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Somebody in Trump’s cabinet came out in favor of carbon pricing?

by mohammedreber18 Posted on February 25, 2020

Trump’s agriculture secretary managed to alarm lots of rural conservatives and White House staffers when he broke with the administration last week to say that farmers would make money if the government did what economists, think tanks, and some old-school Republicans have been clamoring for — putting a price on carbon.

“If it is a social goal and social priority there, then let’s put a price over carbon emissions,” Sonny Perdue told reporters. “And I think you can really see farmers show out in their carbon sequestration efforts.”

The biggest farm-lobbying group, the Farm Bureau, has long opposed any carbon-pricing plans. But it has warmed a bit to the idea that farmers might benefit: In January the conservative lobbying group voted to support research on carbon-storing soils, and “unbiased science-based research on climate change.”

Perdue’s apparent break with White House orthodoxy had the executive-branch’s flaks scrambling to spin the story. Perdue couldn’t possibly have proposed that the government put a price on carbon emissions, they said, because President Donald Trump opposes that. Instead, he was simply pointing out that farmers could win: “If the free market puts a value on carbon,” an Agriculture Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.

Oh, okaaaaay. It’s unclear how the free market would impose a price on carbon pollution, but sure. Putting aside the spin, was Perdue right? Would farmers benefit if we put a price on carbon? It’s a worthwhile question with agriculture responsible for about 9 percent of the greenhouse gasses emitted in the United States.

Back in 2009, when Congress came close to passing a climate bill, scholars were asking these same questions. One of the people to do the math was economist Bruce Babcock, then at Iowa State, and now a professor at the University of California at Riverside. Babcock calculated that a carbon price would drive up the cost of propane farmers use to dry their corn the diesel that fuels their tractors, and the nitrogen fertilizer spread on their fields. But all those costs could be wiped out if farmers were paid for storing carbon in soil.

A price of $20 per ton of carbon dioxide would increase an Iowa farmer’s costs by about $4.50 an acre, while no-till farming could earn that farmer $8.00 per acre, Babcock calculated. So farmers wind up netting $3.50 thanks to a carbon tax.

The basic math still applies today, but a couple dollars an acre probably wouldn’t convince farmers to make major changes, Babcock said. “A more productive way would be to convince them they have a private benefit from better soil health. Improving soil is the best investment they can do, and carbon is an indicator of healthy soil.”

It always depends on the individual farm, but most would be able to adapt to a price on carbon emissions. But adapting to climate change is a different story. “Given how much irrigated agriculture in the West relies on consistent mountain snowfall and Corn Belt agriculture relies on warm summers with abundant rainfall, any disruptive change in climate will have a far greater impact on livelihoods than will the price of carbon,” Babcock wrote.

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Somebody in Trump’s cabinet came out in favor of carbon pricing?

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Guess who’s hiding again? Oregon Republicans hoping to squash a climate bill.

by Jurgen5242 Posted on February 25, 2020

When it came time to vote on a bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions in the Oregon Senate on Monday, the Republican state senators’ chairs were empty. All of them except state Senator Tim Knopp of Bend had run away from Salem in an attempt to kill Oregon’s cap-and-trade bill. Again.

That left Democrats one senator short of the 20 they need to hold a vote, effectively putting the state government on pause. If signed into law, the legislation would make Oregon the second state in the country after California to adopt a cap-and-trade program. But that would require bringing Republicans back to Salem.

It’s the third walkout by Oregon Republicans in 10 months: the first for a business tax to raise money for Oregon schools, and the second for the vote on the cap-and-trade bill last June, which ended up lacking enough Democratic support to pass.

“Frankly, the entire world is watching,” Governor Kate Brown said in a news conference on Monday. “We need to get this done now. The votes are there to pass it straight up.”

Brown said she had “bent over backwards” to make compromises with the Senate Republicans. “They’re adults,” she said. “They need to come back to the building. They need to do the jobs they were elected to do. And instead, they’re taking a taxpayer-funded vacation.”

There are still two weeks left of the 35-day legislative session — and if one of the senators comes back, it’ll be enough to hold a vote.

The Senate Republicans have been threatening to walk out for weeks, arguing that Democrats were refusing to compromise with them on the cap-and-trade bill, which is opposed by some odd bedfellows. The logging industry argues that it would raise fuel costs, threatening a compromise the industry had made with the state’s environmental groups. Climate activists with Portland’s Sunrise Movement oppose the cap-and-trade policy, arguing that it isn’t strict enough.

Despite Oregon’s reputation as a green state, a fact sheet from the Northwest-based Climate Solutions shows that it’s falling behind on taking steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Though other states have passed policies to put a price on carbon, raised fuel standards, and committed to a timeline for running on totally clean electricity, Oregon is not among them. If the state government doesn’t do something soon, according to Climate Solutions, Oregon won’t be able to meet its own emissions goals for 2020.

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Guess who’s hiding again? Oregon Republicans hoping to squash a climate bill.

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How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake news

by bpyroyal959013 Posted on February 7, 2020

The world has known about the dangers of climate change for decades — so why are oil and gas companies still drilling for crude as if there’s no tomorrow? There’s no simple answer. But any explanation would have to give some credit to the wizards of public relations. For more than a century, these spinmasters downplayed misdeeds, twisted facts, and cajoled the media into mimicking their talking points.

“A lot of what we have as PR today, in general, was built in service of the fossil fuel industry,” said Amy Westervelt, the host of Drilled, billed as “a true-crime podcast about climate change.” The first season of Drilled investigated the history of climate denial, and the second looked at the West Coast crabbers suing Big Oil for contributing to warmer oceans and throwing the marine food web out of whack. In the latest season launched last month, Westervelt introduces the “Mad Men of Climate Denial” — the publicists who coached the fossil fuel industry how to shape public opinion over the past century.

Creating a cloud of confusion around established science is one of their well-known tactics. Exxon and the coal industry knew about global warming as early as the 1960s; instead of telling the public, they spread doubt about the science behind it. That’s just one facet of the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda machine. (“Propaganda” might seem too strong of a word, but Westervelt says it’s the very definition: “a one-sided message with the aim of shifting public opinion or policy.”) Digging through archives, presidential libraries, and old PR books, Westervelt found the pushy executives, manipulative schmoozers, and “inventive” storytellers who made it work.

“People are largely unaware that there’s a massive system running underneath everything,” Westervelt said in an interview with Grist. “A lot of the ideas they have about the fossil fuel industry and even the language they use has been crafted very carefully by the industry itself.”

She takes us on a wild journey from a turn-of-the-century massacre in Colorado coal country to the messaging strategy of, yes, Nazi Germany, telling the stories of the people who worked to boost oil’s image and how their experiences taught them to influence the media, politicians, and the courts. Here are just a handful of the wild strategies they came up with, all still in use.

Fake news: “Fake news” proliferates on the internet today, a plague of modern life with a long pedigree. You can trace it back to Ivy Ledbetter Lee, often called the father of modern public relations. In the early 1900s, Lee was tasked with rehabilitating the public image of the tycoon John D. Rockefeller. His company, Standard Oil, had brutally stamped out a workers strike at a Colorado coal mine in 1913, setting tents on fire and spraying their camp with machine guns. Lee crafted a story to smooth things over, claiming that the strikers were actually plants hired by a labor union, and that the whole thing had been orchestrated by Mother Jones, a famous labor organizer (he also made up that she ran a nearby brothel). “What are facts anyway but my interpretation of what happened?” Lee said later on.

Corporate philanthropy: Lee’s coverup went so well that Rockefeller kept him on board for the rest of his life. In addition to inventing the press release (imagine, the newspaper prints your version of the story word for word!), Lee prodded Rockefeller to donate to charitable causes, like museums, to burnish his reputation. The approach gained traction as other robber barons realized that they, too, could be remembered as kindly philanthropists. The arts are now soaked with oil money — and with their names emblazoned on art museum walls and festivals signs, corporations get a similar reputational boost.

Herb Schmertz and Sheila O’Malley Fuchs attend a party at the Parrish Art Museum in 2007. Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Astroturfing: What better way to counter grassroots activists than to fake your own grassroots group? This practice, called “astroturfing,” was the brainchild of Daniel Edelman, a PR whiz who advised Mobil Oil, Big Tobacco, and many other companies in the mid-20th century. There are now hundreds of fake front groups backed by oil-funded lobbying groups like the Western States Petroleum Association, said Christine Arena, former vice president of the firm Edelman (yes, named after Daniel), in the podcast. They go by friendly names like “California Drivers Alliance” or “Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy.”

False equivalence: Herb Schmertz, who advised Mobil starting in the 1960s, took an aggressive stance toward the press. He’d attack any journalist or outlet critical of his company, arguing that they weren’t hearing Mobil’s side of the story, and then watch them overcorrect in the next edition. The approach eventually expanded to demanding airtime for climate deniers. One study looking at climate change articles in major U.S. outlets between 1988 and 2002 found that more than half of them presented climate science and fringe, Big Oil-friendly theories as equivalent. “It took a while for newspapers to realize that this was not a great way to go,” Westervelt said.

It seems like many in the media have decided to stop playing along. And there are other signs that the tide is turning against the oil industry. Once the world’s most valuable company, Exxon’s stock has dropped by a third over the last five years, wiping away nearly $200 billion in market value. Jim Cramer, the loudmouth host of CNBC’s Mad Money, recently said that it’s time to ditch oil stocks. Even public relations companies are now taking their services elsewhere.

“As soon as an industry starts to get an irretrievably bad image, the PR folks start dropping off, and the industry has to find somebody else to do this stuff,” Westervelt said. She said she has seen oil companies turn to more obscure consulting groups, like FGI Consulting and the DCI group, to do their PR work.

The fossil fuel industry is starting to move away from publicly denying the facts about climate change (which isn’t working as well these days) and back toward pro-oil, all-American messaging, like the new ads from the American Petroleum Institute that tout oil and natural gas as “energy progress.” If only Big Oil was as good at cutting greenhouse gas emissions as it was at marketing.

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How the oil industry pumped Americans full of fake news

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Climate change helped spawn East Africa’s locust crisis

by MadonnaDeshotel Posted on January 28, 2020

An alien species visiting Earth in the year 2020 would be forgiven for assuming that humankind had succeeded in pissing off some kind of vengeful God. This month alone, mega-wildfires ripped through Australia, massive king tides swept California shorelines, and, now, billions of desert locusts have descended on East Africa in an insect storm of biblical proportions. But climate change, not an angry deity, is to blame.

East Africa had an unusually wet year in 2019 — warming waters in the Indian Ocean produced a high number of tropical cyclones, which doused the coast and created “exceptional” conditions for locust breeding, Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker told the Associated Press. Now, swarms of hungry insects are feasting on crops in the Horn of Africa, where millions of people already lack reliable access to nutritious food.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says a swarm the size of Paris can gobble up as much grub as half the population of France. To make matters worse, desert locusts can travel up to 80 miles a day and multiply at terrifying speeds. Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, the FAO said, are dealing with swarms of “unprecedented size and destructive potential.” Kenya plans to spend $5 million to curtail the worst locust invasion it’s had in 70 years. Meanwhile, the FAO is asking wealthier nations to take urgent action and calling for $70 million in emergency funding. The problem, the organization says, could quickly spread to other parts of East Africa.

Pictures from the ground show the extent of the burgeoning crisis. If these desert locusts aren’t reined in soon, the FAO says, swarms could grow 400 times bigger by the beginning of summer.

Invading locusts spring into flight from ground vegetation as young girls in traditional Samburu-wear run past to their cattle at Larisoro village near Archers Post. TONY KARUMBA / AFP via Getty Images

Swarms of desert locusts fly above trees in Katitika village, Kitui county, Kenya. AP Photo / Ben Curtis

A swarm of locusts aggregates on the canopies of shrubs at Lerata village near Archers Post in Samburu county, approximately 186 miles north of kenyan capital, Nairobi. TONY KARUMBA / AFP via Getty Images

Locusts swarm from ground vegetation as people approach at Lerata village, near Archers Post in Samburu county. TONY KARUMBA / AFP via Getty Image

Locusts swarm across a highway at Lerata village, near Archers Post in Samburu county. TONY KARUMBA / AFP via Getty Images

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Climate change helped spawn East Africa’s locust crisis

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Here’s why Australia is having a cataclysmic wildfire season

by Georgin3763 Posted on November 12, 2019

California isn’t the only place with wildfire woes this year. Weeks before the start of summer, southern Australia is ablaze with some of the most ferocious early-season wildfires the continent has ever seen. This week, a “catastrophic” fire warning was declared in the greater Sydney and Hunter Valley areas. Almost 4,000 square miles of land has gone up in flames, 150 homes have burned down, and at least three people have died.

On Sunday, the New South Wales Fire Service announced the fire threat on Monday would be “worse than originally forecast” — prompting New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian to declare a state of emergency for the next week.

In mid-October, the New South Wales fire service already saw signs of an unusually intense fire season. “It’s important to remember that this is no ordinary bush fire season and we can’t afford to have anyone think this is just another year,” said the fire service’s commissioner in a press release at the time.

This isn’t the first time the dry state has gone up in flames. In 2013, a similar state of emergency was declared when the Blue Mountains were ablaze. But this year is certainly worse than usual, and the reason has to do with climate change. Rising temperatures don’t create fire out of thin air, but they can make wildfires a whole lot worse.

Since 1910, Australia has warmed by a little more than 1 degree C. And crucially, rainfall between the summer months of April to October has decreased by 11 percent in the southeast portion of Australia since 1970. Between May and July — the winter season — rainfall has decreased by roughly 20 percent. Monday might be the first day in recorded history that nary a drop of rain fell anywhere on the Australian mainland — a development that had the weather nerds at the country’s Bureau of Meteorology scratching their heads, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

“Australia has had a nasty combination of very, very dry conditions and also very warm conditions across the last several months,” Dr. John Abatzoglou, associate professor of earth systems at the University of Idaho, told Grist. “It’s essentially primed a lot of the fuels there to basically be receptive to carrying fires.”

Though the tree species native to Australia are different from the ones seen in the United States, Abatzoglou said, “The recipe for fires in Australia very much mirrors what we see in some of the forests we have here in the western U.S.” The seasons may be backward in the Land Down Under, but the wildfires act the same.

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Here’s why Australia is having a cataclysmic wildfire season

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Grab your apocalypse bag — it’s fire season in California

by BrockCecil Posted on October 29, 2019

It’s officially fire season in California. Dry winds rush in from the desert to the east, smoke turns midday to twilight, people hurry from place to place in facemasks, and the electricity goes out.

That’s been the story for the last three years. The risk of wildfires has always been high in the fall when the wind that usually carries cooling fog from the ocean into the interior reverses course. But it has never been so consistently bad. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but behind it all is a warming climate that’s killing trees, drying out brush, and turning bad behaviour into disasters.

Meteorologists predicted the dangerously dry weather a few days in advance, and Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, let customers know that it would be turning off power to guard against windblown branches crashing into power lines. I was visiting my parents in Nevada City, a 3-hour drive east of my home in the Bay Area, when the lights went out on Saturday. The kids delighted at the novelty of it We set jugs of water by the sinks and made our way to bed by lamplight. In the morning, despite protests from the children, my father fired up the noisy generator he had hooked up to his propane tank, so we could do the dishes, cool the refrigerator, and check the news.

In Southern California, people grabbed their “apocalypse bags” of pre-packed necessities and made their way through jammed roads out of harm’s way. Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and basketball star LeBron James were among the evacuees. James had to try four hotels before he found one with room for his family.

The search for housing was tougher in Northern California wine country, where evacuations from the Kincade fire have forced some 200,000 people out of their homes. People have been sleeping in churches and fairgrounds. Officials ordered mandatory evacuations from an area stretching from the active fire east of Highway 101 all the way to the Pacific Ocean as 70 mile-per-hour winds whipped the flames to the west. Some of the houses rebuilt since the 2017 fires may burn again. The smoke was dangerously thick in many parts of wine country, but farmworkers were still out picking grapes.

Many of the schools in the Bay Area closed, and those closest to the fire will be shut all week. More than 100,000 students stayed home Monday around Los Angeles. Firefighters worked to contain the Getty Fire in west Los Angeles, in anticipation of the most severe winds so far this year. PG&E expects to cut power to more than half a million customers on Tuesday and Wednesday.

On Sunday, when I surveyed routes for driving home, I found my options were limited. To the west, the Kinkade Fire was swallowing more of wine country. To the east, a handful of small fires were blazing. And in the middle, a wall of fire had engulfed the Carquinez Bridge, closing Interstate 80, our usual path home. We waited for hours. Fortunately, firefighters quickly put out most of the new fires, I-80 reopened, and we slipped home Sunday evening, gawping at smoking black patches on either side of the road.

The winds have calmed here in the Bay Area, but it’s only temporary. The weather is supposed to turn incendiary again by Wednesday. It’s just what Californians have come to expect. After all, it’s fire season.

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Grab your apocalypse bag — it’s fire season in California

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New study helps regions find their renewable energy soul mates

by xaviernicolay02 Posted on October 29, 2019

The climate crisis is an intricate and multifaceted problem, but by now most of us understand the essence of the thing: emissions bad, renewables good. A new study from Harvard’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment puts a fresh twist on that well-worn equation. Turns out, it’s not enough to grab a handful of renewable energy projects from a clean energy grab-bag and scatter them across the United States like wildflower seeds. Where you put new renewable energy infrastructure is even more important than what kind of renewable you’re dealing with.

By looking at a number of variables in 10 regions across the U.S. and the costs and operational requirements of three types of renewables — utility-scale solar, rooftop solar, and wind power — the study’s authors were able to figure out which region stands to gain the most from which kind of renewable. Kind of like OkCupid but for geography and renewable energy compatibility. The researchers took into account the amount of existing dirty fossil fuel developments in those regions, because implementing renewable energy would replace those power plants and result in more emissions reductions. Here’s what they found:

The Upper Midwest, Lower Midwest, Rocky Mountains, Northwest, and Great Lakes regions stand to experience the greatest reductions in CO2 by replacing coal with clean energy. In terms of public health, the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest regions, followed by the Lower Midwest, saw the greatest hypothetical benefits.
In the Upper Midwest, the economic and health benefits of installing 3,000 megawatts of wind energy top $2.2 trillion, the highest out of any region.
Solar is highly compatible with the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions, where it would produce $113 of economic and health benefit per megawatt-hour of electricity produced.
California and the Southwest generally stand to gain the least from renewables, in part because those regions don’t have a lot of dirty fossil fuels to displace.
Northeasterners, don’t fret! Some oil can be displaced by renewables in that region, and the Northeast also could gain some powerful public health benefits per ton of CO2 displaced, since it’s so densely populated.

Something that surprised the study’s lead author, Jonathan Buonocore, was that the benefits of renewables outweigh the benefits of carbon capture and sequestration. That technology — which is still in development — has been touted as something of a hail Mary for the fossil fuel industry, as it can be used in tandem with dirty energy developments to bring down emissions. But installing renewables literally anywhere in the country was more cost-effective than doing direct air carbon capture, Buonocore told Grist. Installing carbon capture technology on a coal plant, where it can stash away carbon before it’s released into the atmosphere, was about as cost-effective as installing renewables in many places in the U.S. — but that’s only when you’re comparing purely economic benefits. “When you include health, that changes dramatically,” he said. “For a lot of these different regions, if you include health the renewables look much more cost effective than installing carbon capture and coal.”

Buonocore hopes the study will help policymakers make informed decisions about where to put new energy developments, and to take health into account more often. “This is really important to be ideally included in evaluations of all climate policies,” he said. You hear that, politicians? A public health analysis a day keeps the climate catastrophe away.

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New study helps regions find their renewable energy soul mates

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SUVs are back, and they’re spewing a boggling amount of carbon

by JonasJ16wyni Posted on October 18, 2019

How can we end our love affair with sport utility vehicles?

Sure, I get it: They carry more people than sedans, and they look cooler than minivans. But consider the facts. A new analysis from the International Energy Agency shows that there are 35 million more SUVs on the road today than in 2010. The number of electric vehicles increased by just 5 million in the same time period. The result: The business of driving humans around is guzzling more gas. So, while greenhouse gas pollution from regular passenger vehicles actually declined since 2010, emissions from SUVs and trucks have increased enough to wipe out those gains, and then some. SUVs, counted alone, are now warming our planet more than heavy industry.

These gas guzzlers could single-handedly eliminate the possibility that the world achieves the climate goals set in Paris in 2016 by insuring that transportation emissions continue to swell. The new IEA analysis concludes: “If consumers’ appetite for SUVs continues to grow at a similar pace seen in the last decade, SUVs would add nearly 2 million barrels a day in global oil demand by 2040, offsetting the savings from nearly 150 million electric cars.”

If you aren’t motivated by the long-term threat of climate change, perhaps you may learn to dislike SUVs if they threaten to kill you. As Kate Yoder pointed out, every one of these vehicles that goes on the road makes the world more dangerous for everyone but the people in them. Pedestrian deaths have reached the highest levels in decades, thanks largely to the influx of bigger vehicles packing heavier punches.

So more deaths and more emissions. We got a preview of this trend in recent numbers coming out of California, where SUVs are also threatening to leave state climate goals broken and bleeding into the gutter.

The fact that beefy vehicles make their drivers a little safer, while endangering everyone around them is a hint as to why it’s been so hard to end our toxic relationship with SUVs. The people making the choice reap the benefits, while everyone else bears the cost. That’s the larger problem popping up here, in the form of surging SUV sales. It’s the problem that runs, and ruins, the world.

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SUVs are back, and they’re spewing a boggling amount of carbon

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Gene editing could help save the planet — if scientists can avoid the typos

by LeannaFoust8593 Posted on October 7, 2019

For the last few years, writers and scientists have marveled at the potential for gene editing to allow farmers to grow more food on less land and allow more of the earth to grow carbon-sucking forests and savannas.

The main advantage of gene editing is precision. It’s right there in the name: Instead of dealing with the randomness of breeding, or the rough power-tool work implied by the term “genetic engineering,” the “editing” suggests that scientists could now change the letters of genetic code with the same ease that a writer corrects typos.

But in late July, FDA scientists found a chunk of bacterial DNA in gene-edited calves, prompting people to wonder if this precision tool wasn’t as precise as advertised. That hopeful vision of a gene-edited future — verdant with pesticide-free, carbon-sequestering crops — flickered.

On Monday, the scientists studying these gene-edited cattle published a paper in the journal Nature Biotechnology explaining what happened. Essentially, this new paper tells us that gene editing precisely tweaked specific letters of DNA, exactly what it was supposed to do. But scientists also used older, cruder tools, and one of those caused the genetic typo. Even so, the end result might be that gene-editing slides into the muck of controversy over GMOs.

To be clear, the cows at the center of this study have nothing to do with creating more productive, pest-resistant foods. The scientists had edited their genes in stem cells, which grew into calves without horns. Farmers usually remove the horns to prevent cattle from injuring each other — goring is a real danger.

When I visited the University of California Davis in 2015, I saw a pair of these black-and-white bull calves standing and chewing in an outdoor pen, like ordinary but adorable bovines. Unlike other calves, however, they wouldn’t have to suffer through a painful dehorning operation, in which a veterinarian burns out their horn buds.

Some cows are naturally hornless: Angus and Hereford breeds, for instance. But those are beef cattle. For dairy you want Holsteins or Jerseys, and these champion milk producers are more carefully bred than the winners of the Westminster dog show. If you started crossing muscled Herefords with black-and-white Holsteins, it would take decades of breeding to move the hornless trait into the dairy line then weed out all the beefy traits.

What if you just plucked a single gene and moved it into dairy cows? With gene editing, you could tweak dairy cows without messing up their finely tuned milk-producing DNA so that they would no longer have to endure dehorning. The Minnesota-based company Recombinetics tried this using a technique called TALENS (you might have heard of CRISPR — this is just a different version of the same thing).

To run with the editing metaphor, Recombinetics basically took out the DNA that laid out instructions for “HORN” and replaced it with 202 letters of DNA that said “HORNLESS.” But first, they attached it to a bacterial plasmid — think of it as a sub-cellular copy machine — that would reproduce this strand over and over again (HORNLESS, HORNLESS, HORNLESS!). Then they injected all those copies into a cow cell — that gave one of those copies a much better chance of bumping into the one spot in the DNA that read HORN. This is where things went wrong. Instead of just replacing HORN with HORNLESS, the plasmid also folded into the cell’s DNA so that it read something like HORNLESS-COPYMACHINE-HORNLESS. That genetic information went into an egg, which went into a cow’s uterus, and, in 2015, grew into a hornless calf. No one noticed until years later.

The calves I saw at Davis were there to be studied by Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist. Funded by a U.S. Department of Agriculture program to assess the risks of biotech, her team first verified that the hornless trait was being passed down through generations of cattle. “Basically, we found that Mendel knew his shit,” said Van Eenennaam (that’s Gregor Mendel, the scientist from the 1800s who described how traits are inherited).

With this new paper, Van Eenennaam’s team showed that the bacterial plasmid had also been passed down to some of the calves, again following the rules of genetics 101. It doesn’t seem to be causing a problem — it’s fairly normal for DNA from germs and viruses to work its way into genomes (the human genome is about 8 percent virus DNA), and critters can usually just roll with it. But because these cattle had DNA from a bacteria, it meant they were genetically modified organisms, or GMOs in the eyes of government regulators. That, in turn, meant they would have to undergo years of testing. A giant corporation like Bayer could afford that, but not a small startup like Recombinetics. The FDA is now treating gene-edited animals like new drugs, requiring multiple rounds of safety testing, which effectively puts an end to the quest to make hornless dairy cows. Longtime opponents of biotechnology think that would be a good thing. Friends of the Earth recently released a report with Janet Cotter, who runs the consultancy Logos Environmental, condemning gene edited animals.

“The scientific evidence shows that gene editing, particularly in animals, is far from precise.” Cotter said in a statement. “Instead, it can produce unintended changes to genetic material and disrupt genetic processes. Such effects could have far reaching consequences for food safety, so these applications will require a rigorous assessment if they are to be used in agriculture.”

It would be easy enough to screen out plasmids before putting gene-edited eggs into a cow’s womb. That’s a routine procedure, said Van Eenennaam. But she worries that won’t quell fears that gene editing is sloppier than expected. Treating gene-edited animals like drugs is not proportionate with the risk, Van Eenennaam said, and would prevent breakthroughs that might help us meet the challenge of climate change, whether it’s cows that don’t belch methane, or corals that can survive heat., Van Eenennaam said.

“The debate has pretty much blocked the technology in animals through my whole career. I was hoping gene-editing would be different,” she said. “I have students who are excited about gene editing for disease-resistance — but now I feel like it’s Ground Hog Day. Here we go again.”

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Gene editing could help save the planet — if scientists can avoid the typos

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On Shaky Ground – John J. Nance

by Myrna Posted on October 4, 2019

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On Shaky Ground

America’s Earthquake Alert

John J. Nance

Genre: Earth Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: January 19, 2016

Publisher: Open Road Media

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


A chilling look at the massive earthquakes that could strike America at any moment Far beneath the earth’s surface, great tectonic plates grind against one another with incredible pressure that must—inevitably—be released. Earthquakes manifest with little warning, upending buildings, shattering infrastructure, and unleashing devastating tsunamis. In this remarkable survey of the history of seismology and the extraordinary seismic events that have occurred in the United States, Mexico, China, and other locales, author John J. Nance traces the discoveries of the scientists who have dedicated their lives to understanding and predicting one of the deadliest threats known to mankind.   From the Pacific Northwest to the Midwest and the East Coast, most of the United States—not just California—is in danger of a massive quake, and few citizens are adequately prepared. Through riveting firsthand interviews with earthquake survivors, and with the same command of technical detail and gripping style that he brings to his New York Times –bestselling thrillers, Nance demonstrates the need for readiness—because the next big quake could happen tomorrow.

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On Shaky Ground – John J. Nance

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