Tomorrow, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell will announce the plan to open California desert land to renewable energy projects - but why is there so much backlash?; we discuss new Census Bureau data that shows U.S. household incomes rose by 5.2 percent in 2015; and it looks like men are doing more of the housework, though women are still doing more.
Unveiling, or unleashing, the final Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan for California
At 11 a.m. tomorrow, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell will be in Palm Springs to announce the final version of a plan to open thousands of square miles of public land in the California desert to industrial scale renewable energy projects like wind farms and solar arrays.
The so-called Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) would set aside 2,000 square miles of land administered by the Bureau of Land Management for large-scale renewable energy projects. It would also set aside an additional 7,812 square miles to conserve desert habitat for the desert tortoise, bighorn sheep and other animals.
AirTalk will debate a number of perspectives on how the ambitious plan will impact energy resources, wildlife and the ecosystem, and the big picture balance of environmental costs and benefits.
Guests:
Chase Huntley, director of the Energy and Climate Program at The Wilderness Society
Nancy Rader, executive director of the California Wind Energy Association
Steve Gregory, KPCC’s environment and science editor
The middle class gets its first raise in eight years, but is it enough?
Finally, a piece of good news from the economy.
The Census Bureau says the typical U.S. household's income rose 5.2 percent in 2015 to $56,516. That is still below the median household income of $57,423 in 2007, when the Great Recession began.
Those living in poverty also fell last year, and fell to to 13.5 percent. That's a drop of 1.2 percentage points from 2014, the largest decline in poverty since 1999.
How reliable is this number as an indicator? Do other economic trends bear out this news?
With AP files
Guest:
Nick Timiraos, national economics correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C., who’s been following the story. He tweets from
Mobile news consumers likely to be less informed citizens, study suggests
Using eye-tracking software to measure how people consume news stories on different devices - computers, tablets, and smartphones -, researchers found smartphone users spent the least amount of time looking at articles and paying attention to additional links.
Johanna Dunaway of Texas A&M University explains, "Eye-tracking measures attention and cognitive processes; humans are not good at self-reporting where they direct attention. So this allowed us to have a simple measure of how much time people spent looking at the body of the story." Dunaway says the findings suggest citizens who rely on mobile news alone will be less informed and less engaged citizens. Read more about her paper at the site of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.
News outlets care a great deal about how people consume news and in what "spaces." Gabriel Kahn, professor in the journalism school at USC, says news executives are having to pay more attention to where news engagement is taking place. "That's why we see, for instance, more news videos on Facebook complete with the text of the story in subtitles." The caution is that Silicon Valley innovators are driving the future of journalism, without any allegiance to it.
Does this track with how you consume news? How could content or technology be changed to account for this risk of a “second-class digital” citizenry?
Guests:
Johanna Dunaway, Associate Professor of Communication, Texas A&M University; Study author, “Mobile vs. Computer: Implications for News Audiences and Outlets”
Gabriel Kahn, Professor of Professional Practice of Journalism, University of Southern California; Co-director of the Media, Economics, and Entrepreneurship program, USC
Doctors, patients pressure FDA to regulate commercial stem cell clinics
The Food and Drug Administration is holding a public hearing this week on the proposed regulation of for-profit stem cell therapy clinics.
As reported in STAT, the two-day hearings will end on Tuesday, and patients, doctors and stem cell researchers have been weighing in on the ethics of commercial clinics without regulations. Supporters of the proposal argue that stem cell research hasn’t crossed the threshold into for-profit treatment, while clinics claim scientific breakthroughs in the field have benefited their patients.
But the biggest argument for FDA regulations has been about false hope that may be placed on desperate patients suffering from conditions including paralysis, erectile dysfunction and autism. Opponents of the regulation worry that the proposal may be another obstacle to the advancement of stem cell technology and research.
What do you think of the FDA’s proposal? Does it protect patients or hinder the progress of stem cell research?
Guests:
Dr. Mark Berman, MD, FACS, co-medical director of the Cell Surgical Network, a chain of clinics specializing in adult stem cell regenerative medicine.
Lawrence Goldstein, Ph. D., director of the Sanford Stem Cell Clinical Center, UC San Diego School of Medicine
FBI child porn sting operation comes under fire over privacy concerns
In 2014, a child porn site called The Playpen started in what is known as the dark web on the internet, a space where users can operate anonymously using special software.
The FBI got word of Playpen soon after its launch. Instead of shutting it down, the agency continued running it for two weeks to catch suspected child pornographers. Investigators first planted a hacking tool on the site to allow them to obtain information like IP addresses from the users’ computers. Then it went to Internet providers to get the names and physical addresses of those same people. The FBI did obtain search warrants for both steps. Over 180 people have been arrested from the sting operation.
But the FBI’s tactics have come under criticism from privacy experts. The issue is this: the FBI had sought legal permission from a federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia to install the Playpen hacking tool, and under current laws, federal magistrate judges can only grant a search warrant in their jurisdictions. Because Playpen users are located in different places across the country, critics argue that the warrant obtained by the FBI wasn’t valid.
Guests:
Jamie Satterfield, journalist specializing in the law and crime for the Knoxville News Sentinel, which is part of Gannett that owns USA Today. She’s been following this story since October 2015. She tweets from
Mark Rumold, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed amicus briefs on behalf on some of the defendants in the case
Women are spending less time doing chores - what that means for gender equality
A new study conducted over a 50-year span by Oxford University researchers found that women are spending significantly less time doing household chores, while men are spending slightly more time doing chores than in past decades.
Results also indicated that the overall gender gap in [the time spent doing] household chores has declined in several countries, including in the U.S.
What do these results mean? For starters, household chores are still largely considered a woman’s job; think back to the term, “the second shift,” used to describe childcare and household chores that await women after having worked a full shift at work. Despite traditional gender roles, researchers of the study concluded that the narrowing gender gap indicates a general movement toward gender equality in the household.
Judith Treas, chancellor’s professor of sociology at UC Irvine, says there are two reasons women are spending less time on household chores: women’s high labor force participation has left them with less time for chores and couples are marrying much later in life, forcing bachelors to figure out how to do their own laundry.
How do you and your partner divide chores? Does your household adhere to traditional gender roles or has your family created its own set of rules? Has this evolved over time?
Read the study below:
Fifty years of change updated: cross-national gender convergence in housework:
Guest:
Lynne Casper, Professor of sociology, USC