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The plan meant to unite Biden and Bernie voters on climate is finally here

Once upon a time, many moons ago — i.e., back in April — Democratic presidential primary candidate Bernie Sanders agreed to exit the race and join forces with his mortal frenemy Joe Biden to help the former vice president take the White House. The two announced they were putting together a series of joint “unity” task forces with experts from each of their camps to shape the Democratic platform, including a task force on climate change.

After a few months of weekly Zoom meetings and conference calls, the task forces sent their final recommendations to the Democratic National Committee for its consideration on Wednesday.

On climate change, the two candidates and their supporters had some serious divides to bridge. Over the course of nine months of primary debates, Biden touted his plan to build 500,000 electric vehicle chargers and put his faith in American exceptionalism while Sanders bashed fossil fuel executives and promoted the Green New Deal. To try to find a middle ground, Sanders appointed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash, and Catherine Flowers, the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, to the joint climate task force. Biden selected former Secretary of State John Kerry, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy, and former Biden policy advisor Kerry Duggan, along with two members of Congress.

From the preamble to the task force’s policy recommendations, it’s clear that Sanders’ camp had a meaningful influence on the platform. Titled “Combating the climate crisis and pursuing environmental justice,” the introduction immediately namechecks communities that have suffered the most from the effects of climate change, like Houston, Texas and Paradise, California, and quickly moves on to those that have long suffered from racist policies and pollution, like Flint, Michigan and the Navajo Nation. The platform goes on to work justice and equity into pretty much every bullet point, from eliminating legacy pollution like Superfund sites, to creating union jobs in clean energy that reflect the full diversity of the country. While the Green New Deal is never mentioned, traces of it are all over the place.

Prakash wrote about her experience on the task force on Twitter on Wednesday, explaining that she had two goals: to push Biden to increase his ambition on climate change in terms of timelines and benchmarks, and to place environmental and climate justice at the heart of all of Biden’s climate policies.

On Prakash’s first goal, there was certainly some success. Previously, Biden’s climate policies centered around achieving 100 percent clean electricity by 2050. The task force shaved 15 years off that goal. It also came up with a slew of closer, more specific benchmarks: Within five years, make all school buses electric and help spur retrofits of 4 million buildings by unlocking private sector funding and setting efficiency standards, and by 2030, zero out the carbon footprint of all new buildings.

As for Prakash’s second goal, she applauded Biden’s commitment to putting environmental justice at the heart of his climate policy agenda by “directing federal funds to disadvantaged communities, ending pollution & toxic waste sites, and creating mitigation strategies and rebuilding from disaster in just and equitable ways.”

“We are leaving these discussions with policies that, if implemented, will make Joe Biden’s climate agenda far more powerful, equitable, and urgent than where his plans were just weeks ago,” she tweeted.

Naturally, there is evidence of compromise throughout the task force’s plan. While the document endorses repealing fossil fuel subsidies and addressing methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure, it does not say anything about fracking, and the only pipeline that it mentions is the “diverse pipeline of talent” the government should help create to fill good clean energy jobs. However, it does urge the Democratic party to explicitly fess up to “historic wrongs” perpetrated against Native American tribes with respect to infrastructure (i.e. pipelines), and to commit to a more robust and meaningful consultation process with tribes across all federal agencies. To do so, the task force recommends conducting a “Tribal Needs Assessment” to understand how to support more than 500 tribes in the energy transition.

Primary season left the Democratic party deeply divided, and some on the climate left will inevitably remain skeptical that a Biden administration will be ambitious enough. This document is by no means the scripture of climate policy. But Biden has proven to be pliant, allowing himself to be pushed further and further on climate since first announcing his candidacy, and this experiment in intra-party negotiation and compromise offers some evidence that the trend could continue.

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The plan meant to unite Biden and Bernie voters on climate is finally here

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Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

The coronavirus may have canceled many of this weekend’s organized Fourth of July fireworks displays, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t celebrating at home. Roadside fireworks stands are seeing an explosion of business, and firework complaints are cropping up across the country. In Boston, police calls regarding illegal fireworks were 23 times higher this year compared to last year — and that was in May. In New York in the first few weeks of June, such calls were up 236 times over the same period last year.

Bill Weimer, vice president of the retailer Phantom Fireworks, says he’s been “knocked over” by this season’s booming fireworks sales. “The demand and the business we’ve seen so far has been the strongest early fireworks season I’ve seen in my years of involvement in the fireworks business,” he told CNN.

The immediate dangers from exploding fireworks — injury and fires — are high on many public officials’ minds. But as the Fourth draws near and Independence Day partygoers snatch up the nation’s supply of sparklers, StarFires, and Raging Zombies, health experts have pointed to another troubling side effect of the pyrotechnics displays: a spike in air pollution.

They’re specifically worried about particulate matter — tiny dust and soot particles that may cause human health and environmental problems. A 2015 study in the journal Atmospheric Environment found that the average level of particulate matter across the United States increased a whopping 42 percent on the Fourth of July, and the Environmental Protection Agency warns that exposure to particulate matter may cause significant respiratory problems. For people with preexisting heart or lung conditions, it can even lead to premature death.

This week, a new study published in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology adds to the layers of concern. Not only is particulate matter bad in general, but the study found that the emissions from fireworks may pose unique health risks. After collecting particulate matter released by 12 types of commercially available fireworks, the study’s authors found high levels of toxic metals like copper and strontium in five of them.

Most of these metals are technically allowed in fireworks, said Terry Gordon, the lead author of the study and a professor of environmental medicine at NYU Langone Health. In fact, those metals are responsible for producing the fireworks’ vivid colors. But that doesn’t mean people should be inhaling them.

Krystal Pollitt, an environmental health scientist at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved with the new study, says that when people breathe in metal particles like the ones let off by fireworks, it can cause cells to experience “oxidative stress.” This disrupts normal cellular signaling and metabolic processes and, if left unchecked, it can lead to cell damage and even cell death.

“Oxidative stress is a mechanism that underlies a lot of different diseases,” Pollitt told Grist, including a number of respiratory conditions. It is also implicated in kidney and liver failure, as well as neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.

Gordon and his team were looking for signs of oxidative stress — and that’s what they found when they exposed human lung cells in a lab to the metal-containing particulate matter from the fireworks. Some types of fireworks, like the so-called “Saturn Battery 1,” caused a stronger reaction than others. Meanwhile, cells that were exposed to a control sample of black carbon — a common and relatively innocuous component of particulate matter —showed no signs of oxidative stress.

The researchers later confirmed the damaging effects of the particulate matter in live cells by conducting an experiment on mice. After injecting a subset of the fireworks particles into the mice’s lungs, they found that the particles with higher concentrations of toxic metals caused greater inflammation.

Gordon said he was most surprised to find that emissions from two of the fireworks contained dangerous levels of lead, despite the fact that lead is not allowed in consumer fireworks. One type of firework, called the “Black Cuckoo,” produced particulate matter with lead concentrations greater than 40,000 parts per million.

“That means it was 4 percent lead, which is outrageous,” Gordon told Grist. Even though the industry says it follows rigorous testing procedures to prevent this kind of contamination, he added, either regulators or manufacturers appear to be failing to keep it out of consumer fireworks. “To me, it’s almost criminal activity,” he said.

The American Pyrotechnics Association, an industry group, expressed concern about the fireworks’ metal content, saying the contaminated products should not have gotten past routine regulatory testing. “All consumer fireworks imported into the U.S. are prohibited from containing any form of lead,” the group’s executive director Julie Heckman told Grist. However, she added that the study did not provide detailed information on the fireworks or their manufacturers, making it difficult to determine where the oversight occurred.

Though Gordon’s study focused on small-scale fireworks displays — the kind you might have in your backyard — he said his results raise questions about the safety of larger shows. Gordon suspects that big firecrackers use many of the same chemicals as the little guys, and big displays produce much greater amounts of particulate matter. Plus, air pollution from big celebrations can blanket urban areas and linger for days.

Although some of the largest Fourth of July fireworks shows won’t be happening this year — events in New Orleans, Orlando, Minneapolis, most of southern California, and elsewhere have been canceled — others are plowing ahead. Macy’s NYC fireworks show, the largest pyrotechnics display in the country, is going on as a series of short, unannounced displays to prevent crowding. And after a 10-year moratorium on pyrotechnics at Mount Rushmore due to fire danger, the Trump administration is planning to bring “THE BIG FIREWORKS” back to the national monument, along with an anticipated crowd of 7,500 people.

These events raise obvious concerns about spreading the coronavirus through person-to-person contact, but the danger posed by pollution remains unclear without more research on the population-wide toxicological effects of exposure to firework-generated particulate matter.

“We don’t know what the risks could be,” Gordon said, calling for more research. But until we know more, he says it could be worth it to investigate alternative ways of celebrating Independence Day. Laser shows, he noted, are bright and colorful without the toxic emissions.

For the time being, he recommends that viewers exercise caution, whether they’re staying home to detonate a Lava Blaster or heading to a big pyrotechnics show. “If I’m in a fireworks celebration and the wind’s blowing right at my family and me,” he told Grist. “I’m not a happy camper.”

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Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

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Seattle’s ‘autonomous zone’ belongs to a grand tradition of utopian experiments

The year 2020 seems to be drawn straight from the plot of some discarded dystopian novel — a book that never got published because it sounded too far-fetched. Not only is there a pandemic to contend with, unemployment nearing levels last seen in the Great Depression, and nationwide protests against police brutality, but it’s all happening in the same year Americans are supposed to elect a president.

Amid the chaos and tear gas, some people see a chance to scrap everything and start over, a first step toward turning their visions for a better world into reality. In Seattle, protesters in one six-block stretch of Capitol Hill, a neighborhood near downtown, have created a community-run, police-free zone, recently renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP. It’s a scene of masked crowds, vibrant signs and street art, a “no cop co-op” giving away food and supplies, and newly planted community gardens. In Minneapolis, volunteers turned a former Sheraton hotel into a “sanctuary” offering free food and hotel rooms — until they got evicted.

“We’re seeing a new resurgence of utopianism,” said Heather Alberro, an associate lecturer of politics at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom who studies radical environmentalists and utopian thought.

Problems like climate change, the widening gap between the rich and everybody else, and racial inequality gives many the sense that they’re living through one giant unprecedented crisis. And these combined disasters create “the exact conditions that give rise to all sorts of expressions” of utopian thinking, Alberro said. From broad ideas like the Green New Deal — the climate-jobs-justice package popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — to Seattle’s “autonomous zone,” people are offering up new plans for how the world could operate. Whether they came from literature or real-life experiments, these idealistic efforts can spur wider cultural and political change, even if they falter.

A community garden in CHOP’s Cal Anderson Park. Grist / Kate Yoder

Based on President Donald Trump’s tweets about Seattle’s CHOP (or Fox News websites’ photoshopped coverage of the protest) you’d picture pure chaos, with buildings afire and protesters running amok. The reality was more like people sitting around in a park, screening movies like 13th, and making art. It’s a serious protest too, with crowds gathered for talks about racism and police brutality in front of an abandoned police precinct. The protesters’ demands include abolishing the Seattle Police Department, removing cops from schools, abolishing juvenile detention, and giving reparations to victims of police violence.

“The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone #CHAZ is not a lawless wasteland of anarchist insurrection — it is a peaceful expression of our community’s collective grief and their desire to build a better world,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan tweeted last week.

The protest zone goes by many names: Originally called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, it was later rebranded as CHOP. The barricaded area, which spans from Cal Anderson Park into nearby streets, is part campground, part block party. Tourists wander through, snapping photos of the street art.

A week earlier, protests in Cal Anderson Park, sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, were met by police officers spraying rubber bullets, mace, and tear gas. Then, last week, the police abandoned the area, and the protesters declared it their own, turning the “Seattle Police Department” into the “Seattle People Department” with a bit of spraypaint.

The CHAZ follows a long history of anti-capitalist experiments that reimagined the way the world was run. In 1871, the people of Paris, sick of oppression, rose up to take control of their city for a two-month stint. The Paris Commune canceled debt, suspended rent, and abolished the police, filling the streets with festivals. The French government soon quashed their experiment, massacring tens of thousands of Parisians in “The Bloody Week.” Even though it was short-lived, the Paris Commune inspired revolutionary movements for the next 150 years.

Protesters sleep in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan during Occupy Wall Street, 2011. Ramin Talaie / Corbis via Getty Images

In 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestors took over New York City’s Zuccotti Park for two months to highlight the problems of income inequality. Their encampment offered free food, lectures, books, and wide-ranging discussions. The radical movement ended up changing the way Americans talked, giving them a new vocabulary — the “99 percent” and “1 percent” — and its concerns about income inequality went on to mold the priorities of the Democratic Party.

Alberro compared Seattle’s CHOP to a community of 300 environmental activists in western France who set up camp at a site earmarked for a controversial new airport starting in 2008. One of many ZADs (zones à défendre) that have sprung up in France, the community ended up being not just a place to protest the airport, but to take a stand against what protesters saw as the underlying problems — capitalism, inequality, and environmental destruction. (The government ended up shelving plans for the airport in 2018). “The point of these autonomous zones is not only to create these micro exemplars of better worlds,” Alberro said, “but also to physically halt present forces of destruction” — whether that’s an airport or, in the case of Capitol Hill, how police treat black people.

A bike rides past a farm in “la Zad,” a utopian community protesting an airport in Western France. LOIC VENANCE / AFP via Getty Images

Seattle has a lengthy history of occupations and political demonstrations tracing back to the Seattle General Strike in the early 1900s. The Civil Rights era brought sit-ins and marches. Indigenous protesters occupied an old military fort in 1970 and negotiated with the city to get 20 acres of Discovery Park. Two years later, activists occupied an abandoned elementary school in Beacon Hill, demanding that it be turned into a community center (now El Centro de la Raza).

And it might not be a coincidence that the new protest zone appeared on the West Coast, often portrayed in literature as an “ideal place” to set up utopian communities, Alberro said. For instance, the book Ecotopia, published in 1975 by Ernest Callenbach, depicted a green society — complete with high-speed magnetic-levitation trains! — formed when northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the United States. The book went on to become a cult novel, influencing the environmental movement’s focus on local food, public transportation, and renewable energy.

Ecotopia isn’t exactly an ideal parallel for the current wave of protests, as its utopia was white. Callenbach envisioned a segregated society where black people opted to live in the less affluent “Soul City.” Still, it’s apparent that some of its other messages live on. Alberro has talked to many “radical” environmental protesters for her research, and most of them haven’t read any of the green utopian books she asks about. But they repeat some of the ideas and phrases from that literature nearly “word for word” when describing the changes they want to see in the world.

Though Seattle’s protest zone is focused on racial oppression, not environmental destruction, Alberro sees a similar impulse behind all these projects. “Many activists would argue that it’s all part of the same struggle,” she said, arguing that people can’t successfully take on environmental issues without addressing racism and other socioeconomic problems. “There seems to be a cultural atmosphere that molds these different movements, even though they often don’t come into contact with one another.”

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Seattle’s ‘autonomous zone’ belongs to a grand tradition of utopian experiments

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For indigenous protesters, defending the environment can be fatal

Adán Vez Lira, a prominent defender of an ecological reserve in Mexico, was shot while riding his motorcycle in April. Four years earlier, the renowned activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead in her home in Honduras by assailants taking direction from executives responsible for a dam she had opposed. Four years before that, Cambodian forest and land activist Chut Wutty was killed during a brawl with the country’s military police while investigating illegal logging.

These are some of the most prominent examples of violence faced by environmental activists in recent years — but, according to a new report, they are not unusual. As police crack down on protests demanding justice and equity in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in the U.S., it’s clear that activism in general comes at a heavy price. Environmental activists specifically — particularly indigenous activists and activists of color — have for years faced high rates of criminalization, physical violence, and even murder for their efforts to protect the planet, according to a comprehensive analysis by researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, which was released last Tuesday.

The researchers analyzed nearly 2,800 social conflicts related to the environment using the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) database, which they created in 2011 to monitor environmental conflicts around the world. The study, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, found that 20 percent of environmental defenders faced criminal charges or were imprisoned, 18 percent were victims of physical violence, and 13 percent were killed between 2011 and 2019. The likelihood of these consequences increased significantly for indigenous environmental defenders: 27 percent faced criminalization, 25 percent were victims of physical violence, and 19 percent were murdered.

“We can think of this as compounded injustice, highlighting the extreme risks vulnerable communities opposing social and environmental violence against them face when they stand up for their rights,” one of the study’s researchers, Leah Temper, told Grist.

Environmental defenders, as the researchers defined them, are individuals or collectives that mobilize and protest against unsustainable or harmful uses of the environment. Examples of the sort of conflict covered by the study are the construction of pipelines on tribal lands, illegal mining in the Amazon rainforest, oil extraction in the Arctic, and the construction of fossil fuel refineries.

The analysis draws on last year’s report from the human rights and environmental watchdog organization Global Witness, which found that at least 164 environmental activists were killed in 2018 alone. The Philippines was named the deadliest country in the world for environmental defenders, who have been called terrorists by President Rodrigo Duterte.

In fact, not long after these findings, 37-year-old Brandon Lee, an American environmental activist who was in the Philippines on a volunteer mission, was shot four times in Ifugao province by unknown assailants after his group, the Ifugao Peasant Movement — a farmers group opposing a hydropower project — had been labeled an “enemy of the state” across social media by propagandists. As of April, Lee was recovering in his hometown of San Francisco, but he remains paralyzed from the chest down.

The lead author of last week’s study, Arnim Scheidel, said he hopes that the analysis gives lawmakers and the public a better understanding of the causes of the violence that protesters still face around the world.

“Globally, indigenous peoples suffer significantly higher rates of violence in environmental conflicts,” Scheidel said. “Being aware of these connections may help to connect struggles against various forms of racism worldwide. Protest is key for the success of such struggles, particularly when using diverse channels and building on broad alliances.”

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For indigenous protesters, defending the environment can be fatal

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Why climate skeptics are less likely to wear coronavirus masks

There are many ways in which the coronavirus pandemic intersects with climate change — so many that Grist launched a whole newsletter about them. This week, the pollsters at Morning Consult unveiled another link between the two issues: Concern about climate change correlates with the way people are responding to the virus.

The poll, conducted online between April 14 and 16 on a national sample of 2,200 adults, found that people who said that they are not concerned about rising temperatures are less likely than the general public to take steps to prevent the spread of COVID-19. (The poll was weighted for age, educational attainment, gender, race, and region and has a margin of error of 2 percentage points.)

Forty-four percent of all the adults surveyed said they “always” wear a mask to grocery stores, public parks, and other public places. Fifty-four percent of folks who said they’re concerned about climate change said they always wear masks, but just 30 percent of people who are unconcerned about climate change said they always wear masks in public places. That’s a 24-point difference.

The survey defined climate-concerned adults as people who said they’re worried about climate change and agree that it’s driven by human activity. Climate-unconcerned respondents were those who said they were “not too concerned” or “not concerned at all” about climate change. (Must be nice!)

The disparity between climate hawks and climate skeptics was also evident in responses to other survey questions about disinfecting and social distancing, albeit on a smaller scale. The researchers said that the relatively small gap between climate concerned and unconcerned adults on the question of social distancing — a modest 8 percent — could be due to the fact that local, state, and federal officials started getting out the message about distancing earlier and were clearer about it than they were about disinfecting surfaces and wearing masks. (The CDC only advised Americans to start wearing masks in public in early April.)

Morning Consult cites experts who say there could be two reasons why people who aren’t concerned about climate are less likely to take steps to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic. A general skepticism of science and scientists is one of them. Previous polling has shown a partisan disparity in the way people regard scientists, primarily environmental scientists. In a 2019 poll, 43 percent of Democrats had “a great deal” of confidence in scientists, compared to 27 percent of Republicans. Much of conservatives’ mistrust of science is the result of a long, deliberate disinformation campaign from fossil fuel companies. Now, many of the same conservative pundits and leaders (including the president) who have sown doubt about climate change are also spreading misinformation about the coronavirus.

Concerns about personal autonomy can also help explain the divide in the poll, Emma Frances Bloomfield, an assistant professor in communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Morning Consult. “Everything that science asks us to do is really sacrificing personal convenience for community convenience and well-being,” Bloomfield said. “And for a lot of people, the coronavirus is invisible, just like climate change is invisible.”

The pandemic has asked a lot of Americans. The climate crisis will surely ask more of us. The question, as we get deeper into the pandemic and more Americans are affected or know someone who has been touched by COVID-19, is whether authority-averse and science-skeptical adults will start drawing connections between their personal choices and scientist’s warnings, or if the pandemic will force everyone deeper into their ideological foxholes.

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Why climate skeptics are less likely to wear coronavirus masks

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Coronavirus’s next victim: Big Meat

Americans are soon going to be eating a lot less meat — just not in the way environmentalists had hoped that would happen. Coronavirus has shuttered so many meatpacking plants around the country that the number of cattle and pigs slaughtered every day is down 40 percent. Farmers are euthanizing pigs by the thousand and trucking the meat to landfills to rot.

“The food supply chain is breaking,” wrote John Tyson, chairman of Tyson Foods Inc. in a full-page that ran in major newspapers on Sunday.

As far as his business is concerned, Tyson is right: The meat industry has never experienced a crisis like this before. It’s likely to lead to many long term changes: more scrutiny of the industry’s consolidation, more support for smaller meat companies, and a renewed push for mechanization. In the short term, it means two things: scarcity and higher prices.

“It’s going to cause price spikes somewhere downstream,” said Rich Sexton, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis. But the average shopper might only notice empty shelves rather than higher prices, because “big grocery chains don’t like to jack up prices, especially in times like this.”

By the last week of April, some 16 plants had been shut down. In response, President Donald Trump issued an executive order Tuesday to reopen meatpacking plants, provoking protests from unions and Democratic politicians who say that the order doesn’t do enough to protect workers from getting infected. “We are really putting workers in grave danger today,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut at a press conference on Tuesday. At least 20 meat-processing workers have died from coronavirus so far.

It’s all frightening enough that very serious people are warning of a collapse that could end in food riots. So is it time to panic-buy for real? How could we protect the people risking their lives to produce food? And could this crisis wind up breaking the grip of the few companies that control most of meat processing in America? Here’s our explainer for anyone who wants to get beyond their reflexive Trump-fury and search for solutions.

Would people starve if the meatpacking plants stayed closed?

After Trump announced his order, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa tweeted that “society is 9 meals away from food riots.” But, no, there are still plenty of calories to go around — even with farmers dumping mountains of potatoes and oceans of milk. Meatpacking plants are not an existential necessity, because humans survive primarily on grains; we are more seed eaters than beef eaters. The supply chains delivering bread, pasta, and rice are still working well because they rely on machines rather than virus-vulnerable human labor. And much more food is in storage.

“There’s still enough food, but it might not be what we wanted,” said Jayson Lusk, food economist at Purdue University.

What’s the argument for keeping these plants open?

Keeping even a few of the biggest meatpacking plants closed for more than a month could cripple every food business and farmer connected to them. And they are connected to almost everyone. The meat industry is shaped like an hourglass, with farmers at one end, eaters at the other, and a few enormous packing plants at the chokepoint. For example, just 15 slaughterhouses kill 60 percent of the pigs in America.

Purdue University

So the economists I talked to said it only made sense to find a way to get the plants running again as soon as possible.

Farmers are scrambling to find smaller slaughterhouses and meat packers, and those smaller businesses are benefiting, said Nelson Gaydos of the American Association of Meat Processors, which represents these smaller companies. “A lot of people are saying it’s like Christmas on steroids,” he said.

But the big boys are so enormous that the small- and medium-sized meat companies can’t make up for their losses. Imagine you ran a small slaughterhouse that killed 200 pigs a day from local farmers: That might sound like a lot, but you’d have to do that for 100 days to provide as much pork as one of the big plants butcher in a single day (Lusk did the math in a blog post).

Can the plants reopen safely this soon?

It’s tough to tell. Companies are giving workers masks, having them stand six feet apart, and putting up plexiglass barriers when they need to be closer, said Gaydos.

Democrats have said that the government should mandate worker protections rather than simply asking for good-faith efforts as Trump did in his executive order. “It is vital that we do everything we can to protect food supply workers,” wrote a group of Democratic senators in a letter to Trump. “Breakdowns in the food supply chain could have significant economic impacts for both consumers and agricultural producers.”

There’s only so much the government can do. Trump’s executive order releases meat companies from liability from worker’s lawsuits, and it overrules state and local authorities calling for shutdowns. But the president can’t force workers to come back to the job if they don’t feel safe.

How will this crisis change things?

A crisis exposes weaknesses. This one is revealing two major vulnerabilities in the meat industry: Its reliance on human labor and its concentration.

Henry Ford modeled his assembly lines after the disassembly lines he saw in meat packing plants. Automobile assembly lines grew more and more automated, while meat plants continued to rely mostly on dirty, dangerous grunt work. The experience of a pandemic could soon change that. There’s one slaughterhouse in Holland that is almost completely run by machines.

“There is going to be even more of a rush to automate farmwork and slaughterhouses,” Sexton said.

The hourglass shape of the meat industry is another vulnerability. This concentration of just a few giant meat companies is able to put inexpensive meat on the plate of people at even the lowest income levels in America, but it can’t nimbly respond to changes.

Concentration causes other problems, too. For instance, the meat behemoth JBS recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to a union for conducting a “multi-faceted corporate campaign” to “coerce” the corporation to make worker-safety concessions at a plant in Greeley, Colorado.

Of course, unions exist to coerce companies to give workers more money and better conditions. The fact that JBS views the union demands as an illegal breach, rather than business as usual, suggests that it is not used to serious challenges to its authority.

The number of slaughterhouses has fallen 70 percent since the 1960s, a result of bigger companies swallowing up the little ones to grow even bigger. But the pandemic has put these giants in the spotlight. On Wednesday, a bipartisan pair of Senators asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate meatpacking consolidation.

And maybe this crisis will lead politicians to lift some of the regulatory barriers that keep smaller businesses out, Lusk said.

What about the environment? At the moment, that’s an afterthought. The attention right now is focused on ensuring Americans have a steady supply of meat, not on prodding the industry to become environmentally sustainable.

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Coronavirus’s next victim: Big Meat

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The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution – Susan Hockfield

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The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution

Susan Hockfield

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: May 7, 2019

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


From the former president of MIT, the story of the next technology revolution, and how it will change our lives. A century ago, discoveries in physics came together with engineering to produce an array of astonishing new technologies: radios, telephones, televisions, aircraft, radar, nuclear power, computers, the Internet, and a host of still-evolving digital tools. These technologies so radically reshaped our world that we can no longer conceive of life without them. Today, the world’s population is projected to rise to well over 9.5 billion by 2050, and we are currently faced with the consequences of producing the energy that fuels, heats, and cools us. With temperatures and sea levels rising, and large portions of the globe plagued with drought, famine, and drug-resistant diseases, we need new technologies to tackle these problems. But we are on the cusp of a new convergence, argues world-renowned neuroscientist Susan Hockfield, with discoveries in biology coming together with engineering to produce another array of almost inconceivable technologies—next-generation products that have the potential to be every bit as paradigm shifting as the twentieth century’s digital wonders. The Age of Living Machines describes some of the most exciting new developments and the scientists and engineers who helped create them. Virus-built batteries. Protein-based water filters. Cancer-detecting nanoparticles. Mind-reading bionic limbs. Computer-engineered crops. Together they highlight the promise of the technology revolution of the twenty-first century to overcome some of the greatest humanitarian, medical, and environmental challenges of our time.

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The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution – Susan Hockfield

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Joe Biden has a podcast, and there’s an episode on climate change

The public rarely gets access to the real Joe Biden. His team keeps the gaffe-prone 77-year-old on a tight leash on the campaign trail. That strategy has paid off handsomely; the former vice president is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. But there is a way to get access to the inner workings of Uncle Joe’s brain, and it doesn’t require sneaking past the Secret Service.

Biden has taken a tip from the entire male population of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and started his own podcast. It’s called Here’s the Deal — possibly the most on-brand title of a podcast in the history of the genre.

So far, the former vice president has recorded six episodes with folks like Senator Amy Klubochar (Biden’s former primary rival) and Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. But the latest episode of Here’s the Deal, released on Earth Day, is worth listening to in particular because it sheds light on how Biden is thinking about climate change, an issue that he’s been previously accused of underestimating by both climate activists and scientists. In this week’s episode, Biden remotely interviews Washington governor and former climate candidate Jay Inslee from the confines of his basement in Delaware.

The 20-minute conversation touches on a number of issues that are front-of-mind for many Democratic voters right now: the potential of wind and solar energy to outpace fossil fuels, the nation’s progress on electric vehicles and other green technologies, and the notion that progress on climate and economic growth actually go hand in hand. They also talk about the connection between the coronavirus pandemic and the looming climate crisis. About halfway through the conversation, Biden asks Inslee whether he thinks there’s an opportunity for the U.S. to implement a climate plan as the country gets back on its feet. The question indicates that Biden is thinking along the same lines as a number of green groups that have released proposals for how the U.S. could implement a green stimulus in the coming months (including a team of former Inslee staffers).

Biden’s posture toward Inslee throughout the conversation is almost deferential. Biden makes a point of saying that he has reached out to Inslee for his input in the past and aims to continue doing so. “I hope I can keep bothering you on the telephone,” he said to Inslee, who graciously agrees.

That attitude is in keeping with other overtures Biden has recently made to the progressive climate movement. Earlier this week, Biden scored his first environmental endorsement from the League of Conservation voters, an environmental group that funds climate-friendly Democrats. In response, Biden said expanding his $1.7 trillion climate change plan “will be one of my key objectives” in the coming months and that he knows the issue “resonates” with young voters. That openness to beefing up his climate platform may have played a role in the endorsements that followed: first from a group of more than 50 scientists and climate experts, then from longtime climate hawk Al Gore and Inslee himself.

Inslee plugs his endorsement again on the podcast. “I can’t wait to have an optimist back in the White House,” he tells Biden. The whole thing sounds like a voicemail two of your grandparents left you — wholesome, if a bit rambly. Except in this case one of the grandparents is gearing up for what may be the most consequential election of our lifetimes. “Wash your hands,” Inslee, sounding concerned, tells Biden toward the end of the episode. “I did!” Biden assures him.

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Joe Biden has a podcast, and there’s an episode on climate change

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These air pollution standards kept people out of the hospital. Trump just rolled them back.

The Trump administration isn’t letting the COVID-19 pandemic get in the way of its deregulatory agenda. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would not tighten air quality standards for fine particle pollution, despite warnings from scientists, including former agency staffers, that the current rules were not strict enough and could result in tens of thousands of premature deaths. The agency then finalized a decision on the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, determining that it is not “appropriate and necessary” to regulate mercury and other pollutants from power plants despite the fact that utilities have already spent millions of dollars to comply with the standards.

The announcements arrived the same week as a new study that links these two regulations to tangible public health improvements. When these rules, in addition to other air quality regulations, were strengthened under the Obama administration, Louisville Gas and Electric (LG&E), a utility in Kentucky, was forced to retire three coal plants and spent almost a billion dollars upgrading another plant to comply with the rules.

The study, published in the journal Nature Energy last week, analyzed public health data in Louisville to see how rates of asthma-related hospitalizations, ER visits, and symptom flare-ups changed in relation to improvements in air quality. Using zip code–level data from the city’s Department of Public Health and Wellness, the researchers found that after one of LG&E’s power plants in Louisville was retired in 2015, and pollution controls were installed on three other coal plants in the area, there were approximately three fewer asthma-related hospitalizations and ER visits per zip code per quarter over the following year across the county’s 35 zip codes. That adds up to nearly 400 avoided doctor visits.

The researchers also analyzed data from a program that tracked inhaler use among 207 residents with the help of digital inhalers, and found that after new pollution controls were added to one of the coal plants in 2016, average inhaler use went down by 17 percent. Among participants who had the highest inhaler usage before the controls were added, average use went down by 32 percent.

In Louisville, as in the rest of the country, the health impacts of air pollution aren’t distributed equally. The study shows a clear concentration of asthma-related hospitalizations and ER visits in the West End of Louisville, a predominantly African American neighborhood, even after the controls were installed. The coal plants are only one part of the picture there — the neighborhood is also home to a cluster of chemical and manufacturing plants dubbed “Rubbertown.”

The city implemented a toxic air reduction program in the early 2000s that was largely successful in reducing emissions from the Rubbertown plants, but the West End still suffers disproportionately from the impact of ongoing pollution. According to a health report published by the city in 2017, inpatient admissions for asthma in west Louisville are more than 10 times that of more affluent neighborhoods to the northeast. Higher cancer death rates and lower life expectancy are also clustered in the western half of the city.

The COVID-19 pandemic thrust the reality of these health disparities into the headlines recently, when a preliminary study showed that people who lived near major sources of pollution are more likely to die of the virus, and new data revealed that it is killing black Americans at higher rates than any other demographic. “Communities of color, they’ve always been the sacrifice zones,” said Mustafa Ali, the vice president of environmental justice, climate, and community revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation, in a recent Twitter video. “They’ve been the places where we’ve pushed things that nobody else wants.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading public health expert on President Trump’s coronavirus task force, acknowledged the structural inequality underlying the numbers during a White House press briefing earlier this month. “When all this is over — it will end, we will get over the coronavirus — but there will still be health disparities which we really do need to address in the African-American community,” he said. The research from Louisville shows that upholding — and strengthening — our air quality standards is one place to start.

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These air pollution standards kept people out of the hospital. Trump just rolled them back.

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Is waging ‘war’ the only way to take on the coronavirus?

What do climate change, drugs, and Christmas have in common? The United States has supposedly been at “war” with all of them.

When facing any sort of crisis, big or small, Americans often frame the situation through the lens of a battle. So when coronavirus brought daily life in the United States to a halt last month, it seemed nearly inevitable that President Donald Trump would declare himself a “wartime president.”

“The world is at war with a hidden enemy,” he tweeted. “WE WILL WIN!”

Similar language has been invoked by leaders around the world. France’s President Emmanuel Macron deployed the phrase “we are at war” no less than six times in one speech last month. And in a rare special address to the United Kingdom last week, Queen Elizabeth II invoked the “Blitz spirit” of World War II, a time of shared sacrifice.

Wartime rhetoric serves as an aggressive moral appeal, drumming up emotion and calling people to action. But here’s the thing about the war on coronavirus: We’ve already lost it.

“I think war metaphors are best used as a mobilizing effort,” said Stephen Flusberg, an associate professor of psychology at Purchase College in New York. “And it’s too late in the United States. We’ve failed.”

If coronavirus were truly a “war,” the United States would be the best prepared in the world, with a so-called “defense” budget at $700 billion a year and climbing — more than what the next seven largest countries spend added together. What the country was unprepared for was a pandemic, something infectious disease experts had warned was eventually coming.

Warlike language has been part of our speech for so long, it usually goes unnoticed. When the Spanish Flu hit England in the summer of 1918, newspapers warned their readers to prepare “defenses” against the disease. Soon enough, they described the flu as a “new foe,” and people freaked out, panic-buying quinine. It sounds all too familiar to anyone who’s been following the news of coronavirus, which the New York Times first painted as a “mystery” illness in January, something to “combat” in February, and an “all-out war” in March.

Fighting words have their time and place, language experts say, but public discourse seems to get stuck fighting everything. Studies show that this framing can paralyze people with fear and limit our collective imagination about what can be done to fix complex problems. In times of pandemic, calling the virus an “invisible enemy” can evoke xenophobia and racism. The framing primes people to view problems like climate change as a battlefield — this side vs. that side — widening partisan divides while obscuring any common ground.

“When a metaphor is used again and again and again, it really makes people experience something in those terms,” said Veronika Koller, a linguist at Lancaster University in England. In other words, people start to feel like they’re living in wartime. This can help governments gain public support for short-term actions that would normally be unpopular, like closing borders or exercising emergency powers. But for a prolonged crisis, it results in fatigue, Koller said. From climate change to cancer to coronavirus, the struggle is not a matter of weeks, but months, years, and decades.

Researchers say that it’s clear we need a new way to discuss big problems, a broader repertoire of metaphors to choose from. “There’s a paucity of the imagination around insurmountable challenges,” said Brent Ryan Bellamy, an instructor at Trent University in Canada.

Last week, Trump tweeted, “The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!” Though he didn’t mention the virus, no one seemed confused by what he was referring to — a sign that the war narrative has firmly taken hold. But others are already describing the pandemic in creative terms, comparing the government’s response to a storyline in a Harry Potter book, or practicing social distancing to a string section playing quietly (it only works, after all, if everyone does it). A group of linguists are attempting to #ReframeCovid, tracking international efforts to put new words to the crisis.

Flipping the usual script can lead to fresh critiques, new alliances, and eventually, if the new metaphors take hold, different ways to cope.

Coming next week: A look at efforts to use a new vocabulary to take on social problems.

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Is waging ‘war’ the only way to take on the coronavirus?

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