Tag Archives: michigan

Most Americans think climate change has a place in education.

by FredricBroome Posted on April 12, 2018

In a statement about the decision, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said that the city’s water has tested below the federal action level for lead and copper for the last two years. But Mayor Karen Weaver doesn’t agree that the free bottled water should stop, and many Flint residents aren’t so sure their tap water is OK to use.

“My water stinks. It still burns to take a shower,” Melissa Mays, a Flint activist and plaintiff in a lawsuit that forced the replacement of water lines, told the Associated Press. “There’s no way they can say it’s safe.”

Resident Ariana Hawk doesn’t trust the water, either. “Everything that me and my kids do from cooking to boiling their water for a bath, we’re using bottled water,” she told the local ABC-affiliate news station.

The New York Times reports that about 6,000 of Flint’s lead or galvanized steel pipes have been replaced, but there could be 12,000 more lines to go. According to the World Health Organization, there is no known safe level of lead exposure.

“This is wrong,” tweeted Mona Hanna-Attisha, a Flint doctor whose research exposed lead poisoning in the city. “Until all lead pipes are replaced, [the] state should make available bottled water and filters to Flint residents.”

But after the remaining free bottles are collected, only water filters and replacement cartridges will be provided.

Continue reading here – 

Most Americans think climate change has a place in education.

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Can’t bring yourself to say ‘climate change’? Try these Trump-ready phrases instead.

by BebeKlingyuejr Posted on March 21, 2018

Imagine you are Brock Long, the man President Trump appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. You’ve got an interesting challenge on your hands: hammering out FEMA’s long-term strategy while avoiding all mention of “climate change” — an unwritten rule among your colleagues.

The problem is that last year’s pileup of hurricanes, wildfires, and floods completely overwhelmed your agency. And scientists say that these climate change disasters will only get worse. OK — but they’re scientists. Whatever! This is the Trump era.

Under Obama, FEMA’s strategic plan plainly stated that the climate is changing. In the Trump era, that 37-page plan is peppered with the obliquest references to climate change you could dream up: “Rising natural hazard risk. The emerging challenges of 21st century disasters. The changing nature of the risks we face.”

Under the Trump administration, which actively promotes coal and oil while repealing climate policies, “climate change” has systematically disappeared from government websites, social media accounts, and science research, resulting in a culture of censorship.

If you, like a typical Trump administration employee, can’t bring yourself to mention the-change-that-must-not-be-named, try these alternative phrases instead.

‘Pre-disaster mitigation’

FEMA’s new strategy seizes on a delightfully climate-free phrase that appeared just once in the Obama plan. “Pre-disaster mitigation” is employed a full 10 times.

“As the number of people that move to coastal areas increases, and natural and manmade hazards become increasingly complex and difficult to predict, the need for forward leaning action is greater than ever before,” the report reads. “Although the Nation must do more to assess and quantify these increasing risks, we do know that pre-disaster mitigation works.”

It’s like preparing for more extreme weather and rising seas, no climate change involved!

Could FEMA carry out climate policies without acknowledging climate change? It seems unlikely. But then again, the Trump administration has done it before.

Last August, Trump revoked an Obama-era climate policy that made federal building standards stricter in flood-prone places. But after hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria struck, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development brought back a nearly identical rule for states receiving relief.

“All of this is being done without mentioning the words ‘climate change,’ but clearly these are the same types of actions,” Rob Moore, senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Bloomberg at the time.

So maybe there’s more hope for FEMA than you’d think. There’s money behind “pre-disaster mitigation,” after all: an entire FEMA grant program is devoted to it.

‘Weather extremes’

Last August, officials instructed staff at the U.S Department of Agriculture to avoid using “climate change” in their scientific work, suggesting “weather extremes” as a replacement.

The message projected far beyond the USDA. An NPR report found that National Science Foundation scientists, hoping to protect their research from funding cuts, had wiped climate change from summaries of their research grants. While climate change mentions were down 40 percent last year, references to “extreme weather” were on the rise.

“Scientists I know are increasingly using terms like ‘global change’, ‘environmental change’, and ‘extreme weather’, rather than explicitly saying ‘climate change,’” Jonathan Thompson, a senior ecologist at Harvard Forest, told NPR.

‘Sustainability’ and ‘resilience’

The Trump administration has made sweeping changes to federal government websites, systematically removing mentions of climate change. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), a group tracking these changes, found many instances where agencies shifted from straightforward language to wishy-washy terminology.

Across the Federal Highway Administration site, page banners that once read “Climate Change,” “Climate Adaptation,” and “Climate Mitigation” are now simply “Sustainability.” The “Sustainable Transport and Climate Change Team” became the “Sustainable Transportation and Resilience Team.”

Justin Schell, an EDGI archivist at the library of the University of Michigan, says that Trump officials may find these vague terms more palatable. “Sustainability and resilience can mean lots and lots of things,” he told Grist. “It could be that this gives them a little more flexibility to do the work that they’re trying to do” — which ostensibly has little to do climate change. Yet the words still come across as having a “green” vibe.

The fact that Trump administration officials are adopting words like “sustainability” and “resilience” could be a worrisome sign that those words aren’t as useful as environmentalists thought.

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Can’t bring yourself to say ‘climate change’? Try these Trump-ready phrases instead.

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Flint’s mayor, who promised to clean up its water problems, faces a recall election today.

by LucretiG37 Posted on November 7, 2017

At a hearing on the federal response to the 2017 hurricane season, New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler questioned the EPA’s decision to declare water drawn from the Dorado Superfund site OK to drink.

In 2016, the agency found that water at Dorado contained solvents that pose serious health risks, including liver damage and cancer. Yet after CNN reported that Hurricane Maria survivors were pulling water from the site’s two wells, the EPA conducted an analysis and found the water fit for consumption.

When Nadler asked Pete Lopez, administrator for Region 2 of the EPA, why his agency changed its position, Lopez responded that the chemicals are present in the water, but are within drinking water tolerance levels.

The EPA’s standards for drinking water are typically higher than international norms, John Mutter, a Columbia University professor and international disaster relief expert, told Grist. Nonetheless, he believes it is unusual for the EPA to declare water safe to drink just one year after naming it a Superfund site.

At the hearing, Nadler said the situation was “eerily similar” to the EPA’s response after 9/11 in New York. One week after the attacks, the agency said the air in the neighborhood was safe to breathe. But since then, 602 people who initially survived the attack have died from cancer or aerodigestive issues like asthma, and thousands more have become sick.

“The [EPA’s] history of making mistakes makes you feel like perhaps they should be challenged,” says Mutter, citing the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Source: 

Flint’s mayor, who promised to clean up its water problems, faces a recall election today.

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Syria is joining the Paris Agreement, leaving the U.S. alone in rejecting it.

by NHFTroymkwprj Posted on November 7, 2017

At a hearing on the federal response to the 2017 hurricane season, New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler questioned the EPA’s decision to declare water drawn from the Dorado Superfund site OK to drink.

In 2016, the agency found that water at Dorado contained solvents that pose serious health risks, including liver damage and cancer. Yet after CNN reported that Hurricane Maria survivors were pulling water from the site’s two wells, the EPA conducted an analysis and found the water fit for consumption.

When Nadler asked Pete Lopez, administrator for Region 2 of the EPA, why his agency changed its position, Lopez responded that the chemicals are present in the water, but are within drinking water tolerance levels.

The EPA’s standards for drinking water are typically higher than international norms, John Mutter, a Columbia University professor and international disaster relief expert, told Grist. Nonetheless, he believes it is unusual for the EPA to declare water safe to drink just one year after naming it a Superfund site.

At the hearing, Nadler said the situation was “eerily similar” to the EPA’s response after 9/11 in New York. One week after the attacks, the agency said the air in the neighborhood was safe to breathe. But since then, 602 people who initially survived the attack have died from cancer or aerodigestive issues like asthma, and thousands more have become sick.

“The [EPA’s] history of making mistakes makes you feel like perhaps they should be challenged,” says Mutter, citing the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan.

More: 

Syria is joining the Paris Agreement, leaving the U.S. alone in rejecting it.

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Ohio is suing an Energy Transfer Partners pipeline for spilling millions of gallons of drilling fluid.

by LeolaLhotsky Posted on November 6, 2017

At a hearing on the federal response to the 2017 hurricane season, New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler questioned the EPA’s decision to declare water drawn from the Dorado Superfund site OK to drink.

In 2016, the agency found that water at Dorado contained solvents that pose serious health risks, including liver damage and cancer. Yet after CNN reported that Hurricane Maria survivors were pulling water from the site’s two wells, the EPA conducted an analysis and found the water fit for consumption.

When Nadler asked Pete Lopez, administrator for Region 2 of the EPA, why his agency changed its position, Lopez responded that the chemicals are present in the water, but are within drinking water tolerance levels.

The EPA’s standards for drinking water are typically higher than international norms, John Mutter, a Columbia University professor and international disaster relief expert, told Grist. Nonetheless, he believes it is unusual for the EPA to declare water safe to drink just one year after naming it a Superfund site.

At the hearing, Nadler said the situation was “eerily similar” to the EPA’s response after 9/11 in New York. One week after the attacks, the agency said the air in the neighborhood was safe to breathe. But since then, 602 people who initially survived the attack have died from cancer or aerodigestive issues like asthma, and thousands more have become sick.

“The [EPA’s] history of making mistakes makes you feel like perhaps they should be challenged,” says Mutter, citing the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan.

More here: 

Ohio is suing an Energy Transfer Partners pipeline for spilling millions of gallons of drilling fluid.

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EPA says the water at a Puerto Rico Superfund site is safe. This congressman isn’t convinced.

by NanYNBBcalr Posted on November 3, 2017

At a hearing on the federal response to the 2017 hurricane season, New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler questioned the EPA’s decision to declare water drawn from the Dorado Superfund site OK to drink.

In 2016, the agency found that water at Dorado contained solvents that pose serious health risks, including liver damage and cancer. Yet after CNN reported that Hurricane Maria survivors were pulling water from the site’s two wells, the EPA conducted an analysis and found the water fit for consumption.

When Nadler asked Pete Lopez, administrator for Region 2 of the EPA, why his agency changed its position, Lopez responded that the chemicals are present in the water, but are within drinking water tolerance levels.

The EPA’s standards for drinking water are typically higher than international norms, John Mutter, a Columbia University professor and international disaster relief expert, told Grist. Nonetheless, he believes it is unusual for the EPA to declare water safe to drink just one year after naming it a Superfund site.

At the hearing, Nadler said the situation was “eerily similar” to the EPA’s response after 9/11 in New York. One week after the attacks, the agency said the air in the neighborhood was safe to breathe. But since then, 602 people who initially survived the attack have died from cancer or aerodigestive issues like asthma, and thousands more have become sick.

“The [EPA’s] history of making mistakes makes you feel like perhaps they should be challenged,” says Mutter, citing the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Link – 

EPA says the water at a Puerto Rico Superfund site is safe. This congressman isn’t convinced.

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Water bills are skyrocketing, and people of color are being hit hard.

by DebWhmtiplstm Posted on October 26, 2017

A new Chicago Tribune investigation found that residents in black and Latino communities are charged water rates up to 20-percent higher than those in predominantly white neighborhoods.

The Tribune examined 162 Chicagoland communities with publicly managed systems using water from Lake Michigan. While only 13 percent of the cohorts surveyed are majority-black, those groups included five of the 10 areas with the highest water rates.

Water bills are soaring across the country. A recent USA Today report of 100 municipalities found that over the past 12 years, the monthly cost of water doubled in nearly a third of cities. In Atlanta, San Francisco, and Wilmington, Delaware, the price of water tripled or more.

Low-income residents and communities of color are bearing the brunt of surging water rates, which have buried families in debt, causing some to lose their homes. In Flint, Michigan, more than 8,000 residents faced foreclosure because of unpaid water and sewage bills.

This year, Philadelphia launched an income-based, tiered assistance program to aid low-income residents. City Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez spearheaded the bill because residents in her district — which includes some of Philly’s largest Puerto Rican communities — bore 20 percent of the city’s unpaid water debt despite only being a tenth of its population.

Taken from:

Water bills are skyrocketing, and people of color are being hit hard.

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After the lead crisis started, Flint’s fertility crisis began

by AngelitaHampton Posted on September 25, 2017

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the year following the start of its water crisis, Flint, Michigan, saw fewer pregnancies among its residents and higher fetal deaths, according to a working paper published last month.

Kansas University economics professor David Slusky and West Virginia University economics professor Daniel Grossman examined health statistics in Flint between May 2007 and March 2015 and compared them to 15 other cities in Michigan. What they uncovered was alarming: After April 2014 — when, in an effort to cut costs, Flint officials switched its water supply from Detroit to the Flint River, leading to elevated lead levels — fertility rates among women in Flint dropped 12 percent. Fetal deaths spiked by 58 percent.

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“This represents a couple hundred fewer children born that otherwise would have been,” Slusky said in a university press release this week. The researchers project that between 198 and 276 more children would have been born from November 2013, when the child was first conceived, to March 2015 had the city not switched its water supply.

The researchers also conclude that the water change and the corresponding increased exposure to lead prompted a decline in the overall health of children born. Children exposed to high levels of lead can suffer from irreversible neurological and behavioral consequences. Moreover, children born in Flint since the start of its water crisis saw a 5 percent drop in average birth weight compared to those in other parts of Michigan during the same time period.

Shortly after the move in April 2014, residents complained about the water’s stench as it became inflicted with lead from old pipes in residential homes. Even after doctors and experts alerted state and federal officials to the elevated lead levels in Flint’s children and in houses’ water, Governor Rick Snyder and other state officials didn’t concede to the public health emergency in Flint until September 2015. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality eventually acknowledged that it erred in not requiring the city to add anti-corrosive chemicals into its water.

Health officials found that between June 2014 and November 2015, 91 residents in Genesee County, which includes Flint, contracted Legionnaires’ Disease, a bacterial illness that can arise out of contaminated water, though not all were conclusively linked to Flint’s water crisis. At least 12 people from the disease died after 2014.

As of September 2017, 15 officials have been charged for their involvement in Flint’s water crisis, with five charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection to the Legionnaires’ outbreak. Earlier this year, a federal judge approved a $87 million settlement for the city of Flint that would pay to replace 18,000 water lines by 2020. The state still faces a number of lawsuits. One calls for the state to provide more special education services for children exposed to lead as a result of the water crisis.

Credit:  

After the lead crisis started, Flint’s fertility crisis began

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Let’s Cut the Crap About Why Hillary Clinton Lost

by BOYSamanth Posted on June 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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The latest thing for the caterwauling classes to caterwaul about is Hillary Clinton’s recent interview with ReCode. Basically, she said that the big reasons she lost the election were Russia, the Comey letter, and the media’s infatuation with her email server. Everyone is outraged that she refuses to admit that she herself made gigantic mistakes that led to her loss.

Bah. Let’s run the tape:

Hillary Clinton was running for a third Democratic term with an OK but not great economy. Most models predicted a roughly 50-50 race.
In the end, despite everything, she still outperformed the models and won the popular vote by 2 percent.
The Comey letter cost her 2-3 percent, and the other stuff probably cost her another couple of points. Without those things, she wins in a landslide and cruises into the White House.

So she’s right. I guess everyone wants her to be the captain going down with her ship, but that’s stupid. She accurately described why she lost. Why shouldn’t she?

But still, what about all the stuff she screwed up? There wasn’t that much, really, but sure, there are a few things:

The Goldman Sachs speeches were dumb.
The private email server was dumb.
The “deplorables” comment was dumb

But look: no candidate is perfect and every campaign has stuff like that. It comes with the territory. And despite all that, Clinton had a comfortable 7-point lead by the end of September. Those things couldn’t have been the reason for her loss since they were all well known by then. After that, she crushed Trump in all three debates and was all set to win.

So why didn’t she? The answer is pretty simple: despite running a pretty good campaign, she got walloped by things that decidedly don’t come with the territory: Russian interference via the WikiLeaks drip; an indefensible letter released by the FBI director; and a press corps that treated the Comey letter like the OJ trial. She got slammed late in the game, and had no time to recover.

That’s just what happened. Denying that reality because we like losers to wear hair shirts is dumb.

Now, there is one thing I’m still curious about: did her data analytics team blow it in the (now) infamous states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania? In most recent campaigns, there’s at least one embedded reporter who promises to embargo everything until after the election, and then gives us the inside dope when it’s all over. But I guess Clinton didn’t allow that, so we don’t really have an inside view. Supposedly, though, internal polling is far more accurate than the stuff we plebs see, and it should have alerted her that something was going on in her firewall states.

Did the analytics fail? Or did they work just fine, but she ignored them? To this day, does anyone know?

Original article: 

Let’s Cut the Crap About Why Hillary Clinton Lost

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"Get Out" Is the Horror Flick America Needs Right Now

by JanineVerran500 Posted on February 24, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

“Do they know I’m black?”

That’s the question photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) asks his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) before they venture off to meet her parents for the first time. She assures him everything will be fine. But Chris is rattled. Whether that assurance is enough in this faux-postracial America underpins the social commentary behind comedian Jordan Peele’s subversive horror film, Get Out, which opens Friday. The color of one’s skin—and how others respond to it—matters, whether or not the love itself is colorblind.

In his directorial debut, Peele, known for his previous foray in the sketch comedy show Key & Peele, carries us through the uncomfortable situation of the first encounter with the significant other’s parents. Except that in this case, Chris encounters Rose’s warm yet overly polite parents in a secluded, rural estate. Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), a neurosurgeon by trade, explains at one point how he would’ve voted for Obama for a third term and felt the need to let Chris know his father ran alongside Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics. Missy, a hypnotherapist, welcomes Chris with open arms. At a social gathering of the Armitages’ rich, predominantly white friends (with the exception of one Asian man and a dapper, strange “brother” named Andrew, played by Lakeith Stanfield), Chris must smile and nod. Equally as unsettling are the zombielike behaviors of the Armitages’ help, a black groundskeeper and q maid plucked from a time long past.

What begins as a comedy guided by paranoia and discomfort takes a sinister turn, morphing into a psychological thriller about what Peele calls “the universal monster that is racism.” I spoke with the director about his social satire and why there aren’t not enough horror flicks for black and Latino audiences.

Mother Jones: At Sundance, you talked about how the idea for Get Out arose out during the 2008 presidential primaries. What was it about that moment that sparked the idea?

Jordan Peele: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were competing for the Democratic nomination, so there was this sort of understanding of gender civil rights and racial civil rights, and we were looking at the two in terms of one another. It got me thinking about my favorite movies—Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives—which are these thrillers that pulled off amazing commentary about gender. It got me wondering why there’s not a quintessential racial horror film since Night of the Living Dead. That set me off on the path.

MJ: Do you think this film will resonate differently now that Donald Trump is our president?

JP: I do. The conversation about race is inevitable. It’s one that people know that we have to have and continue to have. It’s very uncomfortable to talk about race. It often devolves before it begins. I think Get Out is resonating now because people are facing this problem, but want to do it in a fun way, if possible.

MJ: So much of the movie is grounded in discomfort and paranoia around social situations, from Chris’ first meeting with the Armitages to the huge gathering with friends. How much of that is grounded in your own experience?

JP: That’s something every black person I’ve talked to certainly recognizes. Most minority groups would see some version of this. I would also imagine women feel this way. Race is a universal flaw in humanity. So yes, I’ve been in many situations where I’ve felt like the outsider because of the color of my skin.

MJ: What do you mean when you say race is a universal flaw in humanity?

JP: It’s in our DNA. Back when we were Neanderthals or whatever, we evolved to think along tribal lines. Survival was based on this idea of who are we and who are the others who will come and take our resources. I think it’s an animal and a human thing that we all see in terms of us vs. them, and race is a very easy way to separate who is us and who is them. I just think racism is within each and every one of us. It’s everyone’s responsibility to figure out how they deal with this kind of obsolete instinct.

MJ: Watching this movie reminded me of the first time I went to my girlfriend’s megachurch in rural Michigan. You get that sense of “Are they staring at me?”

JP: Laughs. Yeah, sure. Which side of the interracial relationship are you?

MJ: I’m Puerto Rican. She’s white.

JP: Oh yeah, see, this is why I need to do a Latino Get Out next! It’s the same experience, this feeling of being the other. I’m sure you’ve been in situations as a Puerto Rican man where people are approaching you and the first thing they say is, I don’t know, using their limited knowledge of Spanish or their favorite food or somehow talking about Mexicans or something. It comes from a nice place. People are putting out their olive branches and trying to connect and trying to tell you, “Yeah, it’s okay. We can talk. We can find common ground.” What they don’t understand is that those conversations add up for us. They add up to a greater truth that I think we are faced with on a day-to-day basis as minorities, which is: We are the color of skin first and people second—even in these more pleasant conversations.

MJ: How did you decide to take that paranoia and transition it into something more sinister?

JP: I modeled this after some of my favorite movies. With a horror movie, you’re making a metaphor. You’re making a personalized nightmare for the protagonist. That’s what this is. It’s meant to get crazy to relay what the inner state and inner fears are representing.

MJ: Bradley Whitford, who plays Rose’s father, Dean Armitage, recently said that Get Out was a look at “unconscious, white liberal racism.” Do you agree with that?

JP: It’s a look at racism. The villains happen to be white liberals. Well, they don’t just happen to be—it explores a type of racism that I’ve seen in that group. But the movie is about the universal monster that is racism and the fact that it does take different forms. On the one hand, at its worst, it’s violence, it’s incarceration, it’s some form of true oppression. It also has sides of it that are, on the surface, harmless. For me, that doesn’t mean it’s not part of the same human demon.

MJ: What role did comedy play in shaping Get Out?

JP: I used my skill set in comedy to plan the scares in this movie. The entire premise has satirical overtones, like Stepford Wives. It makes an ironic commentary on the way we are. The last is the comedic-relief element; I bring in the Rod character (Lil Rel Howery) not only to release the tension, but also to satisfy this urge for somebody to say what we’re all thinking.

MJ: What is that ironic commentary on the way we are, in your view?

JP: It’s the fact that this is a horror movie about race, the notion that there might be some sinister modern form of slavery going on. Which is obviously ironic when you pair it with the notions of there are live-in servants in the house. There’s also satire and irony in some of the cultural choices within the movie. It’s a movie that has lacrosse sticks and bocce ball and bingo, all kinds of specifics that are stereotypically alien to an African American. And we find a subversive, darker take on those. That’s like the darkly funny stuff.

MJ: Okay, so why aren’t there more horror movies for black and Latino audiences?

JP: We haven’t done enough work to encourage minorities to strive to make movies. Hollywood is a place full of white male directors—there are many good ones. We just haven’t nurtured our voices. Since Straight Outta Compton, we’ve seen a big renaissance where untapped voices are getting their platforms to try some elevated work. I’m thinking of Donald Glover with Atlanta, Issa Rae, Ava Duvernay, F. Gary Gray, Ryan Coogler. It’s a relatively new realization in Hollywood that films with that sort of minority perspective can make money if you give us a shot.

MJ: When asked by the New York Times what scared you the most, you said, “Society is the scariest monster.” Why is that?

JP: When people get to together, we’re capable of the most beautiful, amazing things. But we are also capable of genocide. We can convince ourselves to do things in conjunction with one another that we wouldn’t have been able to do as an individual. You think of things like scapegoating or neglect of people’s suffering based on how close to us they are. How we act with each other really reveals our most animal instincts.

Excerpt from – 

"Get Out" Is the Horror Flick America Needs Right Now

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