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Watch: Crack-Up of Sea Ice in the Arctic Ocean

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| Fri Apr. 5, 2013 3:15 AM PDT
Gigantic area of sea ice caught in the process of fracturing in the Arctic OceanGigantic area of sea ice caught in the process of fracturing in the Arctic Ocean off northern Alaska beginning in late January 2013: NASA image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory | Jesse Allen using VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.

As I reported last week, sea ice in the Arctic Ocean reached its maximum growth for the winter on about 13 March and is now losing more ice than it's gaining. The National Snow and Ice Data Center initially reported that 2013 was the sixth lowest sea ice extent on record. NASA has revised that to an even more dismal fifth-lowest sea ice extent on record.

In the image above—and even more so in the video time-lapse below—you can see the tremendous dynamism at work in this frozen ocean. Jostled by monster winds and ocean currents, sea ice sheets constantly shift, crack, and grind against one another. 

And that's what's happening on the left side of the video (above) in late January, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. A high-pressure weather system parked over the region produced warmer temperatures and winds flowing in a southwesterly direction. Those winds drove the Beaufort Gyre clockwise. And that gyre pulled pieces of sea ice west past Point Barrow, Alaska's northwestern-most point. 

​The crack-up began in late-January and spread west toward Banks Island throughout February and March 2013. A series of February storms passing over central Alaska exacerbated the fracturing. By the end of February large pieces of ice had borken all the way to the western coast of Banks Island, a distance of ~600 miles (1,000 kilometers).

It's fascinating for me to see this area of the Arctic Ocean—particularly the Beaufort Sea part of the Arctic Ocean—which I sailed through in its entirety last October (more on that here) and saw not one speck of sea ice then. So all of the ice cap breaking up here is likely young, first-year ice.

Here's NASA's two-minute explainer on the Arctic winter of 2013, amid the mega-changes underway so far this century. Chilling.

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Ohio State Senator Leading Review of "Stalinist" Renewable Energy Standards

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| Fri Apr. 5, 2013 3:05 AM PDT
This is your energy on communism.

Bill Seitz, a Republican state senator from Ohio, recently told the Wall Street Journal that his state's renewable energy and energy efficiency standards are reminiscent of "Joseph Stalin's five-year plan."

Seitz, who is also on the board of the shadowy corporate-government allegiance known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), made this charmingly ahistorical claim just a week after inviting the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute to testify against the standard before the Ohio Senate Public Utilities Committee. He has taken it upon himself to determine whether Ohio should amend or repeal its clean energy law, which requires utilities to institute energy efficiency measures and to draw at least 12.5 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2025.

The Ohio legislature approved its clean energy standard almost unanimously in 2008. Since then, wind and solar companies have created 8,000 new jobs, and efficiency programs have netted rate payers $1 billion in savings, according to the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists and the Ohio Public Utilities Commission. But in late February, Seitz introduced legislation that aims to overhaul the law.

Seitz maintains that he has launched the review because the current policies were based on the assumption that wind and solar prices would go down faster than they have over the past five years. He says the state has already deployed the "low-hanging fruit" energy-saving measures, and utilities and their industrial customers are reticent to implement the more expensive technologies that might be necessary to reach the goals set in 2008. "Nobody is for more carbon emissions than you need to have, but at the same time the question is, well, what does it cost?" Seitz told Mother Jones in an interview.

The senator's record and alliances are probably some indication of the direction he'll take his review process. In 2011, Seitz cosponsored a bill to repeal the renewable energy requirement entirely. He also sits on the board of ALEC, a public policy group that brings together corporate interests and conservative lawmakers to push industry-friendly bills in state legislatures, and coauthored the group's model renewable energy standard repeal bill known as the "Electricity Freedom Act." Another ALEC member, the Ohio-based American Electric Power Company Inc. (which stands to lose money due to the law's efficiency standards), was the third largest donor to his 2012 campaign, according to campaign finance data. Other big utilities, including FirstEnergy Corp. and Duke Energy, have been consistent supporters of Seitz.

Renewable energy advocates are not optimistic about Seitz's "review" of the renewable energy standard. "For Senator Seitz to create an appearance of a fair process given his close alliance with ALEC and its powerful interests is disingenuous," said Steve Frenkel, the Midwestern director of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Seitz, on the other hand, doesn't think his campaign donations have any influence on his decision-making. "I'm term-limited. I could give a damn," he said, noting that he's "done" when his term ends in 2016.

Despite Seitz's allusions to Soviet centralized planning, recent polling shows that more than 65 percent of Ohio voters support the renewable energy benchmarks, and a majority of respondents said they would be willing to pay more for power from clean sources. "Ohioans know that their economy and their environment are benefiting from investing in clean energy technologies," Frenkel said. "And Senator Seitz is just out of step with the people of Ohio in recognizing the important clean energy transition that the state's already making."

Frackers Are Losing $1.5 Billion Yearly to Leaks

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| Fri Apr. 5, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Of all the many and varied consequences of fracking (water contamination, injured workers, earthquakes, the list goes on) one of the least understood is so-called "fugitive" methane emissions. Methane is the primary ingredient of natural gas, and it escapes into the atmosphere at every stage of production: at wells, in processing plants, and in pipes on its way to your house. According to a new study, it could become one of the worst climate impacts of the fracking boom—and yet, it's one of the easiest to tackle right away. Best of all, fixing the leaks is good for the bottom line.

According to the World Resources Institute, natural gas producers allow $1.5 billion worth of methane to escape from their operations every year. That might sound like small change to an industry that drilled up some $66.5 billion worth of natural gas in 2012 alone, but it's a big deal for the climate: While methane only makes up 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (20 percent of which comes from cow farts), it packs a global warming punch 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide.

methane
Courtesy WRI

"Those leaks are everywhere," said WRI analyst James Bradbury, so fixing them would be "super low-hanging fruit."

The problem, he says, is that right now those emissions aren't directly regulated by the EPA. In President Obama's first term, the EPA set new requirements for capturing other types of pollutants that escape from fracked wells, using technology that also, incidentally, limits methane. But without a cap on methane itself, WRI finds, the potent gas is free to escape at incredible rates, principally from leaky pipelines. The scale of the problem is hard to overstate: The Energy Department found that leaking methane could ultimately make natural gas—which purports to be a "clean" fossil fuel—even more damaging than coal, and an earlier WRI study found that fixing methane leaks would be the single biggest step the US could take toward meeting its long-term greenhouse gas reduction goals.

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Top Dem on Gun Control Says She's Working With GOPers—But Won't Give Names or Numbers

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| Fri Apr. 5, 2013 3:00 AM PDT
Elvert Barnes/Flickr

In January, with the horror of the Newtown massacre still fresh, House Democrats assembled a task force to begin discussing gun controls. With negotiations now about to culminate in the Senate, the task force is focused on a bipartisan effort to assure a vote on that potential legislation in the House, according to Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), who is playing a key role behind the scenes.

McCarthy, who came to Congress in 1997 on a campaign to reduce gun violence after her husband was murdered and her son severely injured in the Long Island Rail Road massacre of 1993, serves as vice chair of the task force. Given the steep political climb for any new gun control measures (with expanded background checks perhaps being the most possible, though still far from certain), McCarthy is remaining tightlipped about who might be cooperating on the Republican side. "We're not releasing any names," she said, declining to comment even on the number of Republicans involved.

McCarthy did reveal in an interview that the task force is focused on persuading 27 Democrats in the House who typically would not vote for gun reforms. Among those, she said that there may be seven of them "who truly would be in [electoral] trouble" if they backed the bill. (The House currently has 232 Republicans, 200 Democrats, and three vacant seats.) It's a struggle in which she has been facing an all-too-familiar response from some of her colleagues, she said: "'Carolyn, I'd love to vote for you,' they say, but they're waiting to see what comes up [in the Senate]."

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Obama Proposes Making Food Aid Less Insane

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 10:34 PM PDT

Jonathan Zasloff writes today about the insane rules governing U.S. food aid overseas. Suppose, says Zasloff, there's a famine in Ethiopia:

The quickest and most effective thing to do would be to find some farmer or group of farmers in other parts of the country, or in neighboring countries, buy their food and get it to the stricken area. After all, one key cause of famine is the lack of money, not lack of crops. But under current law, USAID is basically forbidden from doing that. Instead, it must buy grain in the United States and ship it several thousand miles to the famine area. You can imagine the amount of time that that takes; sometimes, several weeks. it’s a logistic nightmare. In the meantime, thousands die, usually the weakest such as children and the elderly.

But it’s worse than that.

If the food needs to be shipped, then that means that the shipping must be paid for. And it sure is: according to a study done by AJWS and Oxfam, nearly 55% of the cost of American international food aid goes not to food, but to shipping costs. That’s what your tax dollars are going to.

But it’s worse than that.

There are three more repetitions of "it's worse than that" after those two, so read the whole post to see just how bad things are. Needless to say, the reason for this grim state of affairs is that instead of treating food aid as a way to help people who are starving, it's basically treated as a big slush bucket for American farmers. But it would be far more sensible to buy food near the point of famine when possible, so the White House has proposed doing just that. The New York Times reports the unsurprising results:

An Obama administration plan to change the way the United States distributes its international food aid has touched off an intense lobbying campaign by a coalition of shipping companies, agribusiness and charitable groups who say the change will harm the nation’s economy and hamper efforts to fight global hunger.

....Twenty-one senators from farm states also wrote to the Obama administration last month, after being lobbied by the groups, asking that the food aid program be kept in its current form.

As Zasloff points out, even the executive director of the American Maritime Congress, who can probably be trusted to exaggerate the figures as much as possible, claims only that the proposed changes would cost "hundreds" of jobs. Hundreds! As for actual charities, only one is quoted opposing the changes in the Times article, and its opposition is based solely on the fear that Congress would lose interest in overseas charity completely if most of the money were actually used for aid instead of paying off special interests.

In theory, this should be a bipartisan winner. The Bush administration wanted to do it, and now the Obama administration wants to do it. It would be a far more efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and it would allow U.S. aid to help far more people. It's a slam dunk. Call your congress critter today and tell them, for once in their benighted careers, to just suck it up and do the right thing.

Can We Talk About the Global Investment Drought, Please?

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 6:45 PM PDT

The topic of the day in the econosphere is interest rates. Why are they so low? How long will they stay low? Ryan Avent comments:

The most common explanation for the drop in real interest rates (one advanced by Ben Bernanke) is the global savings glut. In a sense, the explanation is almost tautological; if a price is falling, a glut (or excess of supply relative to demand) is almost by definition the cause. The more interesting issue is the source of the imbalance. Mr Bernanke points, among other things, to reserve accumulation by emerging markets. More recently, he has also noted that a shortage of safe assets could be contributing to the problem.

For these dynamics to work, there should be an insensitivity, somewhere along the line, to interest rates. The glut occurs when there is too much desired saving relative to desired borrowing, and the interest rate falls in order to bring the two into balance.

I wish I understood this better, because that bolded sentence has always seemed like the key insight to me. In theory, as Avent says, if the savings level is high, then interest rates will go down until it's once again attractive to borrow all that money to invest in real-world production of goods and services. But that hasn't happened, which means the real problem we're facing is the mirror image of a global savings glut: namely, a global investment drought. For more than a decade now, no matter how low interest rates have gone, the appetite for real-world investment has remained anemic. During the aughts, this problem was partly masked by the flow of money into property and related derivatives, but after that blew up nothing was left. Capital is still sloshing around the system and is available at ever more attractive rates, but it goes begging nevertheless.

So forget the savings glut. The real question is why, over the past decade, the world has gotten so bearish on real-world investment opportunities. The answer, almost by definition, is that confidence in future economic growth has waned. But why?

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One More Reason to Miss Roger Ebert: His Love of Trash

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 4:15 PM PDT
Roger EbertRoger Ebert (center), with his wife Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert (left) and actress Nancy Kwan. Chuck Boller/Hawaii International Film Festival

Chances are good that Roger Ebert, who died Thursday at age 70, was the first film critic you ever heard of. He was also the only one in recent memory to rate a eulogy from the White House: "For a generation of Americans—and especially Chicagoans—Roger was the movies," President Obama said in a statement released Thursday afternoon.

Ebert's decades as a critic in print and on television made him easily the most influential man in the business—and his ability to adapt in the rapidly changing landscape of news and media only made his dominance more evident. "A [Roger Ebert] tweet is worth as much traffic as a small Digg or YCombinator hit. Crazy. That's some distribution power," Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal observed last August.

Ebert passed away just days after announcing a "leave of presence" to deal with a recurrence of cancer. In 2006, Ebert had a near-death experience during surgery to remove cancerous tissue; following that operation, he lost his ability to speak and part of his lower jaw. He'd recently expressed a desire to devote more time to writing about his illness.

Beyond his career as a Pulitzer-winning movie critic, Ebert was an author (I recommend his excellent 2011 autobiography), a raging liberal (especially via social media), and a screenwriter (he wrote the 1978 Sex Pistols film Who Killed Bambi? that was junked after financing fell through). When a figure of this caliber leaves us, they inspire a deluge of praise, listicles, and remembrances; I will leave it up to you to choose the most comprehensive or definitive.

But what I will remember Ebert for is this: It is rare for a man of his influence and fame to so gleefully and unabashedly embrace (and I write this with the greatest enthusiasm) cinematic trash. No snobbery, no pretentiousness, and absolutely no shame in indulging in guilty pleasure—that's what impressed me the most about his criticism. His favorite films of all time were critically acclaimed gold mines like Werner Herzog's beautiful and notorious Aguirre, the Wrath of God or the 2011 Oscar-winning Iranian film A Separation. But he had a soft spot for popular garbage: Remember that ridiculous and disposable Vin Diesel action flick from 2002—the one so groggily titled XXX? If you don't remember, it's the Vin Diesel movie where Vin Diesel goes snowboarding in an avalanche. Here's an excerpt from Ebert's loving, nearly four-star review:

If Bond is a patriot, [Diesel's] Xander is a man who looks out only for No. 1, until Gibbons threatens him with prison unless he agrees to go to the Czech Republic and stop a madman with, yes, a plan to destroy and/or conquer the world. This villain, named Yorgi (Marton Csokas), apparently lives in the Prague Castle, which will come as a surprise to President Vaclav Havel. He's a renegade officer of the evil Czech Secret Service; the movie doesn't seem to know that the Cold War is over and Czechs are good guys these days, but never mind: The movie was shot on location in Prague, part of the current filmmaking boom in the republic, and the scenery is terrific.

[...]

Is "XXX" a threat to the Bond franchise? Not a threat so much as a salute. I don't want James Bond to turn crude and muscular on me; I like the suave style. But I like Xander, too, especially since he seems to have studied Bond so very carefully. Consider the movie's big set piece, totally in the 007 tradition, when Xander parachutes to a mountaintop, surveys the bad guys on ski-mobiles below, throws a grenade to start an avalanche, and then outraces the avalanche on a snowboard while the bad guys are wiped out. Not bad. Now all he has to work on is the kissing.

That's what did it for me: An earnest, glowing review of an inconsequential popcorn flick, and laced with political observation and a modest wit. Ebert's flair for this sort of thing lasted right up until the very end. And it's just one of the reasons why he is already sorely missed.

 

Front-page image credit: Jaimie Rodriguez/Globe Photos/ZUMA Press

Republicans Embrace Listicles as Key to 21st Century Success

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 2:30 PM PDT

Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus released an "autopsy" a couple of weeks ago that suggested the party's woes were mostly due to poor optics and weak use of technology. Apparently the NRCC, the committee that funds Republican House races, agrees.

Yep: they're doing the thing that every flailing organization does when they can't think of anything actually constructive to do: redesigning their website. In this case, they've decided that cat videos and mindless listicles are the key to political success:

"BuzzFeed's eating everyone's lunch," said NRCC spokesman Gerrit Lansing. "They're making people want to read and be cognizant of politics in a different way."....The NRCC's redesign includes a list of recent and popular posts. Other changes include shorter posts, fewer menu items and a heavy helping of what now passes for social currency on the Web: snark.

The new site comes a few months into the beginning of a broader strategy to capture more of the social Web's attention. To that end, the NRCC has begun dropping blog posts with headlines like "13 Animals That Are Really Bummed on Obamacare's Third Birthday." A recent image macro the NRCC posted on Facebook featured a photo of President Obama laughing below a caption mocking voters for believing his claims about health insurance premiums.

Well, who knows? It might work. They suckered me into writing about it, after all. Still, I have to say that the screenshots of the new site don't really look all that BuzzFeedy to my professionally trained eye. In honor of the new site, then, I think we should come up with a list of listicles for the NRCC to try out. I'll get us started:

  • 12 Ways That A Capital Gains Cut Will Benefit You
  • 10 Best Tea Party Costumes From CPAC
  • VIDEO: Republicans Promote Cat, Dog Adoption as "Antidote to Partisan Bickering"
  • 7 Heartbreaking Letters To Obama From Schoolchildren Asking Him Not To Destroy Their Future
  • GALLERY: Five Gruesome Abortion Photos
  • 17 Ways That Obama Has Made America Less Safe

Your turn. Give the NRCC your best ideas.

It's Official: A Majority of Americans Wants Pot Legalized

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 1:44 PM PDT

For the first time in more than four decades of surveying national attitudes towards marijuana, the Pew Research Center announced today that a majority of Americans believe that pot should be legal. Pew's latest phone survey, conducted over the course of five days last month, found that 52 percent of Americans support pot legalization and 45 percent oppose it.

The most surprising support for tokers' rights came from some of the most socially conservative parts of America. Among residents of the 26 states that have not decriminalized pot or enacted medical marijuana legislation, a whopping 50 percent backed legalization in the poll, compared to only 47 percent who opposed it.

Shifting views on cannabis have a lot to do with changing demographics. The gigantic Millennial generation supports legalization at a rate of nearly 3 to 1. Yet Boomers' views have also shifted, or, you might say, boomeranged: In 1978, 47 percent of Boomers favored legalization, but their support plummeted to 17 percent by 1990 before slowly inching back up, finally hitting the 50 percent mark just this year.

As memories of Reefer Madness and the '60s culture wars continue to fade, more Americans are divorcing pot smoking from notions of morality:

Instead of a crusade against the devil, Americans increasingly view the war on weed in economic terms—and they don't like what they see. A full 72 percent of poll respondents agreed that "government efforts to enforce marijuana laws cost more then they are worth."

The Environmental Movement’s Greatest Hits, All in One Documentary

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| Thu Apr. 4, 2013 12:56 PM PDT
Rena Schild/Shutterstock

This story first appeared on the Grist website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Mark Kitchell didn't want to make your standard here's-a-really-important-issue, be-the-change-you-want-to-see-in-the-world, bleeding-heart environmental documentary. Kitchell, best known for his award-winning documentary Berkeley in the Sixties, doesn't even consider himself an environmentalist. But the story of the environmental movement was too much for him to resist.

"It doesn't get any bigger than this, in terms of a social movement," he says. "Especially when you think about what's at stake and the kind of transformation of society that needs to take place."

What Kitchell ended up producing was a kind of greatest hits of the environmental movement from its early days fighting over the building of dams in the West, to Love Canal, the first Earth Day, and the birth of Greenpeace, to the mother of all environmental issues—and maybe all issues, period—climate change. A Fierce Green Fire is now rolling out at a series of film festivals and theaters across the country.

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