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Climate change gets a single question at the fifth Democratic debate

Ten Democratic candidates for president took the stage in Atlanta to talk impeachment, health care, the economy, paid leave, and, oh yeah, our overheating planet.

Those hoping for a debate heavy on what Bernie Sanders called “the existential threat of our time” were surely disappointed. Climate change was awarded a single question, though candidates found chances to bring it up throughout.

Moderators from MSNBC and the Washington Post opened the night with a question about impeachment. Healthcare and the economy also dominated the conversation (no surprise there). About halfway through the night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked the debate’s only question about rising temperatures. Many viewers care deeply about climate change, she said, then Maddow offered up a question from a viewer in Minnesota: What do candidates plan to do about it, and how do they aim to drum up bipartisan support for their plan?

The question went to a frontrunner, naturally. Just kidding. Representative Tulsi Gabbard from Hawaii got first dibs. Gabbard said she aims to prioritize climate action if elected, a promise that would be easier to take at face value if she wasn’t the only candidate on stage who hasn’t unveiled a comprehensive plan to combat rising emissions. To be fair, Tulsi introduced the OFF act, a bill to wean the United States off fossil fuels, in Congress last year. Tom Steyer, the billionaire who runs a progressive advocacy group called NextGen America, got a chance to take a stab at the climate issue next and made a more passionate case for action.

“Congress has never passed an important climate bill ever. That’s why I’m saying it’s priority one,” Steyer said (an echo of Governor Jay Inslee’s line: “If it’s not number one it won’t get done.”) Steyer was the only candidate on stage who said he aims to declare a national emergency over climate change as president.

Sanders was the first to bring up the subject on his own, calling it “the great existential threat of our time.” Later, he talked about climate change refugees, something he said will become a major security issue in the coming year. He promised to go after oil and gas companies, an industry he said could be criminally liable for knowingly misleading the public about the effects of burning fossil fuels. “They have lied and lied and lied,” Sanders said. He also took issue with the idea that the effects — drought, floods, and extreme weather — are decades away. “If we don’t get our act together in eight or nine years,” he said, major cities will be underwater all over the world.

Even though moderators asked one question about rising temperatures, several candidates were able to weave the topic into responses to other questions. Andrew Yang and Steyer shared a moment of camaraderie when Yang gave Steyer props for using his money to tackle the climate crisis. “You can’t knock someone for having money and spending it in the right way,” Yang said.

Pete Buttigieg talked about a farmer in Boone, Iowa who told him farmers would rather be focusing on conservation over trade wars. “American farmers should be one of the key pillars of the solution to climate change,” he said. Elizabeth Warren plugged her proposal to employ 10,000 young Americans and veterans in public parks and climate resiliency projects. Toward the beginning of the debate, Steyer incorporated the need for sustainability in urban planning and development.

Climate change has been the topic of less than 10 percent of the questions asked at each of the previous four debates, and this debate was no different. But the fifth debate did demonstrate once again that candidates are ready to talk climate, even if moderators aren’t.

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Climate change gets a single question at the fifth Democratic debate

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The dark money protecting the ‘worst energy policy in the country’

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This summer, Ohio’s beleaguered nuclear and coal plants got a major gift in the promise of a big bailout. Now, the fight over that promise has escalated into one of the most dramatic and bizarre showdowns of the 2020 election cycle.

It all started back in July, when the Ohio state legislature passed a law — called HB6 — that, starting next year, will charge consumers new fees to rescue four struggling power plants. Those charges will eventually add up to a $1 billion bailout for the utility FirstEnergy Solutions’ two nuclear plants, while handing a lifeline to two 1950s-era coal plants owned by another utility, the Ohio Valley Electric Corporation.

Because of the law, Ohio is the first state to reverse its renewable energy standards and efficiency targets, all while funneling more money to coal — a move that has clean energy advocates fuming. Leah Stokes, an environmental political science professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, called it the “worst energy policy in the country.”

But this it isn’t your typical environmentalists-vs.-fossil-fuel-industry fight. The side opposing the bailout has clean-energy advocates working alongside the natural gas industry. And though the supporters of the bailout include some of the usual suspects — FirstEnergy, coal-reliant American Electric Power, and Duke Energy, and the coal baron and Trump donor Robert Murray — they have also marshaled a mysterious string of deep-pocketed advocacy groups.

A bit of history: The fight dates back to at least 2014, when FirstEnergy pitched a bailout to Ohio’s utility regulator. FirstEnergy went bankrupt in 2018, around the same time it was urging the Trump administration to use emergency powers to save nuclear and coal. (The Department of Energy considered that proposal, but ultimately it went nowhere.) By early 2019, though, FirstEnergy saw a window of opportunity in the Ohio legislature and spent $1 million lobbying on the bailout law. According to an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch, it contributed almost $1 million to state candidates in the 2018 cycle, including $25,000 to help elect Larry Householder as the new speaker of Ohio’s House.

As soon as the law was passed in July, opponents formed a coalition called Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts. The group, which aims to gather the 265,774 signatures required to get the referendum on the ballot in the 2020 election, hasn’t yet disclosed its funding, but observers suspect that it mostly comes from the renewable energy industry and natural gas companies.

In response, the law’s supporters have waged an unprecedented “all-out deceptive effort to prevent the issue from getting on the ballot,” says Dave Anderson who has tracked developments for the watchdog think tank Energy and Policy Institute.

In addition to FirstEnergy, a number of shadowy groups have materialized to oppose the referendum. Here’s a quick rundown of the major players:

Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs bought $10,000 in ads to target Facebook users, directing them to remove their signatures from the petition supporting the referendum. In the ads, it claims that repealing the law would “kill Ohio clean energy jobs.”
Generation Now, a group that does not disclose its donors, hired the petition firm FieldWorks, which has traditionally worked with Democratic clients. The referendum campaign claims that FieldWorks staff have harassed and allegedly paid off their workers, and firms allegedly deploying “petition blockers” to discourage people from signing onto the referendum. In one case, a confrontation between Fieldworks employees and petition workers escalated to the point where the police were called. Generation Now has rejected those allegations as “vague and unsubstantiated.” Generation Now spokesperson Curtis Steiner added that “Fieldworks has been operating in a very professional manner.” He noted that the employee associated with the incident was dismissed.
Ohioans for Energy Security has flooded local networks with a 60-second ad in which a narrator warns viewers that signing the referendum petition would help the Chinese government, as it’s “quietly invading our American electric grid.”

Thousands of Ohioans received mailers from the same group warning, “Don’t give your personal information to the Chinese Government! Don’t sign their petition attacking House Bill 6!”

The claim, based on the fact that some gas plants received funding from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, has been roundly debunked. The ads neglect to mention the funding from other major global banks, or that FirstEnergy has loans from the same bank. “We have pretty strong regulation of utilities that would prevent foreign governments from controlling them,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

“These ads are some of the most bizarre and xenophobic I’ve ever seen in relation to energy, electricity, and climate,” says Director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign Mary Anne Hitt.

While the groups opposing the referendum don’t disclose their funding, the Energy and Policy Institute has found links between several of them and FirstEnergy. For example, Protect Ohio Clean Energy Jobs appears to share an address with two lobbyists that FirstEnergy hired to pass HB6.

The Dayton Daily News recently reported that Ohio Attorney General David Yost is investigating some of these allegations of harassment and intimidation. His investigation includes a charge that the opposition has tried to buy off firms working with the referendum for as much as $100,000, which would be considered a felony under state law.

FirstEnergy has neither denied nor confirmed its role in the campaign to scuttle the referendum, instead maintaining that the referendum is unconstitutional and “inherently misleading and confusing to Ohio voters.”

Gene Pierce, a spokesperson for the referendum’s main support group, Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts, admits that the efforts by the law’s supporters have slowed the signature-collecting process and “driven up the price to hire people.” The referendum has only recently launched a website and an ad campaign that fight back.

If the referendum fails, the outlook for Ohio’s clean-energy advocates could be bleak. The state is the third-biggest consumer of coal in the country. Nuclear power, which provides 15 percent of the state’s electricity, is the state’s biggest source of carbon-free energy. In 2018, the state got a measly 2.5 percent of its power from solar, wind, and biomass — making it one of the lowest users of renewable energy in the country.

Beyond the coal plants the new law helps directly, FirstEnergy has hinted that the extra money from the bailout may help it reverse its plan to close down one of its coal plants. The true cost of the bailout could be higher as coal becomes more unprofitable. All told, “there’s more money in the Ohio law to bail out dirty old coal plants than to support carbon-free nuclear power,”Stokes says.

Sierra Club’s Mary Anne Hitt echoed those concerns. She called the effort to uphold the bailout “one of the most extreme and also aggressive efforts like this that I have ever seen.” She added, “Unfortunately, it’s regular Ohioans who end up paying the price.”

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The dark money protecting the ‘worst energy policy in the country’

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Why Extinction Rebellion is occupying an NYC park

Hundreds of climate protesters around the world were arrested Monday, kicking off Extinction Rebellion’s “International Rebellion,” two weeks of direct action and civil disobedience protests in 60 countries. In London, protesters blocked all major roads around the Houses of Parliament, including Westminster Bridge, while hundreds more occupied Trafalgar Square. In Argentina, activists in hazmat suits and blood-red cloaks with white face paint called the “red brigade” occupied a Bayer-Monsanto office in Buenos Aires. And in the Netherlands, more than 100 people were arrested for trying to set up a tent city in a major tourism area.

In New York City, protesters staged a “die-in” in the middle of Wall Street in downtown Manhattan on Monday morning as part of what they called a “funeral procession for the earth.” Two famous statues, Charging Bull and Fearless Girl, dripped with fake blood that the activists had splattered all over their fellow protesters and the cobblestone streets. (The group cleaned up all the blood after the action ended.) Around 60 people were arrested.

Extinction Rebellion, a decentralized, non-hierarchical environmental action group born in the U.K., is different from Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement in a few notable ways. For one thing, the group is made up of people of all ages, not just youth. For another, the group’s main strategies are civil disobedience and other non-violent disruption techniques. The youth climate strikes, by contrast, are generally cleared with local governments and permitted ahead of time. This means Extinction Rebellion protesters are more likely to get arrested for things like trespassing and marching without a permit.

After the die-in on Monday, the NYC Extinction Rebellion group set up more than half a dozen tables and booths in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park, where they’re planning a weeklong occupation dubbed “RebelFest.” Pro-environment musicians and guerilla theater troupes performed and activists delivered speeches. The group’s camp included a food pantry, an art table, and a wellness area, though they didn’t have the city’s permission to table in the park.

Christina See, an Extinction Rebellion NYC organizer, is a film producer who has been dedicating all of her free time to Extinction Rebellion over the last 10 months. Grist / Molly Enking

Christina See, an NYC-based organizer for Extinction Rebellion, said RebelFest is as much about education as it is disruption. There is a “massive difference in consciousness around the climate and ecological emergency” between the U.S. and Europe, See said. “You can see in Europe, there is mass mobilization happening, with people on the streets demanding their governments take action to protect their citizens.” In America, she said, it’s harder to get people mobilized in the same way because the country is so spread out.

RebelFest, See told Grist, “is about having a place for people to come, meet, and see that these are everyday people, not ‘radical activists,’ who are doing this.” See pointed out that she’d only been active with Extinction Rebellion for 10 months. “But we all see what’s happening, and we have a moral obligation to not just us, but future generations and all of the species on this planet,” she said.

Pratt Institute students (from left) Megan Shoheili, Alex Ellerkamp, and Sydney Jones came by to learn about Extinction Rebellion after reading about the morning’s “die-in” on Wall Street. Grist / Molly Enking

Sydney Jones, Alex Ellerkamp, and Megan Shoheili, students at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, came by the park after hearing about the morning’s protests on Wall Street. The students were a fan of RebelFest because, they said, it provides a platform for education, conversation, and building community. They said they approved of Extinction Rebellion’s tactics because more disruptive action can make a bigger difference. “Visually offensive stuff like the fake blood can make more of an impact,” Shoheili said.

All three also agreed that both the permitted marches of the youth climate movement and the civil disobedience of Extinction Rebellion are needed, because not everyone feels comfortable potentially getting arrested, “it sends a stronger message to march without a permit,” Jones said. “Why should we follow the rules, when lawmakers are ignoring the climate crisis?”

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Why Extinction Rebellion is occupying an NYC park

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Something Deeply Hidden – Sean Carroll

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Something Deeply Hidden

Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

Sean Carroll

Genre: Physics

Price: $14.99

Expected Publish Date: September 10, 2019

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


“Deftly unmasks quantum weirdness to reveal a strange but utterly wondrous reality.” —Brian Greene As you read these words, copies of you are being created.   Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist and one of this world’s most celebrated writers on science, rewrites the history of 20th century physics. Already hailed as a masterpiece, Something Deeply Hidden shows for the first time that facing up to the essential puzzle of quantum mechanics utterly transforms how we think about space and time.  His reconciling of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of relativity changes, well, everything. Most physicists haven’t even recognized the uncomfortable truth: physics has been in crisis since 1927. Quantum mechanics  has always had obvious gaps—which have come to be simply ignored. Science popularizers keep telling us how weird it is,  how impossible it is to understand. Academics discourage students from working on the "dead end" of quantum foundations. Putting his professional reputation on the line with this audacious yet entirely reasonable book, Carroll says that the crisis can now come to an end. We just have to accept that there is more than one of us in the universe. There are many, many Sean Carrolls. Many of every one of us.   Copies of you are generated thousands of times per second. The Many Worlds Theory of quantum behavior says that every time there is a quantum event, a world splits off with everything in it the same, except in that other world the quantum event didn't happen. Step-by-step in Carroll's uniquely lucid way, he tackles the major objections to this otherworldly revelation until his case is inescapably established.   Rarely does a book so fully reorganize how we think about our place in the universe. We are on the threshold of a new understanding—of where we are in the cosmos, and what we are made of.

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Something Deeply Hidden – Sean Carroll

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Harry Potter: A Journey Through Potions and Herbology – Pottermore Publishing

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Harry Potter: A Journey Through Potions and Herbology

Pottermore Publishing

Genre: History

Price: $2.99

Expected Publish Date: June 27, 2019

Publisher: Pottermore Publishing

Seller: Pottermore Limited


The history of magic is as long as time and as wide as the world. In every culture, in every age, in every place and, probably, in every heart, there is magic. This non-fiction short-form eBook features content which is adapted from the audiobook Harry Potter: A History of Magic – inspired by the British Library exhibition of the same name. Potions have been made for thousands of years – associated with bubbling pots and mysterious ingredients, they have been brewed to make medicines, drugs and poisons. Harry Potter became much better at Potions with a little help from the Half-Blood Prince. Plants have also been important components of medicines as much as myth-making and magic. A source of danger as well as a means of overcoming obstacles, Herbology was a subject which had a major bearing on Harry’s key decisions and mistakes in the wizarding world. This eBook short examines the colourful characters and curious incidents of the real history of magic, and how they relate to the Hogwarts lesson subjects of Potions and Herbology from the Harry Potter stories.

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Harry Potter: A Journey Through Potions and Herbology – Pottermore Publishing

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This casino’s microgrid might be the future of energy

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the Fukushima disaster unfolded in Japan, the Blue Lake Rancheria, in Northern California, was dealing with its own crisis. Several miles inland and uphill from the Pacific Ocean, the 100 acres of tribal land had turned into a haven for roughly 3,000 coastal dwellers who were fleeing a feared tsunami from that same earthquake. A huge line of cars assembled at the Rancheria’s gas station; one young woman ran in circles, holding her baby and weeping.

Local inundation ended up being relatively minor. But the Blue Lake Rancheria was shaken. “That was an eye-opener,” says Jana Ganion, sustainability and government affairs director at the Rancheria. “We need to prepare for the disasters that are reasonably foreseeable here.”

Tsunamis for one. But also the massive earthquake that’s going to devastate the Northwest. And California’s annual wildfires, made ever more vicious by climate change. These disasters all have one thing in common: They threaten to cut the Blue Lake Rancheria off from the grid for days, maybe weeks. Tucked behind the state’s “Redwood Curtain,” the Rancheria’s rural placement affords it few access points, and roads may be inaccessible in the aftermath of a disaster.

The answer was to help pioneer what could be the future of energy in California and beyond. Working with scientists at the Schatz Energy Research Center at nearby Humboldt State University, and the local utility PG&E, the Rancheria developed its own solar-powered microgrid, allowing it to disconnect from the main grid and run off Tesla battery power. The setup powers six buildings, including a 55,000-square-foot casino and 102 hotel rooms — over 140,000 square feet of total building space.

The tribe — which tallies just 49 members — is under constant threat from wildfire, along with many other communities in California. In autumn, seasonal winds rustle electric equipment, showering sparks onto dry brush below. State officials have blamed PG&E for starting 17 of California’s 21 major fires in 2017 alone, as well as for last year’s devastating Camp Fire, which virtually destroyed the town of Paradise, leveling almost 20,000 buildings and killing 85. If the utility had cut power when winds near Paradise became particularly intense, that deadly blaze might never have ignited. But concerns about local hospitals and other emergency facilities tend to prevent utilities from taking such preemptive actions. Switching to microgrids during especially dangerous wind storms could keep the state’s mountain towns much safer.

But take it from the Blue Lake Rancheria: Building a microgrid isn’t so easy as throwing up a bunch of solar panels, bolting batteries to the ground, and saying au revoir to the grid at large. It takes a whole lot of time and expertise and money, about $6.3 million for the Rancheria so far — $5 million in R&D money granted by the California Energy Commission in 2015, and the rest coming from the Rancheria itself. But that research money is an investment that communities throughout California could soon benefit from.

Construction of the Rancheria’s microgrid began in May 2016, and a little over a year later, PG&E gave its blessing to begin operation. In an ideal world where the sun always shines, the Rancheria could power itself indefinitely, recharging its batteries using more than 1,500 solar panels during the day and depleting them in the evening. But on a gloomy day, such as the one on which I toured the grounds, the panels struggle to collect photons—they’re generating 120 kilowatts, compared to 420 kilowatts when the sun is cranking full-blast. On a typical day the Rancheria still draws a small amount of power from PG&E’s grid to stabilize the system. But if they lose that connection for whatever reason, those six core buildings could theoretically last for months on solar power, with backup generators kicking in at night or during periods of cloudiness.

At the entrance to the Rancheria’s offices, Dave Carter, managing research engineer at Schatz Energy Research Center, shows me a pair of flat screens. One displays a family-tree-looking diagram, with lines connecting the utility and microgrid to buildings like the hotel and casino and offices. The other screen displays a graph of energy pricing throughout the day. Noon to 6 p.m. is when electricity costs the most, so the system charges the batteries in the morning, so it can be discharged in the afternoon when the utility has its peak pricing.

The Rancheria is building out its system even further. It just added 167 panels above the pumps at its gas station, which it will switch on this summer. Behind the station, electricians are installing another Tesla battery pack to store that extra energy. And so long as they have the money, the tribe can add still more panels and batteries to boost its capacity and hedge against cloudy days.

Building out a microgrid, however, is no easy task for any community. “All of those buildings are going to be in various states of repair, they’re going to have various vintages of electrical systems and diesel backup generators,” says Ganion, who oversaw the project for the Rancheria. “So what we learned very quickly is that the controller on the diesel generator wasn’t smart enough to talk to the microgrid system. We had to do a bunch of work in the middle.”

Ganion hopes to turn the Rancheria’s hard-fought lessons into “a one-stop shop for communities who want to develop microgrids.” Think of it like the evolution of the personal computer: The Rancheria is basically operating as if it’s the 1980s, having to assemble a PC on its own, while one day other communities may be able to buy a microgrid that works more or less right out of the box, like a sleek modern laptop.

That might sound like something that utilities like PG&E would try to prevent. (PG&E declined to comment for this story.) Their business, after all, is in keeping customers dependent on their services. But as the world slowly moves away from fossil fuel energy plants, the utilities of the future will start to look less like energy producers and distributors, and more like just distributors. “It’s the future of the grid in California,” says Peter Lehman, founding director of the Schatz Energy Research Center.

Utilities won’t just operate power lines and other infrastructure for ferrying around electricity. Helping to develop microgrids could become part of their core business. The Rancheria’s microgrid is still in constant communication with the grid at large. “You have to work really closely with the utility on that,” says Carter, of Schatz Energy Research Center.

That interdependence means that utilities have a natural role to play in a microgrid world. The alternative is business as usual: a labyrinthine statewide network of power lines that utilities are loath to disconnect, even during high-wind events that cause and fuel wildfires, because of the liability involved in losing power to critical services.

The challenge for small, isolated communities, though, is the cost — Tesla recommends installing two of its Powerwall batteries to ensure even a small home can go a week off the grid, a system that will set you back $14,500 just in equipment costs. “What would it cost to do this, and who should be paying for it?” asks Richard Tabors, president of Tabors Caramanis Rudkevich, an energy consulting firm. “Initially, to be absolutely honest, the state of California should be paying for it.” The state is, after all, suffering an unprecedented wildfire crisis. It’s a matter of saving lives, but also of smart investing: Last November’s Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive in state history, caused over $16 billion in damages.

The Rancheria describes its experience with PG&E in positive terms, but others hoping to install home solar have not been so fortunate, says Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association. “The sad thing is the utilities just have a stranglehold on policymaking and regulation making,” she says. “They absolutely are giant barriers to people being able to even just do the simple self-generation.”

Yet as California moves toward powering itself with 100 percent clean energy by 2045, making solar installations easier will become paramount. The challenge will be largely one of management, such as determining who’s responsible for maintaining different parts of the grid. Because maintenance comes with liability — you don’t want to be the one whose mismanaged equipment sparks the next deadly wildfire.

Meanwhile, the Schatz Energy Research Center is helping design a microgrid for Humboldt County’s regional airport down the road from the Blue Lake Rancheria, which will include a nine-acre solar array. And the Rancheria will keep iterating on its own microgrid, adding capacity and streamlining the overall process.

Ganion walks me through the parking lot and says the Rancheria is planning to add car shelters with solar panels. Behind the hotel and casino we find the two-acre solar farm — panel after panel soaking up photons through the cloud cover. In its next experiment with the future of energy, she says the Rancheria might start toying with a simple form of carbon sequestration, encouraging the growth of plants underneath the panels to suck carbon dioxide out of the air.

“When you come back, we might have an herb garden growing under there,” says Ganion. “It would beat the weeds, for sure.”

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This casino’s microgrid might be the future of energy

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The plastic industry is on track to produce as many emissions as 600 coal-fired power plants

When you think about plastic, what comes to mind? Microplastics at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, whales dying with truckloads of garbage in their bellies, that zero-waste Instagram influencer you follow?

A new report shows it’s high time to think more about the fossil fuels that go into making those plastic products. The global plastic industry is on track to produce enough emissions to put the world on track for a catastrophic warming scenario, according to the Center for International Environmental Law analysis. In other words, straws aren’t just bad for unsuspecting turtles; plastic is a major contributor to climate change.

If the plastic industry is allowed to expand production unimpeded, here’s what we’re looking at: By 2030, global emissions from that sector could produce the emissions equivalent of more than 295 (500-megawatt) coal plants. By 2050, emissions could exceed the equivalent of 615 coal plants.

That year, the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from production of single-use plastics like bags and straws could compose between 10 and 13 percent of the whole remainder of our carbon budget. That is, the amount of CO2 we’re allowed to emit if we want to keep emissions below the threshold scientists say is necessary to ensure a liveable planet. By 2100, even conservative estimates pin emissions from plastics composing more than half of the carbon budget.

So, congrats on ordering that metal straw from Amazon! But the report shows that the plastics industry is still planning on a major expansion in production.

Here are a few more takeaways from the report, which looked at the emissions produced by the plastics industry starting in 2015 and projected what emissions from that sector could look like through the end of the century:

Of the three ways to get rid of plastics — recycling, landfilling, or incinerating — incinerating is the most energy intensive. In 2015, emissions from incinerating plastic in the United States were estimated to be around 5.9 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
This year, production and incineration of plastic products will make as many emissions as 189 coal power plants — 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases.
Plastics that wind up in the ocean could even fuck with the ocean’s ability to do what it has historically done a superb job at: sequestering carbon. That’s because the phytoplankton and lil ocean critters that help capture the CO2 at the surface of the ocean and drag it under are being compromised by — you guessed it — microplastic.

But it doesn’t look like the industry is going to slow its roll on refining oil for plastics anytime soon. In 2015, 24 ethylene facilities in the U.S. produced the emissions equivalent of 3.8 million cars. There are 300 more petrochemical facilities underway in the U.S. Two of those, one being built by ExxonMobil and another by Shell, could produce emissions equivalent to 800,000 new cars on the road per year.

So if you’re gonna boycott single-use plastics, keep in mind that you’re not just doing it for the turtles — you’re doing it for us.

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The plastic industry is on track to produce as many emissions as 600 coal-fired power plants

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10 Simple Hacks for an Eco-Friendly Bedroom

You might wake up every day with good intentions to take care of the planet. But are you an eco-warrior in your sleep? With some sustainable design choices, your sleep space can be healthy both for you and the environment. Here are 10 simple hacks for a more eco-friendly bedroom.

1. Choose organic bedding

Credit: KatarzynaBialasiewicz/Getty Images

Pesticides aren?t just something to avoid on your food. It?s also ideal to look for bedding and other fabrics that are organic and produced in a sustainable manner. ?The cotton industry uses one quarter of all the pesticides that are consumed in the world,? Greg Snowden, founder of the Green Fusion Design Center, tells HGTV. ?For that reason alone, it’s important to support organic cotton sheets and bedding.? Opting for chemical-free bedding also means you won?t be absorbing toxins into your skin as you sleep. ?Be suspect when you see the words ?repellents? or ?proof? on bedding labels, which indicate the product has been treated with chemicals,? HGTV says.

2. Go green with your mattress

When it comes to furnishing a bedroom, your mattress is probably the most important choice you?ll make. After all, getting enough quality sleep is vital to your health and well-being. Your mattress should support you through a comfortable night?s sleep ? and it shouldn?t have any qualities that adversely affect your health. ?Choose a mattress that’s toxin-free and doesn’t contain polyurethane foam and fire-retardants such as PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers),? HGTV says. ?? Green options include organic wool- and cotton-filled mattresses that are just as comfortable as a chemical-filled mattress. The greenest option is latex.?

3. Avoid down filling

Although some companies are trying to source down feathers via slightly less horrifying methods (such as not plucking live birds), don?t be fooled into thinking down bedding is friendly to the environment or the animals. Buying a down product might mean you?re supporting ?the cruelty of the foie gras and meat industries because many farmers who raise birds for food make an extra profit by selling their feathers as well,? according to PETA. And we know the meat industry is a major contributor to climate change. So choose vegan fillings, such as cotton or buckwheat, for an all around friendlier option.

4. Give old furniture new life

Credit: KatarzynaBialasiewicz/Getty Images

If you?re looking to refresh your bedroom decor, make something old new again. New furniture not only is typically more expensive, but it also takes more resources to produce and ship. So take inventory of what you already have if you?re doing a bedroom redesign. Even if you?re not that handy, there are many easy DIY tactics to give furniture a facelift. Or check local thrift stores and antique shops for pieces that meet your needs. ?You can often find old headboards to upholster or paint, giving a singular look to the bed for less,? according to HGTV. ?An old door turned on its side and wall mounted is another eco-friendly, and rustic, solution.? And try to keep any large furniture pieces on the neutral side, so you can continue to use them even if your decorating style changes.

5. Use low/no-VOC paints and stains

If you are going the DIY route, make sure any paints, stains and other products you use have little to no volatile organic compounds. VOCs are a major pollutant of indoor air and are found in many household products, including paints, solvents, wood preservatives and adhesives, according to the EPA. They can cause short- and long-term health effects, such as headaches, dizziness, breathing issues and cancer. And many of these products are considered hazardous waste that can pollute water and destroy ecosystems. So buy the greenest products possible for your projects. Use them according to label instructions, and dispose of them safely.

6. Reuse or recycle old fabric

It?s not just old furniture that you can repurpose for your eco-friendly bedroom. You also can take a green approach to your fabric choices. There?s a lot of fabric in bedrooms ? sheets, duvet covers, blankets, curtains, etc. And while buying organic bedding is a plus for the environment, don?t forget some other sustainable strategies. ?For inexpensive DIY pillows or curtain panels, visit fabric shops and ask for their leftover material scraps,? HGTV says. ?Or, repurpose old blankets and sheets for a comforter that’s completely your own.? And if you have old fabric items you?re not going to use, either donate them or bring them to a facility that takes textile recycling.

7. Open windows

For your best sleep, experts suggest your bedroom should be somewhere between 60 and 67 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Sleep.org. But that doesn?t mean you always have to snooze in a climate-controlled environment. Open windows anytime the weather allows it to take advantage of the cool night air (and to chase out some of those indoor air toxins). If opening windows isn?t an option, opt for a fan in the bedroom. ?Buy a stylish ceiling fan to circulate hot and cool air, and save money on energy bills,? HGTV says.

8. Add insulating decor

Credit: KatarzynaBialasiewicz/Getty Images

Speaking of windows, the bedroom is an ideal space to hang thicker, insulating window treatments that can block hot and cold outdoor air ? as well as light for those mornings when you want to sleep in. And this kind of insulating, energy-saving decor doesn?t stop at the windows. Adding rugs to the bedroom also can reduce your need for climate control, especially in the colder months. ?We all like the feel of soft rugs under our feet, but did you know that putting down layers of rugs will stop heat escaping from a room?? Ikea says. ?So turn up the rugs, and you could be turning down the thermostat.?

9. Choose dimmer bulbs

The bedroom probably isn?t a place where you need bright lighting. So an easy way to conserve some energy is by replacing all your bedroom lighting with dimmer LED bulbs. ?LED lights last for around 20 years, which significantly cuts down on the number of times you?ll have to change the bulbs,? Ikea says. ?Not only that, you?ll be cutting down your electricity bill too, as LED uses 85% less energy than incandescent bulbs.? And if you fall asleep with those LEDs still on, you won?t have to feel so bad about the energy you?ve wasted.

10. Make space to hang clothes

Clothing is a whole other category that impacts the environment. And one way you can make your bedroom more conducive to eco-friendly choices is by setting up an area to hang clothes you don?t want to put in your closet. This can be a spot for air-drying clothes. Or it can be a place to keep clothes that simply need to air out a little, rather than a full wash. ?Hang trousers or tops up on hooks overnight and you won?t need to wash them so often, saving water and time spent ironing,? Ikea says. Along those lines, aim to keep your closet decluttered. Know what you have in there, so you can shop your own closet instead of wasting resources on extraneous purchases.

Main image credit: KatarzynaBialasiewicz/Getty Images

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10 Simple Hacks for an Eco-Friendly Bedroom

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Green New Deal activists make first 2020 endorsement in wildfire-burned California

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Green New Dealers are making their first endorsement of the 2020 election.

At a rally on Saturday, Sunrise Movement, the youth-led grassroots group whose protests pushed the Green New Deal into the political mainstream, endorsed Audrey Denney, an agricultural educator running to replace Rebulican Representative Doug LaMalfa in California’s wildfire-scorched 1st congressional district.

“She’s spent her life working to help farmers and rural communities in the district put food on the table for their families and be part of environmental solutions,” Varshini Prakash, Sunrise Movement’s co-founder, said in a statement. “Representative LaMalfa’s constituents are dying because of climate change, yet he’s spent his career in Washington cozying up with the same oil and gas lobbyists who profited at the expense of his constituents’ lives.”

The rally, the latest stop on Sunrise Movement’s tour to promote the Green New Deal, took place in Chico, a northern California city with nearly 94,000 residents, which was hit repeatedly last year by deadly wildfires.

LaMalfa, who rejects what he calls the “bad science” behind climate change, beat Denney last November to win a fourth term.

But the Democrat faced extraordinary personal challenges in her debut bid for elected office. She advanced to the general election despite entering the primary race late. But midway through the campaign, she underwent surgery after her doctor diagnosed a football-sized tumor on her ovary. Eighteen hours after her procedure, she shot a video from her hospital bed reflecting on the limited healthcare access in her district.

She lost the race but managed to shrink LaMalfa’s usual 20 percent margin of victory to 9 percent. At the time, Sunrise Movement — then a much smaller operation working on just a handful of progressive campaigns, including that of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  — did not endorse her. But this time the group is betting that its newfound clout and the sobering climate realities that voters in California’s 1st now face will propel Denney to victory in 2020.

Already last summer, the Carr Fire ripped through the district, killing eight. But, days after the election, a utility equipment failure ignited the Camp Fire. By the time its final flames went out, the blaze killed 85, reduced the entire town of Paradise to ash and displaced thousands in the deadliest wildfire in California history. Though mostly spared, the Chico City Council declared a climate change emergency earlier this month.

“In 2018, 93 lives were lost in my district in the Carr and Camp Fires,” Denney said in a statement. “I’m running for Congress because we need a representative who is only beholden to their constituents, not to corporate interests and political gamesmanship.”

Denney pledged to reject money from fossil fuel companies and executives, and she vowed if elected to support Green New Deal legislation in Congress. That stands in stark contrast to LaMalfa, who’s received over $162,330 from energy and natural resource corporate political action committees and over $100,000 from the oil and gas lobby, according to data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. A LaMalfa spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

Sunrise Movement is expected to play an expanded role in 2020. Last November, the group’s protests mainstreamed the Green New Deal, a movement for a sweeping national plan to zero out emissions and provide clean-energy and climate infrastructure jobs to millions. Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey released a joint resolution outlining the core values of a Green New Deal in February. With notable exceptions, including former Vice President Joe Biden, nearly every major contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination backed the plan.

The group is in the midst of a nationwide tour with roughly 250 events at churches, classrooms and town halls meant to drum up support for the Green New Deal.

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Green New Deal activists make first 2020 endorsement in wildfire-burned California

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They worked in sweltering heat for Exxon, Shell and Walmart. They didn’t get paid a dime.

This story was originally published by Reveal and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A nationally renowned drug rehab program in Texas and Louisiana has sent patients struggling with addiction to work for free for some of the biggest companies in America, likely in violation of federal labor law.

The Cenikor Foundation has dispatched tens of thousands of patients to work without pay at more than 300 for-profit companies over the years. In the name of rehabilitation, patients have moved boxes in a sweltering warehouse for Walmart, built an oil platform for Shell, and worked at an Exxon refinery along the Mississippi River.

“It’s like the closest thing to slavery,” said Logan Tullier, a former Cenikor participant who worked 10 hours per day at oil refineries, laying steel rebar in 115 degree-heat. “We were making them all the money.”

Cenikor’s success is built on a simple idea: that work helps people recover from addiction. All participants have to do is surrender their pay to cover the costs of the two-year program.

But the constant work leaves little time for counseling or treatment, transforming the rehab into little more than a cheap and expendable labor pool for private companies, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

At some job sites, participants lacked proper supervision, safety equipment and training, leading to routine injuries. Over the last decade, nearly two dozen Cenikor workers have been seriously injured or maimed on the job, according to hundreds of pages of lawsuits, workers’ compensation records, and interviews with former staff. One worker died from his on-the-job injuries in 1995.

Labor experts say Cenikor’s entire business model might be illegal under federal labor law. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires all employees to be paid minimum wage and overtime.

“They have to look at a different way to run their business operation other than merely absconding with the workers’ wages,” Michael Hancock, a former Department of Labor official, said when presented with Reveal’s findings. “They’re being preyed upon.”

An ongoing Reveal investigation has exposed how many drug rehabs across America have become little more than lucrative work camps for private industry. Patients have slaughtered chickens on speeding assembly lines in Oklahoma and cared for residents at assisted living facilities in North Carolina.

Among these programs, Cenikor stands out. It has a long history of accolades from sitting lawmakers and judges and even former President Ronald Reagan. Last year, the Texas-based nonprofit earned more than $7 million from work contracts alone, making it one of the largest and most lucrative work-based rehabs in the country.

Bill Bailey, who as Cenikor’s chief executive officer earned more than $400,000 in 2017, repeatedly declined requests for comment. But in a statement, Cenikor officials said the work provides “a career path for clients to be hired by companies who traditionally do not hire those with felony convictions, allowing them to return to a life of being a responsible, contributing member of society.” They said they follow all state and federal laws.

Many Cenikor participants work for a network of subcontractors that then dispatch them to the major companies.

Walmart said it found Cenikor’s labor arrangement troubling and pledged to investigate.

“Our expectations are that all of our vendors follow both the applicable laws and regulations as well as our standards for suppliers,” Walmart said in a statement.

Exxon declined to answer specific questions, but in a statement said the company “contractually requires all of our suppliers to comply with all applicable environmental, health, safety, and labor laws for themselves and their subcontractors.”

Cenikor sent participants to work at an Exxon refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Julie Dermansky / Reveal

Shell did not respond to requests for comment.

Many participants said Cenikor saved their lives and equipped them for success. After 18 months in the program, participants can become eligible to receive wages and graduate with jobs, a car and the tools to build a promising life. But fewer than 8 percent of people who enter Cenikor make it to graduation, according to the program’s own numbers, and therefore never receive a paying job.

“It was just a money racket,” said former Cenikor patient Alester Williams, who checked himself in to Cenikor for help quitting alcohol and cocaine. “That place was all about manipulation and greed.”

Cenikor patients and staff said work came before everything else. Staff routinely canceled doctors’ and legal appointments in favor of sending patients to work, records show. Working up to 80 hours per week left little time for counseling, therapy, or sleep.

Like many participants, Ethan Ewers was ordered to complete Cenikor by a Texas judge after failing a drug test while on probation. Once he arrived, he said he worked 43 days straight in a sweltering warehouse unloading cargo containers for Walmart. One day in 2016, when he was bone tired and on the brink of relapsing, he finally snapped.

“I said, ‘You need to give me a day off because I can’t do this anymore,’ ” Ewers told Cenikor brass. “It was absolutely ridiculous.”

Multiple former staff members told Reveal that counselors routinely falsified counseling records to make it appear as though patients received more counseling than they did. During busy work seasons, some received no counseling at all.

Peggy Billeaudeau, who was the clinical director at Cenikor’s Baton Rouge facility from 2015 to 2016, said she got so fed up with the excessive work that she and her staff launched their own investigation. They pored over patient timesheets and painstakingly entered the hours into a spreadsheet. Billeaudeau discovered that many Cenikor patients were working 80-hour weeks and rarely received counseling.

She presented the evidence to top Cenikor officials at a staff meeting. “It was kind of like, ‘Peggy, don’t touch that with a 10-foot pole,’ ” she recalled. “It was about the money. Get the money.”

Some rehab staff have a financial incentive to work participants harder and longer, according to interviews. Former vocational services managers, who secured outside job contracts, said the more money they brought in, the larger their bonuses.

Cenikor managers had a compelling sales pitch. They promised companies cheap workers who were drug tested and always on time. Cenikor would pay for transportation and cover the costs of insurance.

“We tended to charge less than the temp agencies because of the demographics,” said Stephanie Collins, a former vocational services manager. “We were competitive.”

Patients, meanwhile, make nothing. They are told that their paychecks will be used to offset the cost of the program. Federal labor law allows Cenikor to deduct the costs of food, lodging, and certain other expenses. But according to interviews and records obtained by Reveal, Cenikor typically brings in far more money from work contracts than it spends on patients.

Food stamps cover meal costs for all Cenikor participants, and in Louisiana, many are signed up for Medicaid to pay for counseling and medical care. Internal financial ledgers from the program’s Baton Rouge facility show that in 2016 and 2017, Cenikor’s job contracts regularly delivered more than twice as much money as its daily operating expenses.

At minimum, labor experts say this means Cenikor patients should see at least some of the pay from their work.

“I can’t fathom this being legitimate,” said John Meek, a former Department of Labor wage and hour investigator. “That math is just against it.”

Despite its reliance on work, Cenikor frequently has skimped on providing safety training or giving participants basic protective gear, such as steel-toed boots and harnesses.

In 2016, David Dupuis and other Cenikor participants went to work for a company cleaning up flooded homes filled with black mold and raw sewage. While regular employees got protective equipment such as masks and boots, Dupuis said Cenikor workers got nothing.

“They didn’t give us any protective equipment at all,” he recalled, adding that workers frequently caught staph infections. “It was extremely hazardous.”

In 2018, Cenikor sent Matthew Oates to a private residence in Baton Rouge to trim trees without a safety harness, helmet, or rope. As he teetered on a ladder 20 feet in the air, Oates lost his balance and tumbled from the tree. The fall broke his back.

“You’re wondering if you’re going to be crippled, you know, you’re going to be in pain for the rest of your life,” Oates said. “You know, what’s going to happen to me? Am I going to be able to work again?”

Oates said his back still causes him severe pain and he regularly sees a chiropractor.

Cenikor has been warned repeatedly to make sure participants are safe on the job. After a Cenikor worker plummeted from an unstable platform and died in an office supply warehouse in 1995, federal labor officials told Cenikor that ensuring patient safety was paramount.

“Cenikor officials should take more of (an) active role in providing quality training” and “recognize hazards associated with the job,” officials with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration wrote. But injuries have continued to rack up.

In recent years, a Cenikor worker crushed his hands in an industrial press, another worker fell off scaffolding and shattered his knee at a chemical plant, and at least two workers broke their backs.

In Texas, Cenikor is not required to report on-the-job injuries to rehab regulators. But when officials with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission learned about the injuries from Reveal, a spokeswoman said the agency was “concerned about any injuries sustained to clients” and planned to investigate further.

A sign at the entrance to the Cenikor Foundation, a private, not-for-profit behavioral health facility, is pictured in Deer Park, Texas. Julie Dermansky / Reveal

In Louisiana, state law requires Cenikor to report injuries, but Cenikor has not submitted a single injury report to the Louisiana Department of Health in the last three years, even though Reveal uncovered numerous injuries during that time. Licensing officials said they would investigate the injuries if a patient complained about them.

The federal Department of Labor had the opportunity to crack down on Cenikor’s labor abuses more than 20 years ago. In 1994, Cenikor participant Loren Simonis graduated from the program and immediately filed a complaint with the wage and hour office, alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Under federal law, workers are entitled to minimum wage and overtime for their work. The Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that working for free in a nonprofit — even one with a rehabilitative purpose — was a violation of federal labor law. Cenikor can deduct the cost of room and board, but it cannot keep all of participants’ wages, former labor officials told Reveal.

But the Department of Labor declined to investigate Simonis’ complaint, according to records obtained by Reveal. Simonis got tired of waiting and filed a lawsuit against Cenikor, claiming unpaid wages. He eventually settled for an undisclosed sum.

Labor officials declined to comment on the department’s 1994 decision and refused to answer questions about whether investigators would look into Cenikor for wage violations. A department spokesman said the agency “takes all complaints of worker safety and health hazards and violations seriously.”

Today, Simonis lives in Oregon with his wife and kids and runs his own screen-printing shop.

“I’ve turned my life around,” he said. “I don’t think Cenikor had anything to do with it.”

Continued here: 

They worked in sweltering heat for Exxon, Shell and Walmart. They didn’t get paid a dime.

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