Two-Thirds of America Doesn’t Really Know What Fracking Is
That's weird.
Republicans Holding Nearly 3 Million Transportation Jobs Hostage For 6,000 Temporary Oil Jobs
With as many as 2.9 million new and existing jobs on the line, House Republicans are refusing to pass a transportation reauthorization bill, even after the Senate’s version of the bill overwhelmingly passed through the upper chamber in a 74-22 bipartisan vote.
The deadline for new transportation funding is June 30, and if the calendar flips to July without a compromise, as many as 1.9 million workers could lose their jobs, at least temporarily. The Senate version of the bill, if adapted, would create an additional one million new jobs as well, according to Department of Transportation projections.
So why are House Republicans holding nearly three million jobs hostage? Because they want approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to be included in the bill. This infographic gives a sense of the GOP’s priorities:
The State Department estimates that roughly 6,000 jobs would be created if the Keystone XL is approved, but as few as 20 of them will be permanent.
Nissan Expects LEAF Sales to Double When Tennessee Factory Begins Production
According to Nissan, once its new factory in Smyrna, Tennessee begins production, the number of LEAF EVs sold will go up quickly enough for the company to reach its goal of selling at least 20,000 during its current fiscal year (which ends in March).
A Bike-Powered Music Festival? You Bet! (June 23rd, San Francisco)
If you are in San Francisco this weekend, check it out!
Tesla Model S Gets Official EPA Ratings: 265 Miles Range and 89 MPGe Efficiency
Unsurprisingly, car makers tend to be a little over-enthusiastic about their products. This goes for electric car makers too, and when they quote electric driving range figures, they tend to be significantly higher than what the EPA's testing shows.
Latin America Report: ‘Time Is Not On Our Side,’ Says U.N. Chief
The United Nations Earth Summit kicked off this week in Rio de Janeiro, but even before its conclusion, the highly anticipated Rio+20 gathering was beset by a lack of specific goals and a failure to draw world leaders like American President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Interior Secretary Gleefully Hails Resumption of Oil Drilling in Vicinity of BP Spill
Or... Ken Salazar does a good impersonation of Peter Kent.
What The Frack? Most Americans Don’t Know What Hydraulic Fracturing Is
Take nothing for granted. That is the most important thing to remember when communicating with the public — or the media or any other group for that matter. Readers of Climate Progress are immersed in the details of climate science and energy policy, but the vast majority of people aren’t.
For instance, “Natural gas is mostly methane,” but many people don’t know it, which is why I wrote that post last year.
As someone who has been working in the energy arena for over two decades, I myself sometimes forget to lead with the basics. But Sheril Kirshenbaum, director of The Energy Poll at The University of Texas at Austin, has a good post that should serve as a reminder to us all, “Americans Not So Familiar With Hydraulic Fracturing.”
She reports that after polling nearly 2,400 people (“representative of the U.S. based on census data”) on energy issues, she learned that while “everyone seems to be talking about” hydraulic fracturing, “as the poll results demonstrate, media coverage is not synonymous with public energy literacy and awareness”:
Sixty-three percent of respondents reported they had “never heard of” or were “not familiar” with hydraulic fracturing. Just 32 percent called themselves “familiar,” leaving 5 percent who answered more ambiguously, “neither.” In other words, fracking is a case where the public lags behind the science and the technology, so we are left with a highly controversial topic that few Americans understand. But this technology is not only a big deal; it’s already changing the international energy landscape.
This is why we all need to do a better job of basic energy and climate communications — because these issues are way too important to have an uninformed public. Fracking is injecting a fluid mixture into the earth to release natural gas (or oil). It has lots of impacts (see, for instance, Shale Shocked: ‘Remarkable Increase’ In U.S. Earthquakes ‘Almost Certainly Manmade,’ USGS Scientists Report). You can find more at Wikipedia or in this video from ProPublica:
That said, we also need to remember that people don’t need to know every last technical detail to make wise choices. Indeed, poll after poll makes clear the public is way ahead of supposedly better informed politicians on supporting climate action and clean energy:
- Gallup: 65% of Americans Support ‘Imposing Mandatory Controls On CO2 Emissions’
- Poll: 75 Percent of Americans Support Regulating CO2 As A Pollutant, 60 Percent Support Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax
- Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?
- Independents, Other Republicans Split With Tea-Party Extremists on Global Warming
- Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent
Wind Developers Look to Ontario in the Midst of PTC Uncertainty
Planning for wind energy developments in the U.S. for 2013 is literally at a stand-still due to the uncertainty of an extension of the Production Tax Credit (PTC). But that isn’t stopping some developers from moving forward with new projects for next year. These new builds might, however, pop up not in the U.S., but in a community with a stable gov
Cheap Coal Is Dead. Long Live Renewable Age (Part 2)
With oil costing close to $100 a barrel, and most imported Asian coal about $120 a ton, fossil energy costs are crippling emerging economies in Asia and Africa. Although renewable alternatives are far less costly than they were even two years ago, they still can't match the cheap coal and oil that Asia and Africa had counted on.
Uruguay Boosts Wind-power Estimate to 1,000 Megawatts by 2015
Uruguay increased the amount of wind-powered electricity it plans to bring online in coming years, saying it wants to capitalize on cheap turbine prices.
Fossil Fuel Subsidies Five Times Higher than Wind Power Subsidies
UK newspapers have again picked-up on the issue of government subsidies to wind power saying that one Cabinet Office minister — Oliver Letwin — backs an end to subsidies to onshore wind farms by 2020. But the Guardian reported that Mr. Letwin’s comments have “irritated” Ed Davey, the UK climate change secretary, who last week set out his backing fo
Activists Campaign to Bring Bikes into the Conversation at Rio+20
Can we be serious about bikes? For a means of sustainable transportation which is transforming cities around the world, it is not receiving the recognition it deserves. A group seeks to change that.
UK Wind Energy Subsidies Could be Cut
There is speculation that UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, is to cut subsidies to wind energy, in a move which has been suggested to halt the expansion of turbines throughout the country.
Ministers are expecting a reduction of up to a quarter in the value of Renewable Obligation Certificates — or “Rocs” — when the Energy Bill is published in a few weeks’ time.
The news came after Oliver Letwin, the Cabinet Office Minister, said in a leaked email at the weekend that the subsidy could be eliminated altogether by 2020.
The email sent to Terry Stewart, president of the Dorset branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, disclosed by The Sunday Telegraph, made it clear that financial support both for onshore wind and solar panels is expected to have “disappeared” by 2020.
The planned changes are also likely to lead to protests from the green lobby and electricity firms, which benefit from the subsidies.
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Anti-hunger, pro-soda: Are you kidding me?
About one in seven Americans — 46 million of us — get help from SNAP, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps. The government spent about $78 billion on SNAP last year. Participants collect about $133 per person per month. SNAP is a valuable safety net that deserves support, for many reasons, outlined here.
But, by some unverified estimates, about $4 billion of SNAP money [distributed via electronic benefit transfer, or EBT, cards] is spent on soda; the government won’t say how much is spent on soda, or anything else. Reasonable people can disagree about whether soda should be taxes. But it’s hard to see why we should be subsidizing it.
It’s no surprise that Coke, Pepsi and the American Beverage Association oppose efforts to stop SNAP money from being used to buy sweetened, carbonated drinks. But they are joined in their opposition by anti-hunger groups like Feeding America and the Food Research and Action Center, as writer-consultant Michele Simon noted in her recent report, Food Stamps: Follow the Money: Are Corporations Profiting from Hungry Americans? [PDF, download]
Do these advocacy groups really believe that poor people in America will be better off if they can use SNAP benefits to buy soda?
Or are they being swayed by the money they get from the food industry?
I’ve asked Feeding America and FRAC to explain why they oppose restrictions on SNAP benefits, and whether they are compromised by their food-industry funding.
Ross Fraser, a Feeding America spokesman, replied by email:
Feeding America has consistently opposed efforts to restrict the ability of SNAP recipients to make individual decisions regarding the types of foods they purchase for themselves and their families using their SNAP benefits. Working with a coalition of other advocacy organizations, food manufacturers, and retailers – including the Food Research and Action Center, the Congressional Hunger Center, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the American Beverage Association, the National Milk Producers Federation, and the Food Marketing Institute – Feeding America has advocated on Capitol Hill and with the Administration for policies that strengthen access to SNAP benefits for low-income individuals, promote benefit adequacy, and protect the program from unnecessary stigma.
FRAC hasn’t responded at all, despite several requests for comment.
The arguments about giving SNAP recipients the freedom “to make individual decisions regarding the types of foods they purchase” don’t make sense to me, for a couple of reasons. First, and most important, carbonated soft drinks aren’t food. The N is SNAP stands for nutrition. Second, SNAP benefits are already restricted. People can’t buy tobacco, alcoholic beverages, supplement pills, hot prepared foods, and non-food items with SNAP benefits. Adding soda to the list would hardly create an “unnecessary stigma” or add complexity to the program–another argument advanced by those who oppose restrictions.
What’s more, school breakfast and lunch programs, which are also administered by USDA, comply with nutrition standards that exclude soda, as they should. So does the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, which is limited to foods that deliver health benefits to pregnant and breastfeeding women and young children.
Feeding America–an important nonprofit that distributes 3 billion tons of food a year through its network of food banks–depends on the generosity of the food industry for its work. Its “leadership partners” include ConAgra Food, Food Lion LLC, General Mills, Idol Gives Back, Kellogg Company, Kraft Foods and Kraft Foods Foundation, Kroger, The Lincy Foundation, Nestle, Pepsico, Procter & Gamble, The Starr Foundation, SUPERVALU, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation. Some of those donors probably don’t care if SNAP funds are restricted, but others clearly do.
FRAC’s supporters include the foundations of Kraft, General Mills and ConAgra. As I reported the other day, a FRAC fund-raising dinner earlier this month was supported by the American Beverage Association, Kellogg Company, PepsiCo, Inc., Mars Incorporated and Nestlé USA, among others.
It’s not just Feeding America and FRAC that benefit from beverage industry donations. Through its foundation, Coca-Cola has given money to American Academy of Family Physicians and American Academy of Pediatric Dentists–groups that, under other circumstances, might be critical of soda consumption. Its foundation also gave money to the NAACP for a program called Project HELP (Healthy Eating, Lifestyles and Physical Activity).
Obesity is serious business, folks. That’s why Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, has proposed restricting the sizes of soft drink containers. Last year, he tried to get a waiver from USDA to see what would happen if SNAP funds could not be used to by soda, but Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack turned him down. To grasp the scale of the problem in the US’s biggest city, check out a city report titled “Reversing the Epidemic: The New York City Obesity Task Force Plan to Prevent and Control Obesity”. It calls obesity New York City’s “most serious and rapidly growing health problem,” saying it kills 5,800 residents a year. Being overweight or obese is “now the norm in our city,” the report says. Black, Latino and low-income communities are among the hardest hit.
A final point: Getting people to drink less soda won’t end the obesity crisis, as the American Beverage Association never tires of pointing out. (See this and this.) A far more comprehensive approach will be needed. But right now, the government encourages soda purchases–by permitting them to be part of SNAP, as well as by subsidizing the corn industry, whose high fructose corn syrup is the most popular sweetener used in soft drinks. This does no one any good, except, of course, the beverage industry.
