EPA Unveils New Rules on Carbon Emissions

Earlier this week, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy announced how power plants will be?regulated?to address carbon emissions. Called the “Clean Power Plan,” EPA’s?proposal is the biggest action on climate change?ever taken?by a US president and is?the?centerpiece of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.?The plan is to cut carbon emissions by 25% by 2025 and 30% by 2030, from 2005 levels. As a result soot, sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide will be simultaneously cut by 25%. In?the first year alone,?EPA expects?150,000 fewer?asthma attacks and 2,100 fewer heart attacks in the US. The EPA will set?a cap on carbon emissions customized for every state based on?how much carbon power plants emitted in?2005. States will have complete flexibility on how they meet the cap: they can use any combination of power plant regulations with required upgrades; energy efficiency; renewable energy; even?implement?a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program. But as with health care, the policy could lead a variety of rules that frustrate businesses and may be resisted by states that oppose the policy. While these regulations are a much needed step in the right direction, there is much more that needs to done to properly address the seriousness of climate change.

New Report: 80% of Meat Labels Could Be Meaningless

A new report by the advocacy group Animal Welfare Institute finds that “sustainably produced” claims on meat and poultry packaging are not living up to many of their feel-good labeling claims. Animal Welfare Institute spent three years requesting documentation from the USDA about companies that boast their animals are well cared for or raised in accordance with high environmental standards. The USDA failed to supply documentation supporting these sorts of claims?which range from ?Humanely Raised and Handled? to ?Sustainably Farmed??for 20 of the 25 products AWI investigated. The findings suggest that whether or not the animals are actually being raised humanely or in an eco-friendly manner, there are big gaps in verifying those claims and giving consumers access to that information. For most people, these claims mean you are getting something above the standard of conventional industry but without any verification on these claims, they could very well be meaningless.

New Study on Fast Food’s Effect on Patience

In a series of recent papers, experts from the University of Toronto examined the question of whether or not fast food played a role in exacerbating impatience ? and not just for food, but in other facets of our lives. The experiments began by prompting participants with reminders of fast food, like pictures of fast-food logos or having them recall recent experiences of eating fast food. They were then given a number of tasks to complete.
Across several studies, researchers found that thoughts of fast food spurred participants to hurry through reading a paragraph describing their city; express a greater desire for timesaving products; report less happiness from savoring a beautiful opera duet; and save less for tomorrow.The investigation went a step further and looked into how the prevalence of fast-food restaurants in neighborhoods might affect patience. In one study, they measured people?s tendency to savor a variety of realistic, enjoyable experiences, and then correlated their responses by their ZIP code. Using census data, the concentration of fast-food restaurants versus sit-down restaurants per ZIP code were charted. The results were that prevalent fast-food restaurants in the neighborhood were, the less likely respondents were to report savoring a set of experiences, even when controlling for economic factors of the individual and the neighborhood.? While the physical effects of consuming fast food seem to be abundantly clear, this study goes to show that the health consequences of fast food to include the psychological as well as the physical. The lesson to be learned here is to slow down, eat real food, and savor the moment.