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"Songs for Slim" Is an All-Star Benefit for the Replacements’ Ailing Guitarist. It’s Good, Too.

by AntonioRe Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Various Artists
Songs for Slim
New West

This dandy two-CD set is subtitled Rockin Here Tonight: A Benefit Compilation for Slim Dunlap, which says it all. Former Replacements guitarist Bob “Slim” Dunlap suffered a severe stroke in early 2012, prompting friends and admirers to launch a fund dedicated to his care. Songs for Slim is one part of their efforts. Most of the cuts are covers of little-known, ’90s-era Dunlap compositions, which are raucous, funny and tender, and well deserving of belated discovery.

The first disc compiles the 18 tracks originally featured on limited-edition 45s that were auctioned earlier this year. Among the highlights: the reunited Replacements’ “Busted Up”; John Doe’s stomping “Just for the Hell of It”; the swaggering “Ain’t Exactly Good,” from underrated, long-running Australian band You Am I; and Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood’s poignant “Hate This Town.” (There’s also Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and more.) The second disc offers previously unreleased performances, including a dreamy reading of “When I Fall Down” by Replacement Chris Mars, and for you old-timers, there’s “Love Lost,” by The West Saugerties Ale & Quail Club, with none other than Lovin’ Spoonful leader John Sebastian on harmonica.

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"Songs for Slim" Is an All-Star Benefit for the Replacements’ Ailing Guitarist. It’s Good, Too.

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3 Graphs That End The ‘Food vs. Fuel’ Debate

by Posted on October 22, 2013

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3 Graphs That End The ‘Food vs. Fuel’ Debate

Posted 22 October 2013 in

National

Critics of renewable fuel (chiefly the oil industry) love to claim that growing our own fuel means higher food prices for American consumers. They’re dead wrong, and there’s still a lot of misinformation out there regarding the relationship between corn and the price of food in the grocery store. Let’s take a look:

  1. The price of corn is the lowest it’s been in three years, yet food prices have not come down. This year USDA is forecasting a record breaking corn crop in the US – just this week they updated their inventory estimate by an increase of 25%! Accordingly we have reached a three year low drop in corn prices- corn traded this month at$4.41 a bushel compared to the 2012 peak of $8.49.

Source: NASDAQ.com

 

  1. Only 16% of grocery costs can be traced back to farm inputs, like corn or wheat. The rest goes to costs like energy, transportation, packaging, marketing and labor.

Source: USDA.com, foodpolitics.com

 

  1. Oil, not corn, has been driving up global food prices. While the price of corn is one of many, complicated factors that go into grocery costs, researchers at the World Bank identified crude oil as the number one determinant of global food prices. The cost of energy from oil is integral to so much of the 84% we discussed in #2 (above) that when the price of oil goes up, food prices follow closely behind.

The facts could not be more clear: the agricultural inputs that become renewable fuel simply do not have enough influence on food prices to make a meaningful difference. The only way to spare consumers pain at the grocery store is to end our oil dependence and protect policies that promote alternatives, like the Renewable Fuel Standard.

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Dramatic charts reveal climate change’s effects on oceans

by c7u433n Posted on October 16, 2013

Dramatic charts reveal climate change’s effects on oceans

By

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What’s going on out there?

Climate change is scrambling the oceans. It’s raising water temperatures, lowering pH levels, reducing oxygen availability, and driving down the size of wildlife populations the oceans can sustain.

A study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology painstakingly chronicles many of the consequences of marine changes that the researchers describe as “unprecedented” during the last 20 million years:

Our results suggest that the entire world’s ocean surface will be simultaneously impacted by varying intensities of ocean warming, acidification, oxygen depletion, or shortfalls in productivity. Only a very small fraction of the oceans, mostly in polar regions, will face the opposing effects of increases in oxygen or productivity, and almost nowhere will there be cooling or pH increase. …

The social ramifications are also likely to be massive and challenging as some 470 to 870 million people – who can least afford dramatic changes to their livelihoods – live in areas where ocean goods and services could be compromised by substantial changes in ocean biogeochemistry.

It’s not all bad, according to the international team of researchers. Take a look at this chart from the study revealing cumulative net benefits expected by the year 2100 from changes in oceanic temperature (oC), oxygen content (O2), acidity level (pH), and productivity (Pr):

PLOS BiologyCumulative benefits of biogeochemical changes in the oceans to the year 2100. Click to embiggen.

Ah, that was kinda nice, wasn’t it. But if you want to stay in that happy place be sure to not look at the next chart, which, for comparison, reveals the cumulative negative consequences of all those biogeochemical changes:

PLOS BiologyCumulative negative impacts of biogeochemical changes in the oceans to the year 2100. Click to embiggen.

Yikes, that thing has more warning colors than a poison dart frog.

We’ll leave the final word for the researchers: “These results underline the need for urgent mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions if degradation of marine ecosystems and associated human hardship are to be prevented.”


Source
Biotic and Human Vulnerability to Projected Changes in Ocean Biogeochemistry over the 21st Century, PLOS Biology

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Dramatic charts reveal climate change’s effects on oceans

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An American Shutdown Reaches the Earth’s End

by Myrna Posted on October 14, 2013

If the government shutdown stymies Antarctic research planned for this year, it could jeopardize scientific studies built on decades of work. View article: An American Shutdown Reaches the Earth’s End Related Articles Ailing Occupants of the Bronx Zoo Get Sophisticated Medical Care Moose Die-Off Alarms Scientists France Upholds Fracking Ban

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An American Shutdown Reaches the Earth’s End

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Is this the beginning of the end for coal?

by Natalia681 Posted on September 20, 2013

Is this the beginning of the end for coal?

By

Aaron Hockley

Coal is going off the tracks.

From a failed coal auction in Wyoming to slowing demand in China, times are tough for the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel. And that’s before we even get to EPA’s new proposed power-plant rules.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management held an auction Thursday for the right to mine 167 million tons of coal from the 1,254-acre Hay Creek II coal tract in Campbell County, Wyo. The highest bid of $35 million, by Kiewit Mining Properties, was so low that the bureau rejected it. From Bloomberg:

The company’s offer was less than one-fifth what mining companies paid for similar deposits last year, and the lowest amount per ton since 1998. It didn’t meet the government’s estimate of fair value, the bureau said in a statement.

“The bottom has just dropped out of the market,” Mark Northam, director of the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources, said by telephone. “This represents a high degree of uncertainty about whether coal will stay robust in the future.”

The remarkably low bid followed a similar auction last month, held by the same BLM office in Wyoming, in which not a single company bid on the right to mine a 316-million-ton coal reserve.

Meanwhile, controversial plans to build new coal export terminals on America’s West Coast are flailing. From a New York Times report last week:

United States coal exports this year are expected to decline by roughly 5 percent from last year’s record exports of 125 million tons, and many experts predict the decline will quicken next year.

At the beginning of 2012, the coal industry had plans to expand port capacity by an additional 185 million tons. But those hopes have faded this year.

“Global coal prices right now are not supportive of large-scale U.S. coal exports,” said Anthony Yuen, a Citigroup energy analyst.

The AP has more on coal’s troubles around the world:

Economic forces, pollution concerns and competition from cleaner fuels are slowly nudging nations around the globe away from the fuel that made the industrial revolution possible.

The U.S. will burn 943 million tons of coal this year, only about as much as it did in 1993. Now it’s on the verge of adopting pollution rules that may all but prohibit the construction of new coal plants. And China, which burns 4 billion tons of coal a year — as much as the rest of the world combined — is taking steps to slow the staggering growth of its coal consumption and may even be approaching a peak.

Michael Parker, a commodities analyst at Bernstein Research, calls the shift in China “the beginning of the end of coal.” While global coal use is almost certain to grow over the next few years — and remain an important fuel for decades after that — coal may soon begin a long slow decline.

With coal on the downslide, who do we need to talk to about getting our mountains back?

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Is this the beginning of the end for coal?

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Vanishing ocean smell could also mean fewer clouds

by donkorleone842 Posted on August 28, 2013

Vanishing ocean smell could also mean fewer clouds

By

Shutterstock

Open your eyes: The clouds are disappearing, too.

Next time you’re at the beach take a deep, long sniff: That special coastal scent might not last forever. While you’re at it, put on some extra sunscreen: As that smell dwindles, cloud cover could, too.

The unique oceanside smell that flows over your olfactory organs is loaded with sulfur — dimethylsulfide, to be exact, or DMS. It’s produced when phytoplankton decompose. And it’s a fragrant compound that’s as special as it smells: In the atmosphere it reacts to produce sulfuric acid, which aids in the formation of clouds.

But it’s a smell that’s endangered by climate change. Experiments have linked the rising acidity of the world’s oceans to falling levels of DMS. A paper published online Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change warns that ocean acidification could reduce DMS emissions by about one-sixth in 2100 compared with pre-industrial levels.

Clouds do more for us than just dispense  quenching rain and snow: They also reflect light and heat away from the earth, helping to keep temperatures down.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology found that the knock-on effects of rising ocean acidity threaten to rob the world of so much of its cloud cover that global temperatures could noticeably rise.

“Marine DMS emissions are the largest natural source of atmospheric sulphur and changes in their strength have the potential to alter the Earth’s radiation budget,” the scientists wrote. From an explainer article in Nature:

On a global scale, a fall in DMS emissions due to acidification could have a major effect on climate, creating a positive-feedback loop and enhancing warming. …

In a ‘moderate’ scenario described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which assumes no reductions in emissions of heat-trapping gases, global average temperatures will increase by 2.1 to 4.4 °C by the year 2100.

The model [used for the new research] projected that the effects of acidification on DMS could cause enough additional warming for a 0.23 to 0.48 °C increase if atmospheric CO2 concentrations double. The moderate scenario projects CO2 doubling long before 2100.

Diminished cloud cover and rising temperatures are bad enough, but the real horror might be raising kids in a world where the only place you can smell the ocean is Bath & Bodyworks.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate-denier politicians under attack by new ad campaign

by Isaiah McKenna Posted on August 12, 2013

Climate-denier politicians under attack by new ad campaign

By John Upton

ronjohnson.senate.gov

Sen. Ron Johnson will be the target of a new ad from LCV.

Here comes more bad PR for climate change–denying politicians.

Barack Obama’s advocacy group, Organizing for Action, began trying to embarrass denier Republicans earlier this year. Now the League of Conservation Voters is piling on, spending nearly $2 million on TV advertisements aimed at four GOP flat earthers.

Ads unveiled Monday ridicule the voting records and anti-scientific statements of Reps. Dan Benishek (Mich.), Mike Coffman (Colo.), and Rodney Davis (Ill.), and a fourth ad will soon target Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.). From a League of Conservation Voters press release:

This ad campaign follows the release of bipartisan polling [PDF] by LCV showing that young voters across the country are particularly concerned about climate change and support federal action to address it. A solid majority in the poll said they are willing to hold accountable those who ignore the problem, going so far as to describe climate change deniers as “ignorant” and “out-of-touch.”

The Hill points out that LCV has run a similar campaign before:

Last election cycle, the group launched a $1.5 million effort to defeat what they called the “Flat Earth Five,” five lawmakers who were skeptical of climate change science. All but one were defeated.

The new ad targeting Davis quotes him saying “global warming stopped” 16 years ago:

In the Benishek ad, the rep is quoted describing climate change as “baloney”:

And the ad targeting Coffman likens him to an ostrich:

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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INEOS Bio Begins Commercial Production of Cellulosic Ethanol

by Posted on July 31, 2013

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INEOS Bio Begins Commercial Production of Cellulosic Ethanol

Posted 31 July 2013 in

National

This morning, there’s a lot of good

news

for second generation biofuels, starting with a significant milestone: At 10am,

INEOS Bio

announced that is it producing the nation’s first commercial volumes of cellulosic ethanol out of its Vero Beach, FL facility. Made from wood waste, this clean burning, environmentally friendly fuel is proof positive that the RFS is working. We are lessening our dependence on oil, diversifying our fuel supply, and reducing our carbon emissions.

 

From the INEOS Bio press release:.

 

The biofuels produced in Florida will anchor the new production of cellulosic ethanol under the U.S. Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS). INEOS Bio is working with other companies and cities globally to use this technology as a new direction for waste disposal and the production of advanced biofuels and renewable power.

 

This news comes on the heel of other excellent news in the world of advanced renewable fuel.

Sapphire Energy

, which uses algae to make fuel,

announced yesterday

that they were paying back their $54.5 million dollar loan from USDA ahead of schedule. On top of this,

Zeachem

, which produced cellulosic ethanol at its demonstration facility earlier this year, announced today that their facility has been approved by the EPA under the cellulosic renewable fuel portion of the RFS, moving them one step closer to commercial cellulosic production as well.

 

An exciting two days for advanced renewable fuel, it is becoming more and more clear that the RFS is doing exactly what it set out to accomplish.

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Rampaging pig virus may raise pork prices

by Leon Russell Posted on June 20, 2013

Rampaging pig virus may raise pork prices

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Vulnerable little factory-reared piggies.

A stomach virus that kills most of the piglets it infects is tearing across America, reaching farms in at least 13 states just a month after it was first detected here.

The disease threatens to trim back the nation’s pork supplies at a time when the price of the meat is already rising following last year’s drought.

Scientists say a strain of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), which shares 99.4 percent of its genes with a strain that recently killed more than 1 million piglets in China, is harmless to humans and other animals. But you wouldn’t want to be a baby pig that contracted the disease.

From Reuters:

While the virus has not tended to kill older pigs, mortality among very young pigs infected in U.S. farms is commonly 50 percent, and can be as high [as] 100 percent, say veterinarians and scientists who are studying the outbreak. …

When and how PEDV arrived in the United States remains a mystery. The total number of pig deaths from the outbreak is not known, and the uncertainty is fueling fears among traders, meat processors and farmers about the potential impact on pork supplies later in the year.

The outbreak comes as U.S. hog and wholesale pork prices in the large hog-raising states of Iowa and Minnesota have surged to nearly two-year highs. Supermarkets are racing to fill meat cases for the summer grilling season even as supplies tighten, analysts said. Hog supplies were already tight after last summer’s historic drought drove up feed-grain costs, which prompted a higher-than-normal slaughter rate last summer.

The first U.S. case of PEDV was reported on May 17. But researchers at the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, and other diagnostic labs have since discovered that PEDV arrived as early as April 16, according to the American Association of Swine Veterinarians.

Farmers and county fair goers should be extra hygienic around swine, experts say. From PorkNetwork:

PED typically is spread through the feces of infected swine or contaminated trailers, equipment, boots, clothing and hands. The way it is spread makes it a particular concern now because a number of states will be holding fairs soon, according to [swine specialist David Newman of North Dakota State University].

He says everyone involved in pig handling, including hog operation employees and owners, and those transporting pigs, need to take steps to avoid spreading the virus.

Ew. Time to experiment with veganism?

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Obama may delay Keystone decision until 2014

by bibw6a Posted on May 13, 2013

Obama may delay Keystone decision until 2014

By Lisa Hymas

Jim Barber

Kick … kick … kick …

The Obama administration has been procrastinating on its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline for years — and now comes word that it may kick the can even further down the road. From Reuters:

The Obama administration is unlikely to make a decision on the Canada-to-Nebraska Keystone XL pipeline until late this year as it painstakingly weighs the project’s impact on the environment and on energy security, a U.S. official and analysts said on Friday.

The decision may not be made until November, December or even early 2014, said a U.S. official … who did not want to be named given the sensitive nature of the project.

Analysts agreed that a decision would not be made by this summer as the State Department had suggested when it issued an environmental review on the pipeline on March 1.

If Obama can just delay until Jan. 20, 2017, then finally it’ll be somebody else’s problem.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on

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