Region: National

The Dietary Supplement Scandal

There are 65,000 dietary supplements on the market, and almost half the population uses at least one of them. Americans spent $13 billion on dietary supplements last year, according to the Washington Post.  There are disturbing indications that nearly all  that money is wasted — or to put it more bluntly, that the industry is essentially …

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Tea Party Support for Cutting Greenhouse Gases?

Surprising New Poll Results

The NY Times reports some very interesting poll results regarding climate change. The poll shows that Americans are more likely to support a candidate who favors action on climate change, less likely to favor a candidate who takes the “I am not a scientist” line, and much less likely to favor one who calls climate …

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Renowned Scholar Jim Salzman to Join UCLA Law, UCSB Bren School Faculties

I am thrilled to share the news that  Jim Salzman is moving west to join the faculties of the Bren School at UC Santa Barbara and  UCLA School of Law.  Jim is  currently the Samuel Mordecai Professor at Duke Law School and Nicholas Institute Professor at Duke’s School of the Environment  but is moving  this summer to become …

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Solar Tariff Wars Heat Up

States that have helped boost rooftop solar installations through so-called net metering policies are beginning to scale back their subsidies under pressure from utilities.   As ClimateWire reported today (here’s the link but it’s behind a paid subscription wall), Hawaii’s largest utility has just proposed rolling back the state’s net metering policy, joining Arizona, California, …

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Food: Too Much and Too Little

Actual malnutrition among American children (weight more than two standard deviations below normal) is rare in the U.S. Most of the estimates that I found range around 1%. Still, there are roughly 45 million children under 12 in the U.S., so 1% amounts to almost half a million children. Malnutrition seems considerably more common among …

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Expanding Access To Energy Information To Boost The Clean Technology Sector

Joint UC Berkeley / UCLA Law Report Released Today

California is poised for a major energy transformation in the coming decades, with Governor Brown pledging to put the state on a path to 50% renewables and 50% less petroleum usage by 2030. Achieving this transformation will require a robust and thriving clean technology sector, including renewable energy and energy storage developers, energy efficiency contractors, …

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Don’t Know Much ‘Bout Climatology

Why should we believe the scientists about climate change?  Nobody — not even any individual scientist — understand all the details of the IPCC’s recent 1552 page “summary” of climate science.  So why buy into the idea that tiny amounts of gases from beneficial energy production can cause devastating global harm? Part of the reason …

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Killer Coal

Black lung has been the underlying or contributing cause of death for more than 75,000 coal miners since 1968, according to NIOSH, the federal agency responsible for conducting research on work-related diseases and injuries. Since 1970, the Department of Labor has paid over $44 billion in benefits to miners totally disabled by respiratory diseases (or …

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The Hottest Year (So Far)

Scientists at NOAA and NASA announced the 2014 was the hottest year since systematic record keeping began in 1880.  This is all the more striking because 2014 wasn’t a strong El Nino year, when you expect especially warm global temperatures. If you leave on the East Coast or in the Midwest, you may not have …

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Public Opinion and Energy Politics

Pew published some intriguing polling results on energy issues just before Christmas. Americans have clearly noticed falling prices at the gas pump, but only half realize that U.S. oil and gas production has soared.  So far, the changes haven’t affected policy views: a large majority favors expanding use of alternative energy, but solid majorities continue …

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