Miscellaneous Articles

National Soda Tax Would Make Americans 4% Less Fat
The USDA has recently been delving into the potential benefits of enacting a tax on sugary beverages like sodas and fruit juices. Clearly, there's plenty to debate about such a tax -- whether it would raise soda prices enough to discourage consumption, whether it would unfairly impact the poor, how much revenue it would raise, and whether it would actually make anyone healthier. Well, according to the USDA's just-released study, it would at least do the latter -- the projections show that a sugar tax on sweet drinks would reduce caloric intake from beverages by 13% in adults. For the average American, that equates to roughly 3.8 fewer pounds gained per year.
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Our Very Own KGB - Shedding Light on Our Leviathan National Security State
Investigative reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin have Pultizer Prize caliber story today in the Washington Post "Top Secret America" detailing the vast national security state apparatus that has been built up since the September 11, 2001 attacks. Their introduction begins "the top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work." Among their findings:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.
* Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
Glenn Greenwald over at Salon writes that "we chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, but this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization." He adds that "what's most noteworthy about all of this is that the objective endlessly invoked for why we must acquiesce to all of this -- National Security -- is not only unfulfilled by 'Top Secret America,' but actively subverted by it."
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Presidents' Climate Commitment Expels Inactive Colleges
The American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment has lost 15 signatories in a recent move to prune those institutions that haven't met any of their deadlines since committing to the sustainability initiative. The move was made by the consortium's steering committee, which simultaneously congratulated the remaining 673 institutions for the progress they've made.
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After Oil Spills, Hidden Damage Can Last for Years
On the rocky beaches of Alaska, scientists plunged shovels and picks into the ground and dug 6,775 holes, repeatedly striking oil - still pungent and dangerous a dozen years after the Exxon Valdez infamously spilled its cargo.
More than an ocean away, on the Breton coast of France, scientists surveying the damage after another huge oil spill found that disturbances in the food chain persisted for more than a decade.
And on the southern gulf coast in Mexico, an American researcher peering into a mangrove swamp spotted lingering damage 30 years after that shore was struck by an enormous spill.
These far-flung shorelines hit by oil in the past offer clues to what people living along the Gulf Coast can expect now that the great oil calamity of 2010 may be nearing an end.
Every oil spill is different, but the thread that unites these disparate scenes is a growing scientific awareness of the persistent damage that spills can do - and of just how long oil can linger in the environment, hidden in out-of-the-way spots.
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Success in Sierra Club's Five-Year Formaldehyde Fight
Little-noticed while the ongoing BP Oil Disaster dominated the headlines in early July was President Obama's signing of a critical piece of environmental legislation-a landmark bill that will protect consumers by enacting national standards for formaldehyde in composite wood products.
The Formaldehyde Standards for Composite Wood Products Act, which passed with bipartisan support, was signed into law on July 7.
"Without the action of Congress, better regulation of formaldehyde could have taken many years longer," says Becky Gillette, above, a longtime volunteer leader for the Sierra Club's Mississippi Chapter who now directs the Club's Formaldehyde Campaign.
With Gillette spearheading the effort, the Sierra Club has been working on formaldehyde issues in earnest ever since tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents were sickened by formaldehyde poisoning in FEMA-issued trailers across the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
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Ethan Zuckerman on Global Media
A TED GLOBAL 2010 TALK
Global media thinker, writer and former Worldchanging board chair Ethan Zuckerman just gave a TED talk on the importance of seeking out global information in order to be better able to think about global issues...
Way to go, Ethan! Below you can find Ethan's notes and slides from his talk in full. Additionally, Ethan has been doing quite a bit of blogging on other presenters at TED Global 2010. His posts are well worth reading, please visit these links for more:
Check out global media thinker, writer and former Worldchanging board chair Ethan Zuckerman's recent TED talk on the importance of seeking out global information in order to be better able to think about global issues...
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Biodiversity: An Introductory Video and a Chart of Industry's Impact
The European Commission on the Environment's Biodiversity Campaign is a public outreach campaign to educate people about biodiversity. Their central message is "we are all in this together" so we need to act now and change our behavior to stop the current alarming rate of species loss; a worthy message and one that's likely familiar to Worldchanging readers. What the Biodiversity Campaign website does well is that it makes a basic introduction to biodiversity available to a wide audience; the content is available in 23 languages and the stories and recommended actions are targeted at both children and adults. For me, the most captivating part of the campaign comes from the "Biodiversity" video they produced, a haunting and beautiful piece that moves through a city connecting animals, plants and people together:
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MUSICIANS COME TOGETHER TO HELP END MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL MINING
An impressive roster of musicians came together for one night in Nashville to help end the destructive method of coal mining known as mountaintop removal. As part of NRDC's "Music Saves Mountains" campaign, this unprecedented concert drew such artists as Dave Matthews, Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Patty Griffin and others to bring attention to the communities throughout Appalachia that are being devastated by mountaintop mining. Visit Music Saves Mountains for more information on the campaign.
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Do Cleaning Products Cause Breast Cancer?
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2010) - Women who report greater use of cleaning products may be at higher breast cancer risk than those who say they use them sparingly. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Environmental Health asked more than 1500 women about their cleaning product usage and found that women who reported using more air fresheners and products for mold and mildew control had a higher incidence of breast cancer.
Julia Brody, from the Silent Spring Institute, USA, worked with a team of researchers to carry out telephone interviews with 787 women diagnosed with breast cancer and 721 comparison women. She said, "Women who reported the highest combined cleaning product use had a doubled risk of breast cancer compared to those with the lowest reported use. Use of air fresheners and products for mold and mildew control were associated with increased risk. To our knowledge, this is the first published report on cleaning product use and risk of breast cancer."
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Oil Devastation Found at Major Gulf Breeding Site
ScienceDaily (July 22, 2010) - A Cornell Lab of Ornithology team working in the Gulf has documented what may be the worst oil spill devastation of a major bird colony so far.
The documentary and research team, led by biologist and multimedia producer Marc Dantzker, first visited Raccoon Island on Louisiana's Gulf Coast on June 18, 2010, and found one of the largest waterbird colonies in the state to be oil free and in excellent health.
The team returned July 11 and 12 after hearing reports from local biologists of significant oil landfall with impact to birds. The team found oil present on rocks and all along the beaches. Almost all of the juvenile brown pelicans they saw had at least some oil on them, and they estimated that roughly 10 percent were "badly oiled." Roughly forty percent of juvenile terns also had visible oil on them.
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Federal Report Faults Banks on Huge Bonuses
With the financial system on the verge of collapse in late 2008, a group of troubled banks doled out more than $2 billion in bonuses and other payments to their highest earners. Now, the federal authority on banker pay says that nearly 80 percent of that sum was unmerited. In a report to be released on Friday, Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Obama administration's special master for executive compensation, is expected to name 17 financial companies that made questionable payouts totaling $1.58 billion immediately after accepting billions of dollars of taxpayer aid, according to two government officials with knowledge of his findings who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the report.
The group includes Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and the American International Group as well as small lenders like Boston Private Financial Holdings. Mr. Feinberg's report points to companies that he says paid eye-popping amounts or used haphazard criteria for awarding bonuses, the people with knowledge of his findings said, and he has singled out Citigroup as the biggest offender.
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