Tag Archives: there

Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan May Be DOA, But It Should Be Fun Anyway

by MonserrateDLZ Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Speaking of Dave Camp’s tax reform plan, it’s out now. It may be DOA, but it’s out. In a nutshell, it reduces rates, reduces the number of tax brackets, and increases both the standard deduction and the child tax credit. As a result, many fewer people would have to file 1040 long forms. To make up for this, Camp proposes limiting or eliminating a raft of deductions and tax breaks. Here’s my favorite:

Preventing makers of violent video games from qualifying for the R&D tax credit.

Boo-yah! That’s the way to play culture war politics in a boring tax reform proposal. There are also references to “Wall Street tycoons”—not a phrase you normally hear from a Republican—and a proposal to end tax breaks that allow university presidents to live in mansions tax free. Populism!

Joking aside, I’ll give Camp credit for going after a long laundry list of very specific deductions. On the other hand, he also appears to finance his plan partly through an effective cut in the Earned Income Tax Credit. I can’t say that for sure without more details, but it sure looks that way on first inspection. The plan also “consolidates” higher education tax breaks, which might be a good idea, though it’s hard to tell without more details. If it’s just an excuse to reduce financial aid, it’s not so good.

There’s also a proposal for a small change to the mortgage interest deduction—a brave act even if it’s fairly paltry—and a proposal to partially end the carried interest loophole. Camp also proposes a 0.035 percent tax on big banks, which is probably a good idea. Camp repeals the AMT, which is a great idea, and funds it by eliminating the tax deduction for state and local taxes. This is a longtime favorite of conservatives because, as Camp says, “This deduction redistributes wealth to big-government, high-tax states from small-government, low-tax states.” In other words, it benefits blue states more than red states, so why not get rid of it?

He also wants to get rid of the NFL’s tax exemption. Sounds good to me.

Camp’s plan is long and includes upwards of a hundred specific tax deductions that he wants to reform or eliminate. There are enough caveats that it’s hard to tell exactly how far his proposals go, but again, kudos to him for making specific proposals at all. His plan may be DOA precisely because he was so specific, but kudos anyway. I’ll be interested in following the reaction as everyone figures out just whose ox would be gored by his various bullet points. Should be fun.

View original: 

Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan May Be DOA, But It Should Be Fun Anyway

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dave Camp’s Tax Reform Plan May Be DOA, But It Should Be Fun Anyway

The Fed Cares About Inflation 10 Times More Than It Cares About Unemployment

by 4ko9dra Posted on February 25, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ryan Avent, having exhausted his conventional analysis of the Fed’s 2008 transcripts, turns today to a more analytical approach: counting words. I think others have already made this point without numbers, but Avent’s most powerful finding is that the Fed cares way more about inflation than it does about unemployment:

There is only one winner in the dual mandate. The word “inflation” (or variants thereof, such as “inflationary”) was mentioned a cool 2,664 times in 2008; “unemployment” pops up just 275 times.

I’m assuming he played fair and also looked for variants of “unemployment,” like “employment” or “jobs.” In any case, I don’t think this comes as much of a surprise to anyone, since it’s been obvious for decades that the Fed not only doesn’t care about unemployment, but gets positively worried when too many people have jobs. That would mean the labor market is tight and workers might get paid more, you see, and that could be inflationary. Still, it’s nice to see this verified quantitatively.

Avent also found that there were fewer mentions of “recession” as the year went on, which seems odd but might not be. Early on, when it was still unclear if the economy was in recession, I suppose they argued about this a lot. By June, when there was no longer any question about it, they all took it for granted and no longer even needed to mention it.

As for the finding that laughter increased later in the year, I guess I can’t blame them. There’s only so much globe-destroying financial panic you can take without cracking a few jokes.

Original post – 

The Fed Cares About Inflation 10 Times More Than It Cares About Unemployment

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Fed Cares About Inflation 10 Times More Than It Cares About Unemployment

Share These Stats About Black America With the Racist In Your Life

by JuliaPage Posted on February 19, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Did you know that black high school students are more likely to have their homework checked than their peers from other groups? Or that black players make up about two-thirds of players in the NFL but get hit with more than 90 percent of unsportsmanlike penalties?

Black Stats, a new book by Oakland-based academic, author, and activist Monique Morris, explores that data and much more about black American life from education to the entertainment industry to the justice system. “There’s a lot of information that floats in the public domain about black America,” says Morris, and a lot of damaging numbers get tossed around without context. She hopes her book can debunk persistent myths and reset misleading narratives, explaining, for instance, that black overrepresentation in jails doesn’t mean the majority of the incarcerated population is black. She also explores areas that aren’t usually talked about and she says could use a lot more research, like sexual identity and the rising rate of acceptance of gays in the black community.

Morris talks about some of the surprising and lesser-known numbers she came across in her work, and you can see more in the charts below the video:

Follow this link:  

Share These Stats About Black America With the Racist In Your Life

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Share These Stats About Black America With the Racist In Your Life

Elizabeth Kolbert: "Humans Will Eventually Become Extinct"

by JuliusI82gkpps Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Things have been pretty boring, extinction-wise, since an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Until humans came along, that is. Most folks might not know it, but there’s an mass extinction happening right before our eyes, and guess who is causing it? To better understand this madness, The New Yorker‘s acclaimed climate journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert clomped through the tropics, crawled into the caves at Lascaux, and emerged with a new book, The Sixth Extinction, which will be published by Henry Holt & Co. on February 11.

Also read Julia Whitty’s 2007 cover story on mass extinction and the hazards of vanishing biodiversity.

Kolbert’s book brims with the fascinating and harrowing details of humanity’s brutal and pervasive impacts on other species. Did you know, for instance, that “before humans finally did in the Neanderthals, they had sex with them”? Well they did. And as a result, Kobert writes, most of us are part Neanderthal—up to 4 percent.

No matter what Donald Trump says, it’s clear that global warming is rapidly changing conditions on our planet. But there are other large-scale effects at play. For instance, acidification of the oceans and rampant deforestation, both human-caused, are putting serious strain on ecosystems, and some of them are on the verge of crashing. As one ecologist put it, “we’re busy sawing off the limb on which we perch.”

Ultimately, Kolbert says, humans, too, will go extinct. I recently reached the author at home in Western Massachusetts to get a better grasp on the scale of the problems our descendants will face.

Mother Jones: I was fascinated by your discussion of the “perception of incongruity,” and how humans create more and more elaborate explanations to account for contradictory evidence. Where does this turn up in the modern debate on extinction?

Elizabeth Kolbert: Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn’t fit into an existing paradigm. For a long time the story that we’ve been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn’t particularly special. What I’m trying to convey in the book is that we are unusual. We turn out to be the one species altering the planet like this, and that puts people back in the position of being responsible for what happens. There’s a big resistance to the idea that we could be such a big deal. The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time you can’t find anything like us.

MJ: Is it still the case that we don’t have a general theory of mass extinction?

EK: Yes absolutely. We can’t say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.

MJ: So even though it appears cyclical…

EK: It is not cyclical at all! That whole idea has been debunked. It’s completely random as far as we can tell.

MJ: The people you came across during your investigation bring so much expertise and color to the book. What was your sense of their feelings toward the extinction? Alarm? Cynicism? Anger?

EK: That’s a really good question. I think alarm is a good word. I think there’s real sadness. If you’re a conservation biologist in many fields these days, you’re seeing your study subject disappear. People are in the position where they’re chronicling radical decline, and that is not a position that conservation biologists want to be in. Frustration would be another word. Things that evidently should be done are not being done. There’s also fascination. Grim fascination. We are seeing changes that should take thousands of years. That is amazing from a scientific point of view.

MJ: You write about a phenomenon called “overkill,” where first we killed off the megafauna—the large animals—and then the Neanderthals. If we accept the hypothesis that modern humans are responsible for the demise of these species, does that mean the sixth extinction has been happening ever since we came along?

EK: Yes. Laughs. how’s that for an answer? You know, we’ve been around for 200,000 years. Some people would say there’s even evidence that our ancestors were part of extinction in Africa, but I think that’s heavily disputed. It’s pretty widely accepted that the Australian megafauna were done in by people. That was 40,000 years ago. But when you look at the vast sweep of history, it will all be compressed down to this tiny little layer.

MJ: Given this timescale, it seems like an everyday person might struggle to grasp mass extinction, since you can’t actually see the degree to which it is happening in our time. How do you get around that?

EK: There’s this idea of shifting baselines. It was coined by a guy named Jeremy Jackson. It’s the idea that every generation takes what it sees, and says, “Okay, well, that’s the norm.” The fact that 100 years ago there were many more species? Well, that’s been erased because you weren’t here for that. That problem is really severe. Most of us live in parts of the world where we don’t expect to see much, and we wouldn’t necessarily notice things that are crashing. Bats are crashing, and if you’ve been watching even in one brief lifetime you would notice that there are many fewer bats. If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.

MJ: The book kind of shows us how these animals are getting screwed at every turn. In one chapter you write about how the world is changing in ways that force species to migrate, and at the same time creating barriers to that movement. Is this something of a perfect storm?

EK: We don’t entirely know yet. But if you’re asking in the abstract, “What could you do to really mess up a lot of species?” it would be hard to design a better system than the one we’ve got. Practically everything is on the move now, in some way, because of climate change. And they’re going to run up against all these man-made barriers. We’ve completely changed the rules of the game. The territory they’d like to move to just isn’t there.

MJ: After spending time with with Suci, the Sumatran rhino, you wrote about experiencing a “flicker of interspecies recognition.” Would you attribute part of the human callousness towards the plight of animals to a scarcity of that experience?

Elizabeth Kolbert Barry Goldstein

EK: Really interesting question. I don’t know the answer to that. We have all this Paleolithic art that suggests that our ancestors really venerated animals and that they depended on wild animals to survive—as opposed to domesticated animals that we depend on. Would it radically change things if we had more rhinos in our midst? I kind of suspect it would. You know, a rhino is a grand animal. And if we did have more experience with that, as opposed to factory-farmed cows….On the other hand, the colonists who came to this country and saw the amazing herds of buffalo and slaughtered them very close to the point of extinction, which seems impossible to imagine, because the herds were so great. So that would be countervailing evidence.

MJ: At one point, you note the possibility that “eventually travel and global commerce will cease.” What does that suggest about the future of humans on this planet?

EK: Humans will eventually become extinct. People treat that as a radical thing to say. But the fossil record shows us that everything eventually becomes extinct. It depends what “eventually” means. But the idea that were going to be around for the rest of global history… I don’t think there’s any scientist who would suggest that is true. It could be millions of years from now. We may leave descendants that are human-like.

MJ: Is this book a call to action?

EK: I very carefully avoided saying what it was. What I’ve laid out requires action commensurate with the problem. We’re talking really huge global-scale change, and I did not feel that I had the prescription for that kind of action so I’m going to leave it to the reader.

Continue reading:

Elizabeth Kolbert: "Humans Will Eventually Become Extinct"

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Elizabeth Kolbert: "Humans Will Eventually Become Extinct"

3 Badass Olympic Athletes Go for the Gold

by Cindy Holman Posted on February 1, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As the world gears up for the Sochi Games, we reached out to these three amazing women to talk about everything from their first runs to high-speed crashes to race and gender politics. The opening ceremonies take place on Friday, February 7. Here’s the complete schedule of events.

Erich Schlegel/Zuma

Jazmine Fenlator, 28, bobsled

A lot of people think I’m on the Jamaican bobsled team. It’s a question every black bobsledder gets, even if you’re wearing a USA shirt. My dad used to love watching Cool Runnings with me. When I told him I got an invite to try out for the US bobsled team, his first words were: “Sanka! You dead, mon? Let me kiss your lucky egg!” Growing up biracial, I never really thought about things: I mean, you have some acceptance issues, but I grew up in a predominately white town. The side of my family I’m closest with is all white, so it’s not necessarily a topic of conversation. You get a lot of naive questions, but I welcome those. The more people I can teach and tell about bobsled, the more cheers we’ll have in Sochi. Not many people can relate to bobsled, and it’s hard to spectate. It’s a grueling, blue-collar sport. To support my bobsled habit, I’ve sometimes worked three jobs in the offseason. We do all the work on our sleds. We carry our sleds. There’s no caddy, there’s no pit crew. We handle all those things on top of trying to be the best athletes within our sport in the world.

Click here to read our extended interview with Fenlator. Women’s “bobsleigh” heats begin on February 18.

Erich Schlegel/Zuma

Katie Uhlaender, 29, skeleton

I always challenged men in foot races or whatever as a kid growing up, because it was a way of challenging myself—but you have to accept that men are born with testosterone. You can beat them for so long, but eventually they’re gonna catch up. There is a double standard: My father was a major league baseball player, and I grew up thinking I could have the same attitude on the field that he did. When I did that in real life, people thought I was a total bi-atch. Laughs. Women are held to a different standard, but there’s a reason. Because we are mothers, we have a different role in society. There are certain benefits we get being women—and we deserve them! But don’t take advantage of them. You have to walk the line and show that you have self-worth. If you lose yourself, then no one’s going to respect you. Miley Cyrus, the girl crossed the line! You can be sexy without licking a hammer.

Click here to read our extended interview with Uhlaender. Women’s skeleton commences on February 13.

Mitchell Haaseth/NBC

Maddie Bowman, 20, halfpipe freeskiing

Some people don’t understand that you can ski in the halfpipe. They think it’s cool and kinda crazy. It’s like a polar bear-grizzly bear mix—a pizzly. It’s a new species and it’s super badass! I was a racer before, but it felt a little too serious. My parents were a little resistant, but then they skied with us and realized we think about things before we jump off of stuff. They definitely get nervous. You can’t have my mom video a run at all because it’s so shaky—she always misses it! The first time I ever did a “left nine”—it’s two and a half spins, and I’m spinning down the wall, rotating to the left—I was so excited I completely forgot the rest of my run; I just sort of made it up. Most skiers, we can think pretty quickly on our feet—or off our feet if we’re falling. We like to push the limits, but when the limits push back, it’s always a rude awakening. Concussions and injuries are something everyone worries about. But you can’t be out there worrying about getting hurt, or else you’re more likely to get hurt. If I got hurt, knock on wood, I don’t know what I would do. Maybe I’d actually be a real college student.

Click here to read more about Bowman. The women’s halfpipe competition is on February 20.

View original article:

3 Badass Olympic Athletes Go for the Gold

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 3 Badass Olympic Athletes Go for the Gold

How to Stop Talking About the Weather—and Start Understanding It

by NoemiStrahan Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

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

Talking about the weather used to be a euphemism for not talking about anything at all.

No matter how many times scientists tell us that weather isn’t climate, the day-to-day weather sure does remind us of the long-term trends that together form the climate.

Is the unseasonably warm, dry weather we’re having in California a pleasant occasion for pleasantries or an impending sign of planetary doom? Maybe both.

The same goes for hurricanes and polar vortices and any other anomaly. We talk about our strange local weather, but we are also talking about our planet’s future.

And what that means is: Talking about the weather no longer simply requires looking outside or checking the temperature on an app. We need context, long-term trend lines, analysis, and—because why not—also data and maps and webcams and pictures from space.

Here’s how to elevate your weather-talking game with help from @burritojustice, the best Twitter feed for eclectic, unexpected links (especially about the weather and historical mapping).

There are three general types of resources here. First, there are people and institutions that analyze the weather and tell us about them. The second category is unfiltered public weather data and imagery. And the last tranche of resources deliver forecasts or computer models on which forecasts are based.


People and Institutions

The first stop for budding weather nerds is Jeff Masters’ Wunderground blog. This is meteorology, raw and uncut. Masters breaks down newsy weather phenomena better than anyone.

On Twitter, friends swear by @EricHolthaus, a meteorologist who recently joined Slate. Others love Anthony Sagliana, who writes for Accuweather. There are many meteorologists with prominent online presences, like Cliff Mass for the Pacific Northwest/West, the Capital Weather Gang for the DC region, and @phillywx for the Delaware Valley. Check out, for example, Mass’ look at Western snowpack as seen in satellite imagery from 2013 and 2014.

It’s also worth following the regional Twitter accounts that interest you. For example, if you’re interested in tornadoes, the NWS’s Norman, Oklahoma, regional office is a must follow. Or if you follow space launches out of Johnson Space Center, there’s a feed just for you.

During a weather event, these Twitter feeds often present the most interesting Weather Service information in a way that’s easy to access.

If you’re not a Twitter user, they have a variety of ways to receive important alerts. Specific types of weather events tend to have their own web outposts, too. For hurricanes, for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains the National Hurricane Center.

There are also several tools and apps that provide a lot of data all in one place for your local weather. The standard is probably Weather Underground, but there are many sites. Check out, for example, Weatherspark for a detail-rich interface.

But sometimes all that data can be overwhelming. In that case, there are cheeky feeds like @OneWordSFWthr, which provides the San Francisco forecast in one word. Today? Muddled.

And in between these two extremes, there are a variety of apps that try to simplify and beautify the weather experience. Probably the best known is Dark Sky, which has the killer feature of telling you when it’s going to rain just about right where you are.


Weather Data and Imagery

The core resource in this category is, of course, the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA. You can find all kinds of stuff:

Radar maps
River and lake gauge data (to assess flooding)
Precipitation data
Air quality readings including ozone, smoke, and dust
Satellite imagery in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum

That’s just the beginning, too. Of particular interest, I think, is the Climate Prediction Center, which does longer term analyses. For example, let’s say you wanted to know how anomalous a given temperature was relative to the long-term average of a place. There’s a microsite for temperature anomaly maps.

And there are also:

Long-term precipitation charts for cities
Long-term temperature plots for cities
Long-term trend plots for the country

Among non-governmental websites, the company Unisys posts a variety of weather data. Here’s just a sampling:

Weather front position maps

Wind chill maps

Heat index maps
Wind streamline maps
Sea surface temperature maps
Sea surface temperature anomaly maps
Individual weather station time-series plots

And there’s a whole set of data about the upper air including temperatures at given atmospheric pressures and heights of certain temperatures. It’s wild. There’s so much.

The data keeps going. NOAA can give you surface temperatures from 9,000 weather stations, some of which have data stretching back to the beginning of the 1900s. In certain local areas, like San Francisco, people have made this history easier to access. Perhaps the coolest of these projects is @datapointed’s look at rainfall patterns in the Bay before and after Valentine’s Day.

Or if you prefer a more visual interface, Forecast.io brings you Quicksilver:

The metapoint with these last several links is that because weather data is so widely available, there are a lot of people doing interesting things with it.


Forecasts and Models

Weather forecasting has come a long way, in part due to the increasing availability of data and the sophistication of the simulations that forecasters can run. In the section above, we saw data sources, current and historical. In this section, we look at the models and the forecasts they generate.

The National Weather Service creates the Global Forecast System Model, the only one for which all data is available over the Internet. For that reason, most of the weather products you see out there (or in the App Store) are based on NWS data. But just for medium-range global forecasting, there are four other global models. (This is to say nothing of other types of models.)

Each model has been trained with certain types of data and makes certain assumptions. Global models lose some resolution, but they provide ways to understand how various weather patterns interact around earth. More regional models might be able to incorporate more local data, but they might miss out on effects from more planetary forces. Even between global weather models, they might weight some factors more heavily than others.

For that reason, forecasters might look at more than one model to understand a given weather phenomenon. Meteorologists can also look at “ensemble” forecasts that combine the output from many different models. The NWS produces the Global Ensemble Forecast System, which is fascinating to look at because one can see the variation that the model runs show between each other. Here’s one run of the model, showing the contour lines for atmospheric pressure at 500mb over North America. Note how in this forecast, which is for Saturday, the lines representing the various models have begun to diverge.

There’s even a probability tool that lets you probe the differences between the models in the GEFS for individual stations!

Now, this is a dense and technical world. It’s a bit beyond the scope of this post or my expertise to lead you through how to effectively test weather predictions with the models that exist.

But, there are three tools for probing models that you should be aware of:

NOAA’s Model Guidance (With this index)
Weather Underground‘s simplified model prediction mapping tool
Unisys’s model exploration tools

All three let you explore the models discussed here as well as the North American Mesoscale Model, Rapid Refresh Model, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model.

Continued here – 

How to Stop Talking About the Weather—and Start Understanding It

Posted in alo, Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How to Stop Talking About the Weather—and Start Understanding It

Enviros and climate scientists continue their fight over nuclear power

by Adalberto7975 Posted on January 11, 2014

Enviros and climate scientists continue their fight over nuclear power

By

Shutterstock

More than 300 environmental, peace, and anti-nuclear groups and leaders published an open letter this week urging four prominent climate scientists to stop “embracing nuclear power” as a tool for curbing climate-changing pollution.

In response, one the four scientists reaffirmed his reluctant support for nuclear power, denying that he embraces the technology, but saying there’s “no justification” for claims it could never become safe or affordable.

The debate among environmentalists over nuclear power flared up in November, when the four scientists published a letter calling for increased development and deployment of “safer nuclear energy systems.” The letter was written by some of the climate community’s best and brightest: NASA scientist-turned-activist James Hansen, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Kerry Emanuel of MIT, and climatologist Tom Wigley.

That letter triggered a cavalcade of opinion articles, many of them arguing that nuclear power is too dangerous and much more expensive than wind and solar power. And now many critics of the scientists’ arguments — from tiny groups to big ones like Greenpeace USA and the Environmental Working Group — have united to voice their opposition in this new letter. Here are some highlights:

We respectfully disagree with your analysis that nuclear power can safely and affordably mitigate climate change.

Nuclear power is not a financially viable option. Since its inception it has required taxpayer subsidies and publically financed indemnity against accidents. New construction requires billions in public subsidies to attract private capital and, once under construction, severe cost overruns are all but inevitable. As for operational safety, the history of nuclear power plants in the US is fraught with near misses, as documented by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and creates another financial and safety quagmire — high-level nuclear waste. Internationally, we’ve experienced two catastrophic accidents for a technology deemed to be virtually ‘failsafe’. …

Moreover, due to the glacial pace of deployment, the absence of any possibility of strategic technological breakthroughs, and the necessity, as you correctly say, of mitigating climate risks in the near term, nuclear technology is ill-suited to provide any real impact on greenhouse gas emissions in that timeframe. On the contrary, the technologies perfectly positioned now, due to their cost and level of commercialization, to attain decisive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in the near term are renewable, energy efficiency, distributed power, demand response, and storage technologies.

Instead of embracing nuclear power, we request that you join us in supporting an electric grid dominated by energy efficiency, renewable, distributed power and storage technologies.

Grist asked the climate scientists for a response, and here’s an email we received from Caldeira:

It is time for people to rethink their positions on nuclear power, and make arguments based on facts rather than prejudices.

Any good scientist and any good citizen should be constantly re-examining their positions, so the basic call for us to rethink our position on nuclear power is most welcome. I hope that the signers of this Civil Society Institute letter can bring themselves to re-examine the nuclear power issue with the same objectivity and lack-of-bias that they seek from us.

The letter confusedly suggests that I “embrace nuclear power”, and implies that I somehow discount the importance and potential of solar, wind, and efficiency. I cannot speak on behalf of my colleagues, but at least in my case, these claims are far from the truth.

We embrace things that we love. I don’t love nuclear power. Nuclear power has brought us Chernobyl and Fukushima. If the current industry were scaled up enough to solve the climate problem, there would be one such accident each year — and that is clearly unacceptable. Were I king of the world, I would decree that solar, wind, and efficiency would be the primary means we deploy to solve the climate problem.

But there is no energy storage system that works at the scale of the modern megalopolis. We need a way to power civilization when the sun is not shining and when the wind is not blowing. In a modern real economy, not ruled by benevolent kings, reliable power is required at competitive prices. There are very few technologies that can provide this reliable baseload power. Fossil fuels and nuclear power are the two leading candidates. I think an objective assessment of the facts shows that fossil fuels are far more dangerous than even today’s nuclear power.

But I do not defend today’s nuclear power industry. Even though most nuclear power plants have an excellent safety record, there are an important few that do not. There is no justification for the claim that this important type of electricity generation can never be made sufficiently safe and inexpensive.

To say that an entire category of technology can never be sufficiently improved is, I think, to adopt a position of technological myopia, where one lacks to the capacity to imagine that future technologies can differ substantially from today’s technologies.

I do not embrace nuclear power. There is no power source that one wants to embrace. They all have negative consequences. I do not want a solar PV factory, a massive wind turbine, or a nuclear power plant in my back yard. But I want the juice. The question is not about what power source I embrace, but about what power source I might think myself capable of not rejecting. Many people want to reject power sources, but want the juice that comes from those power sources.

In summary, I applaud the signers of the Civil Society Institute letter for their concern regarding climate change and for their support of solar, wind, and efficiency. Their call for us to rethink our positions on nuclear power is most welcome, and I ask only that they rethink their position with respect to nuclear power with the same degree of receptivity and objectivity that they ask of us.

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.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Climate & Energy

See original – 

Enviros and climate scientists continue their fight over nuclear power

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, ATTRA, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Safer, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Enviros and climate scientists continue their fight over nuclear power

McDonald’s will shift (very slowly) to sustainable beef

by AntoineRuggles Posted on January 7, 2014

McDonald’s will shift (very slowly) to sustainable beef

By

rob_rob2001

We aren’t suggesting that you try this, but should you venture into a McDonald’s a few years from now and order a hamburger, some of the beef you end up eating may have come from a sustainably raised cow.

The fast-food giant’s first planned purchases of frozen beef patties from “verified sustainable sources” will begin in 2016, the company announced today. That’s an important step because McDonald’s is a huge international dealer in beef — it sells more than $5 billion a year worth of Big Macs and less iconically branded hamburgers. Here’s more from Joel Makower at GreenBiz:

“Our vision is to buy verifiable, sustainable beef in the future for all of our beef,” said Bob Langert, McDonald’s vice president, global sustainability. “We have achieved internal alignment and energy around that aspirational goal, which is a big task,” he told me during a November visit to the company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill.

Langert says McDonald’s isn’t yet ready to commit to a specific quantity it will purchase in 2016, or when it might achieve its “aspirational goal” of buying 100 percent of its beef from “verified sustainable sources.” (The company will only say that, “We will focus on increasing the annual amount each year.”) Realistically, it could take a decade or more to achieve the 100-percent goal.

But what is sustainable beef, exactly? (Is it ground off the hide of an ever-suffering but immortal cow, perhaps?) There is no clear definition, so McDonalds is working with other food giants and the World Wildlife Fund to try to figure that out. They’re collaborating through a group known as the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. Again from GreenBiz:

The group developed six draft principles that the membership is currently considering, along with multiple criteria within each of those principles. The principles cover people (human rights, safe and healthy work environment), community (culture, heritage, employment, land rights, health), animal health and welfare, food safety and quality, natural resources (ecosystem health) and efficiency and innovation (reducing waste, optimizing production, economic vitality).

This is part of a bigger push by McDonald’s to be more green and socially responsible:

Beef isn’t the only sustainability issue the company is looking at. For years, the company has been addressing the environmental and social impacts of its supply chain, one ingredient at a time. The company’s Sustainable Land Management Commitment, unveiled in 2011, requires suppliers to gradually source food and materials from sustainably managed land, although there are no specific timelines, and it is initially focusing on beef, poultry, fish, coffee, palm oil and packaging. Notably missing for now are pork, potatoes and other produce.

There’s plenty more that is notably missing, including a willingness to pay workers a living wage.

Still, the beef shift should bring some real environmental and climate benefits. Watch for more on that from GreenBiz later this week, in parts 2 and 3 of its series on McDonald’s and beef.


Source
Exclusive: Inside McDonald’s quest for sustainable beef, GreenBiz

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.

Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

,

Food

Excerpt from – 

McDonald’s will shift (very slowly) to sustainable beef

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on McDonald’s will shift (very slowly) to sustainable beef

"It’s Hucking Yourself Downhill Super-Fast"

by Jonelle8381 Posted on December 30, 2013

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

As far as Katie Uhlaender can tell, skeleton—which involves hurtling yourself face-first on a sled down an icy course at top speeds of nearly 90 miles an hour—is the safest sport she has ever tried. “I’ve had eight surgeries,” she says, “but none of them were from skeleton.”

Four years ago, preparing for the Vancouver Olympics, Uhlaender twice shattered her left knee—the first time in a backcountry snowmobile accident—requiring four surgeries and keeping her on crutches until 20 weeks before the Games. Add in the emotional pain of the death of her father, former major league outfielder Ted Uhlaender, and it’s no wonder that she struggled to an 11th-place finish in Vancouver.

Now, for the second Olympics in a row, Uhlaender is coming off an injury. This time, it’s skeleton-related: She suffered a concussion on a training run in Lake Placid a few months ago and was limited throughout the fall. “It was the first time in 10 years that I’ve had to not take the second run,” she says.

With Sochi on the horizon, I chatted with the 2012 world champ about how she got her start on the sled, how to slide without thinking, and how to manage the double-standard between men and women, in sports and beyond:

Mother Jones: So how did you ever get started in skeleton?

Katie Uhlaender: I just happened to get to meet someone completely random and got sucked in before I knew better. Laughs. I just met a girl who was a bobsledder, and she talked me into trying it. Three weeks into it I won junior nationals, fourth week I went to junior worlds, eighth week I won senior nationals. I kind of started winning right away, and it was either go to college and get a Ph.D. or become an Olympian. So I basically made a choice.

MJ: Had you played a lot of sports growing up?

KU: My father was a major league baseball player, so if you weren’t an athlete, you weren’t cool. I just was an athlete and was looking for a sport, and that’s what happened. I just took advantage of an opportunity and made a choice.

MJ: What was it like to have so much success so early?

KU: It’s all relative, right? First, when I went to junior worlds, I was conflicted because I didn’t feel like I deserved it. And then I talked to my dad, and he referenced his first at-bat in the big leagues. He couldn’t stop shaking. And then he realized that every legend before him took the same steps he took up to the plate. Once you get to the plate, you have two options: You either quit, or you try to hit the ball.

Continue Reading »

Link: 

"It’s Hucking Yourself Downhill Super-Fast"

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on "It’s Hucking Yourself Downhill Super-Fast"

10 Reasons That Long-Term Unemployment Is a National Catastrophe

by MichelineConte Posted on December 23, 2013

Mother Jones

Unemployment is bad. Obviously long-term unemployment is worse. But it’s not just a little worse, it’s horrifically worse. As a companion to our eight charts that describe the problem, here are the top ten reasons why long-term unemployment is such a national catastrophe:

  1. It’s way higher than it’s ever been before. When the headline unemployment rate peaked in 2010, it was actually a bit lower than the peak during the 1980 recession and only a point higher than the 1973 recession. As bad as it was, it was something we’d faced before. But the long-term unemployment rate is a whole different story. It peaked at a rate nearly double the worst we’d ever seen in the past, and it’s been coming down only slowly ever since.
  2. It’s widespread. There’s a common belief that long-term unemployment mostly affects older workers and only in certain industries. In fact, with the exception of the construction industry, which was hurt especially badly during the 2007-08 recession, “the long-term unemployed are fairly evenly distributed across the age and industry spectrum.”
  3. It’s brutal. Obviously long-term unemployment produces a sharp loss of income, with all the stress that entails. But it does more. It produces deep distress, worse mental and physical health, higher mortality rates, hampers children’s educational progress, and lowers their future earnings. Megan McArdle summarizes the research findings this way: “Short of death or a debilitating terminal disease, long-term unemployment is about the worst thing that can happen to you in the modern world. It’s economically awful, socially terrible, and a horrifying blow to your self-esteem and happiness. It cuts you off from the mass of your peers and puts stress on your family, making it likely that further awful things, like divorce or suicide, will be in your near future.”
  4. It’s long-lasting. Cristobal Young reports that “job loss has consequences that linger even after people return to work. Finding a job, on average, recovers only about two thirds of the initial harm of losing a job….Evidence from Germany finds subjective scarring of broadly similar magnitude that lasts for at least 3 to 5 years.“
  5. It dramatically reduces the prospect of getting another job. There’s always been plenty of anecdotal evidence that employers don’t like job candidates who have long spells of unemployment, but recent research suggests that this attitude has become even worse in the current weak economy. Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Fed, sent out a bunch of fictitious resumes for 600 job openings. Each batch of resumes was slightly different (industry experience, job switching history, etc.), and all of these things had a small effect on the chance of getting a callback. But one thing had a huge effect: being unemployed for six months or more. If you were one of the long-term unemployed, it was all but impossible to even get considered for a job opening.
  6. It turns cyclical unemployment into structural unemployment. What we’ve mostly had during the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery has been cyclical unemployment. This is unemployment caused by a simple lack of demand, and it goes away when the economy picks up. But structural unemployment is worse: it’s caused by a mismatch between the skills employers want and the skills workers have. It’s far more pernicious and far harder to combat, and it’s what happens when cyclical unemployment is allowed to metastasize. “Skills become obsolete, contacts atrophy, information atrophies, and they get stigmatized,” says Harry Holzer of Georgetown University.” Economists call this effect “hysteresis,” and there’s plenty of evidence that we’re suffering from it for perhaps the first time in recent American history.
  7. It hurts the economy. A recent study, which Paul Krugman called the “blockbuster paper” of last month’s IMF research conference, concludes that “by tolerating high unemployment we have inflicted huge damage on our long-run prospects.” How much? The authors suggest that not only has this cut GDP growth, it’s even cut potential GDP growth. They estimate the damage at about 7 percent per year—which represents a loss of roughly $3,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.
  8. Cutting off unemployment benefits makes things even worse. Cutting off benefits obviously hurts the unemployed in the pocketbook. But there’s more to it than that. Since you have to keep looking for a job to qualify for benefits, many discouraged job seekers have less incentive to keep looking when their benefits run out. This means they drop out of the official numbers and are no longer counted as formally unemployed. In other words, because we’ve allowed unemployment benefits to expire for so many people, the real long-term unemployment rate is probably even worse than the official figures say it is.
  9. There still aren’t enough jobs to go around. In a normal economy, there might be good reason to keep unemployment benefits short: it motivates people to go out and look for work. But that’s not the problem right now. The number of job seekers for every open job has declined since its 2009 peak, but there are still three job seekers for every available job, which means that this simply isn’t a matter of incentives. It’s a matter of there being too few jobs for everyone. Conservative scholar Michael Strain uses a simple analogy to get this point across: “If you look at the long-term unemployed, a good chunk of them have children. A good chunk are married. A good chunk are college-educated or have had some college and in their prime earning years….It strikes me as implausible that this person is engaged in a half-hearted job search.”
  10. Practically everyone, liberal and conservative alike, agrees that this is a catastrophe. And yet, we continue to do nothing about it. Republicans in Congress have declined to extend unemployment benefits further, and they show no sign of changing their minds when Congress reconvenes in January. Democrats have a plan to fight for further benefits by linking them to a farm bill that Republicans want to pass, and right now that’s pretty much the best hope we have to offer the workers who have been most brutally savaged by the Great Recession.

Source:

10 Reasons That Long-Term Unemployment Is a National Catastrophe

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Pines, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 10 Reasons That Long-Term Unemployment Is a National Catastrophe