The death of Justice Scalia has made law experts question the current Supreme Court justice term limit; an author and professor of theology discuss the changing faces of the religion; and researchers have identified more than 200 methane hot spots in the Los Angeles Basin.
The gamesmanship behind Obama’s potential Sandoval nomination
Before last week, the name Brian Sandoval was as far away as can be from any conversations about the Supreme Court.
The Nevada governor wasn’t on any observers’ lists of potential nominees that President Obama might consider to fill the spot left vacant by the late-Antonin Scalia. The 52-year-old is described as a centrist Republican. Despite his party affiliation, he supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
Numerous outlets are reporting that President Obama is weighing the possibility of nominating Sandoval to the Supreme Court, a day after Senate Republicans vowed to deny holding confirmation hearings for any Obama nominees. The Sandoval news has not changed Senator Mitch McConnell and others’ position.
But this morning, Nevada political insider Jon Ralston tweeted this out, saying that Sandoval is no longer in the running:
Breaking: Sandoval takes himself out of consideration for SCOTUS.
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports)
Breaking: Sandoval takes himself out of consideration for SCOTUS.
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) February 25, 2016
Do you support the choice of Sandoval? Would the political calculation of nominating a centrist Republican pay off for President Obama? What’s the next move for the Obama team if Sandoval does pull himself out of the running?
Guests:
Greg Stohr, Supreme Court reporter for Bloomberg News. He tweets from
Burgess Everett, a congressional reporter for POLITICO who’s been following the story
After Scalia, gauging political will for Supreme Court term limits
No matter their politics, the top legal minds in the U.S. tend to favor 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices (with a small minority leery of thrusting the Court regularly into election battles).
They argue that longer life-spans and an increasingly politicized bench are not what the founders intended in offering lifetime tenure in the Constitution.
However, creating term limits would require an amendment - two-thirds of Congress to propose it and 38 of the 50 states to ratify it.
In the current climate, could Congressional leaders and President Barack Obama gin up support for such an amendment?
Guests:
Erwin Chemerinsky, Founding dean of the School of Law at UC Irvine and an expert on constitutional law
Roy Englert, Appellate Litigator based in Washington, D.C. who has argued 20 cases at the Supreme Court
How today’s progressive movement is changing the face of Evangelicalism
The conservative politics of the Evangelical world could be viewed as less than inclusive. But with many young, progressive members of the Evangelical church, that perception is shifting.
LGBTQ Christians are coming out and staying in the church and pro-life members are focusing on the socioeconomic factors that contribute to the issue, instead of seeing it as a black and white case of morality. Same-sex marriage and gender equality are also being discussed in a more accepting light.
Deborah Jian Lee, author of the book, “Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism,” explores the changing world of Evangelicalism and how a young, diverse demographic of Christians is bringing the church into new territory. She joins Larry Mantle and Professor of Theology and Culture Kutter Callaway to talk about her view of the new Evangelical movement.
Deborah Jian Lee will be speaking about reclaiming evangelicalism at The Level Ground Festival today from 2 to 4 p.m, taking place at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena. Click here for more information.
Guests:
Deborah Jian Lee, journalist and author of the book, “Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism” (Beacon Press, 2015); Deborah tweets from
Kutter Callaway, Assistant Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary
A federal court rules against businesses requiring employees to share tips
Last Tuesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals released its 2-1 decision barring business from forcing waiters, bartenders and other staff to split tips with back-of-house employees such as bussers, cooks, and dishwashers.
The ruling applies to states like California where workers earn the minimum wage. The decision re-ignites the debate about how service businesses like restaurants and casinos should compensate employees amidst rising costs due to higher minimum wages across many cities in the US and medical insurance due to the Affordable Care Act.
Other states affected include Alaska, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
Guest:
Randy Renick, Partner at the law firm Hadsell, Stormer and Renick LLP where he specializes in wage and hour, employment and civil rights litigation
Josh Loeb, CEO and owner of the Rustic Canyon family of restaurants, which include some of LA’s most popular dining spots including Rustic Canyon and Milo & Olive
Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zewail shares his perspectives on some of the most pressing problems facing the world
This Friday, Professor Ahmed Zewail is being honored at Caltech’s Science and Society Conference to address the most challenging problems facing the world and its future from medicine and space exploration to inequality and world economics.
The professor will be recognized for his scientific contributions as well as his critical role in negotiating a peaceful resolution and transition to a new regime during the Egyptian Revolution in 2011.
In 2009, President Obama appointed Zewail as US Science Envoy to the Middle East and Zewail also served as Science Advisor to the United Nations. In 1999, Zewail won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his contributions to femtochemistry, an area of physical chemistry that studies chemical reactions on extremely short time scales. Zewail developed a way to capture real-time movies of molecules as they meet and mate at speeds billions of times faster than the blink of an eye.
The Science and Society Conference featuring Ahmed Zewail and other Nobel Prize winners begins Friday, Feb. 25 at 9 a.m. at the Beckman Auditorium at the Caltech campus in Pasadena. Admission is free. For more information visit scienceandsociety.caltech.edu.
Guest:
Ahmed Zewail, Nobel laureate in chemistry and Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics at Cal-tech
Researchers sniff out more than 200 methane hot spots in LA, Riverside, Orange counties
Power plants, water treatment facilities and even cattle in Chino are just a few of the things creating methane hot spots around Southern California, according to a new study out from the University of California, Irvine.
The study looked at areas around the Los Angeles Basin emitting the highest levels of methane, which scientists have linked to climate change. Using a special vehicle outfitted with GPS, a rooftop sampling mast and spectrometers, researchers drove for miles around Southern California and took air samples continuously.
They monitored levels of methane, ethane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Using the data, they were able to identify 213 hot spots in locations across L.A., Riverside and Orange counties.
While the study was conducted before the Porter Ranch gas leak happened this past October, the study's authors say they’re hopeful Southern California Gas Company will use the findings to help meet Gov. Jerry Brown and the Air Resource Board’s orders that they remove as much methane from the air as was emitted during the leak.
Interview highlights
Are you blown away by this UC Davis researcher’s findings about methane at Porter Ranch?
Francesca Hopkins: That certainly has been far bigger than any magnitude of what we’ve seen throughout the L.A. Basin.
Now, this project you started before this whole Porter Ranch thing — tell us about it.
It’s been known for a couple years now that we observe higher methane emissions when we do atmospheric measurements in the L.A. Basin than what’s accounted for in the state’s methane inventory. There’s been a lot of work done in the past about that, but nobody had looked at the spatial patterns of methane. So that’s what we set out to do. We built a mobile lab system that actually measured air in real time and measured the methane and ethane concentrations in the air to try to locate where these methane emissions are coming from.
Now, landfills, don’t they have methane capturing systems so that this doesn’t — at least theoretically — spew into the air?
That’s right. Most of the landfills in the L.A. basins have methane capture systems. But what we found is that their effectiveness probably varies greatly. We weren’t able to do really facilities-specific measurements, but from our observations, we observed methane emissions from all the landfills that we measured — including landfills that have been closed, so no new trash has been added for up to 50 years [but the landfills] are still emitting methane despite the presence of theses mitigating systems.
Does that pose any health challenges for people who live, you know, close to or downwind from landfills?
We were only measuring methane in this study, so I can’t speak to the more harmful pollutants, but the levels of methane that we measured in the atmosphere were thousands of times below the levels that become dangerous for the explosive limit.
But still collectively pose a greenhouse gas climate concern.
Absolutely. Other work has shown that there’s at least 50 percent more emissions than what the state is accounting for.
Fifty percent more methane?
Right. Other studies have shown that in the past, and our work is really just trying to pinpoint what are those locations. That’s really the first step we need towards taking action to mitigate these leaks.
What was the biggest surprise location where you saw methane released?
I think one of the big surprises is that we see methane leaking from compressed natural gas fueling stations. It’s a system that we have in place to fuel these vehicles that actually burn much more cleanly than traditional vehicles, but it looks like some components of these stations are leaking methane into the atmosphere. So that was a big surprise also, because that’s not being accounted for in most greenhouse gas emissions inventory.
Have you had direct contact with state regulators on this for them to follow up based on your research?
No, we haven’t yet, but we’re hoping that now [that] the results are published that maybe we can build that collaboration.
Guest:
Francesca Hopkins, post-doctoral fellow at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the UCI study which mapped methane hot spots across the L.A. Basin
Note: This interview has been edited for clarity.
This story has been updated.