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Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

by NZDAurelio Posted on December 3, 2014

Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

By on 3 Dec 2014 12:34 pmcommentsShare

Obama’s plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants “is a dagger in the heart of the American middle class, and to representative Democracy itself,” said a poetic-feeling Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) back in June. He went on to claim the plan would mean “higher costs, fewer jobs, and a less reliable energy grid.”

“Nope,” said Nike, Starbucks, and 221 other companies on Tuesday in a letter to President Obama. (I’m paraphrasing).

The plan, which would cut carbon pollution from power plants by 30 percent over 2005 levels, will, the EPA estimates, cost between $7.3 billion and $8.8 billion to implement, but will save between $55 billion and $93 billion in public health and climate change–related costs. (It will also save thousands of lives, if you want to factor that into the equation.)

The letter, signed by other major household names like Ikea, Kellogg’s, and Nestle, and organized by the sustainable investment group Ceres, frames the plan as good fiscal policy. It explains that these 200-plus companies’ support is “firmly grounded in economic reality. We know that tackling climate change is one of America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st century and we applaud the EPA for taking steps to help the country seize that opportunity.” It continues:

The new standards will reinforce what leading companies already know: climate change poses real financial risks and substantial economic opportunities and we must act now. We applaud your administration for its commitment to tackling climate change and we encourage your timely pursuit of the finalization and implementation of these standards.

So what was these companies’ motivation for taking a stand? Many of them, the letter explains, have set a goal of getting more energy from renewable sources or decreasing their carbon footprint. “In short, a majority of the world’s largest companies are investing in clean energy and reducing emissions,” the letter says. “Today’s rules will help spur investment and provide the long-term certainty necessary for our businesses to thrive and to meet these goals.” So, if the administration helps the economy become less carbon-dependent through regulation, these companies are for it. (Nike, Starbucks, and a number of these same companies also backed the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House in 2009 but failed to move forward in the Senate.)

This declaration of support for the EPA and the president is a rebuke to those in Congress who, like McConnell, have been echoing the fossil fuel industry’s claim that regulating CO2 from power plants will simply demolish America’s economy. In fact, the administration’s plan poses a threat to only a handful of companies — mostly those that are dependent on mining, moving, or burning coal — whose interests elected politicians seem disproportionately concerned with protecting. If this interest group’s many challenges to the power-plant rules are unsuccessful, the EPA plans to have it finalized by next summer.

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Nike, Starbucks, and other big businesses step up to support Obama’s climate rules

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This Is the Best Newspaper "Retraction" You’ll Read All Year

by StarSlonemfxegk Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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The “retraction” appeared in Australia’s Courier-Mail, which later interviewed the family:

Kai Bogert, as he is now called, was known as Elizabeth Anne for 19 years. Ms Bogert last night told The Courier-Mail that placing the ad was “a no-brainer”.

“I needed to show my son I support him 100 per cent and wanted to let the world know that.”

Perfect.

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This Is the Best Newspaper "Retraction" You’ll Read All Year

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Climate Negotiators Are Working on History’s Most Important Mad Lib

by KeithMercer Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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The latest round of United Nations climate negotiations kicked off today in Lima, Peru. For the next two weeks, delegates from 195 countries will hash out the framework for what they hope will become a major international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when negotiators reconvene in Paris next year. The Lima meeting will also be a chance to hear how far some major carbon-polluters—Brazil, India, Mexico, and more—are willing to go to slow global warming.

The goal of the Lima talks is to set a standard for how countries will formally submit their proposed emissions pledges in preparation for next year’s big summit. You can think of it like a climate action Mad Lib, where the story outline is now being drafted in Lima, and each country will fill in its blanks (but with emissions goals instead of nouns and verbs) before Paris. One of the big debates prior to Paris will be whether developed and developing countries will be required to meet the same criteria for setting those goals, and whether the goals will be legally binding.

This month’s talks will also be the first key test of President Obama’s climate pact with China, which was announced last month. The deal was important for a few key reasons. It set new carbon reductions goals: The US will reduce carbon emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, while China promised to peak its emissions by 2030. It includes a plan to jump-start clean energy trade between the two countries. But perhaps most importantly, it could be a powerful incentive for other countries to create their own ambitious targets.

“The mood music will change,” said Michael Jacobs, a former environmental advisor to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Jacobs, who is in Lima this week with a climate economics think tank run by former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, added, “I think we will see…that if the US and China are both committed, then other countries will not want to look like they aren’t coming to the table.”

That’s a big deal, because widespread political participation is a prerequisite for the kind of global accord UN officials are hoping for in Paris. And it’s a big shift from past climate summits, like the 2009 one in Copenhagen, which have fallen apart thanks to a lack of cooperation from the US and China. Those two countries, the world’s top carbon emitters, have traditionally dragged their feet when it comes to global warming. Neither one of them ratified the last international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

But climate hawks are optimistic that the US-China accord has already advanced the future Paris negotiations into uncharted waters. As the Harvard economist Robert Stavins pointed out, the Kyoto Protocol covered only about 14 percent of global carbon emissions. But the Paris agreement will be structured differently. Instead of a single unified treaty that every country is expected to sign on to (an approach seen as a political dead end), the Paris agreement will be built around a patchwork of “nationally-determined contributions.” The US-China pact essentially serves as both countries’ commitment, and combined with the European Union commitment announced in October, already more than 50 percent of global carbon emissions are covered.

Negotiators in Lima are also designing a system for the international community to review countries’ proposed contributions to ensure that their proposed carbon cuts are sufficiently aggressive and that their calculations make sense. This would be the first time a peer review process is used in international climate talks, said Jennifer Morgan, a senior analyst at the World Resources Institute. Pushing for a strong review framework is a top priority of the US delegation, she said, speaking this morning from Lima.

Countries have until the spring to announce their emissions reduction pledges, so it’s not yet clear if there will be more announcements from Lima. Many eyes are on India, the world’s third-biggest carbon polluter, whose emissions are projected by WRI to climb 70 percent above 2000 levels by 2025. Without cooperation from India, a global accord would be much weaker; Narendra Modi, the country’s new prime minister, has so far been lukewarm on climate action.

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Climate Negotiators Are Working on History’s Most Important Mad Lib

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Why this U.N. climate summit is especially important

by MaximilPKR Posted on December 1, 2014

Why this U.N. climate summit is especially important

By on 1 Dec 2014commentsShare

Thousands of diplomats from around the world are gathering today in Lima, Peru, in the latest round of wrangling to hammer out a deal to address climate change. This two-week conference is the COP20 — meaning, it is the 20th conference of parties to 1992’s U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Yes, we’ve been having a lot of these climate-related U.N. summits — one every year, in fact, plus the summit in New York City earlier this year, which wasn’t an official conference of parties. You, dear Grist reader, are more likely than most to reside in that small minority that finds every U.N. summit on climate change worth paying attention to — but this COP is really important, and even more worth paying attention to than the rest of them. That’s because negotiations are both more urgent and seem more likely to accomplish something than in years past.

First, the urgency: This conference is the last before the big one in Paris in 2015. That conference, the COP21, has taken on great significance among climate hawks because it could very well be the last chance for nations to cut a deal to avoid 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, a target scientists have said will likely allow us to dodge some of the truly awful effects of global warming.

The hope is that the Lima conference will produce a draft document for nations to commit to in Paris in December 2015. In theory, between now and next spring, each nation will come up with a goal for how much they can cut their emissions, and announce their intention to meet that goal. Then, next December, world leaders will sign an agreement acknowledging those commitments, with plans to reconvene and assess how each nation is doing.

For a while, nations haven’t been willing to make these kinds of commitments — but things feel a bit more optimistic this time. Though it has its naysayers, the recent joint U.S.-China announcement that both nations have timelines in place for limiting their emissions made a difference. The announcement demonstrated that the two largest polluters are taking climate change seriously. The deal, in turn, puts the heat on the other big polluters — both those that bare a historical responsibility for global warming, like the U.S. does, and those that only recently industrialized, like China — to come up with a climate plan. The European Union recently announced a timeline to reduce emissions by 40 percent over 1990 levels, which only makes the pressure greater on countries like India, Russia, Brazil, Japan, Australia, and Canada to commit to their own timelines.

Still, in many of those countries, even with the building momentum, commitments face considerable hurdles. India has been wishy-washy, mostly indicating we shouldn’t expect an emission-reduction plan anytime soon. Canada and Australia have the significant impediment of being run by leaders who don’t really give a hoot about global warming. And even if commitments are made, they may swing into effect too late. Writes The New York Times’ Coral Davenport:

The problem is that climate experts say [emissions reduction] almost certainly will not happen fast enough. A November report by the United Nations Environment Program concluded that in order to avoid the 3.6 degree increase, global emissions must peak within the next 10 years, going down to half of current levels by midcentury.

But the deal being drafted in Lima will not even be enacted until 2020. And the structure of the emerging deal — allowing each country to commit to what it can realistically achieve, given each nation’s domestic politics — means that the initial cuts by countries will not be as stringent as what scientists say is required.

That’s bad news for the inhabitants of low-lying islands, farmers in the developing world, and even vulnerable communities in the United States, who are already at high risk.

But even though we’re going to have to deal with some climate changes no matter what, taking action sooner is far better than taking it later. Whether or not the world manages to stay below 2 degrees of warming, emissions will eventually have to be reduced significantly. We’re not on that path yet, but we may be getting closer. That’s why we’ll be watching the news from Lima.

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Why this U.N. climate summit is especially important

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The Looming Olive Oil Apocalypse

by Margene8108 Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

The world’s most celebrated olive oil comes from sun-drenched groves of Italy. But Italy is also a hotbed of olive oil subterfuge, counterfeit, and adulteration—and has been since Roman times, as Tom Muellar showed in an eye-opening 2007 New Yorker piece (which grew into a book called Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil.) Next year, getting real olive oil from Italy is going to be even harder than usual. Here’s the LA Times’ Russ Parsons:

As a result of what the Italian newspaper La Repubblica is calling “The Black Year of Italian Olive Oil,” the olive harvest through much of Italy has been devastated—down 35% from last year.

The reason is a kind of perfect storm (so to speak) of rotten weather through the nation:

When the trees were turning flowers to fruit in the spring, freezing weather suddenly turned scorching, causing the trees to drop olives. Summer was hot and humid, leading to all sorts of problems. Then in mid-September, there was a major hail storm, knocking much of the fruit that remained onto the ground.

Other major olive oil-producing nations suffered similar calamities; Parsons reports that in Spain and Mediterranean neighbors, production is also “forecast to be far below last year’s.” And California, that big chunk of Mediterranean-like climate on our west coast, where excellent olive oil is produced? Parsons says the epochal drought is pinching production, and he quotes Muellar to the effect that “frankly, I hear about a lot of games being played there too, with labels and quality alike.” Sigh.

I find all of this distressing. I came of age as a cook in an era of olive oil hegemony. I treat it like the oil that powers my car, as something to be relied on casually, as if it appeared by magic from nowhere. (Nearly all my Tom’s Kitchen columns feature it.)

Once a staple of Mediterranean polyculture—farms and households would feature olive trees in mixed groves along with a multitude of other crops—olive oil production has long since industrialized. Here is The Ecologist from 2008:

Industrial olive farms grow their olive trees, planted at high densities, in massive irrigated orchards on lowland plains. The olives are harvested by machines that clamp around the tree’s trunk and shake it until the olives fall to the ground. Oil is then extracted by industrial-scale centrifuge, often at high temperatures. In contrast, small, traditional farms are often ancient, their trees typically planted on upland terraces. The farmers manage their groves with few or no agrochemicals, less water and less machinery. Olives are picked off the ground by hand and the oil extracted by grinding the olives in a millstone and press. Demand for cheap, mass-produced oil is making it a struggle for the smaller, traditional farms to be economically viable, however.

….

Intensive olive farming is a major cause of one of the biggest environmental problems affecting the EU: widespread soil erosion and desertification in Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal. In 2001, the European Commission ordered an independent study into the environmental impact of olive farming across the EU. The report concluded: ‘Soil erosion is probably the most serious environmental problem associated with olive farming.

I fear that next year’s olive oil crunch is a harbinger of things to come. I am officially in search of alternative cooking fats. One I’ve come to appreciate: lard from pasture-raised hogs. Lard’s rotten nutritional reputation is the result of outdated and discredited science. And it makes food taste really good, too.

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The Looming Olive Oil Apocalypse

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We’re eating chocolate faster than we can grow it

by TawnyaRiddle Posted on November 18, 2014

bar none

We’re eating chocolate faster than we can grow it

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18 Nov 2014 7:04 AM

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A confession: I want chocolate. I want to eat unreasonable amounts of the stuff — which is a problem for more than just my blood sugar. It turns out I’m not alone: We are eating more chocolate, faster than we ever have before. And now we’re running out.

We already knew that increasingly hot, dry weather and a disease called”frosty pod rot” are both taking their cut from cocoa crops, especially in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where more than half of the world’s cocoa is grown. Now, new statements from Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut, two of the largest chocolate makers, point to another problem facing cocoa addicts: Me. And — be honest — you, too.

Our collective chocolate lust is  so out of control, we are in the middle of a “chocolate deficit” — wherein farmers produce less raw cocoa than the rest of us eat in the course of a year. Like other deficits, this one carries over from year to year, and (let’s be real) usually gets bigger. Unlike other deficits, it has me actually scared. From the Washington Post:

Last year, the world ate roughly 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. By 2020, the two chocolate-makers warn that that number could swell to 1 million metric tons, a more than 14-fold increase; by 2030, they think the deficit could reach 2 million metric tons.

I’d just like to point out that that’s A LOT of cocoa. Some of that is just because we are eating more chocolate, period. But we’re also eating way more dark chocolate, which contains way more cocoa than the average chocolate bar. Still, don’t panic! Chocolate is not going extinct anytime soon — it’s just going to get a lot more expensive.

Gulp. If you need me, I’ll be stocking my chocolate bunker.

Source:
The world’s biggest chocolate-maker says we’re running out of chocolate

, Washington Post.

Chocolate: Can Science Save the World’s Most Endangered Treat?

, Bloomberg.

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America Is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country

by Nina55Twyeiebi Posted on November 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago Vox ran a story about a new Ipsos-MORI poll showing that Americans think the unemployment rate right now is an astonishing 32 percent—higher than during the Great Depression. The correct answer, of course, is about 6 percent. And this is not just a harmless bit of ignorance, like not being able to name the vice president. “It matters,” we’re told, “because the degree to which people perceive problems guides how they make political decisions.”

My first thought when I saw this is the same one I have a lot: how has this changed over time? After all, if Americans always think the unemployment rate is way higher than it is, then it doesn’t mean much. But I couldn’t find any previous polling data on this. I made a few desultory attempts in between football games this weekend, but came up empty.

Luckily, John Sides is a stronger man than me, and also more familiar with the past literature on this stuff. It turns out there’s not very much to look at, actually, but what there is suggests that this Ipsos-MORI poll is a weird outlier. Generally, speaking, most people do know roughly what the unemployment rate is:

In this 1986 article….two-thirds, stated that the unemployment rate was 10 percent, 11 percent, or 12 percent — a substantial degree of accuracy.

In this 2014 article….approximately 40-50 percent of respondents could estimate this rate within 1 percentage point.

In this 2014 article….most respondents gave fairly accurate estimates — which is reflected in the median.

So the whole thing is a little odd. In past polls, people weren’t too far off. In this one, they’re off by more than 25 points. Something doesn’t add up, but it’s not clear what. In any case, it’s worth taking this whole thing with a grain of salt.

But all is not lost. If you decide to take this poll seriously anyway, you might be interested to know that the unemployment results are merely one part of a broader report titled “Perils of Perception.” Basically, it’s an international survey showing just how wrong people in different countries are about things like murder rates, number of Muslims, teen birth rates, voting, and so forth. This is then compiled into a handy “Index of Ignorance.”

So who’s #1? Not us. We came in second to Italy. But that’s not too bad! We’re pretty damn ignorant, and with a little less effort we might take the top spot next year. Still, even though Germans and Swedes may feel smug about their knowledge of demographic facts, can they launch pointless wars in the Middle East whenever they feel like it? No they can’t. So there.

POSTSCRIPT: On a slightly more serious note, Sides tells us that not only is the Ipsos-MORI poll an odd outlier, but that his research suggests that ignorance of the unemployment rate has very little impact on people’s attitudes anyway. I’d say the Ipsos-MORI poll accidentally confirms this. The German public, for example, has a much more accurate view of the unemployment rate than the American public. So has that helped their policymaking? It has not. Over the past few years, Germany has probably had the worst economic policy of any developed country, while the US has had among the best. A well-informed public may be less important than we think.

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America Is the Developed World’s Second Most Ignorant Country

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Two Charts That Show How the US Is Shortchanging the World

by Antony9244 Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim McDonnell

This morning, the New York Times reported that President Obama is poised to announce a pledge of $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations-administered account to help poor countries deal with climate change. That’s the biggest single pledge of any country so far (see chart above); it doubles the total size of the fund and is a major step toward the UN’s target of raising $15 billion before next month’s climate talks in Lima, Peru. Other notable carbon emitters, such as the UK, are expected to announce contributions by the end of next week.

But viewed in a different context, the US contribution looks much less impressive. The idea behind the fund is to reconcile one of the cruel ironies of climate change: Many of the nations that will be hit hardest by global warming—countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, for example—have done very little to cause the problem. Bangladesh was recently ranked as the country that is most vulnerable to climate change, but its per-capita carbon dioxide emissions are 44 times smaller than the US’s per-capita emissions, according to the World Bank. So the fund is meant to bridge the gap between the rich countries whose carbon pollution causing climate change and the poor countries that are suffering from it.

As the chart below shows, the US’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund looks a lot smaller when it’s adjusted to take into account America’s extremely high emissions:

Tim McDonnell

Cumulatively since 1980—the earliest year for which consistent data from the Energy Information Administration is available—the US has emitted more carbon than any other country, including China. (In 2008, China overtook the US as the leading annual carbon polluter). So it’s probably fair to say that the US is more to blame for global warming than any other single country. And yet Obama’s pledge to the Green Climate Fund only translates to about $17,100 per million metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted from 1980 to 2012—placing it ninth among the 13 countries that have announced pledges. That’s a bit like crashing a friend’s car and only offering to pay to fix the steering wheel. By contrast, Sweden’s pledge equates to $292,000 per million tons of CO2 emissions—17 times greater than the US pledge.

It’s great and necessary that Obama is willing to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. But I think it’s fair to say the US is getting away pretty cheap.

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Two Charts That Show How the US Is Shortchanging the World

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Here’s Why China Cares More About Climate Change Than Congress Does

by HyeMarshall Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

On Tuesday, China and the United States announced an unprecedented plan to work together to fight global warming. The deal includes new trade partnerships and significant new greenhouse gas goals for both countries. The US pledged to cut its emissions by up to 28 percent by 2025, while China agreed that its emissions would peak around 2030 and promised to get one-fifth of its power from non-fossil-fuel energy sources by the same year. Environmental groups have roundly welcomed the plan as an important step. But critics of the deal—including congressional Republicans—say China has been let off lightly and that it won’t follow through with its commitments.

The reality, of course, is far more complex. So I asked experts on US-China relations to explain why this deal was so attractive to the leaders of two countries that have historically locked horns over everything from human rights to lingerie imports. Here’s their explanation of why China really does want to want to act on climate change, and why the bargain makes sense for President Barack Obama, as well:

China has to act on air pollution. If it doesn’t, the country risks political instability. Top Republicans have slammed the US-China deal as ineffective and one-sided. “China won’t have to reduce anything,” complained Sen. Jim Inhofe (Okla.) in a statement, adding that China’s promises were “hollow and not believable.”

Climate Desk

But the assumption that China won’t try to live up to its end of the bargain misses the powerful domestic and global incentives for China to take action. The first, and most pressing, is visible in China’s appalling air quality. President Xi Jinping needs to act now, says Jerome A. Cohen, a leading Chinese law expert at New York University. Why? Because “the environment—not only the climate—is the most serious domestic challenge he confronts.” And Xi has the power to follow through on this “ambitious and necessary commitment,” says Cohen, who notes that the Chinese president will likely be in charge for eight more years and has “no overt opposition to his impressive power.”

Over the past few decades, China has witnessed the fastest and deepest wealth creation in history, hauling millions out of poverty in the space a generation. That growth has been heavily reliant on coal, which makes up roughly 70 percent of the country’s total energy consumption. China is the world’s top coal consumer and producer. All that has come with big cost: toxic air. According to one Lancet study, pollution generated mostly by cars and the country’s 3,000 coal-fired power plants killed 1.2 million Chinese people in 2010.

That’s why, Cohen says, this new announcement is such a big win for Chinese people themselves—it’s a clear demonstration that the country’s leaders are confronting China’s largest crisis. “This is very encouraging progress on a crucial issue of human rights: the right to a nonthreatening environment,” he says.

China’s air has become a major political threat to the Communist Party. As we reported in our yearlong investigation into China’s fracking plans, the country has a daily average of 270 “mass incidents”—unofficial gatherings of 100 or more demonstrators—sparked in part by pollution and environmental degradation. The message is clear. As The New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos put it, if the government doesn’t figure out a way to respond, “then it’s a political crisis, not just an environment crisis.” That’s what my colleague Jaeah Lee and I found when we toured China last year: It’s impossible to escape the scourge of coal. To understand why China wants to act now, you need to understand just how desperate the crisis has become:

The Atlantic‘s James Fallows made this point Wednesday, writing that “when children are developing lung cancer, when people in the capital city are on average dying five years too early because of air pollution, when water and agricultural soil and food supplies are increasingly poisoned, a system just won’t last.”

You can watch Fallows explain just how closely tied China’s environmental crisis is to the fortunes of the Communist Party:

President Xi Jinping wants to be a powerful global player. Another motivation for Chinese action has to do with global politics, says Orville Schell, who directs the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

“Xi Jinping is a very tough, muscular, nationalist leader whose toolbox is taken from earlier Mao periods,” Schell said in a phone interview. According to Schell, Xi’s preference for assertive leadership on the world stage means that China is “going to accept much less hectoring and bullying” from the rest of the world, perceived or otherwise. “They are going to be much more defiant.”

This deal—in which China is appearing on the world stage as an equal partner with the United States—fits into that narrative, explains NYU’s Cohen. The “climate issue is needed to boost sagging and increasingly tense Sino-American relations,” he said. “Xi is pursuing a two-faced policy toward the US: progress on issues of critical importance to him and his party/state, and relentless hostility toward the continuing soft power influence of the US over the Chinese people and China’s neighbors. Xi is facing severe internal challenges. He sees that the US can help him on some and undermine him on others, so, following one of Chairman Mao’s famous maxims, he is ‘walking on two legs.'”

China is actually serious about climate change. It’s not the case that everything is about the machinery of global politics—or even simply about China’s domestic worries over air quality. China’s recent actions suggest that its policymakers are actually attempting to confront global warming. Beijing has committed to gradually shut down coal plants inside the city by 2017. Obama and Xi agreed last year to curb the use of hydrofluorocarbons—powerful greenhouse gases that are used in refrigerants. In September, China announced it was moving forward with plans for a massive, nationwide cap-and-trade program intended to help combat climate change. The program will launch in 2016, but there are already a series of pilot carbon markets across the country.

So what does Obama get out of this deal? Despite Republican criticisms that the deal lets China off the hook, Schell says that Obama gets to own a big foreign policy success—one that actually helps him achieve a major domestic policy goal. Obama’s success with China was born out of failure at home: “He’s had to export his hopes and dreams for some sort of collaborative solution in China,” Schell said. “China, paradoxically, has allowed Obama to say that he has followed through with his earlier commitments to take climate change seriously.”

Cohen warns that opposition to climate action in the US could still undermine the bilateral agreement, but he says he’s hopeful that Obama “can implement the US commitment.”

As for whether the deal could signal a larger breakthrough by the Obama administration in US-China relations, the experts are skeptical. “The two big moments—the breakthrough moments—in US-China relations, were Nixon in ’72 and Carter recognizing China when Deng Xiaoping came to the US in ’79,” says Schell. “This is not the case this time with Obama in China.” Still, Schell says that any agreement with the tough Chinese leadership “does represent some progress.”

After all, he says, Obama “certainly can’t do anything at home.”

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Here’s Why China Cares More About Climate Change Than Congress Does

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This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

by ReneeQuisenberr Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Like Disney and the WWF, the game show Jeopardy! has its villains—or at least one, in the form of Arthur Chu, the 30-year-old Cleveland native who took home nearly $300,000 after winning an 11-game streak and seemingly pissing off half of America. How? His sins ranged from “pounding the bejesus out of his buzzer” to skipping wildly around the board in search of Daily Doubles, setting longtime viewers’ heads on fire. The “Jeopardy! bad boy” has continued courting controversy since his February appearance with a number of provocative essays on race and gender issues. He’s recently had a lot to say about Gamergate, a fierce debate going on in the world of video games over issues of diversity and harassment of women. I talked to Chu right before his Jeopardy! return in this week’s Tournament of Champions.

Mother Jones: So how does one study for Jeopardy?

Arthur Chu: A lot of flashcards. There’s a whole online community where people archive clues from the past. Since I talked about using that, I think they’ve started writing the show to make it harder.

People say Jeopardy! is getting “dumbed down” because there are more pop culture questions. I think it’s the opposite. There’s only so many classic operas you can study. For pop culture, you have to actually watch the shows. There’s one every week! It’s much harder.

MJ: What’s your buzzer strategy?

AC: The thing about being a lifelong gamer is that my eye-to-hand reaction time is faster than average. I actually went on a website that tests your reaction time and verified this to my satisfaction.

I knew Ken Jennings loved to buzz in and then start to try to figure out the answer after buzzing. Ken’s very smart, but that’s a little too dangerous for me. Jeopardy! is won partially by keeping your mouth shut when you aren’t sure, so you don’t lose points by getting something wrong.

Really, when you practice watching the show, you should practice reading ahead of Alex’s talking so that by the instant he’s done talking, you’ve digested the question and decided whether you know it or not.

MJ: The times you’ve played, were there any categories you just dreaded, and prayed they wouldn’t come up?

AC: Sports was a huge handicap for me in my original run. And what’s worse, it’s known that it was a huge handicap for me because everyone reported on that famous Daily Double where I bet $5 and blew off the clue. So I felt like I had to shore that up, and studied a ton of sports.

MJ: Switching topics to another kind of gaming, the Gamergate debate is clearly on some level a backlash to demands for better diversity in video games. But a lot of gamers say the lack of female lead characters in games—or brown characters, queer characters, and so on—simply isn’t a problem that needs fixing.

AC: You hear a lot of this. “Why are you dragging real-life politics into cyberspace? I go to gaming to get away from real-life issues.” For a lot of geeks, gaming is all about stripping who you are completely and entering this imaginary space, this world that’s made for you, where winning and losing have nothing to do with real life. They try to argue that representation in games has not been an issue because nobody is really themselves in a game; it’s all just avatars. They’re not seeing the many ways in which that’s not true.

This is a conversation that we’ve needed to have for a long time. And now it’s being dragged into the open.

MJ: So why are we having this conversation now?

AC: From the beginning, the internet has been dominated by white men. So if you wanted to be a part of the internet and you weren’t a white man, you had to adapt yourself to their world. It became normal for women on the internet to adopt gender-neutral or male screen names. If you’re not white, you didn’t talk about your background. It became normal to subsume yourself into a generalized American identity.

We’ve sort of reached a tipping point where people are tired of that. People are saying, “Look, I’m gay”—for instance—”and being gay is important to me and I’m going to talk about it and I’m not going to just sit here and pretend that the many little ways you take a crap on my identity don’t matter.”

MJ: I’ve noticed that the vast majority of people supporting Gamergate online are using anonymous avatars, while a lot of the people they’re piling on to are writing under their real names.

AC: It’s part of the whole idea that the internet is just “for lulz,” that the internet’s not real. Look at 4chan culture, which is the ultimate version of shedding your IRL in real life identity—you don’t even keep a consistent screen name from thread to thread. That’s very important to them, this belief in the possibility that what I do online is completely separate from who I really am.

MJ: Do you have any empathy with the young men who are the bulk of this movement, who, whether they realize it or not, are pretty clearly grappling with some gnarly issues of identity and change?

AC: Oh yeah, I do. I think I’ve tried to be open about the fact that I’ve changed a lot. As an early adopter of the internet, I’ve changed as the internet has changed, and I regret a lot of the things that I used to believe or used to do.

MJ: Like what?

AC: For example, in college I was known as Mister Reasonable Neutrality, always trying to find the middle, to be “rational.” And now that’s almost a cliché—that annoying guy on the internet who insists on playing devil’s advocate, on having a “rational debate,” insisting that emotions are always wrong or biased.

It took me a while to realize that it doesn’t help anyone to have these rational debates. A rational debate is never going to lead to an objectively rational conclusion. It’s never going to pull people out of where they are.

MJ: I feel like anyone who’s spent any time on Reddit has met That Guy.

AC: The joke when I was a teenager was, “Someday you’ll all be working for me.” Being a nerd meant being good with computers, book knowledge, and data, and being bad with people. So the idea was that if you got really good at working with things and manipulating objects, you’d reach a point in life where you wouldn’t need people to like you. You’d win purely by merit. There’s nowhere on Earth where this is actually true, but there’s people who believe that.

That’s why so much of nerd culture involves these power fantasies full of magic—literally reshaping the world through thinking about it—and superheroes with super abilities. It’s also why a lot of the people in geeky subcultures gravitate towards libertarianism. There’s a strong ideological belief in wiping out “politics,” because politics means having to interact with people, and negotiating with people who have different interests.

MJ: So you know a bit about being on the receiving end of a lot of online hate. Most of us will never experience anything like this. What was it like?

AC: I’m glad it happened the way it did. I became a C-list celeb for being controversial. I’m the guy everybody hates. I’m the villain. I thought, I can embrace that.

Every time I write an article, it’s like, I’ve already been the “most hated man in America” for this really dumb thing. How could it get any worse if it were for something I actually believe? I’ve got the money already from being on this stupid game show. The limelight is an unexpected bonus. If I use the limelight to make people like me for a fake image of me, abandon these things I was so passionate about back when it was just me writing to a bunch of my friends on Facebook, then what kind of a person am I?

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This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

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