Author Archives: Laura Brown

Ted Cruz Really Hates Climate Change

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I dinged Ted Cruz for blathering about how he’d eliminate five cabinet departments. Big deal. The programs would just go elsewhere. Instead, tell me what programs you’d eliminate.

As it turns out, Cruz does have a list of programs he wants to get rid of. It’s really hard to find because his website is a horrific mess, but here it is:

  1. Climate Ready Water Utilities Initiative
  2. Climate Research Funding for the Office of Research and Development
  3. Climate Resilience Evaluation Awareness Tool
  4. Global Methane Initiative
  5. Green Infrastructure Program
  6. Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program
  7. New Starts Transit Program
  8. Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund
  9. Regulation of CO2 Emissions from Power Plants and all Sources
  10. Regulation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Vehicles
  11. Renewable Fuel Standard Federal Mandates
  12. UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
  13. UN Population Fund (abortion)
  14. USDA Catfish Inspection Program (genuinely wasteful)
  15. Appalachian Regional Commission (helps poor people)
  16. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Obama program)
  17. Corporation for Public Broadcasting (culture war)
  18. Corporation for Travel Promotion (???)
  19. Legal Services Corporation (helps poor people)
  20. National Endowment for the Arts (culture war)
  21. National Endowment for the Humanities (culture war)
  22. Presidential Election Campaign Fund (no one uses it anymore)
  23. Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation (???)
  24. Sugar Subsidies (anti-Rubio)
  25. Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (part of hated Obama stimulus program)

I’ve re-ordered this list to make clear just how much Cruz hates climate change. Nearly half of his cuts are to programs related to the environment or climate change. Cruz also wants to ditch some culture warrior stuff (arts, humanities, public broadcasting), some anti-liberal stuff (legal services, CFPB, TIGER), some anti-Rubio stuff (sugar subsidies), and some genuinely stupid stuff (USDA catfish inspection, a clever protectionist measure beloved of catfish-producing states).

So how much would this save? Cruz says $50 billion per year, but that seems pretty optimistic. The catfish thing, for example, costs $14 million, and lots of items on the list don’t cost the government anything. I suppose I could google all 25 of them and see what they add up to, but not today. My horseback guess, though, is maybe $10-20 billion.

I’ve tried to identify the reasons Cruz hates each of these programs, but I came up blank on two of them: travel promotion and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Maybe they’re genuinely wasteful. I’m not sure.

In any case, this is it. Cruz deserves credit for at least making a list, which is more than most candidates are willing to do. But will this actually save more than a tiny fraction of his stupendous tax cuts? Not a chance.

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Ted Cruz Really Hates Climate Change

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Fox’s Poll Cutoff for the Republican Debate Works Better Than Rachel Maddow Suggested Last Night

Mother Jones

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Last night Rachel Maddow invited Lee Miringoff, polling director for the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, to discuss the way Fox News is using polls to cut the Republican debate field down to ten candidates. Basically, both Maddow and Miringoff agreed that the whole thing was ridiculous because so many of the candidates on the right-hand tail were so close to each other. Is it really fair for a guy who polls at 3.2 percent to be on stage while a guy with 2.7 percent is kicked to the corner? After all, the margin of error is 3 percentage points. There might not really be any difference between the two.

For some reason, Miringoff didn’t push back on this. But he should have. There are two key bits of arithmetic they left out:

A typical poll has a 3 percent margin of error. But Fox News is averaging five polls. I don’t know precisely what the margin of error is in this case, but it’s probably somewhere around 1.5 percent.
The margin of error goes down as you go farther out on the tails. If you have two candidates polling 51-49, you can use the standard margin of error. But for candidates polling at 2 or 3 percent? It’s roughly half the midpoint margin of error.

Put these two together, and the true margin of error for all the also-rans is something like 0.7 percentage points. This doesn’t entirely negate Maddow’s point, since the difference between 10th and 11th place might still be less than that. But it does mean the results are a lot less random than she suggested. Assuming Fox does its poll averaging correctly, there’s actually a pretty good chance that the top ten really are the top ten.

That said, I wouldn’t do the debate this way either. I’d rank all the candidates using the polling average, and then have one debate with all the even-numbered candidates and a second debate with all the odd-numbered candidates. Make it a 3-hour show with 90 minutes given to each group. What’s so hard about that?

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Fox’s Poll Cutoff for the Republican Debate Works Better Than Rachel Maddow Suggested Last Night

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Why Bill Nye Won the Creationism Debate Last Night

Mother Jones

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They warned Bill Nye not to do it. Not to go into the hokey museum of the America’s leading Young Earth creationist, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, and try to reason with the guy.

Evolution defenders have long turned down such high-profile public debates, of the sort that creationists yearn for. The logic is simple: It puts creationism on an equal footing with real science; and once you’ve done that, the creationist has already, in effect, won.

But something funny happened on the way to disaster last night at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Sure, creationist leader Ken Ham got the opportunity to appear before a huge audience (some 750,000 people were tuned in simultaneously at one moment in the debate; the total number of viewers is surely much higher). He got to show he was likable, and play a lot of well-produced videos featuring people with Ph.D.s or scientific training who nonetheless embrace creationism. In all likelihood, then, Ham gained some followers last night. And he definitely got some priceless advertising for his museum.

Yet it came at the cost of being trounced by Nye, who managed to show not only how downright absurd Young Earth creationist beliefs are (noting, for instance, that there is a 9,550-year-old tree in Sweden that is itself several thousand years older than Ham thinks the Earth is), but to demonstrate the extreme nature of Ham’s brand of creationism. In one of the best lines of the night, Nye emphasized that “billions” of religious people around the world accept science, adding, “the exception is you, Mr. Ham.”

Most of all, Nye allowed Ham to undermine himself before the audience. By in effect preaching, rather than sticking to scientific assertions, Ham demonstrated what we’ve always known about creationism, and what many canny anti-evolutionists have sought to conceal: It’s a religious doctrine, not a scientific one. When asked what kind of evidence would change his mind in the question and answer phase of the debate, Ham basically had no answer. “The answer to that question is, I’m a Christian,” said Ham. “And as a Christian, I can’t prove it to you, but God has definitely shown me very clearly through his word, and shown himself in the person of Jesus Christ, the Bible is the word of God. I admit that that’s where I start from.”

The picture of a dogmatist, holding out against all evidence for an Earth that’s somehow supposed to be only a few thousand years old, where somehow all plant life survived being inundated for months by Noah’s flood, shone through.

To be sure, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Nye, who in his 30-minute presentation at the outset of the debate laid out a host of facts and scientific details (about the ages of limestone, bristlecone pine trees, air trapped in ice cores, and much else) without articulating a clear message. Early in the debate, Nye’s strategy seemed to be to simply show why Ham’s brand of creationism is intellectually absurd, even as Nye himself played the role of a “reasonable man” (a phrase he repeated often) who found it all just too much to swallow.

Yet this approach likely failed to touch the audience emotionally by showing, for instance, what a threat creationism is to our kids’ education, and what an affront it is to the many serious religious believers around the world who don’t see any need to pit science and faith against each other. Instead, Nye piled on facts. Or as the moderator, CNN’s Tom Foreman, put it when Nye finished, “That’s a lot to take in.”

But as the evening wore on, Nye proved he was better off the cuff than when he was formally presenting. And he started to land a different sort of punch, repeatedly emphasizing the threat to US competitiveness from creationism-infused education, and Young Earth creationism’s exclusionary nature. “There are billions of people around the world who are religious and accept science,” Nye emphasized repeatedly. Meanwhile, Ham appeared increasingly dogmatic, simply banishing from the realm of “observational science” (as he defined it) anything that would tell us how old the Earth is, or what happened there before modern humans could directly observe it.

And then, well, there were the lions. Ham’s particular theology requires him to believe that before Noah’s flood, all the animals were vegetarians. “I have not spent a lot of time with lions, but I can tell they have teeth that really aren’t set up for broccoli,” Nye countered.

“Just because an animal has sharp teeth, it doesn’t mean it’s a meat eater, it means it has sharp teeth,” Ham answered, unbelievably.

Brian Malow, the science comedian, had fun with this one:

In the end, the most important thing about this debate, which drew dramatic attention, is that it was thoroughly disruptive of the evolution-creationism status quo. We’ve been in a rut in this battle for too long, with school boards and lawmakers continuing their stealth anti-evolution attacks (rarely admitting, as Ham so plainly did, that they’re driven by religion) even as scientists wring their hands about American anti-intellectualism from the safety of their college towns.

Last night, in contrast, it all hung out. We saw what Young Earth creationists really, really think. They believe in vegetarian lions and an Earth younger than its oldest-living tree. And for most Americans, there’s just no way that makes any sense.

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Why Bill Nye Won the Creationism Debate Last Night

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National Review Lets Its Freak Flag Fly

Mother Jones

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National Review is being sued by climate scientist Michael Mann for defamation. In a blog post at The Corner last year, Mark Steyn quoted Rand Simberg calling Mann the “Jerry Sandusky of climate science” (both are from Penn State); wrote that Mann was “the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph”; and concluded that “his ‘investigation’ by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.” (The “investigation” cleared Mann of any wrongdoing.)

A judge recently ruled that Mann’s suit could go forward. I’m personally a little uneasy about this, since I’d normally think of Steyn’s post as hyperbolic and stupid, but still fair comment on a public figure. It’s a close call, though. I suspect Mann will lose his case, but that’s for a jury to decide now.

Today, though, I read this blog post over at NRO asking for money to help them with their defense:

One readers supports NRO with $50 and this note:

I have followed the catastrophic global warming argument since I retired in 2007. In a few years it will be seen as the greatest “scientific” scam of all time. Best wishes on your court case, and glad to help.

….And another reader, sends $200 in support and this:

Have tried in past to support, fully agree with your efforts here. As a chemical engineer, I have been looking at “global warming” for over a decade. Such nonsense.

Questioning climate science is one thing, and National Review has done plenty of that. But I’m still a little surprised that apparently they aren’t embarrassed at having readers who believe that global warming is “the greatest scientific scam of all time.” Or, as the chemical engineer puts it, “nonsense.” In fact, NR is so far from being embarrassed that they put these letters front and center on their website as a call to arms.

Wasn’t there a time when a serious publication would quietly bury correspondence like this? Sure, every magazine has some lunatic readers, but you generally want your public face to be a little more serious. The stuff you publish should at least have the veneer of respectability.

Either that’s hopelessly old-fashioned thinking, or else National Review really does believe that climate change is just flatly a scientific scam. I guess I don’t read them closely enough to know which. But I was still a little taken aback that they seem actively proud to trumpet stuff like this. Shouldn’t they be leaving this kind of thing in Glenn Beck’s capable hands?

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National Review Lets Its Freak Flag Fly

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Caught on Film: The Dark World of Truck Stop Sex Workers

Mother Jones

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“The truth is, making the movie was a really traumatic experience. I suspect I may have developed some mild PTSD.” This is how filmmaker Alexander Perlman describes shooting Lot Lizard, his hypnotic new documentary about truck stop prostitution. While his claim might sound hyperbolic—or like a canny bit of marketing—it rings true: He logged thousands of miles and hundreds of hours to make the film, braving roach motels, crack highs, and homicidal pimps. Indeed, what Perlman captures in Lot Lizard is visceral and harrowing.

The film’s three protagonists—Betty, Monica, and Jennifer—work on the fringes of the trucking industry. America’s Independent Truckers’ Association estimates there are nearly 5,000 truck stops across the country, and although many offer nondescript places to sleep, eat, or shower, many others host a bustling shadow economy of sex and drugs. Lurk on truckers’ online message boards long enough and you’ll likely come across what amounts to a guide to interstate sex, replete with lurid tall tales (see here, here, and here).

A police intervention program in Texas that works?

Life on the road, they say, is lonely. To quote one trucker in Lot Lizard: “These walls close in on you. Being in this truck can actually make you crazy.” As Perlman discovered, however, the women—and, occasionally, men—who cater to this loneliness don’t fare much better. Betty and Monica are addicted to crack, Monica is homeless when she’s not crashing with friends or sympathetic drivers, and both are entangled in dysfunctional relationships. “I can feel money,” Betty says, a kind of human divining rod, and yet she spends most of the film desperately searching for just that.

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Caught on Film: The Dark World of Truck Stop Sex Workers

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A Tiny Little Peek Inside the FISA Court

Mother Jones

Eric Lichtblau managed to get a few administration officials to open up—slightly—about just what kind of rulings the secret FISA court has handed down over the past decade. Among other things, there’s this:

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.

The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

Is this legit? There’s no way to know because the FISA court’s rulings are secret, and the presiding judge is afraid that the public might be misled if redacted versions of the rulings were released. So for now, anyway, we just have to take their word for it that all their rulings are models of statutory interpretation.

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A Tiny Little Peek Inside the FISA Court

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Seattle adopts plan for going carbon neutral — but will pot growers get in the way?

Seattle adopts plan for going carbon neutral — but will pot growers get in the way?

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Holyhikaru

Seattle’s climate ambitions are thiiiis big.

Seattle has set itself an 86-page to-do list to help it reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

The city council on Monday voted unanimously to adopt the 2013 Seattle Climate Action Plan [PDF], which outlines a detailed process designed to achieve the heady goal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions to zero in less than 40 years.

The council originally set its carbon-neutrality goal in 2011. Following work by consultants and staff, the city now has a plan laying out how that goal can be turned into reality. Next comes the hard part: actually doing all the climate-friendly stuff.

“While I’m pleased that Council adopted the Plan, we know the real work is just beginning,” said Jill Simmons, director of the city’s Office of Sustainability & Environment.

From an explainer piece published last month by The Seattle Times:

The plan will almost certainly be expensive. It calls for new funding to improve and expand bus service, to build the infrastructure to make it safer to walk or bike around, and to build out the region’s light-rail system, all to reduce the approximately 40 percent of greenhouse gases that comes from cars and trucks.

The plan also calls for making energy use more visible to consumers through smart meters and energy audits that could improve the largest and least efficient commercial and multifamily buildings. The city also could require energy-use disclosures when houses or apartments are rented or sold.

There is not yet a cost estimate, but ideas to pay for the plan include a 1.5 percent motor-vehicle excise tax, a renewed Bridging the Gap levy and other local funding that would be less regressive than the failed $60 car-tab fees.

Simmons’ office will finalize an implementation plan by October, identifying the specific roles that each of the city’s departments will play in reaching carbon neutrality.

But Washington state’s recent legalization of dope could hamper the city’s climate plan — not because its officials are too stoned to do the challenging jobs entrusted to them, but because indoor pot growers are massive energy hogs. From KUOW radio:

The City Council is also looking at zoning rules to allow indoor marijuana growing in Seattle. [Seattle City Council Member Mike] O’Brien said for him, that’s not compatible with addressing climate change.

“The idea that we’re going to take agriculture that traditionally grows outside using sunlight for energy and put that inside buildings and use electricity or other fuels to fuel growing — that creates a big problem for me,” he said.

A study last year in the Journal of Energy Policy found growing marijuana indoors currently sucks up the same amount of energy as two million average American homes. It also found that the industry generates greenhouse gases equivalent to that of three million cars.

O’Brien wants growers to strive for carbon neutrality, although he doesn’t know what that would look like at this point. One way to reduce energy consumption would be to grow marijuana outdoors.

Take heed, Seattle stoners: Help your city go green and carbon neutral by insisting on outdoor bud.

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

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Seattle adopts plan for going carbon neutral — but will pot growers get in the way?

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Today in Grandstanding Senators

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The Economist’s Jon Fasman reports on the latest political pandering from a member of the Greatest Deliberative Body On Earth:

On Wednesday David Vitter (pictured), a Republican senator from Louisiana, proposed—and the Senate agriculture committee accepted—an amendment to the farm bill that would, in Mr Vitter’s words, “prohibit convicted murderers, rapists and pedophiles from receiving food stamps.” It’s not hard to see why this amendment passed. All Mr Vitter needed to do was propose it []. Then the tacit question arises: Does anyone in this chamber want to stand up and say that taxpayers should feed murderers, rapists and pedophiles? No? Of course not.

This is revolting. It obviously has no fiscal impact worth mentioning, and just as clearly does nothing to reduce the future rate of murder, rape, or pedophilia. It’s just pure political grandstanding from a guy who knows an amendment like this will play well with the rubes back home. It’s a mindless glorification of barbarism for the sake of a few votes.

If you think the current sentencing standards for murder, rape, and pedophilia are too lenient, then lobby to change them. Until then, though, anyone who’s released from prison is someone who’s done their time and paid their debt. Their punishment at the hands of the justice system is sufficient. They don’t deserve more at the hands of every showboating senator with his next election on his mind.

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Today in Grandstanding Senators

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The Michele Bachmann Campaign Probe, Explained

Mother Jones

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Last Friday, news broke that the FBI is investigating allegations that the 2012 presidential campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) violated federal laws by not disclosing payments to an Iowa state senator, improperly coordinated with her PAC, and tried to silence whistleblowing staffers. Bachmann has responded by pointing out that the allegations, which first surfaced in January, don’t directly accuse her of any wrongdoing. Still, some political observers believe that the allegations could spell the end her Congressional career when she faces off against the same Democrat she narrowly defeated in 2012.

How did this all begin? In January, Peter Waldron, Bachmann’s former national field coordinator, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. Waldron, a Florida evangelist who did outreach work to Christian conservatives for Bachmann in Iowa, alleged that her campaign violated federal statutes in five separate incidents:

Deliberately concealing monthly payments of about $7,500 to Bachmann’s former Iowa chairman, Republican state Sen. Kent Sorenson, over the course of about seven months, in an attempt to dodge a state ethics rule prohibiting senators from doing paid campaign work. Waldron alleged that Bachmann’s political action committee, Michele PAC, funneled undisclosed payments to Sorenson through the fundraising firm C&M Strategies (PDF).
Improperly using Michele PAC to pay C&M Strategies $40,000 for consulting work while the firm’s owner, Guy Short, served as Bachmann’s national political director in the two months leading up to the Iowa caucuses. PACs can’t get involved in actual campaigns. Short responded to the allegation by claiming that he was simply a campaign volunteer and was paid separately for his consulting work.
Improperly coordinating with the National Fiscal Conservative PAC to set up TV and radio ad buys. The National Fiscal Conservative PAC is a so-called hybrid PAC that combines a super-PAC and traditional PAC provided they keep their fiscal affairs separate. The super-PAC part can raise unlimited funds but is prohibited from using them to coordinate with a candidate’s campaign.
Violating whistleblower protection laws. In July 2012, former campaign staff member Barb Heki filed a lawsuit against Bachmann and campaign aides, including Short and Sorenson, alleging that Sorenson stole an email list of Christian home-school advocates from her private computer to use for the campaign. As of January, several firms and former campaign staff, including Heki, said they had not been fully reimbursed for their work on the campaign. Waldron believes that Heki may have not been paid in retaliation for her lawsuit.
“Extortion.” When Waldron asked Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, to help resolve the issue of unpaid staff, the campaign responded by having those staff members sign non-disclosure forms requiring them to consult with campaign lawyers before talking to police or other lawyers about campaign activities. That, Waldron suggested, amounted to an effort to sabotage Heki’s lawsuit and criminal complaint.

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The Michele Bachmann Campaign Probe, Explained

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Green infrastructure for an eco-friendly world

Green infrastructure is an eco friendly medium of storing and managing the storm water by the process that was used earlier by nature. These processes has been used and maintained by the nature ever since it was created.

Why green infrastructure?

With the development of structures and buildings in a habitable area, the systems occurring naturally to handle storm water have been greatly disturbed. Roads were built, buildings came up and the soil was compacted by equipments used in construction. A result of these activities was that the amount and extent of soil that could allow storm water to drain was greatly reduced. Only about 2-3 percent of rain that fell on a particular area flowed in the surface area.

Since less amount of the rain water is absorbed by the soil many other problems has raised. The most important of all is the erosion which provides threat to the stream banks and the foundations of the buildings. However these kinds of the problems are saved by process of costly shoring. Problems like accumulation of accumulation of water on the electricity workings of the buildings and flooding of the roads have also come up.

To counter act these problems, green infrastructure concept has been put in practice. Green infrastructure was developed in mid nineties in USA to tackle the increasingly severe issues concerning storm water. Storm water also called non-point source water is the biggest source of water pollution in USA.

50 years back the rain water was collected and taken to faraway place through a network of pipes. In modern times Green Infrastructure has replaced this obsolete method.

Elements of Green infrastructure

To manage storm water, green infrastructure use vegetation. In addition, the storm water source itself is examined. The two green infrastructure elements are —downspout extensions and Rain gardens and bioswales.

The greatest source of storm water is rain falling on rooftops. Many rooftops presently have a storm water collection system with downspouts and gutters. However, in some cases, the downspouts connect to pipes that surface on a downgrade and storm water drains into adjacent properties. In some other cases, the collected storm water drains onto road ways and driveways.

But with the downspout system the collected rainwater is drained onto the nearest rain garden. It is the simplest and the cost effective way to deal with rainwater.

Rain-gardens and bioswales are lower in elevation than areas surrounding them. The soil is so engineered that it allows rain water to percolate through several soil and gravel layers. The rain-garden or bioswales captures rain water and even filters it reducing storm water runoff and pollution.

The rain gardens and bioswales are placed close to the structure that produces storm water. Native plants are used for vegetation. The vegetation in the rain garden retains the soil’s permeability. They are designed in such a way to capture 1 inch rainfall completely.

A lot of positive thinking, with productive planning and tremendous effort the idea of the green infrastructure projects have come into being. It has also been proved to be comparatively less expensive and simpler than the other methods of the environment conservation.

Find out more about Environmental Consulting Insurance here and how Beacon Hill Associates can help you.

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