In 2012, Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla.) and his colleagues in the Republican-led House of Representatives put forward a record number of legislative items that would directly impact the environment for good or ill—but mostly for ill. The acts ranged from mandating drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to defunding the federal government's efforts to prohibit use of fuels that emit high levels of greenhouses gases to completely gutting the Clean Air Act. Out of the more than 100 bills, riders, and amendments advanced by the House, the League of Conservation Voters in its 2012 Congressional Scorecard highlighted 35 bills that had the greatest ramifications for the environment and public health. On those 35 bills, Crenshaw voted against the environment 33 times.
It might not seem that surprising considering Republicans' record on conservation initiatives in recent years is spotty at best, but Crenshaw sits as one of the chairmen of a group of 140 lawmakers* who joined together to advance initiatives for the protection of natural resources around the world: the International Conservation Caucus.
Clockwise from top left: Byron Nuclear Station; Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant; Perry Nuclear Plant; Brunswick Steam Electric Plant. Each experienced a "near miss" in 2012. Photos courtesy NRC
Two years ago today, floodwaters from a massive, deadly earthquake/tsunami combo in Japan knocked out cooling equipment at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, resulting in what experts were quick to deign the second-worst nuclear disaster in history (after Chernobyl), after radioactive contamination touched everything from tuna to baby formula to butterflies. The $125 billion incident precipitated an identity crisis among the world's big users of nuclear power, particularly Germany, which was so spooked that it vowed to shut down every one of its nuke plants by 2022.
But here in the United States, there's no sign of any impending nuclear phaseout, despite the steady parade of meltdown scares reported in a new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS dug into public data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the nuclear industry's top federal regulator, and found that, in 2012, 12 different nuclear power plants experienced "near miss" events, defined as an incident that multiplies the likelihood of a core meltdown by at least a factor of 10. The reasons range from broken coolant pumps to fires to "failures to prevent unauthorized individuals from entering secure areas"; in some cases aging equipment was at fault, and two plants were repeat offenders. One California plant already ranks high in vulnerability to earthquakes. In most cases, the study charges, weak oversight from the NRC was to blame.
In the map below, click on a plant to see what caused it to have a brush with meltdown in 2012:
"Even on a good day, I get discouraged thinking about the election of a new pope," laments Maureen Fiedler, a nun and blogger at the progressive Catholic newspaper National Catholic Reporter. "They all look like a Vatican version of the tea party movement."
On Tuesday, three weeks after Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation on February 28, the world's cardinals will begin their conclave to choose a new pope. The past few decades have been rough ones for a church struggling with the widespread sex abuse scandal and an ever-worsening shortage of clergy. But with 1.16 billion members worldwide, the church is still massive—and it's actually in a perfect position to help save the planet, should it choose to do so.
So will Benedict's successor keep up the ecocrusading? Fiedler is right that on social issues like birth control, gay rights, and celibacy among priests, the papabili—or likely contenders—are predictably conservative. Nevertheless, some have spoken out on climate change, conservation, and other hot topics. Here's my extremely unscientific look at a few of the most environmentally aware:
Cardinal Peter Turkson, Ghana: Turkson is probably the most controversial of all the papal candidates. In 2011, he really riled anti-UN types by calling for a "true world political authority." Then, during a meeting of bishops at the Vatican last year, he showed a ridiculous video warning about the spread of Islam in Europe. Most recently, when asked about the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, he told CNN's Christiane Amanpour:
"African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency," he said. Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa, homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society."
So, yikes. Nevertheless, in the past few years Turkson has often expressed interest in protecting the planet. Here he is talking about environmental stewardship in 2012:
In this 2010 interview with U.S. Catholic magazine, Turkson talked about how surface mining devastates Ghanaian ecosystems, and why Americans should care. In a 2011 address during a visit to Wasnhington, DC, he emphasized that protecting the environment can help the poor:
…despite the naysayers, economic resources exist that could help wipe the tears from the eyes of those who suffer injustice, who lack the basics of a dignified life, and who are in danger from any deterioration in the climate. The poor do benefit from champions in solidarity who believe that injustice can be reduced, that harmonious relationships can be fostered, that our planetary ecology can be made sustainable, that a world of greater communion is possible.
Cardinal Scola
Cardinal Angelo Scola, Italy: In a recent speech to twentysomethings in Italy, Scola showed hipster cred of sorts by quoting Jack Kerouac and Cormac McCarthy. In his 2005 book The Nuptial Mystery, however, he alienated both feminists and the gay community by arguing, as the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal put it, "that feminism is responsible for homosexuality, because the more women act like men, the more men are likely to want to have sex with other men." Right. For those of you who still care what he has to say about the environment after that doozy, consider his elegantly stated thoughts in a 2010 article called "Protecting Nature or Saving Creation?":
The way for the urgent, collaborative convergence between ecology and theology is to continue the logic of creation with love. This logic is scientific, religious and political all in one. And consequently it is the logic of justice and of the complete development of humanity.
Cardinal Odilo Pedro Scherer, Brazil: Like many of the other candidates, Scherer is extremely conservative on issues you'd expect; for example, he has vociferously opposed abortion and gay marriage, the AP reports. But he's also been a champion of the poor and outspoken on deforestation, writes National Catholic Reporter's John L. Allen Jr.:
Scherer has also embraced the strong environmental concerns of the Brazilian bishops, especially with regard to the Amazon. In 2004, he called on the Brazilian government to strictly control the expansion of farmland in the Amazon, "so that measures are no longer taken after the problem is already there, after the forest is felled and burned."
Cardinal Rodriguez
Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, Honduras: If I were electing the pope, Rodríguez would probably get my vote. This guy doesn't just pay lip service to environmental stewardship. As the president of Caritas Internationalis, the Catholic Church's social-justice NGO, Rodríguez has spoken out strongly on climate change, calling it a "faith issue." Last year Rodríguez's team advocated for a legally binding treaty that would force world nations to reduce carbon emissions.
Rodríguez is progressive in other ways; he once said that "neoliberal capitalism carries injustice and inequality in its genetic code." He has also advocated immigration reform in the United States. Rodríguez is not without controversy, however. Here's National Catholic Reporter on a particularly low point:
In 2002, Rodriguez set off a tempest in the United States by comparing media criticism of the Catholic Church in light of the sex abuse scandals to persecutions under the Roman emperors Nero and Diocletian, as well as Hitler and Stalin. He suggested that the American media was trying to distract attention from the Israel/Palestinian conflict, hinting that it reflected the influence of the Jewish lobby.
Cardinal Tagle
Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, the Philippines: At 55, Tagle is probably the youngest of the candidates. He's also one of the more progressive (though not as much as Rodríguez). Tagle is known for his work with the poor, and he recently supported an anti-development protest in an eastern coastal region of the Philippines. And then, there's this tidbit from the AP:
Even as a bishop, Tagle did not own a car. He took the bus or "jeepney," the popular working-class minibus, to church and elsewhere.
On the other hand, Tagle has strongly opposed the use of birth control among Catholics, as have almost all of the other candidates. One could argue—and Julia Whitty does a great job of it in thisMother Jones piece—that the best gift that a pope could give to the poor and the environment would be to allow Catholics to use birth control. But even though the Vatican once almost took that route, there's little support for it among today's cardinals. That's too bad, considering the views of the faithful, at least in the United States: A recent New York Times and CBS News poll found that 71 percent of American Catholics would prefer a pope who favors modern birth control.
The news on antibiotics just keeps getting worse. In the past decade, methicillin-resistant staph aureus—better-known as MRSA—and clostridium difficile ("C. diff" for short) emerged as poster-bugs for antibiotic-resistance. This week, the Centers for Disease Control trumpeted alarming findings about another group of lethal, antibiotic-resistant microbes that has spread in recent years to hospitals across the country.
These "nightmare bacteria"—as CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden dubbed them this week—are called "carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae," or CRE. In healthy people, dozens of enterobacteria species live in the digestive system and pose no threat. In hospital patients with weak immune systems, however, they can cause devastating infections, especially when they acquire resistance to the antibiotics known as carbapenems. These drugs have long served as the treatment of last resort for enterobacterial infections resistant to other antibiotics.
Between 2001 and 2011 the proportion of resistant cases of enterobacterial infection more than tripled.
Between 2001 and 2011, according to the CDC's new report, the proportion of resistant cases of enterobacterial infection more than tripled, from 1.2 to 4.2 percent. And a 2012 survey of acute-care hospitals found that almost one in twenty reported at least one CRE case during a six-month period. The agency did not report the number of deaths from these cases; however, earlier studies found mortality rates of up to 50 percent.
What alarms health care experts is how easily this resistance trait can spread. In bacteria, resistance often arises from genetic mutations. In contrast, CRE carry genes for enzymes that deactivate the carbapenems. These gene packets can be passed along whole to bacteria of the same or even different species--a highly efficient method of disseminating antibiotic resistance. In hospitals, the bacteria are transmitted through hand contact and infected equipment.
An outbreak of klebsiella pneumoniae, an enterobacteria species, swept through a National Institutes of Health research hospital in Bethesda in 2011, infecting 18 patients and killing six. The six-month outbreak began in June that year with the transfer to the NIH hospital of a 43-year-old New York patient with a history of persistent infections.
The incident demonstrated that standard procedures at even the most prestigious medical centers were not sufficient to stem an outbreak of these pathogens. Although CRE infections still remain relatively uncommon in the United States, the CDC warned in its report that the bacteria "have the potential to move from their current niche among health-care–exposed patients into the community" and urged health-care facilities to intensify infection control efforts.
US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ryan Mayes; white flag by Jan Jacobsen via Wikimedia Commons.
I reported in the current issue of Mother Jones on the US Navy's aggressive goals to reduce dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels (My Heart-Stopping Ride Aboard the Navy's Great Green Fleet). These targets include testing and scaling up of biofuels and conserving whatever energy the Navy does procure by using new technologies and good-old common sense—plus training a new generation of officers as "energy warriors."
So what's the sequester going to do to those initiatives, which former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described as among his most important? I spoke with Tom Hicks, Deputy Assistant Director of the Navy for Energy. He told me that at this point all Department of Navy and Department of Defense programs are subject to cuts and civilian furloughs. But some programs weigh more importantly than others:
At this time of declining budgets, investments in the efficiency of our ships and airplanes and in developing alternative fuels becomes more important than ever. In many ways those investments provide savings to the Navy's fleet and to the Navy ashore. The way we budget, we've already accounted for the savings that were expected to be made in fiscal year 2013. If those investments don't happen we'll experience additional costs that we'll have to find a way to pay for in future years. So in a very real way we're going to be facing some bigger budgetary issues if we can't find ways to make those investments.
I know that energy remains one of the top priorities with the Secretary [of the Navy, Ray Mabus]. Certainly shipbuilding is probably foremost among his priorities. But energy is up there as well, in part because of what it provides us. For the fleet it provides additional combat capability and mission effectiveness, and it reduces our vulnerability to increasingly volatile petroleum markets. We had the [amphibious assault ship] USS Makin Island that just recently completed its maiden nine-month deployment. It went out with $32 million fuel budget and it returned back with $15 million saved over its planned fuel usage. That's because it has a hybrid electric drive [part gas-turbine-electric and part diesel-electric] and many other efficiency measures on board that allows it to reduce the amount of energy it needs to conduct its missions. To us, to the Secretary of the Navy, it's now more important than ever to maintain our level of investment in energy.
According to theWashington Guardian, the Navy is forecasting an $8.6 billion budget shortfall by the end of 2013, with plans to shut down four air wings, cancel or delay deployments of up to six ships, dock two destroyers, and defer a planned humanitarian mission by the hospital ship USNS Comfort to Central and Latin America, plus furloughs among its civilian workforce. So far, no mention of axing energy programs.
Not to put too much of a damper on International Women's Day, but I want to call your attention to Nature's eye-popping new report on the persistent gender gap in the sciences. The short of it: Women scientists have made some gains, but they're still getting the short end of the stick.
Take, for example, this chart showing the difference in the median annual salaries for scientists and engineers in 2008. This includes all education levels—bachelor's, master's, and PhD—and age levels:
Nature/National Science Foundation
It doesn't get any better when you have a doctorate, either. Here's the difference between male and female PhDs:
Nature/National Science Foundation
The same goes for getting grants. Here's a chart showing the number of National Institute of Health grants awarded, by gender. Men also got bigger grants; the average size grant for male winners was $507,279, while the average grant to women was $421,385:
Nature/NIH
Part of the issue, as we've reported here before, is persistent gender bias. Male candidates are offered higher starting salaries as well as better mentorship and advancement opportunities. The Nature report also cites research indicating that having children is more likely to push women out of a career in the academy; female postdocs who have or want to have children are twice as likely to leave academia than male colleagues.
I'll end with some better news. At least there are more female science and engineering PhDs entering academia these days:
Despite record heat and extreme weather disasters in recent years, insurers aren't adequately planning for climate change, according to a report issued Thursday. Only 13 percent of insurance companies have a "specific, comprehensive strategy" to deal with global warming.
Researchers at Ceres, a nonprofit that advocates for businesses to become more sustainable, looked at 184 responses from major insurance companies to a new National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) survey on climate risk. They found that only 23 of those companies—which include property and casualty, life, and health insurers—are really taking climate change seriously. Thirteen of those are foreign-owned companies.
Major insurers like Allstate and Travelers expressed "strong ambivalence about the state of the science" in their disclosures.
Out of a potential score of 50 points for climate readiness, insurers averaged a 7.3 overall. Property and casualty insurers—the ones that have to pay out when a monster storm wrecks your house, for example—were more on the ball, with eight actually describing concrete ways they are taking climate change into account in their business. But major insurers like Allstate and Travelers expressed "strong ambivalence about the state of the science" in their disclosures, Ceres found.
Ten percent of responders—many of them life and health insurers—argued that the survey was "not relevant" for their business. The report flags one response from health insurer Excellus that argues that "the Company is not aware of any conclusive data that there are health effects directly (or indirectly) related to climate change." But, as we've reported here before, climate impacts like heat waves, the spread of vector-borne diseases, among others, pose what some in the medical community have dubbed the "biggest global health threat of the 21st century." Only one health insurer, Kaiser Permanente, had a strong position on climate change.
The report's authors found that 88 of the 184 companies said they see climate change as a "potential future loss driver," rather than a current threat. They note, however, that these responses were collected in May 2012—well before Hurricane Sandy which, along with other extreme weather events, caused $58 billion in losses for the insurance industry last year.
This could be bad business for insurance companies, but it's also bad for the rest of us that rely on insurance, Ceres argues. "The insurance sector is a key driver of our overall economy," said Mindy Luber, president of Ceres. "Every segment of insurance industry faces climate risks, and yet the industry's response has been uneven." Luber argued that even just accounting for the risks would go a long way toward helping them address them. "What gets measured gets managed."
Insurance regulators care too, because allowing the risks to go unmanaged could be expensive for policy holders. "Climate has the potential of being a game changer for the insurance industry and we want to make sure it stays on their radar," said Mike Kreidler, the insurance commissioner for Washington State, which is one of three states mandating climate disclosures. "A lot of companies aren't doing much yet."
Average global temperature over the last ~2,000 years. Note the massive uptick on the far right side. Courtesy Science/AAAS
Back in 1999, Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann released the climate change movement's most potent symbol: The "hockey stick," a line graph of global temperature over the last 1,500 years that shows an unmistakable, massive uptick in the 20th century, when humans began to dump large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It's among the most compelling bits of proof out there that human beings are behind global warming, and as such has become a target on Mann's back for climate denialists looking to draw a bead on scientists.
Today, it's getting a makeover: A study published in Science reconstructs global temperatures further back than ever before—a full 11,300 years. The new analysis finds that the only problem with Mann's hockey stick was that its handle was about 9,000 years too short. The rate of warming over the last 100 years hasn't been seen for as far back as the advent of agriculture.
Marcott's team used ocean records to reconstruct global climate further back in time than ever before. Courtesy Science/AAAS
To be clear, the study finds that temperatures in about a fifth of this historical period were higher than they are today. But the key, said lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University, is that temperatures are shooting through the roof faster than we've ever seen.
"What we found is that temperatures increased in the last hundred years as much as they had cooled in the last six or seven thousand," he said. "In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we've seen in the whole Holocene," referring to the current geologic time period, which began around 11,500 years ago.
Syrian rebels rally in Aleppo last November.Pau Rigol/ZUMA
In October 2010, just months before a Tunisian street vendor self-immolated and sparked what would become the Arab Spring, a prolonged drought was turning Syria's verdant farmland into dust. By last month, more than 70,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, had been killed in the brutal and ongoing conflict between President Bashar al-Assad's dictatorial regime and a coalition of opposition forces; just today, the UN announced that over one million refugees fled the country in the last two years. International security experts are now looking at the connection between recent droughts in the Middle East and the protests, revolutions, and deaths that followed, and building a body of evidence to suggest that climate change played a key role in Syria's violence and the Arab Spring generally.
The possibility that climate change could affect security is nothing new: The US Department of Defense has proven to be surprisingly progressive on planning for global warming. But Caitlin Werrell and Francesco Femia, co-founders of the Washington-based Center for Climate and Security, argue that if you want to see the connection between climate and conflict in action today, look no further than Syria. The pair contributed to a series of essays released last week by the Center for American Progress, all arguing that the Arab Spring is a textbook example of the link between climate change and social instability. Climate Desk called them up to discuss how lack of rainfall leads into violent uprising, and how the international community can prepare for the future of extreme weather.
Climate Desk: How does climate change play into civil unrest? Where does it rank compared to other violence-causing factors?
Caitlin Werrell: We use the term "threat multiplier" or "accelerant of instability," in the sense that climate change can exacerbate other threats to national or international security. The way it does that is often through water: You have an increased prevalence of drought or floods or changing rainfall patterns, and what this does is it changes your ability to grow food, it has impacts on food security, it influences your ability to produce energy, it influences your infrastructure.
Francesco Femia: We wouldn't actually rank climate change amongst other factors; we would say that climate change is one of those almost special factors that exacerbates other drivers of unrest and/or conflict. It just makes other drivers of unrest worse.
Global greenhouse gas emissions were way up in 2012, which shows that the world's (admittedly limited) efforts to stop hot-boxing ourselves with dangerous gases aren't going very well.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 2.67 parts per million last year. That puts us at 395 parts per million, according to scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—which is already well past the 350 ppm that some scientists say is ideal for keeping the planet livable. The Associated Pressfirst reported on the jump in emissions:
That's the second highest rise in carbon emissions since record-keeping began in 1959. The measurements are taken from air samples captured away from civilization near a volcano in Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
More coal-burning power plants, especially in the developing world, are the main reason emissions keep going up—even as they have declined in the U.S. and other places, in part through conservation and cleaner energy.
Scientists note that this is the second-largest annual increase in CO2 that they've seen since they've been recording it. Only 1998 was higher, at 2.93 parts per million. Between 2000 and 2010, humans put an average of 2 million additional ppm into the atmosphere each year.
All of this is just another indication that we're likely to blow right past the goal of keeping the global average temperature increase to 2°C (3.6°F) that world leaders have agreed to and continue on toward 4° or more by as early as 2060.
