Hasta La Gadget!

President Obama may not have hit the record number of mentions of the word “innovation” compared to his 2014 State of the Union, but he highlighted pro-innovation priorities like trade and open Internet access and fast networks. These will grow innovation with the platforms and markets innovators need.

Open access to a fast Internet is an economic and innovation issue. This point was made clear at Congressional hearings this week in Congress. For companies like Etsy, Dwolla and thousands of others who rely on open connectivity, its a prerequisite for conducting business — and even for raising capital at the outset. When start-up companies approach investors they have to list potential liabilities. No investor wants to lend money to a company that could fail if an Internet access provider could easily offer a special deal to their competitor but not to them.

Clear predictable rules from the FCC will be welcomed by businesses, and that is why so many have urged the FCC to stand up to narrow special interest politics and move forward with strong open Internet rules that protect consumers’ and businesses’ Internet access.

Etsy mentioned at the hearings that 30,000 of the micro-businesses it represents have asked the FCC to use its Title II telecommunications authority for its Open Internet rules.

With some in Congress are trying to preempt an FCC decision, we are concerned about the role of partisan politics and misinformation that is proliferating.

Several times at the Senate and House hearings, and in the weeks leading up to them, members of Congress ranted against the FCC regulating the Internet — when that is clearly not under consideration at all. The FCC is proposing only to adopt basic safeguards to protect access to the Internet, but is not considering regulating the Internet itself.

This is an important point. The Internet is comprised of a vast backbone and transit networks that are highly competitive, millions of content providers, end-users and their contributions. Internet access is controlled by a small subset of dominant Internet access providers. The FCC is seeking to prevent Internet access providers from abusing their power. And it seems poised to take this light touch regulatory measure to protect consumers access to communications as it has been asked to do by millions of Internet users and businesses.

It is not surprising that the biggest Internet access providers in the cable and telecom industries oppose Open Internet rules. They want the freedom to use their power to erect “toll booths” to collect new access charges.

Many of us believe that charging access tolls when actual customers are already paying for two way connectivity would be abusive. Few would even try to argue that next generation innovators would not be at risk from larger competitors who have paid for faster delivery while the innovator’s customers would face delays in accessing their new services. Likewise, without a ban on paid prioritization, IAPs would be able to favor their own affiliated and competing video or cloud services.

So from an economic standpoint what Congress and all of us need to remember is that weak, unenforceable, or loophole riddled Open Internet rules might benefit a few legacy companies — but would limit our economic future. It is unwise to allow barriers to be erected blocking the next generation of companies that can be the economic driver of jobs. Preventing the FCC from requiring Internet access providers to follow basic nondiscrimination rules that benefit small businesses would enable those barriers to flourish.

An interesting poll from Morning Consult conducted this week revealed that more than twice as many Republican voters trusted the FCC more than Congress to determine net neutrality rules. See the graph below from reporter Fritz Burgher’s story:

The FCC was the institution Congress created years ago to look out for the public interest in communications network access. They were wise to minimize politics and charge the agency with developing the technical expertise to protect universal access to communications services. Congress would be wise now to let the FCC carry out its mission.

Today, the Earth got a little hotter, and a little more crowded.

OO A “Cheesy Love Story” : The Fun Ad Doritos Doesn’t Want You to See – palm oil is bad for people and our carbon-storing rainforests. It’s in Doritos.

Related Headline:

OO Fake Doritos Ad Pressures Pepsi Over Palm Oil Policy

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The State of the Climate

Takeaways:

* Our global “water insurance,” glaciers, are melting away.

* Sea level rise: 8 inches over past century — now, rising much faster.

“The Fuse is Blown”:
Glaciologist’s Jaw Dropping Account of a Shattering Moment
Eric Rignot co-authored a paper last spring showing that large areas of the West Antarctic Ice sheet are now in “irreversible decline” — think irreversible sea level rise….

* Things are changing FASTER than the science predicted.

But we can act to address this fast – the solutions are relatively cheap!
Will you be part of the solution?

Just how likely is global warming man-made, not random variability?

OO Go Figure: Figuring the Odds of Earth’s Hot Streak of Years – by statisticians on the warming being random, rather than man-made.

OO EPA Plans Oil and Gas Methane Emissions Cuts – up to 45% by 2025 (from 2012 levels) Well, that will hack away at a future source … but what about present sources from fossil fuel operations – and from the tundra due to global warming?

SOLAR KEEPS RISING

OO Solar Power On The Rise – As the cost of solar power continues to fall, the market booms worldwide: in many parts, it is now cheaper to produce solar power than fossil fuel or nuclear energy

OO USA: Solar Is Cheaper Than the Grid
in 42 of the 50 Largest Cities – and in almost all of them, solar is a better investment than the stock market.

Related headline:

OO Report: Forget Stocks, Invest In Solar Panels

OO Solar Is Adding Jobs 20 Times Faster Than the Broader Economy

Related Headline:

OO The Solar Industry Created More Jobs In 2014 Than Oil And Gas Extraction

OO US South Goes Solar:
Bipartisans Support Solar Spread in Florida & Georgia – from tea partyers to liberals.

OO Host-Owned Rooftop Solar Improves a Home’s Resale Value – says a new study.

OO CA: Another Big 550MW Solar Farm, Desert Sunlight, Goes Online – as California adds solar capacity in half-gigawatt chunks.

OO US SunEdison Plans $4B Solar Factory, 5GW of Projects – In India

Check it out here, right now!

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GOOD CLEAN NEWS

OO Save Energy –> Cut Pollution –> Cut Children’s Asthma – is the message that really works to get people to cut home energy use, says a UCLA study.

OO US Produces More Wind Power Than Any Other Nation President Obama said in his 2015 State of the Union address, notes the Power of Wind team at the American Wind Energy Association. We also make the most productive wind turbines, but all that is threatened by the recent cut of the federal Production Tax Credit in Congress.

OO Americans Getting More Serious About Global Warming As A Priority – says a new Pew Poll, but at 22nd place in the list of 23 top policy priorities, you might wonder how – 38% of those polled put it on the list, however, and that’s a popup of almost 10% from last year.

OO Maine: Green-Energy Inspiration Found on a Danish Island – Maine’s Monhegan stands to learn from the Danish energy-independent island of Samso.

OO California Takes Lead In Developing Energy Storage – mandating enough stored energy in its utilities to power 1 million homes.

OO US Automakers Keep Rolling Out Electric Vehicles

The many, many reasons why China is cutting subsides for polluting non-electric cars. Wikipedia

OO China to Cut Subsidies for Non-Electric Vehicles

OO Soon 80% Of Canada Could Have A Carbon Price

OO Mines Worldwide Becoming Important Market for Renewables – both as providing solar/wind power sites on deserted lands, and powering current operations with clean renewables.

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WHAT WORKS

Speaking Out:

OO Poland’s Shale Gas Revolution Evaporates In Face Of Protests

OO W VA: Facing Backlash, Board Of Education Votes
For an Accurate Climate Change Curriculum

OO Activists Rally Across USA: Call On White House To Reject Keystone XL

OO Religious Activists Tell Republicans To Get Religion On Climate Change

Insights:

Mongabay

OO Drying And Burning Peatlands Amplify Global Warming

Good Ideas:

OO Biggest Energy Innovation? Go Without – energy efficiency is the invisible fuel.

OO Making Bike Sharing Part Of Public

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WHAT DOESN’T WORK

Fossil Fuel Follies:

OO New – And Worrisome – Contaminants Emerge
From Oil And Gas Wells – two new hazardous fracking waste chemicals – ammonium and iodide – are pouring into Pennsylvania and West Virginia waterways, a new study shows.

OO Who Needs Lobbyists?
Big Energy Spends Big Ad Bucks To Win American Minds

OO Fracking Plays Dirty – fracking sand companies in Wisconsin are asking to be annexed to cities so country regulations don’t stop their growth.

OO Burning Oil : 2.7 Million Gallons A Minute and Rising – Global oil consumption has never been higher and is rising.

OO Canada: 230,000 People With No Drinking Water After Diesel Spill

Biomass burning emits greenhouse gases, and is how America is legally burning its carbon-storing forests: turning them into wood pellets and exporting them to European fireplaces.

OO EPA Gives Green Light to Biomass Pollution – a bad idea, made worse when people start defining carbon-storing forests as “biomass.” Burning biomass emits greenhouse gases.

Even more emissions occur when OO Biomass Industry Plays With Fire and gets burned.

Related Headline:

OO UK: ‘Green’ Biomass Boilers May Waste Billions In Public Money

Clueless Leadership:

Even elephants can’t survive on oil. Credit: Mary Ellen Harte

OO House Passes Sneaky Bill
Attacking Public Health and Environmental Regulations

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WHY WE SHOULD ACT NOW: RISING RISKS

Daily Climate Change: Global Map of Unusual Temperatures, Jan 25, 2015

How unusual has the weather been? No one event is “caused” by climate change, but global warming, which is predicted to increase unusual, extreme weather, is having a daily effect on weather, worldwide.

Looking above at recent temperature anomalies, much of the US and the waters surrounding it are experiencing warmer than normal temperatures: the eastern Pacific warm spot continues to prevent much rain from reaching California, sending it into further drought.

Much of the areas surrounding the North Pole are experiencing much warmer than normal temperatures – not good news for our Arctic thermal shield of ice. Hotter than usual temperatures continue to dominate human habitats.

Nature’s Breaking Points: Humanity Has Crossed 4 Out Of 9 ‘Planetary Boundaries’ says a new study, reports Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post, beyond which we are destabilizing our environment and creating an unsafe future for humans in coming decades. The crossed boundaries are the extinction rate, deforestation, atmospheric CO2 levels, and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous into the oceans.

Although the paper mentions our exploding populations, the authors miss that for what it is: the most obvious crossed boundary of all, and the main force pushing us beyond other boundaries.

An array of human ills, from allergies to depression will increase in a warming world and cause additional deaths, says the World Health Organization.

OO Seven Ways Climate Change Could Really Kill You include allergies, heart attacks, salmonella outbreaks, depression, malaria, diarrhea, heat exposure and malnutrition, all of which will increase as the world warms further, the World Health Organization warns.

Natural Repercussions:

OO Global Warming Linked To More Extreme Weather And Weaker Jet Stream – more directly than ever.

Source Citizen Of Earth at DailyKos

Sea Levels Rising Much Faster Than Previously Thought says a new study, reports Seth Borenstein at the Sacramento Bee via AP. The study uses a new method showing that the rise during much of the 20th century was actually underestimated by about 30% — that is, the rise was slower.

But that means the rise since 1990 to present must be actually far faster to account for current levels. So, the current rise is much faster than previously estimated. Oh-oh.

Related Headline:

OO Sea Level Rise Accelerating Faster Than Thought

OO Earth’s Fresh-Water Resources At Risk says a new study.

High altitude forest in the Grand Canyon National Park. Credit Park Williams, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory

Dry Skies Literally Drying Out And Threatening US Southwest Forests reports John Upton at Climate Central, say researchers. Due to drought, the skies are holding so much less water than they could that it is creating a lack of vapor pressure, known as a vapor pressure deficit.

This ends up pulling moisture out of the high altitude southwest forests atop plateaus and mountains. This, added to decreased snowpacks and higher temperatures, is behind ever worsening wildfire seasons there, and increasing loss of forests.

OO Alarm Over Siberian Sea Permafrost Thaw, Methane Leak where a Russian gas company plans to drill – just west of the peninsula where a giant sinkhole was discovered last summer, probably created from methane escaping the melting permafrost.

Source: www.dcclothesline.com

OO Mass Die-Offs Of Fish, Birds, Mammals Increasing – some of which are consistent with climate change.

OO 2014 Was The Warmest Year Ever Recorded On Earth

OO Perennial Arctic Sea Ice Continues To Shrink – threatening the planetary summer thermal shield.

Human Repercussions:

Source Facebook

OO CA: Drought Fears: Signs Of 4th Straight Dry Year – state and federal water officials sound the alarm, saying that more action will be needed to combat the continuing drought.

OO Los Angeles Basin: Far Higher GHG Methane Emissions Found

OO Fishing Industry Could Lose Up To $41 Billion Due To Climate Change says a new study.

A parasitic trematode worm, magnified. Wikipedia

OO Another Reason To Fear Climate Change: You May Get Worms – parasitic ones, like the ones that invade your skin in the tropics.

OO Asia: Climate Change Plagues Nepal In The Himalayan Mountains as melting glaciers deprive it of needed hydroelectric power and change weather, threatening food crops.

OO Pakistan: Climate Change Turning Mountain Communities Into Soup of Hazards – as hotter temperatures that melt glaciers, and heavier rains create far more flooding.

Smog over the Forbidden City in Beijing, China. Credit Brian Jeffrey Beggerly via wikimedia commons.

OO Airpocalypse Now: Beijing’s Toxic Smog Soars Off Charts. Again.

OO Africa: Global Warming Foments Extremism in Boko Haram – contributing to the ongoing violence.

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KEEPING CARBON STORED: FORESTS UPDATE
Forests: the cheapest way to store carbon

Logging is widespread in Peninsula Malaysia, and in Malaysian Sarawak on Borneo Island.

OO High Deforestation Rates In Malaysian States Hit By Flooding

OO Sarawak Malaysia May Stop New Logging
After Much Deforestation And Corruption

OO Amazon Gold Rush Destroying Huge Swaths Of Rainforest

OO Deforestation Climbing – Along With Fears – In The Amazon

The real price of that steak dinner? More climate change, and threats to your health. Try something deliciously green next time! Wikipedia.

OO Global Warming Driver: Rising Meat Consumption
Pushes Farming Past Deforestation – says a new study.

OO Sulawesi Village Seeks Protection For Sacred Forest
Threatened By Development – it supplies their water and, yes, store lots of carbon.

OO Palm Oil Expansion May Play Role In The Ebola Crisis – as expansion into forests increases likelihood of transmission from wildlife to humans.

Good Conservation Ideas:

Courtesy Tim Kovar in the Portland Tribune

OO Tree Climbing As A Tool To Build Respect For Forests

OO Sulawesi, Indonesia: Farmers Help Restore Degraded Forests

OO Community Forest Management Attracts International Attention
In Sulawesi, Indonesia

There is, of course, much more news on the consequences and solutions to climate change. To get it, check out this annotated resource list I’ve compiled, “Climate Change News Resources,” at WordPress.com here. For more information on the science of climate change, its consequences and solutions you can view my annotated list of online information resources here.

To help you understand just what science does and does NOT do, check this out!

Every day is Earth Day, folks, as I was reminded by this stinging plant flower I photographed in Chile. Making the U.S. a global clean energy leader will ensure a heck of a lot more jobs, and a clean, safe future. If you’d like to join the increasing numbers of people who want to TELL Congress that they will vote for clean energy candidates you can do so here. It’s our way of letting Congress know there’s a strong clean energy voting bloc out there. For more detailed summaries of the above and other climate change items, audio podcasts and texts are freely available.

As gas prices continue to fall, some Americans believe that the federal government should raise its gas tax, which has been unchanged at 18.3 cents per gallon since 1993.

We gaze at the night sky and see the comforting order of constellations in the random distribution of stars. We look up and discern shapes of animals in the wispy condensation of clouds. We breathlessly share on social media images of Jesus on burnt toast or the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich or Elvis as a potato chip. Welcome to pareidolia, the human brain’s amazing ability to perceive patterns, particularly the image of a human face, in what are in fact purely random phenomena

In the Beginning…

We humans cannot turn off our instinct to see familiar shapes in the world around us; pareidolia means that our brains demand that there be order even when none exists. And just as we abhor the absence of visual order, we too are unable to accept the unsettling idea of “I don’t know” when confronted with the disorder of the unfamiliar. So we make up comforting answers to all that perplexes us, just as we create reassuring images from clouds and toast. By making up answers to dull the sting of ignorance, we fool ourselves into thinking we explain the world, that we see design and significance in the absence of both.

In the abyss of great uncertainty, our ancestors developed elaborate creation myths and gods of the sun rain and oceans to explain the mysteries and happenings of daily life. War gods helped in victory, or not. Fertility gods helped, or not. Religion was our first attempt to predict and manipulate the future; also our first stab at physics and astronomy. Ironically, as we gained knowledge about the physical world, the need for multiple gods diminished. As the gods of the gaps grew smaller, we rejected multiple deities to insist rather randomly there is only one. But as did our primitive forebears with multiple deities, we still believe we can communicate with our one god and influence his behavior, because by doing so we gain some control, impose some order, on the chaotic mysteries of the world. So we still have one more god to go, one more to assign to the pantheon of the fallen. The early quest for knowledge led to religion; ever-greater success has obviated the need. Our very effort to understand nature ultimately undermined the means by which we sought to reveal nature’s mysteries. We are just slow to acknowledge that god is superfluous.

Filling the Void

Only one to go, but we are not there yet. Aching with this need to fill the void of the unknown, people east and west all share a compelling quintet of yearning on which religion is founded: fear of death; the desire to explain away nature’s mystery; hopes for controlling one’s destiny; a longing for social cohesion; and the corrupting allure of power. Note that nowhere in that equation of religion’s foundation is a demand for reason, fact, or evidence to support one’s belief. Instead, the religions we create demand that we simply believe through faith, as a means of self-justification. Pareidolia predisposes us toward such folly. A great leap it is not from seeing an image in a cloud to believing that the image is real. We gladly believe, we desperately want to believe, in the god we created, in the images and answers we made up. We do so in the absence of any objective supporting evidence because faith tautologically rejects the idea that such evidence is necessary.

Religion is like our appendix, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past. Perhaps in a few millennia the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusement as rain and sun gods do today. Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter. Some day. But until then, we suffer the consequences of a population that believes in the absence of evidence; and more curiously, rejects an objective reality that conflicts with beliefs easily proven false. And here we come to how all this ties to the politics of today.

In our rush to still the pang of ignorance, we confound faith and fact. Pareidolia rears its ugly head as we see things that are not there and are blinded to things that are. Because faith demands no proof, people cling stubbornly to a belief in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. We see patterns because we want to; we reject what we dislike because faith allows that. Faith trumps fact. Reality is optional. So we have a group opposed to irradiated food that ignores the existence of more than 50 known strains of E. coli that can cause bloody diarrhea, kidney failure, and death. People are duped by claims of harmful emissions from cell phones or cell towers. Life-saving diagnostic x-rays are eschewed from fear of radiation, and vulnerable people are persuaded to rely on crystals and astrology for guidance. The public is unable to filter exaggerated claims by environmental groups (Alar in apples) from legitimate concerns like global climate change. This ignorance has deadly consequences; ask the parents of every child who died from a preventable disease from unfounded fears of vaccines, or subsistence farmers looking at starvation in the face of crops withering in a changing climate. In Africa, eight healthcare workers combating the Ebola epidemic were killed by an angry mob who believed the doctors and nurses were infecting people with the virus. The population most in need of help murdered the only people who could provide assistance. As do those African villagers, climate deniers reject widely accepted scientific fact and accumulated knowledge. Without any anchor in the sciences, reality is an option to be rejected whenever the real world gives us inconvenient truths. As in Africa, this deadly ignorance is borne of unfounded fear and denials based in the irrational rejection of basic established fact.

Fiction, Faith and Fact

When fiction becomes confused with fact, we sever our critical tether to reality. The conclusions from years of careful research, scrutinized by competing scientists and published in peer reviewed journals carry no more weight with the public than the random thoughts of a bloated pundit. Talking heads with no training now have the same authority as highly qualified experts. So global warming is dismissed as a liberal hoax in spite of a preponderance of scientific evidence. Climate and weather are mistakenly thought to be the same so that with every winter storm comes the pathetic and childish denial that the world could not be getting hotter. When presented with evidence, skeptics selectively demand more “proof” without understanding what that concept means in scientific inquiry. Yet, with considerable irony again, when we are not discussing climate change, many hold beliefs securely for which there is no proof at all, the flipside consequence of misunderstanding the scientific method. The anti-vaccine movement demands no proof of the link to autism, which has been thoroughly discredited. They simply believe.

This elevation of faith to fact, and confusing belief with evidence, has real consequences. Nowhere can that be seen more clearly than in conservative opposition to President Obama over the past seven years. By untethering ties to reality, by claiming faith is sufficient proof of any belief, the GOP can with a straight face blame Obama for everything bad, no matter how far removed from Obama in reality; and given him credit for nothing good, independent of how directly his actions led to that good. No leap of logic or time or reason is too great for them to link Obama with something unpleasant; and no cause and effect no matter how obvious or self-evident is too strong for them to dismiss, reject or ignore. Facts do not matter.

The idea that the GOP has substituted faith for fact is easily enough proven. Take any area of improvement: lower unemployment, rising stock market, declining gas prices, an expanding economy, health care; and then ask any conservative friend if Obama can be credited for any of that. When the inevitable answer is no, ask the following question: is there any circumstance, any result, any area of improvement that can be attributed to Obama? Elevated gas prices were his fault, but prices lowered in spite of him. He was blamed for the declining stock market he inherited, but given no credit for a market that more than doubled during his tenure. His economic policies were blamed for high unemployment but those same polices have nothing to do with rates falling below six percent. What could Obama have done, what outcome could we have seen, for which a conservative would be willing to credit him? The untenable but predictable answer is none, at least in the faith-based world of conservatives.

We can only come to this deep divide, this unbridgeable political chasm, because political opponents simply cannot admit that the other side has had any success. And that position is possible in the face of undeniable success only because facts are rejected as nothing but inconveniences, easily dismissed as irrelevant to the greater ideal of faith. This slide away from an objective reality is the primary cause of extreme polarization because faith allows for the creation of an alternative universe in which an opponent is easily demonized by dismissing ameliorating facts. A big leap it is not from believing in god and the devil, to believing in anything at all, including that the president is a radical Christian, but also a Muslim, and a foreign citizen socialist who will take your guns away. Facts don’t matter; we create a fictional order in the face of randomness and then call that real; and the chasm becomes ever wider. Faith and ignorance are not benign, and become downright dangerous when confused with rationality. Pareidolia is great for a kid lying in the grass looking up skyward; not so great as a foundation for a political movement.

Most of our discussions of catfishing are limited to the catfishers and catfishees, but there’s a third category we often forget about: the unwitting catfish-complicit, whose pictures and deets make the catfishing possible, and whose lives also get crappy and complicated when sucked into the mix.

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