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Obama Just Cracked Down on Pollution From Fracking

by Betsy1054icbdyl Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday released the final version of new federal rules intended to curb emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas. Methane, which is the main component of natural gas, had previously been unregulated. There’s a mounting pile of evidence suggesting that as the United States relies increasingly on gas to produce electricity, methane emissions are much higher than most people expected them to be.

That’s a problem for the fight against climate change. Methane emissions are far lower than carbon dioxide emissions, and methane survives in the atmosphere for a relatively short period of time. But methane is far more effective at trapping heat than CO2 is, which makes it a significant near-term warming threat. As I reported in a deep dive on methane yesterday:

When unburned methane leaks into the atmosphere, it can help cause dramatic warming in a relatively short period of time. Methane emissions have long been a missing piece in the country’s patchwork climate policy…The natural gas system produces methane emissions at nearly every step of the process, from the well itself to the pipe that carries gas into your home. Around two-thirds of those emissions are “intentional,” meaning they occur during normal use of equipment. For example, some pneumatic gauges use the pressure of natural gas to flip on or off and emit tiny puffs of methane when they do so. The other one-third comes from so-called “fugitive” emissions, a.k.a. leaks, that happen when a piece of equipment cracks or otherwise fails.

The lack of regulations on methane was one reason why President Barack Obama’s climate strategy, which hinges on swapping the country’s coal consumption for natural gas, has been frowned upon by some environmentalists. Even today’s regulations are only a partial solution, since they only apply to new and modified natural gas infrastructure, not systems that already exist. And by some analysts’ reckoning, more than 70 percent of gas-sector methane emissions from now until 2025 will come from sources that already exist.

Still, the regulation announced today achieves one of the final remaining big items on Obama’s climate checklist. It aims to reduce gas-sector methane emissions 40 to 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025 by tightening the allowed emissions from pumps, compressors, wells, and other infrastructure; requiring more frequent surveys for leaks; and implementing a data-gathering survey that will give officials and companies a better understanding of just how much methane leakage there really is. The EPA expects the regulations to cost $530 million by 2025 but to produce $690 million in environmental benefits.

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Obama Just Cracked Down on Pollution From Fracking

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Liberals Are Picking On Conservatives Again and John Thune Wants Them to Stop It

by IsabellErnest Posted on May 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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The latest micro-flap for conservatives to feel victimized by is an allegation by one guy that the Facebook team that selects “trending” topics is staffed by a bunch of Ivy League 20-something liberals:

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

That was yesterday. Here is today:

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, led by Republican Sen. John Thune, has launched an inquiry in response to recent news that Facebook was reportedly suppressing conservative news items in the “trending” section of the site. The committee, which oversees Internet communication and media issues, drafted a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking about the curated section, telling the tech giant to “arrange for your staff including employees responsible for trending topics to brief committee staff on this issue.” Thune signed the letter, which also asks for “a list of all news stories removed from or injected into the Trending Topics section since January 2014.”

Here’s my question: Even if the allegations are true, in what way is this the business of the United States Senate? Facebook is a private entity and it can highlight any kind of news it wants. Ditto for the Drudge Report, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Mother Jones. Thune should take a closer look at the First Amendment before he goes any further.

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Liberals Are Picking On Conservatives Again and John Thune Wants Them to Stop It

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Drought is a life-or-death situation for low-lying islands

by LeilaniSandberg Posted on May 7, 2016

Drought is a life-or-death situation for low-lying islands

By on May 7, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

From the vantage point of a boat bobbing on the deep blue waters of Majuro Lagoon, the encircling shores of the Pacific coral atoll are normally verdant with tropical vegetation. But on a recent sailing excursion with friends, Angela Saunders was struck by how brown and withered the island looked.

“The vibrant color of all the trees was gone,” Saunders, a Majuro-based program manager with the International Organization for Migration, wrote in an email. “It was like someone put dampers on the world.”

Majuro, capital of the Marshall Islands, is an atoll in the Pacific Ocean with a land area of about four square miles. It is home to about 30,000 people.

Christopher Michel

It is a scene that is playing out across the hundreds of low-lying islands and atolls scattered across a vast swath of the western Pacific Ocean broadly known as Micronesia. One of the strongest El Niños on record has curtailed the rains that are the lifeblood of most of the region’s communities and ushered in an extreme drought that has left inhabitants in a precarious situation.

Wells have become brackish or run dry; the rain barrels that perch on the corners of houses have little or no rainwater left in them. Water rationing is limited to a couple of hours a day in some of the worst-hit communities, while expensive reverse-osmosis machines have been shipped out to the most far-flung atolls to make the seawater drinkable. Staple foods like breadfruit and bananas have shriveled on the trees, inedible.

Worries over acute food and water shortages, as well as the spread of disease, have prompted several of the affected island nations to issue disaster declarations in order to receive assistance from the United States and other countries.

“Drought in the U.S. is kind of an inconvenience … but out here it’s a life-or-death kind of situation,” Chip Guard, a meteorologist with the main regional U.S. National Weather Service office in Guam, said.

While El Niño is waning, it will be weeks or months before the rains gradually return to normal levels. Even then, it will take time for crops, rain catchments, and groundwater levels to recover, continuing the strain on locals well into the summer.

“Every day longer the drought lasts, the more you hear about it,” Saunders said. “In the store, on the streets.”

El Niño effects

El Niño tends to dry out the islands of Micronesia because it shifts the main area of storm activity in the tropical Pacific eastward and away from the region, following the commensurate eastward displacement of the pool of warm waters that fuel those storms.

The western- and northern-most islands tend to fall into drought first, following the gradual eastward migration of the rains, and stay in drought longer. Palau, the westernmost island chain in the region, to the southeast of the Philippines, was the first to enter into drought conditions last year. As of an April 28 update from the National Weather Service, it was in an exceptional drought, the highest level. Koror, its most populous state, had its driest October through March on record, as did Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, and Yap State, in the Federated States of Micronesia.

While some places have had spotty showers that have provided sporadic, temporary relief, others have fared worse. In February, Richard Heim, a meteorologist with the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information, rattled off the rainfall record for Wotje, a hard-hit atoll to the north of Majuro: “Zero, zero, zero, trace, zero, zero … They are getting nothing,” he said.

Although the relationship between El Niño and drought in these islands is well known — which helps governments and aid agencies to forecast and prepare in advance — it is unclear how global warming might alter the El Niño phenomenon in the future.

The effects of climate change are of acute concern to island residents, as rising sea levels already eat away at what little land they have and threaten water supplies as overwashing waves that can make groundwater brackish become more common.

While rainfall is overall expected to increase across Micronesia as the planet warms, according to a 2014 report by an Australian-led project looking at climate change projections in the region, that increase is somewhat uncertain. And it is the variability of rainfall, not average rains, that is the main driver of drought there, Sugata Narsey, one of the coauthors of that report and a climate researcher at Monash University, said.

The main source of variability there is El Niño, he said. Some research has suggested that warming could mean more frequent extreme El Niño events, but the link isn’t yet conclusive.

When drought does occur in the future, it is possible it could last longer because evaporation will also increase with warming, Michael Grose, a climate researcher with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, said. This is one of the ways climate change exacerbated the current drought in California.

Surrounded by water, but none to drink

It is a cruel irony that, though surrounded by the vast expanse of the largest ocean on the planet, the islands and atolls of Micronesia can run out of drinkable water.

Except for some of the larger islands in the region, such as Guam, most don’t have reservoirs to keep water supplies steady and on hand for lean times. (And even those that do have them are seeing well below-normal levels.)

The region of the Pacific Ocean known as Micronesia.

Wikimedia Commons

Instead, most of the region relies on the near-daily rains of the tropics to maintain the groundwater supplies that feed wells and are caught by the green, high-density plastic rain catchments attached to many homes. But a certain minimum threshold of rain — usually about four to eight inches a month — is needed to maintain viable water supplies. Below that level, drought can set in, and quickly.

“The atolls especially are very susceptible to drought,” Guard said, because they are too low-lying to have significant underground aquifers.

For those islands that do have wells, the water inside can quickly become brackish during a drought. As freshwater is extracted, the seawater below it creeps upward, Heim said. One day the well water is drinkable, the next it turns salty. That leaves a tight window for relief agencies to bring water or reverse-osmosis machines to distant atolls a full day’s boat ride from the main islands. These outlying atolls also often lack internet and cellular service, making quick communication a challenge.

“Really a struggle”

When visiting the outer atolls of the Marshall Islands, Saunders, of the IOM, said that as soon as you walk off the plane, “you notice the heat more. There is less shade to sit under and you can really imagine how hard life is for those most affected” by the drought.

The Marshall Islands have been hit particularly hard because virtually all of the nation’s land is low-lying. Of those islands that do have wells, many were too salty to use by early March. Many rain catchments had also run dry by that point.

Dried vegetation on Majuro.Karl Fellenius/University of Hawaii Sea Grant at the College of the Marshall Islands

“Not everyone’s water is totally out, but some are, and everyone is conserving,” Saunders said.

On Majuro, there are 19 water distribution points and a reverse-osmosis machine that generates 25 gallons of potable water a minute and runs 24 hours a day at the College of the Marshall Islands. Island residents have access to tap water for only four hours a week, according to the Marshall Islands Journal. On the outer islands, 32 reverse-osmosis units have been deployed.

“This means that people have to walk to these spots to get water, or if they can, take a car or a pushcart to carry water,” Saunders said.

Each nation has limited resources and it is “really a struggle to respond,” Guard said, which is why aid from the United States and agencies like the Red Cross is critical. The Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau have all declared states of emergency or disaster to enable that aid, and last week, President Obama declared a state of disaster for the Marshall Islands, allowing for FEMA support. The IOM has helped provide reverse-osmosis units, collapsible jerry cans, and soap to residents.

As ground and surface water have dried up, so have key food crops. Staple food sources like taro, breadfruit, banana, and coconut “are for the most part no longer edible,” Guard said in an email. This makes food security a critical issue, especially for outlying islands.

The spread of social diseases like conjunctivitis has also been a concern, as people conserve what little water they have for drinking and cooking at the expense of hygiene. Advisories have also been put out in some locations to boil water in order to prevent the spread of gastro-intestinal illnesses.

Such precautions will likely remain in place for several weeks or months to come, because while El Niño is petering out, rains are expected to stay below normal through the late spring and early summer. But gradually, El Niño’s grip will weaken, and the rains will slowly return from south to north, east to west, reversing their disappearance of several months ago.

But even when the rains do return, it will take time for catchments, groundwater and crops to recover. And that return is not without its own problems — the mosquitoes that spread diseases like dengue fever and Zika virus tend to be more widespread after a major drought, Guard said.

These hardships are something that the people of the region are accustomed to, though, and they have pulled through similarly deep droughts in the recent past.

“The Marshallese are extremely resilient people — that is how they have survived for thousands of years on these small islands,” Saunders said. “They cope, they manage, but it is not easy.”

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Top Gun Lobbyist Calls Hundreds of Child Gun Deaths "Occasional Mishaps"

by TameraGillis Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an in-depth investigation in 2013, Mother Jones found that guns kill hundreds of children per year in the United States. Many die in homicides, and many others die in accidents—mostly when children themselves pull the trigger. The kids shooting themselves or others have often been as young as two or three years old. Invariably these “tragedies” result from adults leaving unsecured firearms lying around in their homes or, in some cases, in their cars.

Since our investigation, the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety has collected additional data confirming the scope of the problem. As the New York Times reported on Thursday, during one week in April four toddlers around the country killed themselves with guns, and a mother was fatally shot by her two-year-old while driving, after the child apparently picked up a weapon that slid out from under the driver’s seat. The data remains stark: “In 2015, there were at least 278 unintentional shootings at the hands of young children and teenagers, according to Everytown’s database,” the Times reported. “A child who accidentally pulls the trigger is most likely to be 3 years old, the statistics show.”

Equally stark is the response from the gun lobby. There has been growing debate about laws aimed at reducing the problem, which, as our investigation showed, has long gone underreported. Larry Pratt, a leading figure among hardline pro-gun activists, argues that tighter gun regulations are not the answer. In comments to the Times, Pratt called the hundreds of child gun deaths that occur each year “occasional mishaps”:

“It’s clearly a tragedy, but it’s not something that’s widespread,” said Larry Pratt, a spokesman and former executive director of Gun Owners of America. “To base public policy on occasional mishaps would be a grave mistake.”

As the Times piece notes, 27 states now have laws that hold adults responsible for letting unsupervised children get their hands on guns. Gun safety advocates have increasingly pushed for tougher laws requiring owners to use trigger locks, gun safes, or other measures for safe storage and use. Another potential solution that’s been gaining new interest is smart-gun technology. But gun lobbying groups including Gun Owners of America and the National Rifle Association have long opposed these policies across the board, claiming that they threaten Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

Even in states with laws on the books, the contentious politics tends to quash appetite among prosecutors for holding adults accountable when young children accidentally kill. Here, the data goes from stark to perhaps stunning: In 2013 we documented 52 cases where adults had left their guns unsecured—but we could only find four people who were held criminally liable for the children’s deaths.

The following year I covered this problem in more detail, in a story chronicling the rise of a new advocacy group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Particularly in more rural communities, a prevailing theme has been that parents—including a few who accidentally shot their own children—have already suffered enough and shouldn’t be punished:

Last Christmas Eve in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a man who’d been “messing with” a 9 mm handgun unintentionally shot and killed his two-month-old daughter as she slept in her glider. The coroner ruled the death a homicide, yet local law enforcement officials said they were undecided about pursuing criminal charges. Typically that might’ve been the end of it, but Moms Demand Action voiced outrage via social media and the local press. Within two weeks the DA announced plans to prosecute. (He said no outside group influenced his decision.)

“While we fully support the father being held accountable for this crime, we also acknowledge the horrific grief this family is experiencing,” Moms Demand Action said after the charges were announced. “We hope their tragedy can serve as an example that encourages others to be more responsible with their firearms.” The father later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment, which could have brought up to 15 years in prison. He got six years’ probation and no jail time.

Moms also drew attention to a case in February in North Carolina, where a three-year-old boy wounded his 17-month-old sister after finding a handgun that their father—who wrote a parenting advice column in a local paper—had left unsecured. (The infant recovered.) “The parents have been punished more than any criminal justice system can do to them,” a captain from the county sheriff’s department said soon after the shooting. After Moms swung into action, the father was charged with failure to secure his firearm to protect a minor; his case is pending.

“All too often DAs are loath to get involved, saying a family has suffered enough,” Watts says, “especially in states where laws are inadequate…This idea of ‘accidental’ gun deaths, when something is truly negligence, has to be remedied.”

For its part, the gun lobby prefers to keep the focus on other fears. On Thursday, the NRA made no reference to the latest data on child gun deaths. On its blog, a post—topped by an image of a toddler biking—offered “10 Tips That Could Save Your Life.” The “home” segment of the list made no mention of safely storing firearms, but instead focused on the specter of a home invasion. “To deal with this possibility,” it said, “be prepared by making a home defense plan and setting up a safe room with your family.” The room should be equipped with a phone for calling 911, it said, and a “personal protection device” such as “mace, batons, Tasers, stun guns, or firearm.”

The NRA’s Twitter feed otherwise attended to politics, denouncing an apparent conspiracy by the Social Security Administration to conduct “the largest gun grab in American history,” and firing away at “Hillary Clinton’s 6-part plan to disarm citizens — and rip apart the #2A.”

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Top Gun Lobbyist Calls Hundreds of Child Gun Deaths "Occasional Mishaps"

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Trump supporters believe in Trump and, weirdly, science

by DorotheaLinton Posted on May 5, 2016

Trump supporters believe in Trump and, weirdly, science

By on May 5, 2016Share

Donald Trump may believe that climate change is a myth created by the Chinese to weaken American manufacturing, but believe it or not, a majority of his supporters — 56 percent — say that climate change is real.

Trump supporters are more likely to have a grasp on climate reality than supporters of ex- presidential candidate and Zodiac Killer Ted Cruz. According to a new report released today by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 38 percent of Ted Cruz supporters said that climate change is stone-cold fact. Like Trump, Cruz denies climate change; unlike Trump, he holds the more shopworn theory that it’s a hoax created by scientists out to scare everybody.

Meanwhile, most supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders think climate change is happening — 92 percent and 93 percent, respectively. Of those, 83 percent of Clinton supporters and 80 percent of Sanders supporters said that they actually worried about it. Some 79 percent of Sanders supporters and 76 percent of Clinton supporters believe that humans are causing it (and the rest believe that it’s due to natural changes in the environment).

This is some crazy news. According to polling data, belief in climate change has waxed and waned over the years. Concern about climate change in America has been rising overall since a not-particularly-mysterious drop around 2008, when the American economy nearly went under, but climate change has been viewed throughout as a margin issue.

Times are changing. Nearly every registered voter who is not a fan of Ted Cruz, regardless of political affiliation, said that they were more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who strongly supports taking action to reduce global warming, regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax (provided other taxes, like income tax, were cut).

A majority of all candidates’ supporters, even Cruz’s, want more money for research into renewable energy. They also favor tax rebates for people who buy energy-efficient vehicles or solar panels — all while they continue to endorse expanding drilling for oil and natural gas off the coast of the United States.

Why is this happening? Here’s my theory: Climate change has finally become a part of the national conversation. It’s officially a thing talked about by politicians not named Al Gore. Last year, a coalition of ranchers, Native Americans, and climate activists blocked Keystone XL, a pipeline whose construction seemed inevitable just a few years earlier. Climate change, rarely mentioned in presidential debates, has been a subject of serious discussion this year. President Obama talks about it, often.

That doesn’t mean people know much about climate science. Only a little more than a third of Clinton and Sanders’ supporters, for example, know the extent of the scientific consensus on climate change. That’s despite the fact that research says that said consensus is the single most persuasive fact about climate change, and would theoretically be as familiar to climate change believers as an ice cream truck jingle.

Two of the researchers behind this study, Anthony Leiserowitz, and Ed Maibach, have spent years arguing that climate change is an issue that has the potential to cut across political boundaries. This is just one study, but it bears that theory out.

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The Keystone movement goes global

by ZacharySimoi Posted on May 3, 2016

The Keystone movement goes global

By on May 3, 2016Share

A wave of protests is crashing down on the fossil fuel industry this month, and there’s almost nowhere left for the fossil fuel industry to hide.

A new global climate action campaign under the banner of the phrase “Break Free” kicked off on Tuesday, beginning with a series of nonviolent demonstrations in cities all around the world. The protests, which cover six continents and dozens of countries, are mainly targeting the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure projects, like oil and gas pipelines, as well as new coal mines and plants. Led by the climate action organization 350.org, they are set to last from May 3 to May 15.

The push follows the battle between activists and the energy giant TransCanada over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, a fight that eventually ended with President Barack Obama vetoing the plans last November. Since that victory for climate activists, new fossil fuel pipelines, storage facilities, and refineries have been facing a wave of public backlash before they even break ground. The phenomenon has been called “Keystone-zation” by both activists and the oil and gas industry.

“It’s fair to say going after the supply side of things is something the Keystone campaign did,” Lindsay Meiman, a communications coordinator for 350.org, told Grist. “We saw huge success there. So we’re bringing it to other fossil fuel infrastructure sites.”

The month’s surge of demonstrations kicked off in Wales, with a group of jump-suited protestors forming a blockade at the United Kingdom’s largest opencast coal mine on Tuesday.

In the United States, Seattle, Denver, Albany, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., are all hosting their own protests against fracking operations, crude oil trains, and oil refineries. Other planned protests include:

In Turkey, community leaders will protest a series of four fossil fuel plants slated for the regions surrounding Aliağa.
Protestors will once again set upon the world’s largest coal port, the port of Newcastle in Australia, to oppose the country’s continued reliance on coal.
In Indonesia, thousands are expected to gather at the presidential palace in Jakarta to protest a score of new coal infrastructure projects.
A crowd of 10,000 is expected for the Philippines’ action in Batangas City, where a 600-megawatt coal fired power plant is planned — one of 28 other proposed facilities just like it.

The demonstrations, writes author and climate activist Bill McKibben in the Guardian, are meant to “turn up the heat on the small band of companies and people still willing to get rich off fossil fuel.” If the members of that band of people are paying reading the news over the next two weeks, they’re definitely going to get the message.

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The Keystone movement goes global

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This Is What Would Happen If the Rest of the World Ate the Way America Does

by KristinRayner Posted on May 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Subscribe to the podcast and learn more at revealnews.org.

If the rest of the world ate like Americans, the planet would have run out of fresh water 15 years ago, according to the world’s largest food company.

In private, Nestle executives told US officials that the world is on a collision course with doom because Americans eat too much meat, and now, other countries are following suit, according to a secret US report titled “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

Producing a pound of meat requires a tremendous amount of water because farmers use tons of crops such as corn and soy to feed each animal, which require tens of thousands of gallons of water to grow. It is far more efficient when people eat the corn or soy directly.

The planet is a on a “potentially catastrophic” course as billions of people in countries such as India and China begin eating more beef, chicken and pork like their counterparts in Western countries, according to the 2009 report released by WikiLeaks and first reported by Reveal at The Center for Investigative Reporting in a cache of water-related classified documents. The Chinese now eat about half as much meat as Americans, Australians and Europeans, a figure that continues to rapidly rise as more Chinese are lifted out of poverty and into the middle class.

And Nestle—which makes Gerber baby food, Nescafe, Hot Pockets, DiGiorno pizza, Lean Cuisine, Stouffer’s, Nestea, Dreyer’s and Haagen-Dazs ice cream—is deeply concerned.

Here are some of the takeaways, with key quotes from the secret report:

Global water shortages are just around the corner.

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050.”

Major regions, including in the United States, are being drained of their underground aquifers.

“Problems with be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

Excessive meat-eating is driving water depletion.

“Nestle starts by pointing out that a calorie of meat requires 10 times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops. As the world’s growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth’s water resources will be dangerously squeezed.”

There’s plenty of water to feed everyone a diet that’s not so meatcentric.

“Nestle reckons that the earth’s maximum sustainable freshwater withdrawals are about 12,500 cubic kilometers per year. In 2008, global freshwater withdrawals reached 6,000 cubic kilometers, or almost half of the potentially available supply. This was sufficient to provide an average 2500 calories per day to the world’s 6.7 billion people, with little per capita meat consumption.”

The American diet is eating the world dry.

“The current US diet provides about 3600 calories per day with substantial meat consumption. If the whole world were to move to this standard, global fresh water resources would be exhausted at a population level of 6 billion, which the world reached in the year 2000.”

This is an even bigger problem now that other countries are eating like America and the global population’s set to grow by 2 billion by 2050.

“There is not nearly enough fresh water available to provide this standard to a global population expected to exceed 9 billion by mid-century.”

So what’s Nestle’s prediction for the future? Think “Mad Max”…

“It is clear that current developed country meat-based diets and patterns of water usage do not provide a blueprint for the planet’s future. Based on present trends, Nestle believes that the world will face a cereals shortfall of as much as 30 percent by 2025. (Nestle) stated it will take a combination of strategies to avert a crisis.”

Why is this the first time you’re hearing this from the world’s largest food company?

“Sensitive to its public image, Nestle has maintained a low profile in discussing solutions and tries not to preach…the firm scrupulously avoids confrontation and polemics, preferring to influence its audience discretely by example.”

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This Is What Would Happen If the Rest of the World Ate the Way America Does

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This Voting Rights Battle Could Determine the Election

by DeneenConley6 Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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House and Senate Republicans in Virginia announced Monday that the GOP would sue to block Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s restoration of voting rights for more than 200,000 felons in time for the November election.

McAuliffe, a Democrat and longtime friend of and fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, used an executive action on April 22 to restore voting rights for felons who had served their sentences and completed their parole or probation as of that date. “There’s no question that we’ve had a horrible history in voting rights as it relates to African Americans—we should remedy it,” the governor told the New York Times when he announced the decision. The paper noted that the decision would have a major impact in a potential swing state this November, as many of the felons are African Americans who are “a core constituency of Democrats.”

The governor estimated his actions would apply to 206,000 people and said he instructed state officials to prepare similar monthly orders that would apply to felons who would qualify to vote after the original April 22 cutoff date. In a statement issued Monday, Brian Coy, McAuliffe’s communications director, said the governor was acting on his “constitutional authority” when he issued his executive order.

“The Governor is disappointed that Republicans would go to such lengths to continue locking people who have served their time out of their democracy,” Coy said in the statement provided to Mother Jones. “While Republicans may have found a Washington lawyer for their political lawsuit, they still have yet to articulate any specific constitutional objections … These Virginians are qualified to vote and they deserve a voice, not more partisan schemes to disenfranchise them.”

Republicans in the state legislature said Monday they will not use taxpayer money to fund the lawsuit they say is necessary to fight McAuliffe’s executive order.

“Governor McAuliffe’s flagrant disregard for the Constitution of Virginia and the rule of law must not go unchecked,” Virginia Senate Majority Leader Thomas K. Norment, Jr. said in a statement. “His predecessors and previous attorneys general examined this issue and consistently concluded Virginia’s governor does not have the power to issue blanket restorations. By doing so now with the acknowledged goal of affecting the November election, he has overstepped the bounds of his authority and the constitutional limits on executive powers.”

The Times noted in a separate piece that the impact of McAuliffe’s decision could be pivotal in a close election—President Barack Obama won the state by 149,000 votes in 2012—but not as significant as one might imagine. “Ex-felons are disproportionately young and less educated, the two most powerful demographic predictors of low voter turnout in the United States,” the paper wrote.

Nearly every state—with the exception of Maine and Vermont—has restrictions on the voting rights of felons. Virginia’s restrictions have been in place since after the Civil War, when the state’s constitution permanently barred former felons from being able to vote.

This piece has been updated to include a statement from McAuliffe’s office.

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This Voting Rights Battle Could Determine the Election

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Even the world’s largest food company knows the American diet is an environmental catastrophe

by MichellQka Posted on April 30, 2016

Even the world’s largest food company knows the American diet is an environmental catastrophe

By on Apr 30, 2016 7:00 amShare

This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If the rest of the world ate like Americans, the planet would have run out of freshwater 15 years ago, according to the world’s largest food company.

In private, Nestle executives told U.S. officials that the world is on a collision course with doom because Americans eat too much meat, and now, other countries are following suit, according to a secret U.S. report titled “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”

Producing a pound of meat requires a tremendous amount of water because farmers use tons of crops such as corn and soy to feed each animal, which require tens of thousands of gallons of water to grow. It is far more efficient when people eat the corn or soy directly.

The planet is a on a “potentially catastrophic” course as billions of people in countries such as India and China begin eating more beef, chicken, and pork like their counterparts in Western countries, according to the 2009 report released by WikiLeaks and first reported by Reveal at The Center for Investigative Reporting in a cache of water-related classified documents. The Chinese now eat about half as much meat as Americans, Australians, and Europeans, a figure that continues to rapidly rise as more Chinese are lifted out of poverty and into the middle class.

And Nestle — which makes Gerber baby food, Nescafe, Hot Pockets, DiGiorno pizza, Lean Cuisine, Stouffer’s, Nestea, Dreyer’s, and Haagen-Dazs ice cream — is deeply concerned.

Here are some of the takeaways, with key quotes from the secret report:

Global water shortages are just around the corner.

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050.”

Major regions, including in the United States, are being drained of their underground aquifers.

“Problems with be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

Excessive meat-eating is driving water depletion.

“Nestle starts by pointing out that a calorie of meat requires 10 times as much water to produce as a calorie of food crops. As the world’s growing middle classes eat more meat, the earth’s water resources will be dangerously squeezed.”

There’s plenty of water to feed everyone a diet that’s not so meatcentric.

“Nestle reckons that the earth’s maximum sustainable freshwater withdrawals are about 12,500 cubic kilometers per year. In 2008, global freshwater withdrawals reached 6,000 cubic kilometers, or almost half of the potentially available supply. This was sufficient to provide an average 2,500 calories per day to the world’s 6.7 billion people, with little per capita meat consumption.”

The American diet is eating the world dry.

“The current U.S. diet provides about 3600 calories per day with substantial meat consumption. If the whole world were to move to this standard, global fresh water resources would be exhausted at a population level of 6 billion, which the world reached in the year 2000.”

This is an even bigger problem now that other countries are eating like America and the global population’s set to grow by 2 billion by 2050.

“There is not nearly enough fresh water available to provide this standard to a global population expected to exceed 9 billion by mid-century.”

So what’s Nestle’s prediction for the future? Think “Mad Max” …

“It is clear that current developed country meat-based diets and patterns of water usage do not provide a blueprint for the planet’s future. Based on present trends, Nestle believes that the world will face a cereals shortfall of as much as 30 percent by 2025. [Nestle] stated it will take a combination of strategies to avert a crisis.”

Why is this the first time you’re hearing this from the world’s largest food company?

“Sensitive to its public image, Nestle has maintained a low profile in discussing solutions and tries not to preach … the firm scrupulously avoids confrontation and polemics, preferring to influence its audience discretely by example.”

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Even the world’s largest food company knows the American diet is an environmental catastrophe

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Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders

by SarahMarquardt Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the Democratic primary basically over, I want to step back a bit and explain the big-picture reason that I never warmed up to Bernie Sanders. It’s not so much that he’s all that far to my left, nor that he’s been pretty skimpy on details about all the programs he proposes. That’s hardly uncommon in presidential campaigns. Rather, it’s the fact that I think he’s basically running a con, and one with the potential to cause distinct damage to the progressive cause.

I mean this as a provocation—but I also mean it. So if you’re provoked, mission accomplished! Here’s my argument.

Bernie’s explanation for everything he wants to do—his theory of change, or theory of governing, take your pick—is that we need a revolution in this country. The rich own everything. Income inequality is skyrocketing. The middle class is stagnating. The finance industry is out of control. Washington DC is paralyzed.

But as Bill Scher points out, the revolution that Bernie called for didn’t show up. In fact, it’s worse than that: we were never going to get a revolution, and Bernie knew it all along. Think about it: has there ever been an economic revolution in the United States? Stretching things a bit, I can think of two:

The destruction of the Southern slave economy following the Civil War.
The New Deal.

The first of these was 50+ years in the making and, in the end, required a bloody, four-year war to bring to a conclusion. The second happened only after an utter collapse of the economy, with banks closing, businesses failing, wages plummeting, and unemployment at 25 percent. That’s what it takes to bring about a revolution, or even something close to it.

We’re light years away from that right now. Unemployment? Yes, two or three percent of the working-age population has dropped out of the labor force, but the headline unemployment rate is 5 percent. Wages? They’ve been stagnant since the turn of the century, but the average family still makes close to $70,000, more than nearly any other country in the world. Health care? Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of the country has insurance coverage. Dissatisfaction with the system? According to Gallup, even among those with incomes under $30,000, only 27 percent are dissatisfied with their personal lives.

Like it or not, you don’t build a revolution on top of an economy like this. Period. If you want to get anything done, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: through the slow boring of hard wood.

Why do I care about this? Because if you want to make a difference in this country, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog. You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves—all the things that Bernie disdains as part of the corrupt mainstream establishment. In place of this he promises his followers we can get everything we want via a revolution that’s never going to happen. And when that revolution inevitably fails, where do all his impressionable young followers go? Do they join up with the corrupt establishment and commit themselves to the slow boring of hard wood? Or do they give up?

I don’t know, but my fear is that some of them will do the latter. And that’s a damn shame. They’ve been conned by a guy who should know better, the same way dieters get conned by late-night miracle diets. When it doesn’t work, they throw in the towel.

Most likely Bernie will have no lasting effect, and his followers will scatter in the usual way, with some doubling down on practical politics and others leaving for different callings. But there’s a decent chance that Bernie’s failure will result in a net increase of cynicism about politics, and that’s the last thing we need. I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie’s spiel and then got discouraged when it didn’t pan out.

I’ll grant that my pitch—and Hillary’s and Barack Obama’s—isn’t very inspiring. Work your fingers to the bone for 30 years and you might get one or two significant pieces of legislation passed. Obviously you need inspiration too. But if you don’t want your followers to give up in disgust, your inspiration needs to be in the service of goals that are at least attainable. By offering a chimera instead, Bernie has done the progressive movement no favors.

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Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders

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