Tag Archives: central

Congress says the EPA will get more money than Trump wants.

by TrinidadAndrzeje Posted on June 16, 2017

This week, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office announced a new initiative to combat climate change–augmented extreme heat in the city. It comes down to: Plant a tree! Make a pal! Those are actually not bad ideas. 

The $106 million package — dubbed Cool Neighborhoods NYC, which, yikes — will largely go to tree-planting across more heatwave-endangered communities in the South Bronx, Northern Manhattan, and Central Brooklyn. Funding will also further develop the unpronounceable NYC °CoolRoofs program, which aims to cover 2.7 million square feet of city roofs with foliage.

But, to me, the more noteworthy component of the plan is Be A Buddy NYC — again, yikes — which “promotes community cohesion” as a means of climate resilience.

“A heat emergency is not the time to identify vulnerable residents,” explains the Mayor’s Office’s report. “Rather, it is important to build social networks that can help share life-saving information prior to such an emergency, and can reach out to at-risk neighbors during an extreme heat event.”

The new policy supports the argument that this whole community engagement thing is a crucial tactic in the fight against climate change.

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Congress says the EPA will get more money than Trump wants.

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Map of the Day: What do San Francisco and Oklahoma City Have in Common?

by ZellaQcmqxobqow Posted on March 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here is today’s mystery map. Can you guess what it is?

This map comes from a team of researchers writing in Seismological Research Letters, and it shows the 2017 earthquake risk in various parts of the country. You probably aren’t surprised to see either California or Seattle in dark orange. If you’re familiar with the New Madrid fault, you’re not surprised by the blotch on the border of Arkansas and Tennessee. But Oklahoma City?

Yep. It’s all because of fracking:

Most of the induced earthquake activity in the central and eastern United States (CEUS) is caused by deep wastewater disposal. Injected wastewater causes pressure changes that can weaken (unclamp) a fault and therefore bring it closer to failure. Seismicity rates in Oklahoma increased exponentially beginning in 2009.

….In Oklahoma, during 2016, a 13 February magnitude 5.1 earthquake near Fairview, a 3 September magnitude 5.8 earthquake near Pawnee, and a 7 November magnitude 5.0 earthquake near Cushing caused damaging ground shaking. These damaging events are thought to be the result of wastewater injection, and the potential for future large earthquakes causes concern to officials responsible for public safety and welfare.

That magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Pawnee is the largest ever recorded in Oklahoma. However, thanks partly to reduced demand for oil and partly to new regulations, the earthquake risk in Oklahoma has decreased a bit in the past year. For now, though, it’s still pretty high. I knew all about the seismic danger from fracking before I read this, but I didn’t realize that, for now anyway, Oklahoma City is literally as earthquake prone as San Francisco.

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Map of the Day: What do San Francisco and Oklahoma City Have in Common?

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Donald Trump Can Deport People Without Even Giving Them a Hearing

by LindsaySwint569 Posted on February 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Last week, the Trump administration released its blueprint for implementing the president’s executive orders on immigration. Not only did it lay out plans to vastly increase the number of undocumented people vulnerable to deportation, but it also revealed that the feds intend to deport many more people caught in their immigration crackdown immediately after their arrest.

“Expedited removal” is the term the government uses to describe the swift deportation of undocumented immigrants without an appearance before an immigration judge—and, as pro-immigrant advocates point out, without due process protections. Previously, only undocumented immigrants who had been in the United States for less than 14 days and were apprehended within 100 miles of the US border were eligible for expedited removal. According to a new memo signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, expedited removal can now be applied nationwide to those who cannot produce documentation that they have been in the country continuously for at least two years.

Jennifer Chang Newell, a senior staff attorney on the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights’ Project, said expedited removal has long been marred by widespread, well-documented abuse and that it “violates due process absolutely.” In 2014, the last year for which there are public statistics, 176,752 people were given expedited removal orders. That number, advocates point out, is now sure to go up.

The expansion of expedited removal is part of the administration’s attempt to bypass the bottleneck of immigrants already awaiting deportation in the immigration court system. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) estimates that it has the capacity to deport 400,000 people annually, but there is currently a backlog of more than 500,000 cases in the courts. Expedited removal allows the administration to skip the courts and summarily deport people without a lawyer, or even a phone call.

Under the new plan, apprehended immigrants will be asked for proof (such as receipts, phone records, or identification) that they have been in the country over the past two years. If they can’t produce the necessary documentation, they will be deported in as little as 24 hours. In effect, Newell said, “the police officer who arrests you and interrogates you also convicts you.” While this obviously is a concern for the tens of thousands of immigrants estimated to have illegally crossed the border since 2015, Alyson Sincavage, a legislative associate at the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), argues that it could affect all undocumented immigrants who can’t immediately make their case to immigration officials—even those who’ve been here for years. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

And then there’s the question of how this might influence asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border. Since 2014, there has been a surge of Central American immigrants—many of them unaccompanied minors or women with children—crossing the southern border due to increased gang violence and instability in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Both Newell and Sincavage expressed concerns that this group, many of whom have valid asylum claims, could be wrongly slated for expedited removal in the general chaos of a large-scale immigration overhaul. A 2013 study by the ACLU found that some asylum seekers were quickly deported because Customs and Border Protection agents failed to adequately screen them in so-called credible-fear interviews, which immigrants must pass before getting a full hearing before an immigration judge. (The Trump administration has indicated that CBP agents should “elicit all relevant information from the alien as is necessary to make a legally sufficient determination” during credible-fear screenings; CBP did not respond to a request for comment.)

Causing further concern, the administration has suggested that many immigrants apprehended at the border could be immediately sent back to Mexico, rather than to their home countries. Luis Angel Gallegos, a program coordinator at the Institute for Social and Cultural Practice and Research, a Mexico City-based nonprofit focused on migrant issues, wrote in Spanish that sending immigrants to northern Mexico would present an enormous logistical challenge and endanger already-vulnerable immigrants. “There is no infrastructure to host and receive them,” he said. “Shelters that help immigrants are often full. Immigration detention centers are full.” Gallegos argued that this could make immigrants targets for extortion, kidnapping, and other crimes by the criminal syndicates operating in the border region.

Even if the Mexican government blocks this part of the plan—on Friday, the Associated Press reported that Mexico’s interior secretary said the country had rejected it in meetings with American leaders—Newell and Sincavage stressed the cruelty of removing people so quickly without a phone call, let alone a day in court. Expedited removal leads to people being “ripped from their communities and whisked away and deported in a matter of hours, based on shoddy paperwork,” Newell said. “This violates our most American notions of fairness.”

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Donald Trump Can Deport People Without Even Giving Them a Hearing

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Here Are the Churches Fighting Back Against Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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For the past eight years, Jeanette Vizguerra had shown up for every one of her required check-ins with US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Though Vizguerra, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, had been issued a deportation order for two misdemeanors in 2011, ICE officials had previously granted her requests for a stay of removal and allowed her to remain in the country with her four children.

But last week, Vizguerra took a different route. Fearing deportation, she took refuge in the First Unitarian Society in Denver and declared sanctuary. The decision proved prescient: The day of Vizguerra’s scheduled check-in, ICE officials told her attorney that Vizguerra’s request to remain in the country had been denied.

Because ICE has a longstanding policy to not enter churches and schools, Vizguerra will be shielded from deportation. But that means that she’ll have to stay in the church indefinitely. “I did not make this decision lightly,” Vizguerra said through an interpreter, according to NPR. “I was thinking about it for weeks. But I think that I made the right decision in coming here.”

Vizguerra may be one of the first undocumented immigrants to seek this kind of refuge since Donald Trump’s election but, for months, churches have been preparing for exactly this possibility. Since the election, faith-based organizers and leaders have ramped up their work as part of the sanctuary church movement, a campaign among organizers and clergy to help undocumented immigrants facing deportation. More than 700 congregations have signed on to a sanctuary pledge, with the number of participating congregations doubling since the election, says Noel Andersen, a national grassroots coordinator at Church World Service, an international faith-based organization. New sanctuary coalitions have popped up in Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

In many ways, this has all happened before. Churches played a huge role in sheltering Central American migrants in the 1980s, when civil wars brought an influx of border crossings. They reached out to immigrants again in 2007, when workplace raids were a common tactic among ICE officers. During the Central American child migrant surge in 2014, congregations revived the movement, opening up their doors to children and families fleeing violence. Churches were able to offer a safe haven to immigrants facing deportation and, in some cases, help individuals win temporary relief from removal.

Now, organizers say, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies have spurred leaders to continue that movement and expand it to other communities targeted by the administration, such as Muslim and LGBQT communities. They’re also looking toward other types of community organizing, such as rapid-response and know-your-rights trainings.

Peter Pedemonti, director of the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, has focused his efforts on a “sanctuary in the streets” campaign, a rapid-response network of volunteers who are trained to peacefully disrupt ICE raids. In a raid in Philadelphia last week, Pedemonti says 70 people showed up outside an ICE office within 20 minutes of being notified. “The broader strategy is to shine a light on what ICE is doing,” he says. “We want ICE to know that if they come into our neighborhoods and try to drag away our friends and neighbors, we are going to be there to slow it down and disrupt it.”

In Los Angeles, Guillermo Torres, an organizer with Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, says that the group’s congregations have been working with the National Immigration Law Center to develop rapid-response trainings. They want to train people to film encounters, interview witnesses, and build prayer walls around ICE officers. CLUE is also trying to enlist faith leaders who would be willing to go to detention centers after raids to talk to ICE officers or to serve as a source of spiritual support to detainees.

Torres says he’s seen a “surge” in clergy leaders expressing interest in the movement, many of whom he’d never met before. “The darkness that’s coming out of the president and his administration has created a lot of pain and sadness in in the faith community,” says Torres, “and that pain is compelling leaders to move to a level they’ve not moved before.”

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Here Are the Churches Fighting Back Against Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

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Just what our crumbling, aging infrastructure doesn’t need: Trump’s plan

by LHSCortez7612 Posted on December 9, 2016

Donald Trump has made rebuilding America’s decrepit infrastructure a centerpiece of his political pitch. And it seems many top Democrats are optimistic about it.

The problem is that what Trump has actually proposed isn’t what our infrastructure needs.

“If you want a plan that is going to be economically transformational and deal with the fact of climate change, this is not your plan,” says Nell Abernathy, vice president of research and policy at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank in New York City. “It’s good for corporations and private interests. It’s bad for the average American and long-term economic performance.”

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Many progressives who have examined Trump’s infrastructure scheme are appalled by it. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who made a big infrastructure spending proposal part of his presidential campaign platform, said he would work with Trump on policies that “improve the lives of working families.” After later looking at Trump’s infrastructure plan, Sanders described it as “a scam that gives massive tax breaks to large companies and billionaires on Wall Street.”

Our bridges, roads, and rails are in desperate shape. The gasoline tax hasn’t been raised since 1993, even to keep pace with inflation, so federal transportation investment has steadily fallen. As a result, the country has too many structurally deficient bridges at risk of collapse, roads pockmarked with potholes, and trains that move slower than they did a century ago because the tracks are so old. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. infrastructure a D+ on its report card and estimates that the country needs $3.6 trillion in infrastructure investment by 2020.

But as it’s laid out now, Trump’s $137 billion proposal would not address any of those needs. Here are the six main reasons why:

1. It’s a tax cut, not government spending for public investment. Trump’s plan would not direct money to fix roads, sewers, airports, and train lines. Instead, the government would grant tax credits to corporations and private equity firms that finance construction projects. It’s a much less efficient and less effective way of getting things done, but taxpayers still pick up the bill.

When government actually spends the money, it gets to decide what to spend it on. But when it subsidizes private investment, investors can pick the projects and keep a profit for themselves.

2. It will leave behind the most disadvantaged communities. Private investors’ chief concern is getting the best return on their investment, not what’s best for the public. Depend on them to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, and you’re sure to wind up with plenty of new toll roads in affluent suburbs, where people will pay for the privilege of avoiding traffic. Analysts say that Trump’s proposal suggests pipelines and other private projects would also get tax credits.

What about the investments we really need, like repairing inner-city cracked streets and sidewalks, creaky train tunnels, and decaying water pipes in impoverished inner-cities? They’re likely to get worse. Sure, there are long-term economic benefits for the country if the government ensures the children of Flint have clean drinking water. But there’s no easy way for an investor to turn a profit on it.

3. Trump’s proposal fails to address a key reason private investors often balk at big infrastructure projects: They often run way over budget.

Consider New York City’s the planned Long Island Rail Road terminal attached to Grand Central station. It’s expected to cost at least $10 billion, more than double the $4.3 billion that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority originally estimated. Projects that require digging tunnels through bedrock alongside to skyscraper foundations are almost guaranteed to encounter setbacks that lead to delays and cost overruns.

“There’s a lot of risk involved because mega-projects end up costing a lot more than initially projected,” says Deron Lovaas, a senior urban policy advisor at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These are risky projects, a lot of them fail. The private sector tends to be pretty picky about them.”

4. It gives tax breaks to projects that don’t need tax breaks. The tax credits don’t have to be used for new projects or ones that wouldn’t be financed without the subsidy, as Ron Klain, who oversaw the infrastructure investments of the American Recovery Act in the Obama White House, explains in The Washington Post. Its design could simply pad investors’ profit margins in existing or already planned projects.

5. It will not spend money efficiently. Trump is an expert at putting his name on flashy new developments. But what the country needs most, and what would bring the most benefit per dollar, is an overhaul of its existing infrastructure.

“What we need in transportation is money to take care of deferred maintenance to roads and rail,” says Lovaas.

A better plan would help pay for the adoption of new technologies. Installing automated monitoring systems on a bridge to scan for structural degradation could avert a collapse. Installing “smart traffic signals” that coordinate traffic lights with current conditions could save time and reduce air pollution.

“That’s not sexy but it’s the most cost-effective,” Lovaas says. “You get a lot more bang for the buck if you replace all the traffic signals nationwide with smart traffic signals than building a shiny new toll road.”

6. It ignores one of the biggest threats of all: the Chinese hoax known as climate change. A smart infrastructure program would favor projects that reduce carbon emissions over ones that increase them. That means favoring mass transit, sidewalks, and bike lanes instead of building new highways. It means improving the electrical grid instead of planning new fossil-fuel pipelines, and supporting projects that will hold up better in a future of higher temperatures and sea levels.

In short, Trump’s plan would suck up political energy, media attention, and tax revenue that would be better spent on a genuine effort to rebuild our crumbling, aging infrastructure. That’s worse than no plan at all.

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Just what our crumbling, aging infrastructure doesn’t need: Trump’s plan

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Many Jewish Groups Are Staying Quiet on Stephen Bannon

by KurtisLeonard Posted on November 15, 2016

Mother Jones

White nationalist leaders have been vocal in their praise for Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon, whom President-elect Donald Trump named as his chief White House strategist on Sunday. But many major Jewish groups have kept quiet about Bannon’s new job, despite the anti-Semitic tropes peddled by both Breitbart and the Trump campaign, as well as allegations that Bannon himself is anti-Semitic (which Bannon denies).

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group that’s one of the highest-profile Jewish American organizations, told Politico that “AIPAC has a long-standing policy of not taking positions on presidential appointments.” It was joined by the American Jewish Committee, which told Forward‘s Nathan Guttman, “Presidents get to choose their teams and we do not expect to comment on appointment of every key advisor.”

Mother Jones contacted a dozen other major Jewish American organizations on Monday, the majority of which did not address Bannon’s hire. B’nai B’rith International, a Jewish advocacy organization dedicated to “making the world a safer, more tolerant and better place,” declined to comment. The Jewish Council for Public Affairs did not answer questions about whether Bannon’s hire affected JCPA President David Bernstein’s plan, laid out in a recent statement, to “engage the Administration, not in violation of our values but in service of them.” Six other groups did not respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones.

But some Jewish groups have responded forcefully to Bannon’s appointment. The Anti-Defamation League applauded Trump’s hiring of former RNC Chairman Reince Priebus as chief of staff while blasting Bannon’s appointment. “It is a sad day when a man who presided over the premier website of the ‘alt-right’—a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists—is slated to be a senior staff member in the ‘people’s house,'” wrote ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in a statement on Monday. The National Council of Jewish Women also opposed the hire in a statement to Mother Jones. “If President-elect Trump truly wants to bring together his supporters with the majority of the country that voted against him—by a margin that is nearing two million people, Bannon and his ilk must be barred from his administration,” wrote Nancy Kaufman, the group’s CEO. Social justice group Bend the Arc called Bannon “an avowed bigot” whose appointment is “as horrifying as it is unsurprising.”

Two other groups, the Jewish women’s organization Hadassah and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, expressed concerns over Bannon but did not outright oppose giving him a White House post. “If he is to serve our country, we expect Mr. Bannon to denounce the anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim rhetoric, racism, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights that we continue to face as a nation, just as we expect the same from President-elect Trump,” said CCAR chief executive Steve Fox in a statement.

Steve Rabinowitz, a consultant to Jewish groups, told the Washington Post on Tuesday that the reluctance of Jewish groups may come down to political strategy. “They really do want to work with the new administration as much as they can, inasmuch as their conscience will allow,” he said. “They have legislative agendas.”

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Many Jewish Groups Are Staying Quiet on Stephen Bannon

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Will an obstinate Senate help heat up the planet?

by FrancisHDV Posted on October 18, 2016

It might, according to a report from Climate Central.

A landmark agreement to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas, was struck over the weekend in Kigali, Rwanda. Some 170 countries agreed to amend the Montreal Protocol, a 1987 treaty banning chlorofluorocarbons, to regulate HFCs, a coolant used in air conditioners and refrigerators. The agreement aims to reduce projected global warming by 0.5 Celsius.

The 1987 treaty banned CFCs in an effort to repair the hole in the ozone layer. The target this time is on fighting climate change.

It’s unclear if the Kigali agreement needs to be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the U.S. Senate. Treaties do, but this is an amendment to an existing treaty. If the Senate’s stamp of approval is needed, the chamber would almost certainly block it. And whatever the outcome of this year’s elections, Republicans seem sure to hold far more than one-third of the votes in the Senate.

A State Department spokesperson told Climate Central she wasn’t sure if the Senate’s approval is required: “We will need to examine the content and the form of the agreed amendment, as well as relevant practice.”

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Will an obstinate Senate help heat up the planet?

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Is Hurricane Matthew the New Normal?

by AbrahamVillegas Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hurricane Matthew, which is currently menacing the United States after causing more than 800 deaths in Haiti, has focused the world’s attention on the growing threat posed by flooding and extreme storms. Here’s what you need to know about how climate change could make these natural disasters even worse.

Severe weather costs billions

So far in 2016, there have been a total of 12 floods and severe storms in the United States that have caused more than $1 billion in losses each, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The losses cover damage to property and infrastructure, interruptions to business operations such as store closings, and agricultural damage to crops and livestock.

Four of those catastrophic floods—two in Louisiana and one each in Texas and West Virginia—have occurred inland as a result of heavy rain. That’s double the previous record, which dates back to 1980. The pattern is clear: “Since 1991, the amount of rain falling in very heavy precipitation events has been significantly above average,” according to the National Climate Assessment, released in 2014.

Why the increase? As explained in the assessment, warmer temperatures enable the air to hold more water vapor. This extra vapor is then ready to be picked up and unleashed by the next storm system.

National Climate Assessment

As the Environmental Protection Agency states, however, the trend is by no means a universal one. As some parts of the country—such as the Midwest, Northeast, and Great Plains—see increased flooding, other regions, like the Southwest, have seen a decrease.

Sea levels are rising, and coasts are threatened

Global sea levels have risen 8 inches since 1880, according to a Climate Central analysis, and the trend shows no signs of slowing down. The culprit? Human activity. Climate Central’s report shows that along the coasts, two-thirds of flood days are now caused by human impact.

In addition to flooding from heavy rainfall, rising seas caused by melting ice sheets and warming water (which takes up more space than cooler water) are already causing coastal flooding in places such as Norfolk, Virginia—even on days without rain, as the New York Times explains. This type of flooding, termed “sunny-day flooding,” can happen at high tide and when winds are strong enough to cause the water to flow onto streets, the Times notes.

Human activity causes two-thirds of coastal flood days. Climate Central

Hurricanes could get worse

Climate models cited by the National Climate Assessment also predict an increase in the number of powerful category 4 (wind speeds above 130 miles per hour) and category 5 hurricanes (wind speeds above 155 miles per hour) by late this century. Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, was upgraded to a category 5 at its most dangerous peak before striking Louisiana as a category 3 storm. It displaced more than 400,000 people, with some estimates topping 1 million. More than a decade later, the exact number of people killed by the storm is still unknown.

Matthew made landfall in Haiti as a category 4 but has been reduced to a category 3 as it pummels Florida. (UPDATE: Matthew has now been downgraded to a category 2 storm.) Yesterday, President Barack Obama declared states of emergency in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, and Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, warned, “This storm will kill you.” Matthew spent more time as a category 4 or 5 storm than any other hurricane on record in the eastern Caribbean, said Adam Smith, a scientist at NOAA.

The warmer surface temperature of the water in the Caribbean Sea has contributed to Matthew’s “resilience and power,” Smith added in an email to Mother Jones.

Storm surge, or the water pushed onto land by high winds, has been another contributing factor to Matthew’s danger. It reached a peak of four feet near Cape Canaveral, Florida, and is predicted to reach as much as six to nine feet in parts of Florida and South Carolina if the surge coincides with high tide.

In fact, storm surge is one of the most dangerous effects of a hurricane. “Along the coast, storm surge is often the greatest threat to life and property from a hurricane,” according to the National Hurricane Center.

And the threat could grow. A study released in 2013 showed that warming temperatures could cause a tenfold increase in extreme storm surges in the next few decades.

“Climate change makes worse many of our weather extremes than they would have been naturally,” Smith said.

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Is Hurricane Matthew the New Normal?

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Behold, the death of memes at the hand of the fracking lobby

by andrew9225 Posted on August 2, 2016

Too Far

Behold, the death of memes at the hand of the fracking lobby

By on Aug 2, 2016 7:02 amShare

As any denizen of the internet will tell you: There are dank memes and then there are bad memes.

Dank memes: Arthur’s fist, Crying Michael Jordan, and Sandra Lee’s extra-special two-shot vodka pour

Bad memes: Anything on frackfeed.com

Frackfeed is a budget bin Buzzfeed created by North Texans for Natural Gas, a natural gas lobbying group that aims to “give a voice to those who support natural gas.” As they say: When a disenfranchised group needs a voice, let them have memes.

In addition to memes, Frackfeed offers #millennialfriendly content like listicles and quizzes. Want to know which Friends character you are? Frackfeed has got you covered, even though — as far as we know — Central Perk has nothing to do with natural gas extraction. Frackfeed also want you to vote for a candidate in the 2016 election named, yes, Fracking — perhaps the dark horse third-party candidate the nation has been waiting for!

At first glance, a website using celebrities, fuzzy animals, and MS Paint to praise natural gas might seem like some fairly high-effort pandering by a lobbying group. Upon closer inspection, however, you will find the still-warm corpse of internet comedy.

But, hey — if you can’t pay BuzzFeed to make listicles for you, as Shell did this week, you might as well create your own.

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Behold, the death of memes at the hand of the fracking lobby

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Here’s a Cure for America’s Latest Zika Panic

by SamaraWaylen4 Posted on July 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Health officials have reported that four cases of Zika in Florida were likely spread from person to person by domestic mosquitoes. This is the moment Democratic politicians—and a few southern Republicans—have been warning about. The finding is bound to create a lot more scary rhetoric and dire headlines.

But here’s the thing: There’s no need to freak out—not yet, at least.

We knew this was going to happen. Back in May, I spoke with Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is leading US efforts to create a Zika vaccine. Here’s what he said:

It is likely that we will have restricted local transmission—small local outbreaks? My call would be that we will. Because we’ve had dengue and chikungunya, which are in the same regions of South and Central America and the Caribbean, and are transmitted by exactly the same mosquito. Historically we’ve had small local outbreaks of dengue in Florida and Texas, and a small local outbreak of chikungunya in Florida, which makes me conclude that sooner or later, we have going to have small local outbreaks of Zika—whether that’s five cases or 30—likely along the Gulf Coast.

This is exactly what we’re seeing. And why is this not a huge problem? Because we’re almost certainly not going to let it become one. Just as Fauci predicted, this likely outbreak—scientists haven’t actually found any infected mosquitoes yet—is highly isolated. According to the New York Times, the suspected “area of active transmission is limited to a one-square-mile area” near downtown Miami.

Aedes aegypti, the most likely culprit, is what University of California-Davis geneticist Greg Lanzaro calls a “lazy mosquito.” It doesn’t fly far. In its entire lifespan of two to three weeks, it might travel a few hundred meters, another expert told me. So it’s not coming for you. The mosquitoes that picked up the virus may be limited in to one small neighborhood.

Here’s what happens when we have such an outbreak: Mosquito-control workers and public health officials swarm all over it. Aegypti is an elusive little bugger, but you can bet that within that one square mile, eradication specialists and epidemiologists will be going house to house until they get to the bottom of this, figure out where the aegypti are breeding, and wipe them out.

Compared with, say, Puerto Ricans, Americans are also protected by our lifestyle. People in the Deep South tend to have air conditioning and screens on their windows. We also don’t usually store drinking water in open containers, as families often do in the tropics. We spend more time indoors, out of the heat. And all of this helps minimize contact with the mosquitoes. Consider that before Zika became a problem, as Fauci mentioned, we also had periodic outbreaks of dengue and Chikungunya, spread by the same mosquito. As I pointed out previously:

When was the last time you worried about Chikungunya or dengue—or malaria, for that matter? Those diseases are far scarier than Zika. WHO estimates (conservatively) that malaria infected at least 214 million people last year and killed 438,000, mostly children under five. Then there’s dengue, named from the Swahili phrase ki denga pepo (“a sudden overtaking by a spirit”)—which tells you something about how painful it is. Each year, dengue, also called “breakbone fever,” infects 50-100 million people, sickens about 70 percent of them—half a million very severely—and kills tens of thousands. Brazil, in addition to its Zika problem, is experiencing a record dengue epidemic. Health authorities there tallied 1.6 million cases and 863 deaths last year—and the 2016 toll is on track to be worse. Zika is seldom fatal.

This doesn’t mean we should ignore the latest news, of course. If you’re pregnant, especially in southern Florida, you’re probably already taking precautions to avoid mosquito bites, like using repellents and eliminating any standing water on your property. FDA officials are asking people in Miami-Dade and Broward counties to refrain from giving blood until we know what’s going on. But most Americans, even most southerners, have little reason to freak out.

Only one of the six scientists I interviewed was concerned that Zika might take off in the continental United States. “You would never see Zika virus, Chikungunya virus, or dengue virus sweep across the country the way West Nile did, even in the regions where these mosquitoes are,” UC-Davis epidemiologist Chris Barker told me. “Because that’s just not how it works in our country.”

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Here’s a Cure for America’s Latest Zika Panic

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