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Beer Brewers Unite to Call for Action on Climate Change

by FaustinIllingwo Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared at the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A group of 24 brewers from across the country have come together to cut greenhouse gas emissions from their operations and call for strong national action to address climate change.

The breweries, which include Smuttynose Brewing Company, Guinness and Allagash Brewing Company, have signed onto the Climate Declaration organized through the sustainable business group Ceres. The declaration pledges that each company will take its own action to reduce emissions from its business, and will also support political action at the national level.

Jenn Vervier, director of strategy and sustainability at New Belgium Brewery, which is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, said action on climate change makes a lot of sense for the brewery because it uses a lot of energy in heating, cooling and transportation, and uses a lot of water. Rising emissions, too, are expected to have negative effects for the beer industry because it relies on the cultivation of barley and hops, which are sensitive to changes in the climate.

New Belgium Brewery has already installed 300 kilowatts of solar at its brewery in Colorado, and it capture methane generated in its operations, which it then burns to generate 15 percent of its electricity.

Vervier said the advocacy for national climate action also makes sense for brewers. “Even if we were to be ourselves climate neutral, it’s such a small drop in the bucket,” she said. “It’s going to take a cleaner grid to lower the emissions from manufacturing.”

Julia Person, sustainability manager at the Craft Brew Alliance, which owns the brands Redhook, Widmer Brothers and Kona, said the commitment to addressing their impact also has clear economic benefits. The company lowered its greenhouse gas emissions 8 percent in 2014, she said, which saved it more than $250,000 in energy costs. It has also reduced the amount of water needed to produce a gallon of beer to 3.5 gallons—much lower than the craft brewery average of 6 to 8 gallons, Person said.

“It’s good for business, it’s not just good for the environment,” said Person. “We’re lowering our operating costs. It’s doing the right thing and having a benefit.”

Also signing the declaration: Aeronaut Brewing Company, The Alchemist, Aspen Brewing Company, Brewery Vivant, Bouy Beer Company, Chuckanut Brewery and Kitchen, Deschutes Brewery, Fort George Brewery and Public House, Fremont Brewing Company, Georgetown Brewing Co., Guinness, Hopworks Urban Brewery, Ninkasi Brewing Company, Odell Brewing, Rockford Brewing Company, Smuttynose Brewing Company, Snake River Brewing Co., Standing Stone Brewing Co., and Wet Dog Café & Brewery.

The brewers hope that their advocacy reaches consumers, too. “Beer is near and dear to people’s hearts. It’s part of people’s everyday activity,” said Vervier of New Belgium. “I think when people see their favorite brands speaking out, it gives them courage to speak out. I think it makes it relatable for people.”

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Beer Brewers Unite to Call for Action on Climate Change

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McDonald’s May Soon Serve Kale—After Promising Never to Serve Kale

by SheilaGooseberr Posted on March 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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So remember way back in January when McDonald’s promised it would never serve kale?

Well, forget all that, because now the brand may soon do the very thing it vowed not to do just over two months ago. Nation’s Restaurant News has the story:

According to Janney Capital Markets Analyst Mark Kalinowski, the Oak Brook, Ill.-based restaurant chain is planning to add kale as an ingredient in a to-be-named product at some restaurants later this year.

A spokeswoman for the big burger chain would not confirm or deny the kale reports, saying only that, “As we continue to listen to our customers, we’re always looking at new and different ingredients that they may enjoy.”

A kale flip-flop wouldn’t be that surprising, considering the fact that in the face of McDonald’s increasingly dismal sales, the company is trying to appeal to people who no longer crave giant quantities of processed junk. (And they really don’t, as my colleague Tom Philpott points out here.) To wit: Last week, the company promised to ditch chicken raised on antibiotics. It also recently hired a fact checker to prove it serves real food.

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McDonald’s May Soon Serve Kale—After Promising Never to Serve Kale

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The Company That Made #TheDress Once Faced a Child Labor Scandal

by ClariceKernot Posted on March 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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The British retailer of the dress that whipped the internet into a frenzy last week—is it blue and black, or is it gold and white?—has big plans to cash in on its newfound fame. Roman Originals founder Peter Christodoulou told the Washington Post that the dress—which is actually blue and black and available online for about $77—will soon be joined by a gold-and-white version. “We have received so many requests for a white-and-gold version,” he said. “It takes about five months to do such a thing, but we’re not going to disappoint our fans. I expect the white-and-gold dress to come out later this year.” The day after the hoopla broke out, Roman Originals told the Boston Globe that worldwide sales were up 560 percent.

But while almost every possible aspect of the dress insanity has now been dissected, there’s one part of the story that has so far been overlooked: Roman Original’s labor practices record.

A 2007 investigation into Indian garment sweatshops by the British newspaper the Observer found children making clothing for Roman Originals and another UK retailer on the outskirts of New Delhi. While uncovering “a network of mud-bricked sweatshops” used by Indian garment makers, Observer journalists Dan McDougall and Jamie Doward discovered “dozens of children cramped together producing clothes for the UK.” One of those sweatshops, the newspaper reported, was making garments for Roman Originals:

In another sweatshop, The Observer found more children completing a major sub-contracted order for a British firm, the Birmingham-based fashion label Roman Originals, whose upmarket garments are popular purchases in English market towns.

I reached McDougall, now a correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, in Thailand via Skype. He told me that the discovery of the Roman Originals subcontractor using child labor was inadvertent. “They weren’t a big firm and they weren’t particularly well known at the time,” he said. “From memory they weren’t on our radar at all. We were investigating a major US firm when we came across Roman Originals.”

The original investigation, as it appeared in April 2007 in the Observer. According to the Observer, the photo above shows children making clothes for a different clothing company. The Observer

At the time, Roman Originals issued a statement to the Observer saying that it hadn’t previously been aware of the child workers and that it immediately canceled its contract with the supplier:

“We were horrified to see these pictures and immediately launched an investigation into our suppliers,” Roman Originals said in a statement, adding it had canceled its contract immediately. “We had visited the suppliers and were presented with an adult-only workforce and practices that satisfied our standards. It appears that our supplier sub-contracted a portion of the business and this is where the problem occurred.”

I also contacted Roman Originals with a series of questions for this article about where, and by whom, the now-famous dress was made, and what standards the company has in place to prevent child labor. I haven’t received a response.

Adrian Fisk, a photojournalist who lived in India for eight years, accompanied McDougall into the maze of slums as they worked on the investigation. Speaking generally about the conditions he observed in various sweatshops while reporting the story, Fisk recalls a grim scene of poverty and deprivation. The reporting team would go into each sweatshop for just minutes at a time to collect photographic evidence of their operations as quickly as they could, knowing their activities could attract unwanted attention. “Generally, the ages probably were averaging about 13, 14, but we did see children as young as what we thought to be about seven,” Fisk told me via Skype from London, where he is now based. The children he saw had “grown up too quickly…just not enough fun, not enough happiness,” he said. “You can see it in the eyes, this slightly glazed, deadened look.”

The garment industry in India is notoriously dangerous and plagued by labor problems, as Dana Liebelson detailed in a 2013 Mother Jones feature. In India—like in other garment-producing countries—it’s common for workers to be locked into exploitative conditions until they fulfill contracts.

McDougall, an award-winning human rights journalist who has reported extensively on garment industry practices, says he’s now worried that the global demand for the world’s most famous dress—and for the forthcoming gold-and-white incarnation—will put massive pressure on the firm’s operations outside the United Kingdom to get the garments made quickly.

“There’s no question in my mind that the firm will be all hands to the pumps to cash in on the publicity and turn around as many of these dresses as they possibly can. It’s a marketing dream,” McDougall said. “But what concerns me, from experience looking into many firms, is ordering huge amounts of garments on quick turnaround can place enormous pressure on supply chains. So I hope Roman Originals make a guarantee to everyone interested in ordering the dress that it will be produced in an ethical way.”

McDougall has a challenge for the retailer.

“Perhaps they should go one step further and be transparent on the supply chain around it?” he said. “Rather than make it a poster child for color blindness, why don’t they make the most famous dress in the world…the poster child for fair trade or sustainable production?”

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The Company That Made #TheDress Once Faced a Child Labor Scandal

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Kagan: Netanyahu Speech Is a Blunder

by MaurineKZPJ Posted on February 28, 2015

Mother Jones

Even the ever-hawkish Robert Kagan thinks Republicans blew it by inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress:

Looking back on it from years hence, will the spectacle of an Israeli prime minister coming to Washington to do battle with an American president wear well or poorly?

….Is anyone thinking about the future? From now on, whenever the opposition party happens to control Congress — a common enough occurrence — it may call in a foreign leader to speak to a joint meeting of Congress against a president and his policies. Think of how this might have played out in the past. A Democratic-controlled Congress in the 1980s might, for instance, have called the Nobel Prize-winning Costa Rican President Oscar Arias to denounce President Ronald Reagan’s policies in Central America. A Democratic-controlled Congress in 2003 might have called French President Jacques Chirac to oppose President George W. Bush’s impending war in Iraq.

Does that sound implausible? Yes, it was implausible — until now.

But President Obama has been poking sticks in Republican eyes ever since November, and Republicans desperately needed to poke back to maintain credibility with their base. Since passing useful legislation was apparently not in the cards, this was all they could come up with. What a debacle.

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Kagan: Netanyahu Speech Is a Blunder

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Friday Cat Blogging – 27 February 2015

by MarceloKirke Posted on February 27, 2015

Mother Jones

My biopsy is scheduled for this morning, so once again you get early cat blogging. Hopper got center stage last week, so this week it’s Hilbert’s turn.

Speaking of Hopper, though, a few days ago she demonstrated the wonders of the internet to me. That wasn’t her intent, of course. Her intent was to chew through the charging cord of one of my landline phone extensions. This effectively turned the phone into a paperweight—and not even a very good one. But then I looked on the back of the charger and there was a model number etched into the plastic. So I typed it into Google. Despite the fact that this phone is more than a decade old, I was able to order two used replacements for $4 each within five minutes. Truly we live in a miraculous age.

But I still wish Hopper would stop chewing on every dangling cord in the house. Steps need to be taken, but I’m not quite sure yet what they’ll be.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 27 February 2015

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Bill O’Reilly Responds. We Annotate.

by Rosa54Nxuhep Posted on February 21, 2015

Mother Jones

On Thursday, Mother Jones published an article by Daniel Schulman and me documenting how Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has mischaracterized his wartime reporting experience. It noted that he has repeatedly stated that during his short stint as a CBS correspondent in the 1980s, he was in the “war zone” during the Falklands war between the United Kingdom and Argentina in 1982. He once claimed he had heroically rescued his cameraman in “a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands,” while being chased by army soldiers. Yet no American journalist reached the war zone in the Falkland Islands during this conflict. O’Reilly and his colleagues covered the war from Buenos Aires, which was 1,200 miles from the fighting.

O’Reilly responded to the story by launching a slew of personal invective. He did not respond to the details of the story. Instead, he called me a “liar,” a “left-wing assassin,” and a “despicable guttersnipe.” He said that I deserve “to be in the kill zone.” (You can read one of my responses here.) And in his show-opening “Talking Points memo” monologue on Friday evening, he continued the name-calling.

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Bill O’Reilly Responds. We Annotate.

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Blogging Isn’t Dead. But Old-School Blogging Is Definitely Dying.

by EpifaniBellamy Posted on January 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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With Andrew Sullivan giving up his blog, there are fewer and fewer of us old-school bloggers left. In this case, “old school” pretty much means a daily blog with frequent updates written by one person (or possibly two, but not much more). Ezra Klein thinks this is because conventional blogging doesn’t scale well:

At this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.

Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. Alyssa Rosenberg put it well at the Washington Post. “I no longer write with the expectation that you all are going to read every post and pick up on every twist and turn in my thinking. Instead, each piece feels like it has to stand alone, with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a clear conclusion.”

I’d add a couple of comments to this. First, Ezra is right about the conversational nature of blogging. There was lots of that in the early days, and very little now. Partly this is for the reason he identified: traffic is now driven far more by Facebook links than by links from fellow bloggers. Partly it’s also because multi-person blogs, which began taking over the blogosphere in the mid-aughts, make conversation harder. Most people simply don’t follow all the content in multi-person blogs, and don’t always pay attention to who wrote which post, so conversation becomes choppier and harder to follow. And partly it’s because conversation has moved on: first to comment sections, then to Twitter and other social media.

Second, speaking personally, I long ago decided that blog posts needed to be standalone pieces, so I’m not sure we can really blame that on new forms of social media. It was probably as early as 2005 or 2006 that I concluded two things. Not only do blog posts need to be standalone, but they can’t even ramble very much. You need to make one clear point and avoid lots of distractions and “on the other hands.” This is because blog readers are casual readers, and if you start making lots of little side points, that’s what they’re going to respond to. Your main point often simply falls by the wayside. So keep it short and focused. If you have a second point to make, just wait a bit and write it up separately not as a quick aside open to lots of interpretation, but with the attention it deserves.

And there’s a third reason Klein doesn’t mention: professionalism. I was one of the first amateur bloggers to turn pro, and in my case it was mostly an accident. But within a few years, old-school media outlets had started co-opting nearly all of the high-traffic bloggers. (I won’t say they co-opted the “best” bloggers, because who knows? In any case, what they wanted was high traffic, so that’s what they went for.) Matt Yglesias worked for a series of outlets, Steve Benen took over the Washington Monthly when I moved to MoJo, Ezra Klein went to the Washington Post and then started up Vox, etc. Ditto for Andrew Sullivan, who worked for Time, the Atlantic, and eventually began his own subscription-based site. It was very successful, but Sullivan turned out to be the only blogger who could pull that off. You need huge traffic to be self-sustaining in a really serious way, and he was just about the only one who had an audience that was both large and very loyal. Plus there’s another side to professionalism: the rise of the expert blogger. There’s not much question in my mind that this permanently changed the tone of the political blogosphere, especially on the liberal side. There’s just less scope for layman-style noodling when you know that a whole bunch of experts will quickly weigh in with far more sophisticated responses. Add to that the rise of professional journalists taking up their own blogs, and true amateurs became even more marginalized.

All of this led to blogs—Sullivan excepted—becoming less conversational in tone and sparking less conversation. There are probably lots of reasons for this, but partly I think it’s because professional blogs prefer to link to their own content, rather than other people’s. Josh Marshall’s TPM, for example, links almost exclusively to its own content, because that’s the best way to promote their own stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. It makes perfect sense. But it’s definitely a conversation killer.

In any case, most conversation now seems to have moved to Twitter. There are advantages to this: it’s faster and it’s open to more people. Blogs were democratizing, and Twitter is even more democratizing. You don’t have to start up your own blog and build up a readership to be heard. All you have to do is have a few followers and get rewteeted a bit. Needless to say, however, there are disadvantages too. Twitter is often too fast, and when you combine that with its 140-character limit, you end up with a lot of shrill and indignant replies. Sometimes this is deliberate: it’s what the tweeter really wants to say. But often it’s not. There’s a premium on responding quickly, since Twitter conversations usually last only hours if not minutes, and this means you’re often responding to a blog post in the heat of your very first reaction to something it says—often without even reading the full blog post first. In addition, it’s simply very difficult to convey nuance and tone in 140 characters. Even if you don’t mean to sound shrill and outraged, you often do. Now multiply that by the sheer size of Twitter, where a few initial irate comments can feed hundreds of others within minutes, and you have less a conversation than you do a mindless pile-on.

I’m not really making any judgments about all this. Personally, I miss old-school blogging and the conversations it started. But I also recognize that what I’m saying about Twitter is very much what traditional print journalists said about blogging back in the day. You have to respond within a day! You have to make your point in 500 words or less! Whatever happened to deeply considered long-form pieces that took weeks to compose and ran several thousand words? Sure, those conversations took months to unfold, but what’s the rush?

Well, they were right to an extent. And now conversations have become even more compressed. Some people think that’s great, others (like me) are more conflicted about it. When I respond to something, I usually want to make a serious point, and Twitter makes that awfully hard. Writing a coherent multi-part tweet is just way harder than simply writing a 500-word blog post. On the other hand, the tweet will get seen by far more people than the post and be far more timely.

As with everything, it’s a tradeoff. I miss old-school blogging. A lot of people say good riddance to it. And the world moves on.

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Blogging Isn’t Dead. But Old-School Blogging Is Definitely Dying.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 30 January 2015

by ArthurAEOG Posted on January 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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My fatigue level is off the charts today. I have no idea what’s causing this. But there are always plenty of catblogging pictures available, and you can hardly go wrong with Hilbert in a bag, can you? Enjoy.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 30 January 2015

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ISIS Fighters Lose Kobani In Win For Obama’s Iraq Strategy

by KaliWallwork Posted on January 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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From the LA Times:

Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border town of Kobani appeared poised Monday to deal a decisive defeat to Islamic State militants after months of street clashes and U.S. aerial bombardment, signaling a major setback for the extremist group.

….The apparent breakthrough shows how U.S. air power, combined with a determined allied force on the ground, can successfully confront Islamic State. The military watched with surprise as Islamic State continued sending hundreds of fighters, vehicles and weapons to Kobani, which was of no critical strategic importance to the overall fight but had become something of a public relations fight.

“Essentially, they said, ‘This is where we are going to make a stand’ and flooded the region with fighters,” said Col. Edward Sholtis, a spokesman for U.S. Air Force Central Command, in charge of air operations in the battle against the Islamic State.

My expert in all things Kurdish emailed me this comment today: “This is a big deal, and it proves the viability of Obama’s strategy of working with proxies in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS. My prediction is we won’t hear much boasting about it from Obama though. These aren’t the politically chosen proxies.”

I’ve been one of the skeptics of Obama’s strategy, and I’ll remain so until the Iraqi military demonstrates the same fighting ability as the Kurdish peshmerga. Kobani, after all, is more a symbolic victory than anything else, and ISIS continues to control large swathes of Iraq. Nonetheless, at a minimum this shows that ISIS is hardly unbeatable, something that Iraqi forces probably needed to see.

Bottom line: this is a proof of concept. When we can do the same thing in Mosul with Iraqi forces in the lead, then I’ll be a real believer.

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ISIS Fighters Lose Kobani In Win For Obama’s Iraq Strategy

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ANWR Proposal Shows That Obama’s Power to Set the Agenda Is Alive and Well

by Myrna Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest salvo in President Obama’s flurry of executive activity following the 2014 election:

President Obama proposed designating 1.4 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as protected wilderness, drawing cheers from environmentalists but setting off a bitter new battle Sunday with the Republican-controlled Congress over oil and gas drilling in pristine areas of northern Alaska.

The plan would permanently bar drilling and other forms of development in the 19.8-million-acre refuge’s coastal plain, a narrow strip between the Brooks Range mountains and the Arctic Ocean where caribou give birth. The area, estimated to hold 10.3 billion barrels of oil, is home to more than 200 species, including polar bears, wolverines, musk oxen and thousands of migratory birds.

Now, technically this is meaningless. ANWR has been a battleground for years, as much symbolic as anything else. The amount of oil it could produce isn’t really huge, but then again, the environmental damage that a pipeline would produce probably isn’t that huge either.1 In any case, the Interior Department already bans drilling in ANWR, and there’s no way that a Republican Congress is going to pass a bill to make a drilling ban permanent. So what’s the point of Obama’s proposal?

It’s simple: once again he’s using the agenda-setting power of the presidency. Basically, he’s making ANWR something that everyone now has to take a stand on. Talking heads will fulminate on one side or the other, and Republicans will respond by introducing legislation to open up ANWR to drilling. This isn’t something they were planning to spend time on, but now they probably will. Their base will demand it, as will the Republican caucus in the House and Senate. Nothing will come of it, of course, but it will eat up time that might otherwise have been spent on something else.

And that’s why Obama is doing this. It also lays down a marker and lets everyone know that Democrats are the party of natural beauty while Republicans are the party of Big Oil. It can’t hurt to make that clear. Still, that’s not the main goal here. The main goal is to toss some sand in the gears of Republican plans for the 115th Congress. Obama is proving once again that even with the opposition in control of Congress, he still has the power to decide what people are going to talk about.

1Please address all hate mail regarding this assertion to my editors. Thanks.

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ANWR Proposal Shows That Obama’s Power to Set the Agenda Is Alive and Well

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