Does your car run on cronyism?
The Intercept
When President Trump named billionaire Carl Icahn as the administration’s “deregulatory czar,” the informal title meant he didn’t have to give up his massive financial holdings, says The Intercept. And that’s lucky for him, because Icahn just brokered a deal with the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), the ethanol industry’s top trade group, that could save his oil refinery company $200 million annually.
A little background: The federal renewable energy standard demands that gasoline sold in the U.S. contain a certain amount of ethanol, typically made from corn. But Icahn’s company, CVR Energy, doesn’t have the technology to refine ethanol, so every year it has to buy expensive credits. Or at least it did. Icahn, according to critics, just strong-armed RFA into supporting a change that would put the onus on blenders (i.e. wholesalers) rather than refiners to add in the ethanol portion of gasoline. In return, the RFA would see the end of a regulation that formally lowered the minimum amount of ethanol required in gas during the summer out of concern that it would damage air quality during the hottest part of the year. Instead, a 15-percent ethanol blend will be mandated year round, not 10-percent, as it now stands — meaning more corn in your tank.
Any official changes would have to go past Congress and the EPA, but without opposition from the ethanol lobby, there’s little reason the new rule wouldn’t sail through. Still, as Emily Skor of Growth Energy, a biofuels advocate, said, “I assure you this is no deal for anyone but Carl Icahn.”
Words for foodies
The Guardian
If kalettes, unicorn cakes, and miso caramel sound like gibberish, then you need to brush up on your hipster food lexicon. Chefs, amateur bakers, baristas, brewers and all manner of trendy foodies are compiling an Instagram dictionary to help you feel at home at the best retro diners in L.A. or Brooklyn. Get studying, before someone asks you to pass the golden milk.
The exotic-animal trade might help keep species alive
Ensia
Every year, 300,000 reticulated pythons — which can grow to 24 feet and whose skin is used for many snakeskin accessories — are killed in hunts in Malaysia and Indonesia. You would think that would be a major blow to the snake’s population. But researchers say it’s just the opposite. Because locals know that they can make money selling the snakes, they go to greater efforts to protect the animals’ overall population, while the companies buying the skins have an incentive to preserve python habitat. In a new global program that connects local harvesters of wild plants and animals to international buyers, the UN is trying to show that letting people profit could be the conservation tool of the future.
An English shepherd ponders rural America
The New York Times
James Rebanks herds his 900 sheep across the same land in northern England that shepherds have been using for 4,500 years. The author of the memoir, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches From an Ancient Landscape, drove through Kentucky farm country — or what’s left of it — the week before Donald Trump was elected. “I was shocked by the signs of decline I saw in rural America,” he writes. “I saw shabby wood-frame houses rotting by the roadside, and picket fences blown over by the wind. I passed boarded-up shops in the hearts of small towns, and tumbledown barns and abandoned farmland. The church notice boards were full of offers of help to people with drug or alcohol addictions.” It’s easy to dismiss all that despair as an American problem. But, Rebanks said, countries like his have long looked to the U.S. as a model for agriculture and food manufacturing. “As a result, America’s future is the default for us all,” he says.
Climate scientists are scared for their careers — and their lives
High Country News
When Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, opened a letter seven years ago, white powder tumbled out. Fortunately for him it was cornstarch, not anthrax, but whoever addressed the envelope meant to give him the scare of his life. Texas Tech University professor Katharine Hayhoe, known for her mix of climate science and Christian evangelism, has received emails warning her to “stop using Jesus to justify your wacko ideas about global warming,” while other climate researchers have had death threats.
The attempts at silencing climate scientists go well beyond individual bullies. The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E), a conservative think tank that promotes what it calls “free-market environmentalism,” has gone after scientists from the University of Arizona in court, demanding to see their climate-related emails. The extra scrutiny has pushed many researchers to hide any mention of climate change in their grant applications whenever possible, even if it’s the main topic of the research. Meanwhile, at the federal level, scientists at the EPA remain under a gag order imposed by the Trump administration.
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