Saturday, March 4th, 2017
Stephan: Here is the latest on the bee crisis that is leading to the extinction of bees, which will have catastrophic implications for agriculture. Which is to say, the food you eat, or can't get.
The study in this report can be downloaded at: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/native_pollinators/pdfs/Pollinators_in_Peril.pdf
This is one of the approximately 4,000 native bee species in the United States, Halictus ligatus. A recent study found that native bees tested had been exposed to neonicotinoid pesticides in many cases.
Credit : USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab
The new analysis, Pollinators in Peril: A systematic status review of North American and Hawaiian native bees, revealed that more than 700 species are in trouble from a range of serious threats, including severe habitat loss and escalating pesticide use.
“The evidence is overwhelming that hundreds of the native bees we depend on for ecosystem stability, as well as pollination services worth billions of dollars, are spiraling toward extinction,” said Kelsey Kopec, a native pollinator researcher at the Center for Biological Diversity and author of the study. “It’s a quiet but staggering crisis unfolding right under our noses that illuminates the unacceptably high cost of our careless addiction to pesticides and monoculture farming.
“The widespread decline of European honeybees has been well documented in recent years. But until now much less has been revealed about […]
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Jonathon Morgan, - The Washington Post
Stephan: The rise of Christian White Fascism -- the alt right as the media so decorously styles it -- is the most important political development in the United States. It is important to understand this large group, and here is an excellent exegetic essay on the subject. Please read it.
A meme posted by an alt-right account on Twitter. The circular symbol to the left is an “occult” icon, often used by neo-Nazis.
Credit: Twitter
Regardless of who triumphs at the ballot box, the biggest winner of this presidential election may be the alt-right: a sprawling coalition of reactionary conservatives who have lobbied to make the United States more “traditional,” more “populist” and more white.
Once relegated to the political fringes, the alt-right has become a sudden, shocking force in mainstream politics, closely identified with the Donald Trump campaign. Trump’s campaign chief executive, Stephen Bannon, is a former executive chairman of Breitbart News, which he once described as “the platform of the alt-right.” Trump regularly retweets the memes and messages of the alt-right, which has propelled the movement into the limelight.
[How the alt-right took over the GOP]
But lurking behind the offensive tweets and racially charged campaign rhetoric, there’s a more subtle — and far more dangerous — potential threat posed by the alt-right. As my colleagues […]
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Adele Peters , - fastcoexist
Stephan: I did a story about the Navajo Generating Station recently, and here is the happy ending.
As this report says the Navajo Generating Station, "... 12 miles from the Grand Canyon near Page, Arizona, is the
seventh largest individual source of climate pollution in the country, pumping out more than 14 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year... shutting it down will... save more than $127 million a year in health costs. This is excellent news of itself, and to that must be added, happily, why the plant is closing.
Even though regulations are being relaxed or eliminated under Pruitt's EPA this coal powered plant is still closing a decade ahead of schedule. Why? Whatever is going on politically people are voting through their daily choices for non-carbon energy. The market is driving the transition.
Navajo Generating Station
Three years ago, the EPA struck a deal with the owners of the largest coal plant in the Western U.S. to close the plant by 2044. Now—because of economics, not regulation—the owners plan to shut the plant down by 2019 instead.
The Navajo Generating Station, 12 miles from the Grand Canyon near Page, Arizona, is the seventh largest individual source of climate pollution in the country, pumping out more than 14 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. It’s also a major source of air pollution for people living nearby; by some estimates, shutting it down will also save more than $127 million a year in health costs.
Both the plant and the nearby coal mine also use a significant amount of water that would otherwise be used as drinking water for the Navajo Nation. “It’s clean water that they’re using,” says Percy Deal from Dine Care, a local Navajo environmental group. “I really believe that it’s time to put an end to that. That 31,000 acre-feet […]
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Annie Waldman , Senior Reporting Fellow - ProPublica - Alternet/ProPublica
Stephan: This Obamacare farce now going on in the Congress is difficult and complicated for only one reason: the United States does not have a healthcare system it has an Illness Profit System. All of this maneuvering is over who profits, and how much.It has very little to do with wellbing.
The pharmaceutical part of the system has gone into an hysteria of greed. Consider the recent black comedy of Epi-pens.`American drug prices bear no relation to those in the rest of the developed world. How about this, the average cost in 2013 for a Lipitor prescription -- a common high cholesterol drug -- is $6 in New Zealand, $13 in Spain, $43 in United Kingdom, and $145 in the U.S.
It isn't just the drugs either. The greed has reached such a psychotic level that medicine itself is being corrupted. I have been following this trends for several years (see SR archives) and here is the latest. It is appalling.
Other countries can create universal healthcare at a fraction of the cost per capita of the partial and selective healthcare in the U.S.
Over the last three years, pharmaceutical companies have mounted a public relations blitz to tout new cures for the hepatitis C virus and persuade insurers, including government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, to cover the costs. That isn’t an easy sell, because the price of the treatments ranges from $40,000 to $94,000, or because the treatments take three months, as much as $1,000 per day.
To persuade payers and the public, the industry has deployed a potent new ally, a company whose marquee figures are leading economists and health care experts at the nation’s top universities. The company, Precision Health Economics, consults for three leading makers of new hepatitis C treatments: Gilead, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and AbbVie. When AbbVie funded a special issue of the American Journal of Managed Care on hepatitis C research, current or former associates of Precision Health Economics wrote half of the issue. A Stanford professor who had previously consulted for the firm served as guest editor-in-chief.
At a congressional briefing last May on hepatitis C, three of the four panelists were current […]
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Frank Andorka, - pv magazine
Stephan: You would think that the recent reinstatement of net-metering in Nevada would have taught the Republicans in Indianapolis something. But No. As this report demonstrates nothing is so persuasive as ideology and greed.
As a result we see the growing difference in the social health of Blue value and Red value states; it is becoming evermore more apparent.
The other thing this story shows is that Republicans, perhaps because they don't really focus on facts, make the same mistakes again and again.
Indianapolis
The Indiana Senate yesterday approved the controversial anti-net-metering bill, Senate Bill (SB) 309, on a 39-9 vote despite growing public opposition and accusations of skulduggery on the part of one of the bill’s authors.
After passage, two state House of Representatives members, Rep. David Ober and Rep. Edmond Soliday, have accepted responsibility for shepherding the bill through their side of the legislature. No date for a vote has been set, but the House can be expected to act quickly.
As pv magazine has documented since SB 309 was introduced in January, the bill has been surrounded by controversy, with organized opposition from the solar industry, including recent accusations that the original author of the bill, Indiana State Senator Brandt Hershman, lied to his colleagues on the Senate Committee on Utilities in an effort to ramrod his bill through.
On the surface, the bill keeps solar net-metering in place until 2027. Language buried deep […]
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