3 Years of Torture Is Enough”: A Transgender Inmate Sues Georgia Prisons

by PhyllisRamsden Posted on March 2, 2015

Mother Jones

In December 2013, Ashley Diamond, a transgender woman locked up at a men’s state prison in Georgia, found herself in solitary confinement. Rutledge State Prison warden Shay Hatcher, she says, put her there for “pretending to be a woman.” The 36-year-old Diamond, who was first diagnosed with gender dysphoria as a teenager, had been denied hormone therapy since entering the prison system in 2012. She still identified as a woman, even as her body was becoming more masculine, causing her extreme anxiety and physical pain.

Later that month, Diamond claims, Hatcher sent her to solitary for a second time after she met with lawyers. About six days later, still in isolation, Diamond told him that she was not pretending, but rather had serious medical needs requiring treatment—and that she was suicidal due to her lack of care. That same day, Diamond tried to cut off her penis with a razor and kill herself; she was hospitalized on an emergency basis. She then received a letter from the medical director of the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC), saying that the officials who had confiscated her women’s clothes and refused to provide her with hormone therapy had handled matters “appropriately.”

Now, Diamond is taking her grievances to court. Earlier this month, the Southern Poverty Law Center initiated a lawsuit on her behalf that accuses eight current and former GDC employees of wrongfully denying her hormone therapy against the recommendations of doctors, and of failing to protect her from at least seven cases of sexual assault. Court documents, including copies of correspondences between Diamond and prison authorities, allege numerous incidents in which officials mistreated and outright harassed her. (The GDC declined to comment.)

Since stopping her hormone therapy, Diamond says she has experienced chest pain, muscle spasms, heart palpitations, vomiting, dizziness, hot flashes, and weight loss. Stephen Sloan, a GDC psychologist who met with Diamond in both December and January, noted that she is staying in a prison where the atmosphere is homophobic, with little support for sexual minorities. “She continues to require hormone therapy and gender role change if she is to receive adequate care,” he wrote in a report after the second meeting. “Withholding this therapy from her increases her risk of self-harm.”

As her body has transformed, Diamond has tried to kill herself at least three times and has tried to castrate herself four times, in addition to attempting to cut off her penis. She is seeking an injunction requiring the resumption of hormone therapy; the right to express her female identity through grooming, pronoun, and dress; and safe placement in a medium security or transitional facility. She secretly filmed a video statement from behind bars; here’s what she had to say:

Transgender women inmates are among the most vulnerable in American prisons, facing a high risk of sexual violence and harassment from other inmates as well as staff, who often house them with men and refer to them with the wrong pronoun. One study in 2007 found that 59 percent of transgender women detained in men’s facilities in California were sexually abused, compared with 4 percent of male inmates. Laverne Cox, the first openly transgender actress to be nominated for an Emmy, has helped bring broader attention to some of these issues with her role on as Sophia Burset, a trans inmate forced to stop estrogen therapy on the hit TV show Orange Is the New Black. And in a high-profile legal case earlier this month, Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning, the soldier who was convicted of sending classified documents to WikiLeaks) made national headlines when she received the go-ahead to begin hormone therapy in a military correctional facility after suing the government.

Federal prisons are required to provide inmates with individualized medical care, including hormone therapy, but at the state level it’s a different story. While some states do require individualized medical care at prisons, others, like Georgia, have policies in place that specifically prevent transgender inmates from accessing treatment despite recommendations from medical professionals. (BuzzFeed‘s Jessica Testa has written at length about the state’s treatment of trans inmates, including Diamond and Zahara Green.)

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“3 Years of Torture Is Enough”: A Transgender Inmate Sues Georgia Prisons

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Climate-denying scientist got piles of money from fossil fuel interests

by CarlaI75evbgsb Posted on February 23, 2015

Climate-denying scientist got piles of money from fossil fuel interests

By on 23 Feb 2015commentsShare

Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon has long been a favorite among the climate-denier crowd. He’s an aerospace engineer who works part-time for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and publishes papers that try to poke holes in the scientific consensus on climate change. But now information in newly released documents is casting serious doubt on his credibility, as The New York Times reports:

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

The bundle of documents, released by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center, gives a fresh reminder how the climate-denial industry functions, throwing huge sums at researchers whose work challenges the vast majority of climate science and claims we’re not on course for dangerous global warming.

Soon’s work tries to show that global warming is attributable to the sun, not humans. He has denounced the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore for overstating the threat our current fossil fuel consumption poses to the climate. And his work, it turns out, has been funded almost entirely by businesses and groups that don’t want governments to take action fighting climate change, including the ExxonMobil Foundation, the American Petroleum Institute, Southern Company, the Texaco Foundation, and the Koch-affiliated Donors’ Trust.

Soon’s affiliation with Harvard and the Smithsonian is prized by the conservative politicians and pundits who cite his work, while really pissing off the environmental community. Suzanne Goldenberg elaborates at The Guardian:

In the relatively small universe of climate denial Soon, with his Harvard-Smithsonian credentials, was a sought after commodity. He was cited admiringly by Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who famously called global warming a hoax. He was called to testify when Republicans in the Kansas state legislature tried to block measures promoting wind and solar power. The Heartland Institute, a hub of climate denial, gave Soon a courage award.

Soon did not enjoy such recognition from the scientific community. There were no grants from NASA, the National Science Foundation or the other institutions which were funding his colleagues at the Center for Astrophysics. According to the documents, his work was funded almost entirely by the fossil fuel lobby.

The newly released documents contain emails between Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian staff who assisted Soon, and Soon’s funders. In the emails, Soon’s research is framed as a sort of trade — the research is referred to as “deliverables.” His funding contracts specified, in some cases, that fossil fuel companies be allowed to review and give input on his work before he publish it, or that the source of his funding be kept secret.

Soon has denied that his funding influences his conclusions. But it certainly keeps his conclusions coming, even though the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which researches climate change, described Soon’s findings to The New York Times as “almost pointless” to the scientific community. The opinion of the scientific community, however, has proven not to matter much when it comes to sowing doubt among voters and policymakers — in that, the climate change deniers who capitalize on Soon’s findings have been very successful.

These new disclosures have lead some to point out that both research institutions and journals are too lax about declaring their researchers’ conflicts of interest. It remains to be seen how Harvard-Smithsonian and the journals that published Soon’s work will respond to the documents, which, because the Smithsonian is a government agency, were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. Will Harvard-Smithsonian drop Soon? Will the journal articles be retracted?

Meanwhile, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is calling for a different sort of action. “For years, fossil fuel interests and front groups have attacked climate scientists and legislation to cut carbon pollution using junk science and debunked arguments,” he told The Boston Globe. So Markey is launching an investigation and asking coal and oil companies to reveal their role in funding research related to climate change.

We’re sure they’ll do that right away.

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Climate-denying scientist got piles of money from fossil fuel interests

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How Coal-Loving States Are Waging War on Obama’s New Climate Rules

by JacintoHahn Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

This week, representatives from the state-level agencies that manage electric grids met in Washington, DC, for a collective freak-out about President Barack Obama’s flagship climate policy. The Clean Power Plan, as it’s called, aims to slash the nation’s carbon footprint 30 percent by 2030. It would require every state to reduce the carbon “intensity” of its power sector—that is, how much greenhouse gas is emitted for every unit of electricity produced.

There’s a unique reduction target for every state, and a likewise diverse array of things for state regulators to hate: They argue the plan is a gross overreach of federal authority; that it will bankrupt utility companies, drive up monthly bills for ratepayers, and lead to power shortages; that states won’t be adequately credited for clean-energy steps they’ve already taken; and that the deadlines for compliance are just downright impossible to meet. And coal companies are justifiably worried that the plan could kill their business.

More than a dozen states (mostly coal-dependent states in the South, which could be hit hardest by the rules) are already raising hell in what’s shaping up to be the environmental version of state-level challenges to Obamacare. As our friend David Roberts at Grist highlighted this week, a number of states have joined a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. And across the country in those states and others, bills are cropping up that could make it hard or impossible for individual states to meet their mandated carbon targets. The idea is effectively to stonewall the EPA and hope the regulations get killed in court.

The most recent battle is playing out this week in Virginia, where a state representative with ties to the coal industry wants to make it more difficult for the state’s Department of Environmental Quality to comply with the president’s climate goals.

First, a little background: The nation’s first anti-EPA bill came early last year in Kentucky, before the Clean Power Plan was even released. The proposed EPA rule would require Kentucky to cut its power-sector carbon emissions roughly 35 percent by 2030. That’s bad news for the coal industry, which supplies more than nine-tenths of the state’s power. So using a model bill developed by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (which has deep ties to the coal industry), Kentucky legislators passed a law that essentially prevents the state from complying with the Clean Power Plan. The new law bars the state from adopting any implementation plan that includes renewable energy or energy efficiency, or that encourages power plants to switch from coal to natural gas. With those restrictions, the EPA goal does indeed seem unreasonable; the state’s top climate official recently told Inside Climate News that he has no idea how to meet the EPA’s demands and stay within state law.

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How Coal-Loving States Are Waging War on Obama’s New Climate Rules

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I Am a White Mother of Black Sons. Here’s What I Know.

by EldonGollan Posted on February 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

For Adam and Khary

Black bodies
swingin’ in
the summer
breeze
strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees

It was 1969 and 1973, both times in early fall, when I first saw your small bodies, rose and tan, and fell in love for the second and third time with a black body, as it is named, for my first love was for your father. Always a word lover, I loved his words, trustworthy, often not expansive, sometimes even sparse, but always reliable and clear. How I—a first-generation Russian-Jewish girl—loved clarity! Reliable words—true words, measured words, filled with fascinating new life stories, drawing me down and in. The second and third times I fell in love with black bodies I became a black body, not Black, but black in a way I’d say without shame and some humor, for mine is dark tan called white. But I am the carrier, I am the body who carried them, released on a river of blood.

Am I black in a cop’s hands when he is pushing, pressing hard for dope or a gun or a rope or a knife or a fist? I am not a black body, yet my body is somehow, somewhere, theirs—Trayvon’s, Emmett’s, thousands more at the end of a rope’s tight murderous swing, black as a night stick splits my head, shatters my chest, black as a boy not yet a man walking toward a man with a gun, suddenly shot dead, a just-become man walking down the stairs toward a gun, black as a tall man, a big man, looking strong but pleading for his breath, killed by choking arms and bodies piled on top of his head.

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I Am a White Mother of Black Sons. Here’s What I Know.

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1958: The Year That Writing About Gay Rights Became Legal

by BryantRiggins Posted on January 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’m familiar with the usual highlights of the gay rights movement, but not much more. So I found today’s article by David Savage about the 1958 Supreme Court case ONE vs. Olesen pretty interesting. Lower courts had ruled the Los Angeles magazine ONE obscene and therefore illegal to ship by mail, but a young lawyer named Eric Julber persuaded the editors to appeal to the Supreme Court:

By coincidence, the Supreme Court was struggling at the same time with the question of obscenity in a case involving Samuel Roth, a New York book dealer, who was appealing his conviction for selling sexually explicit books….”All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion — have the full protection of the guaranties” of the 1st Amendment, said Justice William J. Brennan in Roth vs. United States, handed down on June 24, 1957. “Sex and obscenity are not synonymous,” he added.

With that ruling fresh in their minds, several Supreme Court law clerks read Julber’s petition — as well as the magazine itself — and advised the justices it was not obscene. “This was an easy one for the liberal justices. It was a speech case,” recalled Norman Dorsen, who was then a law clerk to conservative Justice John Marshall Harlan and would go on to lead the national ACLU from 1976 to 1991. But even the conservatives were not in favor of censorship practiced by the Post Office.

“The conservatives on the court then — Felix Frankfurter, Potter Stewart and Harlan — were not like the real conservatives we have now. They were more tolerant,” he said. Brennan, the author of the Roth opinion, looked at all the petitions on his own. He would have seen the magazine and its supposedly obscene articles. After taking several votes, the justices decided on a simple, one-line ruling issued on Jan. 13, 1958, reversing the 9th Circuit decision.

This is obviously a bit of local color for us Southern Californians, but also an interesting tidbit in the history of gay rights for those of you who, like me, had never heard of it before. Worth a read.

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1958: The Year That Writing About Gay Rights Became Legal

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This Glimpse Into Mexican Fruit and Vegetable Farms Is Heartbreaking

by ThaddeuDobbie Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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The ongoing LA Times investigation of conditions on the Mexican farms that grow much of our produce (latest installment here) got me digging around for more information. That’s how I how I found the above short documentary, Paying the Price: Migrant Workers in the Toxic Fields of Sinaloa, by the Mexico-based Tlachinollan Human Rights Center, a MacArthur-funded group that “defends the rights of the indigenous and poor people living in the mountain and Costa Chica regions of Guerrero, Mexico.”

Paying the Price traces the movements of a group of workers from a tiny village called Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, north to a large produce farm in the ag-heavy state of Sinaloa, which churns out huge amounts of food for export to the US. (Ayotzinapa recently gained infamy after 43 students from a rural teachers college based there were kidnapped and probably massacred, under circumstances that are shaking the foundations of the Mexican state.)

The film—about 36 minutes long, subtitled in English—is extraordinary, because it includes in-depth interviews from a variety of players on a big farm that grows vegetables for the US and Canadian markets: everyone from the farm owner to several workers to the labor contractors that bring them together. The farm owner claims the workers get a good a good deal; the workers complain bitterly of pay so low that they leave the several-month stint of hard labor with little to show. Two highlights:

• Starting about at the 18-minute mark, there’s a detailed and sensitive exploration of child labor. The LA Times piece reported that child labor has been “largely eradicated” at the mega-farms that directly supply huge US retailers like Walmart, but that it’s still common on mid-sized farms, some of whose produce “makes its way to the US through middlemen.” That’s the case with the operation depicted in this video. The farm owner basically throws his hands up on the topic, claiming that the workers insist on having their children toil in the fields. By the end of the section, though, you realize that people wouldn’t choose to commit their children to hours of hard labor if they weren’t living in poverty and desperately trying to earn enough to survive.

• Starting about 25:50, there’s a chilling section on pesticide use. We see crop dusters roaring over fields amid chemical clouds; men whose faces are covered in in little more than rags operating backpack sprayers; women complaining that nearly all the children in the camps are sick, some of it possibly linked linked to pesticide exposure, and that medical services are woefully inadequate; and worker advocates claiming that regulation of pesticide use is weak and enforcement nearly nonexistent.

In all, Paying the Price is essential viewing for anyone who wants to know what life is like for the people who grow our food.

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This Glimpse Into Mexican Fruit and Vegetable Farms Is Heartbreaking

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The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

by FaithAEHxvuqw Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Back in 2010, I visited a labor camp that houses some of the migrant workers who grow America’s fruit and vegetables. I found people living densely in shanty-like structures made of scrap metal and cinder block, surrounded by vast fields and long rows of greenhouses. Strangers in a strange land who didn’t speak the language, hundreds of miles from home, they lived at the mercy of labor contractors who, they claimed, made false promises and paid rock-bottom wages. Like all Big Ag-dominated areas, the place had a feeling of desolation: all monocropped fields, mostly devoid of people, and lots of billboards hawking the products of agrichemical giants Monsanto and Syngenta.

You might think I had made my way to Florida’s infamous tomato fields, or somewhere in the depths of the California’s migrant-dependent Central Valley. Those places remain obscure to most Americans, but the gross human exploitation they represent has at least been documented in a spate of excellent recent books, like Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, Tracy McMillan’s The American Way of Eating, and Seth Holmes Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies. But I was somewhere yet more remote and less well-known: Sinaloa, a largely rural state in Mexico’s northwestern hinterland.

If most Americans have heard of Sinaloa at all, it’s because of the state’s well-earned reputation as a center of Mexico’s bloody drug trade. But in addition to the eponymous drug cartel, Sinaloa also houses vast-scale, export-oriented agriculture: farms that churn out the tomatoes, melons, peppers, and other fresh produce that help fill US supermarket shelves. And the people who do the planting, tending, and harvesting tend to be from the indigenous regions of Mexico’s southern states, Oaxaca and Chiapas, where smallholder farming has been ground down by decades of free-trade policies pursued by the Mexican government, which left millions in search of gainful work to the north.

In my brief time there, I found Sinaloa overwhelming: a scary cauldron of labor exploitation, industrial agriculture, and drug violence. Now, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Marosi and photographer Don Bartletti have documented the grim conditions faced by workers on Mexico’s export-focused mega farms in a long-form investigation, after 18 months of reporting in nine Mexican states, including, most prominently, Sinaloa. The Times plans to publish it in four parts; the first, here, is stunning.

Marosi found that Mexico’s mega-farms adhere to the strictest standards when it comes to food safety and cleanliness, driven by the demands of big US buyers. “In immaculate greenhouses, laborers are ordered to use hand sanitizers and schooled in how to pamper the produce,” Marosi writes. “They’re required to keep their fingernails carefully trimmed so the fruit will arrive unblemished in US supermarkets.”

While the produce is coddled, the workers face a different reality. Pay languishes at the equivalent of $8 to $12 a day. Marosi summarizes conditions that often approach slavery:

• Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.

• Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.

• Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.

• Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

• Major US companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

The piece includes excellent photography and is chockfull of stories straight from the mouths of farm workers. And it shines a bright light on a hugely important source of our food. The US now imports nearly a third of the fruit and vegetables we consume, and Mexico accounts for 36 percent of that foreign-grown cornucopia, far more than any other country. And we’re only growing more reliant on our southern neighbor—imports of Mexico-grown fresh produce have increased by an average of 11 percent per year between 2001 and 2011, the USDA reports, and now amount to around $8 billion. The Times investigations demonstrates, with an accumulation of detail that can’t be denied or ignored, that our easy bounty bobs on a sea of misery and exploitation.

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The Horrifying Reason Why Your Fruit Is Unblemished

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A plan to get solar headed in the right direction — literally

by JovitaLarnach Posted on December 2, 2014

westward ho

A plan to get solar headed in the right direction — literally

By on 2 Dec 2014commentsShare

Up here in the northern hemisphere, south-facing solar panels produce the most total electricity. So we should build them to look that direction to make the biggest impact, right? Not so fast, my friend.

Clean energy buffs have been saying for a while that we should point our photovoltaics to the west, not the south, to maximize the value of the juice produced. Westward-facing solar panels capture late-day sunshine (think about it) when electricity demand is highest.

The wonks at utility-software maker OPower know this to be true, and they recently scoured their enormous stockpile of energy data to come up with some new math on the subject (the blog post is well worth reading, or at least looking at the pretty charts). Here’s just one nugget from the analysis of over 100,000 California solar systems:

Overall, 71% of residential systems in the Golden State primarily face the southern sky, while 20% primarily face the western sky. Only around 9% of systems face within 10 degrees of due west — an orientation that’s highly aligned with the needs of the grid, according to recent guidelines from the California Energy Commission.

The Cali solar landscape may begin to tilt toward the west soon, though. Those new guidelines from the CEC, released in September, include a program to give up to $500 to people who build panels that point to the Pacific.

Why is it important, you ask, to provide solar power in the early evening? Well, nine-to-fivers and students come home from work and school and — depending on location and season — turn on the AC or the heat, plug in their rechargeables, run some appliances, and illuminate screens. Meanwhile, the electric utility scrambles to meet this demand as power output from south-facing solar panels wanes. Often, this means firing up natural gas-burning power plants. Sorry climate.

So, if westward-oriented solar panels can offset some of the electricity system’s carbon emissions, why have we been positioning them to aim south? In short, the incentives suck. Most people with solar arrays get paid for the total power generated (or net meter it) at a flat rate. So solar owners and lessees choose to put up panels facing south to make the most money. Who could blame them?

OPower’s study mentions a few ways to fix the issue. First, and easiest, utilities can pay for solar power at varying rates, to reflect the price of power at a particular time of day. Second, solar trackers, which allow panels to follow the sun as it moves from east to west, are getting cheaper. And lastly, tech innovation means better options for storing lots of energy. Large-scale electricity storage makes timing irrelevant — just maximize solar power production and feed it back into the grid as needed!

Until these advances become affordable reality, do your utility a favor and set up your new solar system to look longingly to the west. Your panels want to watch the gorgeous sunset too, you know.

Source:
9% of solar homes are doing something utilities love. Will others follow?

, Outlier.

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A plan to get solar headed in the right direction — literally

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The Darker Side of Jason Mraz

by Travis6964 Posted on October 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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It was the early aughts and the American pop scene was closing out the chapter on a decade of boy bands. Singer-songwriters were up to bat, as John Mayer and Jack Johnson crooned their way up the charts and into the hearts of a nation weary of synchronized dance moves and contrived collaborations.

Armed with an acoustic guitar and an aptitude for wordplay Jason Mraz fit the profile when he burst onto the scene in 2002—and he came with his own distinctive flavor. Hailing from small town Virginia, he cultivated his talent at a New York City conservatory before rounding out the edges in the San Diego coffeehouse scene. He blended these experiences into an eccentric but charmingly optimistic persona—in his debut video he dons a trucker hat, sport coat, an “I love sex” pin, and bunny slippers, and is accompanied by an entourage of chickens.

Alhough he has stopped showcasing his Southern roots (and has dropped the cheeky sexual undertones), the attitude and style captured in “The Remedy” came to define him. “I won’t worry my life away,” he belted between verses originally intended to highlight the silver lining of his best friend’s cancer diagnosis. It was more than just a chorus: Positivity became his doctrine.

In the albums to follow, Mraz cemented his feel-good image and continued to highlight his playfulness. Whether performing at sold-out stadiums or little coffee shops, he charmed audiences with charismatic banter, eagerly and effortlessly connecting to his crowds. He called his fans “friends” and featured them on his website. It’s been a winning way. Over the years, Mraz has taken home two Grammys, two Teen Choice Awards, a People’s choice award, and he’s sold millions of records.

Jason Mraz in San Francisco. Gabrielle Canon

Now, 12 years since that debut album, he’s been busy touring to promote his latest release, Yes!, a collaboration with the band Raining Jane. And while he hasn’t abandoned the positivity thing, he’s become more nuanced about it. Sure, the album is about positivity, he says, but that’s not because he’s an overly happy person. These days, he admits, finding happiness can be a struggle for him. Mraz has recast his carefree mantra as a sort of defensive tactic to cope with his worries.

“I tend to wake up and feel somewhat pessimistic,” he told me. “I will look at the schedule and think ‘Oh my gosh, look at all this I have to do today. There’s not going to be enough time for myself. Am I going to have enough time to put the show together? Is the show going to be great? Probably not? I have already used all my great stuff.’ So anyway, I have this default mode that makes me feel less than—or makes me feel that something is missing.”

Yet while he uses music to drown out those feelings, Mraz doesn’t want to put out songs that won’t make people feel good. His darker compositions don’t make the cut: “What goes on an album is something that I am going to tour. Something that I am passing along to listeners that I think could be valuable music. I don’t want to release music that is a total bummer.”

The persona he’s cultivated over his career, in other words, no longer quite fits. “When I released that first album,” he explains, “my motivations were probably on ego and celebrating my vocabulary and showing off my irregular imagination. Obviously, you read more books, see more documentaries; you’ve had more trials and errors, been in love a few times—had failures. So certainly the perspective changes.”

Even so, Mraz is inclined to give fans what they expect. A few months back, at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, he put on a great show, complete with improvisational interludes, audience participation, and even footage from an excursion to Antarctica, where he performed for environmental scientists. But at moments he let his sentiments show.

After playing a few songs with Raining Jane, he took the stage for a solo version of “The Remedy,” which he had recast as a slow, hauntingly beautiful rendition, disguising the familiar upbeat tune. Later in the show, he introduced “Three Little Things,” a peppy song about what he does to recover when his “life falls apart.” People, he griped to the crowd, accuse him of being happy all the time.

The following afternoon, at a fan meet-and-greet hosted at his favorite local restaurant, Gracias Madre, Mraz smiled minimally, performed mechanically, and seemed almost bored to be there. Sandwiched between two big shows, the event was meant to mimic the intimacy of the coffeehouse scene he came up in. The fans, most of who were there thanks to their participation in a local radio contest, didn’t seem to mind, even when he lectured them on the importance of eating local. This was, after all, Jason Mraz in the flesh, clad in his signature, slightly askew trucker hat and belting out their favorites. Apart from some laugh lines around his eyes and a goatee that added a few years to his boyish features, he looked the same as always.

Even if Mraz’s mentality has undergone a shift, his songs speak for themselves. If anything, just focusing on the intentions behind his latest album would overshadow how good it actually is. Yes! may even be his best one yet. He has put aside styles he experimented with awkwardly in the past—notably scat and rap—and created an album with catchy songs, great harmonies, and enough lyrical complexity to make you actually feel something. And even if he recorded only the most uplifting material, the less blatantly positive tracks are among the album’s best.

Jason Mraz in San Francisco. Gabrielle Canon

Yes! reveals what we’ve always known about Mraz: He knows how to write a great love song—and that may be his greatest legacy. “My story must be love,” he told me. “Whether it is trying to fill in some lack of love that I think I didn’t experience when I was a kid, or a lack of love that I might feel like I am experiencing right now. I have been able to use art as an opportunity to fill that hole.”

It’s hard to say what’s next for Mraz. He’s not quite sure himself. With one album remaining on his Warner Bros. contract, he has hinted that the next one might be his last, and that he’s entertaining the idea of retiring.

Maybe he’ll spend more time tending to his five-acre Avocado farm in Southern California—you can find Mraz avocados at local farmers markets—or focusing on his charity. He’s outspoken about LGBT rights, and uses his music to advocate for other causes, including human trafficking and environmental stewardship. That Antarctica trip was intended to raise awareness about climate change, and the resulting video for “Sail Away” features penguins and spectacular views. His future might also include parenting, he says.

But Mraz wants people to know that his core philosophy will never change: He’s still a dreamer who, despite himself, wants to make people smile. “We are born into society’s dream. We wake up here on this modern earth, and while it may seem unfair in some areas, at least—” He pauses here for a long moment. “At least we have the opportunity to keep dreaming.”

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The Darker Side of Jason Mraz

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