In recent weeks, Rep. Fred Upton, the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has been working with energy industry lobbyists and the former oil and gas industry employees on his staff to undermine or overturn safeguards proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency against air pollution.
Unfortunately, his actions could dramatically impact many of his constituents, particularly children, elderly and others suffering from asthma and other respiratory illnesses.
Rep Upton's district includes Kalamazoo County, which received a failing grade from the American Lung Association (ALA) for high ozone days. Those high ozone days hurt everyone in the county, of course, but those most vulnerable are young children and the elderly. In fact, according to the ALA, there are more than 18,000 people in Kalamazoo with adult asthma.
President Obama said it best during his State of Union address earlier this week: "I will not hesitate to create or enforce commonsense safeguards to protect the American people. That's what we've done in this country for more than a century. It's why our food is safe to eat, our water is safe to drink, and our air is safe to breathe. It's why we have speed limits and child labor laws."
Without government protections, we'll have higher rates of lung cancer, emphysema and other illnesses. Our air will be dirtier, toxic sludge will again invade our waterways and many poorer communities will be left even more powerless to stand up against nearby industrial polluters.
Instead of caving into the Tea Party and its industrial backers, Rep. Upton would better serve his constituents by modeling his actions after places like Pittsburgh, PA, which recently banned a controversial natural gas drilling technique over concerns about public health.
Darlene Harris, President of the city council, said that her colleagues rejected industry arguments that jobs would be lost if drilling was not allowed to proceed.
"There's going to be a lot of jobs for funeral homes and hospitals," she told CBS News. "That's where the jobs are."
Rep. Upton needs to decide if he's willing to disregard such concerns about public health. Are you, Rep. Upton?
I learned last week that Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is floating the idea of stopping EPA's work to reduce carbon dioxide pollution for at least one year.
To say that I am disappointed is an understatement. I have known and admired Senator Sherrod Brown for years, and I respect his track record on defending the environment.
Sherrod's consideration of undermining the EPA's ability to keep our air free from pollution doesn't jibe with his past positions or with what's good for Ohio's economy and for its residents' health.
And it certainly doesn't match up with what I know of Sherrod Brown's leadership.
I first met Senator Brown when he was in the House and I worked for another member of the Ohio delegation. Both members served on the Energy and Commerce Committee. During the long committee hearings, members often left to attend other events, but Hill staffers had to stick around to listen. Staffers aren't allowed to speak at committee meetings-only members can-so when we would hear witnesses making inaccurate statements or exaggerating the facts, we felt powerless to correct the record.
That was until we realized we could turn to Sherrod Brown. He was one of the few members who would sit through the bulk of hearings, and we could always trust him to correct the record when the speaker was off the mark, we could count on him to challenge falsehoods-especially when it came to environmental issues.
More recently, Senator Brown has been a supporter of clean energy-something that has been very good for Ohio. In fact, Ohio is the best in the Midwest when it comes to green job growth. Toledo and Cleveland have led the way by transforming struggling auto-parts factories into manufacturing centers of solar panels, wind turbines, and advanced batteries.
These opportunities led Senator Brown to play an active roll drafting comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation that would have cut global warming pollution and brought as much as $5.6 billion in investment revenue and 67,000 new jobs to Ohio.
Unfortunately, that legislation never made it to the floor. So why would Brown want to put put on hold the only chance we have right now for cutting carbon dioxide pollution? The only thing likely to be different a year from now is that one more year of pollutants will be in our air and businesses will have suffered through another year of renewed uncertainty about the standards they will have to meet.
And EPA has not put in place some Draconian plan. All that's being required is that new plants, or plants undergoing major changes install the latest, affordable equipment. Why would we want new plants to be dirtier than they have to be?
We shouldn't stop work already underway to clean up our air and tackle climate change while we wait for Congress to get its act together. And Congressional "delays" tend to be extended year after year. Before we know it, America will be four or five years further behind in confronting the worst environmental, economic, and national security challenge of our time.
That isn't something the Brown I know would want. And it's not something the people of Ohio should want. Ohio has one of the best clean energy stories to tell in the nation. Confronting climate change and shifting to more sustainable energy will bring more jobs to your state and make the hard-working families of Ohio healthier.
When your children are sick, you don't stop giving them the medicine they need because a better product might be available someday. Heck, you don't even wait for your kids to GET SICK if you can take pre-emptive action to avoid it.
Sherrod Brown can stand up for the health and welfare of Ohio's families by working WITH the EPA to make sure implementation of the Clean Air Act is successful in bringing standards up-to-date to protect public health and drive innovation. That is the leadership we need.
This blog was originally posted on the NRDC Action Fund blog, The Markup.
Editor's Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren't stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We'll return to our normal schedule next week.
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Wednesday is the heaviest travel day of the year in the United States, as millions of Americans head home to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some of you are probably reading this dispatch on PDAs as you wait in an interminable line at airport security. Here's some food for thought.
At Grist, food writer Michael Pollan officially declares himself a Rules Guy. Don't worry, that doesn't mean he won't accept a Friday dinner invitation offered after noon on Wednesday. Pollan thinks that our healthy eating skills are passed down to us as part of food culture. In this era of drive-through windows and meal replacement bars, a lot of the old wisdom is falling by the wayside and Americans are finding themselves adrift in a sea of calories. On the eve of Thanksgiving, Pollan provides some helpful guidelines for avoiding the food coma:
[M]any ethnic traditions have their own memorable expressions for what amounts to the same recommendation. Many cultures, for examples, have grappled with the problem of food abundance and come up with different ways of proposing we stop eating before we're completely full: the Japanese say "hara hachi bu" ("Eat until you are 4/5 full"); Germans advise eaters to "tie off the sack before it's full." And the prophet Mohammed recommended that a full belly should contain one-third food, one-third drink, and one-third air. My own Russian-Jewish grandfather used to say at the end of every meal, "I always like to leave the table a little bit hungry."
But wait, there's more!
Unions representing airline pilots and flight attendants are advising their members to avoid the the TSA's new backscatter x-ray scans because of concerns about the long-term health effects of x-ray radiation. Crew members who refused scans have been subjected to new "enhanced" pat-down searches. This week, the TSA granted an exception to pilots, but not to flight attendants. As I reported for Working In These Times, all crew members go through the same FBI background check and fingerprinting process. "Don't touch my junk!" has become a rallying cry for passengers, particularly white men, who are not accustomed to being asked to give up any part of their body's autonomy for the greater good. Is it a coincidence that 95% of pilots are men and three-quarters of flight attendants are women? [Update: The TSA has relented. The agency announced Tuesday that flight attendants will now get the same exemption as pilots.
Adam Serwer argues in The American Prospect that it's easy to demand tough security measures when the presumed targets are faceless Muslims in a distant country. When air travelers are asked to compromise their own privacy in the name of security, the tradeoff suddenly seems very different.
Employee health insurance deductibles are skyrocketing at Whole Foods and CEO John Mackey is trying to blame the increase on health care reform. "This is very important for everyone to understand: 100% of the increases in deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in 2011 compared to 2010 are due to new federal mandates and regulations," Mackey wrote in a corporate memo. In fact, as Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones, Mackey's memo is pure, organic BS. The provisions in the Affordable Care Act that might increase costs won't go into effect until 2014, so it's hard to figure out how federal policies could be responsible. Health insurance costs were rising by about 5% per year, year after year, before the Affordable Care Act passed. The truth is that health insurance is getting more expensive because health care is getting more expensive. As Harkinson points out, one of the reasons that health care is getting more expensive is because corporations like Whole Foods are pushing more of their employees into part-time work to avoid covering them. Of course, when those workers get sick, someone has to pick up the cost of their care. So those who have insurance, including some of Whole Foods' own employees, have to pay more to make up the difference.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Ed. Note: The Mulch is participating in Blog Action Day 2010, an initiative led by Media Consortium member Change.org that asks bloggers around the world to publish posts on the same issue on the same day. This year's topic is water.
Last week, rivers in Hungary ran red with toxic sludge, creating the perhaps most powerful image of water contamination possible. Imagine, for a second, if every chemical leaching into waterways in this country had such a brilliant hue. What color would our water be?
Less than crystal clear, certainly. We still don't know, for instance, what chemicals the government and BP poured into the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon spill, as Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports. Beyond one time dumps, American industries and consumers are steadily polluting our water system. Energy companies contaminate waterways. So do massive, industrial farms. Sewer systems overflow, and landfills leach waste. Even household chemicals - pesticides applied to suburban lawns, for instance - contribute to the problem.
Flouting the Clean Water Act
After the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, politicians finally took note of the country's polluted and within a few years had passed the Clean Water Act. In theory, the Clean Water Act should limit contamination, but as The New York Times reported last year, violations have been increasing. Just this month, in Kentucky, environmental advocates brought a case against two coal companies that allegedly violated the Clean Water Act more than 20,000 times, as Public News Service's Renee Shaw reports.
The violations "include doctoring water pollution reports, failing to conduct tests, and exceeding permit pollution limits," Shaw reports.
Can Twitter save China? China's environment--and thus public health--has been severely undermined for 30 years, and environmental protests have been a major feature of Chinese political life for at least 20. But what's changed recently is the role of social media to help organize those protests on a massive scale. With that force growing ever more powerful, and an overall cost of pollution greater than the cost of cleanup, a major shift is in the offing, Bloomberg News reports:
China Is Set to Lose 2% of GDP Cleaning Up Decades of Pollution
Li Pingri remembers swimming with fish and shrimp as a boy in Guangdong's Chigang waterway in China. Today, even after the city spent 48.6 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) on a cleanup, he can't stand the canal's smell.
"We are surrounded by black and smelly waterways, breathing the foul air every day and paying the price at the cost of our health," said Li, 79, a former researcher at the Guangzhou Institute of Geography. "If we can't breathe clean air or drink clean water, high economic growth is meaningless."
China, the world's worst polluter, needs to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product a year -- 680 billion yuan at 2009 figures -- to clean up 30 years of industrial waste, said He Ping, chairman of the Washington-based International Fund for China's Environment. Mun Sing Ho, a senior economist at Dale W. Jorgenson Associates and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put the range at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP.
Failure to spend that much -- equivalent to the annual GDP of Vietnam -- may cost the Chinese economy half as much again in blighted crops, health costs and pollution-related expenses, He said: "The cleanup can't catch up with the speed of pollution" if spending is less....
Lost Productivity
The costs arising from pollution in China -- including lost productivity due to health issues, crop degradation and losses from pollution-related accidents -- totaled 511.8 billion yuan, or 3.1 percent of GDP, in 2004, the latest figures available, according to the Beijing-based Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning, part of the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
China doubled total environmental spending in the 2006-2010 period to 1.4 trillion yuan from the previous five-year plan, and may more than double it again to 3.1 trillion yuan in the five years through 2015, said Wang Jinnan, vice-president of the academy.
That's less than the amount He predicts will be needed on the cleanup and includes other costs: developing alternative energy and new sewage works, and protecting ecological habitats. It's also less than the 4 trillion yuan China spent on stimulus in one year to boost the economy.
And as for the social forces pushing for change:
Twitter Protests
"Environmental protests have been one of the leading sources of social unrest for more than two decades," Elizabeth Economy, director for Asia Studies at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The River Runs Black," a book on China's environment, said in an e-mail. What has changed is "the ability of people to communicate through texting, e- mail, and Twitter to organize a protest."
Campaigns of up to 10,000 people in major cities such as Xiamen, Zhangzhou and Chengdu were fighting the planned siting of large-scale chemical plants, and in some cases have forced the government to reverse a decision, Economy told the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China in October 2009. She said about 700 million people in China drink water contaminated with human or animal waste.
And China doesn't even pretend to be a democracy!
Clearly things are much, much worse in China, but they seem to be on the cusp of starting to get dramatically better.
The list of bedrock American laws that Rand Paul is opposed to keeps growing longer. In addition to the Civil Rights Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, Paul has made it clear that he doesn't like the Clean Air Act either. Last weekend, Paul said that President Obama should leave Kentucky alone, especially when it comes to pollution. "You need to keep the EPA out of our affairs," he called on the president.
Paul prefers to have things "handled on a local level." But unlike Paul, I grew up in Kentucky, and I question this logic.
My elementary school sat on a cliff above an Ashland Oil refinery, and our playground was about eye level with the top of their smokestacks. When the paint on teachers' car started to peel and children started getting sick, the PTA tried to make Ashland Oil do something about it. After some fighting, the company finally installed air monitors on the kickball field - and a few months later the school closed its doors.
What sticks with me still is the way the problem was solved: As far as I can see, Ashland Oil didn't clean up its act at all. Our school shut down instead.
Federal efforts to cut pollution aren't perfect, but they are the last line of defense for places like my hometown. They literally save our lives: the Clean Air Act, for instance, has been documented to prevent hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.
Kentucky has a long dark history of environmental injustice. Amazing groups like Appalachian Voices have been fighting for cleaner water, cleaner air, and better safety rules for miners. They often find local solutions, but they also turn to federal agencies like the EPA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration when they need to.
Paul may call it "federal overreach," but I call it protecting the health of Kentuckians.
Of course, Paul trots out the old saw that cutting pollution kills jobs. But I think Paul is more concerned about ideology than jobs, because if he really wanted to create jobs for Kentucky, he wouldn't turn his back on clean energy and climate legislation. Clean energy jobs are growing 2.5 times as fast as traditional jobs. Paul would rather shoot down federal climate solutions than bring the jobs of the 21st century to his state.
Instead, he is banking on the same old dirty industries, and he seems to think that if children get asthma because they played on a field next to a refinery, that's alright because someone had a job. I am sorry, but I can't accept the misconception that my classmates and I were the collateral damage of some polluter's payroll. Good companies that are following the law and being good neighbors provide jobs every single day.
Companies have found time and again that a clean business model is part of the recipe for a successful company. That is why 5,171 small businesses from across the country are supporting the climate bill. That is why some of the largest companies in the nation are calling on Congress to take action immediately.
The parents I know in Kentucky have no interest in working jobs that sacrifice their children's health. They want to provide for their families AND keep them safe at the same time. This isn't an either or situation. Paul seems to forget this in the midst of his fixation with "federal overreach." I too respect states rights, but states still have to be good neighbors. Local empowerment doesn't give you the right to endanger your residents' health, export pollution into nearby states, or block national solutions to fight global climate change.
If leaders like Paul forget these lessons in responsibility, then I am glad federal agencies like the EPA can step in and remind them.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is hosting four public information meetings on the proposed study of the relationship between hydraulic fracturing and its potential impacts on drinking water...The meetings will provide public information about the proposed study scope and design. EPA will solicit public comments on the draft study plan.
The public meetings will be held on:
* July 8 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. CDT at the Hilton Fort Worth in Fort Worth, Texas * July 13 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. MDT at the Marriot Tech Center's Rocky Mountain Events Center in Denver, Colo. * July 22 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT at the Hilton Garden Inn in Canonsburg, Pa. * August 12 at the Anderson Performing Arts Center at Binghamton University in Binghamton, N.Y. for 3 sessions - 8 a.m. to 12 p.m., 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. EDT
We're now into day way too many of the BP oil spill, and the President has just yesterday been down on the Louisiana coast-again.
There have been suggestions that the Administration should take action to essentially push BP out of the way and take over the work itself, particularly as it relates to the cleanup.
It may have even occurred to you that an official declaration of some sort might be needed, in order to bring the full power of the Feds into play.
That's some good thinking, but before we go jumping right into declaring things we better understand the law, because if we don't, we could actually make things worse.
We all know that we need clean air and water to live. But what many of us DON'T realize is that there is another resource we depend on just as much to survive: dirt. Yes, that stuff you played in as a kid and obsessively clean off your car. Believe it or not, dirt is an essential element to our existence on Earth, and DIRT! The Movie aims to teach us all about it. This acclaimed documentary goes beyond preaching about the dangers of pollution, educating the viewer on why we need dirt to survive, how it affects our daily life, and what we can do to improve it.
Every person on Earth, regardless of age, race, or social status depends on healthy dirt to survive. However, it is one of the elements of our planet we take most for granted. DIRT! The Movie does a great job of mixing facts, personal anecdotes, and animation to create a film that educates as well as entertains. Experts from all over the world weigh in on just how important dirt is to us, and they do so in a way everyone can understand- no scientific mumbo jumbo. The animation is clever and cute while remaining relevant, and lets be honest, how could you NOT love little Digby? (If you don't get it, watch the movie)
Although the film does a great job describing why dirt is important to human kind, the real takeaway from this film is that everyone can help to restore it to a healthy state. The movie highlights people from all different ages and backgrounds. A young couple owns their own organic farm that provides vegetables to inner-city people. Children attend a sustainable school and learn about composting. Inmates learn the environmental and personal benefits of gardening. A woman in the Bronx creates her own green rooftop. The possibilities are endless and range from small lifestyle changes to huge worldwide movements. But it is clear after watching DIRT! The Movie that people from all walks of life can really make a difference.
It is that balance of teaching as well as motivating the viewer to take action that makes DIRT! The Movie unique and fun. In fact, that sense of involvement has been pushed beyond the movie into local communities with DIRT!'s program that sets up screenings all over the country. On the DIRT! The Movie website, it is simple and free to create your own screening to bring the movie to your own town or find a showing near you. These screenings make the dirty, fun, and relevant DIRT! The Movie available to people everywhere, and hopefully also creates an impact so that people can work toward restoring our dirt to a healthy state, and save the planet in the process.
The American manufacturing industry and its employees are constantly told that they need to be better competitors in the global market, that they must increase the value they add. How are they doing on that?
Something that jumps out from data about the share of global manufacturing had by the United States, China and five other industrialized nations, is that the US is about even with China. As of 2008 and according to UN figures, China's manufacturing accounts for 17.3 percent of world output in dollars (though this number is slightly inflated), while the US' share is 17.7 percent. All else is rarely equal, so this is about as close as you'll get in the real world.
From a Bureau of Labor Statistics report described here, "By the end of 2006, China's manufacturing employment had increased once again to 112.63 million, nearly eight times the level of manufacturing employment in the United States (14.16 million)." The numbers have surely changed since then, but probably not by an order of magnitude.
Those figures could imply many things, but what they seem immediately to suggest is that American workers are extremely productive. They can produce both a high volume and high value of goods, and they have done so without getting a real raise since 1974.
Yet US manufacturing workers face higher unemployment rates than the national average, and often have to accept lower paying work when their plants close down, which should be no surprise. At the advice of the finance industry, wages and benefits have been driven down, policy makers were encouraged not to worry about the decline of the industrial base, and the whole thing was papered over with a massive consumer credit bubble.
I was reading Paul Krugman's column the other day and was dismayed by his argument. According to the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, a half-ass, half-hearted measure on curbing carbon emissions is better than doing nothing, but I'm unconvinced. As written in The Washington Post:
On paper, the Waxman-Markey bill puts a cost on carbon dioxide by imposing a ceiling, or cap, on greenhouse gas emissions and then setting up a market for regulated industries -- such as the electric power sector -- to buy and sell allowances to pollute under that cap. As the cap is reduced each year, market participants will exchange allowances in a complex auction market.
If you liked what credit default swaps did to our economy, you're going to love cap-and-trade. Just read Title VIII of the bill, which lets investment banks, hedge funds and other speculators participate in the cap-and-trade market. They don't have emissions to cut; they have commissions to make.
The real hidden catch of the cap-and-trade system, though, is that it will require consumers to pay twice: first for emission allowances and then for the construction of new low- and zero-carbon power plants.
That doesn't sound very good, and the bad news gets progressively worse.
Contrary to assurances from the bill's sponsors that utility customers wouldn't have to pay these costs for the first decade, some coal-dependent utilities would be forced to purchase more than half of their allowances when the program is scheduled to begin in 2012. Would these allowances reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? No; that would come when consumers footed a second bill - for the cost of their utilities either to retrofit coal and gas plants to capture carbon - something that cannot be done today on a commercial scale - or to shut them down and build non-carbon-producing nuclear plants and wind farms instead.
Yes, it seems our hunger for cheap meat has the consequences of a possible pandemic swath of death. I can't eat chicken not home grown since I saw Napolean Dynamite and sniffed back the tears for the chickens in that movie. Here's the link for another real tear jerker for pigs, not my most favorite animal either for itself or its meat. But what a horrible life they lead. Please read:
Seriously. It was a primary last Tuesday. No one in the world of hardcore election geekery was going to be distracted by some trivial thing like the fate of the planet. But indeed, the 22nd of April was also Earth Day, when people who aren't election geeks pretend to be distracted by the fate of the planet -- a thing to which so much importance is accorded that it gets an entire 1/365th of the calendar devoted to paying it lip service.
If I sound bitter about that, it's only because I am.
Also, since I was off engaged in election geekery and all manner of making a living/moving house type endeavors last week, I didn't say much of anything about it, either. (Yes, my finger is already pointing back at me, save yourself the effort.) So here's the news from a few people who did ...
- The coal industry has principles. If you guessed that those principles are organized around ensuring the continued existence and profitability of the coal industry, you get a lollipop.
- Some House allies have principles, too. They're not perfect, but hey, they'll give you a little hope if you clicked over to see what the coal industry would have in store for all of us.
- The EcoCity World Summit was held by other people who also don't want a green future to mean a mud hut future.
- Even pine beetles can contribute to global warming. Frak.
- Here are a bunch of things you can do to prevent poisoning your pets with common household toxins. For one, don't overheat your non-stick pans, it can kill your birds. For another, avoid using insecticide on your lawn, it can damage pets' nervous systems. But I'm sure all that stuff they mention is perfectly harmless to humans. (Courtesy, an ad at I Can Has Cheezburger)
- An instructional designer for corporate training considers her profession's environmental impact: "Did you know that you would need to plant just over 200 trees to offset one year of CO2 emissions for a small PC training room equipped with 20 PCs, 1 laser printer, and 1 photocopier (all ENERGY STAR rated)?" Huh. Well, I did not know that.
Anyway, happy belated Earth Day. We will now return to your regularly scheduled election wonkery.
I saw Sherry Boschert on C-SPAN, and I was impressed. What she knows about the potential for Plug-in cars, with technology available today, might make Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force (whoever they are) very uncomfortable.
Cars with massively reduced pollution output are just one benefit. Getting from point A to point B at lower cost isn't the whole picture, either. The bigger picture is that Plug-in Hybrids can be the key to a new, far more optimal electricity grid.
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