By and large, the 2014 midterms did not go well for climate hawks. Republicans’ new majority in the Senate will allow them to at least slow down various climate policies, and maybe even scuttle a few completely. The election also solidified the GOP’s grip on various state governments, making state-level green policy less likely, and threatening the rollback of existing laws.
But there was one big exception.
In Pennsylvania, Democrat Tom Wolf ousted Republican Governor Tom Corbett by a handy margin of 54.9 percent to 45.1 percent. Wolf’s victory ended the lockdown the GOP had held over the state’s executive branch and both houses of its legislature. But even more significantly, it served as an implicit endorsement by Pennsylvania voters of a prominent commitment Wolf made during the campaign: if elected, he’d work to move the state into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).
A Costa Rican Forest
Credit: Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
LA VIRGEN, Costa Rica — Over just a few decades in the mid-20th century, this small country chopped down a majority of its ancient forests. But after a huge conservation push and a wave of forest regrowth, trees now blanket more than half of Costa Rica.
Far to the south, the Amazon forest was once being quickly cleared to make way for farming, but Brazil has slowed the loss so much that it has done more than any other country to limit the emissions leading to global warming.
And on the other side of the world, in Indonesia, bold new promises have been made in the past few months to halt the rampant cutting of that country’s forests, backed by business interests with the clout to make it happen.
In the battle to limit […]
Credit: UPI
ATHENS, OHIO — New research suggests muscles respond to simple thoughts of exercise; simply imagining exercise can trick the muscles into delaying atrophy and even getting stronger. It’s further proof that brain and body, which evolved together, are more intwined than separate.
To demonstrate the power of the brain, researchers at Ohio University wrapped a single wrist of two sets of study participants in a cast — immobilizing their muscles for four weeks. One set was instructed to sit still and intensely imagine exercising for 11 minutes, five days a week. More than just casually daydream about going to the gym, participants were instructed to devote all of their mental energy towards imagining flexing their arm muscles.
The other set of study participants weren’t given any specific instructions. At the end of the four weeks, the mental-exercisers were two times stronger than the others.
Researchers also used magnetic imaging to isolate the area of the brain responsible for the specific arm muscles. Participants that imagine exercise not only had stronger arms but also a stronger brain; their mental exercises created stronger neuromuscular pathways
“What […]
U.S. Factory
Credit: Bloomberg
WASHINGTON — While the U.S. economy grew from July through September at the fastest pace in more than a decade, most other major economies have been struggling.
Europe is straining just to grow. So is Brazil. Japan has slid into recession. China is trying to manage a slowdown. Russia foresees a recession next year.
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy accelerated at a robust 5 percent annual rate last quarter.
“The U.S. is easily top of the charts in the developed world and frankly not half-bad by (faster) emerging-market standards,” said Eric Lascelles, chief economist for RBC Global Asset Management.
The United States has benefited from aggressive easy-money policies by the Federal Reserve, a banking system that rebounded from the 2008 financial crisis, solid consumer spending in areas like autos and a roaring stock market that has left many Americans feeling wealthier and more willing to spend.
Here’s how other major economies stack up with the United States. The figures, compiled by RBC Global Asset Management, show third-quarter growth at an annual rate:
— EUROZONE
Up 0.6 percent. The economy of the 18 countries […]
Credit: Mirissa Neff
In Cuba, December 17th marks El Día de San Lázaro. The day is reserved—both by Cuban Catholics and by the far more numerous adepts of Santería, the Yoruba-born faith of its historical African slaves—for the patron saint of healing and rebirth. Thousands of Cubans stream toward a little church in the village of Rincón, twenty miles from Havana, to honor a figure depicted, in little statues and on key chains, as a hunched old man wearing purple and toting a cane. Even in the early years of Fidel Castro’s revolution, when the Comandante’s secular Marxism made religion forbidden, this ritual persisted.
Last Wednesday, as the pilgrims approached Rincón on a typically bright but cool December morning, there was little hint of the new resonance the day would carry. In the Juventud Rebelde, one of two daily national newspapers in Cuba and the official organ of the youth wing of the Cuban Communist Party, a simple notice stated that at noon, on state TV, Raúl Castro Ruz, President of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
