Science & Environment » peoplesworld

Alameda County bans fracking

Juan Lopez — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:47:00 +0000

OAKLAND, Calif.- "We're ecstatic. It's historic!" an exuberant Ella Teevan told the People's World Tuesday evening after the Alameda County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to ban fracking for oil and natural gas in the county.

Teevan, the Northern California organizer for "Food and Water Watch" and a leader of the Alameda County Against Fracking (ACAF) coalition, said Alameda is the first of nine Bay Area counties to bar fracking.

Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is a method of oil and natural gas extraction that involves blasting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and toxic chemicals, under high pressure deep into the earth. It's been proven to pollute local air and water, endanger human health, and contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.

Carolyn Bowden, organizer for the California Nurses Association, told the Alameda County supervisors that "nurses see every day the debilitating effects of diseases like asthma, heart disease and cancer" on workers and communities exposed to elevated levels of pollution generated by the extraction (especially through fracking), processing and burning of fossil fuels.

"We must protect workers, communities and the environment," declared Bowden. "This is not just a political issue; this is a life and death issue."

Judging by the crowd's prolonged applause and whoops, Bowden hit a high note when she declared, "There is only one solution: leave it (fossil fuels) in the ground!"

A large crowd participated in the supervisors' hearing July 18, among them activists and leaders affiliated with the ACAF coalition, which includes environmental, labor, business and health care groups as well as concerned county residents.

Quanah Parker Brightman, Executive Director of United Native Americans, appealed to the supervisors to "recognize the California indigenous nations' senior water and mineral rights" by voting to ban fracking.

In addition to causing serious illnesses, Brightman said fracking greatly "contributes to the global climate crisis...that endangers our children and our families."

Eight-year-old Sierra brought the house down when she told supervisors that we should not have to worry about "what to drink and what not to drink," when the toxic chemicals used in fracking can find their way into our drinking water supply.

Alameda County has one drilling company operating out of the city of Livermore which does not employ the fracking method.

However, Alameda could possibly have considerable oil reserves because part of the county is near the Monterey Shale, one of the largest reservoirs of frackable oil in the country, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

Alameda joins five other California counties that have already banned fracking - Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Benito, Mendocino and Butte.

As more counties join the anti-fracking campaign, it is likely to increase pressure on Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown who has so far refused to give in to demands for a statewide ban on hydraulic fracturing.

Unlike his fellow Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, who decided to allow a statewide fracking ban in New York, Gov. Brown has opted for tightening regulations on fracking in California.

Despite his intransigence on a fracking ban, Gov. Brown, along with the Democratic majority with a relatively progressive leadership in the state legislature, has helped put California in the lead of efforts to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.

Last year, the governor signed into law a bill, SB-350, requiring state-regulated utilities to increase by 50 percent the electricity generated from renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and geothermal power, by 2030.

The bill also mandated a 50 percent increase in energy efficiency in buildings by the same year.

The original version of SB-350 included a mandate to cut the state's consumption of petroleum by 50 percent by 2030.

The petroleum part of the bill came under fierce attack by Big Oil including an aggressive publicity and lobbying campaign, greased with generous campaign contributions to a number of conservative Democratic legislators representing districts with a more conservative electorate. After the state Senate passed the original bill, 20 of these conservative Democrats ganged up with the Republican minority to strip the bill of its petroleum mandate.

There have also been calls on the Obama administration to ban fracking on federal lands.

Instead of a ban, the Obama administration's Bureau of Land Management (BLM) last year moved to regulate hydraulic fracturing on public lands.

However, in a ruling last month Wyoming-based District Court Judge Scott W. Skavdahl blocked the BLM's detailed standards for the construction of oil and gas wells on federal and tribal land, in favor of the oil industry and several Republican controlled state governments that challenged the Obama administration's regulation.

Although it applied only to public federal land under BLM's control, it was seen as a model for states as they regulate drilling on private lands, according to Bloomberg media.

This decision comes on top of the Supreme Court stay of the Clean Power Plan that requires states to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, among other federal court rulings blocking the Obama administration's environmental agenda.

Although the administration vows to continue to fight these adverse environmental court rulings, in the final analysis everything depends on the outcome of the November elections.

At play is the presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as the Supreme Court, which is now evenly split between conservative and liberal justices.

Whether Republicans or Democrats come out on top in the presidential and Senate races will most likely determine whether the nation will get a conservative or a liberal justice to fill the ninth tie-breaking Supreme Court seat vacated when right wing Justice Antonin Scalia died earlier this year.

Much hinges on the outcome of the November elections. The election may be one of the biggest challenges facing the anti-fracking coalitions, as well as the overall struggle to drastically cut the emission of greenhouse gases, and adherence to and improvement of last year's Paris international climate accord.

Photo: Ella Teevan, Food & Water Watch

Human-caused climate change gets personal

Rev. Jim Conn — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 10:42:00 +0000

Activists wanting to solve the crisis of human-caused climate change face a serious dilemma. The threat appears neither close enough to get our sustained attention, nor distant enough to postpone doing something about it now. There's a corollary problem: It's too big a situation for my behavior to impact, but it is too critical to ignore.

So while I can drive an electric car, I can't do much about the Porter Ranch gas leak. Environmentalists say it may be the biggest human-made greenhouse-gas disaster that ever occurred in this country, while local utility companies warn if the gas storage facility remains shut down, customers may face power outages this summer. In another instance, I can recycle cardboard, even cut the number of items I purchase that need to be shipped, but I can do nothing about the glut of the stuff clogging landfills. I can even install rooftop solar panels, but I cannot stop the estimated 700 million air conditioners expected to be installed in the next 14 years across the planet.

However, in other parts of the world, climate effects feel much more personal. The civil war in Syria that has devastated so many lives has been linked to a devastating drought caused by climate change. The massive dislocation it has caused now unsettles much of Europe. In the Solomon Islands, the tiny archipelago in the South Pacific rapidly going underwater, people evacuating feel the upheavals directly. Climate change in the form of rising seas also forced an American Indian tribe on the Louisiana coast to leave their ancestral home. For the 185 environmental activists killed last year, an increase of 60 per cent according to Global Witness, the issue was very personal indeed.

But now, like the Gulf Coast tribe, human-caused climate change affects more and more people up close and very personal. Representative Barbara Lee of Berkeley, Calif., introduced legislation last year calling for the recognition that here and abroad women suffer the harshest impact of climate change. As the Sierra Club summarized:

"...the worst effects of climate disruption around the world fall disproportionately on women. For example, women make up to 80 percent of global refugee and displaced populations as well as much of the agricultural workforce in developing countries, making their safety and livelihoods particularly vulnerable to extreme weather."

Businesses feel the impact too. Shelly Gottschamer, a Los Angeles woman who manages her company's supply chain, cites a heat wave in Malaysia that cut power to one of her company's major suppliers. In the Los Angeles Business Journal, she reports that the delay meant sending the products by air instead of ship, finishing and checking their goods stateside, then shipping them to retail outlets late. The delay cost everyone more money - her company, the retailers and ultimately the customers. She warns that climate change will continue to disrupt American business across the board.

Even more personal, climate change has become a major issue for millennials thinking about starting a family. A Seattle-based group now leads small group discussions with young couples in major cities across the country. "The climate crisis is a reproductive crisis...," reads the organization's mission statement. "As we consider starting families, it becomes clear that the perils of climate change have made this a terrifying time to make such choices.... We now have to worry that the planet won't support our children." That's about as personal as it gets.

Four decades ago, the elders of the Iroquois Confederacy addressed this issue:

"The destruction of the Native cultures and people is the same process which has destroyed and is destroying life on this planet.... The people who are living on this planet need to break with the narrow concept of human liberation and begin to see liberation as something which needs to be extended to the whole of the Natural World."

As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker, "Humans have already so violently altered the world that without 'deliberate interventions' the future holds only loss and more loss."

What felt distant has become much closer. What could be safely put off, more and more people realize, can no longer be shoved aside. Human-caused climate change has become personal to hundreds of millions of people. As more of us feel its impact, we will act. We will call upon our governments to act. For as people we are all entwined, even as life itself is woven together.

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 by kind permission of the author and Capital & Main.

Pacific Islanders in the U.S.: From immigrants to climate refugees

Michelle Zacarias, Earchiel Johnson — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 14:16:00 +0000

Born in Quezon City, Philippines, Stephanie Camba spent most of her childhood in the Marshall Islands. She said her family first moved to escape poverty, political persecution, and violence, but she eventually found herself immersed in the land and culture of her adopted home. After the attacks of September 11th, 2001 raised uncertainties about security and the economic future, however, Camba's entire family made the difficult decision to relocate to the U.S. This is where she first faced the social and political barriers that came with being an undocumented immigrant in the United States.

Since then, Camba has solidified herself in community organizing and has used her art to create healing spaces grounded in wellness and creative self-expression as a tool for systemic social change. She has been involved in many forms of activism outside of her art. This included participating in a direct action in 2013 on Chicago's Michigan Avenue that blocked the street during a presidential visit in order to call attention to the plight of undocumented communities under the Obama administration.

Though she longs to reconnect with her culture and childhood home, Camba said the Marshallese are facing an unprecedented crisis. A number of the Marshall Islands remain less than six feet above water. As a result, the people of the Marshall Islands are feeling the impacts of rising sea-levels, and the nation is a leading voice raising awareness of climate change through global forums such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Global warming has triggered rising water levels in the South Pacific of about a foot over the past 30 years, faster than elsewhere--creating thousands of climate refugees. The climate crisis only adds to the environmental problems already faced by the Marshall Islands. From 1946-58, the United States tested atomic bombs there, setting off more than sixty nuclear explosions. Some islands, like Bikini Atoll, are still unlivable due to the high levels of radiation.

To this day, the Marshall Islands remain one of the United States' most important military outposts in the Pacific. The arrangement between the U.S. and the Marshall Islands allows Marshallese nationals the right to live and work in the U.S. mainland freely. However, it leaves others who grew up there but do not possess Marshall Islands citizenship, like Camba, in a legal limbo. Even though she lived in the Marshall Islands for much of her childhood, she is not able to enjoy the U.S. immigration advantages given to the Marshallese. Additionally, returning back to the island of Majuro is becoming increasingly untenable, given the severity of oceanic water rise. Camba said she sees no choice other than to speak out on behalf of the climate refugees, many whom she considers family, that have been created through the political apathy surrounding environmental conservation.

Stephanie now resides in Chicago, where she continues to remain engaged in her community as the DACA and Community Outreach Coordinator at AFIRE (Alliance of Filipinos for Immigrant Rights and Empowerment). Through her art and her activism, Camba hopes to address the state-sponsored violence inflicted on undocumented individuals across the country, as well as the specific problems faced by climate refugees.

Photo: Earchiel Johnson/PW

Broad coalition wins Oakland ban on coal

Juan Lopez — Wed, 29 Jun 2016 14:06:00 +0000

Under pressure from a grand people's coalition, the Oakland City Council voted unanimously Monday night to ban the storage and handling of coal in Oakland, successfully blocking a developer's plan to ship coal from the port.

The broad No Coal in Oakland coalition (which came together over the last 14 months) was able to use public demonstrations of opposition to the coal shipping plan, as well as evidence showing the danger coal poses to the health and safety of the community and the environment, to counter the arguments and entreaties of the developer.

This "extraordinarily powerful movement"- as No Coal in Oakland spokesman Michael Kaufman put it - includes labor, the environment, the clergy, the health care community, the academic field, public officials, community groups and the communities that would have been directly affected by the transportation of coal through their neighborhoods.

In addition to the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, a major component of the coalition is the Alameda County Central Labor Council, including a key affiliate, the longshore workers' union whose members would have had to handle the coal at the Oakland docks.

"We're just glad to be part of the coalition, and to fight for...what is good for our community," Derrick Muhammad, Secretary-Treasurer of the International and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU) Local 10, told the People's World.

On the eve of the city council public hearing, a circular opposing the ban on coal made the rounds through the West Oakland community, the neighborhood through which the coal trains would pass before entering the port complex. The circular contained false statements, including that anti-coal proponents want to kill the whole project and the jobs that would go with it.

Addressing the issues raised by the circular and developer's representatives at the public hearing, Josie Camacho, Executive Secretary Treasurer of the Alameda County Central Labor Council, condemned the developer for using the largely African American and minority "community's desire for jobs to push a project that poses a great danger to our health and the environment."

Camacho said, "We reject the notion that this is a matter of jobs vs. community health, or jobs vs. climate justice."

She reiterated the coalition's desire to continue with the project, minus the coal component.

"The port development will be profitable and create jobs regardless of the commodity shipped through it," she said.

The project, known as the Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal, will be built by a group of developers led by Prologis CCIG Oakland Global LLC. FC

Developers cut secret deal

In April of last year, coalition members learned that the developers had secretly cut a funding deal with four Utah counties to export coal through the Oakland bulk terminal.

The deal followed a public statement by Phil Tagami, CCIG's President and CEO, that the company had "no interest or involvement in the pursuit of coal-related operations at the former Oakland Army Base" where the terminal would be built.

Meanwhile, the city had already signed onto the 2013 Development Agreement with the developers, which could not be modified without breaching the contract, but with one exception.

The Agreement stipulates that the city can apply regulations retroactively if it "determines based on substantial evidence and after a public hearing" that occupants or users of the project and adjacent communities would be placed in a condition "substantially dangerous to their health and safety."

Thus, the city council arrived at its decision solely on the basis of the substantial hazard to the community's "health and safety" that the coal plan would represent. Following Monday's decision, the council will take a second vote as required.

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates testified on behalf of the mayors of a number of cities who signed a letter opposing the transportation of coal by rail through their towns on the way to the port of Oakland. In addition to Berkeley, they are the mayors of Fremont, Livermore, Hayward, Richmond, San Leandro, Union City, Emeryville, Albany and El Cerrito.

The proposal to ban coal was co-sponsored by Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Councilmember Dan Kalb who carried the legislation in the council, which called for a ban on petcoke (a toxic coal processing byproduct) in addition to coal. Council member Desley Books was absent from the vote.

Oakland Councilmember Kalb, who played a leading role in the council, said, "With this new law, we're taking the steps needed to protect our community, our workers, and our planet."

A growing trend

With this action, the Oakland City Council joins other West Coast cities calling for a ban on coal. Portland, Ore. was the first city in the country to do so last year. That was followed this year by Oregon becoming the first state to ban coal for the state's electric supply.

In California, State Senator Loni Hancock earlier this month handily won approval in the state senate of two bills, one of which would put significant roadblocks to Tagami's plans to turn Oakland into a major coal export hub.

SB1277 would require additional environmental review for the plan to ship up to 10 million tons of coal per year through Oakland.

The other would prohibit the California Transportation Commission from allocating any state funds for projects proposed after Jan. 1, 2017, for the handling, storage, or transportation of coal at any port facility located in or adjacent to a disadvantaged community.

Before becoming law, the bills would have to be approved by the state assembly and then signed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

"No" to the coal train

Margaret Gordon, a long-time resident of West Oakland and Co-Exec. Director of the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, told the World that the coal train would have brought "more asthma, lung cancer and COPD" in a community, largely African American and people of color already suffering disproportionally from these illnesses.

Gordon, who lives one mile from the port complex and a mile from the rail lines leading to it, said the coal would have come to "hound us after 20 odd years of fighting for reduction of diesel exhaust" and winning some positive results.

She said the spewing of diesel-generated pollutants has be drastically reduced with the upgrading of trucks and the replacement of diesel with electrification of other waterfront equipment.

But, the fight of Gordon, her neighbors and other members of the No Coal in Oakland coalition may not be over yet.

At the public hearing the developer's representatives threatened the council with suing the city if the ordinance banning coal went through.

By all accounts, the Ban Coal in Oakland coalition will endure as long as necessary.

Capturing the sentiment expressed by other coalition partners, Muhammed of the ILWU longshore union said, "On behalf of all the members of Local 10, we stand in solidarity."

Photo: A "No Coal in Oakland" rally before the city council meeting on Monday, June 27, 2016. | Peg Hunter via Flickr (CC)

Swimming in the gene pool: the haves and have nots

Kelly Sinclair — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 14:47:00 +0000

My Personal Genome Project ID is hu4DE348.

I'm part of a Harvard-initiated study which aims to sequence and publicize the complete genomes and medical records of 100,000 volunteers.

That's the goal, anyway. They're up to only 3,500 volunteers since beginning in 2005, probably due to budget constraints. I signed up early on, thinking because of my aunt's early death from colon cancer and my mother's narrow escape from that fate, my genes might reveal useful information for researchers in that field.

Plus, being a volunteer white mouse sounded cool. Back in 2005, the cost of having a complete genome sequenced was in the realm of tens of thousands of dollars. I knew I could never afford that, much like most other Americans.

A science geek with math blindness, I saw this as my chance to do research by proxy. Since results are made publicly available, volunteers had to pass an online exam on genetics to prove we were aware of the risks and scope of the study.

I passed it, then mailed my sputum sample in, which was sequenced by the team and uploaded to a publicly available page. It's not the complete genome, and since I couldn't go to any of the study's blood collection events on the West and East coasts, I was disappointed to learn in recent years that blood sample volunteers are the only ones whose complete genomes will ever be sequenced.

So, I'm not quite on the cutting edge of research as I'd hoped, but on occasion reports are posted with a potent familial angle. A pathogenic allele-let's call it bad gene-for prostate cancer (one brother contracted this decades too early for the usual patient), and yes, a bad gene for colon cancer.

But a bad gene isn't always a powerful indicator, and it works in conjunction with other factors along with one's prenatal and post-birth experiences.

Reading a brilliant book called The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee recently has prompted me to visit PGP's website after an absence of many months. A new medical report had been uploaded. It repeated the old deadly news about prostates and colons, but added a new one, about a bad gene associated with squamous cell carcinoma, which my sister successfully battled during this decade.

Mukherjee remarks in the book that certain genes thought of as being problematic can be useful in some contexts (as with Attention Deficit Disorder when one is hunting or being hunted) but not so much in others (as with the same disorder, but in a classroom).

My sister's carcinoma is obviously not useful in any situation. I can see how knowledge of one's genome, as translated by scientists, can be a valuable part of a medical record. That I'm finding out this data too late to help my family is disappointing.

Any person, regardless of income, should have voluntary and informed access to their genetic profile. As researchers learn more about how our genes operate, and the factors that influence them, it's tempting to sound the alarm about the dangers of too much knowledge in the wrong hands.

Government intrusion, health insurers, corporate testing to weed out job candidates, preference given to certain genetic profiles-these are real issues. But the biggest one in my view is that such genome editing techniques as CRISPR, in which scientists use bacteria to re-engineer genomes in crops and lab animals, are becoming realizable, although the ethics of such options are still not fully understood.

At some point, gene-based therapies for humans, even as early as the fetal stage, could mean the erasure of many of life's ailments. Yet the cost of such knowledge means the haves and have-nots could face an unjust divide regarding their respective genetic profiles.

Opponents of single-payer healthcare tend to rail that medical care is expensive because some people's lifestyle choices push up the costs for everyone else. A retail cashier and a well-paid lawyer with the same genetic profile and similar inclinations, however, have different healthcare options and interventions available.

Now think of a future in which that fortunate lawyer, thanks to early gene-based therapies, never develops high blood pressure or some other condition which we currently see as influenced by a poor choice. But the cashier does.

Then the "choice" to eat salt-laden or fatty foods can more clearly be seen as a decision made by someone whose options were never that great to begin with.

We live in an age where the tools to heal ourselves and our children are growing ever more powerful. Who gets access and at what cost? As a childless woman who volunteered to be a white mouse, and who is fortunate to have moderately good insurance, I don't have to worry about being targeted for my genetic profile.

Others may not be that lucky. Here is something to consider by people who opposes greater public access to health care and information: they're making that decision not only for themselves but also for their family's future.

A grandchild or a great-nephew may end up needing gene-based treatment that could have been scaled up for greater public access at a lesser cost per patient, as the result of progressive policies. But today's naysayers view the issue through glasses that only see morals and money, and not the promise of public science for public good.

Lawmakers and public policy researchers would do well to consider how access to biotechnology and genome engineering might figure in to public health outcomes-and they must include in their calculations the well-being of people who have yet to be born.

The future is now, in more ways than they think.

Investors pull funding from contested Honduran hydro project

Sarah S. Forth — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 13:27:00 +0000

European investors announced late last month they have pulled funding from the contested Agua Zarca hydroelectric project in western Honduras.

Finnish and Dutch development finance companies, FinnFund and FMO respectively, had suspended activities in Honduras following the March assassination of Berta Cáceres, an Indigenous Lenca woman and founder of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras: COPINH).

COPINH has been at the forefront of a multi-year campaign to stop the Agua Zarca project on Río Gualcarque, which they consider sacred and vital to Lenca survival. In 2015, Cáceres was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for leading that struggle.

Early in May, five men were arrested for Cáceres' murder. Two had direct ties to DESA, the Honduran development firm behind the hydroelectric project: Sergio Rodríguez, DESA's social issues manager, and Douglas Bustillo, retired military officer and DESA's former deputy chief of security. Two other military officers, one active and one retired, also were arrested, along with a gang member accused of being the hit man hired for $2,200.

While acknowledging that indictments were not the same as convictions, upon learning of DESA's connection with Cáceres' assassination FinnFund and FMO nonetheless sent representatives to Honduras to negotiate an end to their involvement with Agua Zarca (though not other Honduran energy projects). FMO had $15 million (USD) invested, FinnFund $5 million (USD).

Berta Cáceres, 44, was assassinated March 3 in her home in La Esperanza, Intibucá, Honduras. Also shot, and left for dead, was Mexican environmental activist Gustavo Castro Soto, who was in the country to discuss energy alternatives to the DESA project.

Local police detained Castro Soto and attempted to cast blame for the shootings on local COPINH leaders, whom they repeatedly interrogated while failing to interview DESA employees who had made threats against Cáceres.

Due to intense international condemnation of Cáceres' murder, the case was transferred to the national criminal investigation unit, bolstered by an attorney and a retired police investigator from the U.S., which subsequently had the five suspects arrested.

Following the indictments, COPINH and Cáceres' family issued statements saying the arrests confirmed their belief that DESA had instigated the assassination, but expressing doubts that the "intellectual authors" of the crime would ever be brought to light. They have repeatedly called for an independent assassination investigation conducted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a demand the Honduran government has thus far resisted.

Given the country's high degree of impunity, such doubts are well founded. Honduras has long been ruled by an oligarchy known to take drastic, sometimes violent, actions in response to threats to their control, the 2009 coup overturning the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya being a case in point. Zelaya had raised the minimum wage 60 percent and pledged to mediate land disputes between campesinos and the corporations that had acquired control of vast swaths of prime Honduran real estate.

Since the coup, more than 200 campesinos have been murdered in the northeast Aguan Valley in response to their attempts to reoccupy traditional land holdings appropriated for giant African palm and sugar cane plantations.

Though FinnFund and FMO have withdrawn their investments, the Agua Zarca hydro plant may yet be built. The Atala family, which controls the DESA board of directors, also owns Ficosah, one of Honduras' largest banks.

Until recently, DESA's financial details - who its investors were and who sat on its board of directors - were a closely held secret. In early May, Honduran investigative journalist Felix Molina published this information on his Facebook page, including the facts that a close family member of Honduran Secretary of Security Pacheco Tinoco serves as secretary of the DESA board, and that DESA's president is West Point graduate and former counterintelligence officer Roberto David Castillo Mejía, whose uncle is a long-serving congressman from the ruling National Party.

Following these revelations, Molina survived an assassination attempt with multiple gunshot wounds.

In response to such flagrant attempts to silence critics and activists, Honduran human rights defenders this week journeyed to Geneva, Switzerland, where their government is to appear before the U.N. Human Rights Council for a periodic policy review. Fifty-four organizations have compiled a report that counters the official, sanitized version being presented to the U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Released through FIAN, an international human rights organization, the report claims the Honduran government blocked participation of civil society groups in preparation of the official report. It goes on to detail violation of Indigenous rights to "free, prior and informed consent" before development or resource extraction proceeds on their ancestral lands; violence against women and discrimination against LGBT individuals; and displacement of campesino communities, among other state crimes.

The alternative report sets these violations in the context of widespread poverty, inequality and violence in Honduras, noting that approximately 20 percent of the richest Hondurans earn 60 percent of national income, while the poorest 20 percent earn only 2.02 percent. In the meantime, defense expenditures since the coup have risen 161 percent, while those for education have increased a mere 11 percent and for health, 29 percent.

Photo: Women protest killing of Berta Cáceres. | Fernando Antonio/AP

Labor Secretary: Cleaning the environment will boost economy

Tom Gemuska — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 13:01:00 +0000

CLEVELAND - Cleaning up the environment is "an economic tool" to provide good jobs for U.S. workers, Obama administration Labor Secretary Thomas Perez says.

And cleaning up the environment and good jobs are not contradictory goals, either, he declares.

Perez sounded those two themes as the keynote speaker at the annual Good Jobs Green Jobs national conference, held this year in Cleveland on June 6. Delegates, including some union delegates and leaders, discussed opportunities related to clean energy initiatives and how they will create and maintain quality jobs.

Their key points included that not just restoring the environment but rebuilding our creaky and aging infrastructure - while also making it more environmentally friendly - would provide those good jobs.

"The economic wind at our back results in the shared prosperity for everyone," Perez said. "That is the basic work of the Department of Labor and the Environmental Protection Agency, ensuring that we attack climate change and are environmental stewards."

Perez said the nation must come together and tackle environmental challenges it faces, including working to ensure the implementation of common-sense regulations.

"As I work at the Department of Labor, we hear the tired arguments that businesses can either protect a worker or make a profit," Perez said. "I make house calls and I've met so many people building profitable businesses and protecting workers - such as the International Masonry Institute in Bowie, Md."

While announcing new safety standards related to silica dust in early April at the institute, Perez said nobody should have to walk into a job and give up their lives to that job.

"Facilities like IMI show facility safety and growth can go hand-in-hand," Perez said.

Perez added that development of wind and solar energy are ways to transform the environment. He mentioned a visit he made to Toledo, Ohio, about a year ago where he toured the Toledo Electrical Joint Apprenticeship and Training Center, where apprentice training includes learning about and working on wind turbine technology.

There, he met with apprentices who have good-paying careers working on clean-energy technology - jobs that cannot be shipped overseas.

Careers such as working on wind turbines and building solar panels are a key to creating a strong middle class, Perez said. He also referenced a new factory being constructed at an old steel mill in Buffalo, his native city. Once operational, the factory will become the largest manufacturing facility of solar panels in the Western Hemisphere.

This union-built and union-employed factory will help produce much-needed American made products that provide clean energy and result in a cleaner environment, Perez said.

Besides creating clean energy, Perez said the nation must focus on improving its infrastructure." As an example, he discussed the preventable water crisis in Flint, Mich., calling it an abomination. Meanwhile, he noted, seven billion gallons of potable water are lost per day to leaks in drinking water pipes.

This should be the "low hanging fruit" of the movement to create good jobs while adding the environment, he told the audience. He then encouraged those in attendance to urge their federal lawmakers to support additional funding for capital infrastructure projects.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told conference attendees that demand for clean energy jobs needs to start at home. Nearly 70 percent of clean energy jobs are currently located overseas, he explained. "We supply less than 10 percent of global solar panels," Brown said.

Brown praised the Department of Energy's new partnership that will lead to the creation of a wind farm in Lake Erie. But he also spoke about the need to help the environment by stopping methane leaks that are occurring in old pipes in many cities throughout America. This work, he said, will create many jobs for plumbers and pipefitters.

Besides Perez and Brown, Plumbers and Pipefitters President William Hite received the 2016 Blue-Green Champions Award for the union's work during the Flint water crisis.

Members from union Local 307 volunteered their time, working tirelessly to help install new faucets and filters designed to reduce the amount of lead in the drinking water in almost 5,000 Flint homes. Additionally, members also purchased $20,000 worth of bottled water for the residents to use.

"When there's a crisis, and it has to do with water pipes or sanitation, never forget that the plumber protects the health of the nation," said Hite. He called the water crisis a disgusting development and a disgrace to the people who live in the city. But added that his members were happy to do what they could for the people of Flint.

The Flint water crisis, which saw lead poison its drinking water and permanently harm its kids, occurred because a state-appointed fiscal "czar," looking to save money, ordered the city's water source switched from relatively clean Lake Huron to the dirty Flint River, without needed equipment to prevent lead in Flint's old water pipes from contaminating the water. A public health doctor blew the whistle on the crisis, as officials ignored residents' complaints.

Hite also touched on his union's recent affiliation with the Roofers to help collect and conserve rainwater. Signed last year, the two unions are partnering on this important project to help train their members to install much needed water collection systems in areas where water conservation is mandated or a high priority.

Photo: Workers install photovoltaic panels at a solar plant in Germany. | Flickr/Windwarts Energie (CC)

Leave it in the ground: A new abolitionism needed for climate change

David Mirtz — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 14:18:00 +0000

The world's last best hope to address the climate-change crisis may be this November when millions of Americans vote in the upcoming elections. Often overshadowed by the debate on inequality, the power of Wall Street, and of course the spectacle of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, the November elections will be a turning point for the future of our planet and society.

If climate scientists are correct, then as Alan Neuhauser wrote just prior to the Paris Climate Summit last year, "the next candidate Americans send to the Oval Office...may also be the very last who can avert catastrophe from climate change."

Just last week, Paul Krugman sounded a similar alarm in the Times:

"We're at a peculiar moment when it comes to the environment - a moment of both fear and hope. The outlook for climate change if current policies continue has never looked worse, but the prospects for turning away from the path of destruction have never looked better. Everything depends on who ends up sitting in the White House for the next few years."

Peculiar indeed. So if you weren't stressed out enough about the next Supreme Court nominee or three, about the comb-over king having at his disposal the most powerful military force in the world, or about his refusal to accept basic democratic concepts like rule of law, it's now time to start getting stressed out. The fate of the planet - not just the country - may actually depend on whose name you put your X next to on November 8.

It will be tough even if he doesn't win

Even if "he who must not be named" is defeated in November, averting the many-layered crisis of climate change will still be a very heavy lift. For years, perhaps decades, we have heard that the "green economy" was right around the corner. Because scarce fossil fuels would become more and more expensive, market mechanisms like cap and trade, carbon pricing, and incentives for implementing energy efficiencies would transition us to a "carbonless" economy.

But "extreme energy" like fracking and other methods have made cheap carbon-based energy available for the foreseeable future. Even with energy efficiencies in vehicles, housing, and production, global demand for energy has increased, not decreased. Even though the know-how of renewable energy technology is available and increasingly more affordable, the growth of renewables as a source of total world consumption is still projected to reach only 12 percent by 2040 - nowhere near enough to be on track to solve a climate crisis that demands radical reductions in CO2 emissions now.

Add to this studies like one that appeared in Nature last year which said to remain within the 2C temperature limit (the level beyond which human action will be ineffective against the consequences of climate change), 82 percent of coal, 50 percent of gas, and a third of known oil reserves will have to stay unused in the ground. With the fossil fuel industry's long-term profitability and appeal to investors premised on those same as-yet unused reserves, leaving them "in the ground" effectively means putting the industry out of business.

A new abolitionism

Is dismantling an industry so intrinsic, so imbedded in the political economy of the world possible? As Naomi Klein asks in her book, This Changes Everything, "Has an economic shift of this kind ever happened before in history?" Are there places we can look, historical periods where such transformations took place that can illuminate the challenge?

The closest one can come to an answer would be the abolition of the global system of slave labor that played such a central role in the economic development of early capitalism. In The Nation a couple of years ago, Christopher Hayes broached the idea of a "new abolitionism" to deal with the problem of climate change. It's an idea worthy of further discussion.

Like the fossil industry today, slavery was, in historian Greg Gandin's words, "the flywheel on which America's market revolution turned - not just in the United States, but in all of the Americas." And similar to today's fossil fuel industry, slavery's power shaped the politics of its day even as it decayed into a system increasingly incompatible with the needs of the developing industrial societies of the U.S. and Europe. In The Nation a couple of years ago, Christopher Hayes broached the idea of a "new abolitionism" to deal with the problem of climate change. It's an idea worthy of further discussion.

The trend toward wage-labor and industrialization made the case that slavery's days were numbered, but with the possibility of westward expansion in the United States, the would come later rather than sooner without active prodding. And just as the carbon industry today won't willingly give up the trillions in profits represented by the carbon still in the ground, neither would the slavocracy abandon its source of wealth.

Just as many have still not concluded that saving the planet from climate change requires the "abolition" of fossil fuels, most had not concluded that the end of slavery was required to preserve the nation in the mid-1800s either. As historian Philip Foner illustrated in his preface to The Life and Writings of Fredrick Douglass:

"The United States entered the Civil War with the avowed object of preserving the Union, and only that. As the war continued, however, it became clear that to adhere to this position was to guarantee victory for the slave power. Gradually a fundamental change occurred in the thinking of the American people. From a confused and somewhat timid hope that slavery might die of its own weight if only it were held to the South, the lessons of the war brought to the vast majority of the Northern population the realization that slavery had been the primary cause of the conflict, and that the end of slavery was the only key to victory and a stable peace."

This "change of thinking," though, was not automatic. It required the active role of the abolitionist movement and leaders like Douglass to push it along. As Foner continues:

"It was the result of patient and persistent education carried on by the anti-slavery men and women. The contributions of Fredrick Douglass in this movement to educate public opinion in the North was of outstanding importance. From the very beginning of the conflict, when many other anti-slavery advocates were hesitant and indecisive, Douglass recognized the revolutionary implications of the Civil War, and clearly perceived that the objective purpose of this Second American Revolution was the destruction of slavery and the slave power."

Ultimately, slavery's end was the result of a broad, complicated, and contradictory movement. A movement that included the revolt and rebellions of the slaves themselves, the protests of the religious-based abolitionists, those for whom the preservation of the Union was paramount regardless of the outcome for the institution of slavery, and free-soilers (whites whose primary motivation was access to land that would otherwise be unavailable with the slave systems expansion to the western territories).

Like the complex and contradictory movement to end slavery, it will take a similarly broad and complex movement to challenge the power of "Big Carbon." It will have to be a movement that like Douglass's, recognizes the possibility of the moment. Though deeply flawed, the recent Paris Accord is a recognition of the world's need to address the climate change crisis. Until 55 countries representing 55 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions present formal ratification documents, however, the accord will not take effect. This brings into focus the need and the possibility for bold grassroots action.

Putting "big carbon" on the run

The wellspring of the carbon-based economy, the fossil-fuel industry, is becoming increasingly isolated. Movements against fracking, pipelines, and coal-fired powered plants have scored some meaningful victories. The halting of the Keystone XL pipeline and the achievement of a fracking ban in New York State are among the most notable.

The peddling of climate change denial has become increasingly embarrassing. Even petroleum giant Shell has joined corporations like Google and Facebook in withdrawing their support from the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, citing the latter's opposition to action on climate change as "clearly inconsistent" with its own outlook. Can marshalling these diverse movements create a "shift in popular thought" capable of coalescing into a powerful anti-carbon consensus? Can it bring about a new abolitionism?

Just as the original Abolitionist movement did in its time, so too must the "carbon abolition" movement bring together a broad alliance. This will mean nurturing connections with sectors of society not traditionally considered part of the progressive or environmental movements.

For example, as Tik Root noted recently, there is a growing Evangelical environmental movement: "The Evangelical Climate Initiative...has grown from about 15,000 people to over 800,000 in the past six years." They are aiming to reach 3 million within the next two.

For the secular environmental movement to ignore this potential ally would be costly, as it holds the promise of upending the right-wing coalition that serves as the base of the fossil fuel industry's political power.

2016: A climate referendum

Our upcoming elections will be pivotal in the fight to address climate change. Ironically, many in the Abolitionist movement only reluctantly supported Lincoln in 1860, considering him not anti-slavery enough. Yet Lincoln's election became the most consequential event leading to the abolition of slavery. As Douglass himself explained: "Lincoln's election has vitiated their authority, and broken their power...it has demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at least an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency of the United States." Douglass went on to say, "Mr. Lincoln's election, breaks the enchantment, dispels this terrible nightmare, and awakes the nation to the consciousness of new powers and the possibility of a higher destiny than the perpetual bondage to an ignoble fear."

Today a majority of Americans believe that more must be done to address climate change, even as they hold mixed views as to how best to do that. There are differences around whether nuclear should be part of the renewable energy mix, and so on. As an important arena where millions of people can express their views on what is perhaps the defining issue confronting humanity, the upcoming elections will be a referendum on climate change even if it is not the central issue of the election.

By "vitiating the authority" of climate deniers in government (principally the GOP), a strong message is sent, both internationally and domestically, that addressing climate change is on the agenda for the U.S. Conversely, a win for climate deniers would lead the world to conclude that the U.S. is not serious about addressing the climate crisis and at the same time embolden the fossil fuel industry. On the heels of the Paris Accord, such an outcome would significantly undermine the building of a global consensus that the carbon-based energy industry must be dismantled and replaced with a renewable one.

Rift and reconciliation

Once you get past the climate deniers, the debate on climate change often revolves around jobs. When taking on the challenge involves altering how and where we work, communities can feel compelled to choose between "food on the table" and a "future." As such, even the weakened trade union movement in the United States is a central player in the political drama of the climate crisis.

Between unions like those of the Building Trades, whose jobs can often be tied to the fossil-fuel industry, and those whose future is more closely linked to addressing climate change, such as transportation or health, the rift has widened. It is one unlikely to be reconciled easily. As Sean Sweeney, the director of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) notes in explaining the divisions in the labor movement over Keystone XL: "This was no ordinary squabble, and there are no plans for a "group hug" moment of reconciliation...KXL could be a precursor to a more protracted and serious union leadership-level dispute in the years ahead."

Confronting the climate crisis and ensuring a just transition to a sustainable economy will require a deliberate effort to reconcile that rift. It will require "climate-friendly" unions to accept that mainstream environmental groups and the renewables industry will not lead a transition to a union-friendly sustainable economy without a hard push. Unions in the energy production and infrastructure industries, meanwhile, must make the perhaps more difficult recognition that policies addressing climate change are not the principle cause of union job loss.

Rather, their industries are already becoming increasingly capital-intensive and anti-union, as is the renewables industry and the U.S. economy generally. Energy is an industry in transition, just as the Longshoremen's union had to make bold choices when faced with an increasingly-automated industry in the form of containerization, "energy" unions will have to weigh short-term job protection with long-term job security. The renewable energy economy will not be a "worker-less" industry, but a world in the grips of a climate crisis is unlikely to be a union-friendly environment.

It is not that all "carbon-friendly" unions necessarily deny the threat of climate change. Indeed, some argue that a comprehensive approach must be taken. As IBEW president Lonnie Stephenson points out, "Human-caused climate change is real, and a real threat, but focusing on power generation in isolation - leaving out industry, agriculture, and transportation - ignores three-quarters of the problem. Everyone will benefit from an effective response so everyone should share in the cost."

A comprehensive approach can go a long way in reconciling the rift. Again though, the political climate will shape the debate. It will determine whether there will even be a debate at all. A loss for climate-change deniers in the upcoming elections will help to reframe the debate among trade unions and the labor movement generally, from the narrow "food or future" to "food and a future" - a just transition to a sustainable economy.

If the power of the fossil-fuel industry and anti-union forces over politics is resisted and reversed, the possibility opens, as Sweeney argues, for "unions in all sectors [to] work together to support an approach to energy and climate that is needs-based, grounded in the facts, and independent of both industry interests and the mainstream environmental groups."

Reconstruction

Like the carbon industry today, the power of the Southern slave owners shaped the politics of the day and determined the trajectory of the whole nation. At the time, their power seemed insurmountable. As Fredrick Douglass wrote, "For fifty years the country has taken the law from the lips of an exacting, haughty, and imperious slave oligarchy. The masters of slaves have been the masters of the Republic."

Likewise, the corporate-controlled energy industry has shaped the historical development of the economy to its own interests. Steering it away from a robust public transportation system to a car culture and all that that implies. Cultivating a vast agricultural system dependent on petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides that have exhausted soil fertility. Constructing an energy distribution system that precludes any alternatives.

Just as the Union could not be preserved without the abolition of slavery, climate change cannot be solved without squarely addressing the power of the fossil fuel industry and its control over energy production. As long as the latter remains in corporate hands, efforts to make a just transition to a sustainable economy will be stymied, as will worker power in these industries and in the growing renewable energy sector which is needed to address climate change. The alternative to corporate control is democratic control of energy production at all levels of society.

The defeat of the slave oligarchy in the Civil War began what historians have coined America's "Unfinished Revolution." Reconstruction was, in Eric Foner's words, "not only a specific time period, but also the beginning of an extended historical process: the adjustment of American society to the end of slavery." As with most profound changes, it did not unfold without conflict.

Reconstructing the economy on the basis of renewable energy requires defeating the power of the fossil-fuel industry specifically, but also challenging corporate domination of the economy and politics in general - the same power that has systematically sought to destroy organized labor and its influence. The fight for a just transition to a sustainable economy can afford workers in the energy industry and the labor movement in general, an opportunity to reshape the political economy of the nation in a direction that greater reflects their interests for today and the future.

The Nov. 8 elections may be the last chance to seize that opportunity.

Photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP

Company halts bee-killing chemicals as activists stir up a hornet’s nest

Blake Skylar — Wed, 18 May 2016 13:41:00 +0000

The movement to save the bees recently got a shot - or perhaps a sting - in the arm, when insect control producer Ortho, a subsidiary of Scotts Miracle-Gro, declared that it would begin to transition away from using chemicals that are harmful to the bee population, especially honeybees. The announcement by the Ohio-based company is very much fueled by growing pressure by activists who recently held various protests across California.

Just this week, May 16 in Oakland, one company that refuses to drop such chemicals, Bayer, was the target of a demonstration organized by Occupy Oakland's Environmental Justice Committee, calling for the end to the use of bee-killing pesticides.

"We are demanding the immediate ban of Clothianidin, [a] pesticide responsible for massive bee die-offs worldwide, which is produced by Bayer," said the group. "This pesticide has precipitated colony collapse disorder, threatening the livelihood of both large and small farmers as well as beekeepers. ... Pursuing profits at the risk of destroying the food supply, Bayer has successfully influenced public policy and stopped the EPA from banning this toxic pesticide. They're in our own backyard and we need to call attention to [it]."

Ortho's decision to ban the bee killers came on the heels of similar moves by Home Depot and Lowes, both of whom have stopped carrying neonics - that is, those chemicals that kill bees and other pollinating insects - in their garden care sections last year. It also coincides with state legislation passed by the Maryland General Assembly restricting the sale of products containing neonics. The bill is currently being reviewed by Gov. Larry Hogan, and if approved could be the first of its kind in the U.S., though other states - like California, Oregon, and Vermont - are studying the effects of neonics on pollinators and bee colony collapse, and passing legislation that re-evaluates such chemical products.

May Berenbaum, a bee expert and professor of entomology at the University of Illinois, said that introducing alternatives to neonics is important. She offered cautious praise for Ortho's decision, remarking, "There are still profound problems for bees, but this is a step toward removing one contributor to some of the problems." She added, however, that whatever replacement products they implement, could be just as bad, or worse. And colony collapse disorder, of course, remains a dire issue. "This is not the end," she said. "This is no time for complacency."

Perhaps no one recognizes that more than Pammela Wright, who has been a farmer and beekeeper for 26 years. She spoke by phone with the People's World from her farmhouse in the Ozark Mountains, some 200 miles south and west of St. Louis.

Wright described in detail how she and her now-deceased husband walked out to check on one of their 80 hives one day only to find that the queen was the only inhabitant of one of the once-busy hives. "They were all gone," she said. "All gone, except for the queen, she was alone. And it was the same way in the next hive and in the next one. I didn't know anything about colony collapse which was what I was witnessing.

"So many country fairs and so many farmers markets that I went to with that honey. Sustenance for us and joy for the people who brought the product. I was always a political activist and I'd show up everywhere with the honey and products made from it, but no more would come from those hives."

"I'm an old lady now and all I can manage really is the two hives I have left and the small amount of honey to fill a few jars."

Wright attributes the destruction of the bee colonies to the chemicals "that make all those bees lose their sense of direction. When they go out of the hive, the chemicals that have hurt them make them unable to find their ways back home."

Wright worries about the effects of the chemicals not just on the bees but on the workers who handle them.

"Beekeeping, it's heavy work," she said. "The people that make a living in the beekeeping industry are migratory now. They encounter these pesticides by companies like Monsanto and they're forced to move their bees to a new location."

And in terms of farming, that, she suggested, adds another dimension to the problem: "These companies have bought up so many of the farms and sources that they buy from. And even the crops that don't have harmful chemicals sprayed on them can be affected, due to cross-pollination." In other words, wind-strewn seeds that are genetically modified can find their way onto otherwise natural farmland, and ruin it.

Even worse, the chemicals don't merely affect those solitary bees who happen to browse the toxic flower. "When bees take pollen from a plant like that back to the hive, it poisons the entire hive. Other wild pollinators are also affected, like Monarch butterflies. They sat that it's from habitat loss, but the chemicals definitely play a role."

The issue of bee killing remains close to the hearts of many an activist. It was a hot topic at an event that took place Apr. 17 in San Diego's Balboa Park. Called EarthFair, it celebrated Earth Day and offered free entertainment devoted to important issues like health and sustainable living. One of the issues that brought people there that day was that of bees.

Imperial Beach resident Althea Komorowski showed up to get tips on what to plant near her home that will draw the beneficial insects there, so that she might play her part in fighting colony collapse. "I want to see what I can plant that will attract bees," she said. "I want to save those bees. I'm very worried about that."

But can people make a difference? "Beekeeping organizations have tried to lobby against these big corporations but they're not strong enough," Wright said. "In Europe many of these harmful products are banned, but in the U.S. the companies are smarter. Monsanto tries to get in good with the beekeepers and claim that they're somehow helping.

"You have to deal with the situation carefully. Many farmers are dependent upon these crops that have been genetically modified and they need to move away from that habit. But big farm organizations are tied in with these companies. Even some people in the farmers' union, in states with big memberships like Oklahoma and North Dakota, they don't see anything wrong with genetically modified seeds and using many of these pesticides."

So a part of the solution, it seems, is changing the conversation about bees, and continuing to work toward getting companies to ban harmful products, as has been done overseas. In the meantime, Wright's advice is, "Don't use products like Roundup. And the lawn industry is not your friend. People love to have big, beautiful lawns, but that's like a desert to bees. They need pollen. Grow a garden. Make sure you have a lot of flowering trees. If you want bees to thrive, you have to invite them."

Photo: "Save the bees" mural by a London artist trying to raise awareness of colony collapse disorder. | Louis Masai Michel, courtesy of EcoWatch

Researchers call for more study of Agent Orange effects on vets and their kids

Mike Hixenbaugh — Mon, 16 May 2016 14:40:00 +0000

This story was co-published with the Virginian-Pilot.

More than two decades of studying Agent Orange exposure hasn't produced a solid understanding of how the toxic herbicide has harmed Vietnam War veterans and possibly their children, according to a report released Thursday.

Additional research is long overdue, the report said, but the federal government hasn't done it.

Those are among the conclusions of a committee of researchers that, since 1991, has been charged by Congress with reviewing all available research into the effects of Agent Orange, which the U.S. military sprayed by the millions of gallons in Vietnam to kill forests and destroy enemy cover.

Over the years, the biennial reports produced by the committee have identified numerous illnesses linked to the herbicide, in some cases leading the Department of Veterans Affairs to extend disability compensation to thousands more veterans.

But in its tenth and final Agent Orange report - with most Vietnam vets now well into their 60s or older - the committee concluded there's still much to learn and not enough research underway, especially related to potential health consequences for the children and grandchildren of veterans who were exposed.

"Although progress has been made in understanding the health effects of exposure to the chemicals," the committee members wrote near the end of the 1,115-page report, there are still "significant gaps in our knowledge."

Some 2.6 million Vietnam veterans were potentially exposed to Agent Orange, which contained the chemical dioxin. Calls from veterans to extend the research committee's work for at least a few more years have so far gone unanswered in Congress. The provision of the 1991 Agent Orange Act that established the committee expired last fall.

The panel, working under the auspices of the federal Institute of Medicine, reviewed scientific literature on Agent Orange released between October 2012 and September 2014 for its final review.

The committee members' parting thoughts about the lack of necessary research offered a wake-up call to a federal bureaucracy and researchers who have largely moved on from studying the health consequences of a war that ended 40 years ago.

Even in their final report, the researchers cited a new study of veterans from Korea who served in Vietnam, leading them to conclude that Agent Orange exposure may be linked to bladder cancer and hypothyroidism - two conditions not currently covered by the VA. If certain conditions are linked to Agent Orange exposure, the VA assumes anyone with those conditions got them from their exposure and therefore makes them eligible for disability payments.

The decision over whether to begin compensating Vietnam veterans with those ailments rests with Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald. The VA is not bound by the committee's recommendations, a point made clear in report's final pages. The researchers listed more than 30 past suggestions - including calls for additional government-led studies - that apparently haven't been pursued by the VA or other agencies.

"Some of the recommendations that we've made are not new, that's correct," said Kenneth Ramos, chairman of the committee and an associate vice president at University of Arizona Health Sciences. "Why it has taken as long as it has taken for some of these things to come to fruition, I don't know the answer to them.

"But rather than finger pointing," Ramos added, "I think it's important to emphasize that the VA has begun to recognize the importance of studying these issues and is taking action."

Following the release of the latest report, the VA has assembled a group of subject matter experts "to determine how the recommendations can be implemented to help improve the health and well-being of Vietnam Veterans," VA spokesman Randal Noller said in an email.

The report, according to Rick Weidman of Vietnam Veterans of America, underscores what he called "25 years of willful ignorance" on the part of the VA: "They've tried to undo anything and everything that might lead to further research into the effects of Agent Orange exposure," said Weidman, the group's legislative director. "They are sitting on a mountain range of epidemiological evidence - not just for Vietnam guys, but the health records of every generation of veterans - and they have simply refused to mine the data for the purposes of research."

Vietnam Veterans of America has long been at loggerheads with the VA over compensation and research relating to Agent Orange.

Weidman and his colleagues called on President Obama and VA secretary McDonald to immediately add bladder cancer and hypothyroidism to the VA's list of Vietnam service-connected illnesses. They also want the agency to add three other ailments - hypertension, stroke and various neurological ailments similar to Parkinson's Disease - which were tied to Agent Orange exposure in past committee reports but are still not covered by the VA.

It's not clear how many Vietnam veterans suffer from those conditions or how much it would cost to begin compensating them. The VA spent $22.4 billion to compensate Vietnam-era vets in fiscal year 2014 (the most recent year for which data is available), a figure that includes monthly cash payments, but not health care services.

As it concludes its work, the committee specifically lamented the lack of meaningful research into birth defects and other health problems in children of male veterans born after the war. For decades, Vietnam veterans have argued that their exposure has affected their children, but there's been little research on the matter and, as a result, no conclusive evidence.

That dearth of evidence led the researchers to reverse their previous position connecting spina bifida with a father's exposure to Agent Orange. No new research into the matter has been conducted since 1996, the committee wrote, even though recent rodent studies indicate it's possible that a father's exposure to toxins can affect sperm DNA and cause birth defects and other disorders later in life.

Despite the lack of research, the VA provides benefits for a limited number of birth defects in children of Vietnam veterans, including spina bifida for children of all vets (male and female) and 18 other health conditions solely for children of female vets. As of last year, about 1,200 offspring with spina bifida were receiving those benefits, along with 14 children of female veterans with other covered birth defects, according the VA.

Heather Bowser, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran and co-founder of the Children of Vietnam Veterans Health Alliance, said she was disturbed by the committee's reversal on spina bifida, fearing the VA could move to take away benefits from those already receiving them. (The VA has not sought to do this in the past.) However she supports the committee's call for additional research, which she says is "long overdue."

Bowser's group advocates for thousands of members who believe their health problems are the result of their fathers' service in Vietnam.

With a new generation of troops now returning from war, the researchers also called on the VA and the Department of Defense to work together to better understand how wartime environmental exposures might affect future veterans and their offspring - even if it's too late for those who served in Vietnam.

"One of the biggest challenges for the past 30 years as we looked back at all this data on Vietnam veterans has been the fact that the important data was never collected to begin with," said Ramos, the committee chairman. "Therefore, I think it behooves our society and our government to do whatever it takes to accumulate the relevant data so we can understand how veterans of future conflicts have been affected."

The Vietnam Veterans of America and other groups are calling on Congress to create a national VA research center to study the generational health consequences for veterans - spanning all conflicts, from Vietnam to Iraq - who have been exposed to toxic substances. A bill to do this, the Toxic Exposure Research Act, has 179 co-sponsors in the House and 40 co-sponsors in the Senate.

Weidman, who served a tour in Vietnam with the Army, said the report released Thursday proves the legislation is needed.

"We are going to press hard to get this done, and we are going to keep pressing them," Weidman said. "This research will be coming too late for a lot of Vietnam vets, but it's not too late to take care of our children, and it's not too late yet to take care of the veterans who've come after as."

This article was reposted from ProPublica.

Photo: Vietnam veteran John Kirkwood's first claim for Agent Orange benefits was denied by the Department of Veteran Affairs. | ProPublica

Why is it so hard for capitalism to go green?

David Mirtz — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 14:03:00 +0000

This past Earth Day at the United Nations, leaders from around the world signed what is being called a "landmark agreement" to address the climate crisis. Without a doubt, it is a positive step forward and can help create the political momentum to address what is arguably the defining issue of this century. But as Coral Davenport noted in the New York Times when the accord was hammered out in Paris in December, "The new deal will not, on its own, solve global warming."

Scientists say the greenhouse emission targets that the parties agree to will only count for about half of what is needed to stop atmospheric temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). That's the point where many studies say the world becomes locked into a future of rising sea levels, drought, flooding, more destructive weather patterns, and shortages of food and water.

Put simply, even if the carbon emission reduction goals laid out by the accord are met, we are still well on our way to a tipping point for global temperatures where human action will become ineffective. We should take special note as well of the non-binding character of the accord and the fact that rather than being shaped by what's going on in the rest of the world, it had everything to do with politics here in the U.S.

As Davenport described, "[The agreement's] hybrid legal structure was explicitly designed in response to the political reality in the United States. A deal that would have assigned legal requirements...would have been dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, where many members question the established science of human-caused climate change, and still more wish to thwart Mr. Obama's climate change agenda."

So in many respects, removing the main obstacle to addressing the global climate crisis rests squarely with us and, in no small degree, depends on the outcome of the upcoming presidential and Congressional elections. Though it might sound overly dramatic, with the window for action quickly closing to only a few decades, or perhaps even years, a GOP victory in November could effectively be "game over" for life as we know it.

A new relationship to nature: capitalism and the environment

As decisive as the November elections will be to our long term efforts to prevent catastrophe, we must look deeper to fully understand our inability to address this unfolding crisis. It requires a look at our carbon-based economy and the economic theories that underpin it.

Classical economic theory arose with the emergence of capitalism, with its new forms of ownership and operating principles. It reflected the interests of its leading classes as they pushed feudalism to the side. Private property, as ordained by law and not "divine right" as under feudalism, became central to economic activity, and with it emerged a new relationship of humanity to the natural world.

No longer could the ordinary citizen rely on a direct relationship to nature and the land for subsistence and development. The new economic system forced increasingly greater numbers of people to rely exclusively on wage-labor for survival. Access to and exploitation of the natural world now became the privilege of a few.

As mercantile capitalism developed into industrial capitalism with its reliance on carbon-based power and increasingly industrialized agricultural methods, the social impact of pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources was not a consideration. As Friedrich Engels noted in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man:

"In relation to nature...[capitalism] is predominately concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly opposite in character."

Nature, in classical economic theory, was considered a "gift." So for much of capitalism's development, the accounting of its impact on the environment and ecology was not considered. These "free gifts" of nature were seemingly unlimited, and capitalism's impact on the environment and ecology, though not inconsequential, was for the time being ignorable.

Economic policy and the environment

It wasn't until the mid-20th century that mainstream economic theory began to address the environmental impact of capitalist production and think about how capitalism could "go green." The emergence of the modern environmental movement and the publication of books like Silent Spring by Rachel Carson focused public awareness on growing levels of pollution, health problems associated with the use of pesticides in agriculture, and the massive amounts of industrial waste and garbage produced by the economy.

At the time, New Deal/Keynesian economic policies were prominent and the government's role in addressing social needs and problems was an established and accepted part of political and economic life. The Clean Air Act and other regulations seeking to ameliorate the most apparent impacts of economic activity on the environment and people met with some notable success. At least in the U.S., the water and air became cleaner and exposure to toxins was reduced. Carbon emissions though - the driving force behind climate change - continued unabated and even intensified. According to David Ray Griffin in his book Unprecedented, from its 275 ppm (parts per million) atmospheric base-line before the industrial revolution, carbon "has been rising at an ever-increasing rate. Between 1958 and 1968, it rose from 316 to 324. In each of the following decades, it rose more than the previous decade. By 1978, it had risen to 336. By 1988, to 352. By 1998, to 367."

In the 1970s though, the dominant capitalist economies again began to experience problems of slow-growth, declining profits, and instability. The profound global character of late 20th century capitalism made Keynesian responses to economic crisis insufficient. As economist Michael Yates described, "the greater interconnection among national economies, through trade in goods and services as well as various kinds of money flows, greatly reduces the expansionary effects of such a program." Soon the legitimacy of government action was seriously challenged. Neoliberal economic thought, which came to prominence in addressing the crisis, sought to restore profits and economic growth by resurrecting the orthodoxy of the free market.

It was now argued that government policies aimed at problems like climate change should be replaced with private sector and market measures. Mainstream economic theory viewed carbon emissions and their environmental impact as "externalities," that is, unintended side-effects from economic activity.

The problem with this view, as described by environmental economist J.E. De Steiguer, lay in "the common property nature" that it ascribed to environmental resources: "Since the oceans and the atmosphere belonged to everyone, hence to no one, they were freely exploitable." As with any other property held in common, these economic theories predicted market failure and thus a reduction of social well-being. The logical solution then, was to "define" the rights of this common property through privatization. Only market mechanisms could account for these "externalities" of common property mismanagement.

These market-driven approaches are still the main way governments and international bodies seek to address climate change. As the Climate Conference of the International Transport Workers' Federation concluded in 2010, "Important policy and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund...acknowledge climate change, but...continue to promote neoliberal, trade-led globalization that has seen emissions levels accelerate in recent years."

In fact, emissions have spiked as the consequences of the 30-plus years of neoliberal economic policies and global economic restructuring come to fruition. By the time of the 2008 economic crisis, carbon emissions reached 368 ppm, up from 1978's measurement of 336. Only six years later, they were already at almost 400. And now, atmospheric concentrations are over 400 on a daily basis.

Confronting carbon and capitalism

It is undeniable that the recent Paris Accord is a recognition of the world's need to address climate change, but will it be a tipping point for action? For years, perhaps decades, we have heard that the "green economy" was right around the corner. As fossil fuels became more and more expensive, market mechanisms like "cap and trade," carbon taxes, and incentives for implementing energy efficiencies would transition us to a "carbonless economy."

But "extreme energy," such as fracking and other methods of extraction, has made cheap carbon-based energy available for the foreseeable future. The current glut of such energy on the market provides little to no economic incentive for a transition. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects the growth of renewables as a source of total world consumption to reach only 15% by 2040.

With the climate crisis demanding radical reductions in CO2 emissions now, however, such market-driven measures offer little to get us toward that end. Clearly more than market mechanisms are needed. A consensus to dismantle the carbon-based energy industry is required.

As Sean Sweeney, director of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy has argued: "A low carbon and truly sustainable political economy will not be 'incentivized' into existence. Regulatory and market-based approaches - including carbon markets and taxes - have failed because they do not confront the power of the corporations and their control over energy resources, infrastructure, and markets."

Perhaps just as profound an obstacle to action as the worshiping at the alter of markets is the faith in the gods of growth - the idea that a green economy will be a "growth" economy. The proposals of even the greenest New Dealers - the Keynesians who correctly premised their policies on the real flaws and limitations of economic markets - presume a growth economy even if it is a "green" one. But even in this age of global economic stagnation of slow growth and sagging demand, energy consumption has increased and global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

The contradiction between environmental sustainability and economic growth is so stark that some economists have begun to argue for a "no-growth" economy. Tim Jackson, for instance, says in Prosperity Without Growth that it is "entirely fanciful to suppose that 'deep' emission and resource cuts can be achieved without confronting the structure of market economies."

The "green with growth" model becomes questionable when looked at globally as well. Rich countries like the U.S. account for 60 percent of annual emissions right now and 80 percent historically. Not to diminish the real advances toward clean energy in places like Germany and Scandinavia, but these "clean" economies are possible in no small part due to the "outsourcing" of carbon to countries like China and India. As these developing economies orient themselves towards domestic consumption, their carbon footprint will only increase.

If solving the climate crisis requires a no-growth economy, then contemporary economic theory must address some basic questions about the rights of ownership, property, and wealth. Today, 85 billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of the earth's population. As the majority of humanity faces a deprivation that promises to only intensify under the challenges of climate change, the logic of an economy that has the private appropriation of socially-produced wealth as its central principal seems deeply flawed.

False profits

A truly green economy would require us to, as Tim Jackson says, "revisit and reframe the concepts of productivity, profitability, asset ownership, and control over the distribution of surpluses." In the first place, it would require an accounting of the cost to nature and future generations.

For example, a 2013 report by TruCost, commissioned by the United Nations, concluded that no major industry would be profitable (not even close) if the cost of their environmental impact was included. As much investment in energy production is premised on future assets, mainstream economics, by omitting the true cost of capitalist-oriented production to the environment, distorts capitalism's long-term profitability. If the transition to a "green" economy requires an accounting of the costs to the natural world (how could it not?), then how can capitalism, famously described by economist K. William Kapp as "an economy of unpaid costs," make that transition voluntarily?

Chances are good that it won't.

And that is why the Paris Accord, though deeply flawed, is important. The agreement won't take effect until 55 countries representing 55 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions present their formal ratification documents at the UN. That will take the determined effort of millions of people wanting to save the planet for themselves and future generations to pressure their national governments to take action.

What happens here in the United States over the next six months is of crucial importance. Just as momentum is beginning to build globally, a victory for GOP climate-change deniers in November will put on the brakes at a time when we should be stepping on the gas.

This week in history: Chernobyl nuclear reactor explodes in USSR

Eric A. Gordon — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 11:18:00 +0000

From Chase's Calendar of Events (2012, slightly edited): "Thirty years ago, on April 26, 1986, at 1:23 a.m., an explosion occurred at the Chernobyl atomic power station at Pripyat, Ukrainian SSR, 78 miles north as the crow flies from the capital city of Kiev. The resulting fire burned for days, sending radioactive material into the atmosphere. More than 100,000 persons were evacuated from a 300 square-mile area around the plant. Three months later 31 people were reported to have died and thousands exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Estimates projected an additional 1,000 cancer cases in nations downwind of the radioactive discharge. The plant was encased in a concrete tomb in an effort to prevent the still-hot reactor from overheating again and to minimize further release of radiation."

In the summer of 1980, after the Moscow Olympics had concluded, I had the good fortune of participating in an American peace mission to the USSR, organized by a Connecticut-based group called Promoting Enduring Peace. We visited five major cities and their environs, and in each place met with representatives of the Soviet Peace Committee for an exchange of views. My memories of the trip are especially clear because I shortly published an extensive account of it in the New England chain of Advocate newspapers, from which I offer the following excerpt adapted for publication here:

"At our meeting in Odessa we are faced by a panel of five or six men and one woman, most of them from the University. Someone from our group asks: Might there be some kind of common economic order that is neither capitalism nor communism? Some kind of convergence of the two systems? 'We don't depend on this evolution,' we are answered. 'Each system believes it's forever. But the important thing is to avoid war. In the last fifty years some U.S. theorists have come to see some good things here in the Soviet Union, so there's some hope. Your economist Galbraith recommends state ownership of industries but without ideological underpinnings.'

"In answer to our question about the dangers of nuclear power and particularly nuclear wastes, we are assured that research is going on in solar, water and thermal energy, but that so far it is only theoretical. New methods of re-using nuclear wastes are being developed, but in any case there is no problem because the Soviet Union has strict laws about radioactive materials. After several of these responses, the woman on the panel, who has not addressed any of our questions, leans over to her colleagues and makes remarks in Russian, as if to correct or amplify their comments, but her additions are not translated. When the formal part of the session is concluded, I and several of the women in our group surround her to ask more questions.

"In absolutely fluent English she criticizes what she calls the 'lyricism' of the Soviet responses, in other words their needless defensiveness, and appreciates the Americans' need to hear more candid, balanced statements....

"Afterwards I feel somewhat chagrined with myself, for I am feeling that here, finally, is a Soviet citizen speaking with us on a private level, but also within a semi-official context, whose ability to examine issues objectively and to acknowledge continuing problem areas in Soviet life is unfettered by tight ideological restraints. Am I so conditioned by my own values that I only half accept what I hear in the more customary self-confident, unquestioning tones of Soviet pronouncements? That I believe critical statements are somehow more 'true' than other assertions? That I have come all this way here only to confirm my own ideas?"

When I wrote that long article, which I mailed to every participant in our group, I did not include mention of a further exchange on that panel because I figured my report might well find its way back to the USSR, courtesy of some very ardent Communist Party members on our tour, and I did not wish to cause any problem for that panelist who differed in her view of things.

At that session where I raised the problem of storage of nuclear waste, our panelists assured us that from our point of view this was a reasonable question, for in a capitalist society private contractors took advantage of every loophole and cut every corner to maximize profits, so no wonder our nuclear plants were not safe. But in the Soviet Union, a socialist country, they go the extra mile to ensure that every precaution is put into place, every safeguard secure, because the government and the nuclear industry and the people are all one and share the same interests. I said, Fine, but how long is the radioactive half-life of nuclear waste - 25,000 years? - and how can you know that this country will still be socialist at that time? Some of our own group - Party members, I was sure - rose to object to my "hostile" questions. And then afterward, that woman from the panel, who had not spoken for her side except privately to her colleagues, approached me over refreshments, saying that the answers I had been offered were too over-confident, and that in fact some scientists there were asking the same questions.

Six years later Chernobyl blew, and the way the government handled that incident, minimizing and denying risks, discouraging accurate reportage and access, helped to destroy the Soviets' basic trust in their system. And by that time Mikhail Gorbachev was already in power, the great reformer and liberalizer. Within five years the USSR was no more.

I'm so glad I had the opportunity to experience three weeks in the life of the Soviet Union at its height, and I should not fail to add, I saw a great deal that was healthy and positive. I left there with a profound sense that it was extremely difficult in such an authoritarian state to effect real and substantive change, with isolation, silence and punishment your only reward for speaking what you knew to be true, or even for asking the wrong questions. I was a socialist going there, and a socialist coming home, but my ideas about what socialism meant not only on a policy level, but in the quality of our day-to-day exchanges, became inextricably wedded to the norms of free speech and democratic rights that we knew - at least some of the time - in the West. And I do not believe our capitalist system, or any system, is forever.

Photo: AP

Beyond Flint: Water safety is a life or death issue

Blake Skylar — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 14:47:00 +0000

As the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan has shown us, lead poisoning in water is not just an environmental issue; it is a matter of irresponsibility, and an infrastructure emergency. The question, then, is whether the Flint disaster is merely a symptom of a much broader problem. All over the country, communities are forced to live with tainted water, and it's important to note that in many such cases, in the face of dire health concerns, states exhibit a shocking level of negligence.

It's the sort of negligence in which people's lives and wellbeing hang in the balance, as demonstrated when Michigan GOP Gov. Rick Snyder assigned a state-controlled "emergency manager" to make decisions regarding Flint water; the "manager," Darnell Earley, ultimately failed to manage much of anything when he ruled that citizens should drink the city's lead-tainted water. What's a little widespread illness and death, one could wonder, when such a measure saves the city $5 million over two years? It's this sort of thinking that dictates the terms of environmental and infrastructural management in other states, especially those largely run by Republicans.

This corruption has manifested also throughout small, rural towns in Texas, where 82,000 state residents have tested positive for high levels of arsenic, because their water sources are tainted with the stuff. And "state officials have told [those] people they don't need to find an 'alternative water supply'," according to the Environmental Integrity Project, which released a recent report tracking the violations of Safe Drinking Water standards and criticizing the lack of response or preventative action by state officials. The report noted that "drinking water systems serving 51,000 people in 34 Texas communities have violated the Safe Drinking Water standard for arsenic, a potent carcinogen, for more than a decade, but state health advisories continue to insist that the water is safe to drink."

Over in Flint, it was children who paid the steepest price for consuming poisoned water, and according to the city's pediatric physician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, "it causes irreversible damage. It can impact IQ and behavior. You don't mess around with lead." That situation is being replicated time and again, right under our noses, in schools all over the U.S. On Mar. 4, lead was detected for the second time in a middle school in Healdsburg, California, due to "a problem with lead levels in the drinking water," according to district superintendent Chris Vanden Heuvel. The first incident occurred in a local elementary school.

There is currently no government-approved recommendation to check for lead-contaminated water when children are found to have lead in their blood. The current screening protocols don't look at poisoning from water sources, but rather, focus entirely on matters like lead paint exposure. But much of the problem today lies in the pipes, not the walls. "Any [pre-1990s] building is a candidate for deterioration in the plumbing system, given the construction materials they used," said Heuvel.

"Lead paint is of course still a problem, but I don't think we've been producing any of it for years," said Tom Shepherd, member of the Chicago-based Southeast Environmental Task Force and the Sierra Club. He told the People's World, "At this point, the more critical issue is the lead in the water. Who would want to drink something that comes from that water in Flint?" The same goes for other communities, he added. "Look at the Grand Calumet River in west Indiana, where factories are dumping right into the water." These types of poisonings, he noted, are the ones that are widespread and dangerous to children.

Lead toxicity in water, however, is not solely to blame. It is often a product of greed-motivated officials simply turning a blind eye to drinking water - and decrepit infrastructure. "In Chicago," said Shepherd, "they realized years back that all these homes still had lead pipes. Our previous mayor, Daley, he used to talk a lot about water conservation. And then, of course, came the water department guys telling the residents to let their water run for 10 minutes before use because of the contaminated pipes. So there was quite a discrepancy."

The Flint crisis in particular served as a sobering reminder that U.S. infrastructure is falling apart; the American Society of Civil Engineers found that the approximate cost of fixing lead pipes, unsafe school buildings, mass transit systems, hazardous waste issues, and bridges would amount to roughly $3.6 trillion by 2020. And state Republicans - very much like Gov. Snyder - see those price tags as barriers, not motivators.

"We're supposed to depend on our public officials, but there's no accountability," Shepherd added. "This is going on now in states where tea party Republican governors take power. And these elected officials get their own [corrupt] people into the Departments of Public Works and Departments of Water Resources."

But the issue extends far beyond corruption on a state-by-state basis; Congress has been urged time and again to act on a job-creating infrastructure bill, but has opted instead for obstructionism in the face of any move to pass meaningful legislation that could literally save lives - lives like those in Flint, throughout Texas, and in towns like Healdsburg.

"And this isn't just happening in impoverished areas," Shepherd concluded. "The wealthy ought to be concerned too. Water contamination isn't just something that happens to the poor, it's not even something that just happens in the states. It's a worldwide problem."

Photo: Tragedies involving water contamination like the ongoing one in Flint, Michigan, are occurring in many other parts of the country due to outdated infrastructure, corruption or inaction on the part of elected officials, and outdated, crumbling infrastructure. Detroit Free Press | AP

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

Rev. Jim Conn — 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.

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

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

Anna Musso — 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

Rev. Jim Conn — 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

David Bacon — 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?

Blake Skylar — 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

A crucial tipping point for the environment

Marc Brodine — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 11:20:00 +0000

Many studies and writings about climate change discuss the essential tipping points for hospitable human life on earth, sometimes referred to as planetary boundaries. These range from the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to ozone levels to ocean acidification. Some studies propose nine, others break it up a bit differently.

Many scientists argue that humanity has already forced nature to pass four of these tipping points - some, especially the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (now consistently over 400 ppm), by a wide margin.

Other discussions of tipping points are geared to limits that we must not exceed without causing damage we can't recover from. For example, due to global warming, the Arctic is heating up at a rate about four times that of the world as a whole. That affects the massive areas of permafrost across the top of the northern hemisphere. Within that permafrost, much of it frozen for tens of thousands of years, are buried billions of tons of organic material that once defrosted will release massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane - enough to potentially overwhelm all human efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. We don't know with precision where the exact tipping point is which will result in this runaway train of emissions, but we certainly don't want to find out by crossing it.

While this approach still has many unknown variables and uncertainties, it offers a framework to understand the whole range of environmental crises that humanity faces. Climate change is in some ways the most basic, and in other ways the most crucial because it makes all the other environmental crises worse. But climate change, as the planetary boundaries framework makes clear, is not the only serious and potentially deadly to humanity environmental threat we face. We have to meet many challenges on many fronts to address the imbalance between how humans create the energy which enables developed human existence on the one hand, and the needs of nature upon which humanity depends in even more fundamental ways. We need water and air, and there is no other "product" which can be substituted if they become completely polluted with toxic substances.

Some commentators wish to frame these boundaries as opportunities. They point to spectacular growth in sustainable, renewable energy, and to many other technological advances being made.

However, there is an even more crucial tipping point that has been ignored - environmental movement tipping points.

Environmental movements have the sentiment of billions of people, though the actual organizations and the specific campaigns have been confined to much smaller groups. But the environmental movement and the other organizations and movements it allies itself with are reaching a crucial tipping point.

Millions have taken to the streets in many demonstrations around the world over the last several years, from the Peoples Climate March in September 2014 to innumerable smaller local marches on local environmental issues. Demands to "Keep It in the Ground" and to divest from fossil fuel corporations have taken root and are spreading. Major sections of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have been stopped by President Obama, following years of demonstrations, petitions, and creative acts of opposition. These movements played a big role in forcing the UN COP20 Conference in Paris last December to reach an unprecedented worldwide agreement, limited and inadequate though it was. And more is being planned for this year.

Issues of climate change and environmental policy will certainly play a role in the elections this fall. All the Republican contenders for their party's nomination reject climate change. Both Democratic candidates offer themselves as ready to take on the tasks of addressing how to slow climate change. All the Republican candidates want to eliminate or handcuff the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Democratic candidates want to strengthen it. Bernie Sanders spoke out early against the Keystone XL pipeline, forcing Clinton to join him in urging Obama to reject it, which he did. These conflicts will be one test of how close to a U.S. political tipping point we are.

Though many species are becoming extinct or having their habitat reduced or destroyed, it will take human action to fix the problem. For example, polar bears are "canaries in the coal mine" for global warming. However, we can't organize the polar bears to stop global warming - that will take organizing people.

The problem was created, at least in large part, by people, and only people can make the necessary changes. But it is really not people in general: It is the economic system within which people function - capitalism. Capitalism is based on a paradigm of infinite economic growth, but we live in a world which is finite. These two facts come into conflict. Furthermore, capitalism is based on capitalists paying as little as possible for the production which creates their profits, and that leads most of them and their managers to ignore the needs of nature to be able to reproduce itself.

So to the 9 Planetary Tipping Points, I propose we add as a counterweight the Environmental Movement Tipping Point, the event horizon which will signal a movement large enough, united enough, and militant enough to challenge the system which is creating or exacerbating the many environmental crises we face.

Photo: AP

Flint pediatrician says kids can make it with lots of help

John Rummel — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 13:47:00 +0000

ROYAL OAK, Mich - Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the Flint pediatric physician who first discovered high rates of lead exposure in Flint children, said "lead is a neuron toxin. It causes irreversible damage." Michigan Governor Rick Snyder had initially dismissed and scorned reports of extensive lead poisoning. "It's not a 9 to 5 issue. For the Governor it was. You don't mess around with lead."

Hanna-Attisha was speaking as an invited guest at the Royal Oak Democratic Party meeting last Saturday. She said her commitment to environmental justice began while in her early teens as a high school student at Royal Oak's Dondero High School. She was active in the school's Environmental Science Club that helped close an incinerator in neighboring Madison Heights. "A few activists can sometimes make an incredible difference," she said.

Another member of that high school science club, Elin Batanzo, a specialist in water quality and water infrastructure issues who had spent ten years at the Environmental Protection Agency, told Hanna-Attisha she had never heard of a water authority switching from a clean source of water (the Detroit water system) to a dirty source (the Flint River) and then not using phosphates for corrosion control.

Calling it a "perfect storm," Hanna-Attisha noted the Flint River water was very corrosive, it was going into an aging infrastructure, and the city had lots of lead plumbing.

She told the standing room only crowd that Flint residents did not sit silently by when foul water started coming out of their faucets in April of 2014. She said Flint, the city that gave birth to the United Auto Workers union, has a "proud history." Residents immediately began protesting at town council meetings. Pastors and their congregations joined the fight.

Hanna-Attisha said what happened to the children of Flint is horribly amplified because on top of every disparity Flint's population already has, (forty percent poverty, lower life expectancy) "you give them lead which can impact IQ and behavior."

She stressed there is still hope for Flint's children. The effects of lead are irreversible but we can do a lot. "We need to throw every resource at them." She has over ten pages of suggestions from early childhood intervention, to expansion of WIC (Women, Infant and Children program), to breast feeding education, expansion of mental health services, nutritional services and mobile food banks.

Expressing gratification for the nation's response and saying enough water has been collected, she urged those wanting to contribute to give to the Flint Child and Health Development Fund at www.Flintkids.org

Oakland County Commissioner Dave Woodward commented that Flint was the result of austerity policies meeting poverty, racism, and anti-democratic rule that caused the catastrophe, referring to the lack of action by the Governor and his appointed Emergency Manager, Darnell Earley.

Michigan Congressman Sander Levin (D-9^th) said Flint is a "wake up call for America." Levin warned we are going to have major crises in the country as long as we have people who refuse to raise taxes and allocate the necessary money.

He called for the passage of a Families of Flint Act introduced by Michigan Congressman Dan Kildee (D-5^th). The act calls for $1.5 billion, to be equally shared by the Federal government and state, to pay for infrastructure repairs in Flint, services to families exposed to lead and economic development and expanded youth employment opportunities.

Levin had a quick retort to those who say Democrats are politicizing the issue saying "that's the only way to get changes."

Photo: Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha speaks at U-M School of Public Health, Feb. 3, in Ann Arbor, Mich. Junfu Han | The Ann Arbor News via AP