Tag Archives: states

WATCH: Hillary Clinton Blasts Edward Snowden for Fleeing to Russia and China

by KendraSoileau Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton didn’t have to directly deal with Edward Snowden’s leaks when she was secretary of state. Clinton had already stepped down from her post by the time the Guardian published its first revelations on the expansive scope of spying by the National Security Agency. But at an event at the University of Connecticut on Wednesday night, Clinton made it clear that she’s no fan of the NSA leaker, insinuating that Snowden had cooperated with countries hostile to the United States and unintentionally aided terrorist organizations. “I don’t understand why he couldn’t have been part of the debate at home,” she said.

Clinton questioned Snowden’s intentions in fleeing the country before offerring his information to the public. “When he emerged and when he absconded with all that material, I was puzzled, because we have all these protections for whistleblowers,” Clinton said, when the moderator asked if there had been any positive effects for security policy following the NSA leaks. “If he were concerned and wanted to be part of the American debate, he could have been. But it struck me as—I just have to be honest with you—as sort of odd that he would flee to China, because Hong Kong is controlled by China, and that he would then go to Russia, two countries with which we have very difficult cyber-relationships, to put it mildly.”

Clinton also suggested that Snowden had inadvertently helped terrorists. “I think turning over a lot of that material—intentionally or unintentionally, because of the way it can be drained—gave all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like,” she said.

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WATCH: Hillary Clinton Blasts Edward Snowden for Fleeing to Russia and China

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Apple: Climate Change Is Real, and It’s a Real Problem

by LanoraRedfern Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Climate change is real and a real problem for the world, Apple said on Monday, announcing its progress on environment targets ahead of Earth Day.

The technology company, publishing a video narrated by CEO Tim Cook on its green initiatives and updated environment web pages, claimed that 94 percent of its corporate facilities and 100 percent of its data centers are now powered by renewable energy sources such as solar power.

Lisa Jackson, the former administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency and Apple’s vice president for environmental initiative, wrote in a letter: “We feel the responsibility to consider everything we do in order to reduce our impact on the environment. This means using greener materials and constantly inventing new ways to conserve precious resources.

Greenpeace, which has previously been critical of Apple for sourcing energy from fossil fuels, recently praised the company for improving the energy mix powering its data centers, ranking it above other tech giants such as Amazon. Apple’s Maiden data center in North Carolina is powered by a large 20-megawatt solar farm and biogas fuel cells.

Apple said its carbon footprint in 2013 was 33.8 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2013, or around 5 percent of the United Kingdom’s annual CO2 emissions for the same year. Around three-quarters of the emissions come from manufacturing. “We believe climate change is real. And that it’s a real problem,” the company’s website now says.

The company said its new HQ being built in Cupertino, California, will use 30 percent less energy than an equivalent building, and will be home to around 7,000 trees. It also highlighted a decrease in the material required to make its products—the new iPad Air uses nearly one-third less material, by weight, than the original iPad.

All the company’s retail stores will now take back Apple products for recycling, for free; previously customers had to buy a new product to recycle an old one. In the United Kingdom and United States, an ongoing scheme offering payments for old iPhones, iPads and Macs also continues.

The announcement came ahead of today’s 44th anniversary of Earth Day, a day of activism born in the United States and designed to raise environmental awareness.

Cook recently told climate change skeptics that they should ditch Apple shares if they did not like the company’s backing for renewable energy and sustainability, leading Virgin group founder Richard Branson to say he was “enormously impressed” by Cook’s stance and his call for climate change deniers to “get out of the way.”

Apple has come in for criticism from Friends of the Earth for being slow to admit to using tin in its products sourced from the Indonesian island of Bangka, where mining has caused environmental damage and claimed dozens of lives. Last year, Apple sent a team to investigate conditions on the island and has said it will work to improve them.

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Apple: Climate Change Is Real, and It’s a Real Problem

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Wall Street Wants to Lend You Money to Fight Climate Change

by berrywood1 Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The latest series of reports from the United Nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in stark terms the catastrophic consequences of the world’s governments’ decades-long foot-dragging on limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

But what can you do? For one thing, fix up your damn house. That furnace, from the Reagan era, the inefficient water heater, the drafty windows? They’re directly contributing to climate change. Homes consume 22 percent of the US’s energy and, along with commercial buildings, account for 10 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions.

The chances of the US government enacting a carbon tax, emissions trading scheme or taking other sweeping action to tackle climate change may be next to nil. But thanks to an innovative new initiative from financial conglomerate Citi, the Pennsylvania state treasury and non-profits, homeowners across the country soon will be able to tap a $100 million fund to instantly secure low-cost loans to do everything from installing solar panels on their roof to replacing that roof. Contractors will authorized to offer the loans, meaning no need to deal with state or local bureaucrats who will administer the program.

It’s just another example of how financial innovation has become key to getting the green tech innovations dreamed up in Silicon Valley into the hands of homeowners as well as prompting them to undertake low-tech efforts like insulating their attics.

“There’s no question that energy efficiency technology has outpaced the financial technology,” Cisco DeVries, chief executive of Renewable Funding, an Oakland, California, company that designs green energy-financing programs, told The Atlantic.

Renewable Funding later this year will begin to securitize the loans–called Warehouse for Energy Efficiency Loans, or WHEEL–and sell the securities to pension funds and other investors. That will generate a cash flow to fund further energy efficiency improvements.

“What we’ve set up is an indefinitely scalable program,” says DeVries. “We can purchase loans and securitize them and the more we do it, the cheaper the funds become. This has no limit to its capacity.”

It will certainly need to scale. According to a 2009 McKinsey study it’ll take $229 billion to cut home energy use by about a third.

Still, until WHEEL most homeowners faced with spending five figures on just replacing their windows either had to tap home equity lines or their high-interest credit cards to pay for such improvements. And people tend to make energy efficiency fixes piece-meal, replacing the hot water heater when it breaks, for instance.

The availability of a five, seven or 10-year loan would encourage people to obtain energy audits and comprehensive upgrades to their homes. The payoff is lower energy bills that would help pay back the loans.

Three years in the works, WHEEL is based on a successful Pennsylvania program and initially is available in that state and Kentucky. DeVries expects California and other states to be added by the end of 2014 with nationwide coverage in 2015.

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Wall Street Wants to Lend You Money to Fight Climate Change

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Dear Hollywood: Please Don’t Make the New “Battlestar Galactica” Movie About Drones

by BrendanMauger Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

Universal is planning a major film reboot of the sci-fi franchise Battlestar Galactica, according to a report in Variety. Jack Paglen (Transcendence) has reportedly signed on to write the screenplay, and original series creator Glen Larson is set to produce.

I have one modest request: Don’t make it a movie about Obama’s killer drones. Please. Don’t do that. It’s super zeitgeist-y, but please, just don’t.

The rebooted Sci-Fi Channel series, which ran from 2003 to 2009, garnered much critical acclaim, in large part because it was smartly topical and political. That reboot focused on war between human civilization and the cybernetic Cylon race. The series worked as an allegory of the War on Terror, and incorporated themes of religious extremism, suicide bombing, and state-sanctioned torture. Many images called to mind the Iraq War, Nazi occupation, and the Vietnam War.

So it would only make sense if an upcoming film version of Battlestar Galactica were also deeply political. And with the Bush years in the rearview, Hollywood has frequently (almost relentlessly) turned to drone warfare as a go-to subject for big-budget political critique in the Obama era.

Here are a few examples of drones in big Hollywood fare released in the past year or so:

1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is about “civil liberties issues, drone strikes, the president’s kill list, and preemptive technology,” according to its directors.

2. RoboCop (2014), which features autonomous killer robots called “drones” that are prominently used in an American invasion and occupation of Iran (“Operation Freedom Tehran,” it’s called). OmniCorp, which designs and manufactures these military robots, wants to put this technology to use in law enforcement in the United States. Thus kicks off a national debate on civil liberties and so forth.

3. G.I. Joe: Retaliation, in which the democratic President of the United States is a foreign-born imposter who uses killer drones on American citizens overseas, and desires a world rid of nuclear weapons. (REMIND YOU OF ANYONE???)

4. Pacific Rim, which has drones in the form of gargantuan robots called Jaegers (the robots fight amphibious monsters called Kaiju).

5. Iron Man 3, which fits in snugly with the rest of the Iron Man franchise drone imagery.

6. Star Trek Into Darkness, which covers the ethical question of extrajudicial and targeted killing of terror suspects operating outside American borders.

(And it appears this drone warfare movie is in the works, too.)

This seems like it’s on the verge of being played out. If Jack Paglen is looking for something fresher to weave into his script, maybe he can go with US special operations in Africa.

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Dear Hollywood: Please Don’t Make the New “Battlestar Galactica” Movie About Drones

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No, Our Oil and Gas Production Did Not Give Us an Advantage During the Crimea Crisis

by TeddyAraujo Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Of all the preposterous, irresponsible headlines that have appeared on the front page of the New York Timesin recent years, few have exceeded the inanity of this one from early March: “US Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin.” The article by normally reliable reporters Coral Davenport and Steven Erlanger suggested that, by sending our surplus natural gas to Europe and Ukraine in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the United States could help reduce the region’s heavy reliance on Russian gas and thereby stiffen its resistance to Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior.

Forget that the United States currently lacks a capacity to export LNG to Europe, and will not be able to do so on a significant scale until the 2020s. Forget that Ukraine lacks any LNG receiving facilities and is unlikely to acquire any, as its only coastline is on the Black Sea, in areas dominated by Russian speakers with loyalties to Moscow. Forget as well that any future US exports will be funneled into the international marketplace, and so will favorsales to Asia where gas prices are 50% higher than in Europe. Just focus on the article’s central reportorial flaw: it fails to identify a single reason why future American LNG exports (which could wind up anywhere) would have any influence whatsoever on the Russian president’s behavior.

The only way to understand the strangeness of this is to assume that the editors of the Times, like senior politicians in both parties, have become so intoxicated by the idea of an American surge in oil and gas production that they have lost their senses.

As domestic output of oil and gas has increased in recent years—largely through the use of fracking to exploit hitherto impenetrable shale deposits—many policymakers have concluded that the United States is better positioned to throw its weight around in the world. “Increasing US energy supplies,” said then-presidential security adviser Tom Donilon in April 2013, “affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals.” Leaders in Congress on both sides of the aisle have voiced similar views.

The impression one gets from all this balderdash is that increased oil and gas output—like an extra dose of testosterone—will somehow bolster the will and confidence of American officials when confronting their foreign counterparts. One former White House official cited by Davenport and Erlanger caught the mood of the moment perfectly: “We’re engaging from a different position with respect to Russia because we’re a much larger energy producer.”

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No, Our Oil and Gas Production Did Not Give Us an Advantage During the Crimea Crisis

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Are We Becoming China’s Factory Farm?

by WinnieBachman Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration: Michael Klein

China is in the midst of a love affair with pork. Its consumption of the stuff has nearly doubled since 1993 and just keeps rising. The Chinese currently eat 88 pounds per capita each year—far more than Americans’ relatively measly 60 pounds. To meet the growing demand, China’s hog farms have grown and multiplied, and more than half of the globe’s pigs are now raised there. But even so, its production can’t keep up with the pork craze.

So where is China looking to supply its demand for chops, ribs, loins, butts, and bellies? Not Southeast Asia or Africa—more like Iowa and North Carolina. US pork exports to China surged from about 57,000 metric tons in 2003 to more than 430,000 metric tons in 2012, about a fifth of all such exports. And that was before a Chinese company announced its intention to buy US pork giant Smithfield Foods in 2013. The way things are going, the United States is poised to become China’s very own factory hog farm. Here are a few reasons why:

It’s now cheaper to produce pork in the US than in China. You read that right: Our meat industry churns out hogs for about $0.57 per pound, according to the US Department of Agriculture, versus $0.68 per pound in China’s new, factory-scale hog farms. The main difference is feed costs. US pig producers spend about 25 percent less on feed than their Chinese counterparts, the USDA found, because the “United States has more abundant land, water, and grain resources.”

Americans are not as fond of “the other white meat” as we once were. You wouldn’t know it from the menus in trendy restaurants, but US consumers’ appetite for pork hit a peak in 1999 and has declined ever since. Yet industry, beholden to shareholders demanding growth, keeps churning out more. According to its latest projections, the USDA expects US pork exports to rise by another 0.9 metric tons by 2022—a 33 percent jump from 2012 levels.

Much of China’s arable land is polluted. Fully 40 percent has been degraded by erosion, salinization, or acidification—and nearly 20 percent is tainted by industrial effluent, sewage, excessive farm chemicals, or mining runoff. The pollution makes soil less productive, and dangerous elements like cadmium have turned up in rice crops.

Chinese rivers have been vanishing since the 1990s as demand from farms and factories has helped suck them dry. Of the ones that remain, 75 percent are severely polluted, and more than a third of those are so toxic they can’t be used to irrigate farms, according to a 2008 report by the Chinese government. According to the World Bank, China’s average annual water resources are less than 2,200 cubic meters per capita. The United States, by contrast, boasts almost 9,400 cubic meters of water per person.

Chinese consumers are losing trust in the nation’s food supply—and will pay for alternatives. A spate of food-related scandals over the past half decade has made food safety the Chinese public’s No. 1 concern, a 2013 study from Shanghai Jiao Tong University found. Judith Shapiro, author of the 2012 book China’s Environmental Challenges and director of the Natural Resources and Sustainable Development program at American University, says she expects Smithfield pork to command “quite a premium” in China, because it’s perceived as safer and better than the domestic stuff. Already, “US pork is particularly popular and commands premium prices, as it is viewed as higher quality due to our strict food safety laws,” a Bloomberg Businessweek columnist reported last July.

But what’s good for pork exporters may not be good for the United States: More mass-produced pork also means more pollution to air and water from toxic manure, more dangerous and low-wage work, and more antibiotic-resistant pathogens. And that’s just the beginning. In addition to ramping up foreign meat purchases, China is also rapidly transforming its domestic meat industry along the US industrial model—and importing enormous amounts of feed to do so. The Chinese and their hogs, chickens, and cows gobble up a jaw-dropping 60 percent of the global trade in soybeans, and the government may soon also ramp up corn imports—because while Beijing currently limits foreign corn purchases, meat producers are clamoring for more. And where does a third of the globe’s corn come from? You guessed it: The good old USA.

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Are We Becoming China’s Factory Farm?

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SPECIAL EVENT: Gov. Jay Inslee on Climate Solutions in the Pacific Northwest

by AliceLandreneau Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s say you’re tired of climate inaction. Let’s say you want to see somewhere in the United States that is actually, you know, doing things.

If so, then your focus probably ought to be on the states of the Pacific Coast. Recently Washington state, Oregon, California and the Canadian province of British Columbia reached an agreement to harmonize their climate and energy policies, a development that has the potential to not just accelerate greenhouse gas reductions, but also to catalyze a strong, clean, and resilient economy. That’s a big deal for a region that is home to 53 million people, and whose GDP is $2.8 trillion.

But there are challenges as well: While California and British Columbia have set a price on carbon (through a cap-and-trade program and a carbon tax, respectively), thus far Oregon and Washington have not. Meanwhile, a new battle is brewing over coal exports, one that potentially pits the Obama administration itself against the states of Oregon and Washington.

To discuss the climate outlook for the region, please join Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and other distinguished speakers and panelists for a special installment of Climate Desk Live—a partnership between the University of Washington’s College of the Environment, Climate Access, and Climate Desk, sponsored by Bloomberg BNA. Hosted by award-winning journalist Chris Mooney, the discussion will cover a range of key climate policy issues from coal terminals, to fuel efficiency standards, to carbon pricing, with an eye toward innovation and new energy solutions. The event will follow a March 27 Climate Desk Live panel in Vancouver, which will focus on the lessons learned from the first five years of British Columbia’s carbon tax.

The Seattle event will be Tuesday, April 1, from 3 pm to 5 pm Pacific Time, at the University of Washington Tower Auditorium, 4333 Brooklyn Ave NE, Seattle, WA, 98105. Advanced registration for this event is required. You can RSVP here, and join the event on Facebook here (but you will still need to RSVP). The event will be live-streamed here and also at climatedesk.org.

Featured Guests and Speakers:

Jay Inslee. A fifth generation Washingtonian, Jay Inslee was first elected to Congress in 1998, serving until 2012. He is the coauthor of Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean-Energy Economy, a book about the job-creating potential of the clean tech industry. As governor, Inslee’s top priority is growing Washington’s innovative industries such as clean energy, IT and life sciences, and strengthening existing industries such as aerospace, agriculture, maritime, and military.

Lisa Graumlich. Dr. Lisa J. Graumlich is the inaugural dean of the College of the Environment at the University of Washington, and the Prentice and Virginia Bloedel Professor. As a scholar, Graumlich pioneered the use of tree-ring data to understand long-term trends in climate, focusing on the mountains of western North America. She is actively engaged with a broad range of stakeholders to understand and respond to the impacts of climate change.

David Roberts. David Roberts is the senior staff writer at Grist, where he covers energy and energy politics. He has contributed to outlets including The New York Times, Outside, and Scientific American, and been featured on programs including MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes and The Rachel Maddow Show. His work has been hailed by thought leaders including Al Gore, Paul Krugman, and Michael Levi.

Paul Shukovsky. Paul Shukovsky is Pacific Northwest Correspondent for Bloomberg BNA. He previously worked as a reporter for the Miami Herald, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Tampa Tribune, UPI, and as a public television news producer/anchor alternately covering the environment, indigenous tribes, federal courts, federal investigative agencies, terrorism and national security issues.

(Other speakers may be announced.)

Moderated by:

Chris Mooney, Chris Mooney is an award-winning science and political journalist and the host of Climate Desk Live. He is the author of four books and the co-host of Inquiring Minds, a weekly podcast exploring where politics, society, and science collide.

Partners

Climate Access is a nonprofit network aimed at leveraging the public’s role in addressing climate disruption by increasing support for policy and involvement in shifting energy and sustainability behaviors. Climate Access consists of more than 2,000 leaders from nonprofits, government, and academia located in Canada, the United States, and 43 countries around the world. @climateaccess

Climate Desk is a journalistic collaboration between The Atlantic, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Grist, the Guardian, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Slate, and Wired aimed at exploring the consequences of a changing climate. It has a collective reach of more than 200 million people. @ClimateDesk

Bloomberg BNA, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bloomberg, is a leading source of legal, regulatory, and business information for professionals. Bloomberg BNA has been delivering cutting-edge news and expert reference materials to EHS professionals for more than three decades, always with unstinting attention to detail and complete objectivity. Bloomberg BNA’s Energy and Climate Report continues this tradition, with specialized news and analysis on the legal requirements and policy developments surrounding climate change mitigation and adaptation, clean energy and energy efficiency, and corporate sustainability practices in the United States and abroad. @BBNAClimate

University of Washington College of the Environment is the largest environment-focused college in North America, with unparalleled depth and breadth in environmental systems: from the forests to the seas and from the depths of the earth to the edges of the solar system. In partnership with industry, government and nonprofits, the College is creating new leaders, advancing knowledge and forging sustainable solutions to the critical environmental challenges of our time. @UW_CoEnv

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SPECIAL EVENT: Gov. Jay Inslee on Climate Solutions in the Pacific Northwest

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America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

by Seymour89E Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was conceived as a place to put the worst of the worst. The prisoners that kept starting problems at the other prisons. Put them all together, the thinking went. It wasn’t a place for rehabilitation. It was a place to isolate the infection. Over the 29 years it operated, starting in 1934, “Hellcatraz” earned a reputation so fearsome, it has a powerful hold on the American imagination to this day.

Alcatraz was finally shuttered, 51 years ago today, not because it was brutal, though it was, or because living conditions were inhumane, though they were. It simply cost too much.

This isn’t a secret. But it’s easy to forget. Because people tend to know three things about Alcatraz: 1) It was brutal 2) No one escaped and lived to tell about it, and 3) It’s closed. Lost along the way was “very inefficient from a budgetary standpoint.”

You could be forgiven for assuming that one morning in the spring of 1963, everyone woke up and said, “hey, wait a minute, let’s treat our prisoners better!” Maybe JFK was there and the wind was blowing in his hair and he smiled, and Bobby was there too, and he looked very serious and maybe one of them quoted Dostoyevsky’s line that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” and then they shut the prison and went sailing and Jackie was there and everyone was happy. But that didn’t happen. Everyone was fine with the prisoners being treated the way they were.

And 51 years later, so are we, really. The United States operate 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Like Alcatraz, they aren’t about rehabilitation. They’re about punishment. 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement every year. As many as half of all sexual assaults in prisons are carried out by prison guards. One fourth of the people incarcerated on Earth are incarcerated in the United States. We have 2.3 million Americans behind bars. They aren’t held on an island off San Francisco, they’re held at ADX Florence, or Pelican Bay, and Rikers Island, where an inmate recently baked to death in his cell.

Baked to death.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary—the one that Clint Eastwood broke out of and Nicolas Cage broke into—may be dead. But what we mean when we talk about Alcatraz is very much alive.

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America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

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All the Times Putin Said He Wouldn’t Invade Ukraine

by MariamSimon Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Many a theory has been offered about how the situation in Ukraine has escalated to this point. On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel wondered if Russian President Vladimir Putin was “in touch with reality.” Her point was bolstered by his rambling Tuesday press conference, during which Putin implied—among other things—that this whole thing was the United States’ fault and that the troops on the ground weren’t Russian soldiers but well-outfitted, trained military imposters. “If I do decide to use armed forces,” he said, “this will be in full compliance with international law.” President Barack Obama offered his take, saying that “President Putin seems to have a different set of lawyers making a different set of interpretations, but I don’t think that’s fooling anybody.” Obama added, “There is a strong belief that Russia’s action is violating international law.”

The thing is, Putin actually loves international law—at least, in theory. The Russian president has expressed strong support for international law many times, but, no surprise, it usually comes when he’s singling out the United States as a violator. In recent months and years, Putin has repeatedly assured the public that what’s happening in Crimea right now—the use of force without UN permission and potential violations of the 1994 Budapest memorandum—would never happen on his watch. So in case a reminder might be useful—as diplomatic efforts are underway to de-escalate the crisis—below is a partial timeline of Putin’s many vows to abide by international law and not resort to the unilateral use of force to resolve a crisis.

1) December 19, 2013: About a month after protesters first occupied the Maidan in Kiev, Putin held his annual end-of-year press conference in Moscow and got several questions on Ukraine. One reporter reminded Putin of Russian interventions in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and then asked, “Is a situation possible, even hypothetically, in which you will similarly protect the interests of Russian-speaking residents or Russian citizens of Crimea?…Is the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine at all possible?”

Putin’s answer was a definitive no: “None of what is happening in Crimea is like what occurred in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.” He noted that Russia interfered in these other spots only because the ethnic conflicts in these regions had placed Russian citizens in the area at risk. “We care about the situation of our compatriots…But this does not mean that we’re going to swing sabers and bring in troops. That is absolute nonsense. Nothing of the sort is or will be happening.”

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All the Times Putin Said He Wouldn’t Invade Ukraine

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This Map Does Not Show What Your State’s Favorite Band Is

by SuzannaFirkins Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hello. Good day.

This map has been going around the internet. You’ve probably seen it posted with a headline like “Here Is Your State’s Favorite Band.“

But this map does not show what your state’s favorite band is. It does not purport to show what your state’s favorite band is. This map shows what band or musical artist people in your state like to listen to more than people in other states. The man behind the map, Paul Lamere, gathered streaming data by zip code and then built an app that let’s you compare the most distinct tastes by region. Pretty cool!

For example, according to the map, people in Idaho are way more likely to listen to Tegan and Sara than people in the rest of the United States. This does not mean, however, that Tegan and Sara is the most popular band in Idaho. What is the most popular band/musical artist in Idaho? I have no idea. Tom Petty was pretty popular when I was growing up there, but that was years ago. Who knows?

These misleading headlines are not the map’s fault. The map is good. The map is cool. The map shows where in the country you are most likely to run into someone with the same somewhat peculiar music taste as you.

Let’s say the mob is after you. You’ve stolen some money and they are going to kill you. You’ve been tipped off by a friend, who saw one of the enforcers asking for you at the local watering hole. You’ve got to get out of town, and I mean fast. You head to the airport and everything is looking aces, but then the mob sees you and a car chase ensues. You’re just trying to get to the airport but bang bang bang—wow, this is cinematic—right turn, left turn, over the bridge, and through the tunnel. By the time you pull up to the airport, half the city in ruin. The streets flow with the blood of fallen mob soldiers. You’re going to be okay—or are you? The mafia boss’ psychotic son is down but not out. You see him making his way toward the ticket counter. You tell the ticket agent that you need a flight. “A flight to where?” she asks. That’s when it hits you: You don’t even know where you’re going. “Jesus Christ, I don’t know! I don’t have time for this! You see that guy drenched in blood? He’s going to KILL ME! GIVE ME A TICKET!” “Let me ask you this,” she goes on. “How important is it that wherever you go, you’re able to have a conversation about the band Tegan and Sara?” “Oh, very important, obviously.” “Well, you’re far more likely to be able to have that conversation in Idaho than anywhere else.” “How could you possibly know that?” “Let me show you this map.” “Boise it is!” Then she gives you the ticket, winks, and floats off into the clouds.

Anyway, that’s what this map shows you. What this map does not show you is what your state’s favorite band is. Headline writers, please stop saying it does. It’s really driving me crazy.

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This Map Does Not Show What Your State’s Favorite Band Is

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