by K. L. Dickinson, E. Kanyomse, R. Piedrahita, E.Coffey, I.J. Rivera, J. Adoctor, R. Alirigia, D. Muvandimwe, M. Dove, V. Dukic, M.H. Hayden, D. Diaz-Sanchez, A.V. Abisiba, D. Anaseba, Y. Hagar, N. Masson, A. Monaghan, A. Titiati, D.F. Steinhoff, Y. Hsu, R. Kaspar, B. Brooks, A. Hodgson, M. Hannigan, A.R. Oduro, and C. Wiedinmyer

BMC Public Health
February 12, 2015
doi:10.1186/s12889-015-1414-1

Abstract

Background
Cooking over open fires using solid fuels is both common practice throughout much of the world and widely recognized to contribute to human health, environmental, and social problems. The public health burden of household air pollution includes an estimated four million premature deaths each year. To be effective and generate useful insight into potential solutions, cookstove intervention studies must select cooking technologies that are appropriate for local socioeconomic conditions and cooking culture, and include interdisciplinary measurement strategies along a continuum of outcomes.

Methods/Design
REACCTING (Research on Emissions, Air quality, Climate, and Cooking Technologies in Northern Ghana) is an ongoing interdisciplinary randomized cookstove intervention study in the Kassena-Nankana District of Northern Ghana. The study tests two types of biomass burning stoves that have the potential to meet local cooking needs and represent different “rungs” in the cookstove technology ladder: a locally-made low-tech rocket stove and the imported, highly efficient Philips gasifier stove. Intervention households were randomized into four different groups, three of which received different combinations of two improved stoves, while the fourth group serves as a control for the duration of the study. Diverse measurements assess different points along the causal chain linking the intervention to final outcomes of interest. We assess stove use and cooking behavior, cooking emissions, household air pollution and personal exposure, health burden, and local to regional air quality. Integrated analysis and modeling will tackle a range of interdisciplinary science questions, including examining ambient exposures among the regional population, assessing how those exposures might change with different technologies and behaviors, and estimating the comparative impact of local behavior and technological changes versus regional climate variability and change on local air quality and health outcomes.

Discussion
REACCTING is well-poised to generate useful data on the impact of a cookstove intervention on a wide range of outcomes. By comparing different technologies side by side and employing an interdisciplinary approach to study this issue from multiple perspectives, this study may help to inform future efforts to improve health and quality of life for populations currently relying on open fires for their cooking needs. Read more …

by Maxwell T. Boykoff, Marisa M. McNatt and Michael K. Goodman

Chapter 18 in The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication
Edited by Anders Hansen, Robert Cox

Over the past few years, the number of Reuters stories about climate change has continued to decline. This was consistent with trends across other media outlets globally due largely to political economic trends of shrinking newsrooms and fewer specialist reporters covering climate stories with the same frequency as before. In 2010, The Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor closed their environmental blogs. Three years later, In January 2013, The New York Times dismantled its environment desk, assigning the reporters and editors to other departments, and discontinued its Green blog two months later. Yet, initially, Reuters had largely bucked those trends, continuing to employ top climate and environment reporters from around the globe including, Deborah Zabarenko (North America), Alister Doyle (Europe) and David Fogerty (Asia) who fed top media organizations with reporting comprised of a steady diet of climate and environment stories. So why this subsequent and precipitous drop in Reuters’s coverage of climate change? In July 2013, David Fogerty – who left Reuters in late 2012 –  took to The Baron blog to explain why. He recounted that after the appointment of Editor Paul Ingrassia in 2011, editorial decisions were made to deprioritize climate stories, and to shift these specialists to different  beats. Fogerty, for example, was moved from the climate beat to instead cover issues around shipping in the Asian region. While climate stories had been already declining upon the appointment of Ingrassia, many argued that his revamping of the Reuters reporting priorities served to accelerate this drop. Read more …

by Roger Pielke, Jr.

Sporting Intelligence
March 20, 2015

The salary that FIFA pays Sepp Blatter, it’s long-serving president, has never been disclosed. We know how much US president Barack Obama makes, $400,000, and the head of the United Nations (about $240,000) and even the CEO of the biggest company in Switzerland (Nestle, $10.6 million). But Blatter’s salary is a mystery.

Today FIFA released its 2014 financials, which allows for an informed, forensic estimate of Blatter’s FIFA salary. I took a look at this question in 2013 (here and here), and the new information allows for an update and provides a few more clues.

In 2014, from a total salaries bill of $88.6m, FIFA says it paid out $39.7 million to what it calls “key management personnel” for “short-term employee benefits” (not including pension contributions). This category of personnel includes 13 members of FIFA’s management (most named in FIFA management graphic, right) along with payments made to members of its executive and finance committees.

We don’t know how much these committee members are paid, but in 2011 Mohammed bin Hammam revealed that he was compensated 200,000 Euros for his ExCo service. Sunil Gulati, a US representative on the FIFA Executive Committee, has still has yet to make good on his promise to reveal his FIFA compensation.

Using Bin Hammam’s compensation as a starting point, conservatively, as a rough estimate that suggests about $6 million of the $39.7 million in “key management personnel” compensation was devoted to remuneration for committee service. That leaves $33.7 million to be allocated among 13 individuals. This total represents an increase of almost $12 million since 2009 and $6 million since 2012. Good work if you can get it. Read more …

by Roger Pielke, Jr.

Sporting Intelligence
March 12, 2015

Sport, it is often said, is a mirror to society. That is no more true than in the revelations found in the report of the Cycling Independent Reform Commission (downloadable as a PDF on this website), which earlier this week released its report on doping in professional cycling. We may not like what we see when we look into that mirror. Here are three uncomfortable truths that The CIRC forces us to confront.

A first uncomfortable truth: cheating is complicated. On the face of it, the downfall of Lance Armstrong is pretty easy to explain. The taking of performance enhancing substances in cycling was prohibited; Armstrong took those substances during his seven-year reign as Tour de France champion. He lied about it. Case closed. He is guilty. Right?

Reality has a way of making even the most obvious moral judgments more complicated. The CIRC report (“word clouded” below) explains that the international body which oversees cycling and its annual Tour de France, the UCI, knew for a generation that systematic doping was going on among cyclists. The organization’s “anti-doping strategy was directed at the abuse of doping substances rather than the use of them.”

With cycling’s main oversight and governing body turning a blind eye to doping, and with doping offering 10-15% performance gains, it is not at all surprising that the CIRC concludes a significant majority of all cyclists took prohibited substances during the Armstrong era. Teddy Cutler, writing here at Sportingintelligence late last year, estimated this number to be at least 65 per cent and probably much higher.

Like it or not, doping and covering it up was a part of cycling. As Armstrong’s lawyers note, “the sport he encountered in Europe in the 1990s was a cesspool where doctors, coaches and riders participated daily in doping and covering up doping. Young riders on elite teams competing in Europe faced a simple choice: dope and lie about it or accept that you could not compete clean.”

None of this makes Armstrong less guilty, but it does make his guilt more complex. We allow the norms of behavior in sport to deviate from the norms of broader society at some risk to the integrity of sport. Cycling has found that out the hard way when the gap between its public stated values and its internal norms became too great to sustain.

It is easy to lay blame on one or a few individuals, but anyone judging Armstrong and his fellow competitors harshly needs to be on the watch for deep hypocrisy.

Another uncomfortable truth is that doping is endemic in sport, and not just cycling. This goes for the elite Olympic sports as well as for professional sports.

A study just out in the journal Sports Medicine estimates that as many as 39 per cent of elite, international athletes dope, that is two out of every five.  Professional cyclists interviewed by the CIRC offered estimates of 20 per cent to 90 per cent of riders today are still doping. But nobody really knows, other than it is a lot. Read more …