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Male-dominated Big Ag woos women with paternalistic marketing blitz
Marketing campaigns aside, the face of industrial-scale farming is male. Big Ag is big business — and big profits. And when anyone raises questions about the billions of tax dollars lavished on the largest industrial growers of corn, soybeans, and other commodity crops or points out the harm that these perverse incentives do to the […]
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Big Oil lobby announces it will start donating directly to candidates
Apparently their current amount of influence isn’t good enough.Cross-posted from the Wonk Room. The American Petroleum Institute (API), Big Oil’s chief lobbying organization, will start directly backing political candidates in the second quarter of this year. API, whose membership includes oil giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, already spends tens of millions of dollars every year on […]
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Why do people in cars hate people on bikes so much?
If you’ve ever been behind the wheel of a car, you’ve felt it: The dead certainty that everyone around you is a complete idiot who should get the hell out of your way. If you’ve spent much time riding a bicycle, you have been the target of that wrath. And without the protective metal-and-glass bubble […]
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Why it’s hard to make polluters pay for their own messes
Scoffing at the idea of externalities is a lot easier when wearing a gas mask.Industrial boilers and incinerators currently receive an enormous public subsidy. They emit toxic air pollutants like mercury, cadmium, and acid gases, which even in extremely small amounts cause a range of health maladies from asthma to heart attacks to premature death, […]
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Scientist: 75 percent of coral reefs are threatened — but there’s hope!
Bleached coral in waters off Phuket, Thailand.Photo: AeyseaCross-posted from Cool Green Science As anyone who’s ever snorkeled off of a Caribbean island knows, coral reefs are strange, beautiful structures housing a dizzying diversity of sea life. Coral reefs occupy less than 1 percent of the ocean floor, but provide habitat for as much as a […]
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Half of world’s population could face climate-driven food crisis in second half of the century
[I’m on travel, so I’m updating this timely 2009 post on food insecurity.] The quote above is the powerful final sentence from a 2009 study in Science, “Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat.” The University of Washington news release release explained: Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields […]
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Half of world’s population could face climate-driven food crisis in second half of the century
[I’m on travel, so I’m updating this timely 2009 post on food insecurity.] The quote above is the powerful final sentence from a 2009 study in Science, “Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat.” The University of Washington news release release explained: Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields […]
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High-speed train to Las Vegas probably a better use of your money than Las Vegas
Image: DesertXPressDesertXpress, a planned high-speed rail project between the L.A. area and Las Vegas, was supposed to be built entirely with private funding. As it turns out, developers will have to take out a federal loan, and there’s some question as to whether the project can make enough money to pay it back. But this […]
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FHA PowerSaver Loans – a PACE Replacement?
Late last year, the Federal Housing Administration announced a new PowerSaver loan program to provide financing for home energy efficiency improvements. The program comes on the heels of the downfall of residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing, which allowed homeowners to pay back energy efficiency improvements via long-term property tax payments, as well as […]
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Maine governor on BPA: ‘Worst case is that some women may have little beards’
Image: JMS BoggioPaul LePage, governor of Maine, is pretty confident that nothing can harm him as long as he doesn’t know sh*t about dick. Here’s his scientific assessment of the dangers of plastic additive bisphenol A: “Quite frankly, the science that I’m looking at says there is no [problem],” LePage said. “There hasn’t been any […]
