Salon.com > Tara Lohan

Is climate change fueling an epidemic?

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:37:00 +0000

If you haven’t heard of valley fever, you’re not alone. Although cases in states like California are rising, public awareness is low and misdiagnoses from doctors are sadly high. The AP reported an 850 percent spike in cases across the country from 1998 to 2011, with California and Arizona being the worst states.

“The fever has hit California’s agricultural heartland particularly hard in recent years, with incidence dramatically increasing in 2010 and 2011,” wrote the AP’s Gosia Wozniacka. “The disease — which is prevalent in arid regions of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America — can be contracted by simply breathing in fungus-laced spores from dust disturbed by wind as well as human or animal activity.”

Could a carbon fee save us from climate change?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:19:00 +0000

It’s hard to imagine anyone who has done more to further our understanding of the impacts of climate change than Dr. James Hansen. After 46 years working a scientist and climatogolist for NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen wasn’t content to simply catalog the dangers facing humanity and our planet — he has been ringing the alarm bell. “On a blistering June day in 1988 he was called before a Congressional committee and testified that human-induced global warming had begun,” the New York Times wrote in a recent story about Hansen. “Speaking to reporters afterward in his flat Midwestern accent, he uttered a sentence that would appear in news reports across the land: ‘It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’”

6 things you need to know about the Arkansas oil spill

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:43:00 +0000

By now, you already know that at least 84,000 gallons of crude spilled from an ExxonMobil pipeline, swamping an Arkansas subdivision on Friday, and causing the evacuation of 22 homes. In addition to the loss of wildlife, damage to property, and environmental and human health hazards posed by the spill, it may have implications for the Keystone XL pipeline currently under consideration by the Obama administration.

There is a lot more to the story that's important to understand. Here are six crucial things.

1. Not Your Average Crude

InsideClimate News reported shortly after the spill that an Exxon official confirmed the pipeline was "transporting a heavy form of crude from the Canadian tar sands region." Specifically, it has been identified as Wabasca Heavy, Lisa Song writes, "which is a type of diluted bitumen, or dilbit, from Alberta's tar sands region" although you won't hear any Exxon folks calling it tar sands.

Monster Energy poses monster threat to consumers

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:26:00 +0000

A backlash against energy drinks is afoot.

On Long Island, Suffolk County passed three new bills “aimed at keeping energy drinks out of the hands of minors, citing health concerns, over objections of beverage industry lobbyists who called it unfair,” reported Long Island Press. The bills haven’t been signed yet by the county executive.

There is concern over the consumption of caffeine by kids, which has led many people to speak out, something that hasn’t made energy drink companies too happy. One of those, Monster Beverage, has threatened to sue nutritionist Deborah Kennedy who publishes a newsletter sent to elementary school children. The New York Times reports that the company “objected to several statements in the newsletter, Build Healthy Kids, including one that said children had died from energy drinks and should ‘never drink’ them.”

5 lessons from the horse meat scandal

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:09:00 +0000

By now you’ve likely heard about the horse meat scandal that is rocking Europe. As far as food scandals go, this one is intriguing. Of course, this is not the first time we’ve learned that the meat we buy may not be everything we thought it was. Remember "pink slime"? The only good news here is that, so far, it doesn’t seem to be an imminent health threat, although it does raise some very alarming questions.

As food politics expert Marion Nestle wrote, “The unfolding drama around Europe’s horsemeat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity. Cultural identity? They (other people) eat horsemeat. We don’t.”

As Nestle explains, “Most Americans say they won’t eat horsemeat, are appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason.” Horse meat, however, is eaten in numerous countries around the world like China, Japan and Indonesia, as well as countries in Europe, including France and Switzerland.

5 reasons natural gas won’t save us

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:02:00 +0000

If you’re hoping the natural gas boom means we’ve solved our environmental and economic woes, you’re going to be disappointed. While natural gas produces less nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide when burned compared to coal or oil, the end product is only part of the story. The natural gas boom in recent years has been fueled by extreme extraction methods like fracking that are posing a new slurry of environmental problems before the gas even makes it to consumers.

If you look at the complete picture of how we extract natural gas today, you begin to realize pretty quickly that we aren’t going to be able to drill our way out of the climate crisis without creating an even bigger mess in the process. The list of impacts from fracking is huge, but here are five to kick off the conversation:

1. Methane

5 reasons global warming is more terrifying than you think

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:38:00 +0000

This week the sane among us will scoff at those hoarding candles and food for another apocalypse that fails to materialize. We’ll laugh at the accounts of people readying their bunkers and at store shelves being wiped clean. We know that the world will not come to a cataclysmic end on December 21.

Here’s what we’re not so good at understanding: We are part of a slowly enfolding tragedy in which the end of the world as we know it may be getting closer and closer. It won’t happen on any particular day that we can pinpoint and there won’t be a giant explosion or a big flood that will wipe everything away. There will be many floods and fires over many years. One species, one crop dying off after another.

Be very afraid of what’s in your red meat

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:32:00 +0000

If acclaimed authors Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Jeremy Rifkin (Beyond Beef) and John Robbins (Diet for a New America) haven’t given you enough reasons over the last century to be wary of the meat industry, then a year-long investigation by the Kansas City Star may do the trick.

Mike McGraw kicks off the KC Star’sinvestigative series by introducing Margaret Lamkin, who has been forced to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, after a medium-rare steak she ordered three years ago at Applebee’s was contaminated with a pathogen. The resulting illness destroyed her colon.

Of course we already know about E. coli and other food-borne pathogens; people have gotten sick from everything from spinach to peanut butter. But the news here is that what sickened Lamkin wasn’t just the meat, but a process the industry uses to tenderize it. McGraw explains:

Five crazy schemes for more water

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:53:00 +0000

For decades Canadians have lived with a fear that the U.S. will come for their plentiful freshwater. Perhaps not in the form of armed soldiers crossing the border with empty buckets, but through trade agreements and corporate shenanigans. With each U.S. drought, our northern neighbors grow more wary. George W. Bush fanned the flames in 2001 when he told reporters that he wanted to talk to Ottawa about water exports for Texas. And over the years three major Canadian-US export projects were planned (more on that below).

Although we haven’t raided Canada’s hydrologic treasure chest yet, large water transfers across countries, states and watersheds are commonplace. The great hand of politics usually plays a major role in many of these interbasin transfers. The Los Angeles Aqueduct (of Chinatown infamy) may be one of the most well-known in recent U.S. history, as its construction (and backroom politicking) destroyed the farming community of Owens Valley.

It’s time for a Corporate Spring

Wed, 23 May 2012 12:40:00 +0000

In September 2011, two Appalachian women traveled to Delaware to deliver a petition to the state's Attorney General Beau Biden. Betty Harrah and Lorelei Scarbro represented thousands who believed that the business charter for coal-mining company Massey Energy should be repealed. The company, mostly operating in Appalachia but incorporated in Delaware, has violated the Clean Water Act 60,000 times. An investigation commissioned by the governor of West Virginia found Massey could have prevented the explosion that claimed the lives of 29 miners, among them Harrah's brother, at the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2010.

Massey, they contended, was simply too dangerous to be in business. But their pleas fell on deaf ears. The company plugs along, despite its shoddy environmental and safety records, churning out profits for its parent company, Alpha Natural Resources.

The toxic corporations that run America

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Four days after the April 5, 2010, explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, the 300 family members keeping vigil finally learned that the last of the missing miners had been found and there were no survivors among them. The explosion killed 29 men, and severely injured one. The mine was run by Performance Coal Company, a subsidiary of Massey Energy. Massey's Chairman Bobby R. Inman called it a "natural disaster," but it was anything but natural.

Like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf that would steal the nation's attention (and 11 lives) just two weeks later, Upper Big Branch was the inevitable outcome of regulators turning a blind eye to a greedy corporate culture that puts profit above human lives. But this is nothing new. Coal, oil and gas companies in the U.S. have been getting away with murder for years. Sometimes it is just less obvious -- the slow poisoning of our air, water and food; the deterioration of human health, the loss of homes and jobs, the obliteration of whole communities and ecosystems.