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In 2015, make a New Year’s resolution that will actually change the world

How the power of positive energy turns you into a climate superhero.

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Climate change is laying waste to water supplies, warns Farm Bureau

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South Korea now has the world’s second largest cap-and-trade market

by ShannaRickman Posted on January 12, 2015

South Korea now has the world’s second largest cap-and-trade market

By John Lighton 12 Jan 2015 12:59 pmcomments Share

Monday was the inaugural day of trading for South Korea’s new cap-and-trade market, the second biggest in the world behind the European Union’s. It applies to 525 of the country’s biggest polluters, which account for 66 percent of the country’s emissions that don’t come from vehicles. And will help the South Korea hit its goal of reducing greenhouse gas pollution 30 percent by the end of the decade. From Reuters:

Under the scheme, South Korea’s power generators, petrochemical firms, steel producers, car makers, electro-mechanical firms and airlines have been given a fixed amount of permits to cover their emissions for the next three years.

The government has set the total amount of allowed emissions for the 2015 to 2017 period at 1.687 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Any company emitting more than they have permits to cover must buy allowances from others in the market.

South Korea is the world’s seventh largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, after China, the U.S., India, Russia, Japan, and Germany.

Once China’s cap-and-trade system becomes fully operational in 2020, it is expected to surpass both South Korea’s and the E.U.’s to become the largest in the world.

As the Sightline Institute wrote back in November, carbon pricing is becoming increasingly popular worldwide. Maybe, someday, we’ll even have a national system in the United States …

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in December

by JarrodGwendolen Posted on January 9, 2015

Mother Jones

The American economy added 252,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at 162,000 jobs, which is not quite as good as last month but still not bad. Virtually all of this growth was in the private sector, yet another sign that the recovery is finally motoring along at a steady if unspectacular rate.

But the news was not all good. The headline unemployment rate fell from 5.8 percent to 5.6 percent, but this was mostly because of people dropping out of the labor force. Wage growth was also disappointing. Last month’s wage increases, which I was skeptical about, were entirely washed away. Earnings for nonsupervisory workers actually dropped to slightly below their October levels.

Overall, this jobs report is decent news, but hardly great. Until we start to see steady employment growth and steady wage growth, the labor market still has a lot of slack no matter what the headline unemployment rate is. Given this, in addition to possible headwinds in the rest of the world, the Fed needs to continue to keep interest rates low for quite a while longer. It’s not yet time to tighten.

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Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in December

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Fox News Gives Paris Massacre the Benghazi Treatment

by BeulahGwhk Posted on January 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

On Wednesday afternoon, Fox News’s Gretchen Carlson focused on portraying the Obama administration as weak-kneed and out of touch in its response to the massacre in Paris. After interviewing pundit Ari Fleischer, who served as a principal spokesman for President George W. Bush’s global war on terror, Carlson went with a familiar script:

“It is what it is. It, meaning terrorism. Terrorism is what it is,” Carlson said. “So why does the administration continue to have such a problem telling the American people and the rest of the world just that? Is that a disservice to all of us? In some way giving us a false sense of security? That since our own leaders don’t see any of these attacks as terrorism right away, neither should we?”

The problem is, her premise was plain false. Earlier in the day, Secretary of State John Kerry described the attacks as an “act of terror” in direct, forceful terms. “The murderers dared proclaim, ‘Charlie Hebdo is dead.’ But make no mistake: They are wrong,” Kerry said. “The freedom of expression that it represented is not able to be killed by this kind of act of terror.”

Also prior to Carlson’s commentary, a statement from President Obama was equally clear on this point:

I strongly condemn the horrific shooting at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris that has reportedly killed 12 people. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of this terrorist attack and the people of France at this difficult time. France is America’s oldest ally, and has stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the fight against terrorists who threaten our shared security and the world. Time and again, the French people have stood up for the universal values that generations of our people have defended. France, and the great city of Paris where this outrageous attack took place, offer the world a timeless example that will endure well beyond the hateful vision of these killers. We are in touch with French officials and I have directed my Administration to provide any assistance needed to help bring these terrorists to justice.

We’ve seen this script before, of course, when Fox News, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and other conservatives obsessively criticized the Obama White House over the deadly attack on the US consulate in Benghazi in 2012. The argument was that the president didn’t call the Benghazi attack “terrorism” quickly enough (before quickly morphing into a conspiracy theory about a massive cover-up of some sort). That was despite the fact that Obama had used the phrase “act of terror” three times in the initial aftermath to describe the attack on the consulate.

In Wednesday’s segment Carlson also went on to insinuate that Obama’s policy of releasing prisoners from Guantánamo Bay may lead to a Paris-like attack in the US: “Keep in mind this administration is more concerned about executive actions for manufacturing and even climate control today, and releasing Gitmo detainees,” she said. “We now know many of those detainees go back to join the jihad. So at this crucial moment, after a horrific attack on one of our allies, will politics continue to trump the reality… In the last few months we’ve seen terrorism hit Australia, Canada, and now France. Will the United States once again be next?”

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Fox News Gives Paris Massacre the Benghazi Treatment

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Don’t panic! Fukushima radiation just hit the West Coast

by EugeneWaltman Posted on January 7, 2015

Don’t panic! Fukushima radiation just hit the West Coast

By Amelia Urryon 7 Jan 2015comments Share

Nuclear energy gives plenty of people the heebie-jeebies: Like horror-movie ghosts and ancestral curses, you can’t see or feel or smell it, but it can still kill you. So when Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant was damaged in March 2011, releasing a flood of radioactive cesium-tinged water into the Pacific, nervous nancies the world over took note. And that note, typically, was: PANIC!!!!!1!!11!

First of all: No. Don’t. While some wafting fallout hit the U.S. in the first months after the disaster (results: TBD), ocean-borne radiation took the long way around to get to us. Specifically, 2.1 years, according to an analysis published last month in PNAS.

The study, conducted by scientists from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, in Nova Scotia, monitored water at test sites off the coast of British Columbia. They were looking for atoms of cesium 134 and 137, the two molecules released at Fukushima — and, sure enough, eventually they found them. In June 2012, they found the smallest signs of the radiation only at their westernmost testing site; a year later, the signal made it to the Canadian continental shelf, but still far offshore. Then, in November 2014, a group from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found traces of Fukushima radiation 100 miles off California.

To reiterate: Don’t panic. By the time it made it to this side of the Pacific, that radiation was 10 million times weaker than it was when it left Japan, and 1,000 times below the safe threshold for drinking water (for nerds: We’re talking under 2 Becquerels per cubic meter [260 gallons]). In fact, that’s even lower than the background radiation levels in the ocean, where residual cesium 137 still lurks from atmospheric nuclear testing in the past 50 years. According to WHOI scientist Thomas Buesseler as cited by Quartz, you could swim in that water for six hours a day, every day, and still absorb less radiation than you would from a single dental x-ray.

None of which is to say that a nuclear power plant still hemorrhaging toxic waste into the ocean is NBD. There are real concerns about the fishing industry in Japan, where ecosystems continue to be dosed with the irradiated water, and some concerns about Pacific tuna, which may be vulnerable thanks to their epic migratory patterns.

Did I mention not to panic? Even though you are not likely to turn into a three-eyed mutant thanks to minute amounts of ambient radiation, the Fukushima disaster raises interesting questions about what we know about our interconnected world — and I’m not just talking about Twitter. How, exactly, does an event in one part of the world ripple outward? Scientists have models of Pacific currents, but, given the vastness of the ocean and the confounding number of variables, nothing beats old-fashioned observation. The Fukushima radiation serves as a kind of dye test, showing exactly how water from a single release point traverses the ocean.

And, in fact, the computer models turn out to be pretty accurate. Since irradiated water has continued to leak from the damaged reactors in the past three years, radiation levels will continue to rise, peaking in Canada in 2015 and 2016 and a few years later in Southern California. But — once and for all, drop the adrenaline and iodine tablets, you’re fine — the levels are never expected to exceed the very-safe limit of 5 Becquerels per cubic meter. Now you can go back to panicking about the very real threat of global warming instead.

Source:
Tracking the Fukushima radioactivity plume across the Pacific

, L.A. Times.

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A Quick Note About the Future

by LannyCurtiss Posted on January 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jus a quick note before I move on to another subject this morning. A fair number of comments to my list of predictions yesterday suggested that it made for pretty depressing reading. But I suspect that might have been due to my tone more than the actual content of the predictions themselves. There’s a bit of fuzziness here, but here’s how I’d classify them:

Basically positive: 1, 2, 5, 9, 11, 13
Neutral-ish: 4, 8, 10, 14
Basically negative: 3, 6, 7, 12, 15, 16

Obviously there’s room for debate here. For example, I count the development of artificial intelligence (#1) as a positive development, but I do concede that it will either “transform or destroy” the world. (The case for destroying the world is here.) On the neutralish side, you might think that super social media (#8) sounds great, not neutral, and if you’re Russian or Chinese you won’t think much of #14. On the negative side, the stagnation of manned space travel (#12) might strike you as a yawn, and although any kind of biological attack is bad (#16), I pretty much think we’ll be able to contain this threat.

In any case, you can argue about my categories. Still, I think by any fair measure I ended up with a roughly an even mix of good and bad, and that’s just the way the world is. If you made a similar list for 1900-1950 but did it in hindsight, you’d get electrification, mass-produced cars, and penicillin, but you’d also get the Great Depression, two massive world wars, the start of the Cold War, and the invention of nuclear bombs. It was hardly all roses.

I suspect that for most of us alive today, our attitudes are skewed by growing up in the period from 1950-2000. But this is the anomaly: obviously there was some bad stuff during this era, but the good far outweighed it. On a broad scale, it was almost certainly the most progressive and innovative half-century in human history. After all, we might have been bristling with nuclear weapons, but we never ended up using them, did we? And we made massive material and social progress around the globe, but didn’t yet have any big worries about climate change or terrorism. In hindsight, most of our fears turned out to be modest, while our progress was unprecedented. It’s possible that the period from 2000-2050 will repeat that, but at the very least I think the dangers of the next few decades are both real and deserve consideration.

For what it’s worth, though, virtually everything hinges on two things: the development of benign artificial intelligence and the development of clean, abundant energy. If we manage those two things, the world will be bright indeed.

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A Quick Note About the Future

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The World’s Two Richest Men Made $21 Billion Last Year

by RoxannaZiq Posted on January 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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As everyone from Ted Turner to Drake has said, the hardest part of getting rich is making the first million. The rest just comes naturally.

The fact that wealth begets more wealth was illustrated once again last year by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, currently the two richest people on Earth. According to Bloomberg, the pair finished 2014 a combined $21.1 billion richer than when the year began. (Gates‘ fortune rose $8.1 billion to a total of $86.6 billion. Buffett‘s rose $13 billion; he’s now worth $73.8 billion.)

Gates and Buffett are aware of their privilege. They have both advocated for higher taxes on the wealthy. They have also poured billions of their own money into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest funders of charitable causes like infectious disease research, poverty reduction, and (more controversially) education reform.

The Gates Foundation would be a fitting destination for Gates’ and Buffett’s new wealth, but it’s not the only place they could spend last year’s earnings. Here’s a list of some of the things that money could buy:

Humanitarian assistance for the world’s war-ravaged people. Earlier this month, citing “an unprecedented level of crisis around the world,” the UN asked member states for $16.4 billion to help at least 57.5 million people who “have experienced unimaginable suffering” in Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories, Burma, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Burkina Faso, the Gambia, Chad, Djibouti, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, and Iraq. With $21 billion, Gates and Buffett could meet that request and still have nearly enough money left over to cover the US response to Ebola.

Food for the year for 3.1 million American families. As of last month, an American family with a toddler and a small child needs at least $566.70 each month in order to eat nutritious food, according to the US Department of Agriculture. But this minimum threshold is out of reach for many families. In 2013, 17.5 million households struggled at some point to get enough food, according to the USDA. Extra help would be especially useful given that Congress cut food stamps by $8.7 billion in February.

College educations for 278,000 students. With tuition, fees, room, and board averaging $18,943 per year, attending a state school for four years is out of reach for many Americans. For students who can’t afford college—or who are paying for it by taking on massive debt—a lot of money here could go a long, long way.

The Chesapeake Bay, restored. The Chesapeake Bay is a major source of tourism and fishing revenue for Maryland and Virginia, but agricultural runoff has turned large swathes of it into a marine dead zone. State and local governments have been working to restore the bay. A recent estimate put the cost of the project at $14.4 billion over 15 years. At that price, Gates’ and Buffett’s 2014 earnings could cover the restoration cost—with enough money left over to match the combined pledges from the US, Japan, UK, and Germany to the United Nation’s Green Climate Fund, a pot of money intended to help poor countries deal with global warming.

The means to save the Amazon. In 2009, then-Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the governments of the world to put $21 billion into a fund to manage protected areas of the Amazon and restore other, deforested areas. Five years later, the fund has raised less than $1 billion, mostly from the Norwegian government.

Five record-setting midterm elections. A flood of dark money made this year’s midterms the most expensive in history. With their 2014 earnings, Gates and Buffett could match all sides’ political spending more than five times over.

An aircraft carrier. The US Navy is currently replacing it’s Nimitz class carriers—already the largest warships in the world—with something larger and more technologically advanced: the Gerald R. Ford class carriers. At just $12.9 billion apiece, Gates and Buffett could buy one and have enough money left over to procure a pair of high-tech destroyers that are nearly invisible to radar.

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The Biggest News Stories of 2014, in Photos

by JacquieSpencer Posted on December 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s been a tumultuous year marked by civil war in Syria and Ukraine, the spread of the Islamic State in the Middle East, massive protests against police violence in the United States, air disasters for Southeast Asian airlines, a spirited campaign for control of Congress, and major policy announcements via executive order by President Obama. Here a look back at some of the best images from the year’s major news stories.

January 25: A protester hurls a Molotov cocktail during a clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine. Sergei Grits/AP

January 31: Palestinians line up for food in Yarmouk, a refugee camp in Damascus, Syria. UNRWA/AP

March 22: Relatives of passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 shouted their demands at reporters after Malaysian government representatives left a briefing in Beijing. The airplane has still not been found. Ng Han Guan/AP

April 3: A Spanish officer assists a migrant who fainted atop a fence that divides Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Thousands of sub-Saharan migrants live illegally in Morocco, and regularly try to enter Melilla in the hope of later making it to the Spanish mainland. Santi Palacios/AP

April 12: Supporters of rancher Cliven Bundy fly the American flag in celebration after the US Bureau of Land Management released the family’s cattle onto public land near Bunkerville, Nevada. Armed backers of rancher Bundy lived along a state highway in southern Nevada for almost three weeks following an armed standoff with the BLM, which had rounded up the cattle saying Bundy owed $1.1 million in grazing fees and penalties. Jason Bean/Las Vegas Review-Journal/AP

April 16: A South Korean rescue team and fishing boats try to rescue passengers of the sinking ferry Sewol off the country’s southern coast. The ferry capsized with 476 people aboard, many of them students—and 307 died. South Korea Coast Guard/Yonhap/AP

May 9: Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a parade marking Russia’s forcible annexation, two months earlier, of much of Crimea, previously Ukrainian territory. Ukraine and NATO quickly condemned the victory lap. Ivan Sekretarev/AP

May 12: This image from a video by Nigeria’s Boko Haram terrorist network shows missing girls the group abducted from the northeastern town of Chibok. More than 200 schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haran in April. They were forced to convert to Islam and married off to the group’s members. AP

May 16: Supporters write congratulatory messages for India’s Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi at his party’s headquarters in New Delhi. Modi’s victory, the most decisive in more than a quarter century, swept the long-dominant Congress party from power. Manish Swarup/AP

May 24: Richard Martinez, whose son Christopher was killed in a mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, lashed out at the NRA and politicians who support the group. The previous day, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded 13 before killing himself. Jae C. Hong/AP

June 15: A helicopter circles over the Shirley Fire near Lake Isabella, California. The fire ultimately burned 2,645 acres and caused more than $12 million in damage. It was just one of 5,597 wildfires that altogether burned more than 90,000 acres, according to Cal Fire. Stuart Palley/ZUMA

June 18: Immigrant children who crossed the US/Mexico border without a parent sleep in a holding cell at a Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville, Texas. Eric Gay, Pool/AP

July 8: Brazil midfielder Fernandinho reacts after Germany scores its third goal during the World Cup semifinals. Germany humiliated the host nation with a 7-1 victory before eliminating Argentina in the final to win its fourth World Cup title. Natacha Pisarenko/AP

July 14: Palestinians who fled their homes under heavy bombardment by Israel take refuge at a UN-run school in Gaza City. Many such schools came under attack during the seven weeks of fighting between Israel and Hamas. Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/ZUMA

July 17: NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo restrains Eric Garner with a chokehold in this still from an eyewitness video. Garner died shortly afterward, and a grand jury decision not to indict the officer sparked massive protests across the nation. YouTube

July 19: Emergency workers carry a body bag from the site of a Malaysia Airlines crash near the eastern Ukrainian village of Hrabove. Ukraine accused Russian separatist rebels of shooting down the plane, a charge the rebels deny. Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

July 29: Israeli soldiers, family, and friends mourn Sgt. Sagi Erez, killed in combat after militants used a tunnel to sneak into Israel from Gaza. Ariel Schalit/AP

August 13: A demonstrator throws a teargas container back at riot police in Ferguson, Missouri, where the killing of an unarmed black man by a police officer set off weeks of street protests. Robert Cohen/St Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS/ZUMA

August 14: US servicemen discuss the deconstruction of a command operation center in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. On October 26, after 13 years, America, Britain, and Australia formerly ended Afghan combat operations. Cpl. John A. Martinez Jr./U.S. Marine Corps

August 26: A pro-Russian rebel patrols through the rubble of a market damaged by shelling in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine. Mstislav Chernov/AP

August 28: A worker prepares to remove the corpse of an Ebola victim in Unification Town, Liberia, part of the most severe outbreak since the virus was discovered. Kieran Kesner/Rex /ZUMA

Mid-September: Businessman Jon Gamble near Dunblane on the eve of a Scottish independence referendum. On September 18, a majority of the voters chose to remain part of the United Kingdom. Andrew Milligan/PA Wire/AP

September 23: Air Force Maj. Gena Fedoruk and 1st Lt. Marcel Trott take off in a KC-135 Stratotanker as part of a mission to conduct airstrikes on Islamic State positions in Syria. Senior Airman Matthew Bruch/U.S. Air Force

September 27: Riot police use pepper spray on pro-democracy activists who forced their way into Hong Kong government headquarters, challenging Beijing’s decision to backpedal on promised democratic reforms. Apple Daily/AP

October 20: An airstrike by a US-led coalition in Kobani, Syria, as seen from a hilltop near the Turkey-Syria border. Kobani and the surrounding areas has been under assault by Islamic State extremists since mid-September. Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

November 4: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell casts his ballot at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He easily won a sixth term. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

December 8: Protesters rallying against police violence and the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police, stop traffic on Interstate 80 in Berkeley, California. Noah Berger/AP

December 20: In Havana, members of the so-called Cuban Five celebrate a recent exchange of imprisoned spies, part of a historic agreement to restore relations between the United States and Cuba. Ramon Espinosa/AP

December 26: A protester in Mexico City displays painted hands and the number 43, signifying the number of students taken from a rural teachers college and handed over to a drug gang to be killed, according to an investigation by Mexican government authorities. Marce Ugarte/AP

December 27: The casket of NYPD officer Rafael Ramos is carried from a church in Queens after funeral services. Ramos and his partner, Officer Wenjian Liu, were shot to death in Brooklyn on December 20 by a man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who said it was in retaliation for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Brinsley later killed himself. Julio Cortez/AP

December 29: Indonesian Air Force officials study a map during search and rescue efforts for the missing AirAsia flight QZ8501. Wreckage from the plane, along with dozens of floating bodies, were found in the Java Sea on December 30. Sijori Images/ZUMA

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Is 2015 the year Pope Francis defeats climate change?

by SherryGarsia Posted on December 30, 2014

Is 2015 the year Pope Francis defeats climate change?

By Sam Blisson 29 Dec 2014comments Share

At the very beginning of 2014, we reported that Pope Francis had begun drafting a big green manifesto to guide the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics in their interactions with creation — that is, pretty much everything they do. As the year draws to a close, the environmental edict has at last been scheduled for publication next March, on the heels of a papal visit to Tacloban, the Philippine city most thoroughly destroyed by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.

Pope Francis cannot be blamed for the slow progress on his big encyclical, a letter from the papacy to all bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. He was busy getting shit done in 2014. Just in the past few weeks, he’s helped put the U.S. and Cuba back on speaking terms, and used his traditional Christmas speech to sharply criticize Vatican officials for their gossiping, power-hungry ways.

The forthcoming encyclical on climate change and human ecology is so important to Francis that he plans to distribute the 50- to 60-page document to the whole Catholic world, from priests to parishioners. The Guardian‘s John Vidal reports that this pronouncement is a key piece of the Holy Father’s grand plan to influence next year’s United Nations climate talks in Paris, where the world’s countries will try to end 20 years of climate change disagreement. Also on the docket for 2015: a trip to New York in September to meet with other global religious leaders, and then address the U.N.’s general assembly as it sets new anti-poverty and environmental goals.

No contents of the encyclical have been leaked, which these days means the procrastinating pope probably hasn’t written a word yet. But we can make some guesses as to what he might pontificate based on what he’s had to say this year on nature, humanity, and our economic system — which His Holiness equates with idolatry.

In May, on knowledge:

Creation is not a property that we can rule over at will, or, even less, the property of only a few. … Safeguard creation. Because if we destroy creation, creation will destroy us!

In October, to landless peasants from Latin America and Asia, as well as other social activists:

An economic system centered on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it. … The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.

And in November, from a letter to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott:

[T]here are constant assaults on the natural environment, the result of unbridled consumerism, and this will have serious consequences for the world economy.

Capitalism is an easy punching bag for anyone who thinks people and other life are more important than material wealth, but coming up with something better and a plan to get there peacefully is, of course, the complicated part. Perhaps the pontifical proclamation will lay out his vision for transforming the world economy into something, say, smaller and less destructive. In which case I’m converting to Catholicism.

Source:
Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches

, The Guardian.

Pope Francis to tackle global warming, encyclical due in March

, Catholic Online.

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