Tag Archives: world

Scott Walker Still Having Some Teething Problems Balancing the Tea Party with the Mainstream GOP

by hucmzfbl Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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

I’ve been talking up Scott Walker as a good bet to win the Republican presidential nomination next year, but there’s no question that he first has to find the right balance between the bullheaded “Hulk Smash Democrats” persona designed to appeal to tea partiers and the more mild-mannered Midwestern executive persona designed to appeal to moderates and big-money donors. The latest example of his difficulties with this balancing act comes from a laughable attempt to change the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin. Here’s Walker’s proposal:

The mission of the system is to develop human resources to meet the state’s workforce needs, to discover and disseminate knowledge….

So far, no problem. He just wants to add a bit of boilerplate about training future workers. No one objects to that. But then there’s more. Everything he wants to delete is in bold:

….to extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society by developing develop in students heightened intellectual, cultural, and humane sensitivities, scientific, professional and technological expertise, and a sense of purpose. Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition. Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.

By cracky, we’ll not have our universities extending knowledge beyond the borders of their campuses! And the search for truth? Sounds like a steaming pile of secular liberal claptrap. Off with its head!

But that’s not the end of it. Heather Digby Parton describes what happened next:

After the changes were revealed publicly Walker made a hilariously fatuous claim worthy of Rosemary Woods and the 18 minute gap: somehow those changes just appeared and he didn’t know nothin’ about how they got there and anyway it was the University’s fault for “overlooking” it. He has had to backtrack from that as well, admitting that his people did make these changes and the university official argued vociferously against it. But none of it is his fault because well, it just isn’t. Or anyone else’s.

Last Wednesday, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Walker finally acknowledged that university officials had raised objections about the proposal but “had been told the changes were not open to debate.” And as the Sentinel graphic on the right shows, the proposed changes were, in fact, quite deliberate.

In any case, even Walker is now being forced to pretend it was all a big misunderstanding. So what happened? My guess is that his inner circle thought the changes might win Walker some brownie points with the tea party crowd, which has always been suspicious of long-haired academics and their lefty ideas, but failed to see how bad it would look among the less wild-eyed crowd that looks to Walker as a pragmatic executive type. Walker’s team is having trouble balancing those two constituencies, and that’s a problem since Walker’s key appeal is that he bridges the gap between them.

Needless to say, this dumb little affair won’t do Walker any long-term damage. It’s just a minor dust cloud. Nonetheless, it’s an instructive dust cloud. Clearly Walker still hasn’t quite managed to polish up the balancing act that’s his biggest source of strength in the 2016 presidential race. That’s something he needs to figure out in short order.

See original:  

Scott Walker Still Having Some Teething Problems Balancing the Tea Party with the Mainstream GOP

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Scott Walker Still Having Some Teething Problems Balancing the Tea Party with the Mainstream GOP

Quote of the Day: No Dessert For You!

by QuyenClarkson Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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

From Tyler Cowen:

I would be happy enough if all desserts were simply dark chocolate ice cream or gelato, consumed rapidly and perhaps at a different venue altogether.

Well, that would certainly put a crimp in the dessert business, wouldn’t it? It would actually work out OK for me, but I have a feeling the rest of the world might get bored pretty quickly by an endless series of meals that finish off with dark chocolate gelato.

Anyway, it turns out that restaurant owners are on Cowen’s side. Desserts don’t bring in much money, but they do cause diners to linger around their tables. “You have to turn the tables,” says one restaurant owner, and desserts just get in the way of that. Very sad.

View post:

Quote of the Day: No Dessert For You!

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day: No Dessert For You!

McDonald’s Creates Worst Marketing Campaign in History of Marketing

by CarleyFreehill Posted on February 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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

This morning, Kate Bachelder went into McDonald’s to get an Egg McMuffin. When she tried to pay the cashier, however, things turned weird:

I wouldn’t need money today, she explained, as I had been randomly chosen for the store’s “Pay with Lovin’ ” campaign, the company’s latest public-relations blitz, announced Sunday….Between Feb. 2 and Valentine’s Day, the company says, participating McDonald’s locations will give away 100 meals to unsuspecting patrons in an effort to spread “the lovin’.”

If the “Pay with Lovin’ ” scenario looks touching on television, it is less so in real life. A crew member produced a heart-shaped pencil box stuffed with slips of paper, and instructed me to pick one. My fellow customers seemed to look on with pity as I drew my fate: “Ask someone to dance.” I stood there for a mortified second or two, and then the cashier mercifully suggested that we all dance together. Not wanting to be a spoilsport, I forced a smile and “raised the roof” a couple of times, as employees tried to lure cringing customers into forming some kind of conga line, asking them when they’d last been asked to dance.

The public embarrassment ended soon enough, and I slunk away with my free breakfast, thinking: Now there’s an idea that never should have left the conference room.

Speaking personally, I can say that the Pay with Lovin’ scenario did not look touching on television. It looked horrifying. And I suspect very strongly that in real life it’s even more horrifying than my feeble little imagination can imagine.

And for what it’s worth, when I saw the ads, it actually wasn’t Mickey D’s guinea pig customers who I initially felt sorry for. It was the cashiers. Those are the poor folks who have to execute this marketing monstrosity. Every morning they have to paste on a smile and pretend to be thrilled at the opportunity to force some sleepy customer to write a poem or declare who she loves or perform a jig or whatever. Isn’t it exciting!?! You get to pay with lovin’ today!

Somebody needs to be fired at McDonald’s. Maybe a whole bunch of people. I don’t know who, but someone has to pay. Right now.

Link – 

McDonald’s Creates Worst Marketing Campaign in History of Marketing

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on McDonald’s Creates Worst Marketing Campaign in History of Marketing

Obama Suckered Republicans Into an Immigration Trap—And They Charged Right In

by LillianaLlewell Posted on February 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Ed Kilgore notes that Latino approval of the Republican Party—already low in 2013—plummeted even further in 2014 when they spent all year pandering to their base and blocking any chance at some kind of comprehensive immigration reform. And it’s gotten even worse since then:

The marginally improved performance of the GOP among Latinos in the 2014 midterms probably tempted some to think disgruntlement with Obama would trump estrangement from the elephant party. But since then, of course, the president’s executive action on immigration provided fresh impetus to “deport ’em all” messaging, and the jockeying for position during the Invisible Primary for 2016 is not going to help.

I don’t have any big point to make here. I just wanted to highlight the passage above. In the same way that, say, Osama bin Laden wanted two things on 9/11—to attack the US and to provoke an insane counterreaction—President Obama wanted to accomplish two things with his immigration actions. Obviously he thought it was the right thing to do. Beyond that, though, he wanted to gain Latino support for Democrats and provoke an insane counterreaction from Republicans. He succeeded brilliantly on both counts. Republicans fell swiftly into his trap, and they show all signs of falling even further as primary season heats up. By the time 2016 rolls around, even a moderate guy like Jeb Bush is going to be so tainted by Republican craziness on immigration that he’ll get virtually no support from the Latino community.

It didn’t have to be this way. Republicans could have responded in a more measured way that would have blunted Obama’s actions. Instead they let themselves get suckered. Obama must be laughing his ass off right about now.

Read the article: 

Obama Suckered Republicans Into an Immigration Trap—And They Charged Right In

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama Suckered Republicans Into an Immigration Trap—And They Charged Right In

How China’s Filthy Air Is Screwing With Our Weather

by Salvato23K Posted on January 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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

As the snow began to fall earlier this week in the lead up to the season’s first major blizzard, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters that the Northeast was witnessing “a pattern of extreme weather that we’ve never seen before.” Climate change, Cuomo argues, is fueling bigger, badder weather events like this one—and like Hurricane Sandy.

While the science that links specific snowstorms to global warming is profoundly difficult to calculate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it’s “very likely”—defined as greater than 90 percent probability—that “extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent” in North America as the world warms. In New York City, actual snow days have decreased, but bigger blizzards have become more common, dumping more snow each time. Mashable reported that all of New York City’s top 10 snowfalls have occurred in the past 15 years. Scientists can trace the cause to the enormous amount of energy we’re pumping into the oceans. Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told Wired this week that “the oceans are warmer, and the air above them is more moist”—giving storms more energy to unleash more precipitation. In short, the blizzard dubbed Juno was being fueled in part by the ocean’s excess of climate change-related heat.

But climate change may not be the only way that human activity is making storms worse. In an emerging body of work, NASA scientists have identified a surprising contributor to American storms and cold snaps: Asia’s air pollution. Over the past few years, a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology has found that aerosols—or airborne particles—emitted from the cities fueling Asia’s booming economies are making storm activity stronger in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. These storms wreak havoc on the polar jet stream, a major driver of North America’s weather. The result: US winters with heavier snowfall and more intense cold periods.

Pollution billowing from Asia’s big cities, they found, is essentially “seeding” the clouds with sulfur, carbon grit, and metals. This leads to thicker, taller, and more energetic clouds, with heavier precipitation. These so-called “extratropical” cyclones in the Northwest Pacific have become about 10 percent stronger over the last 30 years, the scientists say.

Chinese cities, for example, are so toxic that 90 percent of them fail to meet the country’s own pollution standards. But it’s not just China. In terms of air quality, 13 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in India. And thirty-one of the world’s 50 most polluted cities are found in China and Southeast Asia (including India), according to the World Health Organization.

New Delhi, India, has the worst air pollution in the world, according to the WHO. All that smog is altering weather patterns around the world. Altaf Qadri, File/AP

The NASA animation above shows how these aerosol emissions moved around the world, from September 1, 2006, to April 10, 2007. I’ve included two versions of it. The first shows the Earth as a globe, the second shows the planet laid out flat. Also seen in the video are locations of wildfires, indicated by red and yellow dots. At the start, fires burn over South America and Africa, emitting black carbon, while dust from the Sahara moves westwards, getting sucked into two Atlantic cyclones. Later, in February, fires burning in Thailand and Southeast Asia mix with sulfates from industry in China and are eventually pulled eastward into cyclones that cross the Pacific and reach North America.

The work raises questions about proposals to “geoengineer” the globe by pumping aerosols into the atmosphere, which some argue could reduce the Earth’s temperature by partially blocking out the sun. The NASA researchers found that sulfates are the most effective type of aerosol for deepening extratropical cyclones, which means that using them to fight global warming could bring about more stormy winter weather around the world.

There’s some hope that China is attempting to stabilize and, eventually, curb its pollution through new emissions standards that would cut the level of dangerous particles, including sulfates. There are also signs that China’s coal boom—the source of most of the country’s air pollution—is finally slowing down. A new analysis released this week by Greenpeace showed that for the first time this century, China’s coal consumption fell in 2014.

But India is another story. That country, which has the fifth-largest reserves of coal on Earth, is desperate to provide power to its millions of impoverished citizens. Sixty percent of the India’s power currently comes from coal, and despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promises to ramp up solar energy, he is also planning to double India’s coal production to more than 1 billion tons annually.

So stock up on non-perishable grocery items. Looks like those blizzards are only going to increase in size.

Link – 

How China’s Filthy Air Is Screwing With Our Weather

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on How China’s Filthy Air Is Screwing With Our Weather

Why Does Washington Still Romanticize Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Brzezinksi?

by Jeff Peterson Posted on January 30, 2015

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 on the TomDispatch website.

En route back to Washington at the tail end of his most recent overseas trip, John Kerry, America’s peripatetic secretary of state, stopped off in France “to share a hug with all of Paris.” Whether Paris reciprocated the secretary’s embrace went unrecorded.

Despite the requisite reference to General Pershing (“Lafayette, we are here!”) and flying James Taylor in from the 1960s to assure Parisians that “You’ve Got a Friend,” in the annals of American diplomacy Kerry’s hug will likely rank with President Eisenhower’s award of the Legion of Merit to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” and Jimmy Carter’s acknowledgment of the “admiration and love” said to define the relationship between the Iranian people and their Shah. In short, it was a moment best forgotten.

Alas, this vapid, profoundly silly event is all too emblematic of statecraft in the Obama era. Seldom have well-credentialed and well-meaning people worked so hard to produce so little of substance.

Not one of the signature foreign policy initiatives conceived in Obama’s first term has borne fruit. When it came to making a fresh start with the Islamic world, responsibly ending the “dumb” war in Iraq (while winning the “necessary” one in Afghanistan), “resetting” US-Russian relations, and “pivoting” toward Asia, mark your scorecard 0 for 4.

There’s no doubt that when Kerry arrived at the State Department he brought with him some much-needed energy. That he is giving it his all—the department’s website reports that the secretary has already clocked over 682,000 miles of travel—is doubtless true as well. The problem is the absence of results. Remember when his signature initiative was going to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal? Sadly, that quixotic plan, too, has come to naught.

Yes, Team Obama “got” bin Laden. And, yes, it deserves credit for abandoning a self-evidently counterproductive 50-plus-year-old policy toward Cuba and for signing a promising agreement with China on climate change. That said, the administration’s overall record of accomplishment is beyond thin, starting with that first-day-in-the-Oval-Office symbol that things were truly going to be different: Obama’s order to close Guantanamo. That, of course, remains a work in progress (despite regular reassurances of light glimmering at the end of what has become a very long tunnel).

In fact, taking the president’s record as a whole, noting that on his watch occasional US drone strikes have become routine, the Nobel Committee might want to consider revoking its Peace Prize.

Nor should we expect much in the time that Obama has remaining. Perhaps there is a deal with Iran waiting in the wings (along with the depth charge of ever-fiercer congressionally mandated sanctions), but signs of intellectual exhaustion are distinctly in evidence.

“Where there is no vision,” the Hebrew Bible tells us, “the people perish.” There’s no use pretending: if there’s one thing the Obama administration most definitely has not got and has never had, it’s a foreign policy vision.

In Search of Truly Wise (White) Men—Only Those 84 or Older Need Apply

All of this evokes a sense of unease, even consternation bordering on panic, in circles where members of the foreign policy elite congregate. Absent visionary leadership in Washington, they have persuaded themselves, we’re all going down. So the world’s sole superpower and self-anointed global leader needs to get game—and fast.

Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently weighed in with a proposal for fixing the problem: clean house. Obama has surrounded himself with fumbling incompetents, Gelb charges. Get rid of them and bring in the visionaries.

Writing at the Daily Beast, Gelb urges the president to fire his entire national security team and replace them with “strong and strategic people of proven foreign policy experience.” Translation: the sort of people who sip sherry and nibble on brie in the august precincts of the Council of Foreign Relations. In addition to offering his own slate of nominees, including several veterans of the storied George W. Bush administration, Gelb suggests that Obama consult regularly with Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and James Baker. These distinguished war-horses range in age from 84 to 91. By implication, only white males born prior to World War II are eligible for induction into the ranks of the Truly Wise Men.

Anyway, Gelb emphasizes, Obama needs to get on with it. With the planet awash in challenges that “imperil our very survival,” there is simply no time to waste.

Continue Reading »

Read this article – 

Why Does Washington Still Romanticize Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Brzezinksi?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, Cyber, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Does Washington Still Romanticize Kissinger, Scowcroft, and Brzezinksi?

Forget foam — now we can grow better takeout containers

by KimCollette Posted on January 27, 2015

scram, styrofoam

Forget foam — now we can grow better takeout containers

By on 27 Jan 2015 3:54 pmcommentsShare

We live in a material world, people — synthetic material, that is, with all the attendant mess that makes. But how can a society addicted to Ziploc baggies, Styrofoam coffee cups, and cheap building materials do without?

Lucky for us, green-minded entrepreneurs are developing sci-fi worthy replacements for these problem materials. Many of these were showcased at a conference in New York City last December, called Biofabricate — apparently “the world’s first summit dedicated to the biofabrication for future industrial and consumer products” — which, you know, cool! Here are some worthy teasers from Fast Company:

Biomason

Bricks inspired by gastropods

Inspired by the way that mollusks grow their shells in seawater, architect Ginger Krieg Dosier began to wonder: Why can’t we just grow our bricks at room temperature instead?

Dosier’s North Carolina-based company, Biomason, is now doing just that, using a mixture of bacteria and nutrients to grow bricks in a matter of days. Dosier at first had no science or engineering background and started experimenting in a spare room in her house. Today, her firm is building a small pilot facility in San Francisco and working to fill its first order.

Petroleum-free plastics that won’t break the bank

Bioplastics aren’t too new … . But at $2 to $3 per pound, they are still more expensive than $1-a-pound (in bulk) conventional petroleum-based plastics, says Allison Pieja, director of technology for Mango Materials, a startup based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Mango Materials is creating a bioplastic that is cheaper by using waste methane from landfills and wastewater treatment plants to feed bacteria that produce biodegradable plastic as a byproduct.

The initial products for its PHA plastics would start small: poker chips, Christmas ornaments, and possibly the microbeads in beauty products that are polluting the world’s oceans. In the very long haul, she estimates there’s enough methane feedstock in the world to produce 3 billion pounds of plastic. “We eat too much we get fat, the bacteria eat too much, they produce plastic. So they’re doing it better,” she says.

Foam made from fungi

Ecovative, a company that grows mushroom-based materials, is on a roll. Started by two college students in upstate New York eight years ago, today it’s working with brands like Dell, Crate and Barrel, and Steelcase to replace perhaps the most unsustainable of all materials — styrofoam — with mycofoam, its biodegradable alternative made from mycelium and agricultural wastes like corn husks.

Lately its been expanding into other materials, releasing Myco Board a “grown-not-glued” alternative to plywood — without the formaldehyde. It also created 10,000 grown bricks for a massive art installation last summer at a museum in New York City — work it hopes to eventually expand into a commercial product—and just released a “Grow It Yourself” kit, so other inventors can experiment with its materials. On its own list next will be mushroom-based home insulation.

These are applause-worthy and all, but we still need to face the facts: U.S. states and cities aren’t banning synthetics fast enough, while Big Plastic just won’t stop ramping up production. I don’t know about the rest of America — but as long as this girl can’t resist the enticing scent of the corner falafel joint, I’ll occasionally betray my values for the sake of a delicious hummus plate snapped tight in folded foam.

But just for the record: If I could get my falafel wrapped in fungi foam, I’d never eat anything else.

Source:
3 Amazing Bio Materials That Are Growing A More Sustainable World

, Fast Company.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Source: 

Forget foam — now we can grow better takeout containers

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Forget foam — now we can grow better takeout containers

We Haven’t Been This Close to the Apocalypse Since 1984

by MichaleFeierabe Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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

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

In 1947, the specter of nuclear holocaust prompted the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to come up with a “Doomsday Clock.” The clock was meant to highlight just how close humans had come to wiping ourselves off the map. Midnight on the clock represented global catastrophe—the end of civilization as we know it.

Back then, the Bulletin set the clock to 11:53 p.m. The group has revisited the setting each year since, occasionally adjusting it forward or backward to reflect changes in world events.

On Thursday, it moved the clock forward two minutes, to 11:57 p.m.

That’s the closest it has been to midnight since 1984, at the Cold War’s peak. The only time humanity has been closer to self-destruction, according to the clock, was from 1953 to 1960, when it read 11:58 p.m. thanks to the nuclear brinksmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War’s end turned the clock all the way back to 11:43 p.m. in 1991. So how did we end up right back at 11:57 p.m., just 24 years later?

The answer is that nuclear war is no longer the only plausible, existential threat we face, according to the Bulletin‘s science and security board. The other: climate change. And, more specifically, the world’s lackluster response to climate change. As Lawrence Krauss explained in Slate two years ago, climate change was added to the clock-setting calculations in 2007, along with the dangers presented by biotechnology and bioterrorism. Despite ever-growing public awareness of the problem, global inaction on climate change has only darkened the picture since then. In a statement Thursday, the Bulletin warned:

Current efforts are entirely insufficient to prevent a catastrophic warming of Earth. Absent a dramatic course correction, the countries of the world will have emitted enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by the end of this century to profoundly transform Earth’s climate, harming millions upon millions of people and threatening many key ecological systems on which civilization relies.

This is not a new sentiment. Earlier this week, in his State of the Union Address, President Obama called climate change the world’s greatest threat to future generations. He wasn’t trying to be hyperbolic. And he might be right.

What’s interesting about the Doomsday Clock, though, is that it represents an attempt—albeit an inherently subjective one, by a group of scientists with their own interests and biases—to put the threat of climate change in context. How bad is it? Really, really bad. And yet, in the Bulletin‘s view, the threat of a warming planet is not quite as bad as the nuclear threat in 1953. Nor is it quite on par with the threat of nuclear war in 1984.

Remember, it isn’t only climate change that has us poised precipitously at 11:57 p.m. today. It’s the combination of climate change and some discouraging recent developments on the nuclear-proliferation front. At a press conference Thursday, Bulletin executive director Kennette Benedict emphasized both. About the nuclear threat, she said:

The arms-reduction process has ground to a halt, with the United States and Russia embarking on massive programs to modernize their nuclear forces—thereby undermining existing nuclear weapons treaties. At the same time, other nuclear-weapons states are joining this expensive and extremely dangerous modernization craze.

The two threats may seem unrelated, but it’s worthwhile to think about them in the same breath, because there are some interesting parallels between them. The greatest danger posed by nuclear bombs is not their explosive power. It’s the prospect of a nuclear winter—that is, a form of very sudden, human-caused, climate change.

The chart above shows the settings of the Doomsday Clock between 1947 and 2012. The lower the graph, the higher the probability of catastrophe. Wikimedia Commons

When we talk about the effects of anthropogenic global warming, we talk a lot about uncertainty. Actually though, the threats posed by climate change are not nearly as uncertain as those posed by nuclear proliferation. We may not know the precise effects of a warming planet, but we do know that it’s happening, and we have a pretty good idea of what will ensue if we don’t change course soon: crop failures, extinctions, famines, water shortages, regional conflicts, coastal floods, and more extreme weather events.

In contrast, we really have no idea what will happen if we fail to rein in the world’s nuclear arsenals. In the worst case, it could lead to all-out nuclear world war, which would change the climate far more rapidly than our current pace of greenhouse gas emissions. In the best case, countries will continue to maintain nuclear arsenals, but no one will ever use them again. And of course there are a lot of plausible scenarios in between.

We could spend years arguing about which is more dangerous, climate change or nuclear proliferation. But that would be like standing around in a burning building, arguing about whether it would be worse to die from smoke inhalation or get crushed by a falling beam.

Likewise, we could have a lively debate about whether the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is right that we’re slightly closer to the brink of disaster today than we were a few years ago, or in 1984, or in 1947. But the real point of the Doomsday Clock is to remind us that we have the power to wind it back. We just haven’t been doing much of that lately.

Follow this link: 

We Haven’t Been This Close to the Apocalypse Since 1984

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, Knopf, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We Haven’t Been This Close to the Apocalypse Since 1984

2014: A Banner Year for Renewable Fuel

by Posted on January 19, 2015

back

2014: A Banner Year for Renewable Fuel

Posted 19 January 2015 in

National

With record ethanol production and the lowest gas prices in years, 2014 was a banner year for the renewable fuel industry. This is good news for the farmers, small business owners, and workers who rely upon this growing sector for their livelihoods. As the new Congress gets to work, it’s important for them to know that:

In 2014, biofuels production reached 14.4 billion gallons — a record — in the United States. As biofuels production soared, U.S. gas prices fell to their lowest levels since 2008 and 2009.
The renewable fuel industry now supports more than 852,000 jobs and $184.5 billion in economic output across the country. This means that more jobs than ever are supported by renewable fuels — especially in America’s rural economies. These are homegrown American jobs that can’t be outsourced.
In 2014, three new commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol facilities came online in America’s Heartland. They will produce the world’s cleanest motor fuel from agricultural waste like corncobs.

All of this progress has been made possible by the Renewable Fuel Standard. At a time of crisis and instability around the globe, we have achieved unprecedented levels of energy independence.

With so much on the line, the United States can’t afford to turn its back on renewable fuels. Congress, the President, and the EPA should keep the progress going and support a strong Renewable Fuel Standard.

Fuels America News & Stories

Fuels
See original:

2014: A Banner Year for Renewable Fuel

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 2014: A Banner Year for Renewable Fuel

Obama’s Crackdown on Methane Emissions Is a Really Big Deal

by Velma36Gqylkyuhv Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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

This morning the White House announced a new plan to crack down on the oil and gas industry’s emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The move is the last major piece of President Obama’s domestic climate agenda, following in the footsteps of tougher standards for vehicle emissions and a sweeping plan to curb carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

Like the power plant plan, the methane standards will rely on the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act. The new rules will regulate the amount of methane that oil and gas producers are allow vent or leak from their wells, pipelines, and other equipment. Ultimately, according to the White House, the rules will slash methane emissions 40 to 45 percent by 2025. The proposal announced today is intended to be finalized before Obama leaves office, but it’s certain to take a battering along the way from congressional Republicans and fossil fuel interest groups.

Methane makes up a much smaller slice of America’s greenhouse gas footprint than carbon dioxide—the volume of methane released in a year is roughly 10 times smaller than the volume of CO2—so the proposal might seem like small potatoes. But it’s actually a pretty huge deal, for a few reasons.

Locking in climate protection: An underlying assumption of Obama’s carbon emissions plan is that many power plants will switch from burning coal to burning natural gas. That’s great, if your only concern is carbon dioxide. But methane, the principal emission of natural gas consumption, is 20 times more powerful than CO2 over a 100-year timespan. The problem is less with natural gas-burning power plants themselves, but with the infrastructure (pipes, compressors, etc.) needed to get gas from where it’s drilled to where it’s burned—and also with venting, the burning of excess gas from wells. So far, those bits and pieces have proven to be exceptionally leaky—some studies have found up to 7.9 percent of the methane from natural gas production simply escapes into the air.

So if we replace our coal with natural gas but let methane go unchecked, we won’t be much closer to meaningfully mitigating climate change, said Mark Brownstein of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Leak rates as low as 1 to 3 percent undo much of the benefit of going from coal to gas,” he added. (Some climate scientists disagree with this assessment, arguing that CO2 from coal is significantly more damaging over the long run than methane leaks from natural gas operations.) The plan proposed today will focus on plugging leaks and will help ensure that the quest to curb carbon emissions doesn’t simply shift our climate impact to another gas.

Saving money and energy: Methane leaks aren’t just bad for the climate, they’re also bad for business. Every year, according to a recent New York University analysis, between 1 and 3 percent of all US natural gas production is lost to leaks and venting, enough to heat more 6 million homes. A separate study from the World Resources Institute put the price tag for all that lost gas at $1.5 billion per year. Plugging leaks and limiting venting from drilling sites would keep more gas on the market.

The industry doesn’t deny that leaks are a problem for its bottom line; the dispute is over whether intervention from the federal government is required and whether the cost to fix the leaks is worth it. Today the president of the American Petroleum Institute called the methane proposal “another layer of burdensome requirements that could actually slow down industry progress to reduce methane emissions.” While it’s true that overall methane emissions have been on a modest decline over the past several years, Brownstein said much more is needed to meet the nation’s climate goals. And the oil and gas sector is the single biggest source of methane.

Cleaning up fracking: Behind any conversation about natural gas is always the specter of fracking. Of course, there are many concerns about fracking that have nothing to do with methane emissions: Public health issues related to water contamination, for example, or earthquakes. But stringent methane rules could alleviate some of the climate-related concerns about the fracking boom and could help refocus the debate around local pollution and land rights issues. These rules are also an opportunity, Brownstein said, for the gas industry to show good faith. “If the industry resists basic regulation for a relatively simple issue to solve, what is the public to think about the industry’s willingness to solve more complex issues,” he said. “This is a moment of truth.”

View original article:  

Obama’s Crackdown on Methane Emissions Is a Really Big Deal

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Obama’s Crackdown on Methane Emissions Is a Really Big Deal