Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2023 i Mother Jones

SINCE 2013, federal agencies have been required to source 7.5 percent of their electricity from renewables. It’s a low bar, and one they’re not meeting. More than half of the green power they claim is actually dodgy renewable energy certificates, which essentially allow purchasers to take credit for supposedly clean electricity produced (and used) elsewhere. And under federal purchasing rules, agencies are incentivized to buy the cheapest RECs available, often from polluting suppliers like trash incinerators and paper mills. In 2021, President Biden mandated the government use only carbon-free electricity by 2030, but agencies have kept on buying dirty RECs. And when the government produces genuinely green energy on federal land—less than 3 percent of its 2021 electricity use—they take a “bonus” and double-count it. For more, visit  motherjones.com/recs, where…

A DUSTY OLD MAP changed the course of Aaron Million’s life. One day in 2002, when he was a resource economics master’s student studying in a Colorado State University library basement, he came across a 1918 survey and had a “lightbulb moment.” The map showed a 41-mile crescent of the Green River—a tributary of the Colorado River that mainly runs through Wyoming and Utah—swooping through Colorado’s northwest corner. “I’ve cowboyed that river,” Million, who comes from a ranching family, recalls, but “I had frankly forgotten it came into the state.” He was struck by the idea that Coloradans could stake a claim to the Green’s water—and soon learned that no one had ever tried. Thus began his ongoing quest to port the river’s water hundreds of miles out of Utah,…

ABOUT A DECADE AGO, some wealthy Middle Eastern nations, having depleted their own ancient aquifers to grow livestock feed, began tapping into the largely unregulated aquifers of drought-stricken US states. Notably, as Reveal discovered, megafarms in the Arizona desert have been exporting vast quantities of precious groundwater in the form of hay. 1986: Phoenix buys a 20-acre parcel in arid La Paz County for access to its aquifer. 2006: Abu Dhabi bans production of alfalfa, a water-intensive crop. 2011: Arizona exports 500 metric tons (MT) of alfalfa, equivalent to the annual water use of up to 3,038 residents. 2012: Arizona’s state pension fund invests $175 million with North Carolina’s International Farming Corporation (IFC), which uses some of the money to purchase Phoenix’s acreage and sink deep wells. 2013: IFC leases…

LIKE AN ESTIMATED two-thirds of the world’s population, I don’t digest lactose well, which makes the occasional latte an especially pricey proposition. So it was a pleasant surprise when, shortly after moving to San Francisco, I ordered a drink at Blue Bottle Coffee and didn’t have to ask—or pay extra—for a milk alternative. Since 2022, the once Oakland-based, now Nestlé-owned cafe chain has defaulted to oat milk, both to cut carbon emissions and because lots of its affluent-tending customers were already choosing it as their go-to. Plant-based milks, a billion-dollar global market, aren’t just good for the lactose intolerant: They’re also better for the climate. Dairy cows belch a lot of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide; they contribute at least 7 percent of US…

“POLITICS AND HARD NEWS are important, I don’t want to imply otherwise.” Uh-oh. When you hear words like that from a tech executive, you know the next thing is a big, fat “but.” “But my take is, from a platform’s perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue [these topics] might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity (let’s be honest), or integrity risks that come along with them.” The executive, in this case, was Adam Mosseri, who leads Instagram and was in charge of Meta’s new app, Threads, an alternative to the dumpster fire that is Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X). Translation for that vortex of buzzwords (all painfully familiar to journalists, because worrying about the inner workings of companies like Meta is part of our job now): News…

IN OCTOBER 2021, an increasingly dire megadrought had left Utah’s most famous lake at its lowest level in recorded history. As Great Salt Lake lay dying, Democrats introduced a modest water conservation bill requiring efficient plumbing fixtures in all new construction, a provision that many states in the West already have. In a state known for wasting enormous amounts of municipal water, it would have saved enough water to supply 30,000 homes annually by 2030. The bill should have been an easy sell. Instead, some rural lawmakers were opposed because they believed that if people flushed less water down their toilets, Great Salt Lake would dry up faster. “I have concerns about the government telling me what kind of toilet I can have in my house,” said Republican state Rep.…

IN JUNE, Democratic advisers began circulating the usual warning: The party needed to change its message. As the Washington Post explained, focus group testing had shown that the slogan of “‘economic fairness’ was a loser.” Instead, Democrats should talk about “growing the middle class.” Soon, leaders like Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) followed the path of former President Barack Obama, who had made growing the middle class a key part of his platform. Democrats were again aiming their economic appeal at the group between the poor and the rich: the vague middle. We are used to hearing politicians press to “grow,” “build,” or “expand” the middle class. The idea has a cross-partisan appeal, implying class politics without insisting on thornier demands: the need for redistribution (tax…

IF YOU DRAW it on a map, the Colorado River has the shape of a tree, with its trunk rooted in the Sea of Cortez and the branches reaching into the mountaintops of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Botanists call the shape of a tree a habit. It is a common form in nature, like an artery branching to capillaries or nerves reaching to fingertips. But there’s always another part that isn’t shown, a looping back to start over. The water runs down the mountains to the ocean that pumps it back to the mountains by way of clouds. The shape is really a circle. The cloud part is just hard to draw on a map. If I’m being honest, the cloud part is a pretty weak effort,…

FROM THE WATER, the White River canyon appeared to be a scene worthy of Ansel Adams. Swallows darted in and out of mud houses packed on the underside of the soaring sandstone cliffs. A lone elk wandered the hillside, while sheep noshed along the riverbank, tended by a man on horseback who completed the iconic Western scene. But as we drifted peacefully around a bend, the stench of oil and other volatile organic compounds (VOCS) engulfed our flotilla of rubber rafts in an invisible cloud of toxic gases, blotting out the scent of sagebrush that had followed us down the river for the past two days. Eventually, the reason for the fumes came into view, and it wasn’t the sheep. Gas lines draped over the cliffs and crosshatched the swallow…

IT’S BEEN A HELL of a year for science scandals. In July, Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a prominent neuroscientist, announced he would step down after an investigation, prompted by reporting by the Stanford Daily, found that members of his lab had manipulated data or engaged in “deficient scientific practices” in five academic papers on which he’d been the principal author. A month beforehand, internet sleuths publicly accused Harvard professor Francesca Gino—a behavioral scientist studying, among other things, dishonesty—of fraudulently altering data in several papers. (Gino has denied allegations of misconduct.) And the month before, Nobel Prize–winner Gregg Semenza, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, had his seventh paper retracted for “multiple image irregularities.” Those are just the high-profile examples. Last year, more than 5,000 papers were retracted,…