AlterNet.org: Environment

Death Toll Continues to Rise After Devastating Oklahoma Tornado

AFP — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:33:00 -0700

The Oklahoma medical examiner's office gave the latest death toll, which was carried by all the major US television networks, which said the number of fatalities was expected to rise.

WASHINGTON — At least 37 people were killed when a powerful tornado with winds of up to 200 miles (320 kilometers) per hour pulverized an Oklahoma City suburb, hitting at least two schools and wiping out blocks of homes. [Editor's note: since publication the AP has reported the death toll is at 51.]

The Oklahoma medical examiner's office gave the latest death toll, which was carried by all the major US television networks, which said the number of fatalities was expected to rise.

"Our first responders are stretched," Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett told CNN. "The state, the National Guard are going to be involved."

Reporters for KFOR-TV saw pupils as young as nine being "pulled out" of the school in Moore, a residential community of 55,000 just south of Oklahoma's state capital.

Anxious parents were being kept at a distance while search and rescue workers scrambled to free the pupils.

A second elementary school, Briarwood, was also hit but did not immediately appear to have sustained casualties. Early reports indicated that many students survived.

From its news helicopter, KFOR's cameras captured scenes of widespread destruction, with street after street of single-story homes in Moore stripped of their roofs and cars piled atop each other like toys.

Utility lines were down and gas lines exposed, triggering localized fires. The Moore Medical Center was evacuated after it sustained damage, a spokeswoman for the hospital told CNN.

The National Guard was called out to help rescue efforts.

Storm spotters estimated the wedge-shaped tornado, which struck in mid-afternoon, to be as big as two miles (3.2 kilometers) wide. It briefly dissipated, only to recycle to the east, threatening the town of Meeker.

"We anticipate that these storms are going to continue to build around Oklahoma," a grim Governor Mary Fallin told CNN, while the National Weather Service urged residents to take cover.

On Twitter, the National Weather Service gave the tornado a preliminary rating of EF-4, indicating that it packed winds of 166 to 200 miles per hour (267-322 km/h) -- more severe than a category five hurricane.

In downtown Oklahoma City, tornado sirens went off at least three times Monday afternoon, and the Interstate 35 highway -- a busy north-south artery through the American heartland -- was closed to all but emergency vehicles.

In Moore, live images from KFOR showed people wandering among the debris and even a couple of untethered horses from a local stables that somehow managed to survive the punishing storm.

"I had no idea it was coming," said a stable worker, who told how he survived the "unbearably loud" twister by taking cover in one of the stalls.

Monday's tornado followed roughly the same west-to-east track as a May 1999 twister that killed 44 people, injured hundreds more and destroyed thousands of homes in Moore and the south of Oklahoma City.

Tornadoes frequently touch down on Oklahoma's wide open plains, but the fact that Monday's twister struck a populated urban area raised fears of a high casualty toll.

Because of the hard ground, few homes are built with basements in which residents can take cover.

Oklahoma City lies well inside the so-called "Tornado Alley" stretching from South Dakota to central Texas that is particularly vulnerable to tornadoes.

On Sunday, a powerful storm system churning through the US Midwest spawned tornadoes in Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma, destroying homes and killing at least two people, US media reported.

Fallin declared a state of emergency Sunday for 16 Oklahoma counties due to tornados, severe storms and flooding over the weekend.

In Washington, a White House official said President Barack Obama was getting updates "as information come in from the ground" and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) stood ready to provide assistance.

"The administration continues to urge all those in affected or potentially affected areas to follow the direction of state and local officials as this severe weather continues," the official added.

Will Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter Stop Meaning Anything When Climate Change Hits?

Sandra Steingraber, Orion Magazine — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:00:00 -0700

My kids and their friends and everyone roughly their age will, in fact, be the last human beings to remember a stable, predictable procession of seasons.

This article first appeared at Orion magazine under the title "The Discontent of Our Winter." You can enjoy future Orion articles by signing up to the magazine's free trial subscription program.

My children have snow anxiety. For the record, this started in the winter of 2011–12 when no snow fell—at all—and sleds, saucers, skis, and snowball makers sat dejectedly on the porch, unused, next to the irrelevant and despondent snow shovel. Week after week, month after month, Faith and Elijah scanned the skies and studied the forecast. When June-like temperatures hit in March, the sight of the toboggan filled them with so much despair that they wordlessly dragged it back to the barn and put it in storage.

Which did not go unnoticed by their dad and me. When had our kids ever put stuff away without being asked? It was as unprecedented as a snowless winter in upstate New York. Nobody had ever experienced that either.

During the unfrozen winter of 2011–12, the grown-ups all walked around saying, “This is crazy!” True enough. When the temperature in the mudroom hits eighty degrees before the daytime:nighttime ratio hits parity, some synonym for insane is what the thesaurus should take you to. But “This is crazy!” also implies that we possess no rational explanation for June arriving in March. And I noticed that my son and his friends never said things like that to each other. They spoke more grimly, along the lines of, Global warming. It’s here. Now we can’t go sledding. Probably ever. So what do you want to do, dude?

When snow and ice finally fell in April—hard enough and fast enough to cancel school—it fell on tulip and magnolia petals and killed off the entire cherry crop.

The toboggan stayed in the barn.

But wishful thinking springs anew in the hearts of children, even in the face of permanent catastrophe, so, after a cherryless summer and a fall with few apples, Faith and Elijah conferred hopefully about the upcoming winter. Last year was a global warming winter. But maybe global warming winters come only every other year. Maybe this year would be normal.

The snow fell. The sleds came out. The snow melted.

The snow fell again. And turned to rain. The ground thawed and great lakes of water filled the low areas, and the sleds that had been parked at the bottoms of sledding hills across the county bobbed around like flotillas of small boats at harbor.

The sight of floating sleds made the adults say, “It’s crazy!” all over again.

The kids just gave up. Let the record show that in February 2013, the children of Trumansburg, New York, gave up on winter. As a season, it was no longer reliable. You could wake up in the morning to a wonderland—snowflakes dutifully falling, the front yard all white, perfect, hushed, squeaky—and by the time school let out in the afternoon, the miraculous world had already reverted back to brown, gray, mushy, yucky.

“Don’t get excited,” said Faith to Elijah right before Valentine’s Day when he looked out the window at first light and announced a fresh snowfall. “It won’t last.”

My children were born just before and after the turn of the century. They are old enough to reminisce about the days before winter went bad and became the crazy uncle in the seasonal family. Faith’s fashionable friends discuss the clothes they used to wear—month after arctic month—when they were little and the snow was piled high from November to March. Kids today, they note with disinterested interest, just don’t have the same relationship to their snow pants.

I think I’m on to something here, and I’d like to make a prediction. I predict that the cohort of kids who are now ten to fifteen years old are going to have a very different worldview than those born just a few years after them. My kids and their friends and everyone roughly their age will, in fact, be the last human beings to remember a stable, predictable procession of seasons.

Let me put a finer point on this. My kids, who are in middle school, know that winter is supposed to be cold and that January pond ice should be thick enough for skating. They possess snowman-making techniques, snow-fort construction skills, and an elaborate ethos about exactly what kind of snowballs can and can’t be used for ambushing the friends of one’s sibling and what body parts are and are not off-limits (no ice balls, never in the face). They have methods for assessing the slide-ability and pack-ability of any given snowfall. They know which methods of tucking snow pants into snow boots work and which leak. They have strong opinions on gloves versus mittens and the proper way to make a snow angel. And yet, for the last two years, they have had almost no opportunity to exercise this knowledge.

Meanwhile, a friend calls to tell me that her otherwise very bright granddaughter, who is of nursery-school age, is having trouble learning the names of the seasons. They make no sense to her. “But grandma, you said that winter was cold!” Winter, when she said it, wasn’t. And there was the added problem of the forsythias. They bloomed this year during a warm spell that spanned the twelve days of Christmas. April showers bring May flowers. When the nursery rhymes no longer match the empirical evidence, what’s a three-year-old to think?

Here are two more stories for the record. Because of climate change, Elijah gave up on Little House in the Big Woods. He liked the first half. But the episodes involving horse-drawn sleighs and maple-syrup snow cones were too painful. He refused to read on. “It’s not that way anymore, Mom,” he said matter-of-factly, and set the book aside.

I was stunned. But then it happened to me. While rereading the poem “Corsons Inlet” by A. R. Ammons—“I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning / to the sea, / then turned right along / the surf”—which had once been the subject of my own master’s thesis, I found that I couldn’t go on. It’s not that way anymore, Archie. And how come, in 1965, you didn’t see it coming? Corson’s Inlet, a last undeveloped stretch of beach in New Jersey, was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy.

I set the book aside. Matter-of-factly.

Not to say that our hearts have all turned to stone around here. Here’s my other story: After days of wild, record-breaking weather, our village winter festival was canceled because of rain and flood warnings. When I told Elijah the bad news on the walk home from school, he began to cry. I told him I was sorry.

He said, “I’m not upset about the festival. I’m upset because the planet’s dying. I know this is all because of global warming.”

This is what I heard myself say: “Look, Mom is on the job. I’m working on it. I’m working on it really hard, and I promise I won’t quit.”

And then I cried. And not only because my son believes himself to be alive on a dying planet, but because all the generations of parents before mine have been unable to deal with the facts and mount a response of sufficient scale to solve the problem, meaning that all of us now have a monumental task before us. I cried because keeping my promise makes me arise before dawn to get on buses, puts bullhorns in my hand in faraway cities, may yet land me in jail, and, in these and other ways, takes me away from my children so that I can prove them wrong.

This article first appeared at Orion magazine under the title "The Discontent of Our Winter." You can enjoy future Orion articles by signing up to the magazine's free trial subscription program.

Shocker: Republicans Fight Obama Plan to Privatize the Hugely Popular, Cheap Energy Source of the TVA

Gar Alperovitz, Thomas Hanna, AlterNet — Sun, 19 May 2013 16:34:00 -0700

Obama's scheme to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority gets push-back from Tennessee Republicans who know the benefits of a publicly-owned facility.

Buried within the fine print of the 2014 Obama budget is a startling bit of history-changing policy. The government, the administration says, should consider selling off the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the nation’s largest publicly operated—that is, “socialist”—institutions, and the largest public power provider in the country.

The TVA is a non-profi, free-standing public authority established by the Roosevelt administration during the Depression—a very large utility, if you like. It provides 165 billion kilowatt hours of power to 9 million Americans, has $11.2 billion in sales revenue, employs more than 12,500 people, and provides other educational, training and related services (such as navigation and land management, flood control, and economic development) to the people in the states and region around the Tennessee river basin.

Strikingly, it’s the free-market Republicans who object to this proposed privatization. Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who has vehemently opposed government tax credits and subsidies for renewable energy, calls the proposal “one more bad idea in a budget full of bad ideas,” and fears that privatization would lead to higher energy costs for his constituents.

Congressman John L. Duncan, Jr., another Tennessee Republican, says privatization is “something that has been proposed in the past and been determined to be a very bad idea.” Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama (a state also served by the TVA), says he will “carefully study any proposals to restructure TVA” in order to make sure that it won’t result in a price hike. And Tennessee’s other Republican Senator, Bob Corker, is clear: “I doubt this idea gains much traction.”

If we didn’t know better, we might think the administration has decided to call the Republicans’ bluff on the issue of “socialism”—a strategy that, however, seems to be beyond the clever quotient of the Obama political team.

The basic problem is that this “socialist” institution is immensely popular. It has given the people of the region good service for roughly eight decades, and its prices are lower than those of many private corporations. An analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration found that consumers in Alabama and Tennessee pay considerably less for power than the national average. The low rates, former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman suggests, have earned TVA “the ‘mother love’ of a politically conservative region.”

Even among environmental groups—which often criticize the TVA for, among other things, its continued use of coal and nuclear power plants—there is little appetite for privatization. The Tennessee chapter of the Sierra Club holds that privatization would be a mistake, potentially allowing new private corporate owners to “liquidate its assets by selling off TVA’s public lands along the Tennessee River and tributaries.”

So why is the Obama administration pursuing a sell-off? Mainly for short-sighted budget appearances. Privatizing public assets like the TVA will generate some near-term revenue and help pay down a (very) small fraction of the nation’s debt. The White House also claims the TVA will likely have to issue more debt securities in the future in order to raise money to modernize its aging infrastructure, which would—in a purely accounting sense—slightly increase the deficit. This is an odd worry, since the TVA is, and would continue to be, entirely self-funded at no cost to the taxpayer, and the new debt is simply to finance the kind of updating and modernizing any major corporation routinely does.

Most Americans do not realize that public ownership like that involved in the TVA, and a cornerstone of much decried “socialism,” can be found in communities in every state in the nation. For one thing, there are more than 2,000 public electric utilities—many in conservative rural areas—and, like the TVA, they are popular among local residents and politicians. Succesful public ownership of vital transportation facilities (such as roads, ports and airports) is also common. And, of course, roughly a third of the nation’s total land surface (and the minerals beneath and forests above) is owned and managed by the government.

Around the world, there are also thousands of highly successful examples of so-called socialism like the TVA. Public enterprises operate advanced high-speed rail networks in many countries. Public ownership of significant or controlling shares of airlines is also common. More than 200 public and semi-public banks, along with over 80 funding agencies, account for a fifth of all bank assets in the European Union. Faster and more widely available Internet access is provided in many countries where public corporations exist side by side with private companies, and public telecommunications companies are also common around the world.

Most Americans are clearly not nearly as ready as citizens of other countries to think about public ownership at this scale—or even at the scale of the TVA. On the other hand, stranger things have happened. Possibly one day the United States might catch up with the kinds of practical things being done in many parts of the world—or even, for that matter, with what Republicans representing areas served by the Tennessee Valley Authority think makes sense.

Bill Moyers: 12 Ways You Can Avoid Toxic Chemicals

Lauren Feeney, Bill Moyers — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:29:00 -0700

Lead, flame retardants, and BPA are everywhere, but you can limit your exposure.

After watching this week’s interview with Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, you’ll probably be wondering what you can do to protect yourself and your family from toxic chemicals. Perhaps the most important thing you can do is become politically involved – join the fight against both chemicals in our environment and money in our political system. In today’s world, it’s virtually impossible to avoid dangerous chemicals, even in your own home, but here are a few simple steps you can take to limit your exposure to known toxins like lead, flame retardants and BPA.

Lead

If you think that lead poisoning is a problem of the past, or one that only affects the urban poor, think again. While it’s true that lead paint has been illegal since the 70s and leaded gasoline was phased out in the 80s, the highly toxic substance still lurks in old homes, parking lots, water pipes, and in products imported from countries that don’t have the same regulations. And while lead poisoning no longer the killer it once was, miniscule amounts of lead can cause neurological damage and behavioral problems in children. According to the CDC, there are currently half a million children with elevated levels of lead in their blood. Here’s what you can do to protect your family from lead poisoning:

1) Find out if there’s lead in your water. A good place to start is with your local government. website. At NYC.gov, for example, you can order a free testing kit. You can also try contacting your local water company, your landlord or a private lab. You may also want to install an NSF-certified water filter on your water tap. Though the EPA has mandated that water systems be tested for lead since 1991, your home’s own internal plumbing could still contain lead, particularly if you live in an older building.

2) Replace old windows. Though lead paint has been illegal since 1978 and has largely been removed from old buildings, in some cases, it was seen as too costly to replace the windows. To have your windows replaced (or to do any sort of renovation on a building that may still contain lead paint), contact an EPA-certified renovator who has been trained to follow lead safety practices. In some cases, your local government may cover the costs.

3) Throw out colorfully-painted toys that were made outside the U.S. or Europe. They may look innocent, but toys, crayons, ceramic and jewelry, particularly those manufactured in China or Mexico, may contain lead, and as any parent knows, children are likely to put these things in their mouths.

4) Dust or vacuum regularly. Even without any obvious source of lead in your home, there may still be lead in the air, particularly if you live in an industrial area or if a neighbor has been renovating an old home. Dust particles containing lead are especially dangerous to babies who crawl around on the floor. It’s also important to keep toys and hands clean.

5) Test the soil. Urban and suburban yards can still contain contaminants from the days when lead paint and gasoline were widespread. Before planting a garden or even letting your kids run around in the yard, make sure the soil is lead-free. Your local public health department may offer free testing; you can also contact a private or university-run lab.

Flame Retardants

The hazards of flame retardants have been known for some time — brominated tris was banned from children’s pajamas back in 1977. And yet, similar chemicals can still be found in everything from couch cushions to television sets. Studies have linked one group of flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs, to lower IQs, behavioral problems, early puberty and fertility issues. And the fire-safety benefits of these chemicals are debatable. Here’s what you can to keep toxic flame retardants out of your home:

1) Check the labels on your furniture. The California Furniture Flammability Standard essentially requires that cushioned furniture, children’s car seats, diaper-changing tables and other products containing polyurethane foam are dipped in toxic chemicals. (Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just because you live in one of the other 49 states — because of California’s size, most mass-produced furniture is designed to meet California’s standard). Check the tags for the familiar notice: This article meets the flammability requirements of California Bureau of Home Furnishings Technical Bulletin 117. (The tag is not required though, so just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s safe.) Fortunately, California has proposed changing the rule; until that happens, you can look for products made with wool, cotton or polyester filling instead of polyurethane foam. And if you can’t afford all new eco-friendly furniture, be sure to dust, vacuum and wash your hands regularly — most of the toxins enter the body by swallowing contaminated dust.

2) Check the labels on electronics, too. Flame retardants have long been used in electronic equipment like computers and television sets. Thankfully, that’s slowly changing. As of 2008, the following companies had committed to phasing out all brominated flame retardants: Acer, Apple, Eizo Nanao, LG Electronics, Lenovo, Matsushita, Microsoft, Nokia, Phillips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony-Ericsson, and Toshiba. To find flame retardant-free versions of everything from refrigerators to nose-hair clippers, check this list created by ChemSec, an environmental non-profit based in Sweden.

3) Beware of fleece pajamas. Though one flame retardant, brominated tris, was banned from children’s pajamas, some sleepwear is still treated with another flame retardant called PROBAN which has been linked to genetic abnormalities and cancer. Check the label — children’s pajamas that DO NOT contain flame retardants must have a tag that reads: “For child’s safety, garment should fit snugly” (the snug fit limits the flow of oxygen in order to prevent fire from spreading, an approved alternative to chemical flame retardants). Cotton and polyester products rarely contain flame retardants, but look out for those cozy fleece footed pajamas — they usually do.

BPA

Bisphenol A, or BPA, has been linked to cancer,asthma, obesity and reproductive issues. And yet, until recently, the chemical was found in, among other things, baby bottles. The FDA finally banned the use of BPA in baby bottles and children’s sippy cups in 2012 — three years after major manufacturers had voluntarily stopped using it. But BPA is still found in other hard plastic containers, the lining of metal cans and the paper that receipts are printed on. It’s difficult to completely avoid BPA — 90 percent of Americans have traces of the chemical in their urine. But here are some things you can do to limit your exposure:

1) When purchasing plastic products — particularly those that come into contact with your food, such as food storage containers, plastic plates and cups, look for those that are clearly marked BPA free. Thanks to vocal consumers, many companies are now manufacturing BPA-free products and marketing them as such.

2) Avoid food containers marked with recycling codes 3 or 7, which may be made with BPA. If your food does come in a container marked 3 or 7, don’t microwave it in that container – chemicals are more likely to leak into your food at high temperatures.

3) Limit your consumption of canned foods, or look for cans marked BPA free — they are rare, but do exist. Eden Organic cans have been BPA free since 1999.

4) BPA is often used in the thermal paper that receipts are printed on. Since it’s impossible to know whether or the receipt you’re being handed has contains BPA, don’t take receipts that you don’t need. If you operate a business that uses receipts, switch to a BPA-free paper manufacturer, such as Appleton Paper, which went BPA-free in 2006.

Keep the Arctic Cold: Why the Rush to Drill Alaska Must Be Stopped

Subhankar Banerjee, Seven Stories Press — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:23:00 -0700

A leading international voice on arctic conservation addresses President Obama’s strategy for tapping America’s northern frontier.

I wrote a letter to the editor as a follow up to the generous review “In the Beautiful,Threatened North” by Ian Frazier in The New York Review of Books of the anthology, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point that I edited. My letter, “Can Shell Be Stopped?” has just been published in the New York Review.

After the June 6 issue (with my letter) went to the printer a few significant things happened that relate to the letter that I’ll mention here briefly. On May 10, the White House published a 13-page document, “National Strategy for the Arctic Region.” It opens with a one-page introduction by President Obama. He begins with these words: “We in the lower forty-eight and Hawaii join Alaska’s residents in recognizing one simple truth that the Arctic is an amazing place.” All fifty-five contributors in Arctic Voices, I’m sure, will be very pleased with these words from the President. But before the tears of joy could flow down my cheeks, the droplets dried up as I began to read the second paragraph: “Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.” In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.” Of course the report mentions protecting the environment but gives no specific details. This major report from the White House was released after we came to know that on midnight on May 7, the average global CO2 concentration had reached 400 parts per million (ppm). The pre-industrial average was 280 ppm. The Scientific American reported, “[T]he last time CO2 levels are thought to have been this high was more than 2.5 million years ago, an era known as the Pliocene.” This is so significant that Scientific American now plans to publish in the coming year a “400 ppm” series of articles, “to examine what this invisible line in the sky means for the global climate, the planet and all the living things on it, including human civilization.” And George Monbiot correctly pointed out in The Guardian, “The only way forward now is back: to retrace our steps and seek to return atmospheric concentrations to around 350 ppm, as the 350.org campaign demands.” We may have forgotten, or didn’t pay attention, that the Arctic had reached 400 ppm almost exactly a year ago. A May 31, 2012 press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated, “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Barrow, Alaska, reached 400 parts per million (ppm) this spring, according to NOAA measurements, the first time a monthly average measurement for the greenhouse gas attained the 400 ppm mark in a remote location. … Carbon dioxide at six other remote northern sites in NOAA’s international cooperative air sampling network also reached 400 ppm at least once this spring: at a second site in Alaska and others in Canada, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and an island in the North Pacific.” Arctic is the barometer of our planet. When it comes to climate change, if you want to know what will happen tomorrow, do not hire an astrologer, instead simply pay attention to what’s happening in the Arctic today. Dr. James Hansen and I are currently engaged in a conversation that will be published in the paperback edition of Arctic Voices in August. As Jim told me, “We must keep the Arctic cold, for us to have a stable planet.” Drilling in the Arctic Ocean is a wrong path for the planet. By asking “Can Shell Be Stopped?” in the NYR, I wasn’t interested in philosophical contemplation but rather to figure out a practical path that might stop oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean–a small but significant step toward helping to “keep the Arctic cold.”

Four Examples from the Last Week Prove Obama Is Full of Hot Air on Climate Protection

Tara Lohan, AlterNet — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:05:00 -0700

You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

A lot has happened in the last week. The Earth hit the 400 parts per million CO2 threshold for the first time in human history. Scientists tell us this is bad news if we want to prevent runaway climate change. "If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades," scientist Michael Mann told Democracy Now! "We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate."

If you didn't know this already, we should be listening to Mann and to other scientists. I thought this was settled a long time ago, but someone keeps giving print space to climate deniers, so a new survey of 12,000 peer-reviewed studies on the climate was just completed and the not-so-shocking conclusion was this, as Mother Nature Network reports:

Published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the analysis shows an overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are a key contributor to climate change, while a "vanishingly small proportion" defy this consensus. Most of the climate papers didn't specifically address humanity's involvement -- likely because it's considered a given in scientific circles, the survey's authors point out -- but of the 4,014 that did, 3,896 shared the mainstream outlook that people are largely to blame.

In light of this news, it makes it even more infuriating to see that the Obama administration has spent the week prostrating to the fossil fuel lobby. Here are four disturbing things the administration's been up to.

1. Moniz Hearts Fracking

Obama tapped nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department and the Senate gave a big thumbs-up to Moniz on Thursday. Many environmental groups had concerns that Moniz was too pro-fracking, and those concerns are clearly warranted. Moniz's first order of business Friday was to clear the way for 20 years of liquified natural gas exports via Freeport LNG Terminal on Quintana Island, Texas.

Of course, we've already been sold the story that we're suposed to frack the crap out of the country in the name of energy security, but we knew all along it was for industry profit, right? Brad Jacobson recently detailed for AlterNet about how Congress members are clamoring for export plans to be fast-tracked -- although what Americans will get out of the deal will be higher gas prices and less energy security.

2. Thanks for Nothing, Sally

While the nomination of Moniz disappointed many environmentalists, some were cheered by REI exec Sally Jewell taking over the Interior Department. Those same folks might not be cheering after Jewell announced the Bureau of Land Management's newest regulations (or lack thereof) for fracking on our public lands.

As Sierra Club's Michael Brune reported Friday:

The new rules are disappointing for many reasons: Drillers won't be required to disclose what chemicals they're using, there is no requirement for baseline water testing, and there are no setback requirements to govern how close to homes and schools drilling can happen. Once again, though, the policy documents an even bigger failure to grasp a fundamental principle: If we're serious about the climate crisis, then the last thing we should be doing is opening up still more federal land to drilling and fracking for fossil fuels.

3. No Time for Farmers

The group Bold Nebraska reported this week that Obama turned down an invitation to hear from Nebraska farmers and ranchers about their concerns that the Keystone XL pipeline could destroy their livelihoods. Of course, the President is a busy guy, right? And besides, the White House said he was not "taking any meetings on the pipeline."

Or is he? The group writes:

Bold Nebraska was therefore surprised the President is meeting with staff at Ellicott Dredges, a company that just testified in Congress in support of Keystone XL and makes equipment that creates the tailing ponds, which are massive bodies of polluted water and a byproduct of the tar sands mining process.

"I simply do not understand why President Obama can find the time to visit a company that helps hold 12 million liters of toxic tar sands water but cannot find the time to visit ranchers who put over $12 billion of Nebraska-grown food on Americans' dinner tables every year," said Meghan Hammond, a young farmer whose family land is at risk with the current route in Nebraska.

4. Who Needs the Arctic? (Hint: We Do)

Subhankar Banerjee, a photographer and longtime Arctic activist, was recently appalled by a new report from the Obama administration on the future of the Arctic. And the rest of us should be, too. Banerjee writes about the report:

“Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region, for the economic opportunities it presents…” President Obama hides his excitement for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean by carefully choosing the euphemism—“economic opportunities.” In page 7 the true intent of the report is finally revealed: “The region holds sizable proved and potential oil and natural gas resources that will likely continue to provide valuable supplies to meet U.S. energy needs.” Of course the report mentions protecting the environment, but gives no specific details.

We know that Obama talks a good talk about climate protection, but his second term has proven thus far that he's completely out of touch with reality. You can't hit 400 ppm CO2 and still think "all of the above" is a rationale energy strategy.

It's Not Easy Being Green: Are Some of the Biggest Enviro Groups Giant Sell-Outs?

Jason Mark, The American Prospect — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:00:00 -0700

As climate change worsens, the internal strains in the environmentalist movement are starting to show.

About a year ago, on March 26, 2012, Sandra Steingraber, an environmental writer and activist against natural-gas fracking, wrote a public letter titled “Breaking Up with the Sierra Club.” Breakups are never easy, and the letter, published on the website of the nature magazine Orion, was brutal from the start: “I’m through with you,” Steingraber began.

The proximate cause of the split was the revelation that between 2007 and 2010 the nation’s oldest environmental organization had clandestinely accepted $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries associated with Chesapeake Energy, a major gas firm that has been at the forefront of the fracking boom. “The largest, most venerable environmental organization in the United States secretly aligned with the very company that seeks to occupy our land, turn it inside out, blow it apart, fill it with poison,” Steingraber wrote. “It was as if, on the eve of D-day, the anti-Fascist partisans had discovered that Churchill was actually in cahoots with the Axis forces.”

In 2010, the club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, stopped taking Chesapeake Energy’s cash. Brune also made the decision to come clean with the revelation and express regret for his predecessor’s lack of better judgment. “We never should have taken this money,” Brune wrote in response to the breakup letter.

But to Steingraber and many others, the betrayal had been done.

“I call them gang-green,” says Maura Stephens, an activist based in Ithaca, New York, who spearheads several anti-fracking groups, including Frack Busters and the Coalition to Protect New York. “There are a lot of so-called environmental groups that were started with noble ideals—for example the ideals of John Muir—but who no longer live up to their mission. … They do good work on some level, but on this [fracking] they are selling us out.”

The eco-infighting over natural gas is just one example of internecine strains that appear to be intensifying in the green movement. When it comes to prescribing ways to address the planet’s ecological challenges, environmentalists increasingly find themselves at odds with each other. In a way, greens’ predicament is a measure of their own prescience. For at least 40 years, they have been warning about the consequences of overpopulation, the risks of industrial pollution, and the loss of wilderness and wildlife habitat due to human encroachment. Few heeded the warnings in time to halt the first effects of large-scale global pollution and resource depletion, and now the consequences of ignoring the warnings have come to pass. Many global fisheries are on the brink of collapse; nearly half of the planet’s land is dedicated to feeding a global population that will soon reach nine billion; freshwater scarcities in some regions are becoming acute; and, most frighteningly, we appear intent on wrecking the global atmosphere, the ecosystem on which all other ecosystems depend.

Environmentalists have found themselves being taken seriously, and it has proved to be something of a curse. As they are asked to come up with solutions for the cascading eco crises, internal divisions are becoming more obvious. The biggest divide may be between those who would do anything to cut carbon emissions and slow climate change—going so far as to support natural gas and nuclear fuel, or even supporting geo-engineering and other controversial ideas—and conservationists who don’t want to trade one earth-damaging practice for another.

“I feel like the community has splintered,” says Chris Clarke, a writer in Joshua Tree, California, and a co-founder of the group Solar Done Right, which has battled the construction of utility-scale solar stations in the Mojave Desert that involve destroying vast stretches of wilderness. “Some people are unwilling to call themselves ‘environmentalists’ because ‘environmentalist’ has now come to mean climate-change mitigation at any cost.”

Some environmentalists say the divisions have been fueled by gadflies looking to appear contrarian for the sake of minor celebrity. “I think, bluntly, that part of this is [happening] because there’s some value to the post-environmentalists in hippie-punching,” says Alex Steffen, a self-described “bright green” futurist who is the author of a new book, Carbon Zero. “Just saying, ‘Oh, those guys are wrong’—since there are a lot of people who want to think that traditional environmentalists are wrong—is a great way to sell books and get speaking gigs.”

It’s true that some of the noise seems calculated for effect. But it would be dangerous to wave off the differences of opinion. A careful look at the environmental movement reveals a profound gap among people who share a worry about the state of Earth. There is a real split over what should be considered a smart survival plan for billions of people on a finite planet. That split, if it’s not navigated constructively, threatens to sap the environmental movement’s political muscle just when it is needed most to achieve its goal: keeping the planet healthy enough to maintain our civilization.

***

In a sense, today’s differences are just a new variation on a century-old dispute. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, American environmentalists fell into two distinct camps. The first, led by Sierra Club founder John Muir, was part of the larger Romantic movement that viewed wild areas as pristine places that needed to be saved from the scourge of humanity’s hand. The second, led by the founding head of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, thought of nature more like a garden—something to be tended by man. Natural resources, in Pinchot’s view, should be mindfully stewarded to conserve them for future generations.

The split between those who esteem nature for its intrinsic value and those who want to protect it for its instrumental value persisted through the years. Some 21st-century environmentalists—most prominently the leaders of The Nature Conservancy—now talk almost exclusively about environmental protection in terms of preserving ecosystem services. We should invest in nature and protect natural infrastructure because humans benefit from them: Wetlands blunt hurricanes, forests suck up carbon dioxide, clean rivers bring us water. At the same time, some environmentalists have been re-energized by a nascent grassroots movement to recognize legal rights for natural systems, an effort inspired by the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia that grant nature formal rights.

Opposing opinions on what constitutes appropriate use of modern technology also divides some putative eco allies. An instinctual techno-skepticism has formed an undercurrent in environmental thought—at least since Silent Spring and the backlashes to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and near disaster at Three Mile Island. As worries intensify about unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions, however, some greens are rethinking their posture toward once-verboten technologies. James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who twice has been arrested at the White House while opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, has said, “Next-generation, safe nuclear power is an option which we need to develop.” Nuclear power is anathema to many other environmentalists, but the British writer George Monbiot reversed his long-standing opposition two years ago and wrote in The Guardian, “Abandoning nuclear power at a time of escalating greenhouse gas emissions is far more dangerous than maintaining it.”

The use of genetically modified organisms also highlights this divide. Even as most rank-and-file environmentalists remain suspicious of them—with their vibe of Promethean overreach and their control by monopolist corporations like Monsanto—some self-identified greens say GMO technologies are the only way to feed a growing population. In a speech earlier this year, Mark Lynas, another British environmentalist, told the Oxford Farming Conference, “The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food.”

Another rift involves the geographic scope of individual environmentalists’ concerns. Ever since Henry David Thoreau set up a shack on Walden Pond, environmentalism has been animated by a love of place. A righteous parochialism was the spark that inspired scores of successful environmental campaigns: a desire to protect this river, this forest grove, this mountaintop. On the other hand, environmentalism has also been animated by a planetary consciousness from the moment the Apollo mission beamed back images of a tiny blue marble floating in space. For a generation these two ideals were in chorus, exemplified best by the greenie bumper sticker: “Think Global, Act Local.” But in the era of global climate change, a love for the local and a concern for the global might be in conflict.

This is best illustrated by the controversies over putting giant solar installations in the Mojave Desert and building a wind farm off of Martha’s Vineyard. One person’s blueprint for clean energy infrastructure is another person’s unthinkable desecration of a beloved place. While some environmentalists argue that we have to pave parts of the desert with solar panels in order to save other parts of the desert from a four-degree Celsius temperature rise, others see that as heresy.

“I think the important split is actually between people are who thinking in planetary terms and people who are not,” Steffen, the futurist, told me. “The key to intelligent planetary thinking is to recognize that goal number one is to be promoting the stability of planetary systems, and then figuring out goal number two: how to get the greatest set of interesting possibilities for humanity into that constraint. And I worry that this debate between ‘old environmentalists’ and ‘post-environmentalists’ or whatever totally misses the larger point. The only kind of conservation worth having is one that starts at those larger systems, talks about what is necessary to maintain their stability, and starts scaling down from there into the particularities of political contexts, and specific places, and technological systems.”

Achieving those goals could get increasingly difficult, however, if the movement is publicly split, as has happened with the issue of hydrofracking for natural gas.

***

The Sierra Club, under the leadership of its previous executive director, Carl Pope, wasn’t the only prominent environmentalist organization heralding natural gas as a bridge fuel that could take our energy system from carbon-intense coal to renewables like wind and solar. (When burned, gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal.) Among the most vocal proponents of natural gas today are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, founders of the Oakland-based liberal think tank the Breakthrough Institute. Nordhaus and Shellenberger ticked off greens in the early aughts with the essay “The Death of Environmentalism,” which urged green groups to rethink the core assumptions of their political strategy. The pugnacious pair is often bashed for their rhetoric, but the two are genuine in their hawkishness on the climate and their commitment to global equity.

“As we look ahead to the human-development challenge, we’re going to need other kinds of low-carbon and zero-carbon energy,” Shellenberger says. “If we have everything riding on solar and wind, then we have all of our eggs in one basket.”

Nordhaus adds: “Look, we have two billion people who don’t have access to anything other than wood and dung [for energy]. Assume a world of nine billion people. Now assume that we have perfect economic redistribution from rich to poor, and everybody makes $15,000 a year. And then just do the math on global energy use—it still triples. You can’t meet that all with renewables.”

But since the fracking boom began in earnest, a larger, anti-fracking grassroots has emerged. Small towns in the East that were unaccustomed to the thrum of the fossil-fuel industry have been shocked to find themselves surrounded by trucks and heavy machinery and with compressors in their back lots whirring all night long. Some homeowners had their wells contaminated with flammable methane. Places like Ohio and Arkansas that weren’t used to seismic activity started to experience earthquakes when underground wastewater injections stimulated geologic faults. Today, the movement against gas fracking has become a cause célèbre (Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo have an “Artists Against Fracking” group) and is one of the most invigorating issues among grassroots environmentalists. At February’s Forward on Climate rally near the White House, easily a fifth of the placards in the crowd of 35,000 had to do with gas drilling.

“No sensible person would ever be a proponent of shale gas,” anti-fracking activist Maura Stephens says. “The number of people whose water is contaminated, I can’t even count. And the number of people who have been given a gag order and been given shut-up money is incredible. The whole idea is to do the harm and then mitigate.”

“Of all the forms of fossil-fuel extraction, fracking is the only one that is wrapped up in a green myth,” says Sandra Steingraber, who wrote the letter against the Sierra Club. “The demand for energy is not some inexorable thing like gravity. We control that. And it’s plain to me that we could reduce our energy use by half and entirely run our economy on renewables.”

Nordhaus and Shellenberger have a nearly opposite worry: that the intensity from partisans like Steingraber and Stephens has forced some big green groups to retreat from gas. The World Resources Institute, a D.C.-based environmental research organization, is an example of that shift. As recently as early 2012, the organization was expressing qualified enthusiasm for gas as a “potential game changer” that “should be part of America’s low-carbon energy mix.” But when asked recently to comment on the gas controversy, Jennifer Morgan, director of the institute’s climate and energy program, chose her words carefully. “It’s an extremely fraught and tough discussion,” Morgan told me. “I think we recognize both the risks—and the risks are significant—and the potential opportunity.”

And, of course, the Sierra Club has retreated from natural gas under its new executive director. Last week at a conference in Santa Barbara organized by The Wall Street Journal, Michael Brune warned that fracking’s greenhouse-gas emissions might be worse than coal due to leaks of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas. The club also has launched a new section on its website: “Beyond Gas.”

***

Whether the question is shale-gas development, nuclear power, utility-scale solar and wind, or GMO crops, the core of the debate among environmentalists comes down to what’s realistic. That, of course, is the same dilemma that confronts any political movement, whether on the right or on the left. But environmentalists’ conundrum is especially complicated because it involves a system beyond our control: Earth.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger say their pragmatism is grounded in what is politically possible given a range of shitty options. In the other camp, Steffen, Steingraber, and Stephens also claim the mantle of pragmatism, one based on geophysical necessity. The existential threat of climate change has become a sort of projection screen: Either it confirms that we are locked into business as usual, or it’s proof that we need to make a societal 180-degree turn in how we relate to the planet.

“Those of us who are calling ourselves the latter-day abolitionists, our idea of what’s possible is grounded in physical and natural laws. How much water and land and resources do we need to feed ourselves?” Steingraber says. “My hope that is that we can help people imagine, have a vision of a future when blasting gas out of the ground to make our tea kettles whistle is just barbaric, which it is.” It’s a view Nordhaus and Shellenberger call naïve.

It’s clear that, much of the time, environmentalists are arguing past each other. Beyond any debates over strategy or technology, the various factions of greens harbor completely different ideas about human nature and the planet’s capacity to hold us. While some eco-policy wonks appear to have internalized the notion that there are no alternatives to our modern, energy-dependent ways, the environmental grassroots remain committed to encouraging a change in consciousness that will prompt a new, less resource-intense mode of living. It’s as if the environmental movement is playing three-dimensional chess, but with the players operating on totally different planes.

Such differences of opinion aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Political movements often benefit from some degree of ideological tension. The differences only become a political liability because our environmental situation urgently needs a solution. Carbon emissions continue to rise, the number of humans continues to grow, and Earth isn’t getting any bigger.

The environmental movement has a surplus of good ideas for how to manage ecological problems. It’s got plenty of smart and passionate people. The one key asset it doesn’t have is time to sort its issues out.

How Our National Parks Are Threatened by Fracking

Glenn Scherer, Blue Ridge Press — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:55:00 -0700

A booming and unregulated energy industry is quietly but quickly encroaching on some of our most cherished national parks with gas and oil drilling fields.

When I was a teenager, a friend and I cruised across the U.S., touring our national parks. What I remember most from that 1977 trip is rolling over vast, wild, unspoiled miles, heading toward the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Zion.

Three years later, I visited Great Smoky Mountains National Park with my fiancé. What I recall from that trip is Gatlinburg, the park’s garish gateway with its Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium, Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, Hillbilly Village, and other weird attractions vying for the attention of corndog and cotton candy-eating visitors.

Gatlinburg became a tourist eyesore by accident—born out of random uncontrolled development. A more serious accident is now occurring in the great open spaces downwind and downstream of such natural wonders as Grand Tetons National Park, Glacier National Park, and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area.

The threat is fracking. A booming and unregulated energy industry is quietly but quickly encroaching on some of our most cherished national parks with gas and oil drilling fields.

“From Glacier National Park’s eastern boundary, visitors can throw a stone and hit any of 16 exploratory wells and their associated holding tanks, pump jacks, and machinery,” says a just released report by the National Parks Conservation Association Center for Park Research. “Visitors heading east from Glacier National Park encounter road signs urging caution against the poisonous gases that fracking operations emit.”

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a lesser-known preserve in the North Dakota Badlands, once offered stargazers some of the nation’s darkest most pristine night skies. Now, fracking fields just outside the park create a scene right out of the science fiction movie Blade Runner, with gas flares spewing flames high into the sky and huge trucks roaring by. Ironically, a proposed bridge and road to service a newly planned fracking field will soon dominate the view from the park’s Elkhorn Ranch, where President Theodore Roosevelt first conceived his influential conservation ideas.

Of today’s 401 national park units, 131 lie either directly above or fewer than 25 surface miles from major underground oil and gas deposits. More than 33 percent of America’s national parks could be impacted by fracking.

The number of fracked wells encroaching on national parks is currently still small, but about to skyrocket. In 2010, for example, there were 1,000 frack well pads in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale region west of Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. That number is projected to rise to as many as 15,000 well pads in twenty years.

Fracking doesn’t belong near our national parks. Hundred-foot tall derricks dominate the drilling fields. Each well consumes acres of land for its concrete well pad, plus more land for roaring, air-polluting compressor stations; wastewater tanks and pits; miles of potentially leaky pipeline; and new roads that require thousands of truck trips to transport the millions of gallons of freshwater needed to frack a well, and to haul away toxic wastewater containing volatile organic compounds like benzene, toluene and xylene.

Add to this a witches brew of air pollution—fumes burned off of wells or that rise from wastewater pits that can contain carbon disulfide and carbonyl sulfide (smelling like rotten eggs); the neurotoxins methyl pyridine and dimethyl pyridine; and lung-damaging ozone.

Fracking isn’t just a toxic eyesore. Its infrastructure is bad for local business, and already putting pressure on people who earn a living through tourism, hunting and fishing. Outfitters near national parks complain that they can’t take hunters back to prime hunting areas because elk and deer have been driven off by drilling. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership notes on its website that “increases in energy development… are threatening public-lands hunting and fishing opportunities across the country.”

Fracking needs to be managed responsibly. There’s no reason we can’t increase domestic energy production while also protecting our nation’s most inspiring natural wonders. Protection may not even require an act of Congress. All that is likely needed is conscientious oversight by the Department of the Interior and the Obama administration.

©Blue Ridge Press 2013

Blue Ridge Press senior editor Glenn Scherer lives in Hardwick, Vermont.

What Will It Take for Us to Recognize That the Way We Live Could Be Destroying Life as We Know It?

Marty Kaplan, AlterNet — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:24:00 -0700

CO2 is at a level not seen in millions of years—if this happened in science fiction, the planet would pay attention.

Say goodnight, Earthlings.

That message — plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve — was announced to the people of the world last week.

When this happens in science fiction — 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is the classic — the planet pays attention. The flying saucer lands; an alien, in this case played by Michael Rennie, emerges; a final warning is issued: Stop it. If you don’t, you’re doomed.

Back then, the “it” was violence — the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear midnight. Last week, it was climate change — greenhouse gases, and the promise of ecological extinction.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” ran the headline on the front page lead story in Saturday’s New York Times, with this sub-head: “CO2 at Level Not Seen in Millions of Years, Portending Major Climate Changes.”

A headline like that — millions of years? really? — normally turns up in comic books and superhero movies, not in the paper of record. In fiction, what usually comes next is a montage. At breakfast tables and on street corners, in souks and igloos, in the Oval Office and at the U.N., the shocking news galvanizes humanity into action.

In the real world, it was pretty much a one-day story.

What does it take to grab us by the eyeballs? Chris Christie’s waistline is guaranteed wall-to-wall coverage. The next Jodi Arias is waiting in CNN’s wings. The Benghazi circus will be in town at least through 2016. Sure, disaster porn is always good for ratings, but though a Superstorm Sandy may momentarily raise the specter of climate change, daily bulletins on the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere apparently aren’t Nielsen enough.

It’s not that people who know our planet’s hair is on fire aren’t trying to get our attention. The animated graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth Science Research Lab showing how atmospheric carbon dioxide has changed over the last 800,000 years should be as horrifying as any computer-generated imagery Hollywood has to offer. Along with the news that we had hit the 400 ppm mark on the CO2 curve for the first time since the Pliocene epoch came scary quotes from scientist after scientist calling this our last chance before the point of no return. Unless we act, children born today will see temperatures rise irreversibly and sea levels rise catastrophically. Weather patterns will be disrupted, deserts and drought will spread and—in the words of Lord Stern, head of the U.K.’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment—“hundreds of millions of people will be forced to leave their homelands because their crops and animals will have died ... [W]hen they try to migrate into new lands ... [they will be brought] into armed conflict with people already living there. Nor will it be an occasional occurrence. It could become a permanent feature of life on Earth."

If graphs and quotes aren’t sexy enough to warrant a permanent place in the news, there are other ways to hang on to the spotlight. The Climate Reality Project’s website features 18 disturbing but entertaining videos about the price of carbon and our addiction to fossil fuels. “Do the Math,” the film that journalist Bill McKibben is using to spark his 350.org movement, has a dramatic narrative that’s compelling but not preachy. “The Years of Living Dangerously,” Showtime’s climate change documentary series now being shot, has producers who know a little something about how to capture audiences: James Cameron, Jerry Weintraub and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Those efforts use media to engage an informed, activist public. Could such a citizenry make change? There’s plenty we can do in our personal lives to reduce our carbon footprint. Local and state policies in conservation, transportation, building design and urban planning can also curb greenhouse gas emissions. But without federal leadership like killing the Keystone XL pipeline and putting a tax on carbon, and without global commitments with teeth to enforce them, it’s hard to imagine a path back from the brink.

In the U.S., the same dysfunctions that prevent anything else useful from happening—the Senate filibuster, the gerrymandered House, the corrupt campaign finance system—also hold climate change mitigation hostage. So does denial. And though some denial can be attributed to hoax propaganda funded by the fossil fuel industry, some comes from an infantile strain in the American psyche that should not be mistaken for religious freedom.

Last week, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) gave a floor speech urging his colleagues to “awaken to what carbon pollution is doing to our planet, to our oceans, to our seasons, to our storms. And I wonder, ‘Why is it that we are so comfortable asleep, when the warnings are so many and so real?’ What could beguile us away from wakefulness and duty? I was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, ‘God won’t allow us to ruin our planet.’ ... [That] statement ... is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking.”

I admit that my fantasy that last week’s CO2 headlines might rally our planet like an alien invasion may make me as guilty of magical thinking as Senator God-Won’t-Allow-Us. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan was a big fan of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and as president he often referred to it. When he first met Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, he speculated that the threat of an alien invasion might get the Americans and the Soviets to cooperate. If Michael Rennie’s “Klaatu barada nikto” line is the father of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” maybe blowing past the 400 ppm barrier can be the progenitor of “Mr. Obama, cancel that pipeline.”

The following is a column from The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Read more of Marty Kaplan's columns here.

Climate Tipping Point? Concentration of Carbon Dioxide Tops 400 ppm for First Time in Human History

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:46:00 -0700

The 400 ppm threshold is widely recognized as a dangerous level that could drastically worsen human-caused global warming.

AMY GOODMAN: Scientists are warning the planet has now reached a grim climate milestone not seen for two or three million years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has topped 400 parts per million. The 400 ppm threshold has been an important marker in U.N. climate change negotiations, widely recognized as a dangerous level that could drastically worsen human-caused global warming.

The environmentalist group 350.org takes its name after the 350 parts per million threshold that scientists say is the maximum atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide for a safe planet. In a statement on the parts per million number hitting 400, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben said, quote, "The only question now is whether the relentless rise in carbon can be matched by a relentless rise in the activism necessary to stop it."

To find out more about the impacts of crossing the threshold, we’re joined now by leading climate scientist Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State University, author of the recent book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Thank you for joining us from the public television station in State College, WPSU. Thanks so much, Michael Mann. Talk about the significance of this threshold being passed.

MICHAEL MANN: Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

So, this number, 400 parts per million, what does it mean? It’s the number of molecules of CO2 for every million molecules of air; 400 of them are now CO2. Just two centuries ago, that number was only 280 parts per million. So if we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere at current rates, we’ll reach a doubling of the pre-industrial levels of CO2 within the next few decades.

Now, 400, what does that round number, 400, mean? Well, what it means is that, as you alluded to, we have to go several million years back in time to find a point in earth’s history where CO2 was as high as it is now. And, of course, we’re just blowing through this 400 ppm limit. If we continue to burn fossil fuels at accelerating rates, if we continue with business as usual, we will cross the 450 parts per million limit in a matter of maybe a couple decades. We believe that with that amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we commit to what can truly be described as dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate.

AMY GOODMAN: Like what?

MICHAEL MANN: So, what we are already witnessing, in fact, the effects of climate change. If we look at the past year here in the U.S., last summer, the record heat, the record drought, the record wildfire that destroyed large forest areas in Colorado, New Mexico. We saw, you know, tremendous damage to our crops in the breadbasket of the country. We saw Arctic sea ice diminish to the lowest level we’ve ever seen, and it’s on a trajectory where there will be no ice in the Arctic at the end of the summer in perhaps a matter of 10 years or so. We also saw the devastation of Superstorm Sandy. Now, we can’t say that Hurricane Sandy was caused by climate change, but many of its characteristics are precisely the kinds of characteristics that we predict tropical storms and hurricanes will have if we continue to warm the planet. We will see more destructive tropical storms. We’ll see more flooding. We’ll see more drought. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because, remember, we’ve only just crossed 400 now. We will reach 450 ppm in a matter of a couple decades if we continue with business as usual.

AMY GOODMAN: How can this be stopped, Professor Mann?

MICHAEL MANN: Well, ultimately, you know, we have to find a way to move away from our addiction to fossil fuels. As former President George W. Bush once put it, we’re addicted to fossil fuels. We need to find a way to transition away from those means of obtaining energy, fossil fuel energy, that we know is degrading the climate and degrading the planet. We have to find a way to level the playing field so that the marketplace will allow renewable energy sources to compete with fossil fuel energy. We’re currently providing subsidies to fossil fuels, the very sources of energy that are degrading the climate, and not providing the appropriate incentives to developing alternative energy.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Mann, I want to turn to the Keystone XL pipeline, the controversial pipeline which would deliver tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in Texas. Earlier this year, a State Department report concluded the Keystone XL pipeline does not threaten the global climate. A number of environmental groups opposed the conclusion in a report called "Cooking the Books." They said, quote, "In a world constrained by the realities of climate change, the proper measure of any project’s climate impact should not be based on the assumptions inherent in a business as usual scenario that guarantees climate disaster. ... There is a climate impact from burning 830,000 barrels per day of any crude that cannot be ignored," they wrote. Michael Mann, what do you think of the climatic effects of the Keystone XL pipeline, if it is approved by President Obama and the State Department?

MICHAEL MANN: Sure. And my understanding was that, in fact, that report was criticized by folks within the EPA, and so there was some question about the accuracy of that report.

But that aside, you know, the larger picture here, the Keystone XL pipeline, developing these tar sand oils in Canada, there have been some calculations that argue that, you know, even if we develop the full petroleum reserves from the tar sands, that we wouldn’t add to our global carbon emissions nearly as much as if we continue, for example, to burn coal. There’s a lot more coal available to burn than there is these tar sand oils.

On the other hand, I think it represents what’s wrong about our current prioritization. If we are to invest heavily in the infrastructure so we’re subsidizing efforts to get at this increasingly difficult reservoir of fossil fuel energy, if we are to incentivize that effort through certain government subsidies, then we’re going in exactly the opposite direction of where we need to be going. We’re actually simply developing more and more of the available fossil fuel reserves at a time when we have to be ramping them down. We need to be bringing our global carbon emissions to a peak within the next few years, and we need to ramp them down dramatically in the decades ahead, if we are going to avoid crossing that next sobering milestone, 450 parts per million in the atmosphere.

And so, it’s really not so much precisely how much carbon we’ll add to the atmosphere by building the Keystone XL pipeline as it is it’s an example of how we’re going the wrong direction. We need to follow what the rest of the world is doing. If you look to India and China, the developing world, they’re investing far more in renewable energy than we are here in the U.S. And this is in fact a matter of global competitiveness. We in the U.S. are falling behind because we’re letting the rest of the world move ahead and recognize that the future of our global economy is going to be in renewable energy.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, last week we reported that an environmental activist met Vice President Joe Biden in South Carolina. Her name was Elaine Cooper. And she wrote for the Sierra Club, saying, "I asked him" — she’s talking about Vice President Joe Biden— "about the administration’s commitment to making progress climate and whether the president would reject the pipeline." She said, "He looked at the Sierra Club hat on my head" — Biden did — "and [he] said, 'Yes, I do—I share your views—but I am in the minority.'" What does that suggest to you, Michael Mann? What message do you have for President Obama?

MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, I saw that. I read that interview, and it was a bit disturbing. You know, the president has talked a good game in the past few months since he won re-election. In his State of the Union address, I think he outlined very clearly the threat of continuing to worsen the climate change problem through our burning of fossil fuels. He acknowledged the threat that it represents to us, whether you’re talking about human health, food resources, water resources, national security. Across the board, if we continue to burn fossil fuels and elevate greenhouse gas concentrations, the cost to society is going to be far greater than any cost of action. And the president has talked a good game in recent months. On the other hand, there are some—to those who read the tea leaves, there appear to be some signals that suggest that he may approve the Keystone XL pipeline. And if he were to do that, in my view, that would be a big mistake. Like I said before, it would be moving us in exactly the opposite direction of where we need to be moving.

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Professor Mann, you have been targeted by climate skeptics for—climate change deniers for years. What is your message to them? And can you talk about the title of your book?

MICHAEL MANN: Sure thing. So, the title of the book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. And as a climate scientist who published an iconic graph called "the hockey stick," which shows how unusual recent warming is, I found myself in the crosshairs of the efforts to discredit the science of climate change, many of those efforts funded by vested interests who don’t want to see us move away from our addiction to fossil fuels. And so I recount my experiences in the book.

But I also talked about the larger issues involved. You know, for example, you alluded to the word "skeptic." Well, many of those who simply deny that climate change exists, we don’t call them skeptics, because that’s not skepticism. That’s just denial or contrarianism. Now, skepticism is a good thing in science, but it means looking at all sides of an issue. And so, when you talk about the uncertainties, there are uncertainties in, for example, the precise projections of how much sea-level rise we will see in the next century. But it turns out those uncertainties are not a reason for inaction, for the same reason that we purchase fire insurance—not because we think our houses are going to burn down, but because we need to hedge against that potentially catastrophic, low-probability outcome. Mitigating climate change is in fact a planetary insurance policy. And so, there’s room for discussion of uncertainty, and there’s room for a good-faith, worthy debate about what to do about this problem. There are valid points of view.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Mann, we’re going to have to leave it there.

MICHAEL MANN: There are valid points of view across the spectrum. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: I thank you so much for being with us, leading climate scientist, distinguished professor of meteorology, speaking to us from Penn State University. His book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

Mark Zuckerberg Supporting Dirty Energy? Why Facebook Desperately Needs a ‘Dislike’ Button

Candice Bernd, Campus Progress — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:53:00 -0700

A subsidiary of his new political start-up called FWD.us has aired ads supporting drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and support for the Keystone XL pipeline.

Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg is facing a wave of backlash thanks to recent moves by his new advocacy group.

A subsidiary of his new political start-up called FWD.us has aired ads supporting drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and support for the Keystone XL pipeline. The group's focus is mainly on passing the comprehensive immigration reform bill, and the group has justified the ads as a way to build support for comprehensive immigration reform from Republican legislators.

CREDO fired back at Zuckerberg last week, posting a counter-ad on Facebook with Zuckerberg's photo asking him to pull his support for Keystone XL; Facebook rejected the ad. According to ThinkProgress:

Facebook initially informed [CREDO] they rejected the ad because it used Facebook trademarks—specifically, Zuckerberg’s image. Though the image used was fully licensed for creative commons use, a Facebook representative told ThinkProgress that any images of Zuckerberg are off-limits, as he is part of the Facebook brand. The rules governing Facebook brand usage specify “trademarks, names, domain names, logos” but does not explicitly restrict images of Zuckerberg.

The subsidiary group responsible for the dirty energy ads is called Americans for a Conservative Direction and the ad in question originally supported Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) for advocating for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and expanded drilling in the Arctic. The CREDO backlash started with a petition launched on the website's grassroots activism platform.

“The people on Facebook who made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire need to know that he is using his fortune to bankroll pro-Keystone XL propaganda," Becky Bond, CREDO’s political director, told Campus Progress. "And if Facebook is giving up ad revenue in order to protect the CEO from public scrutiny of his private political giving, then that's something that both users, employees and shareholders absolutely need to know."

Other progressive groups have also begun pulling ads from Facebook in response.

Candice Bernd is a reporter with Campus Progress. Follow her on Twitter @CandiceBernd.

Does God Hate Climate Change?

Steven Hsieh, AlterNet — Fri, 10 May 2013 09:09:00 -0700

Democrat lawmaker is trying to sell environmental legislation as "God's work" -- but is he pandering to religion to push progressive legislation?

During a 17-minute long speech on the senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R-HI) cited an interesting source to urge his colleagues to get serious about climate change: the Bible.

“I was recently at a Senate meeting where I heard a member of our Senate community say, ‘God won’t allow us to ruin our planet,’” Whitehouse said.

Sen. Whitehouse, an Episcopalian, chastised other lawmakers for using religion to abdicate responsibility when it comes to protecting our planet. The Hawaii senator dismissed the notion that “God … won’t allow us to ruin our planet” as completely removed from reality.

“The statement that refers to God is couched in religious terms, but is it really an expression of religious inquiry? I think not. It is less an expression of religious thinking than it is of magical thinking,” Whitehouse explained. “The statement that God won’t allow us to ruin our planet sweeps aside ethics, responsibilities, consequences, duties, even awareness.”

The senator also referred to Biblical passages to challenge his colleagues’ religious rhetoric. For example, he pointed to Galatians 6:7, which reads, “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” To put this in plain English, Whitehouse remarked, “We are here to do God's work. He's not here to do ours.”

Whitehouse continued, reminding lawmakers that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, explaining, "If we believe in an all-powerful God, then we must then believe that God gave us this earth, and we must in turn believe that God gave us its laws of gravity, of chemistry, of physics.” Of course, this should go without saying. But as the Huffington Post’s Michael McAuliff points out, too many members of Congress still use religious hysteria to advance their agenda, at the cost of science and logic:

Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) recently called evolution a lie from the pit of hell, and … the Science Committee is weighing ways to exert political control on the National Science Foundation. Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) has quoted scripture to deny that climate change will destroy the earth.

With so much ignorance in Congress hiding behind the mask of religion, a stronghold in American politics, it’s understandable why Whitehouse would feel the need to argue on the divine playing field—especially with our planet at stake. But at least one atheist writer disagreed with the senator’s strategy. In particular, Staks Rosch, an atheist advocate questioned the idea that, “We are here to do God's work. He's not here to do ours.” Rosch responded, “No Senator, you are not here to do God’s work; you are there to do the work of your constituents as outlined in the very secular United State Constitution.”

Rosch’s criticism invokes one of the biggest concerns of the American atheist movement—that religion continues finding ways to creep into our government. Rosch argues that Whitehouse’s speech “crosses the line between church and state,” even if for the right reasons.

So does appealing to religion to advance progressive ideas do more harm or good? Watch Senator Whitehouse’s speech and decide for yourself:

How a Legal Loophole Allows Untested Pesticides in Everything From Cosmetics to Clothing

Laura Fraser, OnEarth Magazine — Fri, 10 May 2013 08:53:00 -0700

The EPA is abusing a legal loophole to let products like nanosilver be used in your clothing and baby blankets without ensuring their safety.

This story first appeared at OnEarth.org.

You probably wouldn’t expect to find pesticides in your toothpaste or your gym socks, but they might be in there all the same. And the vast majority of those pesticides have made it into everyday products without adequate oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s because they’ve been approved through a bureaucratic loophole known as "conditional registration," which means they haven’t been fully tested to ensure that they pose no threat to human health or the environment, as required by U.S. law.

Most of us think of pesticides as the chemicals that get sprayed on weeds or used to kill rodents and bugs, but they’re actually found in everything from cosmetics to food containers, as well as antimicrobial textiles (such as the exercise shirt you might have worn to the gym this morning). By killing bacteria and other microorganisms, pesticides can help clothes resist stains or help containers keep food fresh longer. But some have also proven to cause health concerns in humans, kill trees, birds, bees, and fish, or do other unintended harm to the environment.

The EPA has been responsible for registering pesticides since 1972, and during that time, 90,000 have been allowed on the market. A significant number of those -- just over 25,000, according to the EPA -- were initially approved through the conditional registration process. An internal report by the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs shows that of the more than 16,000 pesticides allowed on the market as of 2010, about 11,000 of them were conditionally registered. Because of the agency’s poor record-keeping and flawed procedures, it remains unclear how many of these conditionally registered pesticides have ever gone through the full gamut of safety testing required by law.

“The dirty little secret of the EPA is that almost every pesticide gets put on the market while the agency is looking the other way,” says Michael Hansen, a senior staff scientist at Consumers Union. “That’s not good for consumers, and it’s not the intent of the regulations.”

By law, in order to register and sell a pesticide, companies are supposed to go through a process than can last several years; it includes public comment, reviews of scientific studies, and evaluations by the agency’s in-house science experts. The fast-track conditional registration process was intended to be used only under rare circumstances -- when a product is nearly identical to one already on the market, for instance, or when the EPA needs to approve a new pesticide immediately to prevent a disease outbreak or other public health emergency (a new treatment for bedbugs, for example).

No one knew the extent to which the EPA had been abusing the conditional registration rules until 2008, when the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth) began asking questions about why nanosilver, an antimicrobial made of extremely tiny bits of silver and used to kill bacteria in products such as athletic gear and baby blankets, had been granted conditional registration.

That year, Swiss manufacturer HeiQ had applied to the EPA for permission to use nanosilver in textiles, including clothing and bedsheets. NRDC scientists were concerned that nanosilver might be more toxic than regular silver -- which is not very harmful to humans, but toxic and persistent in aquatic environments -- because its tiny size allows it to travel into cells, organs, and blood, with potentially dangerous, but poorly understood, health effects. A 2010 internal EPA report on nanosilver notes: “the same property that makes it lethal to bacteria may render it toxic to human cells.”

“Until we understand the risks of nanosilver, we really shouldn’t be wearing it in our clothing and bedding,” says NRDC senior scientist Jennifer Sass. Chemist Martin Mulvihill, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Brain Chemistry, agrees that more studies are needed, especially because nanosilver is widely used in consumer products. The effects of nanosilver on human health are not well understood, “which is not to say there are no concerns,” says Mulvihill, who adds, “It’s very clear silver is bad for the environment.” Silver bioaccumulates and is toxic to single-celled organisms and aquatic invertebrates; a 2010 study found that runoff containing silver particles dramatically reduced the reproductive capabilities of mollusks in San Francisco Bay. Products like nanosilver washing machines, which kill bacteria with nanosilver ions embedded in the machinery, could also damage water organisms with their runoff.

“Do I really need nanosilver in my jeans or Tupperware?” Mulvihill asks. “I don’t think so. I can just wash them.”

In response to HeiQ’s 2008 request to use nanosilver, the EPA Scientific Advisory Panel recognized that the effects of nanosilver are different from regular silver. The panel said its regulations would require the company to produce numerous studies on the specific health effects of nanosilver before it could be registered for use as a pesticide.

Then the agency went ahead and allowed the company to use nanosilver in its products anyway.

During the course of reviewing the conditional registration of nanosilver, NRDC filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the EPA’s database of conditionally registered pesticides. “Their recordkeeping is a mess,” says NRDC’s Sass. After the group’s questions compelled EPA to take a closer look, the agency found that of approximately 16,000 pesticides currently on the market, more than two-thirds were conditionally registered. Even worse, the EPA has no system to track whether the data and studies it asked a company to provide for full registration have ever appeared. And if the data were provided, there’s no way to evaluate how many of those studies were reliably conducted. Nor is there any way for the public to access any of the records on these pesticides.

“Pesticides are harmful chemicals that Congress intended go through a rigorous scientific review process,” Sass says. “Instead, they’re going through a loophole, forcing us to trust the data provided by the pesticide industry.”

The EPA press office says that the agency looked at some of the pesticides approved between 2000 and 2010 and found that, of 544 products conditionally registered during that decade, 533 of them had submitted additional data, and all but 10 of those had been reviewed by the agency. (Recall that there were 16,000 pesticides allowed on the market as of 2010, and 11,000 of those were conditionally registered, according to the EPA’s own report). “For 96 percent of the subset of registrations, all actions intended by the conditional registration have been completed in a timely fashion,” an EPA spokesperson said in response to queries from OnEarth, adding that most of the conditionally registered pesticides were what the EPA calls “me-too” products, which are substantially similar to ones already on the market. EPA also says that it is in the process of improving its procedures for tracking pesticides that have been approved through conditional registration.

Environmental and health advocates believe that such a process is not adequate and insist that the agency immediately cancel all the pesticide registrations that have overdue studies. (How many that would be isn’t clear.) NRDC has specifically asked the EPA to establish a public database on conditional registrations that would make gaps in information and unanswered questions transparent -- and to stop using the conditional registration process as a loophole. “It should only be used in very rare circumstances, as Congress intended,” says NRDC staff attorney Mae Wu.

Paul Towers of the Pesticide Action Network, a nonprofit group that advocates to replace harmful pesticides with safer alternatives, says that at the very least, the EPA should put a hold on any new conditional registrations until a better system is put in place. “Then the agency can begin to evaluate each conditional registration as soon as information comes to light about potential harms.”

People connected with the pesticide industry deny that the conditional registration process is being abused. Lynn Bergeson, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who specializes in helping clients with product regulation and approval, says she doesn’t believe that conditional registrations are “somehow on automatic pilot.” She says the EPA takes the conditions “very seriously … Any initiative to review all 11,000-plus conditional registrations would have a severe adverse effect on EPA given its already strained resources.” And it would harm the industry, she adds, because it would give the impression that the EPA was casting doubts on existing products with conditional registrations.

Environmentalists seem unsympathetic to that particular concern. NRDC, for instance, has sued the EPA to undo the conditional registration of nanosilver; its attorneys argued that the EPA didn’t properly assess the risks of the product, basing its assessments on studies that analyze risks to humans 3 years old and above. But what about infants? “They're particularly at risk for a pesticide like this because it’s applied to clothing and other fabrics they’re likely to chew on,” says Cassie Rahm, the NRDC attorney who argued the case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

As of March 2011, according to the Project on Emerging Technologies, 1,317 consumer products contained nanosilver, including 182 clothing products.

The Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, is also getting in the act and preparing a report on the EPA’s conditional registration. Its last such report recommended that the EPA review those registrations, determine what progress was being made in submitting the required data, and take appropriate action, such as suspending or cancelling the pesticide registration in cases where the companies had not made reasonable progress fulfilling their obligations.

That was in 1986. Two years later, the EPA promised to develop a new system to track the data requirements of conditional registrations. An update on the report listed the recommendation as “Closed-Implemented.” Yeah, right.

6 Ways Scientific Studies Can Trick You

Jill Richardson, AlterNet — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:59:00 -0700

Scientific studies with phony findings are not as uncommon as they should be.

Ever see a headline boasting of an outrageous conclusion that some new scientific study found? These headlines pop up regularly, and they are a boon for publications that get lots of eyeballs reading their articles about the shocking new findings. Factory farming is actually good for the environment! Labeling genetically engineered foods will raise your grocery bills! Wow, really? No way!

These too-good-to-be-true – or too-bad-to-be-true – headlines are accurate, in that there was a study and it did come to those conclusions. But how accurate was the study? As it turns out, scientific studies with phony findings are not as uncommon as they should be. And far too often, bad journalism results in the uncritical reporting of these phony findings.

If you ever read about a study finding that all-cupcake diets are the key to longevity and good health, read the study to see whether the cupcakes tested were made from spinach and wheat germ. Here are some favorite tactics used to design a study to get the findings you’re looking for.

1. Start With a Wrong Assumption

If you live in California, you may recall hearing how labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods would increase your grocery bill. When a ballot initiative to label GE foods was first announced, voters overwhelmingly approved it. But by the 2012 election, it narrowly lost. A study “proving” that GE food labeling would make food costs in California skyrocket may be why voters had such a sudden change of heart.

How was that conclusion reached? The study authors – partially funded by the “No on 37” campaign – began with a wrong assumption. American consumers are just like European consumers, they figured. And, just like in Europe, when GE foods must be labeled, most food manufacturers will instantly remove all GE ingredients from their products. Because GE ingredients like corn and soybeans are present in almost all processed foods, reformulating every food sold in California to remove them would be massively disruptive to the food industry. In fact, it would raise food prices!

But their assumption is wrong. Europeans are willing to pay more for non-GE food, but most Americans aren't. So why would food manufacturers reformulate their products, resulting in higher prices, if they know most Americans wouldn't pay for it? They wouldn’t.

The average voter in California never heard these details. They just heard that their food prices were going up unless they voted no on Prop 37. So they did.

2. Throw Out the Data You Don’t Like

In 2012, researchers in the Netherlands published a study finding that organic agriculture yielded only 80 percent as much as conventional agriculture. Wow, is that true? Well, if it is, this study certainly doesn’t prove it. The study doesn’t actually prove much of anything…because the researchers disregarded any data they did not like.

Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union and a formidable agriculture expert, read the study and reflected that, “When you actually look at the paper, you'll see it's incredibly biased in favor of conventional ag, but in a very technical way.”

The study authors essentially picked and chose which data to include, excluding any “organic” method that did not meet the very strictest definition of the term organic, and throwing out any data from conventional systems that included “unrepresentative yield levels.” Details provided on that say: “Yield data for industrialized countries were considered unrepresentative if conventional yields appeared to be far below the regional average, unless this was caused by factors that can also occur in real farming situations, such as pests, diseases or droughts. For developing countries ‘unrepresentative’ implied conventional yield levels that seemed to be far below yields achieved under best farmers’ management.”

“In other words,” wrote Hansen, who is well-traveled and very familiar with agriculture in the Global South, “for developing countries, rather than compare organic to what local farmers that use some chemicals find, they dismiss all but the yields achieved using lots of chemicals under the best conditions – which is not what farmers actually face in developing countries.”

“Finally,” Hansen concluded, “look at their main hypothesis: 'Our hypothesis was that the closer conventional agriculture gets to the potential or water-limited yield, the larger the yield gap between organic and conventional systems will be.' In other words, they're not interested in the conditions that farmers face in the real world in developing countries.”

3. Oops, We Can’t Detect the Chemical in Question

Whenever you hear that there is none of a chemical in something, it’s time to ask: What’s the detection limit? What’s the smallest amount of the chemical they were looking for?

Take, for example, early studies of the pesticide Imidacloprid by its manufacturer, Bayer. A recent European report tells what happened when beekeepers began alleging that the pesticide was the cause of mass bee die-offs. Bees consume nectar and pollen, so Bayer’s first step was checking to see whether any of its pesticide was present in nectar or pollen.

In 1993, Bayer set the detection limit at 10 parts per billion (ppb). When it tested for its pesticide in nectar or pollen of treated crops, it couldn’t find any or it couldn’t quantify the amount detected. Clearly, this pesticide wasn’t harming any bees, because the bees weren’t exposed to it in nectar or pollen!

Six years later, in 1999, a study of sunflowers found 3.3 ppb of the pesticide in pollen and 1.9 ppb in nectar – amounts far below the previous 10 ppb detection limit! And, in 2001, scientists found that chronic exposure to 0.1 ppb of the pesticide kills a bee in 10 days. How much money did Bayer earn from pesticide sales while it stalled the science for six years with its high detection limit?

4. Findings That Aren’t Statistically Significant

“GMOs Cause Tumors in Rats” screamed the headlines after a French scientist named Seralini published findings based on a two-year feeding study using Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn and its pesticide Roundup. Oh my god, this is terrible! Americans have been eating the variety of Roundup Ready corn in question since 2001! We’ll all get cancer!

Okay, take a step back. Were the findings statistically significant? No, they weren’t. Consumers Union scientist Michael Hansen points out that the study only used 10 rats of each sex for each group tested. After publication, the study’s author also noted, “the sample size of their treatment groups was too small to allow them to draw conclusions with regard to long-term carcinogenicity and mortality.” Oops.

That said, in this case, Hansen points out that the data “suggests that there might be something there.” For the most part, the control rats were healthier than the rats that were fed Roundup or Roundup Ready corn. According to Hansen, if the findings were entirely random, one would expect that the number of control group rats afflicted with each morbidity would sometimes be more and sometimes be less than the number of sick rats in the treatment groups. He’d like to see further study using a statistically significant sample size.

5. Design the Study to Get the Results You Want

When the EPA allowed the commercialization of Bayer’s pesticide Clothianidin, they required the company to conduct a study proving that the pesticide would not harm bees. So Bayer performed a study.

It placed four beehives in the middle of 2.5 acres of treated canola. Bees, of course, go as far as several miles from their hive to forage so no doubt the bees feasted on plenty of pesticide-free nectar and pollen during the study. So…the scientists found that their pesticide caused no harm to the bees.

Beekeepers were outraged enough when they discovered the inadequacy of the study, but a revelation that came out two years later made matters even worse. In the U.S., clothianidin is used on corn and canola. Canola is a minor crop in the U.S., whereas corn is the most commonly grown crop we’ve got. Clothianidin-treated corn has about 10 times the levels of pesticide in its pollen as treated canola. Perhaps that’s why Bayer chose to perform its study on canola.

6. All of the Above

For a “Bad Science Sampler,” check out the studies used to justify the safety of the genetically engineered AquaAdvantage salmon. You name it, they did it. Again, Michael Hansen easily poked holes in their work until the study resembled Swiss cheese. They culled young fish with the worst deformities, thus excluding them from the data. They used sample sizes as low as six fish. And they used a detection limit too high to detect any growth hormone in the muscle and skin of any fish. (The GE salmon are engineered to produce extra growth hormone, so they might have looked a little harder to find it if they wanted to show there was no difference between GE salmon and non-GE salmon.)

As you can see, just because a study finds a conclusion, that doesn’t mean it’s correct. Poorly designed studies and statistically insignificant results happen all the time. Now, if only journalists did a little bit more digging about the validity of outrageous studies findings before they report on them.

Hidden Power Grab Stops Communities From Deciding Their Own Futures

David Morris, On the Commons — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:40:00 -0700

Increasingly states are quashing the power of local governments--and thwarting innovation.

In his 1996 State of the Union Address Democratic President Bill Clinton famously declared, “the era of big government is over.” And during his tenure he did everything he could to make that true—deregulating the telecommunications and the financial industries; enacting a free trade agreement severely restricting the authority of the federal government to protect domestic jobs and businesses; and abandoning the 75-year old federal commitment to the poor.

Seventeen years later I fully expect a Republican Governor or two to declare in their state of the state address, “the era of small government is over.” Because again and again, Republican governors and legislatures are preempting and abolishing the authority of communities to protect the health and welfare of their communities.

Earlier this year Wisconsin passed a law eliminating the authority of cities villages and counties to require public employees to live inside city limits, which also voids any existing requirements.
A few weeks ago Kansas passed a law prohibiting cities, counties, and local government units from requiring private firms contracting with these governments to provide higher compensation than the state minimum wages or require other benefits and leave policies.
The Florida House recently voted to preempt local governments from enacting “living wage” laws and “sick time” ordinances. If signed into law, the bill also overrules counties like Miami-Dade and Broward that have “living wage” ordinances that require companies that contract with the county to pay wages higher than the federal minimum wage, and sometimes provide certain benefits.

According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 19 states severely restrict or outright abolish the right of local governments to build their telecommunications networks. Cities began building their own networks after years of begging private phone and cable companies to upgrade their inadequate infrastructure, moderate their continual price increases and improve their customer service. When cities proved to be serious and successful competitors, telecommunications firms, rather than responding to the competition, went to state legislatures to abolish it. Last year North Carolina became the latest state to join the ranks of those who refuse to allow communities to make their own decisions about their own affairs.

Freedom for Unrestricted Fracking

Several years ago the federal government abdicated responsibility for regulating fracking. The Safe Drinking Water Act mandates federal regulation of underground injection activities in order to protect groundwater sources. But in 2005 Congress amended the definition of “underground injection” to specifically exclude “the underground injection of fluids or propping agents (other than diesel fuels) pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities.”

In November 2010 Pittsburgh became the first city in the nation to ban fracking within city limits.

In February 2012 the Pennsylvania legislature responded by passing Act 13, a law that allows fracking in all parts of the city, including residential neighborhoods, which in essence abrogates the right of cities to exercise traditional zoning powers to protect residential neighborhoods from noise and odors and industrial dangers.

In mid-2012 Longmont, a suburb of Denver strengthened its oil and gas regulations. The Colorado Attorney General filed a complaint in court. In response activists successfully got the question put on the ballot. In November 2012 Longmont voters approved the measure with almost 60 percent of the vote. The Attorney General sued. And Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper announced the state would sue any and every city or county that followed the lead of Longmont.

In each of these cases one could argue about the legislation these communities want to enact. In hundreds of communities over the past decade such arguments have taken place, vigorous debates about the appropriateness of residency requirements, or living wage ordinances or fracking restrictions. Communities have gone both ways on these issues. But I would argue that they should have the right to make the decision for themselves. For it is at the local level where those who feel the impact of the decision have the biggest opportunity to be involved with making the decision. Certainly when it is a question of how to spend local taxpayers’ money, or what kinds of commercial activities to allow within residential areas of a city, the community itself should be the locus of decision making and state legislatures should as much as possible respect the outcome.

Cities in Constitutional Limbo

The U.S. Constitution specifically discusses the authority of the federal government and the states. It does not mention municipalities. For that matter, neither does it mention private corporations. Yet after the Civil War, as businesses became more powerful courts gave corporations personhood and dramatically expanded their rights in the face of local and state regulation. At the same time the courts severely redefined cities as mere appendages of the state and restricted the authority of municipalities to govern their own affairs.

For many courts, John Forrest Dillon’s 1872 book Municipal Corporations remains a guidebook for judicial decisions. In an 1868 case, Judge Dillon famously declared, “Municipal corporations owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from, the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so may it destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control.”

Hundreds of U.S. court decisions to the present day have employed the Dillon Rule to determine the scope of municipal powers and rights. In 1907, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the power of Pennsylvania to consolidate the city of Allegheny into the city of Pittsburgh, despite the wishes of the majority of Allegheny residents.

Beginning about 1920, increasing citizen dissatisfaction at their communities’ servile legal status led states to amend their constitutions to include home rule provisions that broadened the power of cities to govern their affairs. In 1961, for example, the Kansas Constitution was amended to provide that “cities are hereby empowered to determine their own local affairs…” It remains to be seen whether Kansas courts will conclude that deciding how to spend local taxpayers’ money is a “local affair.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has rarely come down on the side of local authority. The 1996 Telecommunications Act was justified by Congress as a way to increase competition. The law specifically allowed the federal government to preempt state and local regulations “prohibiting the ability of any entity” to provide telecommunications services. In 1997 Missouri passed legislation that prohibited cities from providing telecommunication services. The Missouri Municipal League asked the Federal Communications Commission to nullify the state law. The FCC refused to do so because it viewed municipal governments much the way John Dillon did in the 1870s. In 2004 the Supreme Court, by an 8-1 decision, upheld the FCC’s ruling that municipalities “are created as convenient agencies for exercising such of the governmental powers of the State as may be entrusted to them in its absolute discretion.”

Last August a Pennsylvania court went in the other direction by overturning Act 13 concerning fracking in a 4-3 decision that found the law in violation of the state constitution by invalidating many existing municipal zoning requirements The Pennsylvania Attorney General has appealed. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is reviewing the decision.

Government Near the People

Local government is the most accessible of all governments, the most responsive to the popular will. Alexis De Tocqueville described local government as “the great school of democracy”. If we don’t like what our city council or county commission does we can throw the bums out. And kicking them out is not very difficult. Most local elected officials serve for only two years. Running for local office is within the means of many citizens, unlike running for federal or even statewide office.

There is a clear case for higher level intervention is when a community’s majority tyrannizes its minority. Constitutionally protected civil liberties, for example, demand intervention by states. But when it comes to how a city spends its money, or what kinds of commercial activities it allows within its borders, the burden of proof should rest heavily on the state government to explain why it should be allowed to intervene in local affairs.

Republican lawmakers in Florida defend their bills forbidding local minimum wage and living wage laws as a way to prevent the state from having a “patchwork” of laws across its 67 counties. “This bill provides consistency with regards to benefit packages across the state,” said Rep. MaryLynn Magar (R-Tequesta). “It levels the playing field.” But consistency is a poor excuse for undermining a fundamental principle of democracy. Indeed, one of the compelling reasons for allowing local control is the innovation and learning experiences that result from a diversity of local initiatives.

Intervention by local governments to protect communities against the predations of private corporations makes sense. The more remote decision makers are from the community affected by a decision, the less likely they will hear citizens’ concerns. This creates a more unequal the public-private power balance. Large corporations have a much easier time persuading higher levels of government, which are farther removed from the people and issues involved, and also more in need of campaign contributions.

Corporations are legally prohibited from putting the interests of the communities they serve above the maximization of profits to their shareholders. And within corporations, power is determined by the number of shares owned, unlike in a political democracy where one person has only one vote.

There has been much written about the federalist nature of the American political system. But virtually all of it focuses on the rights of states vs. the federal government. At this historical moment, where the last bastion of true democracy is at the local level, we need to extend the debate to include the rights of communities vs. the states.

AlterNet.org: Environment

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