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The Wonkosphere’s Top Evergreen Stories, Explained

by JohannaG58 Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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The news business has always had evergreen stories. When Time magazine asks “Why Did Jesus Have To Die?” on its cover, it’s following in its own footsteps along with hundreds of others. If it’s Easter, we have stories about Jesus.

The wonky blog world has its own odd set of evergreens. These are stories that might have been interesting the first time I read them, but which I’m now heartily sick of. So even though I’m a day late for this to be part of the Festivus airing of grievances, here are a few examples:

Does Daylight Savings Time really reduce energy consumption?
An economist explains why Christmas gift giving is inefficient.
The Declaration of Independence wasn’t really signed on July 4th.
Christmas and those crazy Asians: KFC in Japan and Spam in South Korea explained.
Scientists are adding a second to the year today. Here’s why.
The Dow is a lousy proxy for the actual state of the stock market.
Etc.

Of course, if this year happens to be the first time you see any of these evergreens, they’re fresh and new to you. It’s only the fact that I’ve seen them so many times that makes them so tired to me. So feel free to ignore my griping on this subject. In fact, feel free to mock me for it if you like.

Anyway, I was reminded of this by the inevitable spate of bloggish stories last week about why Christmas is inefficient, and then reminded again by not one, not two, but three bloggy pieces about KFC in Japan that I happened to see within five minutes of each other this morning. (Bad luck, that!) And it got me thinking: ordinary old-school evergreens all seem pretty understandable. But these wonkish blog evergreens seem….a bit odd. So I’m curious: what is it that makes a subject a bloggy evergreen? What do these kinds of stories have in common?

Once I figure it out, I plan to write a blog post about it every year. Sort of like the one I write every year about the origins of Black Friday. Are you sick of that one yet?

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The Wonkosphere’s Top Evergreen Stories, Explained

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Critics Say Chevron Flouted Pay-to-Play Law. FEC Says It’s All Good.

by FeliciaFoutch Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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A recent decision from the Federal Elections Commission could overturn 70 years of precedent and defang a long-standing law that bars companies from buying favorable election results to gain federal contracts. Goodbye anti-pay-to-play laws, hello corporate America profiting off lucrative government deals based on campaign donations.

The trouble all stems from a single contribution made during the 2012 election. On October 7, 2012, oil giant Chevron donated $2.5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), a super PAC tied to John Boehner and House Republicans that spent almost $10 million in 2012, largely on ads attacking Democratic House candidates.

That raised the ire of Public Citizen, a liberal consumer advocate group. In a complaint sent to the FEC last year, Public Citizen and a handful of other groups claimed that Chevron and CLF violated a federal law (referred to as pay-to-play) that bans any corporation that holds a contract with the federal government from contributing to a political campaign. The complaint was sent after Public Citizen checked a public database of federal contractors and noticed that Chevron was listed as working with the government. Last week the FEC dismissed those complaints with an argument that could create a loophole a million dollars wide for other companies to exploit.

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Critics Say Chevron Flouted Pay-to-Play Law. FEC Says It’s All Good.

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Say goodbye to Yosemite’s largest glacier

by Morona Jill Posted on October 3, 2013

Say goodbye to Yosemite’s largest glacier

By

roger.williams

Park visitors gaze at what remains of the Lyell Glacier.

Hasta la vista, glacier.

The world’s glaciers are withering quickly — researchers say they are contributing to nearly one-third of sea-level rise, despite holding just 1 percent of the planet’s surface ice. And while the glaciers in California’s Yosemite National Park aren’t the largest, they are suffering the same alarming fate as their icy ilk in other parts of the world.

Yosemite’s granite cliffs and valleys were carved during the Ice Age as glaciers expanded. Now these vestigial masses of ice are mostly retreating — and fast. The park employs a full-time glaciologist, Greg Stock, who recently returned from a trek to Lyell Glacier, which is the park’s largest. He told the L.A. Times that it had shrunk visibly since he made the same back-country hike last year:

Lyell has dropped 62% of its mass and lost 120 vertical feet of ice over the last 100 years. “We give it 20 years or so of existence —  then it’ll vanish, leaving behind rocky debris,” Stock said. …

Yosemite’s other glacier, Maclure, is also shrinking, but it remains alive and continues to creep at a rate of about an inch a day.

Lyell, however, hasn’t budged. It is the second largest glacier in the Sierra Nevada and the headwater of the Tuolumne River watershed, but it no longer fits the definition of a glacier because it has ceased moving.

“Lyell Glacier is stagnant — a clear sign it’s dying,” Stock said. “Our research indicates it stopped moving about a decade ago.”

Stock warned that when the glaciers disappear, steady water supplies that feed the park’s meadows and other ecosystems will disappear with them. ”We don’t know what the impacts of that will be on plants and animals that evolved with these ice flows,” he told the newspaper.


Source
Yosemite’s largest ice mass is melting fast, L.A. Times

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

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Say goodbye to Yosemite’s largest glacier

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