Environment | Mother Jones

We Tracked Down Our Biggest Troll…and Kind of Liked Him

James West and Tim McDonnell — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:07 +0000

If you've ever read anything on the internet, chances are you've encountered a troll. No, not the kind that live under bridges, or the ones with a shock of neon hair. We're talking about those annoying commenters who get their kicks by riling people up as much as possible. But have you ever wondered who these people really are? Well, we found out.

Internet researchers at George Mason University recently found that when it comes to online commenting, throwing bombs gets more attention than being nice, and makes readers double down on their preexisting beliefs. What's more, trolls create a false sense that a topic is more controversial than it really is. Witness the overwhelming consensus on climate change amongst scientists—97 percent agreement that global warming is real, and caused by humans. But that doesn’t settle the question for Twitter addict and Climate Desk perennial thorn in the side Hoyt Connell:

"If you allow somebody to make a comment and there's no response, then they're controlling the definition of the statement," Hoyt says. "Then it can become a truth."

We first encountered Hoyt, or as we know him, @hoytc55, several months ago on our Twitter page, taking us to task for our climate coverage. And the screed hasn't stopped since: In April alone, Hoyt mentioned us on Twitter some 126 times, almost as much as our top nine other followers combined. So we did the only thing we knew how to do: track him down, meet him face to face…and ask a few questions of our own. So we did, in Episode One: Trollus Maximus (above).

Episode Two: The Troll Slayer: Some online commenters are silent, watching from the wings, what internet researchers call "lurkers." Not Rosi Reed, a 34-year-old nuclear physicist at the Large Hadron Collider and long-time internet truth crusader, who goes by the nom de guerre PhysicsGirl.

Finally, we launched an experiment: Episode Three: The Showdown. What if the trolls and the troll slayers met face to face and talked it out, analog-style (or as close as we can get with Google Hangout)? For all their differences, Hoyt and Rosi have one thing in common: They aren't cowards. They agreed to square off in a debate about online commenting, climate change, and what defines truth in the digital age.

VIDEO: 97 Percent of Climate Scientists Can't Be Wrong

James West — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:13 +0000

Telling Americans that scientists don't agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It's been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue." Oh, yeah, and avoid truth: "A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth." It seems to have worked: Only a minority of Americans believes global warming is caused by humans: 42 percent, according to a 2012 Pew study.

That "consensus gap", as it's known, has proven fertile ground in which to sow resistance to climate action, says John Cook, a climate communications researcher from the University of Queensland in Australia. He has led the most extensive survey of peer-reviewed literature in almost a decade (published online this week in Environmental Research Letters). And what he found, just as in other attempts to survey the field, is that scientists are near unanimous.

A group of 24 researchers signed up to the challenge via Cook's website, Skeptical Science (the go-to website for debunking climate denial myths), and collected and analyzed almost 12,000 scientific papers from the past 20 years. Of the roughly 4,000 of those abstracts that expressed some view on the evidence for global warming, more than 97 percent endorsed the consensus that climate change is happening, and it's caused by humans.

His team pulled work written by 29,083 authors in nearly 2,000 journals across two decades. "People who say there must be some conspiracy to keep climate deniers out of the peer reviewed literature, that is one hell of a conspiracy," he said via Skype from Australia (watch the video above). That would make the moon landing cover-up look "like an amateur conspiracy compared to the scale involved here."

Cook is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of his findings: "All people need to understand is that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree. All they need to know is that one number: 97 percent."

Which States Use the Most Green Energy?

Tim McDonnell — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:12 +0000

Florida and Texas might be leading the nation's rollout of solar and wind power, respectively, but Washington, where hydroelectric dams provide over 60 percent of the state's energy, was the country's biggest user of renewable power in 2011, according to new statistics released last week by the federal Energy Information Administration.

Hydro continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant source of renewable power consumed nationwide, accounting for 67 percent of the total, followed by wind with 25 percent, geothermal with 4.5 percent, and solar with 3.5 percent. The new EIA data is the latest official snapshot of how states nationwide make use of renewable power, from industrial-scale generation to rooftop solar panels, and reveals an incredible gulf between leaders like Washington, California, and Oregon, and states like Rhode Island and Mississippi that use hardly any.

The gap is partly explained by the relative size of states' energy markets, but not entirely: Washington uses less power overall than New York, for example, but far outstrips it on renewables (the exact proportions won't be available until EIA releases total state consumption figures later this month). Still, the actual availability of resources—how much sun shines or wind blows—is far less important than the marching orders passed down from statehouses to electric utilities, says Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

"Without some carrot or stick, there's little reason to pick [renewables] up" in many states, he says; even given the quickly falling price of clean-energy technology, natural gas made cheap by fracking is still an attractive option for many utilities.

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WATCH: A Conversation With Climate Scientist Michael Mann

Chris Mooney — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:03:52 +0000

climatenexus on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

One of the chief scientists behind the famous "hockey stick" graph, Michael Mann is among the most influential climate researchers in the United States.

He's also, perhaps, the most regularly attacked.

It started with swipes at the hockey stick—the graph seemed to show global warming so unequivocally that skeptics made it their number one target. The furor became even more intense when some of Mann's emails were exposed in the "ClimateGate" pseudo-scandal. Now, Mann receives regular threats and has found his personal emails pursued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

And all of this has only made Michael Mann more outspoken.

At the next Climate Desk Live event, Mann and host Chris Mooney will discuss new research that reaffirms the validity of the hockey stick. They'll also talk about public opinion on climate change—and why Mann believes it's changing.

Please join us:

Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 6:30 p.m. at the University of California Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036. To attend, please RSVP to cdl@climatedesk.org

Mysterious Poop Foam Causes Explosions on Hog Farms

Tom Philpott — Wed, 15 May 2013 10:00:07 +0000

When you hear about foam in the context of food, you might think of molecular gastronomy, the culinary innovations of the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, who's famous for dishes like apple caviar with banana foam.

But this post is about a much less appetizing kind of foam. You see, starting in about 2009, in the pits that capture manure under factory-scale hog farms, a gray, bubbly substance began appearing at the surface of the fecal soup. The problem is menacing: As manure breaks down, it emits toxic gases like hydrogen sulfide and flammable ones like methane, and trapping these noxious fumes under a layer of foam can lead to sudden, disastrous releases and even explosions. According to a 2012 report from the University of Minnesota, by September 2011, the foam had "caused about a half-dozen explosions in the upper Midwest…one explosion destroyed a barn on a farm in northern Iowa, killing 1,500 pigs and severely burning the worker involved."

And the foam grows to a thickness of up to four feet—check out these images, from a University of Minnesota document published by the Iowa Pork Producers, showing a vile-looking substance seeping up from between the slats that form the floor of a hog barn. Those slats are designed to allow hog waste to drop down into the below-ground pits; it is alarming to see it bubbling back up in the form of a substance the consistency of beaten egg whites.

And here's the catch: Scientists can't explain the phenomenon.

Check out this amazing 2011 video presentation on the matter by University of Minnesota researcher David Schmidt. He opens by describing a 2009 explosion that lifted a hog barn a "couple of feet off the ground" and blew the farm operator himself 20 feet from the building. (Thankfully, he wasn't injured, and there were no animals in it.) And check out the footage, starting about 3:19 in, of the foam itself, which must be seen to be believed. At one point , a shovel dips into the mire and scoops up as sample—which jiggles and pulsates, alive, apparently, with microbial activity. Schmidt also does a great job of explaining just how manure foam can cause explosions.

David Schmidt: Foaming Manure Pits from Iowa State University Extension on Vimeo

I wrote about the phenomenon about a year ago. But these days, there's not much in the agriculture trade press about it. Which led me to wonder: Has the mysterious foam subsided—or congealed into yet another fact of factory farming that isn't even notable anymore, like, you know, raising hundreds of pigs over pits that concentrate their waste, or dosing them them daily with low levels of antibiotics, leading to rampant antibiotic-resistant bacteria?

I decided to do a bit of digging for an update. Via email, Angela Kent, an associate professor in the department of natural resources and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois, informed me that "manure foaming" is "still a very serious problem among pork producers in the Midwest." Scientists have still not been able to finger the cause of it, but "we are in the midst of a large multi-institution investigation focused on finding the cause of this very serious problem."

So: still happening, and still no explanation.

I then got Larry Jacobson, a professor and extension engineer at the University of Minnesota who has been working on the issue, on the phone. He confirmed that the problem persists—just about a month ago, he said, workers were welding metal fixtures in an empty hog facility and a fire broke out, likely because a spark managed to penetrate foam enough to free trapped methane and ignite it. (No one was injured.)

Jacobson said that surveys show that around 25 percent of operations in the hog-intensive regions of Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa are experiencing foam—and "the number may be higher, because some operators might not know that they have it."

He added that the practice of feeding hogs distillers grains, the mush leftover from the corn ethanol process, might be one of the triggers. Distillers grains entered hog rations in a major way around the same time that the foam started emerging, and manure from hogs fed distillers grains contains heightened levels of undigested fiber and volatile fatty acids—both of which are emerging as preconditions of foam formation, he said. But he added that distillers grains aren't likely the sole cause, because on some operations, the foam will emerge in some buildings but not others, even when all the hogs are getting the same feed mix.

But if the causes of manure foam remain a mystery, a solution seems to be emerging, Jacobson told me: Dump a bit of monensin, an antibiotic widely used to make cows grow faster, directly into the foam-ridden pit. At rather low levels—Jacobson told me that about 25 pounds of the stuff will treat a typical 500,000 gallon pit—the stuff effectively breaks up the foam, likely by altering the mix of microbes present. No other treatment has been shown to work consistently, he said.

Thankfully, monensin isn't used in human medicine. Still, it's striking to consider that the meat industry's ravenous appetite for antibiotics has now extended to having to treat hog shit with them.

12 Animals We Wish We Could De-Extinct

— By Maggie Severns and the Mother Jones news team — Wed, 15 May 2013 10:00:05 +0000

Do you miss the mammoth? Dream of dodos? Long for Lycaena dispar dispar? After centuries of driving species after species to extinction, we're now tantalizingly close to bringing some of them back. Using advances in genetic sequencing and molecular biology, scientists across the world are mining extinct animal specimens for ancient DNA to try to resurrect disappeared species.

The science is complicated—National Geographic has a great rundown—and so are the ethics involved. But who can resist dreaming up a de-extinction "wish list"? With more species nearing the extinction danger zone every dayâ€‹, there's no shortage of candidates, but some are more scientifically suited for resurrection than others. And even if we could bring a species back, should we? We looked to scientists to explain who they'd like to bring back, and which are best left in the past.

T. rex, extinct for 65 million years

Designed for "maximum bone-crushing action," Tyrannosaurus rex could down 500 pounds in a single bite. The first complete T. rex fossils, some the length of a school bus, were discovered in 1902 in Hell Creek, Montana, by legendary fossil hunter Barnum Brown, who employed dynamite and horses to dig up fossils all over North America. Given Rex's place in the popular imagination, it's somewhat surprising that only around 30 more specimens have been dug up since then.

Can we bring it back? As they say in bioscience, "You can't clone from stone." As Carl Zimmer explains in his excellent National Geographic piece on de-extinction, "In reality the only species we can hope to revive now are those that died within the past few tens of thousands of years and left behind remains that harbor intact cells or, at the very least, enough ancient DNA to reconstruct the creature's genome." T. rex and the rest of the dinos have been gone for at least 65 million years; it's not gonna happen. In fact, nearly all of the species we could theoretically resurrect are ones we wiped out in our relatively recent rise to the top of the food chain. "This suggests another reason for bringing them back," writes Zimmer. —Zaineb Mohammed

Passenger pigeon, extinct for 100 years

Said to have flown in massive, million-bird flocks that filled the North American sky, the humble passenger pigeon was considered one of the most social birds in North American history, but was wiped out in the early 20th century thanks to hunting and shrinking habitat. The last passenger pigeon, Martha, died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1914.

Can we bring it back? Referred to as the "poster-child for de-extinction," the pigeon's genome is already being sequenced by scientists like Ben Novak at the University of California-Santa Cruz. As National Geographic explains, passenger pigeon DNA could be swapped into corresponding bits of modern-day pigeon DNA—Novak's eyeing the band-tailed variety, found in the western United States—to create passenger pigeon stem cells. Those cells are converted into germ cells, and inserted into modern pigeon eggs. When the eggs hatch, seemingly ho-hum modern pigeon babies will emerge, but they'd be laden with passenger pigeon germ cells. When this new generation mates, the theory goes, it'll bring baby passenger pigeons to life.

Biologist David Ehrenfeld isn't sure this is such a good idea. "Who's going to mother the baby passenger pigeon?" he asks, noting that the band-tailed pigeon flies, mates, sings, and eats differently than the passenger pigeon. —Maddie Oatman

Saber-toothed tiger, extinct for ABOUT 10,000 years

The saber-toothed tiger was a compact killing machine, chasing small mammoths, giant sloths, and bison all over North America until about 10,000 years ago when it and many other species mysteriously died out at the end of the last Ice Age. Its genus name, smilodon, comprises the Greek words for "chisel" and "tooth," though the modern lion's bite is probably three times as strong as old smilodon's.

Can we bring it back? About 2,000 saber-toothed fossils have emerged from the La Brea tar pits in Southern California—it's the state fossil—and, being around 10,000 years old, they likely contain recoverable DNA. But so far, no scientists have actually attempted to recreate it. —Maddie Oatman

Dodo, extinct for 332 years

Dodos were once endemic to the forests of the beautiful, isolated island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Historic accounts describe them as slow, awkward, and rather dumb—making for a convenient, if not particularly tasty, source of island protein. Dutch colonists gobbled up the last of them within 40 years of landing there in the 17th century.

Can we bring it back? Tropical paradises like Mauritius don't make great fossil vaults, so a fully intact specimen hasn't been recovered. Oxford geneticists have cobbled together some dodo DNA from a beak, but the bird's ungainly proportions and slim genetic diversity (a result of its small population size) could make it hard to reproduce. —Tim McDonnell

Great auk, extinct for 170 years

Great auks were once the penguins of the Northern Hemisphere, fanning out from Canada to Scotland. But humans started hunting them in prehistoric times, and by the 17th century, auks only lived in a few areas—and were still a popular source of meat and oil to boot. Newfoundland tried to petition the English to stop hunting auks in 1775, but to no avail. The last great auks are believed to have been shot in Iceland in 1844.

Can we bring it back? "If I could get another project going, it would be the great auk," says Stewart Brand, whose preservationist Long Now Foundation runs a de-extinction campaign called Revive and Restore. There are over 80 stuffed great auks in museums around the world that could help scientists sequence their DNA, too, but we couldn't find any current efforts to de-extinct the species. —Maggie Severns

Pyrean ibex, extinct for 13 years

The Pyrean ibex, also called a bucardo, was a wild goat that grazed the mountains of Spain until just over a decade ago. Hunting thinned the population throughout the 20th century. By 1989, there were only a few dozen left. The last bucardo, a female named Celia, was tracked by wildlife veterinarians across Spanish national parks until she was killed under a falling tree in 2000.

Can we bring it back? In July 2003, scientists briefly de-extincted the Pyrean ibex by cloning Celia. Using frozen skin samples, they made 439 eggs with Celia's DNA, and 57 of those nuclei developed into embryos inside surrogate mothers. Five survived the full term of pregnancy, and one was born. Unfortunately, the baby clone emerged with an extra, nonworking lung, leaving it unable to breathe properly. Minutes after birth, she died in the arms of one of the scientists who created her. —Maddie Oatman

giant ground sloth, extinct for 10,000 years

Giant sloths, which went extinct around the same time as saber-toothed cats and mastodons, probably had more in common with modern elephants than their cuddly counterparts today. These 20-foot behemoths weighed up to four tons and sported huge claws, says mammologist Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where you can see one of the best collections of fossils from these behemoths that once roamed from the New World from Cape Horn to the Arctic circle.

Can we bring it back? MacPhee and his colleagues are at work piecing together the sloth's DNA from pieces of skin fossilized in South America, but it's slow-going. Moreover, modern sloths are too tiny to make good surrogate parents. In any case, says McPhee, it's not clear what we would gain from bringing giant sloths back. There's more potential ROI in bringing recently extinct sloths, like the cow-size Shasta ground sloth, which scatter endangered tree seeds as they munch their foliage. —Tim McDonnell

aurochs, extinct for 400 years

Fans of the 2012 movie Beasts of the Southern Wild will remember the mythological aurochs that returned from ancient days to chase after Hushpuppy. To recreate the giant creatures for the film, filmmakers wrapped Vietnamese potbelly pigs in nutria skins. These grandfathers of modern cattle became extinct in the 17th century due to hunting, disease, and habitat loss.

Can we bring it back? A European coalition of scientists known as Project Tauros plans to "backbreed" cattle species with traits similar to the aurochs, and hope to slowly reverse engineer the extinct beast. "It's straightforward trait selection," says Long Now Foundation's Stewart Brand. "The traits of the aurochs are very well documented, so they're going trait-by-trait back to it." Researchers in Poland also plan to try to recreate an animal that has 99 percent gene compatibility with an auroch to examine exactly why the giant cattle went extinct. —Maddie Oatman

NEANDERTHALS, EXTINCT FOR 28,000 YEARS

Our closest human relative, Homo neanderthalensis was shorter and stockier than humans but had the same brain size, wore clothes, made art, and buried its dead. Some believe Neanderthals became extinct by breeding with humans until there were none left, while others have suggested that they had trouble competing with humans, whose more advanced social networks and group skills made for better survival in harsh environments.

Can we bring it back? Piecing together bits of Neanderthal DNA would be difficult, but Harvard geneticist George Church has another idea: tweak human DNA so it matches that of the Neanderthal. But there's little popular demand in the scientific community for a Neanderthal comeback. "Too risky medically, both for the Homo sapiens mother and for the Homo neanderthalensis fetus," says Stanford law professor and de-extinction ethicist Hank Greeley. "Part of me would love to see what they were like, but I don't trust us to treat Neanderthals well." —Maggie Severns

tasmanian tiger, extinct for About 70 years

Resembling a cross between a wolf and a tiger, the Tasmanian tiger was actually more closely related to the kangaroo or the koala. And unlike its cousin the Tasmanian devil, this tiger was shy and secretive, as well as generally mute. Believed to have preyed on sheep, thylacine was likely driven extinct by human hunting of the kangaroos, small rodents, and birds it hunted for food, as well as competition with the dingo. The last Tasmanian tiger died at a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania, but lives on digitally on video.

Can we bring it back? In 2008, researchers in Australia extracted DNA from four 100-year-old Tasmanian tiger samples and injected a copy into some mice. The technique led to some interesting biological findings about the long-extinct animal, but the DNA samples were revealed to be too degraded for full cloning. Researchers at Penn State University have also looked into extracting DNA from the tiger's hair, but the absence of a closely matched surrogate still leaves cloning unlikely. —Zaineb Mohammed

Giant rodent, extinct for 2-4 million years

Thought to resemble a bull-sized guinea pig, scientists think this enormous rodent fought off saber-toothed cats with its massive teeth. Josephoartigasia mones was 10-feet-long nose-to-tail and thought to weigh up to a ton, based on a well-preserved skull discovered by an amateur paleontologist in Uruguay. Its modern cousin, the much smaller capybara, still lives in South America.

Can we bring it back? Unlikely. There aren't many specimens to provide scientists with DNA and no existing giant hamsters to act as surrogate mothers to modern-day giant rodent babies. —Maggie Severns

haast's eagle, extinct for 500 years

According to Maori legend, Haast's eagles were known to make off with human children, but the nine-foot-long bird mostly fed on moa, large emus that could weigh 300 pounds. Moa were slowly driven to extinction when the Maori arrived in New Zealand around 1300 AD, and the Haast's eagle wasn't far behind.

Can we bring it back? Not without moa around to munch on, and currently there aren't any projects devoted to de-extincting either species. —Maggie Severns

How Michael Pollan Romanticizes Dinner

Tom Philpott — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:00:12 +0000

"Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig?" wonders the title of a recent Salon piece by Emily Matchar, which is an excerpt of her just-released book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity. The Salon headline turns out to be mainly a lunge for clicks—the excerpted passage only glancingly concerns Pollan, and it has nothing to say about his new book Cooked, which clearly hadn't come out when Matchar was writing hers.

But both Matchar in her essay and Pollan in his new book raise important questions about gender, cooking, and what we might as well follow Matchar in calling the "new domesticity"—issues I didn't get to in my own recent review of Cooked.

Matchar—quite accurately, I think—places women at the center of the the budding movement to challenge industrial food. Women, she writes, are "disproportionately represented in the unique-to-the-twenty-first-century worlds of artisan food businesses, urban homesteading, food activism, and food blogging."

Most of her piece amounts to a nuanced, sympathetic critique of the new domesticity. Pollan emerges as her foil when she defends feminism against the charge that it drove women out of the kitchen and led to the decline in cooking. Pollan came perilously close to making that argument in a 2009 New York Times Magazine essay, the seed that germinated into Cooked.

In that piece, Pollan declared Betty Friedan's 1963 opus The Feminine Mystique the "book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression." That's an overreach—a little like calling James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, also published in 1963, the book that taught African Americans that racism sucks. These works illuminated and helped articulate the rebellions against the racial and gender status quos of the era, but they didn't generate them.

And of course, cooking does become drudgery when you're forced to do it whether you want to or not—and it was the power relations around the act of cooking, not cooking itself, that drove Friedan's ire.

To be fair to Pollan, he offers a revised reading of Friedan's impact on cooking in Cooked. He does write that "second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan depicted all housework as a form of oppression"—still conflating a critique of the power relations that surround housework with a critique of housework itself. But he continues: "[T]he food industry—along with falling wages of American families, which is what drove most women into the workforce beginning in the 1970s—probably had more to do with the decline of cooking than feminist rhetoric."

At another point, he adds: "For the necessary and challenging questions about who should be in the kitchen, posed so sharply by Betty Friedan in the Feminist Mystique, ultimately got answered by the food industry: No one! Let us do it all!" That's well said.

Yet Matchar does level a charge against Pollan that sticks: that he bases much of his analysis of the US cooking scene on history tinged with nostalgia. Throughout the book, Pollan acts as if everyone was cooking until a generation or two ago. "Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen," he writes. At another point, he wants to know why food-centered TV shows became so popular "at the precise historical moment [i.e., the present] when Americans were abandoning the kitchen." Matchar delivers a history lesson:

In Colonial America, kitchen work was viewed as a lowly chore, often farmed out to servants (who, needless to say, did not spend a lot of time exulting in the visceral pleasures of pea shucking). In the 1800s, middle-class women supervised immigrant kitchen maids (or slaves), while pioneer women and rural housewives sweated over wood fires and heavy iron pots.

In other words, as Hanna Raskin makes clear in her well-researched Seattle Weekly review of Cooked, class power has long exempted a large swath of the population from having to get their hands dirty in the kitchen—and not just men, but women, too. Here's Raskin:

Although 1870 represented the pinnacle of the domestic-service industry, as measured by the percentage of working women employed by it, the national reliance on hired help hadn’t faded decades later. In Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945, Phyllis Palmer cites a 1937 Fortune survey showing "70 percent of the rich, 42 percent of the upper middle class, 14 percent of the lower middle class, and 6 percent of the poor reported" hiring help.

While reading Raskin, I remembered I had made similar points about Pollan's nostalgic view of the history of cooking back in 2009, in response to his Times Magazine piece (see here and here). I had just happened upon a great 1989 Terry Gross interview with Julia Child, whom Pollan lionizes as a paragon of a golden age when cooking mattered and Americans practiced it regularly. From my second 2009 post:

In the interview, we find out that Child herself didn’t grow up cooking. She says: "I grew up in the teens and '20s, when most people had—middle class people—had maids or someone to help." She reveals that her mother cooked seldom, and then only two dishes: Welsh rabbit (a kind of cheese sandwich) and baking-soda biscuits. As for herself, "I didn't do any cooking then at all."

So even Julia Child, born in 1912, grew up with servants in the kitchen and scant memories of her mother whipping up dinner—although, to the 1960s-era audience of her television show, live-in cooks were likely much less common than they were during Child's 1920s childhood, because the cost of labor had risen over the decades. But the point stands: People with sufficient means have long been able to opt out of cooking. What I wrote back in 2009 still sums up my thoughts today:

Pollan was right: people do need to revalue the craft of cooking, to embrace it as a quotidian pleasure, not a mere chore. But if we manage convince them of that, we'll have achieved something new, not returned to a lost past.

While I think Matchar is right that it's women who are driving the new push to liberate the kitchen from the food industry's grip, men, too, are participating heavily in the new domesticity. And Pollan's brilliant, flawed book—as I wrote in my review, it's a fantastic read—will likely attract yet more men into the realm of domestic production. And if it does, a so-called "sexist pig" will have helped create a broad-based, nonsexist cooking culture here in the Fast Food Nation.

We've Hit the Carbon Level We Were Warned About. Here's What That Means.

Text by Tim McDonnell and James West; Interactive by Duncan Clark — Mon, 13 May 2013 00:04:34 +0000

This interactive explainer originally appeared on the Guardian website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Over the last couple weeks, scientists and environmentalists have been keeping a particularly close eye on the Hawaii-based monitoring station that tracks how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, as the count tiptoed closer to a record-smashing 400 parts per million. Thursday, we finally got there: The daily mean concentration was higher than at any time in human history, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported Friday.

Don't worry: Earth is not about to go up in a ball of flame. The 400 ppm mark is only a milestone, 50 ppm over what legendary NASA scientist James Hansen has since 1988 called the safe zone for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, and yet only halfway to what the IPCC predicts we'll reach by the end of the century.

"Somehow in the last 50 ppm we melted the Arctic," said environmentalist and founder of activist group 350.org Bill McKibben, who called today's news a "grim but predictable milestone" and has long used the symbolic number as a rallying call for climate action. "We'll see what happens in the next 50."

We could find out soon enough: With the East Coast still recovering from superstorm Sandy and the West gearing up for what promises to be a nasty fire season, University of California-Berkeley ecologist Max Moritz says milestones like these are "an excuse for us to take a good hard look at where we are," especially as the carbon concentration shows no signs of reversing course.

Scientists first saw the carbon scale tip past 400 ppm last summer, but only briefly; the record reported today by NOAA is the first time a daily average has surpassed that point. For the last several years concentrations have hovered in the 390s, and we're still not to the point where the carbon concentration will stay above the 400 ppm threshold permanently. But that's just around the corner, said J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society.

"It's clear that sometime next year we'll see 400 consistently," he said. "Avoiding the future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in greenhouse gases."

Most scientists, environmentalists, and climate-conscious policymakers agree this will require, at a minimum, slashing the use of fossil fuels, and in the meantime, taking steps to adapt for a world with higher temperatures, higher seas, and more extreme weather. For example, according to Hansen, the world will need to completely stop burning coal by 2030 if returning to 350 ppm is to remain possible. What's the holdup? Texas Tech University climatologist Katherine Hayhoe blames "the inertia of our economic system, and the inertia of our political system." But she, like most of her peers, believe it can—and must—be done: "We have to change how we get our energy and how we use our energy."

Some progress is being made on that front: Thanks to energy efficiency gains, increased use of renewable power, and policies to cut emissions from cars and power plants, carbon emissions in the United States have fallen 13 percent in the last seven years. But they're expected to begin climbing again soon, and worldwide, 2012 saw the most carbon emissions ever. Today's milestone underscores the reality that if we're serious about addressing climate change, there's still a long road ahead.

"So far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem," NOAA scientist Pieter Tans, who oversees the monitoring program, told the Times.

For McKibben, the real date to mark in the history books has yet to arrive: "I don't think this will be the turning point. The turning point will be when we do something about it."

This Crater in Siberia Reveals the Future of a Globally Warmed Planet

Damian Carrington — Thu, 09 May 2013 19:04:03 +0000

This story originally appeared in The Guardian.

The future of a globally warmed world has been revealed in a remote meteorite crater in Siberia, where lake sediments recorded the strikingly balmy climate of the Arctic during the last period when greenhouse gas levels were as high as today.

Unchecked burning of fossil fuels has driven carbon dioxide to levels not seen for 3 million years when, the sediments show, temperatures were 14.4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today*, lush forests covered the tundra and sea levels were up to 40 meters higher than today.

"It's like deja vu," said Prof Julie Brigham-Grette, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the new research analyzing a core of sediment to see what temperatures in the region were between 3.6 and 2.2 million years ago. "We have seen these warm periods before. Many people now agree this is where we are heading."

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Why the Ethanol Boom Means More E. Coli Burgers

Tom Philpott — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:00:07 +0000

Back in 2007, amid a boom in US corn-based ethanol, researchers at Kansas State University released a sobering study involving distillers grains—the mash that's left over after corn has been fermented and distilled into ethanol. As various government programs ramped up ethanol production—and with it the price of corn—the livestock industry was increasingly turning to distillers grains as a cheap corn substitute. But the Kansas researchers found that the stuff seemed to cause a spike in a particularly dangerous-to-humans form of E. coli in the cows' guts.

"Distiller's grain is a good animal feed," the study's lead researcher said in a press release. But its tendency to boost the potentially deadly E. coli 0157 strain "is likely to have profound implications in food safety."

The US Department of Agriculture, which is responsible for monitoring the safety of meat products, acknowledged the problem from the start. The USDA's then-undersecretary for food safety, Richard Raymond, told the Des Moines Register in early 2008 that he thought distillers grains were one of several factors behind the massive spike in recalls of E. coli 0157-tainted beef that had occurred in 2007. And he also telegraphed the department's strategy for responding to the threat: inaction. Here's the Register:

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The Most Controversial Chart in History, Explained

Chris Mooney — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:00:08 +0000

Back in 1998, a little-known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet's past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent Northern Hemisphere temperatures had been "warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400." The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the "shaft"), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so ("the blade").

The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prominently featured the hockey stick in its Third Assessment Report. Based on this evidence, the IPCC proclaimed that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years."

And then all hell broke loose.

IPCC Third Assessment Report / Wikipedia

Mann tells the full story of the hockey stick—and the myriad unsuccessful attacks on it—in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines; Mann will appear at a Climate Desk Live event on May 15 to discuss this saga. But to summarize a very complex history of scientific and political skirmishes in a few paragraphs:

The hockey stick was repeatedly attacked, and so was Mann himself. Congress got involved, with demands for Mann's data and other information, including a computer code used in his research. Then the National Academy of Sciences weighed in in 2006, vindicating the hockey stick as good science and noting:

The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.

It didn't change the minds of the deniers, though—and soon Mann and his colleagues were drawn into the 2009 "Climategate" pseudo-scandal, which purported to reveal internal emails that (among other things) seemingly undermined the hockey stick. Only, they didn't.

In the meantime, those wacky scientists kept doing what they do best—finding out what's true. As Mann relates, over the years other researchers were able to test his work using "more extensive data sets, and more sophisticated methods. And the bottom line conclusion doesn't change." Thus the single hockey stick gradually became what Mann calls a "hockey team." "If you look at all the different groups, there are literally about two dozen" hockey sticks now, he says.

Mother Jones' Jaeah Lee traced the strange evolution of the hockey stick story in this video:

Indeed, two just-published studies support the hockey stick more powerfully than ever. One, just out in Nature Geoscience, featuring more than 80 authors, showed with extensive global data on past temperatures that the hockey stick's shaft seems to extend back reliably for at least 1,400 years. Recently in Science, meanwhile, Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University and his colleagues extended the original hockey stick shaft back 11,000 years. "There's now at least tentative evidence that the warming is unprecedented over the entire period of the Holocene, the entire period since the last ice age," says Mann.

So what does it all mean? Well, here's the millennial scale irony: Climate deniers threw everything they had at the hockey stick. They focused immense resources on what they thought was the Achilles' heel of global warming research—and even then, they couldn't hobble it. (Though they certainly sowed plenty of doubt in the mind of the public.)

What's more, even if they'd succeeded, in a scientific sense it wouldn't have even mattered.

"Climate deniers like to make it seem like the entire weight of evidence for climate change rests on the hockey stick," explains Mann. "And that's not the case. We could get rid of all these reconstructions, and we could still know that climate change is a threat, and that we're causing it." The basic case for global warming caused by humans rests on basic physics—and basic thermometer readings from around the globe. The hockey stick, in contrast, is the result of a field of research called paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) that, while fascinating, only provides one thread of evidence among many for what we're doing to the planet.

Center for American Progress

Meanwhile, the hockey stick's blade doesn't just stop rising of its own accord. It's just going to go up, and up, and up, as the image above, combining the Marcott hockey stick with projections of where temperatures are headed by 2100, plainly shows.

When he shows that graph to audiences, says Mann, "I often hear an audible gasp." In this sense, the hockey stick does indeed matter—for it dramatizes just how much human irresponsibility, in a relatively short period of time, can devastate the only home we have.

This Town Took On Fracking and Won

Kate Sheppard — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:00:11 +0000

There was a time not so long ago when the most contentious issue in Dryden, New York, was hiring a new dog catcher. Situated in New York's Finger Lakes region, Dryden is a rural town with a population of just 14,500 spread over 94 square miles. It's "a little more progressive than your average upstate town," explains town supervisor Mary Ann Sumner, because it gets some spillover residents from nearby Ithaca, a college town. "But we're still just an upstate town," best known for dairy farms and cornfields.

But everything changed in August 2011, when Dryden became one of the first towns in New York to ban fracking. Natural gas interests swiftly sued, putting the once sleepy spot in the middle of a nationwide debate over gas drilling. Last week, after a spending a year and a half in court fighting to protect its ban, Dryden became the first town in the state to prevail over the gas industry—in a case that could set a precedent for other towns that are trying to keep frackers out.

In 2008, New York imposed a statewide moratorium on fracking, until more research could be done on the environmental and health effects of the practice. But towns all over the state have tried to find their own way to exert control over the industry if and when the state decides to let drilling go forward. Fifty-four other towns have fracking bans in place, and another 105 have passed moratoria. The court's decision last week also upheld a similar ban in Middlefield, a town in central New York, and the two cases together are expected to give traction to the other towns looking to take similar actions.

I visited Dryden in early April as the town was awaiting the appellate court's decision. Supervisor Sumner and I chatted in her log home on an overcast morning, watching through big glass doors in her kitchen as squirrels skittered around a bird feeder.

Dryden sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation that runs under Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Back in 2006, when Sumner had just joined the town board, new studies were starting to trickle out showing far larger estimates of the natural gas contained in the shale than previously thought. A process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which uses a high-pressure mixture of chemicals, sand, and water to break into those rock formations, also allowed them to tap into these new reserves. The fracking boom had already started to take hold in nearby Pennsylvania, and landsmen soon began descending on upstate New York, offering property owners leases to secure the right to drill. In Dryden, some landowners were eager to lease, while others were less sure. Most just didn't really know to expect.

Around 2008, Sumner says, citizens began to express concerns about the prospect of drilling in town after hearing reports of environmental and social impacts in other parts of the country. Some of the residents soon organized the Dryden Resources Awareness Coalition, or DRAC, and began circulating petitions asking the board to bar fracking in the town, citing worries about air and water pollution. Sumner says the social impacts were perhaps the most concerning for the town: big trucks on the roadways, increased demand on emergency services, and potentially higher housing prices as workers come in from out of town. "The more we learned, the more we realized we really couldn't prepare for some of these impacts," said Sumner.

Under New York's Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Law, towns can't regulate oil and gas; that can only be done at the state level. Many towns first assumed there was nothing they could do to stop fracking entirely. But a pair of environmental lawyers from nearby Ithaca, Helen and David Slottje, figured out that towns might be able to use zoning rules to bar that type of industry from coming in instead of trying to regulate it, since zoning is left to towns to determine. "People had had it beaten into their heads there's nothing they can do," said Helen Slottje. "Then two lawyers from Ithaca say, 'We think you can just say no.' That was perceived as pretty radical at that time." The Slottjes worked with other nearby towns, including Ithaca, to pass measures before it went to a vote in Dryden.

There were four or five months of heated debate, with residents showing up in droves at board meetings, Sumner recalled: "It became pretty contentious, pretty loud." On the day they finally voted on the measure, there were more than 100 people in the room; about a third of them were opposed to the ban, but the majority was there to support it. "It was pretty damn passionate on both sides," Sumner said. "And everybody is scared. That's the really sad part. The pro-ban folks are scared that their lives are going to be changed, and the anti-ban folks are scared that their rights are being diminished somehow."

Though the plan had its critics, the Dryden board voted in August 2011 to bar oil and gas development within its borders, by a unanimous, bipartisan vote.

One of the most active residents pushing for the ban was Marie McRae, a spokeswoman for DRAC who lives and boards horses on a small farm in southern Dryden. In May of 2009, she signed a five-year lease on her 13 acres. She says she agreed just to get the landsmen to leave her and her husband alone, after they spent months trying to convince them to lease and threatening that they would be able to come drill anyway. "I felt really, really backed into a corner," McRae told me as we sat on her couch on a rainy early April morning. She and her husband got about $1,200 for signing. "After I signed the lease and started learning, I would have given it back to them in a second if I could," said McRae.

But McRae does understand why some of her neighbors were eager to sign leases. "A lot of farmers around here are land rich and money poor," she said. "So they had a lot of acres that could be drilled, theoretically, and they signed that lease with the thought that they could be a millionaire. That's a really powerful image."

One of those neighbors is Paul Cook, who lives two and a half miles north of McRae. Cook, 76, has wild gray hair and was dressed in denim overalls when I met him. His old white farmhouse was a bit rundown; he asked me to pardon the mess, explaining that he was a widower. He bought the farm in 1960, and still grows some corn and soybeans here, though he now rents part of his land to other farmers.

Back in January 2007, when the companies were knocking on everyone's door, Cook leased 240 acres to Ansbro Petroleum Company at $100 an acre. He used the money from the lease to pay off creditors. "A nice little shot in the arm, but it didn't last long," he said. "On a farm nothing lasts long." He hoped that, when the company drilled, he might make some more money off royalties. But because of Dryden's new zoning ordinance, they never drilled. The lease ended in 2012, and now there are no more landsmen knocking on his door.

Just a few weeks after the board approved the ban, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, which had leased a total of 22,200 acres in town, announced it was suing. The company argued that the town was overstepping its rights by regulating the gas industry. It's hard to say why the industry picked Dryden as the town to take to court. It could be because Anschutz had spent $4.7 million on leases there, making it a prime target. Or it could be because there was some particularly vocal local opposition in the town.

The trial court, however, sided with Dryden in a February 2012 decision. Anschutz appealed but later dropped out of the case; another fracking company, Norse Energy, decided to continue the suit instead. But last Thursday, the four judges on for the appellate court in New York's Third Judicial Department unanimously agreed that state law "does not preempt, either expressly or impliedly, a municipality's power to enact a local zoning ordinance banning all activities related to the exploration for, and the production or storage of, natural gas and petroleum within its borders."

The lawyer for Norse has said his client will seek to appeal to the state's Court of Appeals. However, because Dryden has already won twice, the plaintiff would need special dispensation from the state's highest court to have the case heard again.

Now that Dryden survived the suit, Slottje says, "I think there are going to be a lot of towns that are emboldened to proceed."

Deborah Goldberg, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, which defended the town in court, thinks the decision will have influence even beyond New York in other places where fracking is a top concern. "It has got to be a morale boost to people who have been suffering the adverse affects of this industry," Goldberg said, "to see people in a small town stand up to an incredibly powerful and wealthy industry and win."

10 Key Findings From a Rapidly Acidifying Arctic Ocean

Julia Whitty — Tue, 07 May 2013 10:05:05 +0000

As predicted by chemistry, change in the Arctic Ocean is accelerating as temperatures warm faster than the global average, as the sea ice melts, as northern rivers run stronger and faster, delivering more fresh water farther into the northernmost ocean, and as we continue blasting an ever increasing quantity of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The Arctic Ocean Acidification Assessment, a new report from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP), presents these 10 key findings:

1. Arctic marine waters are experiencing widespread and rapid ocean acidification. In the Nordic Seas, acidification is taking place over a wide range of ocean depths, from surface waters (faster) to deep waters (more slowly). Seawater pH has declined ~0.02 per decade since the late 1960s in the Iceland and Barents Seas. Other ocean acidification signals have also been encountered in surface waters of the Bering Strait and the Canada Basin of the central Arctic Ocean.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

2. The primary driver of ocean acidification is uptake of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere by human activities. The ocean has swallowed our atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions and slowed global warming during the past few critical decades while we dithered in disbelief. But the cost of temporarily delaying even more warming has been the increasing acidification of seawater. The average acidity of surface ocean waters worldwide is now ~30% higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

3. The Arctic Ocean is especially vulnerable to ocean acidification. Arctic rivers plus melting ice input huge (and increasing) amounts of freshwater into the Arctic Ocean, changing the chemistry and making it less effective at neutralizing CO2's acidifying effects. Add the fact that cold waters slurp up more CO2 from the air. Add the fact that dramatic decreases in Arctic summer sea-ice cover—real and projected—allow for greater transfer of CO2 from the atmosphere into the ocean. These combined influences make Arctic waters among the world's most easily acidified.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

4. Acidification is not uniform across the Arctic Ocean. Other processes influence the pace and extent of ocean acidification. Rivers, sea-floor sediments, and coastal erosion all supply organic material that bacteria can convert to carbon dioxide, exacerbating ocean acidification, especially on shallow continental shelves. Sea-ice cover, freshwater inputs, and plant growth and decay also influence local ocean acidification. The contributions of these processes vary from place to place, season to season, and year to year. The result is a complex, unevenly distributed, ever-changing mosaic of Arctic acidification states.

Brian Gratwicke at Flickr

5. Arctic marine ecosystems are highly likely to undergo significant change due to ocean acidification. Arctic marine ecosystems are generally characterized by short, simple food webs, where energy is channeled in just a few steps from small plants and animals to large predators like seabirds and seals. The integrity of such a simple structure depends greatly on keystone species. Pteropods (sea butterflies) and echinoderms (sea stars, urchins) are key food-web organisms that may be sensitive to ocean acidification. Too few data are presently available to assess the precise nature and extent of Arctic ecosystem vulnerability, as most biological studies have been undertaken in other ocean regions. Arctic-specific long-term studies are urgently needed.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

6. Ocean acidification will have direct and indirect effects on arctic marine life. Some marine organisms will respond positively to new conditions associated with ocean acidification. Others won't. Experiments show that a wide variety of animals grow more slowly under the acidification levels projected for coming centuries. While some seagrasses appear to thrive under such conditions. Birds and mammals are not likely to be directly affected by acidification but may be indirectly affected if their food sources decline, expand, relocate, or otherwise change in response to ocean acidification. Ocean acidification may alter the extent to which nutrients and essential trace elements in seawater are available to marine organisms. Shell-building Arctic mollusks are likely to be negatively affected by acidification, especially at early life stages. Juvenile and adult fishes are thought likely to cope with acidification levels projected for the next century, but fish eggs and early larval stages may be more sensitive. In general, early life stages are more susceptible to direct effects of ocean acidification than later life stages.

US Geological Survey at Flickr

7. Ocean acidification impacts must be assessed in the context of other changes happening in Arctic waters. Arctic marine organisms are experiencing not only acidification but also other large simultaneous changes: climate change, harvesting, habitat degradation, and pollution. Ecological interactions—e.g. between predators and prey, or among competitors—also play an important role in shaping ocean communities. As different marine life responds to environmental change in different ways, the mix of plants and animals in a community will change, as will their interactions with each other. We don't know much of anything about this yet.

NOAA Photo Library at Flickr

8. Ocean acidification is one of several factors that may contribute to alteration of fish species' composition in the Arctic Ocean. Ocean acidification is likely to affect the abundance, productivity, and distribution of marine species. But the magnitude and direction of change are uncertain. Other processes driving Arctic change include rising temperatures, diminishing sea ice, and freshening surface waters.

Western Arctic National Parklands at Flickr

9. Ocean acidification may affect Arctic fisheries. Few studies have estimated the socio-economic impacts of ocean acidification on fisheries, and most have focused largely on shellfish and on regions outside the Arctic. The quantity, quality, and predictability of commercially important Arctic fish stocks may be affected by ocean acidification, but the magnitude and direction of change are uncertain. Fish stocks may be more robust to ocean acidification if other stresses—for example, overfishing or habitat degradation—are minimized.

missmonet at Flickr

10. Ecosystem changes associated with ocean acidification may affect the livelihoods of Arctic peoples. Marine species harvested by northern coastal communities include species likely to be affected by acidification. Most indigenous groups harvest a range of organisms and may be able to shift to a greater reliance on unaffected species, but these changes would likely exert a cultural toll. Recreational fish catches may change to different species. While marine mammals—important to the culture, diets and livelihoods of Arctic indigenous peoples and other Arctic residents—are unlikely to escape changes in the Arctic Ocean food web.

Which 20 Lipsticks Contain the Most Lead?

Maggie Severns — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:00:06 +0000

Many women say lipstick makes them feel beautiful and confident. But could it also be making them sick?

In a small study out last week, researchers asked a group of teenage girls to hand over their lipsticks and glosses and tested them for toxic metals, including lead and cadmium. Though metal content varied widely from brand to brand, they found that women who apply lipstick two to three times daily can ingest a significant amount—20 percent of the daily amount that's considered safe in drinking water or more—of aluminum, cadmium, chromium, and manganese. Depending on the lipstick, in some cases women who slathered it on (14 times a day or more) were meeting or surpassing the daily recommended exposure to chromium, aluminum, and manganese. Lead, a metal that humans should avoid exposure to entirely, was detected in 75 percent of the samples.

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What If We Never Run Out of Oil?

Charles Mann — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:00:12 +0000

This story first appeared in The Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill's world. Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill's outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. With characteristic vigor and verve, he set about modernizing the Royal Navy, jewel of the empire. The revamped fleet, he proclaimed, should be fueled with oil, rather than coal—a decision that continues to reverberate in the present. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. Because of this greater energy density, oil could push ships faster and farther than coal could.

Churchill's proposal led to emphatic dispute. The United Kingdom had lots of coal but next to no oil. At the time, the United States produced almost two-thirds of the world's petroleum; Russia produced another fifth. Both were allies of Great Britain. Nonetheless, Whitehall was uneasy about the prospect of the Navy's falling under the thumb of foreign entities, even if friendly. The solution, Churchill told Parliament in 1913, was for Britons to become "the owners, or at any rate, the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the supply of natural oil which we require." Spurred by the Admiralty, the U.K. soon bought 51 percent of what is now British Petroleum, which had rights to oil "at the source": Iran (then known as Persia). The concessions' terms were so unpopular in Iran that they helped spark a revolution. London worked to suppress it. Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

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Europe Bans Bee-Harming Pesticides; US Keeps Spraying

Tom Philpott — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:00:13 +0000

On Monday, the European Commission voted to place a two-year moratorium on most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides, which are a widely used class of chemicals suspected of contributing to a severe global decline in honeybee health.

In the wake of Europe's decisive action, the US Environmental Protection Agency dithered. Well, it did release a joint report with the US Department of Agriculture on Thursday, generated from a "National Honey Bee Health Stakeholder Conference" the two agencies held last fall. The report fingered no single culprit behind colony collapse disorder, the name for the steep annual bee die-offs that have been stumping beekeepers since 2006. Instead, it pointed to a "complex set of stressors and pathogens," including poor nutrition (mainly from loss of flowering weeds due to increased herbicide use), viruses, gut parasites, and, yes, pesticides. But it includes a summary of a presentation by USDA scientist Jeff Pettis noting that "several studies" have shown that low-level exposure to neonics make bees more vulnerable to the common gut parasite Nosema. (Pettis himself is the coauthor of one of those studies.)

Yet, as Natural Resources Defense Council senior scientist Jennifer Sass put it in a Thursday blog post, the joint EPA/USDA report limits itself to "recommendations about best management practices and technical advancements for applying pesticides to reduce dust," while avoiding "recommendations that would reduce the overall sales and profits for chemical makers."

Nor does the report express much urgency; it promises an "action plan [that] will outline major priorities to be addressed in the next 5-10 years."

Meanwhile, the European Commission's decisive action came amid what the Guardian called a "fierce behind-the-scenes campaign" to stop it from Syngenta and Bayer, the Europe-based chemical giants that market them. The move was prompted by a January report by the European Food Safety Authority, which identified "high acute risks" for bees from exposure to neonic-treated crops like corn and sunflower. And studies from independent researchers implicating neonics in declining bee health have mounted.

Even before the decision, France, Italy, Slovenia, and Bayer's home country, Germany, had all suspend use of the chemicals pending more research on bee health. Now neonics will face severe restriction in all 27 European Union countries for two-year period starting December 1, 2013, during which time the commission will continue its assessment of their impact.

The move trains a harsh light on the EPA, which approved the chemicals based on what its own scientists have called flawed research and is currently reviewing them in light of the threat to bees and other pollinators. Earlier this month, an agency spokesperson told CBS News that the review would take five years—meaning that they'll continue to be used widely on farmland in the US during that period. As I reported a while back, neonic-treated crops cover between 150 million to 200 million acres of farmland in the US each year—a land mass equivalent to as much as twice the size of California.

I contacted the EPA to ask whether the EC decision might speed the agency's timeline on reassessing neonics and their threat to bees. The response, in an emailed statement: "At this time, the data available to the EPA do not support a moratorium." The time frame for completing the reassessment remains in place, the statement added, with this caveat: "If at any time the EPA determines there are urgent human and/or environmental risks from pesticide exposures that require prompt attention, the agency will take appropriate regulatory action, regardless of the registration review status of that pesticide."

Yes, People Are Giving Their Pets Medical Marijuana

Josh Harkinson — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:00:10 +0000

Is it ever a good idea to get your dog or cat stoned? California veterinarian Doug Kramer says the answer depends on whether your pet could be classified as a medical marijuana patient.

"I do think there are therapeutic benefits to it," says Kramer, who some years ago found that his homemade pot tinctures helped his own dog, a husky named Nikita, fight pain and regain her appetite after she came down with cancer.

Despite the spread of medical pot laws around the country, marijuana still remains taboo within the veterinary establishment; its medical journals won't publish anything about it, and Kramer is one of the few veterinarians even willing to discuss using medical marijuana for pets. He points out that a slew of medical studies on the effects of pot have relied on rats and dogs as substitutes for humans, suggesting that "mammals have the same cannabinoid receptors as humans do" and "would benefit in the same ways."

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Scientists Use DNA From Poop to Track Rare Tigers

Kate Sheppard — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:59:05 +0000

Update: Kathmandu-based reporter Kashish Das Shrestha was also along on this reporting venture, and has published his story on the Tiger Genome Project on his website, Sustainable Nepal.

Bengal tigers can be elusive. They're classified as an endangered species, they're mostly nocturnal, and if they had their way, they wouldn't see many humans, either. Native to Southeast Asia, there are only an estimated 1,850 left in the wild. That makes counting them somewhat difficult—but researchers in Nepal have developed a system that they think will make it easier to figure out how many tigers live there. They're pulling genetic data out of their poop.

Founded in 2011, the Nepal Tiger Genome Project has collected more than a thousand scat samples from the southern part of the country known as the Terai Arc landscape, one of the last remaining tiger habitats on the earth. Not to get too graphic, but when tigers do their doo, it sloughs off some of their cells on the way out, from which scientists can extract DNA. The DNA allows the researchers to study and catalog the genetic material and to create a database of all the country's tigers.

Dibesh Karmacharya is the executive director of the project, which he runs through his biotechnology company, Intrepid Nepal, and the Center for Molecular Dynamics-Nepal, a research organization that he also directs. Karmacharya returned to Nepal after 14 years in the US working in biotech, and started the lab to focus mainly on molecular diagnostics for human diseases. The lab's work on the Tiger Genome Project brings together two things Karmacharya loves—animals and genetics. "I wanted to be a wildlife photographer," he told me in his office in Kathmandu last week. "I could never get a job doing wildlife in the US. I ended up getting a job in genetics, because that was my skill."

Dibesh Karmacharya, executive director of the Nepal Tiger Genome Project. Kate Sheppard

The wildlife genetics work started when the World Wildlife Fund asked the lab to help track snow leopards, a threatened species native to central Asia. After seeing the success of the snow leopard work, Karmacharya and several researchers from the US—Marcella Kelly, an associate professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Tech, and Lisette Waits, a professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife at the University of Idaho—proposed the Tiger Genome Project and secured a $270,000 grant from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to fund the initial work. (Full disclosure: I was in Nepal to help with a USAID-sponsored environmental reporting workshop.)

To gather the samples, the Tiger Genome Project sent surveyors—armed with specimen vials and field surveys for logging the GPS location, type of forest cover, and condition of the scat— into four national parks and the wildlife corridors that tigers are thought to use to pass between parks. Project leaders hoped to collect 700 samples, but the crew turned up 1,200 over the course of more than two months. "We collected a lot more shit than we thought we would," Karmacharya joked.

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You Won't Believe What's in Your Turkey Burger

Tom Philpott — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:00:14 +0000

More MoJo coverage of bacteria and health:

Are Happy Gut Bacteria Key to Weight Loss?

This Is Your Body on Microbes

Should You Take a Probiotic?

Poop Therapy: More Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Fecal Transplants

Can Antibiotics Make You Fat?

Antibiotics As Key to Curing Starvation

Why You Shouldn't Take Antibiotics for a Sinus Infection

Back in August 2011, the agribusiness giant Cargill recalled a stunning 36 million pounds of ground turkey tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella that had come from a single processing facility in Arkansas, a failure that eventually sickened 136 people and killed another. The company shut down the plant, tweaked its process (mainly by adding to and "intensifying" its system of spraying meat with antimicrobial fluid), and quickly reopened it. Within a month, the company had to recall another 108,000 pounds of ground turkey from the same plant, because it was infected with the same strain of superbug salmonella.

Have things gotten any cleaner in the world of Big Turkey since those events? Cargill says it has cleaned up its act, but recent research suggests that ground turkey still has an antibiotic-resistant-pathogen problem. The latest evidence comes from Consumer Reports, which has just published the results of testing it did on 257 samples of ground turkey picked up from retailers around the country, produced by a variety of processors, including Cargill. CR contacted Cargill with the results, and got the following response:

"As we've publicly stated over the past year and a half, no stone was left unturned in our efforts to determine the originating source of salmonella Heidelberg associated with the ground-turkey recalls, yet to this day we do not know the origin of the bacteria linked to outbreak of illnesses," said Mike Robach, vice president of corporate food safety and regulatory affairs for Cargill in Minneapolis. He provided a long list of steps that Cargill has taken since the outbreak to make its ground turkey safer.

Even so, the results of Consumer Reports' tests won't make you eager to order that next turkey burger: "More than half of the packages of raw ground meat and patties tested positive for fecal bacteria."

Overall, 90 percent of the samples tested by CR researchers carried at least one of the five bacteria they looked for—and "almost all" of the bacteria strains they found showed resistance to at least one antibiotic. The two fecal-related bacteria strains—enterococcus and E. coli—showed up the most frequently:

Consumer Reports

What's more, those bacteria tended to be superbugs—that is, resistant to at least one antibiotic:

Consumer Reports

You'll note from the above charts both good and bad news about salmonella, the source of that 2011 Cargill outbreak. Happily, salmonella was rare in the meat CR tested—just 12 samples contained it, or 5 percent of the total. Unhappily, though, the salmonella they did find tended to be of the superbug variety—eight of those samples carried salmonella resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics. And there's evidence of lingering problems at that Arkansas plant of Cargill's—one of the multiresistant salmonella strains came from there, CR reports.

Consumer Reports also tested samples of ground turkey labeled "organic," "no antibiotics" and "raised without antibiotics." (Under USDA code, meat labeled organic must come from animals that were never treated with antibiotics.) The bacterial strains that turned up in these products were much less likely to be antibiotic-resistant.

Consumer Reports

The Consumer Reports study comes on the heels of a troubling analysis of Food and Drug Administration meat-testing data performed by Environmental Working Group. Every year, the FDA randomly selects samples of meat from retailers, tests them for resistant bacteria, and publishes the results in a manner that's nearly indecipherable (try it yourself—latest report, released in February, is here). EWG slogged through the results (report here) and found that 81 percent of ground turkey samples contained traces of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

All of which shines a harsh spotlight on the FDA's "voluntary" approach to curbing antibiotic use on farms. Between 2003 and 2011, antibiotic use on US livestock farms soared from 20 million pounds per year to 30 million pounds—a jaw-dropping 50 percent leap. These facilities now suck in 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the United States. The great bulk of these drugs are used not to treat sick animals, but rather to make them grow faster and keep them alive until slaughter under tight, filthy conditions.

Meanwhile, there's the US Department of Agriculture's imminent plan to slash the number of inspectors it places on poultry-industry kill lines (chicken and turkey) while simultaneously allowing those same kill lines to be sped up.

Why Do Conservatives Like to Waste Energy?

Tim McDonnell — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 19:34:05 +0000

Back in 2011, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) declared war on energy-efficient light bulbs, calling "sustainability" the gateway into a dystopic, Big Brother-patrolled liberal hellscape. When the lights went off during Beyoncé's halftime set at the last Superbowl, conservative commentators from the Drudge Report to Michelle Malkin pointed blame (erroneously) at new power-saving measures at New Orleans' Superdome. And one recent study found that giving Republican households feedback on their power use actually encourages them to use more energy.

Why do conservatives, who should have a natural inclination toward conservation, have a beef with energy efficiency? It could be tied to the political polarization of the climate change debate.

A study out today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined attitudes about energy efficiency in liberals and conservatives, and found that promoting energy-efficient products and services on the basis of their environmental benefits actually turned conservatives off from picking them. The researchers first quizzed participants on how much they value various benefits of energy efficiency, including reducing carbon emissions, reducing foreign oil dependence, and reducing how much consumers pay for energy; cutting emissions appealed to conservatives the least.

The study then presented participants with a real-world choice: With a fixed amount of money in their wallet, respondents had to "buy" either an old-school light bulb or an efficient compact florescent bulb (CFL), the same kind Bachmann railed against. Both bulbs were labeled with basic hard data on their energy use, but without a translation of that into climate pros and cons. When the bulbs cost the same, and even when the CFL cost more, conservatives and liberals were equally likely to buy the efficient bulb. But slap a message on the CFL's packaging that says "Protect the Environment," and "we saw a significant drop-off in more politically moderates and conservatives choosing that option," said study author Dena Gromet, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

The chart below, from the report, shows how much liberals and conservatives value each argument for efficiency: While liberals (gray) valued all three equally, conservatives (white), were significantly less moved by and most at odds with liberals over the carbon-saving argument.

Courtesy Gromet

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