Monday, August 13th, 2018
Stephan: I spent parts of the day watching the alt-right and their pathetic public gatherings in Charlottesville and D.C., I also watched the very ill-advised Antifa gatherings, somc of whom proclaimed themselves communists. Communists! Really. Can anyone be so dim, so unaware of history, as to be a communist today? Apparently.
Mostly though I thought about what is happening in America, and the race crisis that is upon us. Here is an assessment.
Evelyn Hockstein/ Washington Post /Getty
The white supremacists marching at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year were not ashamed when they shouted, “Jews will not replace us.” They were not ashamed to wear Nazi symbols, to carry torches, to harass and beat counterprotesters. They wanted their beliefs on display.
It’s easy to treat people like them as straw men: one-dimensional, backward beings fueled by hatred and ignorance. But if we want to prevent the spread of extremist, supremacist views, we need to understand how these views form and why they stick in the minds of some people.
It’s important because they’re not going away. This weekend in Washington, DC, a second Unite the Right rally will convene. No one is really sure how many white nationalists will attend, or if the counterprotesters will greatly outnumber them. But they plan to meet in front of the White House to once again put their beliefs on proud display.
Last year, psychologists Patrick Forscher and Nour Kteily recruited members of the […]
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Monday, August 13th, 2018
Niina Heikkinen, - Science
Stephan: Day by day, one by one, fifty years of collective work to improve our circumstances, and hold at bay the worst depredations of corporate greed, are being reversed by the Trump administration. Here is the latest on the pollutant issue.
The Environmental Protection Agency is rethinking how to calculate the costs and benefits of regulations, including those aimed at curbing smog, shown here enshrouding Los Angeles, California.
Credit: Bob Travis/Flickr
Whether it’s in haze-shrouded cities, plumes of car exhaust or even clear skies, fine particle pollution can be found just about everywhere in the United States.
These pollutants are so small they can slip inside buildings and penetrate deep into lung tissue. On hot summer days, high concentrations of the pollutant help trigger poor air quality alerts, warning the very young, elderly and sick to stay indoors. Exposure to fine particles is linked to premature death and higher risks of asthma and heart attacks.
After decades of increasingly strong assertions that there is no known safe level of fine particle exposure for the American public, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Donald Trump’s administration is now considering taking a new position. The agency is floating the idea of changing its rulemaking process and setting a threshold level of fine particles that it would […]
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Monday, August 13th, 2018
Matt McGrath, - Reader Supported News/BBC
Stephan: Here is some good news about solar, although unfortunate news for the U.S.. While we are reverting to old polluting practices, and propping up carbon energy corporations with vast subsidies and diminished regulatory oversight, China is racing ahead out of the carbon era. I can think of no prior example in modern history where a country leading in so many ways abdicates its leadership through incompetent and corrupt governance.
An example of how a flexible, organic solar cell might look.
Credit: SPL
Manufacturers have long used silicon to make solar panels because the material was the most efficient at converting sunlight into electricity.
But organic photovoltaics, made from carbon and plastic, promise a cheaper way of generating electricity.
This new study shows that organics can now be just as efficient as silicon.
What are organic solar cells?
The term organic relates to the fact that carbon-based materials are at the heart of these devices, rather than silicon. The square or rectangular solid solar panels that most of us are familiar with, require fixed installation points usually on roofs or in flat fields.
Organic photovoltaics (OPV) can be made of compounds that are dissolved in ink so they can be printed on thin rolls of plastic, they can bend or curve around structures or even be incorporated into clothing.
What’s stopped them becoming widely used?
In a word – efficiency.
This is a measure of how much of the sunlight […]
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Sunday, August 12th, 2018
Timothy Haab, Professor of Environmental Economics The Ohio State University - GreenBiz
Stephan: The Theorem of Wellbeing, which I have postulated in numerous papers and
The 8 Laws of Change, as my regular readers know, states that social policies that foster wellbeing are always more productive, more efficient, easier to implement, more pleasant to live under, and much much cheaper. And here is proof of that principle.
So the question is: We know what works. Why don't we do it? The answer of course, as is always the case, is profit. A few rich people want to be richer, and they buy the government because most politicians have labile backbones and are for sale if you know how to do it.
Studies by the EPA have calculated that the benefits of avoided deaths and illnesses resulting from the Clean Act far outweigh the costs to society of complying with the law. Credit: EPA
Millions of Americans head outdoors in the summer, whether for a day at a nearby lake or a monthlong road trip. For environmental economists like me, decisions by vacationers and outdoor recreators offer clues to a challenging puzzle: estimating what environmental resources are worth.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order that required federal agencies to weigh the costs and benefits of proposed major new regulations, and in most cases to adopt them only if the benefits to society outweighed the costs. Reagan’s order was intended to promote environmental improvements without overburdening economic growth.
Cost-benefit analysis has been so successful as a tool for policy analysis that every administration since Reagan has endorsed using it. However, it requires measuring benefits that are not “priced” in typical markets. Fortunately, putting a price on non-market environmental outcomes, such as safer drinking water […]
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Sunday, August 12th, 2018
Avery Thompson, - Popular Mechanics
Stephan: As we blithely and with willful ignorance proceed to the catastrophe that is coming, the earth tells us: The debt incurred by your desecration will be repaid.
Credit: Hadi Zaher
As humans put increasingly large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet grows increasingly hotter. To fix this, the vast majority of the world’s governments have agreed to reduce or eliminate their CO2 outputs to prevent the global average temperature from increasing more than a few degrees. But according to new research, our own emissions might not be all we have to worry about.
The Earth is a very complex system, and changing one thing can have repercussions a continent away. In addition, small changes can have extreme impacts that are difficult to predict. A group of researchers has discovered that a number of regions on Earth’s surface could end up releasing greenhouse gases in the future, leading to a ‘hothouse’ Earth that’s several degrees warmer than the present day.
The research, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, outlines a number of scenarios where a small amount of heating […]
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