2013 – Page 833

Ask Josh Fox Anything

by Chris Bodenner

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[Re-posted from yesterday with several more questions suggested by readers to ask Fox. It takes less than a minute to vote your preference if you have the time.]

From his Wiki page:

Josh Fox is an American film director and environmental activist, best known for his Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary, Gasland. In addition to this film, he is one of the most prominent public critics of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. In February 2012 he was arrested during a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on hydraulic fracturing when he attempted to videotape the proceedings.

Gasland 2 is premiering soon at the Tribeca Film Festival and will air on HBO over the summer. From a recent interview with Josh:

[EnergyWire]: In New York, there’s a moratorium against high-volume horizontal fracking, and efforts to end the moratorium have been slowed, partly by vocal activists like you. Do think “Gasland” is directly responsible for slowing down or blocking fracking in New York and sparking the anti-fracking movement there?

JF: They’re concurrent. I saw an industry white paper on this that shows when “Gasland” came out, there was a big spike and that attention never left the media. “Gasland” brought something to a high level of media attention that might not have been that way before, but what it also did was it showed people from different areas that they had the same issues. It’s a comparative study. It brought people out of their isolation. When you had the media hone in on that film in 32 countries, where 50 million people watched it, that’s incredible to me. I started out doing the film as an exercise for my neighbors [in Pennsylvania]. It was a prayer that we would get into [the Sundance Film Festival].

EW: In our pregame interview, you suggested Democrats and CPAC — the Conservative Political Action Committee — have the same policy on fracking. Could you elaborate?

JF: I wouldn’t say it’s exactly the same policy, but I do think there’s been an embrace on both sides of the aisle. And I don’t think that was done with good science, I don’t think that was done with sound information. The gas industry has this myth that gas is better than coal, but they know it’s no better because of methane leakage problems.

To submit a question for Josh, simply enter it into the Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing Josh answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. Thanks for your help.

Battling Big Soda

by Doug Allen

Amy Fairchild weighs the arguments for and against Bloomberg’s suspended soda ban:

From the glass-half-empty perspective, the policy is a drop in the bucket of what would be required to solve the obesity problem. Setting limits on just a single behavior, in the face of all the other unhealthy choices we must avoid (fried foods, excessive portions, carbohydrates galore), can hardly be expected to turn the obesity tide. Moreover, because the ban contains all kinds of loopholes — it doesn’t set limits on refills, for instance, and it excludes (“on suspect grounds”) “other beverages that have significantly higher concentrations of sugar sweeteners and/or calories” — the charge that it is “arbitrary and capricious” may strike opponents as more descriptive than acerbic. (1)

But from the glass-half-full point of view, the ban is not about attacking individual choice but rather about limiting corporate damage. If we see supersized drinks not in terms of the individual’s freedom to be foolish but instead as a kind of industrial pollution that is super-concentrated in impoverished neighborhoods, (2) limits on drink size become a far different kind of regulatory measure. The target is not the individual: it is the beverage industry, corporate America.

I’ll admit, I have a much more favorable view of this particular act of Bloomberg “nannyism” than Andrew does.Part of that comes from growing up with a pediatric endocrinologist in the house: I spent a lot of my own childhood hearing about children struggling with obesity. I also view this policy as more of a Sunstein/Thaler-style “nudge” than a real ban. If you really need 64 ounces of soda, you’d be able to get it, either through refills or another purchase. In fact, contra Fairchild, I think the refill loophole is a plus as it helps to make this a much softer form of paternalism.

I think that the climbing obesity rates, especially among children, are problematic enough that they merit some sort of action. If the ban is ever reinstated by the courts, it may well prove to be ineffective at reducing caloric intake, at which point I would argue for its repeal. But I think we have to start somewhere, and this seems like a reasonable first step.

Stuck With Hamas

by Brendan James

Maysoon Zayid eviscerates Hamas and stresses that their policies of religious persecution and gender-segregation are not what Palestinians are fighting for:

I’m sick to death of hearing that ignorant mantra, “Hamas was democratically elected.” The operative word is “was.” Their term has been up for four years. They are no longer democratically elected; they are warlords, and the Palestinian Authority has gifted them free rein. … Hamas claims to be fighting for freedom while invoking laws that oppress women and religious minorities. As Palestinians, we are striving for equality, not more oppression.

In 2006, I hung out with The Carter Center as they monitored the Palestinian elections. Nobody thought Hamas would win. Hamas did not think Hamas could win. The lion’s share of folks I spoke to who were voting for them were not actually voting for Hamas but against Fatah. They had gotten sick of the blatant corruption and inaction of the Palestinian Authority. They wanted to teach them a lesson. While Fatah was accused of stealing from the people, Hamas provided impeccable social services to the downtrodden. The idea was to put the fear of God in Fatah so they would straighten up, but instead Hamas won—and so did Israel.

Zayid conveys a larger point often lost in the coverage of this conflict: Hamas is not popular in Palestine. They are has-beens and opportunists. Occasionally they receive a boost in support when Israel strikes or the party leadership scores a release of prisoners, but generally they’re a huge disappointment. (A recent poll of both the West Bank and Gaza shows Hamas with support around 12% with Fatah, hardly beloved, around 36%.) If a national government came together and ushered in fresh elections, Hamas could lose serious clout.

On the other hand, Hussein Ibish warns that recently reconfirmed Hamas leader Khaled Mashal may use any reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah as cover to maneuver his way to the head of the PLO:

[I]t’s important not to underestimate the harm this could cause to the Palestinian national movement. Hamas’ policies are strictly inconsistent with those of the PLO, and contradict its treaty obligations. If Hamas joined the PLO with its current policies unchanged, let alone usurped it, the international standing of the PLO – one of the most important achievements of the Palestinian national movement, the value of which no one really questions – would be placed in dire jeopardy.

Palestinians want and need national unity. But the terms are crucial. If such unity in effect means abandoning the positions that underscore the PLO’s standing at the United Nations and other multilateral institutions, and diplomatic relations with well over 100 countries, the price will be exorbitant and disproportionate.

Time I spent kicking around the West Bank originally convinced me that the US and Israel are simply not doing enough to incentivize the formation of a unity government, whose elections would spit Hamas out of the PA soon after it brought them in. After all, the first incarnation of the Arab Spring that cropped up in Palestine was a wave of protests calling for ‘unity’ between Ramallah and Gaza City (which Hamas chose to handle with billy clubs). What if Palestinians got their national unity? The US could bite the bullet, encourage the merger, let Hamas in, watch them shrink into a minority party, and let Fatah lead and handle future negotiations.

But now, considering Mashal’s scheming and some good counterarguments by Michael Koplow in the aftermath of the latest Gaza mini-war, it’s not so obvious it would be that easy to dethrone Hamas. They have a lot of guns, for one thing. And maybe that’s the only thing that really matters.

(Photo: A Hamas militant takes part in the funeral procession. By Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)

Climate Misdirection

by Doug Allen

John Friedman tires of it:

Everyone — even the most ardent climate change deniers — actually knows that air pollution is bad. I accept that for many the question of rising global temperatures and changing weather patterns remains a question. But rather than continue to debate and discuss whether or not we should be reducing environmental pollution because of the threat of rising global temperatures, can we please all agree to stop arguing in favor of pollution? …

Much as a magician distracts his audience from what they are doing with one hand by getting them to focus on the other, those who loudly and publicly remain skeptical about the impact of these pollutants on the environment at a macro-level never, cannot, and do not attempt to argue the well-established fact that what we are pumping into our atmosphere is altering the chemical composition of the air we breathe (changing the climate) and is now the seventh-leading cause of death in the world.

A Poem For Friday

by Matthew Sitman

Alice Quinn, executive director of the Poetry Society of America and the Dish’s amazing poetry editor – she brings you the poems we feature every week – has shared the news that Robert Bly will be presented with the Poetry Society’s highest award, the Frost Medal, at the Society’s annual awards ceremony in their home at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park in New York City tonight. Details about the ceremony, which is open to the public, can be found here.

To celebrate, we’ve decided to highlight Bly’s poetry this weekend. All three poems will be taken from his most recent book, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, published by W.W.Norton & Company. Here’s the first of Bly’s poems we’ll be sharing, “The Teapot”:

That morning I heard water being poured into a teapot.
The sound was an ordinary, daily, cluffy sound.
But all at once, I knew you loved me.
An unheard-of-thing, love audible in water falling.

The citation for Bly’s award was written by his fellow poet, Billy Collins, and should provide a sense of the man and his work:

From rural Minnesota to the U.S.Navy, to Harvard, to Iowa, then to Norway on a Fullbright, then New York and back to Minnesota—these were a few of the stops in the travels of the younger Robert Bly, and whatever else he discovered along the way, he learned then to listen to poetic voices not yet clearly heard in America such as Vallejo, Trakl, Kabir, and Rumi. Thus began Bly’s mission to expand the vocabulary, the tonal range, and the imaginative freedom of American poetry by mixing into it the sounds and techniques of other countries and cultures. Jiminez, Neruda, Machado and others would not be so commonly recognized here today were it not for Bly’s enthusiasm for the good these writers could do to enrich our poetry, to correct “the wrong turn,” as he put it, our native poetry had taken before it found itself in a bloodless dead end.

But Bly’s most persuasive urgings for a more exciting and direct poetry are found in his own poems, beginning in 1962 with Silence in the Snowy Fields. By example, he showed so many poets how to jump from the small into a mystery, how to shuttle quickly between the inner and outer world, how to leap over the fence of logic into strange new fields. So many of us watched with our reading lips moving and our mouths open as he hopped from a teapot to the assurance of love, from the touch of a son’s or daughter’s hand on his shoulder to ‘shining fish turning in the deep sea.’

The Frost Medal celebrates the many roles of Robert Bly—protester, anthologist, translator, myth-maker, story-teller, chimer, image-maker, champion of the father, and citizen of the world inside this world. But what gladdens every alert poet is the good news that their teacher, their liberator is being honored once again.

Does Stretching Do You Any Good?

by Patrick Appel

Maybe not:

Just why stretching hampers performance is not fully understood, although the authors of both of the new studies write that they suspect the problem is in part that stretching does exactly what we expect it to do. It loosens muscles and their accompanying tendons. But in the process, it makes them less able to store energy and spring into action … Of course, the new studies’ findings primarily apply to people participating in events that require strength and explosive power, more so than endurance. But “some research speaks in favor” of static stretching impairing performance in distance running and cycling, [Dr. Goran Markovic, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Zagreb] said.

Mental Health Break

by Chris Bodenner

All your favorite videogames from the Simpsons:

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CollegeHumor’s Favorite Funny Videos

Healthy Fast Food

by Patrick Appel

Bittman taste-tests it:

Veggie Grill, Lyfe Kitchen, Tender Greens and others have solved the challenge of bringing formerly upscale, plant-based foods to more of a mass audience. But the industry seems to be focused on a niche group that you might call the health-aware sector of the population. (If you’re reading this article, you’re probably in it.) Whole Foods has proved that you can build a publicly traded business, with $16 billion in market capitalization, by appealing to this niche. But fast food is, at its core, a class issue. Many people rely on that Tendercrisp because they need to, and our country’s fast-food problem won’t be solved — no matter how much innovation in vegan options or high-tech ovens — until the prices come down and this niche sector is no longer niche.

Can Fracking Be Green?

by Patrick Appel

Brad Plumer captions the above chart, from a World Resources Institute report on fracking:

What does this chart show? The red line is WRI’s best current estimate of greenhouse-gas emissions (including methane) from all natural gas activities. The blue line shows WRI’s estimate of future emissions after recently proposed air-pollution regulations at fracking wells take effect. (The steps that drillers will have to take to reduce volatile organic compounds from these wells will also curb methane leaks.)

The purple line, meanwhile, shows estimated future emissions if the EPA and state agencies required just three new technologies throughout the natural-gas infrastructure: plunger lift systems, leak detection and repair, and low-bleed pneumatic devices. And, with an additional five technologies, the country could get down below hoped-for 1 percent methane leakage rate. That’s the green line.

The Senate’s Evolution On Marriage Equality, Ctd

by Chas Danner

It’s not slowing down yet: two conservative Democratic senators, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana, just came out for marriage equality. Jon Chait and Dan Amira discuss the Democratic senators who have yet to voice their support for marriage equality:

Dan: Well, Jon, it’s been a crazy month, but today, after Joe Donnelly and Heidi Heitkamp dropped out of the tournament, we’re down to the Final Four: Mark Pryor, Joe Manchin, Tim Johnson, and Mary Landrieu. The moderate powerhouses are the only remaining Democratic senators who haven’t come out in support of gay marriage — but only one can be the last Democratic senator not to support gay marriage. Let’s take a look at the field. Landrieu is an interesting case, don’t you think? You could argue she should have been knocked out last week.

Jon: I’m going to get a lot of heat from Landrieu’s fan base, but I’ll just say it: She does not belong in this tournament. She said last Thursday, “The people of Louisiana have made clear that marriage in our state is restricted to one man and one woman. While my personal views have evolved, I will support the outcome of Louisiana’s recent vote.” She has already dropped the e-word. We’re seeding her a distant No. 4.