Last week, the Labor Department reported that youth unemployment stands at 18.2%, nearly twice the national average of 9.8%. The percentage of young people without a job is a staggering 53.4 percent, the highest figure since World War II. Looking deeper, the statistics for youth of color are terrible and telling.
According to the most recent data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40.7% of black youth between 16-19 are unemployed, almost double the amount of whites teenagers (23%). For Latinos the same age, the rate is nearly 30%. Get a little older and the gap grows wider. Unemployment for black Americans aged 20-24 is 27.1%, over twice that faced by white youth (13.1%) in the same age range.
The glaring differences indicate that unemployment is not only decidedly raced, but also that the current economic condition is wholly unforgiving for young people of color. Only a massive, well-funded set of green jobs programs explicitly designed to close those racial gaps can create a truly vital, full-employment economy.
The New York State Senate and Assembly, too often a model of corruption and dysfunctionality, rose above petty politics last week to pass forward-thinking legislation on climate and energy, setting a precedent for bipartisanship and a sensible cap and trade system. The State Senate passed the groundbreaking Green Job/Green New York Act, with strong support from Republicans, Democrats, and the Working Families Party, which spearheaded the legislation. The bill -- expected to be signed into law this week by Gov. David Patterson leverages $112m in revenue from the Northeasts's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) into $5 billion of private investment to finance home weatherization, energy efficiency projects, and green jobs creation.
It's been a chaotic Congressional recess, what with birthers, doubters, and lobbyist-financed astroturf groups disrupting townhall events screaming about euthanasia, that's it's easy to forget how 5 weeks ago there was a whole lot of screaming over the House's courageous passage of The American Clean Energy and Security Act.
The people who run the finance industry are extremely smart. Says so on the label. That's how they were able to convince the government to make good on their gambling debts, though if they were a little smarter, they might have remembered that the house always wins.
They've created speculative bubbles in recent decades (and more than one had to be bailed out) over commodities like silver, unsecured loans, real estate, dotcom firms whose business plans hinged on sock puppet sales, real estate ... well, you get the picture. On to the next big thing.
That thing might well be carbon markets. Turns out, the companies that hold most of the current derivative risk will be able to make ridiculous, unsupervised bets sell dizzyingly complex derivatives against carbon offsets, too. Though no worries, the price of failure would only be the absence of a price signal that will push atmospheric carbon levels down, hastening catastrophic global climate disruption. No big:
... Well, Waxman-Markey had some good language regulating carbon and other energy derivatives.
... However, in the 300 pages of amendments added to Waxman-Markey just after 3.a.m on the night the bill passed, a few new sentences materialized that placed a big asterisk on those safeguards. The final text now says that the sections of the bill regulating carbon derivatives will be overridden by any derivatives legislation that the House passes later in the year. ...
Senator Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, announced this week that her committee won't mark up energy and climate legislation until after the August recess. That's a good thing. It means progressive groups and activists have more time to coordinate their efforts to support the emergence of a progressive bloc of senators on these issues.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, narrowly passed in the U.S. House of Representatives at the end of June. The ACES bill seeks to mitigate climate change via emission reductions, investments in energy technology, creation of clean energy jobs, and rigid standards for energy efficiency. Check out Grist for a valuable breakdown of the act.
This may be one of the most important things anyone's said yet about the Waxman-Markey climate bill, or ACES. Ken Ward Jr. writing at The Charleston Gazette shares a quote from the communications director of the United Mine Workers of America, Phil Smith:
As it stands now, the amount of money dedicated to coal in this bill is remarkable, and the future of coal will be intact.
I've been working extensively to fashion a controlled program that Congress can adopt which will preserve coal jobs, create the opportunity for increasing coal production and keep electricity rates in regions like Southwest Virginia affordable. The compromise that I have reached with Chairman Waxman achieves those goals.
It doesn't seem unreasonable, as many have pointed out, that industry's weeping and wailing about this bill in public hides the fact that they know it's the best deal they're going to get.
Indeed, the EPA is one of the few government agencies that's done anything constructive to push us away from the destructive, outmoded coal industry. As the indispensible David Sasson reports, they did so just yesterday:
In a previous post, I wrote about how the coal industry got its way with ACES, the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Much of their victory had to do with sharply limiting the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose chartered purpose is to protect the environment, and therefore, public health.
The agribusiness industry won a similar victory. When Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), chair of the House Agriculture Committee and point person for an alliance of rural and coal state Democrats seeking to weaken the bill, put his foot down and said, "I'm pretty sure that any role for EPA in agriculture is a deal breaker."
Rep. Peterson's main complaint about the first draft of ACES, and what seemed to be the general complaint of the House Agriculture Committee, was that the legislation didn't give farmers enough money for things they were already doing. Throw more money at us based on no scientific evidence whatsoever, he said, or no deal.
House leadership took Peterson at his word. Like, for example, this word:
... Young people, however, seem to have a special role to play. In many ways, to borrow a phrase from a fellow activist Ken Ward, we may be "the last generation."
Not the last generation on earth - - no doubt society will keep the babies coming until the very end. But maybe the last generation to see winter in Vermont (as I write, a slow drizzle has replaced the usual December snow), the last U.S. generation to grow up in a time of relative economic prosperity, or the last generation to live in a world not plagued by higher levels of disease. And in the face of all this, we're getting royally screwed by our governments. The Stern Report recently re-emphasized that the impact of global warming on the world economy will be like that of the Great Depression, World War I, and WWI . . . combined. Guess who's going to be paying for all of this out of pocket? ...
For all that Rep. Henry Waxman and Rep. Ed Markey tried, and of their sincerity I have no doubts, the current Waxman-Markey bill, The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, or ACES, fails this Last Generation.
In opening my case, I yield the floor to Greenpeace USA Deputy Campaigns Director Carroll Muffett, who today said the following:
... A good number of people have told me in the past few days that major environmental organization[s are] actively working against strengthening amendments to the bill, stating that those groups are fearful that any actual strengthening will keep the bill from being passed. ...
I've certainly been hearing the same things, including that if the bill fails, progressives (both elected representatives and non-profits) will personally get blamed for any mouthing off they do now. (Don't get me started on the fabulists who're saying that it'll be easier once the Senate gets hold of this.)
... Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who has made known that he has enough votes to derail the Speaker's priority legislation if agricultural provisions aren't changed, said he spoke with Pelosi "for a while" and that it was "cordial."
"She's not putting any pressure on me," Peterson said. "She knows where I'm coming from." ...
