People Before Profit blog

A national object lesson: California’s air and coast, a buyer’s market

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 11:26:00 +0000

While the media distract us with the shinier attractions of the presidential-candidate road shows, the dirty work of politics continues in the shadows. I do not mean to diminish the importance of who gets elected or even nominated, but the secret and behind-the-scenes work often makes for decisions that change public policy in favor of the rich and powerful. Those shifts impact our lives in a big way, as two recent examples in California illustrate.

Most recently, the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) upended its mission to clean our air. First the old Democratic majority opposed its staff's recommendation for tougher rules that would govern the fossil-fuel industry. They watered them down. Then two months later, and with an even more pro-business Republican majority, the board went into closed session and fired its long-time executive officer. Praised by environmentalists, even though they often disagreed with him, he had faithfully pursued the AQMD's goals while balancing the impact on industry. That was, apparently, not good enough for the fossil-fuel lobby.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the looser rules benefiting oil companies that the AQMD adopted came from a two-page memo written by the Western States Petroleum Association and other business groups. The new plan postpones the installation of expensive air cleaning devices and other efforts to control emissions.

In a parallel move, a few weeks earlier the California Coastal Commission fired its long-time executive director.

The Coastal Commission signaled its intention to terminate its director when it approved a controversial ridge-line development project in Malibu proposed by The Edge, the U2 guitarist. During the whole escapade, our "environmental governor" had no comment. Since he and the legislature appoint all the board's members, we can imagine that somebody knew what was up.

How did this happen in this environmentally conscious state? These decisions came thanks to political manipulation in the shadows.

The AQMD's governing board is chosen by state officials and governments of the district's four member counties. Last year Orange County leaders voted to dump their long-time representative and replace him with a Republican councilman who was outspokenly pro-business and anti-regulation. About the same time, cities in the Inland Empire decided to do the same. They dropped a clean air advocate in favor of the Republican mayor of Highland, who worries more about regulatory impacts on the economy than the air his constituents breathe. Suddenly, the board had a new majority, one that supported fossil fuels over clean air.

The Coastal Commission coup was a great day for developers and others who have long wanted fewer restrictions on building along the coast. Their lobbyists and lawyers offer perks and campaign donations to people charged with protecting our coastline. One commissioner got to meet The Edge himself, even flying to Ireland for pictures with the rock star and to attend a U2 concert. Others - who are also elected officials from far-flung parts of the state - have been accepting donations for their campaigns from sources representing business before the commission, the Los Angeles Times reported. That has smoothed the way for wealthy and powerful interests to get what they want at the expense of the people whose health these board members are sworn to protect.

In a democracy, lobbyists should have access to decision-makers to present their case. But too often money and power corrupt the process. Corruption occurs because these interests hold more wealth than most local elected officials have ever seen. It happens because a few perks - a round of golf at an elite country club, a small donation to a reelection campaign or a trip somewhere - feel good. It's harder to say no when you've been schmoozed like that.

While not illegal, the kind of influence-peddling that occurs at the Coastal Commission and the AQMD takes place in the shadows, offstage where no one sees it. As Jungian psychologists teach, when the shadow side of the psyche remains unknown and unexplored, the bad behavior pokes up in unexpected places. When it happens in the political realm, it taints democracy and, in these instances, hurts our environment and people.

The shadows fall because the glare of media light focuses on the big newsmakers, like presidential candidates. Too often the small actions sneaking around the edges get ignored. By the time we learn about it - if we learn about it at all - the change has happened and the damage has been done. That's why people, neighborhoods and advocates must constantly shine a light into the dark recesses of our public life. That's why the struggle for justice never ends.

Rev. Jim Conn is the founding minister of the Church in Ocean Park and served on the Santa Monica City Council and as that city's mayor. He helped found Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, Los Angeles, and was its second chair, and was a founder of Santa Monica's renter's rights campaign.

Reprinted, including photo, by permission of the author and Capital & Main.

Next Einstein Forum: African countries seek to keep their brain power

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 13:53:00 +0000

(L'Humanité ) -- In a conference March 8-10, more than 700 persons, researchers, decision-makers, industrialists and heads of state, traced a future path for science in Africa, at the Next Einstein Forum, in Dakar, Senegal.

Brain drain, invisible publications, nonexistent media coverage -- in Africa, scientists and their discoveries remain unknown. Nevertheless, their work is very important, and the authors are talented. "African scientists keep too many discoveries in their desk drawers," regrets Rosa Gana Fomban Leke, professor of immunology and parasitology at the University of Yaoundé-1, Cameroon: "One of our obstacles, we don't have scientific journals of quality in which to publish our important results. And to publish in the international journals is not easy for an unknown African researcher who works in a little corner of Africa, unless he has an international collaboration."

Not forgetting that the universities don't have the financial means and structures adequate to support their researchers. There are, however, numerous discoveries. For example, many medicinal African plants have been studied, and used in medical treatment. But they remain unknown on an international scale. Even between neighboring countries, the information does not circulate.

This waste of talent is shared by African researchers of high level: "Today there are more African engineers and scientists in the United States than there are on the African continent. 11 million young sub-Saharan Africans enter the labor market every year, and do not find employment in Africa. It is urgent to change this," deplores Thierry Zomahoun, head of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. (AIMS).

The director of this great scientific institute, which has trained and launched in their careers students among the most brilliant in Africa for more than 10 years, decided to act on a larger scale by creating the Next Einstein Forum. For three days, hundreds of scientists of international stature, some heads of state, and a half-dozen ministers of research, met in Dakar in order finally to develop a scientific future for Africa. The event presented 15 laureates of African science, carefully selected, of age 42 or less, and working in all domains, from fundamental biology to mathematics to the revalorization of trash.

From Cameroon, Dr. Axel-C. Ngonga Ngomo, who today directs the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web, at the University of Leipzig, in Germany, was one of those selected. Active in research on Big Data Europe, his future work concerns innovative technologies, strategies and competencies for the beneficial use of Big Data to address societal needs. Due to a lack of job opportunities on the continent he was obliged to go abroad. But nevertheless, "the semantic web is the future in Africa also," he states. "At this event, I hope to meet people with whom I can discuss the position of present-day Africa in this domain. And with whom we can decide on concrete projects to develop in Africa, where there is a strong potential."

The Next Einstein Forum is announced as the first in a series of summit meetings. The event will take place every two years, with the precise aim of reinforcing teaching and scientific research across the continent, to give prominence to the best young African scientists and to aid development spearheaded by science. The urgent task being, it is clear, to identify the key questions requiring political intervention and investment, so that Africans may at last find their rightful place in the sciences.

Reposted from L'Humanité in English. Original French article: L'Afrique veut garder sa matière grise, translated by Henry Crapo

Photo: Thierry Zomahoun, head of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and of the Next Einstein Forum. L'Humanité.

Climate change: Learning from the past

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 10:03:00 +0000

Last month my wife Susan and I drove to Phoenix to visit family. We had never spent much time there, and my relatives wanted us to see some sites they thought would interest us. They took us to two places where an ancient people had lived for about a thousand years, reaching their height of power and size between about 950 and 1350 C.E.

This society built water canal systems that, anthropologists estimate, ran for a thousand miles. From what is now downtown Phoenix they took water from the Salt River and distributed it for farming across the local valley. Farther south another group did the same on the Gila River. The main channels can be up to 30 feet across and 10 feet deep, all dug by hand, and so well engineered that water planners use some of the same routes today.

To coordinate this system they built a network of some 40 "platform houses" - raised multistory buildings that may possibly have been used as signal towers. Some of these sites apparently included structures used to record astronomical positions and to mark the solstices and equinoxes. It's quite possible these observations of sun and stars were used to set the calendar for planting and harvesting.

At their peak, these civilizations may have supported upwards of 40,000 people. Then around 1450 they disappeared. The people moved away, the villages dissolved, the signs of its civilization and its elaborate waterworks abandoned.

For years this collapse posed a mystery to anthropologists, but now they think it may have been caused by a deadly combination of overpopulation and drought.

People who deny that humans are causing civilization-threatening climate change like to point to instances like these as signs that weather-based collapse is a normal, common meteorological phenomenon. From time to time ice ages and their retreats, volcanic eruptions and the debris they spew dramatically alter the habitability of major swaths of the Earth. "These things have happened before," as friends have reminded me.

But not like what we're seeing today. Even the fossil fuel companies - such as ExxonMobil - have known for years that the use of their products changes the climate. ExxonMobil analyzed the impact in internal documents, even as the company spent some $30 million over several years to declare human-caused climate change a "premise that...defies common sense," as one former ExxonMobil chairman and CEO put it. Outside, they were paying PR firms to confuse people; inside, the company was making engineering decisions based on the real results of their products. For example, they adjusted the measurements of off-shore drilling platforms to account for rising sea levels.

Apparently the ancient people who lived in the Salt and Gila river valleys did not have the perspective to know what was happening to them. But eventually the water no longer supported the crops needed to support their population. The system had become too successful, and now drought was taking its toll. People went to other places.

Unfortunately, Pope Francis' encyclical concerning the Earth fails to address this matter of overpopulation. The pope sees food redistribution as an important challenge to population growth. And yes, it is true that the world throws away about one-third of its food. And yes, it is true that what the wealthiest half-billion of us use could feed everyone on the planet who is here now. But fixing maldistribution does not speak to the carrying capacity of the Earth herself.

Yoshihiko Wada, a Japanese professor of economics, compares the ecological footprint (the land and resources that a select population uses to exist) with what he calls the Earth's "biocapacity" (what the planet can supply to keep all humans alive). We are in a serious deficit. He says that to sustain the human economy as a whole would take 1.5 Earths. To sustain human life at the level of Japan requires 2.3 planets. We are running an "ecological deficit," as he puts it. The Earth cannot sustain this many people, not only because of the way we have divided up stuff, but because the Earth cannot keep us all going.

Fortunately, some nations are aware of the intertwining of population and the goods people need to survive. So far 11 national governments, mostly but not all in the developed world, have set a limited ecological footprint as one of their official "sustainability indicators." Other international organizations, such as the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, are also studying how to implement such a policy option.

If there is a lesson from visiting the homelands of the ancient people of the Salt and Gila river valleys, it is this: We ignore the interwoven connection between population growth and climate change at our peril. We cannot continue to damage the Earth and expect human life to go on just the way it has.

Reprinted (including photo) with kind permission of the author and capitalandmain.

Lead in Flint water, mold in Detroit schools

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 11:53:00 +0000

In spite of the growing sense of disbelief and horror surrounding the lead contamination of drinking water in the Michigan city of Flint, at least one thing is clear: that the catastrophic levels of pollution and destruction are a direct result of the extreme policies pursued by the Michigan's right-wing leadership.

A very conservative group has controlled Michigan since the election of Governor Rick Snyder and a Republican majority in its legislature in 2011. At the heart of their policies has been a concerted effort to remove control over cities and communities by the people who live in them, and to impose austerity and free market measures on populations who are mostly African American and people of colour.

Some of the key opponents to that threat to democracy, however, have been Detroit's teachers. This January, the Detroit Federation of Teachers filed lawsuit, and some educators even staged a walkout of the city's schools, to protest against the "deplorable, dangerous, unhealthy and unacceptable" conditions for children that have emerged from the wreck of Michigan's autocratic rule.

The key to the conservative's strategy has been the emergency manager law. While a version of it was passed in 1988 under a Democratic administration, new Republican office holders passed Public Law 4 in 2011, which was much more radical. It gave virtually unlimited powers to unelected managers appointed by the governor in times of financial distress, while elected city councils and school boards lost all decision-making power.

With none of the constraints of public accountability, emergency managers in several cities then proceeded to nullify union bargaining agreements and sell off public assets. Detroit itself was forced into bankruptcy in July 2013.

In nearby Flint, Governor Snyder appointed Darnell Earley as emergency manager in October 2013. Over the next 16 months, Earley laid the groundwork for switching Flint's water supply from the municipal utility that serves Detroit to pumping water from the Flint River - a waterway that is highly-polluted as a result of decades of toxic waste dumping by auto plants and other heavy industry.

Earley, a Democrat, justified the move as a measure to reduce costs. It has since become clear, however, that his action was connected to a plan to drive Detroit even further into bankruptcy.

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department has operated with budget deficits that averaged US$57 million a year; debt servicing took up half of its budget. Bondholders, facing the loss of Flint as a customer, pressured for cutting off delinquent customers and raising rates to avoid writing down their investments in bankruptcy proceedings. The French waste and water management multinational, Veolia, was waiting in the wings.

Flint is the biggest customer for Detroit's water

When Detroit's water agency offered to halve its rates to keep supplying the city, Earley and his successor refused. Instead they signed an agreement to put Flint into the hands of a new water supplier connected to Veolia.

Without Flint as a customer, Detroit residents now have to pay higher rates. Detroit itself may have to sell its public water system - one of its main assets - to private investors.

One year ago, under the decree of Detroit's emergency manager Kevyn Orr, the water district began to shut off water services to poor residents behind on their bills. Only a global outcry stalled the move. At the same time Orr began negotiations with Veolia.

In February 2015 Veolia was then hired by Flint to study its water, after the switch in sources had been made. Public health doctors were already warning state and federal authorities that the level of lead in the drinking water pumped from the Flint River was alarmingly high. Lead is a recognised cause of learning disabilities in children, and the damage to their cognitive development is permanent.

Veolia announced that Flint's water was safe. It echoed similar false safety claims by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, an agency under the control of Governor Snyder. However, last year even General Motors stopped using Flint water in its car manufacturing plant because it was causing corrosion.

Eventually Snyder was forced to admit that corrosive river water was dissolving the lining of Flint's ancient lead pipes, causing a spike in the metal's concentration.

Embarrassing emails revealed knowledge by state authorities of the lead contamination, at the same time they were ridiculing parents and public health officials who warned of the danger.

Eventually a state of emergency was declared, and President Barack Obama offered US$80 million in relief, although replacing the city's pipes is likely to cost over US$1 billion.

Emergency in Detroit's schools

After leaving Flint, in January 2015 Earley was appointed by Governor Snyder as emergency manager of Detroit Public Schools (DPS) - the system's fourth emergency manager in seven years.

The main program of all four has been the privatisation of Detroit schools. By the end of the 2009-2010 school year, 36 per cent of students (50,139 students) were already attending private charter schools, and another 41 schools (30 per cent of the district serving 16,000 students) were converted into charters.

The Deficit Elimination Plan - agreed between managers and the state of Michigan in a bid to erase DPS' US$20.4 million deficit by the end of 2021 - required the district to close a further 70 schools over two years, and raise class sizes to 60 students at high school level.

Voters rebelled and repealed Public Law 4 in the 2012 election. The legislature moved even further to the right, however, passing a law forbidding contracts that require union membership as a condition of employment (a so-called "Right to Work" law), and then passed Public Law 4 again in a slightly modified form, as Public Act 436.

In a recent opinion piece, Pamela Pugh, treasurer of the (elected) State of Michigan Board of Education, wrote: "After more than six years of a failed state takeover, Detroit Public Schools have deteriorated into a destabilised education system, marred by decreased academic outcomes and increased deficit, upward of US$3.5 billion. Just as Flint's water crisis occurred under emergency management, so did the demise of the Detroit school district."

Last month, the Detroit Federation of Teachers finally filed a lawsuit to force Earley to resign, and to return the schools to control by an elected school board. "Asking a child to learn or a teacher to instruct in classrooms with steam coming from their mouth due to the cold in the classroom, in vermin-infested rooms, with ceiling tiles falling from above and buckets to catch the rainwater, or in buildings that are literally making them sick, is more than what is legally or constitutionally tolerable", the suit says.

Other conditions named in the action include black mold, bacteria, freezing cold or boiling hot classrooms, rats and insects, exposed wiring and falling debris.

At the beginning of this February Earley finally resigned, telling Governor Snyder he'd completed his work of "comprehensive restructuring" months ahead of schedule. And as hundreds of teachers staging a'sickout'rallied in front of the school district offices, Snyder announced he'd appoint a 'transition leader' to move the schools back toward local control.

"Educators and parents have been raising the red flag for years about dangerous school conditions, only to be snubbed, ignored and disrespected by DPS and the emergency managers, including Earley", said Ivy Bailey, interim president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, in a statement. "The state has brought the school district to its knees, and now it's time to give up the reins."

Michigan cities like Detroit and Flint have been used as a laboratory for market-based policies and the most extreme forms of austerity. The results have been deadly.

Detroit remains in bankruptcy and emergency managers still wreak havoc in several other cities. Detroit schools, even without an emergency manager, will take many years to recover from the devastation caused by disinvestment and privatisation. The water in Flint still has lead, and the children damaged by its pollution will never fully heal.

As Americans go to the polls to vote this year, they must remember that conservative candidates all over the country are proposing to extend policies like those enacted in Michigan. The actions of politicians shouldn't just be debated in the abstract; when people are forced to suffer the very real consequences of political negligence such as that wrought on Flint and Detroit, individuals must be held to account.

Photo: Jessica Owens, a resident of Flint, Michigan, holds up a bottle of water taken from one of the taps in her home. She was attending a committee hearing, on 3 February 2016 in Washington DC, to examine the ongoing water crisis in Flint. | Molly Riley/AP

LA gas leak among worst ever - could new regulations help?

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 15:35:00 +0000

The gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, which began Oct. 23 last year, has been confirmed as the worst methane disaster in U.S. history. The leak was halted on Feb. 18, but not before ravaging the atmosphere with roughly 100,000 tons of methane, leaving a carbon footprint larger than the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Now, in a possible case of 'better late than never,' the Golden State is taking serious measures to curb methane emissions.

The leak, which originated in a large underground methane storage facility at Aliso Canyon, represents one more mark against the natural gas industry, and yet another wound inflicted upon the planet. The Southern California Gas Co., owner of the storage site, insisted there would be no long-term health effects on the nearby community, but residents' complaints of headaches, nausea, and lethargy challenged that admission. The company has now stopped the leak by drilling a relief well that intercepted the base of the damaged one, which they have now begun the process of permanently sealing.

However, these efforts cannot undo the damage that came as a result of this, a widely underreported disaster that could be one of the worst environmental incidents in years. "Aliso Canyon will be, certainly, the biggest single source of the year" for methane, said Stephen Conley of the University of California, Davis and the journal Scientific Aviation. "It's definitely a monster." He and other scientists performed a measurement of the methane output, which were then sent to the Air Resources Board - the clean air agency of the state of California. "It was 20 times larger than anything we'd ever measured," he added. "And it was obvious that there wasn't anything wrong with the instruments [we used]. This was just a huge event."

So now, the Air Resources Board has taken the sobering result of Conley's analysis, and plans to do something about it. The agency is taking regulatory action to cut methane output by the oil and gas industry. The new proposed rules would prohibit intentional emissions (venting), require quarterly leak inspections of facilities, and include measures to prevent worsening air quality caused by oil and gas activity. If enacted, the rules would be the strongest of their kind in the country, outpacing similar measures from the Obama administration and other states.

"In light of the Aliso Canyon disaster, the case for strong national rules to limit methane pollution from both current and future oil and gas sites has never been clearer," said Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) president Fred Krupp. "California is showing that there is a sensible way to reduce these emissions now. Across the nation, the oil and gas industry emits eight million tons a year, which amounts to the same climate impact as the annual emissions from 160 coal plants during the next two decades."

"Keeping gas in the pipes where it belongs protects public and environmental health," added the EDF's Director of California Oil and Gas, Tim O'Connor. "Many of the state's oil and gas facilities are old and decrepit. In light of the science on methane and equipment leaks and the events at Aliso Canyon, this long-awaited proposal for increased oversight and maintenance requirements couldn't have come sooner."

"I hope that one of the lessons learned here is that we need to have some sort of a rapid response methodology in place," Conley concluded. When there's a disaster like this, "somebody needs to be there in hours, not weeks."

Photo: Environmental activist group Save Porter Ranch protests the Porter Ranch leak. On the right is the organization's president, Matt Pakucko. | Brian Melley/AP