Tag Archives: year

Unrecorded diesel emissions kill 38,000 people a year.

by TedPmuzswto Posted on May 16, 2017

In early May, laborers harvesting cabbage in a field near Bakersfield, California, caught a whiff of an odor. Some suddenly felt nauseated.

A local news station reported that winds blew the pesticide Vulcan — which was being sprayed on a mandarin orchard owned by the produce company Sun Pacific — into Dan Andrews Farms’ cabbage patch.

Vulcan’s active ingredient, chlorpyrifos, has been banned for residential use for more than 15 years. It was scheduled to be off-limits to agriculture this year — until the EPA gave it a reprieve in March. Kern County officials are still confirming whether Sun Pacific’s insecticide contained chlorpyrifos.

More than 50 farmworkers were exposed, and 12 reported symptoms, including vomiting and fainting. One was hospitalized. “Whether it’s nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, seek medical attention immediately,” a Kern County Public Health official warned.

If chlorpyrifos’ presence is confirmed, the EPA may have some explaining to do. The Dow Chemical compound is a known neurotoxin, and several studies connect exposure to it with lower IQ in children and other neurological deficits.

The Scott Pruitt–led agency, however, decided that — and stop me if you’ve heard this one before — the science wasn’t conclusive.

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Unrecorded diesel emissions kill 38,000 people a year.

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Why Trump Has You Craving Mac ‘n’ Cheese and Chocolate Cake

by LucilleAyers Posted on May 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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This week’s political news has left me feeling panicky. The more I scroll Twitter, the more often I find myself craving my favorite snacks: chocolate chip cookies and canned Diet Coke.

I’m not alone in my attachment to specific foods for certain moods. Studies suggest that when we’re sick, tired, sad, or stressed, we often eat in aims of feeling better. And given this year’s political climate, some of us may be experiencing an extra strong hankering for a greasy slice of pepperoni pizza or fresh buttercream frosting. A Market Watch survey of food businesses on election night showed spikes in cupcakes, wine, pizza, and other junk food orders.

On a recent episode of our food politics podcast, Bite, we asked listeners to tell us what dishes they’re turning to under the Trump administration.

There’s some science to suggest that we’re wired to crave certain kinds of foods in times of duress. Common comfort foods usually include a salty, sweet, or fattening element. A study by University of Colorado medicine professor Richard Johnson argues that our preference for these flavors may trace back to our early development as humans. To our Paleolithic ancestors, sweetness was a sign that a fruit was ripe and safe to eat. The excess calories helped us put on weight. “Foods that were good for survival are often things that are cemented in your neural pathways as being good for you, so you want more of them,” said San Diego Miramar College anthropology professor Laura González, who has researched emotional eating and comfort foods.

The stress response is similar. The moment we feel threat or impending doom, our bodies are flooded with chemicals that can affect our appetite and metabolism. Hormones like cortisol and ghrelin flood our system and, for some people, increase appetite and caloric intake. It’s common to look for that boost in calorie-dense dishes. “Foods that we turn to in times of stress reward the pleasure centers of our brain,” González said. “So they actually produce more dopamine and more serotonin.”

In González’s research on emotional eating, she found people linked favorite foods with memories of childhood, family, and holiday traditions. She noted that people across various cultures often reach for warm food. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s theorizes that once our ancestors starting using fire to cook, they used less energy to digest, leading to stronger bodies and bigger brains—in short, cooked foods is what made us human.

It’s possible that Donald Trump himself isn’t safe from the effects of stress on appetite. During a recent visit to the White House, Time reporters noted that the president was the only one to receive extra sauce on his entree and two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie.

Here are some more favorite comfort foods from the Twittersphere:

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Why Trump Has You Craving Mac ‘n’ Cheese and Chocolate Cake

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Some methane emissions could actually slow climate change.

by JuliannLombardi Posted on May 9, 2017

Sustainable development projects sound nice on paper, but they often overlook the communities most in need of a revamp. Erick Rodriguez, a native of California, has brought a background in urban design and a knack for community engagement to the city of Cleveland. He’s specifically focused on underserved neighborhoods like Kinsman, where 51 percent of residents live in poverty and 96 percent of residents are black.

Through the Rose Architectural Fellowship, a program that pairs young designers and community developers, Rodriguez has helped neighborhoods focus on tenets of sustainability, like food access. The company he works for, Burten, Bell, Carr Development, has launched a teaching kitchen, a mobile market program that distributes fresh fruit and vegetables, and an urban farming initiative — all in Kinsman.

Rodriguez also works with residents in the Climate Ambassadors program, which offers grants and workshops to community members who want to lead their own development projects. Rodriguez says his efforts are designed to connect people back to the land where they live, even as the planet changes. “Especially within communities of color, we’ve been taken away from our relationship to the earth,” he says.

Next up for Rodriguez: a recycled water project at Burten, Bell, Carr’s office building and a small-business incubator called the Box Spot, which will be housed in recycled shipping containers.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Some methane emissions could actually slow climate change.

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The New York Times Has Imported the Ethics of the Wall Street Journal

by RobFollett79451 Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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As you may know, the New York Times hired Bret Stephens a couple of weeks ago as a new columnist on their op-ed page. Stephens is a conservative who previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, and he’s a climate…something. Climate denier? Climate skeptic? In the past he was probably closer to being a denier, but these days he’s softened and is now a skeptic.

In any case, his hiring set off a wave of outrage among progressives. But I sort of shrugged. The guy’s a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all, and being a climate skeptic is practically a guild requirement among conservatives. If you don’t allow climate skeptics on your op-ed page, you’re going to have a hard time finding any conservative voices.

Then he wrote his first column, and he jumped straight into the maw. It was a pretty bad column, basically saying that, hey, scientists have been wrong before, so maybe they’re wrong this time. That was it—except for a single factual statement, which he botched and had to have corrected. I sighed. Can’t we just change the subject to how tax cuts always pay for themselves?

No we can’t. Stephens’ second column was about climate change again. It was essentially a variant of the first column: sometimes scientists have been wrong about how to reduce greenhouse gases, so maybe they’re still wrong and we don’t even know how to do it. This is tedious, lazy, and sloppy, but it turns out it was more than that. One of his exhibits was Germany’s nationwide effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s been a failure:

Yikes. As Stephens says, “emissions are almost exactly what they were in 2009.”

But wait. Remember those global warming charts that carefully started in the year 1998, an unusually warm El Niño year, to show that warming had stopped dead in its tracks? That was literally the only starting year that gave this illusion, and climate deniers gleefully used it for over a decade until they finally had to stop thanks to the warming of the past few years, which smashed past all the old records.

Well, James Wimberley points out that Stephens did the same thing: he started with the Great Recession year of 2009, when GHG emissions were unusually low. Here’s the full run of data since 1990:

As you can see, 2009 is literally the only year that gives the illusion of Germany making no progress. So that’s the year he used. This is yahoo hucksterism at its worst.

It’s also something that columnists imbibe with the drinking water at the Journal editorial page. Hardly a piece goes by that doesn’t include some kind of egregious statistical flim-flam. This points toward the real mistake the New York Times made. It’s not that they hired a climate skeptic. You can hardly avoid that among conservatives these days. The real mistake is that they imported the ethics of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I don’t know if you can train that out of a person once they’ve spent more than a decade there.

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The New York Times Has Imported the Ethics of the Wall Street Journal

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It Shouldn’t Be a Big Deal When the President Gives a Holocaust Memorial Speech

by susiestamey1517 Posted on April 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Since 1982, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC has organized an annual remembrance ceremony in which Holocaust survivors, members of Congress, and community leaders gather to memorialize the millions of people murdered and persecuted during the Holocaust. For the last 24 years, the president has delivered the keynote address without controversy. But this year was different.

Before Trump took office, his campaign came under fire for overt and coded anti-Semitism and since becoming commander in chief, his administration has continued to face criticism for failing to mention Jews or anti-Semitism in its statement on International Holocaust Day and for not doing enough in response to anti-Semitic acts. There were calls to rescind Trump’s invitation and some on the museum’s board of trustees felt conflicted about whether to even attend.

“I’ve struggled with whether or not I should even go, or to stay away in protest,” board member Andrew J. Weinstein told the New York Times. He said he ultimately would attend despite his “deep concerns about the president and the people he’s surrounded himself with.”

But during the remembrance ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, Trump called Holocaust deniers accomplices to the “horrible evil” and vowed to “confront anti-Semitism.” He then personally addressed the Holocaust survivors in attendance and explained its trauma to them at length.

“You witnessed evil, and what you saw is beyond description, beyond any description,” he said. “Many of you lost your entire family—everything and everyone you love, gone. You saw mothers and children led to mass slaughter.” Here’s the video of his remarks:

“You saw the starvation and the torture,” he went on. “You saw the organized attempt at the extermination of an entire people—and great people I must add. You survived the ghettos, the concentration camps and the death camps.”

Some Holocaust survivors have spoken out forcefully against Trump’s ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, noting that the United States turned away Jews seeking refuge during the Holocaust. Others have noted similarities between Trump’s and Adolf Hitler’s nationalistic and xenophobic rhetoric as they rose to power. Some victims of the Japanese internment camps in the US have also issued similar warnings, saying Trump’s campaign promises and fear mongering about immigrants and Muslims echo sentiments that led to their imprisonment.

In closing, Trump told those gathered in the Capitol, “Your stories remind us that we must never ever shrink away from telling the truth about evil in our time…Each survivor here is a beacon of light, and it only takes one light to illuminate even the darkest space, just like it takes only one truth to crush 1,000 lies.”

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It Shouldn’t Be a Big Deal When the President Gives a Holocaust Memorial Speech

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Obamacare Is Doing Fine Unless Trump Kills It

by ReneCogburn Posted on April 25, 2017

Mother Jones

The Congressional Budget Office says that Obamacare is in good shape:

Under current law, most subsidized enrollees purchasing health insurance coverage in the nongroup market are largely insulated from increases in premiums because their out-of-pocket payments for premiums are based on a percentage of their income; the government pays the difference. The subsidies to purchase coverage combined with the penalties paid by uninsured people stemming from the individual mandate are anticipated to cause sufficient demand for insurance by people with low health care expenditures for the market to be stable.

Insurance companies are starting to make money on Obamacare. Nearly 20 million people have health insurance because of Obamacare. Premiums will probably go up next year, but not by a huge amount. And even if they do go up, federal subsidies will shield most people from having to pay any more than this year. Because of all this, CBO believes that Obamacare will stay stable and strong:

President Trump tweeted the opposite today, saying once again that Obamacare was on the verge of failing. This is a lie, one that he’s repeated over and over. Obamacare will fail only if he cuts off its funding.

The reason for this post isn’t so much to mention that Trump lied again today. The sun also rose in the east, and I didn’t write about that. It’s to remind everyone—including me—to stop writing tweets and blog posts that say something like this:

Trump says Obamacare is in a death spiral. He’s wrong.

When we repeat the lie, we just give it more exposure. The end result is that people vaguely know something about Obamacare and death spiral and controversial, and that’s it. They don’t really know who’s right, they just know that they keep seeing stuff about Obamacare being in trouble.

So don’t do it. Instead, just write the truth and then mention that Trump has lied about it.

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Obamacare Is Doing Fine Unless Trump Kills It

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White House officials are gearing up for a showdown over the Paris agreement.

by Epifani6409 Posted on April 17, 2017

Raj Karmani was a graduate student in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when his frequent trips to the neighborhood bagel store opened his eyes to food waste. Most of the unsold bagels usually went into the trash. Karmani’s obsession with efficiency got him thinking: What if there were an app that would sync up businesses with fresh, excess food and organizations in need of it? In 2013, he started Zero Percent, an online platform for food donation.

Here’s how it works: First, a food producer at a commercial kitchen, say a restaurant or bagel shop, opens an Uber-style app and drops in detailed data about the excess food: the amount, where to pick it up, when to pick it up, etc. Then, a delivery person, hired by Zero Percent, scoops up the food and drops it off at any number of youth groups, community centers, or nonprofits that have also signed up for the app and signaled a need.

Right now, Zero Percent operates in the Chicago area and in Urbana-Champaign (but plans to expand), and its biggest clients include the University of Illinois and the local Salvation Army. Karmani says Zero Percent has delivered more than 1,000 meals. As a well-educated and relatively well-off immigrant, the experience has been eye-opening for him. “Some of these kids have never seen strawberries.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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White House officials are gearing up for a showdown over the Paris agreement.

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‘Gasland’ families are still fighting the company that leaked methane into their water.

by SoilaBroadhurst Posted on April 3, 2017

In Louisiana, more than 18 percent of households didn’t have access to healthy food in 2015 (the national average is 13 percent). In urban centers like New Orleans, there isn’t enough locally grown produce to feed everyone, especially residents.

Marianne Cufone provides a fresh take on locally grown food. In 2009, she built what she describes as a “recirculating farm” on a half-acre plot in the middle of New Orleans. Using bamboo harvested from right there in Louisiana, she set up floating rafts and towers to grow plants — tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, strawberries — in closely packed, in various arrangements around hand dug, rubber-lined fish ponds. Water cycles between the pond and the plants, so nutrients from the fish waste fertilize the plants and the plants filter the water — no dirt required!

Cufone says her farming system is both cost- and energy-efficient, too. Startup costs totaled about $6,000, mostly to install the solar panels and backup batteries that allowed the farm operations to run mostly off-grid. And farms like this could work almost anywhere, she said. “You can grow vertically, in almost any design you want. It doesn’t matter if the land is rocky or paved or even contaminated.”

Cufone’s New Orleans farm initially sold $15 food boxes through a Community Supported Agriculture program and provided produce to local stores and restaurants. In 2011, Cufone started the Recirculating Farms Coalition to promote the idea and secure better policies to help them flourish. That includes pushing for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow recirculating farm produce to be certified organic.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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‘Gasland’ families are still fighting the company that leaked methane into their water.

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Your favorite climate doc is getting a sequel because, it turns out, we couldn’t handle the truth.

by LeolaChristians Posted on March 30, 2017

Some kids dream of being a movie star or an astronaut, but not Karina Castillo. “Hurricane Andrew hit when I was 6, and it changed who I was,” she says of the historic storm that devastated a swath of South Florida near where her family lived. She decided right then to become a hurricane forecaster.

The youngest daughter of Nicaraguan immigrants, Castillo pursued her dream with the intensity of the storms that fascinated her, earning two meteorology degrees at the University of Miami, then working at NOAA and the Miami-Dade County Office of Emergency Management. But the young scientist soon made an important discovery: “I didn’t want to sit behind a computer and program models,” she says. “I knew I could help communicate science to the public.”

After a stint developing climate curricula at the Miami-based CLEO Institute, she took a job with Moms Clean Air Force, a national coalition of parents and caretakers fighting climate change and air pollution. Castillo is now the point of contact for Florida’s nearly 100,000 MCAF members, guiding them through meetings with policymakers, media appearances, and other climate and clean-air advocacy work. She also conducts national Latino outreach for the group, work she’s eager to ramp up in 2017.

“In the Latino community, the ideas of legacy and conservation are really important,” says Castillo. “When you talk about protecting children, the mama bear comes out of people. And that’s an unstoppable force.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Your favorite climate doc is getting a sequel because, it turns out, we couldn’t handle the truth.

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Burning coal for electricity continues its steep slide into history.

by BetseyH277 Posted on March 21, 2017

U.S. cities are packed with about 5 million medium-sized buildings — schools, churches, community centers, apartment buildings. Most use way more energy than they should. Many also have poor airflow and dirty, out-of-date heating and electrical systems. Those conditions contribute to high inner-city asthma rates and other health concerns.

“These buildings are actually making children sick,” says Donnel Baird, who grew up in such a place. His parents, immigrants from Guyana, raised their kids in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, relying on a cooking stove for heat. Baird eventually moved to the South and then attended Duke University, before returning to New York as a community organizer in 2008.

In 2013, Baird launched BlocPower, which provides engineering and financial know-how to retrofit city buildings. The technical part is cool: Engineers survey structures with sensors and smartphone apps, figuring out the best ways to reduce energy use, like replacing oil boilers with solar hot water. But the financing is critical; BlocPower builds the case for each project and connects owners with lenders. It has already retrofitted more than 500 buildings in New York and is expanding into Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

“The biggest way for us to reduce carbon emissions right now,” Baird says, “is efficiency.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Burning coal for electricity continues its steep slide into history.

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