The argument against natural gas got a boost this week, when a congressional investigation turned up evidence that oil and gas companies were using diesel gas to extract gas from the ground.
Natural gas companies have insisted that their newly popular hydraulic fracturing (known as "fracking") techniques are safe, but as Care2's Kristina Chew reports, "environmentalists and regulators have become increasingly concerned that the fracking chemicals-including toluene, xylene and benzene, a carcinogen, which are all from diesel gas---are seeping out into underground sources of drinking water, in violation of the Safe Water Drinking Act."
The mix-up
The Environmental Protection Agency is conducting an inquiry into the environmental impacts of fracking, and some states are considering more stringent regulations of the practice, including disclosure of the chemicals that go into fracking fluid. Gas companies have argued that the blend of chemicals is a trade secret and must be kept private, but the findings of the congressional investigation suggest otherwise. Eartha Jane Melzer reports at The Michigan Messenger, "In a letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson... Reps. Henry Waxman, Edward Markey and Diana DeGette reported that although the EPA requires permits for hydraulic fracturing that involves diesel none of the companies that admitted using diesel have sought or received permits."
And, as Melzer reports, diesel is the only chemical used in fracking that's currently regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. That companies have been sneaking it into the ground does not strengthen the industry's case for independence.
Ensuring that natural gas companies do their work without threatening water supplies is becoming ever more crucial, as the fuel becomes one of the go-to replacements for coal. In Massachusetts, for instance, some legislators are pushing for a coal plant in Holyoke to start using natural gas or renewable energy, rather than being shut down, as Nikki Gloudeman reports at Change.org.
Supporting renewables
And although renewables are thrown in there as an option, right now the clearest way to replace the amount of energy generated by coal is natural gas. This year's line on energy policy from Washington, however, is that the country should support innovations in clean energy.
Will Obama's new direction on this issue go anywhere? Grist's David Roberts has been arguing that any energy policy that leaves out climate change is missing the point.
However, Teryn Norris and Daniel Goldfarb (also at Grist), of Americans for Energy Leadership, a California-based non-profit, have a smart rebuttal. They argue that clean energy needs the boost in research and development that Obama is promising. Ultimately, they, write, "these investments will drive down the price of low-carbon energy and pave the way for stronger deployment efforts - perhaps even including a strong carbon price at some point - both here and in the developing world, where the vast majority of future emissions will originate."
But, about climate change!
And to be fair, the federal government is trying to lead the way on investing in renewables. As Beth Buczynski reports at Care2, the Department of Energy is working on a $2.3 million solar energy project that would power its Germantown, Md., location.
Not every one is willing to wait for investments to take hold, however. On the National Radio Project's show, "Making Contact", Andrew Stelzer examines what climate activists are doing, post-Cancun, to push forward debates on climate change. Ananda Lee Tan, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alterantives argues, for instance, "Community-led climate justice in the U.S. has been winning. The largest amount of industrial carbon that has been prevented in this country has been prevented by community-led groups, grassroots groups fighting coal, oil and incinerators."
Cause and effect
Whether the solution comes from industry, government, or grassroots groups, the country's energy policy will change over the next few decades. And what's troubling is that it's not clear what the impact will be. Take natural gas: Washington favors it right now because it's thought to have lower carbon emission than coal. But any time humans introduce new factors into the environment, they can have unexpected consequences.
That's not only true for the energy industry, too. In Texas, for instance, the government is trying to eradicate an invasive plant species, a type of giant cane called Arundo that is growing all over the Rio Grande Valley. As Saul Elbein reports for The Texas Observer, it's been hard to eradicate:
There are three primary ways to control invasive plant species: Kill them with herbicides, clear them with bulldozers and machetes, or attempt to introduce a new predator. The least controversial approach, clearing the cane, is not going to work. There are thousands of square miles of the stuff, and Arundo cane is nearly impossible to cut out. Each stalk has a thick taproot that sends shoots in every direction. You can bulldoze or chop the cane down, and it will grow right back. Worse, any stress on the plant-say a machete blow-causes it to send out more root stalks. Every chopped-up joint of cane that floats downstream can sprout another stand.
But, Elbein reports, scientists have come up with a different solution: They've bred wasps that originate in the same region as the cane to come in and eat it. They've also taken precautions that the wasps won't have their own adverse impact on the environment by ensuring that they can only survive on this particular type of plant. But even then, it's a tricky business.
"The wasps have to survive," John Adamczyk, an entomologist running the project, told Elbein. "They have to not all get eaten. Then it becomes a question of whether they can keep the cane in check."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
This week, two high-profile trials involving the racially motivated murders of Latinos in Pennsylvania and Arizona are exposing the unsettling implications of growing anti-immigrant sentiment. But while antagonistic political discourse and incendiary policy are shown to provoke ethnic violence-correlating with a 52 percent increase in hate crimes-they also indirectly drive sexual violence against immigrant women. The combination of stricter enforcement and increased cultural animosity toward immigrants renders undocumented women workers more susceptible to workplace rape and sexual exploitation-violent crimes that don't generally register as hate crimes but that nevertheless bespeak of racially charged motives.
President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao touched on energy issues in the bilateral summit between the two countries this week.
"I believe that as the two largest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouses gases, the United States and China have a responsibility to combat climate change by building on the progress at Copenhagen and Cancun, and showing the way to a clean energy future. And President Hu indicated that he agrees with me on this issue," President Obama said during a Wednesday press conference.
But can the United States step up as a leader on clean energy? The proliferation of politicians whom The Nation's Mark Hertsgaard calls "climate cranks" suggests otherwise.
The biggest consumers
In international climate negotiations, the United State and China are the two key players, and if the world as a whole is to move forward on combating climate change, agreement between Presidents Obama and Hu would be a huge breakthrough. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard notes that Hu also said the United States and China would work together on climate changes, but, she writes, "I can imagine, though, that the conversation on this subject wasn't entirely as chummy as the remarks would imply, however. The US last month lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organization about China's subsidies for clean energy, arguing that the country is unfairly stacking the deck in favor of their products."
At AlterNet, Tina Gerhardt and Lucia Green-Weiskel explain the background to those tensions and to the U.S.'s protectionist bent on clean energy projects. They write, "Energy Secretary Chu recently framed the new relationship between the U.S. and China as a 'Sputnik Moment.' Referencing the first satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, which demonstrated its technological advantage and led to the Cold War-era space race, Chu warned that the U.S. risks falling behind China in the clean technology race."
Stumbling blocks
China's motivations for growing its clean energy sector may not be leafy green; new energy sources feed the country's rapidly growing economy. But at least the country is committed to green energy sources, unlike our climate change-denying Congress. As Mark Hertsgaard argues at The Nation, this brand of American has become so pernicious, it's time to stop adhering to the protocol that dubs them "climate deniers" and start calling them "climate cranks." He explains:
True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.
Climate cranks attack
Unfortunately, climate cranks continue to interfere with both climate scientists and forward-thinking energy policy. At Change.org, Nikki Gloudeman writes about the ongoing saga of climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the climatologists embroiled in the Climategate brouhaha, who is still being attacked by climate-denying groups for his work. Gloudeman reports that although Mann has been investigated and found innocent of any misdeeds several times over, a group with a bias against climate change, the American Tradition Institute, is trying to obtain access to his work.
And in New Mexico, the state's new conservative governor, Susana Martinez, "has attempted to subvert her own state constitution in order to stop [a] plan to begin reducing her state's carbon emissions," reports Dahr Jamail for Truthout. The plan, executed through state rules, would have reduced the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 3%, from 2010 levels, each year. The rules should have been made public, but Gov. Martinez kept them from being published, according to Truthout's report. A local group, New Energy Economy, is fighting to implement them.
Bright spots
In some states, however, the clean energy economy is moving forward. As Care2's Beth Buczynski reports, Clean Edge, a clean-tech advisory group, has identified the top ten states for clean energy leadership. They include California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
"Rankings were derived from over 80 metrics including total electricity produced by clean-energy sources, hybrid vehicles on the road, and clean-energy venture and patent activity," Buczynski reports.
And, as David Roberts writes at Grist, there is important work to be done at the local and regional level to both prepare for and prevent climate change. His preferred term for this challenge is "ruggedizing"-strengthening a community's ability to respond to challenges brought on by climate change, such as flooding, droughts, or food shortages. The solutions to these problem, Roberts writes, often have the welcome side effect of decreasing carbon emissions, as well:
For instance, the residents of Brisbane are discovering that when disaster strikes, it's not very handy to have everyone spread out all over the place and utterly dependent on cars to get anywhere. It's more resilient to have people closer together, more able to walk or take shared transportation. It just so happens that also reduces vehicle emissions.
The advantage of this type of work-building the clean energy economy, ruggedizing communities-is that leaders don't necessarily have to agree on the reality of climate change to move forward. But these are only partial solutions, and to address climate change on an international scale, the cranks will need to be quieted.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
(Considering how many people are affected, this is anything but a side-story. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
The federal trial of three Pennsylvania police officers accused of covering up the murder of an undocumented Mexican immigrant opened last week-reigniting critical discussion about the recent rise of anti-immigrant hate crimes. The officers-former Shenandoah Police Chief Matthew Nestor, Lt. William Moyer and Patrolman Jason Hayes-allegedly attempted to conceal the racially motivated nature of the 2008 murder of 25-year-old Luis Ramirez, who was brutally beaten to death in a park by a group of teenagers spouting racial slurs. At the time, Ramirez's murder underscored a growing trend of anti-Hispanic violence in the U.S., which some attribute to increasingly anti-immigrant political rhetoric.
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
The Tucson shooting that left Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) critically wounded and 6 others dead last Saturday wasn't explicitly motivated by Arizona's polemical stance on immigration. Nevertheless, the tragedy bears a number of weighty implications for immigration issues both in Arizona and across the nation.
Contextualizing political violence
Pima county sheriff Clarence Dupnik was among the first to discuss the shooting within the context of Arizona's heated immigration battles. In several television appearances, he characterized the tragedy as a product of hatred and intolerance, telling reporters during one press conference that Arizona has "become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry." Many on the right, including Senator Jon Kyl, were quick to admonish Dupkin for needlessly politicizing a national tragedy.
But, as Care2's Jessica Pieklo argues, the sheriff's contentiously moderate stance on immigration makes him uniquely positioned "to shine a critical light on the fevered political rhetoric that has enveloped his state and this country." While Dupnik has spoken out against Arizona's SB 1070, engendering the goodwill of immigrant rights advcoates, he has also argued that schools should check the immigration statuses of students, a position endorsed by the anti-immigrant right. Given his varied stance on the issues, it's difficult to dismiss his characterization of the tragedy as some kind of party-line pandering. Rather, his statement seems an objective assessment of Arizona's volatile political culture-made all the worse by increasingly fierce immigration debates.
And as Dupnik probably well knows, that volatile political culture has repeatedly coalesced into political violence over the past 20 years. Following the shooting, the immigrant rights group Alto Arizona produced an interactive timeline of Arizona's long history of violence. As ColorLines' Jamilah King notes, this troubling history has frequently centered on explosive immigration issues, from Sheriff Joe Arpaio's lawlessness to murders committed by Arizona Minutemen.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head at a constituent outreach event in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson on Saturday. In all, the gunman shot 18 people, killing 6, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl.
Jamelle Bouie of TAPPED urges President Obama to take up the issue of mental health care in his upcoming speech on the mass shooting. Several people who knew the alleged shooter came forward with stories of bizarre behavior and run-ins with campus police at his community college. College administrators ordered him to seek treatment before he returned to school, but he does not appear to have done so.
H. Clarke Romans of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Southern Arizona explained to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! that mental health services in Arizona have been devastated by budget cuts.
In 2008 the state eliminated support services for all non-Medicaid behavioral health patients and stopped covering most brand-name psychiatric drugs. At least 28,000 Arizonans were affected. Arizonans with mental illnesses can expect even more cuts in the future as the state slashes spending in an attempt to address its budget shortfall.
In AlterNet, Adele Stan, argues that, while we don't yet know the gunman's motives, the right wing's intensifying campaign of anti-government hysteria and violent rhetoric may have emboldened an already disturbed person:
Had the vitriolic rhetoric that today shapes Arizona's political landscape (and, indeed, our national landscape) never come to call, Loughner may have found a different reason to go on a killing spree. But that vitriol does exist as a powerful prompt to the paranoid, and those who publicly deem war on the federal government a patriot's duty should today be doing some soul-searching.
(The first thing the House did was take away voting rights--from DC, Guam and other non-state representatives in Congress. But that's merely a symbolic sideshow compared to the real main attaction in disenfranchisement that conservatives have in mind for this year.... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
Yesterday, a coalition of anti-immigrant lawmakers from 14 states unveiled their much-anticipated birthright citizenship bill. The measure would thwart the 14th Amendment by denying citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. As Julianna Hing notes at ColorLines, sponsors unabashedly admit that, after passing the legislation at the state level, they aim to push it through Congress. If passed, it would effectively become federal law while at the same time force a court case challenging the traditional application of the 14th Amendment.
Editor's Note: We're posting the Weekly Mulch on Thursday this week because of the holidays. It'll return to its regular Friday morning posting next week. Until then, Happy New Year!
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
2010 was a disappointing year for environmentalists.
This was the year Congress was supposed to pass climate change legislation, but each and every time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed on the verge of pushing the bill forward, the effort fell short. In April, off the coast of Louisiana, the Deepwater Horizon explosion led to one of the worst environmental disasters in the country's history, and in the aftermath, neither President Barack Obama nor Congress has pushed for the sort of strong regulations that would rein in the oil industry and the risk it poses to coastal ecosystems.
Meanwhile, a newly invigorated natural gas industry has been plowing forward with a controversial drilling technique called hydrofracking. Although the Environmental Protection Agency has committed to studying the environmental impacts of the practice, it's unclear at this point how much leeway the industry will be given to use techniques that have contaminated water and air across the country. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben had trouble convincing the president to take the small symbolic act of reinstalling a solar panel on the White House roof. And in November, the country elected a group of lawmakers who are skeptical that climate change even exists.
Hope springs eternal
But the news was not all bad, as Change.org's Jess Leber reports. In California, green-minded voters defeated a proposition that would have rolled back the state's ambitious climate law. Coal-fired power plants are closing in states like Oregon and Colorado, and mountaintop removal coal mining is losing its funding. And cities like New York, Washington D.C., Denver and Minneapolis made it easier for their inhabitants to use bikes as a primary mode of transportation.
"All over the world, activists are fighting in their states, towns and cities to do right by the environment," Leber writes. "They are also moving to pressure the corporate world. So while, given the results of Election Day in the U.S., progress in Congress will be an uphill battle, I'm confident there will be even more victories to report this time next year."
A year can be a long time. Consider, for instance, Steph Larsen's reflections on her farm's first year. "I feel like I've lived a decade in the last 12 months," Larsen writes in Grist. Last year, her pasture did not exist, and the farm buildings on her land had sat unused for years. But in the past 12 months, she's grown cherries and tomatoes and squash, kept chickens and hunted for their eggs, and raised livestock that later became her dinner.
Larsen's goals for her farm are modest: "to grow food for her household and community." It can be hard sometimes to see how individual choices like hers can make a difference while global leaders cannot agree on how to reduce carbon emissions and industry continues to exploit and pollute the environment. But as Winslow Myers, the author of Living Beyond War, writes at Truthout, "the cause-and-effect relationship between what I do personally in my daily life and those planet-wide challenges has become infinitely clearer" over the past 50 years:
Now we can see how the two are connected - between my diet and the effect of industrial agriculture on the land, between my energy consumption and global climate change, between the chemicals in my laundry detergent and the health of the oceans - and between my political commitments and the world-destroying weapons built with my tax dollars....the reality is that I am so deeply connected to the whole entity that I am responsible for it, answerable to it.
Local leaders step into the breach
It's true that individual decisions to turn down the heat, or eat local food, or bike instead of drive cannot turn back global warming. But in aggregate, they do make an impact. And although nationally and internationally, politicians are finding it difficult to create strong policies on climate change, that would reduce emissions, not all lawmakers are avoiding the issues. Franke James' visual essay on climate change at Yes! Magazine puts it like this: "Don't be fooled by the global leaders loafing. Local leaders and cities are making plans to adapt to climate change (because it's affecting them NOW!) "
And ultimately, these sorts of decisions on local and individual levels do send a signal to leaders that their constituents care about keeping the planet healthy, care about preserving our environmental resources. To that end, check out these ideas for individual action from the staff and readers of Mother Jones.
And next year? Leaders like Bill McKibben are working to create a global movement around climate change, a people-driven movement that will convince legislators and negotiators that it is incumbent upon them to act. Look for them to start making lots of noise in 2011.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Editor's Note: Due to the holidays, the Weekly Mulch will appear on Thursday afternoon both this week and next week. We'll resume regular Friday morning posts in 2011.
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
It's the naughty children who get coal in their stockings, and it seems like Americans must have been naughty this year. Because across the country, we're awash with coal, carcinogens, and other toxins. And our government is not doing to much to change that.
Waste not
After the massive coal ash spill in Tennessee two years ago, the EPA began working on more stringent regulation of the waste, a byproduct of coal mining. But, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones, the industry has been pressuring the administration to adopts weaker regulations than it could.
"Two years after the largest toxic spill in the nation's history, there is still no regulation of deadly coal ash dumps-nor is there clear direction from EPA on the timing or content of a final rule," Lisa Evans, senior administrative counsel for Earthjustice, told Sheppard. "For the communities enduring damage from aging ponds and leaking landfills, time has run out. There is no reason on earth that their health should be compromised by such an easily avoidable harm."
What's in the water?
Coal ash is one of those pollutants that clearly poses a problem. It looks dangerous. But not all pollutants are so obviously dangerous. This week, for instance, the Environmental Working Group, an environmental health non-profit group, released a report showing that much of the country's tap water is contaminated with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium, with levels high enough to pose a risk to human health.
"Exposure in tap water has been linked to cancers of the stomach and gastrointestinal tract in both animals and people," Rebecca Sutton, a scientist for the Environmental Working Group, wrote at AlterNet. Thirty-one of the 35 cities that the group examined had dangerously high levels of the contaminants in the tap water.
How did this happen? As Sarah Parsons explains at Change.org, "The reason so much chromium-6 winds up in tap water is that industries spew it into waterways, utilities fail to test for the substance, and the EPA doesn't regulate it in drinking water."
What the EPA does do, Parsons reports, is limit the total chromium in drinking water, "the combined amount of hexavalent chromium and trivalent chromium." She explains, "The problem is that trivalent chromium is actually good for you-in fact, it's necessary for metabolism. Hexavalent chromium, on the other hand, is a noxious carcinogen."
Moving forward
These prevalent toxins are just two reminders that, for all their successes in recent decades, environmentalists still have much work ahead of them. How should they approach that work? Earth Island Journal's Jason Mark, considering lessons from the 1980s-era environmental leaders, who focused on moving toward the center and working within the confines of D.C. politics, offers this thought: "The new leaders of 2010 say what we need is less focused group messaging and inside-the-Beltway maneuverings, and more heartfelt spirit and energy directed encouraged at the grassroots. I hope their instincts are right. Because at this point I don't think we can wait another 25 years to figure this stuff out."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
It's a Christmas-week miracle! The Senate, in a vote that astonished everyone, brought the Food Safety and Modernization Act back from the dead on Monday, as Siddhartha Mahanta reports in Mother Jones. The bill, which will enact tougher consumer protections against E. coli and other deadly contaminants in staples like eggs and peanut butter, died in the Senate last week when the omnibus spending bill it had been folded into kicked the bucket.
At Grist, Tom Philpott explains the initial demise, and the basis for the ultimate resurrection of the bill. The House passed the bill on Tuesday, having already passed it twice before.
President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law, which will usher in the first major overhaul of the country's food safety system in more than 70 years. Food poisoning strikes 48 million Americans (1 in 6), lands 128,000 in the hospital, and kills 3,000 ever year, according to CDC figures released last week. Now that's something to talk about with your relatives around the holiday dinner table.
Wisconsin clinic backs off 2nd trimester abortion care
A clinic in Wisconsin has reneged on its commitment to provide second trimester abortion care, as Judy Shackelford reports in The Progressive. Shackelford is outraged that the Madison Surgery Center walked back on its promise to patients. She knows first hand how important later term abortion access can be.
Shackelford found herself in need of a second trimester abortion when she developed a blood clot in her arm during her second, much-wanted pregnancy. She decided to terminate rather than risk leaving her 7-year-old son motherless. It was hard enough to find an abortion provider when she needed one, but if she needed the procedure today, she would have nowhere to turn.
Teen birth rate at record low
The birth rate for women ages 15-19 fell to 39.1 per 1000 between 2008 and 2009, the National Center for Health Statistics announced Tuesday. Many commentators, including Goddessjaz of feministing attribute the drop to the recession. The economy seems to be an important factor because birth rates dropped in all age groups, not just among teens.
Predictably, proponents of abstinence-only-until-hetero-marriage are trying to take credit for the falling birth rate. It's not clear why they think ab-only is finally starting to work after years of unrelenting failure. Perhaps it was Bristol Palin's electrifying performance on "Dancing With the Stars"?
Get the government out of my Medicare
We've become accustomed to the ironic spectacle of senior citizens on Medicare-funded scooters decrying the "government takeover of health care." Medicare is wildly popular, even among those who decry "socialized medicine." When the Affordable Care Act is finally implemented, it won't feel like a government program, either. Paul Waldman of The American Prospect wonders if this "private sector" feel will undermine support for the program:
The Republican officials challenging the ACA in court have characterized its individual insurance mandate as an act of tyranny ranking somewhere between the Stalinist purges and Mao's Cultural Revolution. But in the "government takeover" of health care (recently declared the 2010 "Lie of the Year" by the fact-checking site PolitiFact), Americans will continue to visit their private doctors to receive care paid for by their private insurance companies. The irony is that if the ACA actually were a "government takeover," people would end up feeling much better about government's involvement in health care. But since it maintains the private system, conservatives can continue to decry government health care safe in the knowledge that most people under 65 won't know what they're missing, or in another sense, what they're getting.
If people don't realize that they're benefiting from government programs, they are less likely to support those programs. In an attempt to deflect Republican criticism, the Democrats assiduously scrubbed as much of the aura of government off of health reform as they could. This could prove to be a disastrously short-sighted strategy. If health reform works, the government won't get the credit, but rest assured that if it fails, it will take the full measure of blame.
Funding for community health centers at risk
One of the lesser-known provisions of the Affordable Care Act was to expand the capacity of community health centers (CHCs) from 20 million to 40 million patients by 2015. This extra capacity will be key for absorbing the millions of previously uninsured Americans who are slated to get health insurance under the ACA.
CHCs have been praised by Democrats and Republicans as an affordable way to provide quality health care. However, state budget crises are threatening to derail the plan, as Dan Peterson reports for Change.org. States must contribute to the program in order to qualify for federal funding. However, state funding for CHCs has plummeted by 42% since 2007. So far this year, 23 states have cut funding for CHCs and eight have slashed their budgets by 20% or more.
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.
(With so much else going on, I'm afraid I've dropped the ball in writing about the Cancun summit. Fortunately, this diary does a good job of filling in. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
This year's round of the United Nations-led climate change negotiations, ongoing in Cancun, Mexico, for the past two weeks, end today. No matter what the official outcome, the progress made on dealing with global climate change and carbon emissions will be incremental.
The problem, at base, lies with the incentives, or lack thereof, for the most powerful negotiators at the table. Morally, there are plenty of reasons for every country in the world to commit to drawing down carbon pollution. But economically? Politically? It's easier to take small steps, make half-hearted commitments.
Going all-in
What would a brave policy stance look like? Something like the position the Maldives-an island archipelago-has taken: "We do not have to wait for everyone else to do this," as the country's environment minister, Mohamed Aslam said at the conference this week. As Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports:
Right now the country relies heavily on diesel fuel for much of its energy needs. The government has already conducted an audit of their emissions, much of which comes from the shipping sector, a fact of life in island nations. But Aslam envisions solar, wind, tidal power, and renewable transportation fuels driving the nation in the near future-even if islanders don't have all the solutions now.
Aslam notes, Sheppard writes, that it's in the country's economic favor to take up these policies. So for the Maldives, at least, it's not a tough sell.
Bribery?
The real dilemma for island countries like the Maldives, though, is how much wiggle room they should give larger countries, who are bigger emitters, in international agreements. Larger countries have more to lose, economically, so they're less willing to commit to, say, legally binding goals for reduced carbon emissions.
But these larger countries also tend to have more money. And that's where the problem for countries like the Maldives comes in: they're going to need financial support to deal with creeping sea level rise and other consequences of climate change. Some of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, as The Guardian reported, revealed how countries like the United States use those needs to their diplomatic advantage. Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman asked U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern to respond to these revelations, but didn't get much of a response.
I've got the power
Ultimately, though, a country like the Maldives is always going to have a weaker negotiating position than bigger countries. Take, for instance, this account from Inter Press Service's Darryl D'Monte on how to identify an important player at Cancun:
A rough yardstick for identifying which Asian countries make the biggest ripples in Cancun is the number of journalists who crowd around the spokesperson immediately after a press conference. ... Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has certainly come into his own on this score. As the spokesperson for the BASIC group of countries, which includes Brazil, South Africa and China, he is articulate, well-informed and witty. Journalists swarm around him after a press conference, eager to get him make a scathing remark about another country or group of countries.
This profile of Ramesh is a fascinating window into how one negotiator manages to navigate these complicated talks. But, as D'Monte points out, even for India, financing is a key question: one of the "non-negotiables" for India, Brazil, South Africa and China is speedier delivery of promised mitigation monies.
Moral Highground
There's one group at Cancun whose incentives line up impeccably with a faultless moral position: young people. They're the ones most likely to suffer the consequences of a warming world, and they're advocating for a draw-down of carbon-heavy industries. At Change.org, Jess Leber reports that about 1,000 young people are participating in some way in the conference this year. (Official attendance tallies, for participants inside and outside the building, estimate 22,000 people in total.)
Leber reports that young people did make some progress this year: "The negotiators agreed to ramp up support for climate education and training programs worldwide, but especially in developing countries, and agreed to give the youth delegation are larger official voice in the negotiating process," she writes.
That's good news for adults, as well. As the UN's chief negotiator, Christiana Figueres, demonstrates in this video at Care2, it's tough to face down the people who are actually going to suffer from your generation's waffling. "Figueres tears up when speaking of why the talks are important; she also describes the inspiration that keeps her working toward a global agreement," writes Nancy Roberts.
Figueres' inspiration? "It's you," she tells young activists. "It's not our planet. It's yours...You will all take it over very soon...Nothing is going to be perfect...Everything here is going to be one step. But it is the best that this group of people under these circumstances...can do for the time being."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
It won't be long before the world has to confront its diminishing supply of clean water.
"We've had the same amount of water on our planet since the beginning of time, " Susan Leal, co-author of Running Out of Water, told GritTV's Laura Flanders. "We are on a collision course of a very finite supply and 7.6 billion people."
What's worse, private industries-and energy companies in particular-are using waterways as dumping grounds for hazardous substances. With the coal industry, it's an old story; with the natural gas industry, it's a practice that can be nipped in the bud.
In many cases, dumping pollutants into water is a government-sanctioned activity, although there are limits to how much contamination can be approved. But companies often overshoot their pollution allowances, and for some businesses, like a nuclear energy plant, even a little bit of contamination can be a problem.
Business as usual
Here's one troubling scenario. At Grist, Sue Sturgis reports that "a river downstream of a privately-owned nuclear fuel processing plant in East Tennessee is contaminated with enriched uranium." The concentrations are low, and the water affected is still potable. The issue, however, is that the plant was not supposed to be discharging any of this sort of uranium at all. One researcher explained that the study had "only scratched the surface of what's out there and found widely dispersed enriched uranium in the environment." In other words, the contamination could be more widespread than is now known.
Nuclear energy facilities must take particular care to keep the waste products of their work separate from the environment around them. But in some industries, like coal, polluting water supplies is routine practice.
The dirtiest energy
In West Virginia, more than 700 people are suing infamous coal company Massey Energy for defiling their tap water, Charles Corra reports at Change.org. In Mingo County, tap water comes out as "a smooth flow of black and orange liquid." Country residents are arguing that the contamination is a result of water from coal slurries, a byproduct of mining that contains arsenic and other contaminants, leaking into the water table. Residents believe the slurries also cause health problems like learning disabilities and hormone imbalances, as Corra reports.
Newfangled notions
Even so-called "clean coal," which would inject less carbon into the atmosphere, is worrisome when it comes to water. The carbon siphoned from clean coal doesn't disappear; it's sequestered under ground. For a new clean coal project in Linden, NJ, Change.org's Austin Billings reports, that chamber would be 70 miles out to sea. As Billings writes:
The plant would be the first of its kind in the world, so it should come as no surprise that the proposal is a major cause for concern among New Jersey environmentalists, fishermen, and lawmakers. According to Dr. Heather Saffert of Clean Ocean America, "We don't really have a good understanding of how the CO2 is going to react with other minerals... The PurGen project is based on one company's models. What if they're wrong?"
In this case, it wouldn't only be human communities at risk ("Polluted Jersey Shore," anyone?), but the ocean's ecosystem.
Frack no!
Coal communities in West Virginia have been dealing with water pollution for decades. But a another source of energy extraction-hydrofracking for natural gas-has only just begun to threaten water supplies. Care2's Jennifer Mueller points to a recent "60 Minutes" segment that explores the attendant issues: it's a must-watch for anyone unfamiliar with what's at stake.
Fortunately, some of the communities at risk have been working to head off the damage before it hits. In Pittsburgh this week, leaders banned hydrofracking within the city, according to Mari Margil and Ben Price in Yes! Magazine. They write:
As Councilman [Doug] Shields stated after the vote, "This ordinance recognizes and secures expanded civil rights for the people of Pittsburgh, and it prohibits activities which would violate those rights. It protects the authority of the people of Pittsburgh to pass this ordinance by undoing corporate privileges that place the rights of the people of Pittsburgh at the mercy of gas corporations."
Environmentalists in other municipalities, in state government, and in Congress would do well to follow Pittsburgh's lead.
Mutant fish
Of course, you can't believe every tale of water contamination you hear. At RhRealityCheck, Kimberly Inez McGuire takes on the persistent myth that estrogen from birth control is making its way in large concentrations into the water supply and leading to mutations in fish.
This simply isn't true. As McGuire explains, "The estrogen found in birth control pills, patches, and rings (known as EE2) is only one of thousands of synthetic estrogens that may be found in our water, and the contribution of EE2 to the total presence of estrogen in water is relatively small." Where does the rest of the estrogen come from? Factory farms, industrial chemicals like BPA, and synthetic estrogen used in crop fertilizer. So, yes, the water is contaminated, but, no, your birth control is not to blame.
Greening the US
Stories like these, of environmental pollution by corporations, seem to come up again and again. They're barely news anymore and so easy to ignore. But it's more important than ever for environmentalists to fight back against these challenges and push for a green economy that minimizes pollution. The American Prospect's Monica Potts recently sat down with The Media Consortium to explain the roadblocks to a green economy. If green-minded people want to stop hearing tales like the ones above, these are the obstacles they'll need to overcome: watch the video.
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
While Arizona's draconian anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, was far from the first controversial immigration measure of its kind, it stands out as a hallmark of increasingly visible nativist sentiment. Numerous legal challenges and a federal injunction notwithstanding, the measure continues to inspire copycat legislation and attract millions in donations. Even as Arizona's legislature attempts to outdo itself by pushing increasingly outrageous bills, as Care2 reports, SB 1070 remains center stage.
As some Americans obsess over whether to brine or deep-fry their Thanksgiving turkeys, others are going hungry. Seth Freed Wessler reports for ColorLines that 50 million Americans went hungry in 2009, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Astonishingly, more than 36% of female-headed households suffered from food insecurity last year, in spite of a massive expansion of federal food stamp benefits as part of the economic stimulus. Forty-two million families received food stamps last year, 10 million more than the year before. Congress gutted the food stamp program this summer. If something isn't done, families of four will lose $59 a month in food stamp benefits at the end of 2014. At the time of the cuts, House Democrats promised to restore food stamp benefits during the lame duck session of Congress, but Freed notes there's been little sign recently that they plan to follow through on the promise.
Making Crisis Pregnancy Centers come clean
The New York City Council is preparing to vote on the legislation to force so-called "crisis pregnancy centers" (CPCs) to disclose that they are not health care facilities and that they do not provide birth control or abortions. CPCs are anti-choice ministries that deliberately mimic abortion clinics in order to trick women who might be seeking abortions. It's all a ruse to bombard these women with false information about abortion under the guise of health care. As we discussed last week in the Pulse, CPCs also serve as incubators for more extreme forms of anti-choice activism, from clinic obstruction to violence.
In RH Reality Check, Dr. Lynette Leighton explains why she supports New York City's proposed bill to require so-called "crisis pregnancy centers" to disclose that they aren't real clinics staffed by health care providers:
As a family physician, I provide comprehensive health care for all of my patients, including safe abortions for women who decide to end a pregnancy. I've cared for many women who came to me in crisis when they learned they were pregnant. The last thing my patients need is to be misled by anti-abortion organizations masquerading as health clinics. I'm strongly in favor of the New York City bill requiring crisis pregnancy centers to disclose that they do not provide abortions or contraception, or offer referrals for these services.
New York CPCs are claiming that the requirement to disclose violates their freedom of speech, Robin Marty notes in RH Reality Check. In other words, they are claiming a First Amendment right to bait and switch. The executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) is scheduled to testify before the City Council that the free speech claim is baseless.
See you in court!
In other reproductive rights news, the Center for Reproductive Rights took the FDA to court on Tuesday over access to the morning after pill. The FDA has been ignoring a court order to make emergency contraception available over the counter to women of all ages, and the Center is going to court to spur the agency to comply, Vanessa Valenti reports for Feministing.
Look at this smokin' hipster
Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds is courting hipsters with a new "Williamsburg" cigarette, Brie Cadman reports for Change.org. "[Smoking Camels is] about last call, a sloppy kiss goodbye and a solo saunter to a rock show in an abandoned building... It's where a tree grows," according to the online ad copy. Mmm, kissing smokers.
It's all part of an online marketing campaign in which users are invited to guess where brand mascot Joe Camel will show up next week. Interestingly, the contest's name is "Break Free Adventure," a twist on the Camel brand's "Break Free" tagline. Odd that they'd pick a slogan usually associated with quitting smoking, rather than feeding the addiction. Those hipsters sure love irony.
Blowing the whistle on health insurers
On Democracy Now!, health insurance executive turned whistleblower Wendell Potter predicts that the Republicans will back off their grandiose campaign promises to repeal health care reform and instead try to dismantle the bill's provisions that protect consumers. Potter notes that health insurers are major Republican donors, and that parts of the law are very good for insurers, notably the mandate forcing everyone to buy health insurance.
Apparently, some true believers haven't gotten the memo. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly notes that some Republican members of Congress are still gunning to shut down the government over health care reform and other spending.
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.
A year ago, it seemed possible-likely, even-that President Barack Obama would sweep into the international negotiations on climate change at Copenhagen and make serious progress on the tangle of issues at stake. The reality was quite different. This year, the expectations for the United Nations Climate Conference in Cancun are less wild.
The conference will be held from Nov 29 to Dec 10 and the same issues from 2009 are up for debate. Countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany are still contributing an outsize share of carbon to the atmosphere. Countries like India and China are still rapidly increasing their own carbon output. And countries like Bangladesh, Tuvalu, and Bolivia are still bearing an unfair share of the environmental impacts brought on by climate change.
A very different set of expectations are building in the climate movement this year. If last year was about moving forward as fast as possible, this year, climate activists seem resigned to the idea that politicians just aren't getting it. Change, when it comes, will have to be be built on a popular movement, not a political negotiation.
Climate change from the bottom up
Last year, climate activists put their faith in international leaders to make progress. This year, they believe that it's up to them, as outside actors, to marshal a grassroots movement and pressure their leaders towards decreased carbon emissions.
"There's a recognition that the insider strategy to push from inside the Beltway to impact what will happen in DC, or what will happen in Cancun has really not succeeded," Rose Braz, climate campaign director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Making Contact's Andrew Stelzer. "What we're doing in conjunction with a number of groups across the country and across the world is really build the type of movement that will change what happens in Cancun, what changes what happens in DC from the bottom up." (This entire episode of Making Contact is dedicated to new approaches to climate change, at Cancun and beyond, and is worth a listen.)
Fighting the indolence of capitalists
Here's one example of this new strategy. As Zachary Shahan writes at Change.org, La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement, is coordinating a march that will begin in San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara, Acapulco, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, then converge on Cancun. The march will include "thousands of farmers, indigenous people, rural villagers, urbanites, and more," Shahan reports.
After they arrive in Cancun, the organizers are planning an "Alternative Global Forum for Life and Environmental and Social Justice" for the final days of the negotiations, which they say will be a mass mobilisation of peasants, indigenous and social movements. The action extends far beyond Cancun, though. Actually, they are organizing thousands of Cancuns around the world on this day to denounce what they see as false climate solutions.
These actions echo the strategy that environmentalist and author Bill McKibben and other climate leaders are promoting to push for climate change policies in the U.S. All this talk about building momentum from the bottom up, from populations, means that anyone looking for change is now looking years into the future.
The U.S. is not leading the way
Of course, ultimately, politicians will need to agree on a couple of standards. In particular, how much carbon each country should be emitting and how fast each country should power down its current emission levels. The U.S. is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to agreement on these questions, especially due to the recent mid-term elections. As Claudia Salerno, Venezuela's lead climate change negotiator wrote at AlterNet:
Unlike what many suggest, China is not the problem. China, along with India and others, have made considerable commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and are already working to realize them. Other developing countries have done the same, although we only generate a virtual drop in the bucket of global carbon emissions. The key player missing here is the U.S.
China, the U.S. and Clean Coal
The most interesting collaborations on clean energy, however, aren't happening around the negotiating table. This week, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote a long piece about the work that the U.S. and China are doing together on clean coal technology, the magic cure-all to the world's energy ills.
In the piece, Fallows recognizes what environmentalists have long argued: coal is bad for the environment and for coal-mining communities. But, unlike clean energy advocates who want to phase coal out of the energy equation, Fallows argues that coal must play a part in the world's energy future. Therefore, we must find a way to burn it without releasing clouds of carbon into the atmosphere. That's where clean coal technology comes in. So far, however, researchers have had little luck minimizing coal's carbon output.
A few progressive writers weighed in on Fallows' piece: Grist's David Roberts thought Fallows was too hard on the anti-coal camp, while Campus Progress' Sara Rubin argued that the piece did a good job of grappling with the reality of clean energy economics. And Mother Jones' Kevin Drum had one very clear criticism-that the piece skated over the question of progress on carbon capture, the one real way to dramatically reduce carbon pollution from coal. He wrote:
All the collaboration sounds wonderful, and even a 20% or 30% improvement in coal technology would be welcome. But that said, sequestration is the holy grail and I still don't know if the Chinese are doing anything more on that front than the rest of us.
On every front, then, the view on climate change is now a long one.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
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