Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Darby Minow Smith

Monckton at the Copenhagen climate talks. Photo courtesy Matthew McDermott via FlickrInfamous climate change denier Lord Christopher Monckton briefly
fixated on another googly-eyed theory at a Tea Party event yesterday.

In his speech, Monckton made the tea baggers choke
by joking, “America!
Land of opportunity! You can be born in Kenya
and end up as president of the United
  States!”

After calling climate activists “Hilter Youths” at the
Copenhagen Climate Talks, it’s no surprise that Monckton would affiliate
himself with a party known for brandishing posters of Obama as the Führer.

And Monckton did, after all, make his name (and money) by
denying facts.

But really? Birther theories? That may be a little too weird
and wide-eyed even for Lord Crazy-pants. When reporters from the Washington Post and USA Today questioned Monckton after the
event, the good Lord backed off a bit.

“I have no idea where he was born,” he conceded. “What
I do find strange is that the public records of his Hawaiian birth have been
sealed, and can not be obtained by the public. His lawyers have spent a lot of
money trying to seal the records of his public life. All of those records
should be open to the public, as they always were for previous
presidents.”

When the Washington
Post reporter pointed out that the state of Hawaii did release Obama’s birth certificate—two years ago—Monkton was,
well, you decide: “The effective classification of all of these documents of
his early life is surely contrary to the spirit of freedom and openness in the
Democratic west. It’s bound to raise questions in some peoples’ minds. However!
I have no idea where he’s born, but it made a nice joke.”

Chortle chortle indeed, Lord Debunkedton. 

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Tea Party supporters far less informed about climate change than general public

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But can you dance and chew gum at the same time?

by Grist

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I know. I know. The phrase Securities and Exchange Commission is zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. But the SEC did something sort of landmark last January: in a 3-2 vote, commissioners approved guidelines that urge companies to regularly disclose climate change-related risks (and opportunities) to investors. If you’re a big box store importing underwear from China, or an insurance company indemnifying coastal businesses, you’ll have to start accounting for the carbon cost of all that transportation, or the projected rise in global sea levels. We’re not talking laws here, just guidelines. But the SEC’s decision should make corporate America take climate change more seriously, and it may even push American businesses and investors—and the rest of us—to start thinking long-term again, a nice ability to rediscover if we ever hope to combat climate change. We’ve convened some heavy hitters to weigh in on what happens next. Call in to hear them predict the future [on Monday, April 19, 2pm EDT, 11am PDT, at 347.934.0400.]

Kristen A. Sheeran
Executive Director at Economics for Equity and the Environment Network
“Environmental risks have largely been absent from long-term planning because we’ve been rooted in a mindset that’s shorter, and that believes we’ll be able to adapt with a more prosperous economy and investment in technological changes. That mindset is changing, and this ruling is a clear indication of that shift.”

Sara Robinson
Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future
“Accepting limits is a very new thing for Americans. But the average American feels that the crazy
days are over and we have to get serious about how make it through the winter. We are gathering ourselves to live in a world
with more limits.”

Julie Fox Gorte
Senior Vice President for Sustainable Investing at Pax World Management Corporation.
“I do think corporations can lead. A few have. And corporations are going to have to lead if we’re going to be able to live on this planet.”

 

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The Real Problems with Paul Krugman’s Climate Economics Primer

by Osha Gray Davidson

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people
can change the world.”
—Margaret Mead

Because Americans
are optimists we tend to see Mead’s observation as upbeat and life-affirming
(as it was probably intended). Blinkered by optimism, however, we miss the dark
flip side of her observation—that a few fanatics can do immense harm.

In their sweeping and comprehensive new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco
Smoke to Global Warming, historians Naomi Oreskes
and Erick M. Conway document how a handful of right-wing ideologues—all
scientists—have (mis)shaped U.S. policy for decades, delaying government
action on life-and-death issues from cigarettes and second-hand smoke, to acid
rain, and now, finally, to climate change. The book is similar to the popular
Discovery Channel show “How Do They Do It?” Only instead of investigating
quirky mysteries like how stripes get into toothpaste, Merchants of Doubt looks at exactly how we arrived at the gravest
crisis in the history of our species—one we created ourselves.

Although most of
these scientists were influential men in themselves (and they are all men),
they could not have done as much damage without powerful allies. Whole
industries bankrolled their research, sometimes laundering the money through
front groups with innocuous names. Think tanks like the George C. Marshall
Institute were financed specifically to publish and disseminate their papers—junk science that couldn’t survive the rigors of peer-reviewed journals.
Oreskes and Conway also devote an insightful section to the mass media’s mostly
unwitting complicity in this scandal.

This premise may
sound like a conspiracy theory, but the truth Oreskes and Conway elucidate is
more banal and convincing. The title, Merchants
of Doubt, frames the authors’ argument, echoing an internal memo from the
Brown & Williamson tobacco company that declared: “Doubt is our product
since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in
the mind of the general public.” Big tobacco helped finance the industry of
doubt in its modern form, run by the scientists whose schemes this book
details. In a sense, this is an industrial history and it should be no more
shocking to see the same names continually popping up than it is to see Lee
Iacocca’s in a history of the auto industry.

Fred SeitzThe central
characters in Merchants of Doubt include Fred Seitz, S. Fred Singer,
William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow. These may not exactly be household
names, but it’s probably not much of a stretch to call them the founding
fathers of industrial-strength doubt.

Fred Seitz was a
pioneer of solid-state physics who helped develop the atom bomb. From the end
of World War II until his death in 2008, Seitz devoted himself to protecting
laissez-faire capitalism from communism. He moved quickly from scientific
research to administrative work, serving as president of the National Academy
of Sciences from 1962 to 1969. When the Soviet Union
broke a moratorium on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, Seitz immediately
urged President John Kennedy to respond in kind, despite evidence that
radioactive fallout contaminated swaths of land for more than a thousand miles.
Innocent people would die, but some collateral damage is inevitable when
fighting a war, even a cold one.

Fred SingerFred Singer is
another physicist turned cold warrior. He began his career developing the
government’s earth observation satellite system. Along the way, Singer took up
the cudgel defending free enterprise by opposing environmental regulations. The
other “merchants of doubt” profiled by Oreskes and Conway traveled a similar path. Physicist
William Nierenberg’s work on the Manhattan Project led him in the early 1960s
to become NATO’s chief scientist working on developing weapons to use against
the Soviets. Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow moved from NASA into a leading
position supporting Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka,
Star Wars) to counter “Soviet hegemony,” which he called the
“greatest peril” in U.S.
history.

What all these men
have in common (aside from their background in physics) is the belief that the
Cold War didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In their minds, and in the minds of their followers, “real Americans” are still battling socialism, only now the
threat comes primarily from within. Grasping that bizarre and paranoid notion
is central to understanding their motivations and methods.

In the 1950s, Big
Tobacco had begun using scientists to sow doubt about links between their
product and cancer. As the evidence against them mounted in the 1970s, the
tobacco industry realized they needed something more. They found it in Seitz,
who was not merely a scientist, but the former president of the Academy of Sciences.

R. J. Reynolds put
Seitz in charge of the company’s biomedical research grant program. The amount
of money available was staggering. In 1981, Oreskes and Conway write, the
American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association together contributed
$300,000 to research. In that same year, Big Tobacco directed $6.3 million to
researchers who consistently found no evidence conclusively linking tobacco to
serious medical problems.

Seitz and the
tobacco industry were a perfect fit. Environmental and industrial regulations
were anathema to each. For the industry, it was a simple matter of
self-interest. While Seitz was well-paid for his work, ideology may have been
the more important factor. Over the years Seitz’s conservative views had grown
ever more extreme. He found himself alienated from many of his scientific
colleagues over the Vietnam War (many of them were against the war; Seitz was
an enthusiastic supporter). He also became convinced that environmentalists
were dupes of communist propaganda, if not outright traitors.

Eventually,
Seitz’s right-wing views would become too much for even the tobacco industry.
Seitz was, in their view, “not sufficiently rational” to maintain a public
connection with the industry.

William NierenbergWhile Seitz was
busy doling out “research” funds for R. J. Reynolds, his colleague, William
Nierenberg, was leading the fight in a different arena: to prevent the federal
government from taking action on acid rain. Once again, Oreskes and Conway do
an excellent job of bringing to life a complex and important environmental
battle that is poorly remembered today. In 1982, Nierenberg was appointed by
President Ronald Reagan to lead a review of the scientific evidence concerning
acid rain. Had the acidity of rain in the northeastern part of the United States
really increased? If so, how serious was
the problem? And what caused acid rain? Was it naturally occurring, or did
humans play a role in creating the problem?

The questions were
valid, or at least they had been when the phenomenon was first examined a
decade earlier. A broad scientific consensus had emerged over several years, so
that by 1979 it wasn’t news to most scientists in the field when Scientific American published an article
explaining to the public that “In recent decades, the acidity of rain and snow
has increased sharply over wide areas. The principle cause is the release of
sulfur and nitrogen by the burning of fossil fuels” to generate
electricity.  What’s more, the National
Academy of Sciences had released a report in 1981 with similar conclusions, but
going even further. That study concluded that there was “clear evidence of
serious hazard to human health and the biosphere” from acid rain, requiring
immediate action.

The Nierenberg
Panel produced a report at war with itself, marked by a key internal
contradiction. For the most part, the executive summary agreed with the 1981
NAS study. But, write Oreskes and Conway, an appendix was added suggesting that
“we really didn’t know enough to move
forward with emissions controls.” The confusion bred by the report cast just
enough doubt on what was actually known about acid rain to allow the Reagan
administration to do exactly what it had wanted to do all along: nothing. The
misleading appendix was written by Fred Singer. In the early 1980s, Singer was
a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, arguably the most influential
conservative think tank during the Reagan era. Created with an initial
quarter-million dollar grant from beer magnate and right-wing Republican
activist Joseph Coors, the group was initially led by Paul Weyrich, who
combined absolute allegiance to the Free Market, ultra-nationalism, and
fundamentalist evangelical Christianity of the narrowest kind. (Along with
Jerry Falwell, Weyrich founded the group Moral Majority.)

Robert JastrowNineteen
eighty-four marked a key moment in Oreske and Conway’s darkly fascinating
history of selling doubt. The issue at the center of events at the time had no
obvious relation to climate change. The controversy involved missiles, specifically,
Ronald Reagan’s $60 billion program to build an impenetrable “missile shield”
over the United States.
Most scientists regarded SDI as technologically impossible and almost certainly
destabilizing. Over a thousand experts signed a petition stating that they
would refuse any government funding of projects that could further SDI. The
move enraged Seitz and his colleagues Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow. In
reaction, the three hawks formed the George C. Marshall Institute, a
conservative think tank dedicated to selling Star Wars to policy makers and the
public. For Seitz and his colleagues, GMI represented a decisive step away from
the scientific community—and from science itself. With the fate of the
country hanging in the balance, an ideology devoted to the red, white, and blue
came before science, which prided itself on being colorless and colorblind.

As the unworkable
SDI inevitably faded, GMI turned to other ideological battles, including ozone
depletion and global warming. Their adversaries saw these as scientific issues,
not clashes of ideology, which gave GMI an advantage. Science recognizes the
inevitability of uncertainty. The point isn’t to go for perfection but to
continually refine models of how complex phenomena work. Science uses doubt as
a tool, a prod to deepen understanding. Seitz and his associates used doubt as
a weapon against science. They seized on inevitable uncertainties in scientific
models as evidence that the models had no value, or worse. In 1987, for
example, Singer, then working at the Department of Transportation, wrote an
article published in The Wall Street Journal that was rife with
inaccuracies and distortions minimizing the importance of the discovery of a
hole in the ozone layer, a portion of the lower stratosphere that blocks most
harmful ultraviolet rays from reaching the surface of the earth.

“It was the
beginning of a counternarrative,” write Oreskes and Conway, “that scientists
had overreacted before, were overreacting now, and therefore couldn’t be
trusted.”

That same
counternarrative of denial continues today, stronger and more strident than
ever, and now focused on creating doubt about all aspects of climate change.
The ultimate goal hasn’t changed since the tobacco days—preventing
government regulation of industry. In a 2007 article, Newsweek called the George C. Marshall
Institute “a central cog in the denial machine.” GMI has received millions of
dollars from conservative foundations and corporations. Exactly how much isn’t
known because in 2001, tired of facing criticism over the fact that one of the
largest corporate donors to its anti-global warming work was oil giant
ExxonMobil, GMI made its donor list secret.

The denial machine
contains a huge number of cogs, and it would take an encyclopedia to list them
all. The authors do an excellent job, however, of touching on many of the cogs
inside that dreadful box, from clueless writers (Bjorn
Lomborg, John
Tierney, George
Will) to odious politicians (Sen. James Inhofe, Vice President Dick Cheney)
to the scores of conservative foundations that wrap themselves in the flag that
they disgrace by their actions.

Merchants of Doubt is an important book.
How important? If you read just one book on climate change this year, read Merchants of Doubt. And if you have time
to read two, reread Merchants of Doubt.

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by Lou Bendrick

Everyone’s a critic: one of our panelists gropes for a sniff of biscuit.Photo: Jason Houston

I’ve got a bone to pick with conventional dog biscuits. Like commercial dog food, they are made with un-green or even potentially dangerous ingredients. Surely, they’re unworthy of a companion who greets your return from the mailbox with nothing less than rapture.

But are the spendy, natural and/or organic versions worth the price of reducing Rover’s carbon pawprint? Will your dog eat them, or even prefer them to cheap, commercial Milk-Bones?

Our esteemed critics are ready for their treats. Photo: Jason HoustonTo find out, I grabbed some Milk Bones (for comparison purposes) and higher-quality (even organic!) biscuits to test whether dogs prefer one over the other. Then I assembled a canine tasting panel. For scientific purposes, I went for a range of dogs across age groups and breeds. My four-legged panel includes:

Burn: a ten-year-old, painfully sentient, ball-obsessed Border Collie.

Lulu: a two-year-old cartoonishly cute Cockapoo with a high-pitched bark that could sever one’s auditory nerves.
Sugar Ray: a beanbag-shaped, geriatric Pug with a seriously deviated septum.

Austin: a handsome seven-year-old Australian Shepherd with glacial eyes.

The plan was to give each dog a choice: Milk Bone or fancy biscuit?

I also managed to talk the dog’s adult owner-companions into joining in the taste-test. Don’t wrinkle your nose—the “eco” biscuits in this taste-off were of higher quality than most of the stuff found in school cafeterias. Personally speaking, I’ve eaten many dog biscuits on a dare during my childhood, which explains why I have great teeth and a glossy coat.

Our mixed panel of beasts—canine and hominoid—found:

Wagatha’s Super Berry Biscuit

Ingredients: Whole millet flour, dark rye flour, barley flour, oat flour, canola oil, whole eggs, brown rice flour, flax seed, quinoa, sunflower seeds, apples, cranberries, carrots, blueberries, apple cider vinegar, alfalfa, rosemary, allspice, ginger, calendula.

Price: $7.99 for 9 ounces

These small classically bone-shaped, USDA certified 100 percent organic treats from Vermont are pretty much vegetarian, though not vegan. Lulu clearly preferred this treat over the Milk Bone and Austin, the Aussie, consumed it with little chewing. Sugar Ray backed away from the bowl and observed the biscuits from a safe distance. Burn, perhaps searching for her tennis ball, left the room. The humans thought these treats smelled like “berries and bacon” and “tea.” Taste-wise, the humans were pleasantly surprised. “I’ve had things at the health food store that taste like this!” Another taster thought he detected “sundried tomato.” Wrong!

Newman’s Own Organics Salmon & Sweet Potato dog treat

Ingredients: Barley flour*, ground salmon, sweet potatoes*, carrots*, apples*, chicken fat (preserved naturally with mixed tocopherols and lecithin), rolled oats, rosemary extract. (*certified organic)

Price: $4.29 for 10 ounces

Okay, so a few ingredients here are organic and that’s cool, but what’s up with the conventional salmon? I know that Newman’s Own Organics is trying to do the right thing, but surely they know about environmental hazards of farm-raised salmon. The dogs were not impressed with the cutesy heart shape, or, surprisingly, the fishy smell. The Pug could not be enticed even when the biscuit was waved in front of what passed for his nose. Only the Aussie was game (he pulled both bones, the Newman’s and the Milk Bone control, out the dog dishes and gobbled them). Most of the hominid tasters meanwhile were repulsed. Two ran to the sink to flush their mouths. “It’s like the cardboard the fish was stored in!” said one taster. “It gets worse with saliva,” said another. But one taster chomped approvingly and said, “I like salmon!” (It should be noted that, while in Africa, said taster once drank goat’s blood directly from the animal’s neck.)

Mr. Barky’s Vegetarian Dog Biscuits

Ingredients: Wheat flour, whole oat groats, whole ground brown rice, whole ground yellow corn, whole barley, soy flour, sunflower oil (preserved with mixed tocopherols), calcium ascorbate (source of vitamin C), yucca schidigera extract, vitamin E supplement, vitamin A acetate, vitamin D2 supplement (calciferol), D-pantothenic acid, niacin, pyridoxine hydrochloride (vitamin B6), riboflavin supplement, thiamine mononitrate, vitamin B12 supplement, biotin, zinc amino acid chelate, calcium amino acid chelate, copper amino acid chelate, iron amino acid chelate, cobalt amino acid chelate, sodium selenite.

Price: $5.99 for 21 ounces

We all know that dogs aren’t vegetarian. What I think is going on with these biscuits is that, by avoiding potentially creepy animal ingredients, owner-companions can assuage their own guilt. Although vegetarian is the greenest way to go for the planet, a veggie bikkie may leave your dog pining for the backyard squirrels. Sugar Ray took an unenthusiastic whiff at this multivitamin-posing-as-snack and hit the ground. Lulu seemed unable to smell it at all. (She wagged her stumpy tail and circled the bowls suspiciously.) True to form, Austin ate it while the Milk Bone was still in his mouth. The human tasters were unenthused, comparing these bix to “straight-up cardboard,” and “Zwieback teething biscuits” and, most damningly, “like Ryvita!”

Harmony Farms Health Bars with Apples & Yogurt

Ingredients: Oat flour, pearl barley, rye flour, oatmeal, dried egg, apples, blueberries, yogurt, oat fiber, chicken liver, flaxseed, salt, calcium carbonate, dicalcium phosphate, chicken fat (preserved with natural mixed tocopherols), carrots, cinnamon.

Price: $4.29 for 18 ounces

Health bars … really? With non-organic chicken liver and fat? And WTF are “natural mixed tocopherols”? At this point in the tasting the Burn started looking despondent and went on a hunger strike. The clearly well-fed Pug lay down again, either out of boredom or because of aching joints. Lulu sniffed, snubbed and cocked her cute little head as if to say, “I do not understand your silly species.” Austin, on the other hand, sniffed at the Milk bone and then clearly chose the Harmony Farms bar. The humans, meanwhile, were ready to serve these with tea. “Almost cookie-like!” enthused one, while another concurred “like an unsweetened graham cracker.” One mother’s comment: “This is like something I’d make for the kids, but without the rendered chicken fat!”

Organix Organic Dog Cookies, organic peanut butter flavor

Ingredients: Organic chicken, organic peas, organic brown rice, organic oats, organic barley, organic chicken fat naturally preserves with mixed tocopherols (form of vitamin E) natural chicken liver flavor, organic natural peanut butter flavor, organic flaxseed, rosemary extract.

Price: $5.69 for 12 ounces

Right off the bat I wondered, why peanut butter flavor and not actual peanut butter? I mean, how freakin’ hard is it to put peanut butter in the batter? The dogs must have wondered this, too. Austin was the only dog who ate this biscuit. Lulu pranced away, Sugar Ray seemed close to death, and if Burn had opposable thumbs she—convinced that she was being subjected to this because she had done something truly horrible—would have committed seppuku. At this point we offered her a choice of all of the biscuits, and she rolled her Jesus-like eyes to the ceiling (Forgive them father, they know not what to eat). The bipeds, meanwhile, agreed on the extremely crunchy texture but deemed this cookie “not peanut buttery” and tasting like “dog food smells.” Zinger: “It tastes like something you’d have at a Super Bowl party in the suburbs.”

Milk Bone Medium Dog Biscuits for Dogs 20-50 pounds

Ingredients: Wheat flour, wheat bran, meat and bone meal, milk, wheat germ, beef fat (preserved with tocopherols), salt, dicalcium phosphate, natural flavor, calcium carbonate, brewers dried yeast, malted barley flour, sodium metabisulfite (used as a preservative), vitamins & minerals (choline chloride, zinc sulfate, vitamin E supplement, D-calcium pantothenate, vitamin A supplement, copper sulfate, ethylenediamine dihydriodide, riboflavin supplement, vitamin B12 supplement, vitamin D3 supplement).

Price: $3.49 for 26 ounces

With the exception of Austin, all of the dogs snubbed these iconic treats. A few human tasters patently refused to put them in their mouths. Those brave enough to try this courtesy-of-the-rendering plant treat were rewarded not with fresh breath, but with something “salty and chickeny” and “like wet fur” and most strangely, “like a taste bomb—an exploding harpoon.”

The Bottom line

Let’s be honest here: Canine taste-tests are for purely for entertainment. Dogs’ taste preferences range from super-fussy to so undiscriminating that they will eat road kill, litter box contents (“Almond Roca”) or even their own feces. That said, the winner of this particular taste test was Wagatha’s, based on the fact that two out four dogs ate them. The humans, meanwhile, seemed to actually enjoy the Harmony Health Bars and the Wagatha’s. (And really, aren’t many of the choices we humans make for our dogs about us, not them? Hence those humiliating dog pajamas, breath spray, canopy-style dog beds, Halloween costumes-need I go on?) The bottom line is that owner-companions should carefully read ingredients, avoid the potentially scary and environmentally bad stuff (the generic meats, animal byproducts, digest and meals that are the consequences of factory farming, HFCS, artificial dyes, preservatives and cheapo grain fillers like corn and rice), and make a choice based on your dog’s fussiness level. Also, consult your vet about your dog’s specific needs.

Lastly (you regular readers know what’s coming) … if you want to save money and avoid stepping into a big ole pile of carbon caused by shipping and packaging story-bought dog snacks, follow Umbra’s advice and bake your own treat. 

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by Agence France-Presse

Photo: Wikimedia Commons. REYKJAVIK—Around 800 people living near an Icelandic volcano spewing clouds of ash across Europe returned to their homes after fleeing to escape flash floods from a melting glacier atop the crater, authorities said Friday.

For the second time in two days residents quit their homes briefly Thursday evening to avoid floodwater from the melting Eyjafjallajokull glacier that covers the erupting volcano, authorities said, adding they were being cautioned to wear masks and goggles due to health risks from the ash.

“Local residents, with the exception of 20 farms, were able to return to their homes when it became clear that flood barriers had held back the flood water,” the Civil Emergency Administration said in a statement.

“There was no need for further evacuations during the night despite two additional flash floods … The flooding did however cause widespread damage,” it added.

Local Hvolsvollur police chief Kjartan Thorkelsson told AFP the situation was being closely monitored in case a new evacuation was needed.

“If we see the water level going up we can again move people quickly,” he said.

University of Iceland geophysicist Pall Einarsson predicted that the danger of flash flooding had yet to subside. “We can expect flood waves to come down from the volcano without too much notice, and the people have to adjust to that fact,” he told AFP.

People and animals had escaped harm so far in the flooded rural area, some 75 miles east of Reykjavik, but some farmland had been ruined, Thorkelsson said.

The main problem now was the massive clouds of ash still spewing from the volcano, he said.

Iceland’s second volcano eruption in less than a month has sent plumes of ash and smoke billowing more than 20,000 feet into the sky.

In the area around the Eyjafjallajokull glacier the ground was thick with toxic ash, which could cause “respiratory effects and eye irritation,” the Civil Emergency Authorities said.

“Those in affected areas should use a mask when outside and use protective goggles,” it stressed, pointing out that “the ash that is falling is composed of fine and course particles.”

The massive ash cloud which is gradually sweeping across Europe and forcing the continent’s biggest air travel shutdown since World War II contains large concentrations of fluorite, which “is considered to be of great danger for animals,” according to the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland.

On the bright side, the ash was being carried in a “wet” eruption cloud, meaning it is rich in steam which absorbs a lot of pollution, according to the institute, adding that more pollution would be expected if the ashfall came from a dry eruption cloud.

According to institute’s Gudrun Larsen, thick volcanic ash was covering a wide area.

“Ashfall (as far as) 55 kilometers (34 miles) east of the volcano began at 11:00 this morning with a strong westerly wind,” she told AFP.

“We had to close roads because of the ash yesterday (Thursday),” Thorkelsson said.

Iceland’s Civil Protection Department said late Thursday ash “had fallen to the ground unevenly and sporadically, in some places in a layer up to three millimeters (0.19 inches) thick (and appeared) black to grey in color and very fine, similar to flour or sugar grains.”

According to Einarsson, there was no sign yet of the eruption tapering off and it was not possible to predict when it could end.

“The tremor that is recorded from the eruption site is now at about the same level as it was yesterday,” he said.

“We cannot say anything about the end (of the eruption), the rigor of the eruption oscillates, going up and down,” he said. “It’s a continuous eruption.”

Police chief Thorkelsson also said there was no indication when the eruption would stop.

“The last time this volcano erupted (in the 1820s), the eruption lasted 14-15 months,” he said.

Last month, the first eruption at the Eyjafjallajokull glacier forced 600 people from their homes in the same area.

That eruption, in the Fimmvorduhals volcano next to the glacier, was the first in the area since 1823 and Iceland’s first since 2004, gushed lava for more than three weeks and ended Tuesday, hours before the second one occurred.

Experts cautioned then that eruptions near Eyjafjallajokull tend to set off the larger Katla volcano, which is considered one of the most dangerous volcanos in Iceland, and which last erupted in 1918.

So far there is no sign of activity at Katla, but geologists point out that an eruption there often follows a year or two after the smaller blasts at Eyjafjallajokull.

Einarsson said Friday a new eruption was not likely “while this one is going on,” he said.

“We don’t expect another one to appear in this volcano. The current one is relieving the pressure of the volcano,” he said.

“If the eruption stops, then we might expect it to break out in a new place,” he added.

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by Jeff Goodell

So yesterday was the official publication day for my new
book How to Cool the Planet, an event
that I’d like to mark by … taking a long nap.
I’m only a few days into the book tour, but I’m already exhausted.

Not that
I’m complaining. Being worn out by your
book tour is a nice problem for a writer to have. Part of my fatigue is the result of  a bumpy redeye from LA to NYC the other
night; part of it can be blamed on a flood of questions from chemtrails conspiracy cultists who believe that Dark Forces are engaged in a secret plot
to reduce the population of the planet by poisoning millions of people with
aluminum particles dispersed in the sky. I’d like to have a sense of humor about this, but it’s hard enough to
have a serious discussion about geoengineering without having to fend off the
black helicopter crowd.

I’m not
bashing chemmies. I just want to talk about something more
interesting: money. 

Not surprisingly, the question of
what role private capital might play in developing and deploying the hardware
to cool off the planet came up at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference in southern California
I attended earlier this week. After all,
geoengineering is the mother of all engineering projects. If we move forward with any of the various
technologies that are now being discussed (a very big if), there’s gonna be a
lot of cash flying around. An obvious
question: who will be the financial winners in a geoengineered world?

Here’s my top five:

Lobbyists: 
Right now, because geoengineering is not much more than a twinkle in James Lovelock’s
eye, nobody on K street
is pushing for Department of Energy funding of stratospheric aerosol injection
devices. But in the future, they might
be. Geoengineering could turn out to be
the 21st century equivalent of industrial agriculture … or a
government project that has a lot in common with the overwrought, overfunded
Star Wars missile defense system. Either
way, lobbyists make out.

Carbon-sucking entrepreneurs: 
Here’s a simple truth: anyone who figures out a cheap, simple way to
suck CO2 out of the air is going to make a lot of money. Not surprisingly, a number of scientists/entrepreneurs
are working on it, including David Keith, a physicist at the University of
Calgary. Keith’s company, called Carbon
Engineering, uses a simple chemical process borrowed from the pulp industry,
and has attracted $5 million in funding from investors, including Bill Gates. Right now, the cost of sucking carbon out of the
air is up around $150 a ton, but if Keith—or anyone else—can cut that cost
in half, things start to get interesting.
And when it comes to geoengineering, CO2 removal is the one area where
the profit motive is clearly lined up with the public good. 

Early investors in albedo engineering companies:  Manipulating the earth’s albedo (a
fancy word for reflectivity) by brightening clouds or injecting particles into
the stratosphere is the most dangerous and complex type of geoengineering
researchers are currently exploring. 
Among the many questions: Who is going to end up doing the actual work
of brightening clouds or injecting aerosols? Maybe governments will be in charge, maybe a Richard Branson-like
billionaire. Either way, the hardware
is likely to be built by private contractors, just as the fighter planes used
by the U.S. Air Force are built by private concerns like Lockheed Martin—a
company with a market cap right now of about $32 billion. 

Geoengineering conference organizers:  The
whole idea of geoengineering is so fraught with technical, political, moral,
and cultural complexities that, no matter how the future of geoengineering
plays out, there are going to be plenty of issues to fret about. So we may as well gather up and fret
together, even if we have to pay for the privilege.

Fundamentalist preachers:  I’m
not suggesting that religious leaders are motivated by money (or sex). However, if we start trying to deliberately
manipulate the earth’s climate, you can be sure that some will see this as
trespassing into forbidden realms, and they will raise their voices against
it. Imagine the war over abortion played
out in the stratosphere and you’ll have a pretty good idea where we might be
headed.

——-

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts from Jeff Goodell, author of How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate. Here’s his first and second posts. And here’s an interview with Goodell about his book, and an earlier interview about Big Coal.

Related Links:

What does coal mining have to do with geoengineering?

Can a book on geoengineering change the climate conversation?

Sole “Strategic Partner” of landmark geo-engineering conference is Australia’s “dirty coal” state of

by Todd Woody

Dropping my son off at school on Wednesday, I ran into Danny
Kennedy, a fellow parent and veteran Australian Greenpeace activist turned
solar entrepreneur. How’s business? I
asked. Pretty bloody good, as it turns out. Kennedy’s startup, Sungevity, took in more orders for rooftop
solar systems in March than in all of 2009.

That solar flare is being fueled in large part, according to
Kennedy, by a new lease option Sungevity recently began offering its customers.
The option is financed through a $24 million deal with U.S. Bank. Rather than
purchasing a solar array, customers can lease the system through Sungevity for
a monthly fee, thus avoiding the considerable capital costs of buying the
system outright. The popularity of lease options, which are also offered by
bigger installers such as SolarCity, is another indication that creative
financing is as key to getting people to go solar as the performance of the
hardware.

As it happened, the Solar
Energy Industries Association annual report landed in my inbox later that same
day. It showed that Sungevity isn’t the only solar company looking at a very
good 2010.

Although the United
  States solar industry’s overall growth for
all types of solar energy slowed somewhat as the Great Recession reached its
nadir in 2009, residential rooftop installers had a record year. Companies like
Sungevity installed 156 megawatts of residential solar panels in 2009, up 101
percent from the previous year.

That’s an amazing number, considering one could reasonably
expect that putting a $25,000 solar array on one’s roof would fall to the
bottom of the home improvement list during the greatest economic downturn since
the Great Depression.

But there were other incentives. The Obama stimulus
package’s lifting of the $2,000 tax credit cap on home solar systems certainly
helped. As did solar panel makers’ price slashing due to the oversupply that
resulted from a ramp up in production. Solar module prices fell more than 40
percent in 2009, according to the SEIA report. That led to a 10 percent decline
in the cost of an installed solar array. (Installation costs typically account
for half the price of a solar array.)

As photovoltaic power has gotten cheaper, solar panels have
come off the roof and are being planted in the ground in huge solar farms. The
dramatic price declines in solar modules got the attention of California utilities in 2009. The utilities signed
power purchase agreements for hundreds of millions of megawatts’ worth of solar
power plants.

Utilities have also initiated huge solar distributed
generation programs. California’s
two biggest utilities, PG&E and Southern California Edison, last year
announced that, over the next five years, they would install a total of 1,000
megawatts on rooftops and in ground arrays near substations and cities.
(SunPower, the San Jose, Calif.-based solar module maker, recently won a
200-megawatt contract with Southern California Edison). When the Sacramento
Municipal Utility District put 100 megawatts of distributed solar up for bid,
the program sold out within a week.

All the activity attracted the attention of Chinese solar
module makers, whose California
market share more than doubled (to 46 percent) in 2009. One company, Yingli, arrived
in California
at the beginning of 2009 and ended the year with nearly a third of the market
share.

No surprise then that California
remains the solar capital of the country. In 2009, the state installed 200
megawatts of solar capacity, nearly four times the amount of New Jersey, the No. 2 solar state. (It’s no
coincidence that both states offer the nation’s most generous solar
incentives.) Altogether, California now boasts
a total solar capacity of 1,102 megawatts—10 times that of New Jersey. (That’s impressive, but still
less than about half of California’s
wind energy capacity.)

Once you get past California
and New Jersey,
however, the numbers drop dramatically. The third biggest solar state, Nevada, had just 100 megawatts of solar capacity
installed in 2009; No. 10, Massachusetts,
had 18 megawatts.

Still, the growth in the solar industry meant more green
jobs. Solar added 10,000 jobs plus 7,000 indirect jobs in 2009, even as the
overall unemployment rate soared. According to the SEIA, total solar employment
in the U.S.
stood at more than 45,000 last year, about evenly divided between direct and
indirect jobs.

The need to ramp up solar power is thrown into sharp relief when
you compare how much capacity the U.S. added in 2009 compared to
other countries. Germany,
the world’s biggest solar power thanks to years of generous subsidies,
installed 3,800 megawatts last year, according to the SEIA. That’s nearly twice
the total U.S. capacity and
eight times what the U.S.
installed in 2009. Germany
now generates 9,677 megawatts of solar electricity. (Even the Czech Republic
installed nearly as much as the U.S.
in 2009, putting 411 megawatts online.) Solar currently supplies less than 1
percent of America’s
electricity.

However, if you consider the huge numbers of massive
megawatt solar thermal power plants planned for the desert Southwest, the U.S. is poised
to become a solar superpower. (Solar thermal plants use arrays of mirrors to
focus sunlight on liquid-filled boilers that create steam to drive
electricity-generating turbines.)

The SEIA says there are 10,583 megawatts of solar thermal
power plants in the pipeline. Licensing those big solar farms—and securing
the billions of dollars needed to build each one—has proven to be a laborious
process. Only 81 megawatts in the pipeline are currently under construction.

But to put things in perspective, the solar thermal project
closest to being licensed—BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah plan in Southern
California—will generate nearly as much electricity as all the photovoltaic
panels installed in 2009.

Given the trends in the solar industry, the SEIA says
prospects in 2010 are looking bright, with growth continuing. Expect a big bump
in rooftop solar thermal systems, which collect sunlight to heat water, as a
new California
subsidy program kicks into gear.

All of which is good news for Sungevity’s Danny Kennedy. The
boom in demand has him scrambling to secure supplies of solar panels. That’s a
nice problem to have in the Great Recession.

Related Links:

Pollution limits are essential for clean energy investments

Know your solar

China’s changing energy economy

by Umbra Fisk

Dearest readers,

Achy muscles from hunching over your computer? Tumultuous
tummy from crazy deadlines? Tension headache from staring at that tiny cell
phone screen too long? Well, April is National Stress Awareness Month and today
is National Stress Awareness Day, so step away from the laptop, the calendar,
and the phone for some deep breathing and your fave anxiety-reducing activity.
Otherwise, stress may land you in the doctor’s office, and then you’ll just be
fretting about all the pharmaceuticals you’re popping (and leaching into our
waterways), and medical bills piling up, and time lost from work, and and AND! That’s
why I pilfered the archives for these calming little morsels on chillin’ like a
villain.

Being eco eating you?
If achieving the nirvana level of being green is what’s stressing you, relax
first—perhaps through some sort of meditative or spiritual practice—and then
make some goals for yourself. Sit down and write out the highest hopes you have
for your personal environmental impact on everything from your home to your
neighborhood to the earth. Look carefully at those hopes, and from them select
the realistic goals for what you might be able to achieve in your lifetime. And
then set reasonable, human timelines for achieving these goals. Get the full Ask Umbra answer.

Light my fire.
A little candlelight can be totally soothing. Worried about candles making you
ill? Easy: Burn fewer candles. Like any burning object, candles give off
particles and vapors that can enter your lungs and irritate your respiratory
system. Most of these irritants are present only in negligible amounts, with
the exception of lead, which is used to keep wicks stiff. U.S. candle
manufacturers voluntarily ceased using lead wicks in recent years, but
companies in other countries continue the practice. If you don’t know the
candle’s country of origin, you can test for lead in the wick by cutting off a
section, stripping the outer cotton sleeve, and rubbing the core on a piece of
paper. If it contains lead, it will leave a pencil-like mark. Also, avoid
scented candles (which contain chemical additives), paraffin candles (which are
made from petroleum), and smoky flames (which produce more soot). Get the full Ask Umbra answer.

Just say om.
Downward dogging can be good for working out the kinks, but the vinyl and
phthalates in conventional yoga mats? Not so much. Vinyl is toxic to the
environment during production and disposal, through creation and release of
dioxin—among other issues, including that it is made from a nonrenewable
resource. Phthalates are “plasticizers” often found in soft vinyl
materials, which do leach out during a product’s lifetime. Exposure to
phthalates has been linked to negative reproductive health
effects in both men and women. However, many manufacturers are offering
PVC-free options, usually made of jute and rubber. Get the full Ask Umbra answer.

Such a tea-se.
Nothing like a hot cup of tea to soothe the nerves. Ah, but how to heat the
water: gas stove, microwave, or electric tea kettle? A review of the literature
(various governmental energy-efficiency advisories, like this one from Canada) indicates that the electric kettle is
No. 1 in efficiency. So pop a reusable tea filter full of organic leaves into a
reusable mug, and take a chill pill. Get the full Ask Umbra answer.

Tranquilly,
Umbra

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on birth control, single-serve coffee, and sanitizing countertops

Ask Umbra on Ronald McDonald’s retirement, card games, and a coffee stirring stir

Ask Umbra on Babeland’s boinking for bucks

by Tom Philpott

In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries.

——————-

Would you like those burgers with, or without, hazardous residues? Next time you’re at an eatery whose sourcing practices you don’t trust, avoid the veal. Skip the burger, too. Those are the immediate takeaways from this stomach-turning report (PDF) from the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General. The long-term takeaways are more profound—and disturbing.

The report focuses on the USDA’s system for keeping hazardous chemical residues—“veterinary drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals”—out of the meat supply. You know, meat—the stuff that Americans eat more than a half a pound of per day, on average.

How is the agency doing at this critical task? From reading the report, I’d describe its system as sieve-like—but that would be unfair to sieves. After all, those kitchen implements do at least catch most of the solid bits suspended in a liquid. The USDA routinely lets chemical residues flow right into the nation’s meat supply—without catching a damned thing.

The problem is not trivial, as the report makes clear:

Residues of drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals differ from microbiological pathogens like E. coli, Salmonella, and Listeria Monocytogenes, which the public more readily associates with food safety.  While cooking meat properly can destroy these pathogens before they are consumed, no amount of cooking will destroy residues.

In fact … “In some cases, heat may actually break residues down into components that are more harmful to consumers.” [Emphasis mine.]

Evidently, the problem is worst of all for meat from animals raised on dairy farms. Such cows find their way into the beef supply in two ways. “Spent” dairy cows—ie, ones that are too sick or old to lactate—get slaughtered for beef. Their meat is so tough that it’s mainly used as hamburger. As for veal, much of the U.S. veal market is supplied by the male offspring of dairy cows. Such animals are known as “bob veal.”

According to the report, “Plants handling [spent] dairy cows and bob veal were, in 2008, responsible for over 90 percent of residue violations found.”

Now, the USDA’s meat safety arm, the FSIS, knows full well that beef-processing plants that deal with dairy cows tend have the great bulk of residue trouble. But get this, from the report:

FSIS allowed such plants to continue treating residue problems as “not reasonably likely to occur”—the determination that would allow plants to justify not implementing additional procedures to control residues.

One such plant had 211 violations in 2008, the report states—and still was able to operate as though such violations were “not reasonably likely to occur.”

Okay, so why is meat from dairy cows so likely to be tainted with residue? The report puts it bluntly:

Some producers provide antibiotics to dairy cows in order to eliminate an infection after a calf is born.  If the producer perceives that the cow is not improving, he may sell the animal to a slaughter facility so that he can recoup some of his investment in the animal before it dies.  If the producer does not wait long enough for the antibiotic to clear the animal’s system, some of this residue will be retained in the meat that is sold to consumers.

So let’s get this straight: sick cows pumped full of antibiotics are routinely being slaughtered for burger meat.

As for veal …

Farmers are prohibited from selling milk for human consumption from cows that have been medicated with antibiotics (as well as other drugs) until the withdrawal period is over; so instead of just disposing of this tainted milk, producers feed it to their calves.  When the calves are slaughtered, the drug residue from the feed or milk remains in their meat, which is then sold to consumers.

Now do you see why I advised against ordering veal and burgers in the opening paragraph?

Recall that that “spent” dairy cows were at the center of the notorious 143 million-pound beef recall back in 2008, when Humane Society investigators caught workers at a California meat plant cruelly prodding “downer” cows through a slaughter line.  Long-time Meat Wagon readers will remember that, despite the recall, 37 million pounds of that suspect meat made it to school cafeterias. That’s because school cafeterias, with their tight budgets, are forced to buy the cheapest beef possible. And as we learned in the downer-cow scandal, the cheapest beef possible comes from plants that deal with spent dairy cows.

Putting everything together, this report is telling us that meat tainted with residues is routinely making into school cafeterias.

Well, that’s the stuff I found most scandalous in this amazing report. There’s more, too. Apparently, for a lot of nasty chemical residues, the EPA has no minimum tolerance levels. And because the EPA has no minimum tolerance levels, the USDA just lets them pass right on through to the public.

And get this: when the agency positively identifies residue-tainted meat, it … does nothing about it: “We also found that FSIS does not recall meat adulterated with harmful residue, even when it is aware that the meat has failed its laboratory tests.”

To me, this report dramatizes the withering away of the federal government’s ability to protect the public from the negligence of powerful industries. Just as coal mines continue operating despite repeated safety violations, the meat industry churns out tainted product as a matter of course … with the full knowledge of government regulators. (All of this reminded me of the study a while back showing that “people who eat meat and poultry have
significantly higher levels of common flame retardants compared to
vegetarians.”)

The analogy between residues in meat and and unsafe coal mines goes only so far, though. Every once in a while in a coal mine, a spectacular “accident” happens, drawing attention to the safety issue. For residue-tainted meat, the consequences are mainly subtle and cumulative. As the report puts it, “the effects of residue are generally chronic as opposed to acute, which means that they will occur over time, as an individual consumes small traces of the residue.” In other words, heavy eaters of industrial meat—i.e., literally hundreds of millions of Americans, many of them kids—are like the frog in the pot, not noticing that the water is slowly getting hotter and hotter. 

Rest assured: the FSIS swears it will correct all the wrongs exposed in this report. But also consider this: the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General pointed out many of the same issues in a 2008 report (PDF).  The FSIS swore it would make everything better then, too. The current report was explicitly written to assess the steps that have been taken since then, which doesn’t inspire confidence.

Ethanol waste as livestock feed: it breaks pigs’ hearts
Distillers grains are the the industrial waste left over from the corn-ethanol process.  Used as a livestock feed—as they are, in increasing amounts—distillers grains neatly combine two of my fixations: 1) the structural public-safety and ecological problems with industrial meat production; and 2) the idiocy of committing public money to turning industrial corn into car fuel.

As I’ve shown before, distillers grains in feed rations appear to increase rates of deadly E. coli 0157 in cows. And speaking of that Inspector General’s report, they’re also full of antibiotic residues (turns out that ethanol makers use lots of antibiotics to control the fermentation process).

Well, here’s another doozy: distillers grains are being increasingly added to feed rations for hogs in CAFOs—even though they appear to make hogs sick. You see, distillers grains are often riddled with mycotoxins, micro-fungi that can be quite dangerous. Get this, from a hog-industry trade journal:

Incidence of Mulberry Heart Disease (MHD), a condition of the heart muscle that often leads to sudden death, has become a growing concern in the pig population. Linked to oxidative imbalance, many in the pig industry point to changes in pig rations – particularly the increased use of DDGS (Distiller’s Dried Grains with Solubles) and the threat of more concentrated levels of mycotoxins—as adding fuel to this culprit’s fire.

In fact, pig-industry folks are pretty sure that distiller grains are the problem. Get this:

Evidence can be found in examination of one such production system feeding DDGS. The system was experiencing a number of serious problems with their weaned pigs when they fed DDGS to their breeding herd. In fact, the problems had become so severe that management was going to discontinue feeding DDGS despite a savings of approximately US$0.50 per weaned pig at the time. When DDGS was removed from the ration, the problems diminished. When it was returned to the diet, the problems reappeared. DDGS levels were approximately 20% in gestation and 10% in lactation.

The article also points to research by an Ohio State professor fingering distillers grains as the culprit. Most of us, faced with the specter of a heart condition that “that often leads to sudden death,” might consider eliminating the culprit, distillers grains, from the feed. But …

But with the economic benefits of using distillers grains for pig rations difficult to pass up [ie, they’re so damned cheap!], the days of feeding traditional corn and soy diets are unlikely to return to the extent seen in the past.

So what’s causing the problem? Evidently, distillers grains are full of “free radicals” that damage the pigs’ cells through oxidization. Pretty nasty. The article suggests supplementing pigs’ feed with the antioxidant vitamin E to help keep them alive until slaughter while chowing down on distillers grains. For me, this story represents yet another reason to avoid industrial pork.

 

Related Links:

Scenes from a school cafeteria [slideshow]

What I learned at Michelle Obama’s historic obesity summit

Fred Kirschenmann, winner of NRDC’s Growing Green “Thought Leader” award

by Josh Nelson

The new CBS/NYT poll of tea party supporters [PDF, H/T Greg Sargent] includes a question on climate change:

Do you think global warming is an environmental problem that is causing a serious impact now, or do you think the impact of global warming won’t happen until sometime in the future, or do you think global warming won’t have a serious impact at all?

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it turns out that tea party supporters are far less informed about climate change than the general public:

This meshes with a spate of other recent polls showing a sharp decline in understanding of and concern for environmental issues among Republicans.
In contrast, other recent polls have shown that Latinos, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and young Americans are much more concerned about climate change and environmental issues.

Related Links:

The Climate Post: Why isn’t the Keeling Curve more famous?

The Real Problems with Paul Krugman’s Climate Economics Primer

Taxpayer dollars subsidizing destruction

by Michael A. Livermore

Dan Reicher, Google’s director of climate changePhoto: Steve Rhodes via FlickrGoogle wants a price
on carbon and wants it now—both for lofty reasons like combating global
warming, but also because it could be good for business. 

As the Senate inches
closer to climate legislation that could give the Internet giant what it wants,
I checked in with Dan Reicher, the director of climate change and energy
initiatives at Google to see what surfing the web had to do with reining in greenhouse
gases. 

Turns out, the
answer is technology. Reicher—a former
Department of Energy assistant secretary who now directs Google’s investments
in clean energy—believes that exposing the hidden costs of dirty fuels will set off
a rush of investment in new energy innovations.
He says carbon pricing is an “essential signal we have to get to.” Right now, “money is sitting there to make
significant investments,” he says, but the cash flow is sidelined because the
incentives aren’t there. 

Once they have to
pay the true price of carbon combustion, the calculus for companies would
change, making it fiscally prudent for them to conserve and make cleaner energy. All of a sudden it would make sense to invest
in figuring out how to consume less power, or in new technologies that cut
emissions at the source. And that would
mean a huge new market for innovations that would help them do that. 

The same would go
for individuals—under carbon pricing, households save if they reduce their
electricity loads, and we’d expect a spike in demand for cheap energy
efficiency technology as folks seek to reduce their monthly bills. Reicher gives us a compelling vision full of
smart grids that know when your fridge needs to defrost and when your car’s
battery can turn you a profit by selling spare juice. 

Google is
particularly interested in this low hanging fruit of energy efficiency which
Reicher says “grows back” as we switch from incandescent to compact
fluorescents and now to LED. At each
step we save more energy and promote more innovation, making the area
particularly ripe for investment dollars.

Google is thinking
about the big global picture. Reicher
told me that, “in general terms, a carbon price will do a lot to advance the
competitiveness of these technologies that offer serious climate reductions,
help for our energy security, increase our domestic fuels, and can create all
sorts of jobs.” 

But the search-engine-plus
is also thinking about its own bottom line. It’s already got products on the market that help consumers save
electricity. The Google Power Meter
helps you monitor and reduce down your BTUs online-showing you the cheapest and
easiest ways you can cut back on juice. For
example, your toaster might be sucking up $8 worth of power per year when it’s
not even in use. If it is, Google will
let you know so you can unplug it. 

As Reicher puts it,
“putting
a serious price of carbon will both get us closer to the serious energy
reductions we need to make but also accelerate the domestic development and
adoption of these technologies.” It’s
that last part that’s good for business.
When government holds up its side of the “triangle of technology,
policy, and finance” that Reicher says is essential for green development, it
spurs the private investment and innovation that keeps businesses strong. 

That’s where
Congress comes in. The most important
policy is carbon pricing. That’s what
will change the economic fundamentals, augmented by other programs—like energy
efficiency standards and government revolving loans to bring new ideas  to the market. The
technology and finance sides are ready and able; but we’ve been waiting for too
long for the policy piece that can complete the puzzle. 

Google hopes the Senate will act quickly to jumpstart
what it thinks will be an economic bright spot in the current downturn. Reicher doesn’t really care how it’s
done, saying there are “various ways to get to a carbon price.” Whatever packaging it comes in, a price on
carbon will ultimately be good for that company and many others.

Related Links:

Pollution limits are essential for clean energy investments

Kerry-vs.-Bingaman power struggle lurks beneath ‘what next?’ question in Senate

Open letter to Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman: a bipartisan path forward on energy and climate

by Grist

Photo courtesy Mrs. QTo understand the problem of school lunch in America, try the following experiment. Go to the supermarket and buy ingredients for a single meal for your family—or a group of friends. Limit yourself to 90 cents per person. If that sounds like too little, consider that it’s about what cafeteria administrators have to spend on the ingredients for kids’ lunches each day.

Cafeteria workers face another major challenge too: as many as half of all school cafeterias in America have no cooking equipment. Such “kitchens” are really reheating centers that no longer require skilled cooks—button-pushing clerks will do. 

And what kind of food are they churning out? Last fall, a teacher in a Midwestern school district decided to find out. Mrs. Q—she remains anonymous to avoid losing her job—is eating in her school’s cafeteria every day for the entire school year and documenting the experience, with snapshots. Her blog, Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project, provides a rare and often unpalatable window into what’s cooking in our public-school cafeterias—and we couldn’t resist sharing it with you. For this slide show, we lifted a few representative images and dsscriptions from Mrs. Q’s blog—with her permision, of course.

For more on the school lunch issue, see Grist’s extensive coverage of the topic, particularly Tom Philpott’s recent piece “Why even the childless should care about school lunches.”

Photo courtesy Mrs. Q

Today’s menu: Spaghetti with meat sauce, green beans, a breadstick, chocolate milk, and a blue-raspberry icee thing.

As far as school lunches go, this one is pretty good. The meat sauce
over penne was passable, and the green beans were OK too. I ate all
of main stuff, but I only took one bite of the breadstick, which was
too chewy yet semi-hard, and the blue raspberry thingy…I took one
suck and knew it was not for me. Of course, I drank all the chocolate
milk.

Photo courtesy Mrs. Q

Chicken patty with peas, two slices of bread, fruit cup, and chocolate milk.

There was sauce on the patty. I guess it was tomato sauce, but it was
tasteless and of course you can see that it was burnt. The fruit cup
was partially frozen. In fact, I stabbed it with my spork.

Photo courtesy Mrs. Q

Peanut butter and jelly graham cracker sandwich, apple juice, fruit cup (peaches), and milk.

I could barely eat this meal, so I didn’t. And then I was deliriously ravenous driving to get my little one.

And then it got worse.

I got sick when I got home. I can’t say what exactly did it. Whether it
was the lunch (I ate only half of one sandwich) or the not eating enough
(also family history of vertigo) or taking a vitamin toward the end of
the day without much in my stomach or just plain getting sick…

I noticed a LOT of kids with packed lunches today. Maybe they knew
something I didn’t.

Photo courtesy Mrs. QCheese croissant, broccoli, fruit jello, and milk (not pictured).

Stale. Enough said.

Photo courtesy Mrs. Q

Hamburger, wheat bun, fries, pear, and milk.

I was happy to eat fruit
today!

Photo courtesy Mrs. Q Bagel dog (turkey), tater tots, apple, and milk.

A dear friend of mine had a family member who owned an apple orchard. She told me, “Never
eat around the stem because when they spray, the pesticide collects in
the top.” It wasn’t soon after that I started eating only organic
apples. Of course, I don’t have a choice in this project. I try to sample every
food, but I find it really hard to take a bite of the apple.

 

Photo courtesy Mrs. Q Meatloaf, bread, fruit cup, mystery greens (!), and milk

To qualify for the label “meatloaf,” I think meat should be baked in a
loaf pan and then sliced. So given that definition, it is obvious that
what I ate today is not meatloaf, but instead a meat patty.

And I was so thrilled to see what I assumed to be spinach! I was
floored. But then when I took a bite, they were so very bitter. After
work I chatted with my mom about it, and she thinks they are collard
greens. But I’m not sure it was. All I
can say is that this was the first time I could not finish my veggies
during this experiment.

Photo courtesy Mrs. Q

Mac and cheese, mixed veggies, breadstick, fruit cup, and milk.

I can’t tell how the mac and cheese looks in the photo (I think it
looks ok, but my husband doesn’t agree). What I can tell you was that
it was very cheesy. It’s probably something the kids really enjoyed.
You know, it wasn’t that bad and I’m not trying to be nice. All I’m doing is comparing this meal
to the other school lunches that I’ve eaten and I can say that this
ranks a little higher than most. I was able to eat everything but the
fruit cup.

Photo courtesy Mrs. Q“Tex-Mex,” beans, tortilla chips, and banana.

What “Tex-Mex” refers to is taco meat over
rice with a little cheese on top. I enjoy comfort food and this is nice.

I took a close-up of the beans, which are darker on the top (at first
glance you think “black beans”) and lighter on the inside (then you
think “pinto beans”). I don’t know what kind of beans they were, but
I’ve always liked refried beans. They were OK.

 

 

Photo courtesy Mrs. QChicken nuggets, carrots, corn muffin, fruit jello, and milk.

I can’t remember how this meal tasted. Even just a couple hours after I
consumed it, I have no idea what flavors were present. I don’t remember
a texture jumping out at me. I don’t remember eating the corn muffin. It’s like I blocked it out. The other day I ate the fruit jello and I thought it was fabulous.
Today I took a couple sporkfuls and that was it. Could my taste buds
have amnesia? Or worse have they deserted me? Whatever the case the
little buds that remain in my mouth may need therapy.

 

Photo courtesy Mrs. QCheese sandwich, tater tots, pretzels, fruit icee, and milk (not pictured).

I ate most of the cheese sandwich. In case you were wondering the tater
tots count as the veggie here. Yes, I’ll say it again—tater tots (or
fries for that matter) count as a veggie. I know. I was shocked too but
now I just shrug.

Then the fruit icee bar! The packaging has been
upgraded. AND it is 100% juice so that’s an improvement. I was able on
it suck on it and I didn’t pucker up from a massive influx of sweet
hitting my taste buds.

Related Links:

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What I learned at Michelle Obama’s historic obesity summit

Egger’s Head: School lunches

by Tyler Falk

Move over Balloon Boy. Cluster ballooning’s as real as it gets.Photo: omnibus via FlickrIt’s carbon-free, it flies, and it has lots of balloons. How are cluster balloons not catching on?

Well at least one man is getting around the way Balloon Boy
pretended to do and the way the old man in UP does.

Last weekend, Jonathan Trappe flew “The Spirit Cluster”—57 helium-filled balloons and a small harness—109 miles in 14 hours above his home state of North Carolina, AOL News reports.

“Flying a gas balloon is unlike any other
    experience. There is no sound. No propellers, no jet engines. No
burner,
    no heart-thumping rotors of a helicopter. Not even the wind that
gliders
    experience. This is true, silent flight,” Trappe said on his website. “When you launch a balloon, part of the wonder is that you do
    not know where you will land. You are carried with the wind,
towards destinations
    unknown. It is a wonderful adventure, and it is the most pure form
of flight.”

It might not stimulate the new green economy, but if this catches on look for a boom in circus shops and landing gear (scissors).

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

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But can you dance and chew gum at the same time?

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Insane posse of climate deniers?

by Agence France-Presse

Photo courtesy of Sverrir Thor via FlickrREYKJAVIK – A huge cloud of ash from an Icelandic volcano covered northern Europe on Thursday, forcing the closure of vast swaths of international airspace and the cancellation of thousands of flights.

The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southeast Iceland melted a 250-meter thick glacier around it, causing severe floods. More than 700 people were evacuated from their homes.

Ash from the second major eruption in Iceland in less than a month blew eastwards across the North Atlantic, closing major airports more than 1,000 miles (1,700 kilometers) away.

Belgium, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden all shut down their airspace because the ash was a threat to jet engines and visibility. There was also major disruption in France, Finland, Germany and Spain.

More than 300 flights out of London’s Heathrow and Gatwick airports were cancelled, including transatlantic services.

Hundreds more were hit across Britain and the rest of northern Europe. Thousands of passengers were stranded at airports with no firm estimate of when flights could start again.

“The cloud of volcanic ash is now spread across the UK and continuing to travel south,” said the National Air Traffic Services, which manages British airspace.

“In line with international civil aviation policy, no flights other than agreed emergencies are currently permitted in UK controlled airspace,” it said, as it grounded all non-emergency flights until 6:00 GMT Friday.

British Airways said it would run no flights in or out of Britain until at least Friday morning. Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport prepared beds and meals for stranded travellers.

The ash was drifting at an altitude of about 5.0-6.0 miles (8.0-10 kilometers) and could not been seen from the ground. But experts said it posed a major threat to air traffic.

In the past 20 years, there have been 80 recorded encounters between aircraft and volcanic clouds, causing the near-loss of two Boeing 747s with almost 500 people on board and damage to 20 other planes, experts said.

Thanks to the winds, however, Icelandic airports remained open.

“Flights to and from Iceland are still OK. The wind is blowing the ash to the east,” Hjordis Gudmundsdottir of the Icelandic Airport Authority told AFP.

“It’s amazing really,” she said.

The volcano on the Eyjafjallajökull glacier in southern Iceland erupted just after midnight on Wednesday.

Smoke from the top crater stacked more than 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) into the sky, meteorologists said. Icelandic public broadcaster RUV reported that a 500-meter fissure had appeared at the top of the crater on Wednesday.

Lava melted the glacier, causing major flooding that forced the evacuation of between 700 and 800 people. Evacuees were being directed to Red Cross centers.

“We have two heavy floods coming out from the melting of the Eyjafjallajökull glacier,” police spokesman Roegnvaldur Olafsson told AFP from near the site of the eruption on Wednesday.

The eruption—in a remote area about 125 kilometers (75 miles) east of Reykjavik—was bigger than the blast at the nearby Fimmvorduhals volcano last month.

“It is very variable how long these eruptions last. Anywhere from a few days to over a year,” Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson, a professor of geophysics and civil protection advisor in Iceland, told AFP.

“Judging from the intensity of this one, it could last a long time.”

“There were more than 250 meters (820 feet) of thick ice on top of the crater. That quickly melted, causing massive flooding which caused some damage yesterday,” Gudmundsson added.

Olafur Eggertsson, a farmer, told how his family had to abandon their livestock when they fled their property, which lies in the path of one of two large floods of melt water coming from the glacier.

“We heard a lot of noise and saw mud and soil suddenly rushing down from the mountain. Just 30 minutes later we had mud and soil and a giant flood running into our dyke above the farm,” Eggertsson told AFP.

“We have 200 animals on our farm: cows and sheep who are all inside now. It takes some time for the dykes to be destroyed and I don’t know yet if they are in danger, but we are extremely worried,” he said.

Last month, the first volcano eruption at the Eyjafjallajokull glacier since 1823—and Iceland’s first since 2004—briefly forced 600 people from their homes in the same area.

That eruption at the Fimmvorduhals volcano, which gushed lava for weeks, ended Tuesday, experts said.

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by Debra Eschmeyer

FLOTUS with the mostest: Michelle Obama addessses the Obesity Summit. When
President Obama established a “Presidential
task force on childhood obesity” in
February, Grist’s Tom Laskawy wondered whether our nation’s first federal food policy council had quietly
sprung into being. In a food policy council, the key stakeholders of a
region’s food system come together to assess the current food situation
and envision ways it might be improved. Food policy councils are a
growing phenomenon at the state and municipal level, but such a thing
had never existed before at the national level. Does it now?

Well,
last week I had the honor of attending the new task force’s White
House Childhood Obesity Summit,  and it certainly had the flavors
of a food policy council: an array of food-policy players across
agencies gathered to discuss a key symptom of a food system gone off the
rails: childhood obesity.

The task
force was charged with developing and submitting to the President in 90
days an interagency plan
that “details a coordinated strategy, identifies key benchmarks, and
outlines an action plan.” As part of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! campaign, the
task force is engaging both public and private sectors with the primary
goal of helping children become more active and eat healthier within a
generation, so that children born today will reach adulthood at a
healthy weight.

Feeding our children better may look at first
glance like a softball issue for the first lady; but the Ms. Obama is
actually in the opening stages of what looks like a long and complicated
fight. but as Time put it:

If this sounds like a political fight, well,
it is. Michelle Obama may be tilling nonpartisan ground with her
vegetable garden and child-obesity program, but food has long been
political. From soda taxes to corn subsidies, food is about health care
costs, environmentalism, education, agriculture and class.

Which is why such heavy hitters from the
latter departments are involved in the President’s Task Force on
Childhood Obesity and all spoke on Friday at the White House’s Childhood
Obesity Summit, including Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle,  Interior Secretary Ken
Salazar, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Office of Management and
Budget Director Peter Orszag,
Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture
Kathleen Merrigan, and
Domestic Policy Adviser Melody Barnes.

The lead pitcher to
Let’s Move!, Michelle Obama, provided the welcoming
remarks for this historic event. She declared:  “This gathering has
never happened before at the White House. It’s one where we’re bringing
together teachers and child advocates, doctors and nurses, business
leaders, public servants, researchers and health experts to talk about
one of the most serious and difficult problems facing our kids today,
and that is the epidemic of childhood obesity in this country.”

After
Mrs. Obama made brief welcoming remarks, Barnes, the domestic-policy
advisor, took over. Barnes chairs the obesity task force, and said it
was time for “all hands on deck” as the task force focuses on its report
for the President.

Joining the ranks
of the 75 students who are Michelle Obama’s most critical stakeholders in her Let’s Move! campaign, I was fortunate
enough to be on deck and participate as a representative for the National Farm to School Network at
this meeting and make the point that connecting schools to their
surrounding farmers is critical; it advances all four
of the objectives laid out by the Administration:

(a)
Ensuring access to healthy, affordable food;
(b) Increasing physical
activity in schools and communities;
(c) Providing healthier food in
schools; and
(d) Empowering parents with information and tools to
make good choices for themselves and their families.

Four break-out groups convened separately for the
topics a-d above ,and we were tasked with identifying 3 to 5 of the
best ideas to present to the writers of the roadmap to a healthier generation.
I was assigned to Kevin Concannon’s breakout: using schools for improving nutrition for American children.
We were asked to consider the nutritional quality of school meals,
necessary changes to the school environment, and infrastructure that
would lead to key benchmarks and actions.

Our group dove right into lively discussion with
two enthusiastic food service directors, Tony Geraci of Baltimore City Schools,
and Tim Cipriano of New
Haven Public Schools, showcasing what does work: farm to school.  In
sum, the recommendations coming out of our group included:

1)
Need for strong national standards for ALL food in schools: meals,
snacks, competitive, etc.
2) Enhance and ramp up professional
training for all those involved in putting food on the tray: food
service, custodians, and all adults in the school
3) Rethink business of meal production and its
delivery: kids involved in preparing food, local procurement, schools
gardens, etc. Find funding for this. We need to rethink the business of
meal production and its delivery with programs such as Farm to School.
Some of the most fortunate schools have gardens and Farm to School
programs. We need to break down the myths of USDA regulations: it is ok to source locally and it is ok to have a garden. The CNR
includes funding for Farm to School nationally.”
4) Nutrition
education needs to happen across all classrooms (again citing farm to
school)—classroom for nutrition education, but also using cafeteria as
educational opportunity for a teachable moment
5) Integrate
incentives to make positive change happen

We
then re-convened with the full gathering and shared our small-group
results. My full notes are available here (PDF).

I left with Michelle Obama’s concluding words running
through my head: “What we have done is start a national conversation. 
But we need your help to propel that conversation into a national
response.”

This
administration has continually opened doors for civil society
participation in the discourse of creating a healthier generation. There
was an opportunity for public comment, a kid-only Town Hall at the
White House, and this child obesity meeting at the White House. Do you
have something to tell the President’s Task Force on Childhood Obesity?
Build more playgrounds? Reform school lunch? if so, send your comments
to LetsMove[at]who[dot]eop[dot]gov.

When I returned from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, I
received this message from my sister, a mother of three, who juggles a
full time job and a family calendar of activities that makes your eyes
glaze over: “In honor of you today fighting childhood obesity, I’ll make
sure Grant eats an apple and plays outside before we let him on the Wii.” If all parents would make
that commitment, Michelle Obama would be one step closer to succeeding
in the goal of her Let’s Move! initiative.

Related Links:

Egger’s Head: School lunches

Americans eat more processed food than, well, anyone

Why even the childless should care about school lunch

by Jonathan Hiskes

Sim Darcy: An illustration of the Welsh urban villageCourtesy The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment Coed Darcy is an
oddly named urban village that’s going to be built from the ground up over the
next 20 years in southern Wales. It’ll have an impressive 4,000 compact homes,
plus commercial space and 1,300 acres of parks and greenery. It’s also got a
high-profile engineer—the Prince of
Wales, whose Foundation for the Built Environment is building it on a brownfield formerly occupied by a BP oil refinery.

The idea is to unite
the best of British village traditions with 21st century sustainability
principles. The BBC has a well-produced video with glitzy simulations of the completed
village and an interview with Prince Charles about his commitment to “a return
of human values to architecture.” Sadly, it’s not embeddable, but it’s available
on Youtube.              

Most of us will never
live in new towns built from the ground up. And they certainly have a spotty
track record (see the latest
trouble for Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City). But these sorts of projects—from the
sleepy, pastel-hued Seaside,
Florida, to the futuristic, $35 billion Songdo,
Korea—can show us what’s possible, and they’re fun to think about. There’s something
useful in the way these things appeal to people’s pioneer spirits, or at least
their inner SimCity nuts.

The Prince’s focus on
the built environment also complements the many-pronged
Welsh clean energy project.

(Hat tip to Kaid Benfield at
Switchboard)

 

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Great Barrier Reef oil spill hits renowned nature sanctuary

Paris mayor wants to drive cars away from the Seine

by Ashley Braun

From activists to politicians, everybody loves to talk about the promise of green jobs. But in reality, who the heck actually has a green job, and how do you get one? In our new column, “I Have a Green Job,” Grist will be regularly profiling one of the lucky employed who has landed a job in the new green economy, or a green job in the old economy.

Know someone with a green job and a good story? Tell us about them!

Michael Thompson has the sticky—but deeply satisfying—job of wrangling bees on Chicago’s west side.Krysia HaagMeet Michael Thompson, 62, professional bee wrangler and co-founder of Chicago Honey Co-op, a Chicago-based agricultural cooperative that’s dedicated to chemical-free beekeeping, growing community, and entrepreneurial dreams of garlic.

Q. How does the Chicago Honey Co-op work?

A. You can buy a hive and put it there and
learn beekeeping, or we can take care of the hive for you. The only rule we have really is that you can’t use any chemicals in your hives. We have a pretty strict rule about that. We also have a community farm there.

Q. What were you hoping to accomplish with the co-op?

A. Producing
delicious, healthy food—that was our first goal. The other goal that we set
out for ourselves was to have a business that could support itself. And the other thing we
wanted to do was job training in an area of Chicago where people really need
jobs. 

Q. What long and winding road led you to where you are today—as director of the Chicago Honey Co-op?

A. I’d say it started in southern Kansas when I was a child.
I had an early need to find out how to grow things, so I asked these matriarchs.
They were in their 70s or 80s at the time. They taught me how to grow food, and
by the time I was 10, I was growing tomatoes and dragging them around in wagons
to the neighbors and selling them at 10 cents a pound.

By the time I was 12, I had badgered my parents for a bee
hive because I’d read about it in an encyclopedia, and they bought me a beehive
as a present for my birthday.

Q. Are your friends jealous of your job?

A. Yeah, often. A friend, Diane, just kept saying, “You’re so lucky. You have such
great luck in your life.” And so I had to admit that I do have a lot of luck,
but I’d like to blame it on those people who taught me when I was a child that
it was all right to grow plants and food when you’re seven years old.

Q. Do you see yourself doing this kind of work for the rest
of your life?

A. I do. I made a commitment to myself to grow food on a
larger scale for the rest of my life. One of the dreams I have is to produce
more garlic. I see there are niches that can be filled, and that’s the trick to
entrepreneurship. Find that niche, and
not only can you make a little money—I don’t know if it will support you
forever—but it will help support you and it will make you happy.

Q. What about your bee farm sets you apart from conventional
beekeeping? What pushed you in that direction?

A. I was a bee inspector for the state of Illinois when I
was 21. If you find a bee yard with this disease called American foulbrood, you
have kill the bees. After about eight months I ran into a nearly abandoned
apiary, and I had to do that. I had to use a spray aerosol can of
cyanide. I smelled that, and I quit the next day.

So when we decided to start [the Chicago Honey
Co-op], there was no question among the three of us beekeepers about chemicals.
At the time it was very radical, even eight years ago, to not use chemicals in
your hives. But we knew it was harming the bees and the environment. Also, we believe in being part of a
community. We don’t just do it because we want to get to market, and we don’t
just do it because we know we can produce delicious food. We want to pass it on
to others.

Q. Could you talk a little bit about the education and the
job training that the Chicago Honey Co-op offers?

A. The job training started first with a grant from the
Illinois Department of Corrections—not usually a grant-giving organization.
And they somehow were convinced by the three of us beekeepers that this was a
good idea: a small business doing job training with people who had just gotten
out of prison and couldn’t find jobs because of that.

Q. What part of your job makes you the most hopeful about
creating a more sustainable world?

A. The best part of the job these days is the young people
who have become interested in what we do, to have them show up and explain to
me what the world’s about. That kind of cultural exchange that happens among
different generations—there is nothing like it. It is so rich, so important.
That’s how I started out and now I’m in that place to be the mentor.

Q. What do you think a green job is and why do you think your
job is one of them?

A. I wish somebody would come up
with a different term. I like names of things that say what they are and this
one is definitely a stretch and always has been for me. I guess a green job contributes to the health
of the earth and to the people and the animals on that earth. We decided to
actually produce something tangible and delicious, but something you could hold
in your hand that wasn’t just an idea or a service.

And why do I consider this job [a green one]? Because we
build soil every day. We’ve also been helping with what people are eating in
the neighborhood and what we’re eating at home. And we’re teaching.

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by Rachel Morello-Frosch

Co-authored by Manuel Pastor. Cross-posted from The Huffington Post.

No doubt you’ve heard the warnings—the melting ice caps and rising sea levels, the extinct polar bears and extreme weather conditions.  From pop culture movies like The Day After Tomorrow, to the tireless work of advocates like Al Gore, the discussion around climate change has often focused on environmental catastrophe and what the future may hold if humans don’t change their carbon-emitting ways.

These are, of course, serious concerns and we need to address them to secure our planet’s future. But what’s been missing from the conversation is how climate change is affecting us here at the local level, in our communities, and that climate change policy—done right—could result in cleaner air for many American families today.

Last year, we released research about the “climate gap”—the fact that people of color and the poor in the United States may suffer more from the economic and health consequences of climate change than other Americans. Our newest study, Minding the Climate Gap: What’s at Stake if California’s Climate Law isn’t Done Right and Right Away, builds on that work to show that people of color and the poor have the most to lose if efforts to confront climate change are delayed. However, they also have the most to gain if we implement climate policies that deliver immediate public health benefits for everyone.

In California, for example, communities of color are more likely to live near major green house gas emitting facilities, such as refineries, power plants, and cement kilns, which also spew toxic air pollution.  This inequality in pollution emissions persists even after accounting for income differences across neighborhoods.  In the case of particulate matter, which affects respiratory health, we find that, on average, communities of color face a pollution emission burden that is 70 percent higher than for whites. This trend makes clear that getting climate change policies right and right away is important for all of us, but it’s particularly essential for these overburdened communities.

What’s astonishing is that despite the real threat that climate change poses—and the immediate benefits from enacting climate change policy—some politicians and big oil corporations are saying that we need to put the climate change law “on hold” in California. Whether or not millions of us will soon be breathing cleaner air may now hinge on a California ballot initiative, a statewide referendum that has once again become a proxy war for national policy debate.

Recent news has revealed that Texas oil companies Valero and Tesoro are major contributors to a campaign—to the tune of $600,000—to prevent implementation of California’s climate law (known by its legislative name AB 32).  These same companies are big contributors to air pollution. Our research indicates that all four of Valero and Tesoro’s major refineries in California are major contributors to public health risks from air pollution. We also found that Valero and Tesoro’s refineries are among the worst facilities in the state for disproportionately emitting pollutants in communities of color.

California’s climate law was put into place years ago and now it’s time to implement it.  Allowing out-of-state oil companies to stop its implementation will not save jobs. Economic research on this issue shows that green job growth is a more likely result of climate policy and California is well-positioned for gains in that sector. If the oil companies win, it will just delay the immediate opportunity for cleaner air and better public health.

Implementing the climate law in the “right way” is also not that complicated. We suggest incentives should be structured to reduce greenhouse gases in neighborhoods suffering from the dirtiest air. Facilities responsible for the greatest estimated health impacts—could be prohibited from paying a fee or trading emissions credits in lieu of cleaning up their operations. Revenues generated from polluter fees could also feed into a “Climate Gap Neighborhood Protection Fund” to improve air quality in these communities and enhance the ability of disadvantaged Californians to adapt to climate change impacts.

The enormous potential for cleaner air as a result of California’s climate law hasn’t even been a part of the debate yet, but last week a Field poll found that 58 percent of Californians support the policy. As more people realize that supporting smart climate policies will also give them cleaner air to breathe, that number could increase significantly. That’s good news for those seeking to protect California’s climate law and public health against the misguided anti-AB 32 campaign.

Whether the goal is protecting the environment or re-building America’s workforce, preventing climate change is not just about reaping some future returns. Real climate solutions will give us cleaner air to breathe—and this is an immediate benefit for everyone, especially for communities of color and the poor who are currently suffering from the dirtiest air.

Rachel Morello-Frosch is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a Grist board member.

Manuel Pastor is Professor of Geography and American Studies &
Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

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by Jen Harper

Photo: KIMTI wore a purple lamé dress to my junior prom, which I
attended with my best friend, Jessica, because we were both too dorky to
actually have dates. (Sorry, Jessica, I should just speak for myself. I was too dorky, and Jessica was my faithful best
friend. Thank you, Jessica. And thanks for driving us in your mom’s car.)
Anyway, I’m stoked to see that shiny fabric is still in for prom—wait just a minute. That’s not fabric. It’s a gum wrapper. A shitload of gum
wrappers.

Yep, high
school junior and proud Iowan Elizabeth Rasmuson, inspired by all the duct-tape prom
creations, did a little extreme DIY-ing and created her prom dress and her
adoring (see picture for just how adoring), shaggy-haired date’s vest out of 5—the brand, not the number—gum
wrappers. Though I was a bit disappointed to hear that she’d sealed the whole
recycled deal with a vinyl topcoat (Umbra would be even more
bummed), I’m proud of her for daring to be different and also believing in
another of the three R’s—reuse…of the word “like.”

“We started collecting, like, the specific colors, like,
at the very beginning of the year,” says Elizabeth.

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by Jonathan Hiskes

Courtesy

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