Environment | Mother Jones

Reporters Say Exxon Is Impeding Spill Coverage in Arkansas

Kate Sheppard — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 22:08:38 +0000

Reporters covering the oil spill from ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas, are reporting that they've been blocked from the site and threatened with arrest.

On Friday morning, Inside Climate News reported that an Exxon spokesperson told reporter Lisa Song that she could be "arrested for criminal trespass" when she went to the command center to try to find representatives from the EPA and the Department of Transportation. On Friday afternoon, I spoke to the news director from the local NPR affiliate who said he, too, had been threatened with arrest while trying to cover the spill.

Michael Hibblen, who reports for the radio station KUAR, went to the spill site on Wednesday with state Attorney General Dustin McDaniel. McDaniel was in the area to inspect the site and hold a news conference, and Hibblen and a small group of reporters were following him to report on the visit. Upon arrival, representatives from the county sheriff's office, which is running security at the site, directed the reporters to a boundary point 10 feet away that they should not pass. The reporters agreed to comply. But the tone shifted abruptly, Hibblen told Mother Jones on Friday:

It was less than 90 seconds before suddenly the sheriff's deputies started yelling that all the media people had to leave, that ExxonMobil had decided they don't want you here, you have to leave. They even referred to it as "Exxon Media"…Some reporters were like, "Who made this decision? Who can we talk to?" The sheriff's deputies started saying, "You have to leave. You have 10 seconds to leave or you will be arrested."

Hibblen says he didn't really have time to deal with getting arrested, since he needed to file his report on the visit for both the local affiliate and national NPR. (You can hear his piece on the AG's visit here.) KUAR has also reported on Exxon blocking reporters' access to the spill site.

Since the spill happened a week ago, cleanup crews have collected 19,000 barrels of oil and water.

Hibblen says county officials seem to be deferring to Exxon when it comes to reporters. "This gets back to who's really in charge, and it seems like ExxonMobil," he said. "When you throw the media out, that's when the media really get their tentacles up."

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

Julia Whitty — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:15:13 +0000

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.

â€‹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.

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

Ryan Jacobs — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:05:09 +0000

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

Tim McDonnell — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:00:10 +0000

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.

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.

What's more, the solution to the problem doesn't rely on some kind futuristic, expensive technology: It's literally a matter of patching up leaky pipes.

So what's the holdup? For one thing, Bradbury says, that $1.5 billion in savings wouldn't necessarily go to the companies making investments in fixing pipes: Gas inside a pipeline is owned by the producer, but the pipeline itself is owned by an independent operator who might not see any advantage in preventing methane leaks. The other issue is detection: Methane is colorless and can be odorless, so there's no way to know when it's escaping, where, and how fast, without special equipment. Gear to simplify the detection process is beginning to crop up on the market, but without a government mandate there's less incentive for companies to invest in it. And without hard data on much methane they're losing, companies are disinclined to address the problem—especially across all of the nation's 300,000 miles of natural gas pipelines.

Or simply unwilling: A recent (debunked) report from the American Natural Gas Alliance claims the methane emissions risk is way over-hyped; an industry spokesperson said current practices were already enough to ensure that "people don't need to trade protection of air, land and water for economic advancement."

This is where the EPA needs to step in, Bradbury says. Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA could regulate all greenhouse gas emissions, which would cover not only methane but also the main climate change culprit, CO2. It could, at a minimum, require companies to monitor these emissions. And it could reward companies that take action via recognition in its fracking best-practices program, Natural Gas STAR. Finally, the EPA could provide better support to the state-level agencies that are ultimately responsible for enforcing Clean Air Act rules.

If the president is serious about tackling climate change from the Oval Office, Bradbury said, there could hardly be a better place to start than here.

"We need to be focused on solutions and not take a wait-and-see approach," he said. "You want to get these rules in place at the front end; we're already playing catch-up."

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

Joanna M. Foster — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:56:47 +0000

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.

I sat down with Kitchell recently to discuss his struggles telling the story of the environmental movement. Here are excerpts, edited for brevity and clarity.

Joanna M. Foster: What was the most difficult part of this story to tell?

Mark Kitchell: Telling the story of climate change is the greatest challenge, creatively, I have ever faced. At its essence, it's the impossible issue, impossible to deal with, impossible to ignore. On top of that, for a long time there weren't any events that gave evidence of a movement. No big protests like Love Canal or the first Earth Day. It is a creeping, slow, ineffable, and often intangible issue. I grew up in the era of the bomb and it was all going to end with a bang. This is the opposite. It's going to end with a whimper, and we aren't going to be able to tell when it has gone too far, when it's already too late. They say we have to really do something in the next two or three years to avoid catastrophe, but they've been saying that since the early '90s. So you see, it's a hard story to tell, hard to know which way we're moving, where the turning point is, whether or not we are actually building momentum, where this is all going, and even what we wish would happen.

JF: For each act in the film, there are images that summarize the movement: the famous cartoon advertisements of the Sierra Club against the building of dams in the West, the photo of a Greenpeace activist on a tiny boat in front of a whaling ship. What is the image for climate change?

MK: This was a real struggle for me too. I didn't want to do the cliché of a polar bear floating precariously on a bit of ice or a glacier calving dramatically into the ocean. These images are so overused, I feel we're dead to them and they really only capture one tiny piece of the story. We used some imagery from Bill McKibben's 350 protests. It's interesting; though: When we first started work on the project, it was right around the time of Katrina, and we wrapped up just as Superstorm Sandy was making her way through NYC. I wonder if when we look back at this nebulous climate change movement we'll see either of those visuals as pivotal. Or maybe it will be a picture of Obama as he is sworn into office for his second term. You never know; I'm hopeful.

JF: What kind of reactions have you gotten so far? And what kind of reactions are you looking for?

MK: Look, this isn't a typical environmental documentary. I'm not saying, "Here's this issue, now go do something about it." We tried to do a "solutions" ending—Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, wind turbines and shields in space to protect us—but it just didn't work. I hope our level of discussion was deeper, broader, and more idea-driven than solutions-driven.

I think there are a lot of advantages to focusing on activism, rather than an issue. It's a more passionate, more involving approach to material that really pulls audiences in more. We see successes and failures. We need to educate, inspire, recruit, and mobilize—I hope this film at least educates. I had a young woman who came up to me after a screening of the film. She was a presenter for Gore's Climate Reality Project and she said that there were so many things in the film that she didn't know. Another woman came up to me at a film festival and said that the film reminded her and her husband of all the ways they used to be involved in issues and they realized how much they missed that. I'm good with this response. A film isn't just a film, you know, it's all the discussions around a film.

JF: What can be learned from these past successes of the different environmental movements you chronicle?

MK: The whole film is a kind of "how to"—how to build a movement. There are a lot of ways things have been done in the past—sometimes movements go too far, and sometimes, like in the case of Love Canal, you just need to take the EPA hostage. How can you use the media? How can you get people's attention? How can you make government officials listen and, more importantly, act? And when there is top-down political failure, we need bottom-up social movements to take over. Just about every movement is the story of holding on as a small group even in the face of overwhelming odds.

CHART: Withering Drought Still Plaguing Half of America

James West — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:00:10 +0000

Click here for a larger version. James West

The $50 billion drought that bedeviled the country last Summer—the worst since the Dust Bowl of the 1930's—still has its fingers around half the country. And if predictions are to be believed, it's only going to get worse for many in the coming months.

Weekly drought figures released Thursday by the US Drought Monitor, a joint project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the USDA and several other government and academic partners, show the situation has worsened slightly from last week, with nearly 52% of the continental US now suffering from a moderate drought or worse. Below-average winter snow pack and rainfall are keeping much of the country in a holding pattern. No measurable precipitation fell on most of central and northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, central and northern Iowa, southwestern Minnesota, and the Louisiana Bayou last week. Rain that fell in the West did nothing to alleviate the drought there; in fact, parts of western Oregon and southwestern Washington have reported their driest start to a calendar year on record. The forecast for the next two weeks? Dry and dry again.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate prediction center warns today that drought is likely to persist for much of the West and expand across northern California and southern Oregon. Although the numbers are more optimistic across eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, with some rain on the way, drought still has a strong grip on much of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona due to low snow-water (around 75% of normal) heading into spring and early summer. That is just the latest in a battery of warning signs that show another brutal summer on its way: California experienced its driest January-February period on record, and average winter temperatures across the contiguous US were 1.9°F above the 20th century average.

These figures come on the back of the spring outlook from NOAA released two weeks ago that point to hotter, drier conditions coming up across much of the US, and with that, flooding.

In many parts of the country, drought in fact never loosened its grip, imperiling the winter wheat crop that sustains much of the US wheat industry.

Invasive Crab Restoring Cape Cod's Dwindling Salt Marshes

Julia Whitty — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:51:30 +0000

The European green crab—an invasive species in North America and one of the "worst 100" invaders on the Global Invasive Species Database—may not be the utter evil we once thought. A couple of new papers (here and here) from a team at Brown University detail how they're actually helping the dwindling salt marshes of Cape Cod recover. It's a fascinating detective story—from the frontlines of an emerging field known as historical ecology—and it's rife with plot twists and red herrings, which begins like this:

People built mosquito ditches into Cape Cod's salt marshes in the 1930s to drain flooded mosquito breeding habitat
Which resulted in the appearance of corridors of low marsh cordgrass in areas formerly dominated by high marsh plants
Coastal development ramped up big-time after World War II, with the permanent human population on the Cape doubling every 20 years from 1939-2005

Purple marsh crab: Photo courtesy of Mark Bertness

Enter a mysterious die-off of Cape Cod low marsh cordgrasses that began decades ago. Researchers eventually traced the culprit to the native purple marsh crab, photo above, which was eating through the cordgrasses at alarming speed.

But why had this good crab suddenly gone bad? The researchers kept researching. Turns out that predators of those crabs—blue crabs and striped bass—were being overfished by recreational fishers. In the course of 337,000 fishing trips to Cape Cod annually, these fishers had triggered a trophic cascade.

That's when the removal of predators messes up the ecosystem two or more trophic links removed. In other words, a system-wide meltdown of a functioning ecosystem. And one unlikely to recover its former state.

Turns out the mosquito ditches, which had seemed more or less harmless since their installation decades earlier, were accomplices in this trophic cascade. That's because the ditches had facilitated corridors of low marsh cordgrasses. As striped bass and blue crabs were being overfished, purple crabs were experiencing a fourfold increase in population. Suddenly these corridors of low marsh cordgrasses became superhighways for hungry purple crabs to eat themselves into a novel state of hyperabundance.

At developed sites with increased accessibility and fishing pressure (a), the purple marsh crab, [c]) is released from predatory control (eg blue crab and striped bass, [b]) and consumes cordgrass , [d]) along creek and ditch banks: TC Coverdale, et al. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. DOI:10.1890/120130

But wait. The story's not over. Enter the introduction of an invasive species, the European green crab with a reputation for biological badassness. According to the findings of the researchers, just published in Ecology, these unwanted invaders (they probably got to Cape Cod as stowaways on ships) discovered the banquets of incredibly yummy (okay, I surmised that part) purple crabs that almost no one else was eating. Nature being what it is, the badass crab struck hard.

Hard enough to begin to reverse the decades'-long decline of Cape Cod's salt marshes. Which, BTW, keep the Cape from eroding off into the Atlantic Ocean. The authors write:

Our results show that, despite previous evidence of negative impacts on native species throughout its introduced range, [the European green crab] is well suited to accelerate the recovery of heavily degraded salt marsh ecosystems in New England.

The effect of the invasive crab doesn't even have to involve actually eating all that many native purple crabs, lead author Mark Bertness tells me. "Fear of being eaten can be a stronger ecosystem effect than being eaten, because predation happens one event at a time whereas a single predator can scare away dozens of prey yielding much larger ecological effects." Though he adds this caution: "Marsh recovery driven by fear of green crabs is superficial and doesn't replace the centuries of accretion and carbon sequestration taken to build Cape Cod marshes."

The Drought Is Drying Up All Our Ethanol

Tim McDonnell — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 10:00:10 +0000

Bill Pracht has bad memories of last summer. "The drought was so bad here that the corn was just decimated," he recalls of the farm country around Garnett, Kan., where he oversees East Kansas Agri-Energy, an ethanol plant. "Many fields were zero."

In August, corn prices hit their highest level ever, driven mainly by the severe drought that crippled America's corn belt. By October, Pracht could see that he was spending more on corn than he could make with ethanol, and with no relief in sight, he began to have doubts about keeping the plant open.

"We knew we'd be wasting money," he says.

So, he pulled the plug, shuttering the plant and laying off twenty employees until conditions improve enough to make churning out what was until recently one of the nation's fastest-growing fuel sources profitable again. And as the EPA nears a final decision on new regulations that would require oil companies to use more ethanol in their gasoline mixes, Pracht's story illustrates a risk of increasing reliance on corn-based fuels in a warming world.

Pracht isn't alone: Over the last year, nearly 10 percent of the nation's ethanol plants have shut down. Annual corn yields came in almost a third lower than projected, according to the USDA, driving record-high corn prices that are likely to continue to rise into 2013, up to 19 percent higher than 2011-2012 averages. Overall, 2012 was the first year since 1996 (another drought year) in which total ethanol production decreased (by 4.5 percent), reversing a trend of exponential growth that's lasted almost a decade, according to the federal Energy Information Administration:

Tim McDonnell

In February, USDA Chief Economist Joseph Glauber blamed drought for "one of the most unfavorable growing seasons in decades" in testimony before the Senate's Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry in February.

But despite the pain of 2012 and some grim predictions from NOAA about the months ahead (drought could lift in the eastern reaches of the Corn Belt and Pracht's region of Kansas, but worsen elsewhere in the state and to the west), a report on Thursday from the USDA predicts that corn growers will plow into the coming season with gusto: 97.3 million acres of corn are expected to be planted in 2013, up six percent since before the drought and the most acreage since 1936.

East Kansas Agri-Energy has been closed since last October, when drought conditions made corn unaffordable. Courtesy Bill Pracht

That should be a sign of hope for the ethanol industry, says Joseph Glauber, the USDA's chief economist; if weather conditions improve and the whole crop comes in, corn prices could drop a third by year's end. But he cautions that ethanol ain't out of the woods yet: If conditions like the first three months of 2013 persist, he says, ethanol production could fall by another eight percent this year.

"As much as anything it's related to the drought," he says.

For that reason, last week's USDA report came as a huge relief to Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, which represents the ethanol industry. Dinneen is hopeful the drought improvements NOAA forecasts for Iowa and Minnesota will spread southwest to Nebraska and Kansas, where the forecast is less optimistic.

"In any kind of normal weather year, we'll have a bin-busting season," Dinneen says. "You're always concerned. You don't want to see another [drought], but this is a time of year when everybody's optimistic."

Of course, how the season will pan out is still far from settled. The EIA also projects a further drop in total ethanol production this year of about 0.9 percent, much less severe than Glauber's prediction but enough to highlight the uncertainty producers face going into the summer, and the vulnerability of the ethanol industry to variable climate conditions.

For ethanol, growth is also limited by what's known as the "blend wall;" because only a relatively small fraction of cars can run well on ethanol-based fuel, ethanol can comprise no more than ten percent of the total fuel supply—a ceiling Dinneen says his group is pushing aggressively to raise. At the same time, President Obama signaled last month a desire to shift away from corn ethanol with heavy investments in advanced, non-corn biofuels—from things like municipal solid waste or woody biomass, sources that could prove more resistant to drought than corn—via his proposed Energy Security Trust.

Still, Glauber says, for the time being ethanol eats up forty percent of US corn, which leaves it vulnerable to bad weather and subsequent shifts in grain supplies: "Ethanol is a huge driver of corn demand. All of a sudden, there are much higher corn prices when you have a drought."

As long as climate change is a factor, the EIA reports, more and more ethanol producers are adopting oil recovery methods to squeeze more power out of their corn, increasing the chances of staying profitable in a time of unpredictable weather.

For Bill Pracht, those advances can't come soon enough. He hopes to be able to re-open his plant by September, keeping a skeleton crew on in the meantime so that the plant can spring back into action when the price is right.

"When Mother Nature cooperates," he says, "we'll be able to start it up and get back to where we were before."

ADHD Diagnoses Increased More Than 50 Percent in a Decade

Maggie Severns — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:00:15 +0000

In 2011, eleven percent of school-age children had been diagnosed with ADHD That's a sixteen percent more than in 2007 and 53 percent more than a decade ago, according to a New York Times analysis of new data from the Center for Disease Control.

This comes out to a grand total 6.4 million children in the US, up to 4 million of whom have prescriptions for Adderall, Ritalin, or other medication, a class of drugs that brings in an estimated $9 billion in sales annually. The Times found that boys, particularly teenage boys ages 14-17, have the highest rates of diagnosis, though no one knows why:

The New York Times

The director of the CDC told the New York Times that "The right medications for A.D.H.D., given to the right people, can make a huge difference. Unfortunately, misuse appears to be growing at an alarming rate." The CDC estimates that we spend $31.6 billion annually in health care and work absence costs for children and adults with ADHD and their families.

Clearly, more and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD. What the new study doesn't tell us is whether more and more kids actually have it. Another recent CDC study, that both surveyed parents and screened children, suggested doctors are over-diagnosing ADHD in some kids while overlooking the condition in others. The survey, which focused on South Carolina and Oklahoma, found that of children taking ADHD medication, only 40 percent in South Carolina and 28 percent in Oklahoma actually met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD.

In other words, the current system for diagnosing kids with ADHD is probably not working very well. Meanwhile, as another recent story in the Times demonstrated, concerns over the potential side effects of ADHD medications—which can include addiction and anxiety—are mounting.

Keystone XL: The Science, Stakes, and Strategy Behind the Fight Over the Tar Sands Pipeline

Chris Mooney — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:00:14 +0000

On February 17, more than 40,000 people rallied in Washington to convince the president to reject the Keystone XL, a proposed 875-mile pipeline running from the Canadian border into Nebraska and slated to transport oil from tar sands (which is 17 percent more greenhouse gas intensive than standard crude oil). The crowds outside the White House provided overwhelming proof that opposing Keystone has mobilized a new and powerful grassroots constituency.

But in the US Senate, the mood was different. In a nonbinding vote, 62 Senators—including 17 pro-Keystone Democrats—voted to approve the pipeline. Just 37 Senators voted against it. In fact, the amendment was co-sponsored by four Democrats, including Max Baucus of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.

So are activists' efforts all in vain? What will happen to the environmental movement if President Obama ultimately lets Keystone go forward?

And more broadly: What does this say about the best strategy for fighting climate change? Does compromise, horse-trading, and winning industry allies ultimately work best—or do you have to push the limits of the possible? You're invited to the next Climate Desk Live event—hosted by myself—for a debate and discussion between some of the leading voices on this issue:

David Roberts, Grist magazine, who has been covering Keystone regularly and recently wrote about the "Virtues of Being Unreasonable on Keystone."

Michael Levi, director of the program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of the new book The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle For America’s Future (Oxford, May 2013), where he writes that combating climate change will require "doing deals [with those] who want to expand production of oil and gas."

Michael Grunwald, senior national correspondent for Time magazine, author of The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, who recently declared that on Keystone, "I'm with the Tree Huggers!"