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Climate change is overwhelming our crappy water infrastructure

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Most of Nebraska is a disaster area with 95 percent of the state’s population affected by flooding. According to FEMA, total economic losses are approaching $1 billion, including more than $400 million to agriculture and more than $400 million to public infrastructure. Cascading levee failures along the Missouri River have meant that, for the time being, there’s essentially nothing holding back the floodwaters.

Six Nebraska public drinking water systems went offline, and dozens of wastewater treatment facilities failed — including one for Omaha which officials say could take weeks or months to restore. In several cases, raw sewage is being discharged into streams and rivers.

For rural residents who get their water from private wells, that added pollution could prove dangerous. Emergency room visits for gastrointestinal issues increase after heavy rains.

As climate change makes rainstorms more intense, this problem will only worsen. Across the Great Plains, the frequency of heavy downpours has increased by 29 percent over the past 60 years. Flooding isn’t just a quickly damaging natural disaster that destroys roads, bridges, homes, and factories — it’s a lingering public health issue.

This problem isn’t unique to Nebraska. In recent years, floods in Texas, the Carolinas, and coastal Virginia have swept hazardous material from the petrochemical industry, hog farms, and agricultural land into waterways, threatening public safety.

As of 2015, there were 772 cities — mostly in the Midwest and Northeast — with outdated sewer systems that funnel waste directly into streams as a matter of course even without record-breaking floods. These systems were cheap to build in the 1800s, but now people are starting to reconsider “combined sewer overflow” systems.

Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has campaigned on his record of using eco-friendly methods, like rain gardens and expanding parks near floodplains, and technology to deal with its combined sewer system. City officials say they’ve saved $500 million by adding smart sensors to its sewer system.

Cities are trying to hold polluters accountable for cleanup costs, too: A new wave of “failure to adapt” lawsuits might help put pressure on industry to put more foresight into how climate change might turn their infrastructure into toxic waste sites.

Lawsuits and tech aside, the most effective way of adapting to climate change may ultimately be a planned retreat from coastlines and waterways — giving more space for nature as a buffer.

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Climate change is overwhelming our crappy water infrastructure

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Across the Country, Thousands Protest Trump’s “Muslim Ban”

Mother Jones

Thousands of people poured into the streets Sunday marking a second day of widespread protest against President Trump’s executive order banning immigration for seven predominantly Muslim countries.

The executive order, which was partially stayed by a federal judge late Saturday evening, has been criticized by both national security experts and civil rights organizations alike.

From Boston to San Francisco, the protestors—of every color, creed, and age—carried signs and shouted slogans making clear in one voice that Trump’s “Muslim ban” is an affront to their ideals and their country.

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Across the Country, Thousands Protest Trump’s “Muslim Ban”

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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

Mother Jones

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Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump churns out strong opinions like McDonald’s produces Big Macs. But save for the odd eruption—like declaring the supremacy of Trump Tower Grill’s “taco bowls” or blaming the California drought on environmentalists to the delight of the state’s agribusiness interests—he has been relatively quiet about food. At last month’s Republican National Convention, the real-estate developer/reality TV star took a step toward filling out his food and farm policy by tapping Nebraska agribusiness owner and cattleman Charles Herbster as the chairman of his Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee.

Like Trump, Herbster is an unconventional business titan with political ambitions.

He and his wife own Conklin, a Kansas City-based company with an odd mix of product lines: from pesticide additives called adjuvents to fertilizers for farms and lawns to probiotics for livestock, pets, and even people to industrial roof coatings to motor oils for “everything from semis to farm equipment to race cars.” In addition, he owns a cattle-breeding company called Herbster Angus Farms as well as farmland in Nebraska and Colorado, for which he received a total of $196,757 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. (That’s not a particularly high number—many Nebraska farm operators got much more over that time frame.)

Before he took the reins of Trump’s ag-policy team, Herbster was best known for his aborted 2013 campaign for Nebraska’s governorship, as Politico’s Ian Kullgren recently noted. Soon after exiting the race, Herbster donated $860,000 to the campaign of another Republican gubernatorial candidate, Beau McCoy, a Nebraska state senator. Herbster ultimately donated a total of $2.7 million to McCoy’s campaign, “nearly his entire war chest,” The Omaha World-Herald reported. McCoy lost the race. Last year, Herbster hired McCoy to run marketing for Conklin’s building-supply business. Another one-time Nebraska officeholder, former Gov. Dave Heineman, joined Conklin’s board of directors last year.

Herbster’s largesse to politicians hasn’t been limited to McCoy’s failed bid. Politico notes he “has given $336,000 to Republican candidates and ag-related PACs since 2012.”

He is a major funder of Ag America, which describes itself as a “Federal Super PAC active in local, state, and federal elections.” Herbster sits on the Ag America steering committee, and according to the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets, he donated $60,000 to it in 2015. Other recent contributors include Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and several other agribusiness giants.

In public documents, Ag America pushes a a fairly standard agribiz policy agenda: The next president must subject (unnamed) federal ag regulations to “rigorous cost-benefit analyses” and pursue free trade agreements “across the globe to open markets for America’s agricultural products.”

That last bit would seem to contradict Trump’s oft-stated antipathy to the the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending trade deals that was hotly supported by the agribusiness lobby.

And that appears to be where Herbster comes in—reassuring farm interests that a Trump presidency wouldn’t mean reduced access to foreign markets.

On a recent afternoon, I caught up with Herbster by phone on a corn field on his Nebraska farm after calling a number I found on the website of Herbster Angus Farms. I was quite surprised when the man himself answered the phone. After volunteering that “I’ve been friends with Donald J. Trump for more than 10 years,” Herbster told me that he’s been getting calls from farmers “concerned about issues of trade.” Herbster said he reassures them that Trump “is not against trade in any way”—it’s “just that we wants trade to be fair,” and that means renegotiating trade deals. Herbster acknowledged that “trade for agriculture in the Midwest has probably been pretty good for the past few years,” but that it “hasn’t been good for small manufacturers in middle America and the coasts.” Trump, he suggested, would make trade great again for everyone.

He then mentioned reducing the inheritance tax (applied only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher) as a “big issue,” and said that rolling back regulation would be “at the forefront” of a Trump’s first 100 days as president. “We regulate, regulate, regulate,” he complained. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, he added that “if it moves, the government’s response is to tax it; if it keeps moving, the response is to regulate it; and if it stops moving, the response is to try to control it and subsidize it.”

I asked him to specify what regulations he sought to dismantle. “We’re not gonna pinpoint and try to detail the minutiae of all of those, because the first thing we have to do is we have to win,” he said. “I believe we are gonna win, but I’ve always said, until you win, all of the great ideas in the world aren’t going to help you, because you have to win to implement ’em.”

Rather than sweat policy details, “my focus .. is to make sure we get rural America out to vote, that we raise as much money as possible,” he said, adding that “it’s gonna take a lot of money for this campaign, because we saw what happened with Romney versus Obama.”

Meanwhile, Herbster said, he’s working to assemble a group of people to serve with him on Trump’s ag-policy committee, which will be announced the first week of August. “Everyone’s gonna pretty well know the names on that list—we have some governors, we have some former governors … we’ve put together a really great list.”

I pressed him for more policy details, but he politely hustled me off the phone. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got concrete being laid at the farm,” he said.

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Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

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TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

By on 3 Nov 2015 6:40 amcommentsShare

President Obama has reportedly been gearing up to reject the Keystone XL pipeline project, so pipeline company TransCanada is trying a last-ditch effort to get the decision punted to Obama’s successor.

The latest twists and turns in the long-running Keystone saga kicked off on Monday afternoon, when White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest responded to a question from a reporter by saying that President Obama will make a decision on the pipeline before he leaves office. It’s been rumored for months that his decision will be “no.” As The Washington Post reports, “The administration is preparing to reject a cross-border permit for the project aimed at transporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of heavy crude oil from Canada’s oil sands region to Gulf Coast refineries, according to several individuals who have been briefed but spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House’s decision has not been announced.”

A few hours after Earnest’s comments, TransCanada sent a formal letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking the State Department to “pause” its review of the Keystone proposal. His department has been tasked with determining whether the project would be in the “national interest” and then reporting its determination to the White House. TransCanada is arguing that because the pipeline’s planned route through Nebraska is in contention, the federal review should be put on hold until the route is finalized.

That’s pretty cheeky: After years of complaining that the administration has been delaying its Keystone decision, TransCanada is now asking the administration to further delay it.

Climate campaigners and anti-Keystone activists see TransCanada’s move as a desperate ploy that has exactly nothing to do with the pipeline route. “The route in Nebraska has been uncertain for years,” activist Jane Kleeb of the group Bold Nebraska told the Omaha World-Herald. “The only difference is they know they are losing now.”

Activists are loudly calling on Obama to reject TransCanada’s request for a delay and then reject the pipeline altogether. Said 350.org founder (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben, “No matter what route TransCanada comes back with, the ultimate problem all along with Keystone XL has been that it’s a climate disaster.”

If TransCanada’s request for a delay is granted, the final Keystone decision would likely fall to the next president. TransCanada is obviously hoping that president will be a Republican, as all of the Republican candidates support Keystone, while the top three Democratic candidates oppose it. Hillary Clinton had refused to take a position on the pipeline for years, but in September she finally came out against it. “This is nothing more than another desperate and cynical attempt by TransCanada to build their dirty pipeline someday if they get a climate denier in the White House in 2017,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld of the League of Conservation Voters.

If Obama sticks to his plan and denies TransCanada the permit it needs, the move could help build his legacy as a leader in the climate fight. Says McKibben, “If President Obama rejects this pipeline once and for all, he’ll go to Paris with boosted credibility — the world leader who was willing to shut down a big project on climate grounds.” A major round of U.N. climate negotiations will start in Paris on Nov. 30, and Obama has been working to get other big countries to make significant pledges of climate action ahead of that meeting.

A pipeline rejection from Obama might mean that TransCanada is screwed even if a Republican moves into the White House in 2017. “The company would either have to restart the difficult and costly application entirely from scratch — or, more likely, abandon the pipeline altogether,” writes Brad Plumer of Vox.

So where does all this leave us now? Exactly where we were two days ago: waiting to see what Obama will do.

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TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

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Want to Suppress the Vote? Stress People Out

Mother Jones

The United States has a voting problem. In the 2012 presidential election, only about 57 percent of eligible American voters turned out, a far lower participation rate than in comparable democracies. That means about 93 million people who were eligible to vote didn’t bother.

Clearly, figuring out why people vote (and why they don’t) is of premium importance to those who care about the health of democracy, as well as to campaigns that are becoming ever more sophisticated in targeting individual voters. To that end, much research has shown that demographic factors such as age and poverty affect one’s likelihood of voting. But are there individual-level biological factors that also influence whether a person votes?

The idea has long been heretical in political science, and yet the logic behind it is unavoidable. People vary in all sorts of ways—ranging from personalities to genetics—that affect their behavior. Political participation can be an emotional, and even a stressful activity, and in an era of GOP-led efforts to make voting more difficult, voting in certain locales can be a major hassle. To vote, you need both to be motivated and also not so intimidated you stay away from the polls. So are there biological factors that can shape these perceptions?

In a new groundbreaking study just out in the journal Physiology and Behavior, a team of political scientists, psychologists, and biologists say they’ve found one. They maintain that individuals who have higher baseline levels of the bodily stress hormone cortisol are, as a group, less likely to vote. In other words, individuals who are more sensitive to stress don’t appear to vote as often. “Our study is unique in that it is the first to examine whether differences in physiology may be causally related to differences in political activity,” says Jeffrey French, the lead author of the paper and director of the neuroscience program at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

Dubbed the “stress hormone,” cortisol follows a daily cycle in the body, tending to be higher in the morning and lower in the evening. But it also spills into the bloodstream, from its home in the adrenal gland, in response to stimuli that are perceived as stressful. Moreover, some people tend to have more cortisol in their blood than others, even when they’re not stressed out. These people tend to be more socially avoidant, sensitive to fear, and prone to depression. High cortisol levels can lead to a wide range of negative health outcomes.

The research was conducted in a group of 105 ideologically diverse citizens of Lancaster County, Nebraska. Official voting records from the secretary of state’s office were correlated with the participants’ cortisol levels before and after each participant had to perform stressful tasks, such as conducting difficult math calculations out loud or preparing to give a 10-minute speech that (they thought) would be filmed and evaluated. While these exercises were being mounted, the cortisol levels of the participants were collected from their saliva. (All of the research was done at the same time in the afternoon to weed out natural bodily swings in cortisol levels.)

Bodily cortisol levels predicted voting behavior. Adapted from French et al., “Cortisol and Politics,” Physiology and Behavior, 2014.

The results were striking.The baseline cortisol levels (before the stress was induced) showed a relationship with the participants’ voting behavior in past elections. High cortisol individuals tended to vote less frequently than low cortisol ones. Meanwhile, the researchers were able to show that in a statistical model that controlled for standard demographic variables (such as age, sex, and income), using baseline cortisol as a factor led to more accuracy in predicting whether a person was likely to vote.

After the controls, the role of this hormone did end up being only modest. But French still thinks that’s a big deal. “When we’re talking about an electorate where only half of people vote, even a small amount of variance, we think, is important,” he says. Theoretically, this means that in the future, political campaigns might be able to target individuals based on their biology—to boost voter turnout, or perhaps suppress it.

These results also suggest that recent GOP efforts to combat alleged “voter fraud”—for instance, by implementing stringent ID laws or encouraging poll workers to place more demands on voters—are likely to make stressed-out people less inclined to participate.

French says that if we want high-cortisol individuals to vote more, we should make voting less stressful and challenging: “Things like absentee voting, or mail ballots, may make people with high afternoon cortisol more likely to engage.”

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Want to Suppress the Vote? Stress People Out

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Keystone XL opponents dominate raucous Nebraska hearing

Keystone XL opponents dominate raucous Nebraska hearing

Reuters / Dave WeaverRandy Thompsen tells State Department officials why Keystone XL is a terrible idea.

More than 1,000 people traveled from far and wide to snowy Grand Island, Neb., on Thursday to tell the State Department what they think of plans to build the Keystone XL pipeline. Commenters had a maximum of three minutes apiece to speak their minds during the hearing at the Heartland Events Center, which, according to Reuters, is “a venue more used to hosting monster-truck derbies and antique shows.”

Thursday’s eight-hour hearing allowed members of the public to formally comment on the State Department’s draft supplemental environmental impact statement on the pipeline. It’s the only hearing State is expected to hold on the report, which effectively concluded that there is no environmental reason not to build the pipeline. That conclusion is, of course, hotly disputed, especially in the wake of the recent spill from a tar-sands oil pipeline in Mayflower, Ark.

The Lincoln Journal Star describes the crowd at the hearing:

[H]undreds of critics with rural addresses, young, old and in between turned out in red, white and blue shirts with the words “Pipeline Fighter” spread across their chests. Tribal leaders also weighed in strongly against the project.

There to counter them were busloads of union workers from Omaha, plumbers, welders and pipeline fitters wearing blue and orange shirts, many of them bearing the words “Approve the KXL pipeline so America works.”

But the sides were not evenly matched: “for every voice of support there were at least a dozen against” the pipeline, reports The New York Times.

The hearing … drew hours of emotional testimony, mostly from opponents of Keystone XL, who whooped and applauded when anyone from their ranks spoke, and solemnly hoisted black scarves that read “Pipeline Fighter” during comments by the project’s supporters.

“The Keystone ‘Export’ pipeline is not in the national interest, and it is most certainly not in Nebraska’s interest,” said Ben Gotschall, a young rancher, one of the first speakers at the hearing, which was held in a large events hall at the state fairgrounds here.

“Our landowners have been left to fend for themselves against an onslaught of dishonest land agents and corporate bullies,” Mr. Gotschall said.

Nebraska has been a rallying point for environmental groups, landowners and ranchers who oppose the 1,700-mile proposed pipeline, which would carry diluted bitumen from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast.

Many who didn’t make it to the Nebraska hearing have submitted written comments on the environmental impact statement — at least 807,000 of them. More comments will be accepted through April 22, and the State Department is considering a request to extend the comment period for another 75 days. State said in March that it wouldn’t release the comments publicly, but this week it reversed course and said all comments would be posted online, Bloomberg reports.

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Keystone XL opponents dominate raucous Nebraska hearing

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Hundreds of Nebraskans speak out against Keystone XL pipeline

Hundreds of Nebraskans speak out against Keystone XL pipeline

For eight hours last night, Nebraskans at a public meeting in Albion shared their views on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline — most of which were unfavorable. From Nebraska Watchdog:

An estimated 800 people filled a huge metal county fairgrounds building Tuesday night to talk about a proposed $7 billion oil pipeline that would be built through Nebraska en route from Canada to Texas. …

It was a sometimes rowdy crowd, as many opponents to the pipeline booed or applauded speakers — despite admonitions not to — while supporters of the project were less vocal. At times it seemed like boots versus suits, as many people wearing boots, caps and jeans — farmers, ranchers and landowners — testified against the pipeline while many pro-business and free market advocates and people who would help build the pipeline testified in favor of it.

The hearing was the final step in the state’s environmental consideration of TransCanada’s proposal of a new pipeline route. In October, Nebraska gave preliminary approval to the new plan, noting that it avoids the sandy region of the state over the Ogallala Aquifer. So if the pipeline were to rupture (ahem), the state suggests, the damage wouldn’t permanently destroy a critical water source. That would be an improvement.

boldnebraska

A man holds up a container of oil and sand as he testifies at last night’s hearing.

Unless you live near the proposed route.

People such as Bonny Kilmurry of Atkinson said the pipeline would threaten her land and water supply if the pipeline leaks into the aquifer.

“Water is our lifeblood,” she said. “We can live without oil. We cannot live without water.” …

One of the most passionate voices of the night was Susan Luebbe, a Holt County rancher whose land was in the original pipeline route.

“There’s a reason they call it flyover country, because the Midwest does not matter until everyone bitches enough,” she said loudly. She criticized the [Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality]’s $2 million environmental review on the revised route as disorganized, a shamble and embarrassing.

Bold Nebraska, an organization that has taken a leading role in the fight against the pipeline, released a “Citizens’ Review” of the state’s environmental findings. Among the group’s concerns is that the new route would still pass through a sandhill region, marked by a type of soil that absorbs precipitation that ends up in the aquifer. In other words: The new route may have the same problem that the old route did. Bold Nebraska also believes that the state “simply published information given to them by TransCanada.”

Earlier in the day, pipeline supporters rallied in Omaha — led by the local Republican Party, Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, and the Laborers union. Here’s a photo of the event, held at the Laborers hall. (At political events, Laborers typically wear orange.) Organized labor is split on the pipeline.

Of course, the status of the pipeline in Nebraska is only moot if the pipeline as a whole is approved — a decision that rests some 1,200 miles from Albion, Neb., at the White House. Recently, hundreds of people have also shown up there, also hoping to have their opinions heard.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Hundreds of Nebraskans speak out against Keystone XL pipeline

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