Extreme Weather Devastating U.S. Raises Calls to Pass Biden’s Infrastructure Bill | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

Waterworld: Louisiana National Guardsmen with the 922nd Engineer Vertical Construction Company helped rescue 135 people and four dogs in the flooded community of LaPlace, Louisiana, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. (Photo credit: Louisiana National Guard/Flickr)

The infrastructure bill may not be enough to address the climate crisis; some lawmakers are urging the president to declare a national emergency.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

8 min read

On August 30, 2021, President Joe Biden committed the federal government to help Louisiana and Mississippi recover from Hurricane Ida’s devastation for “as long as it takes for you to recover.” With several federal agencies working on the massive recovery effort, the president added during the virtual briefing at the White House that “it’s in moments like these that we can certainly see the power of government to respond to the needs of the people.” The devastating hurricane has killed more than 60 people, left more than 1 million people without power, and could cost more than $50 billion in damages.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was quick to make the connection between Hurricane Ida and climate change. “Global warming is upon us,” he said. “When you get two record rainfalls in a week (in New York City), it’s not just coincidence. When you get all the changes that we have seen in weather, that’s not a coincidence… It’s going to get worse and worse and worse, unless we do something about it.” Schumer and other federal lawmakers have used Hurricane Ida as a selling point to pass Biden’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill—which includes several climate change mitigation and resiliency measures and passed the Senate on August 10—as well as the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation spending plan, which has been dubbed the “human infrastructure” bill. A recent poll found that a majority of Americans support both measures. “It’s so imperative to pass the two bills,” Schumer said.

The hurricane’s intensity was likely fueled by climate change. Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the connection between hurricanes and the climate, said of Ida’s power, “This is exactly the kind of thing we’re going to have to get used to as the planet warms.”

In their latest climate report published in August, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that human activity, particularly the combustion of fossil fuels, is the likely driver behind the increase in both the frequency and intensity of hurricanes over the past four decades. “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement on the report. “Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible.” Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and one of the report’s co-authors, meanwhile, offered a stern warning: “It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” she said, adding that there is “[n]owhere to run, nowhere to hide.”

Adding to the concern is the fact that the end of hurricane season is still far from over, as meteorologists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitor Hurricane Larry’s path across the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, Hurricane Ida is just one of the several extreme weather events that have caused death and destruction across the nation. Massive wildfires, fueled by extreme heat and dry conditions, are ripping through California, where more than 1 million acres have been burned in 2021. These are unprecedented times: Only twice in the history of California have wildfires raged from one side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range to the other, and both of those wildfires took place in August.

The National Interagency Fire Center has reported that more than 5 million acres have been charred this year nationwide as of September 7. Nearly half of the land area of the lower 48 states is currently experiencing drought, with the NOAA warning in August that these extremely dry conditions—with precipitation at below-average levels and temperatures at above-average levels—are likely to “continue at least into late fall,” according to the New York Times. As a whole, the United States experienced its hottest June in the 127 years since temperature records have been maintained, while July was Earth’s hottest month on record.

“Climate scientists were predicting exactly these kinds of things, that there would be an enhanced threat of these types of extreme events brought on by increased warming,” said Jonathan Martin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s very distressing. These are not encouraging signs for our immediate future.”

The increase in both the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and heat waves is providing a fitting backdrop for amplified calls to pass Biden’s infrastructure bill, which would help mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis by repairing 20,000 miles of aging roads and 10 of the country’s most economically crucial bridges to make them more resilient to extreme weather. The bill also seeks to accelerate the nation’s shift toward clean energy to achieve the Paris climate agreement’s goal of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions in order to limit the planet’s surface temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. (The agreement’s hope to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius now seems unlikely, given the findings of the new IPCC climate report.) The bill seeks to utilize a combination of federal spending and tax credits to improve transportation, broadband internet, housing and the electric grid, as well as financial support to advance the nation’s manufacturing capabilities, specifically those industries that the administration believes will help the United States compete economically with China.

The White House issued a fact sheet describing the president’s infrastructure plan, saying that it would “create a generation of good-paying union jobs and economic growth, and position the United States to win the 21st century, including on many of the key technologies needed to combat the climate crisis.” The bill would be the first to earmark spending specifically for climate resilience, including $6.8 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers to address federal flood control and ecosystem restoration projects, with an eye toward environmental justice, and calling for 40 percent of all climate-related investments to happen in disadvantaged communities.

“Mr. Biden’s pledge to tackle climate change is embedded throughout the plan,” reports Jim Tankersley for the New York Times. “Roads, bridges and airports would be made more resilient to the effects of more extreme storms, floods and fires wrought by a warming planet. Spending on research and development could help spur breakthroughs in cutting-edge clean technology, while plans to retrofit and weatherize millions of buildings would make them more energy efficient.”

In August, Schumer said that the bipartisan infrastructure bill and Democrats’ reconciliation spending package would cut the United States’ carbon dioxide emission levels by 45 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. He added, “When you add administrative actions being planned by the Biden administrative and many states—like New York, California, and Hawaii—we will hit our 50 percent target by 2030.” That is the goal that Biden set for the nation after he rejoined the Paris climate accord.

“In order to avoid the worst long-term consequences of the climate crisis, we need to put the U.S. on the path to 100 percent clean energy—otherwise, this summer may just be a preview of the disasters to come,” Brooke Still, senior director of digital strategy at the nonprofit League of Conservation Voters (LCV), told Earth | Food | Life recently in an email. “We know what a transition to clean energy will take: We need to stop using oil and coal and go big on clean energy. It’s clear the public agrees—71 percent of the public supports making the investments in climate, justice, and jobs that President Biden proposed. But climate deniers, fossil fuel interests, and obstructionist members of Congress are slowing things to a crawl.” LCV has launched a public petition urging Congress to “invest in clean energy and… in people and communities who too often have been left behind.”

While some lawmakers have pegged the two bills as key to combating climate change, others—including Representatives Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Matt Cartwright (D-PA), Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI)—are calling for the White House to take another measure: declare the climate crisis a national emergency. These congressional members, along with Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, have joined with several advocacy groups, including the California League of Conservation Voters, Global Warming Solutions, and Progressive Reform Network, to sponsor a public petition urging Biden to declare a national emergency due to the climate crisis. By doing so, President Biden would unlock certain executive options to tackle climate change directly.

“From Oregon to Texas, from wildfires to winter storms, the results of our inaction on climate change are visible every day. It’s a disaster and a grave threat to the future of our country and planet,” states the petition. “We’ve nibbled at the edges of the problem for too long. It’s time for bold action. One key step? President Biden should declare climate change a national emergency. That declaration will elevate climate change as a national security priority and allow us to devote more resources to cut carbon emissions, invest in clean energy, hold polluters accountable, and ensure climate justice for frontline communities.”

To achieve his goal of slashing annual emissions by 50 percent by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, Biden must eliminate around 2 billion metric tons of climate pollution from the nation’s energy system. “Is that even possible?” the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer asked Danielle Arostegui, a senior analyst for U.S. climate policy at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. She responded, “It’s not Can we do it? but Will we do it?” As the nation—and the world—steer through the climate crisis, it is becoming clear that our goals and our actions are not necessarily aligned. As the saying goes, where there’s a will, there’s a way. But just because there’s a way doesn’t mean there’s a will.

Robert Brulle, a sociologist who studies the influence of the fossil fuel industry on U.S. politics, framed the obstacle to ensure meaningful climate action bluntly: “It’s really hard to get people to change their way of life and existence.”

Take action…

Home sweet home? We only have one Earth to live on, and it’s one thing that we all have in common. (Photo credit: Ivan Radic/Flickr)

A group of representatives on Capitol Hill have joined with several advocacy groups to launch a public petition urging President Joe Biden to declare climate change a national emergency. “That declaration will elevate climate change as a national security priority and allow us to devote more resources to cut carbon emissions, invest in clean energy, hold polluters accountable, and ensure climate justice for frontline communities,” they write.

Urge President Joe Biden to declare climate change a national emergency.

Cause for concern…

Danger zone: The California National Guard was deployed in August to battle the Dixie wildfire, the second-largest wildfire in California’s history. (Photo credit: 1st Sgt. Harley Ramirez/U.S. Army National Guard/Flickr)

Round of applause…

Earth-friendly foods: Eating less meat and dairy —which accounts for 14.5 percent of anthropogenic global greenhouse gases—and more plant-based foods like fruits, vegetables, grains and beans is an excellent way to reduce your climate impact and stay healthy. (Photo credit: Stacy Spensley/Flickr)

ICYMI…

Treehuggers: Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service joined forces to plant trees and engage urban youth in conservation and biological sciences at Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2015. (Photo credit: Tom MacKenzie/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/Flickr)

“I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time following my 3-year-old son around and switching things off. I tried something new the other day: ‘It’s bad for the planet when you switch things on that you don’t need,’ I said. He stopped and looked at me for a moment, then switched off the light and continued playing. A small victory. This felt like the start of something we’ll need to continue talking about for many years. What’s clear to me now is that there won’t be a single moment when we need to have ‘the talk’ about climate change. Instead, climate change needs to be something that’s part of our everyday conversations and actions. It needs to be fun and engaging, solutions-focused, and fact-based. And, above all, it needs to start now. Here are five techniques that can help.”

—EFL fellow Lucy Goodchild van Hilten, “How to Talk to Kids About Climate Change (and Have Fun, Too),” (Yes! Magazine, March 7, 2019)

Parting thought…

Losing ground: Between 1990 and 2015, the Earth lost over one-third of its primary forests due to human activity. (Photo credit: benjgibbs/Flickr)

“For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.” —Martin Luther

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Taxpayers Are Funding Cruel and Outdated DOJ Training Programs That Kill Animals | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

Bad policy: “The use of animals for [the Department of Justice’s live tissue training] is expensive, obsolete, unnecessary and opposed by most Americans,” Representatives Matt Cartwright (D-PA) and Ted Lieu (D-CA) wrote to the agency in 2019. (Photo credit: Oliver Gouldthorpe/Flickr)

It makes no sense to continue wasting both tax dollars and animals’ lives.

By Stephen R. Kaufman, Independent Media Institute

3 min read

When I went to medical school in the 1980s, it was standard practice to have students cut apart live dogs and other animals as part of the curriculum to teach them medical skills and concepts. Since then, these crude and cruel animal labs have been abandoned in medical schools and advanced surgical courses in favor of realistic human simulators that are more humane, cost-efficient and effective.

Apparently, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) didn’t get the memo about this.

According to federal contracts uncovered by taxpayer watchdog White Coat Waste Project (WCW), for which I serve as a volunteer medical adviser, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (both under the DOJ) have still been conducting “live tissue training” (LTT) courses. LTT is a euphemism for inflicting traumatic, life-threatening injuries on live animals to teach certain emergency medical procedures.

As DOJ funding panel Chairman Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-PA) and House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) astutely wrote in a letter to the DOJ in 2019, “LTT involves intentionally wounding live animals—usually stabbing, burning and shooting pigs and goats, and sometimes even dogs—and then having trainees crudely attempt to repair the damage… The use of animals for this training is expensive, obsolete, unnecessary and opposed by most Americans.”

Many of the animals die from these traumatic injuries during the courses, and even those who survive are killed at the end.

The federal government’s own studies show that human simulators like the Cut Suit, TraumaMan and TOMManikin that mimic human anatomy—even replicating bleeding and breathing—are more effective and economical than these outdated animal labs. Unlike the animals who are purchased, transported, dismembered, killed and thrown away after every LTT course, each simulator can train many students and can be reused time and again.

Even the U.S. Defense Department states in a 2016 report that LTT is “outdated and cost-prohibitive” and a 2017 report from the Pentagon says that “live tissue training options are not anatomically accurate.” An Army-funded study at Yale concluded in 2015, “it is clear that simulated training costs less than live tissue training.” And a 2020 U.S. military-funded study concluded that human simulation is an effective replacement for LTT. 

Nearly every civilian trauma training program in the country now teaches lifesaving skills using simulation, too.

Adding insult to injury, the DOJ has already spent taxpayers’ money to purchase high-tech trauma simulators, but has continued to waste $131,793 on recent, completely unnecessary LTT courses anyway. The DOJ can’t defend this waste and abuse, so instead it tried to keep the details a secret, and it took a federal lawsuit by White Coat Waste Project to pry away relevant documents from the agency.

A majority of Americans on both sides of the aisle want change and support doing away with this outdated practice. A June 2020 national survey of 1,000 taxpayers by Lincoln Park Strategies found that 63 percent of them—which included 66 percent of Republicans surveyed and 65 percent of Democrats surveyed—backed the effort to ask the DOJ to defund LTT.

As a physician, medical educator and animal advocate, I oppose this senseless waste of tax dollars and animals’ lives. There needs to be political support from leaders like members of Congress and Attorney General Merrick Garland to take swift and decisive action to cut live tissue training from the curriculum.

###

Stephen R. Kaufman, MD, is a board-certified ophthalmologist and assistant professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He is also a volunteer medical adviser for the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project, which works to end taxpayer-funded animal experiments.

Take action…

Pig pals: Spending time with rescued pigs at Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, the nation’s largest farm animal rescue organization. Pigs are intelligent, emotional and cognitively complex, yet are subject to cruel, deadly and unnecessary experiments by the U.S. federal government. (Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals Media)

White Coat Waste Project: “The Department of Justice (DOJ) wastes American taxpayer money to fund cruel and wasteful live tissue training on pigs, goats, and possibly dogs. The DOJ sent $131,793 of your tax money to the FBI and U.S. Marshals service for animal abuse that would land an individual in jail. During live tissue training, pigs, goats, and sometimes even dogs are shot, stabbed, burned alive, and blown up. […] Many of the victims die from botched surgeries, and those who survive are killed anyways. What’s worse? The DOJ doesn’t need to butcher live animals for training. They already own more effective and more cost-efficient human patient simulators. Even the Defense Department has criticized live tissue training as ‘outdated and cost-prohibitive.’ There’s simply no excuse for these atrocities.”
 
Urge Congress to defund DOJ live tissue training.

Cause for concern…

Stormy weather: The crew of the International Space Station took this image of Hurricane Ida as the storm “made landfall in Louisiana… [on August] 29, 2021, with maximum sustained winds of 150 miles per hour,” NASA reported. (Photo credit: European Space Agency)

“Hurricanes are heat engines, feasting off warm, tropical waters,” reports Andrew Freedman for Axios. “The vast majority of extra heat going into the climate system from burning fossil fuels is being absorbed by the oceans, and the seas are warming as a result… A recent scientific assessment found that the planet’s oceans have warmed faster during the past 100 years than at any point in the past 11,000 years.”

Round of applause…

Poisoned ecosystems: The widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides in the United States has made the nation’s agricultural landscape 48 times more toxic to honeybees—and most likely other insects—than it was just 25 years ago, according to a 2019 study. (Photo credit: Aqua Mechanical/Flickr).

“Three common neonicotinoid insecticides were ruled ‘likely to adversely affect’ thousands of endangered species and critical habitats, according to draft biological evaluations released by EPA,” reports Emily Unglesbee for Progressive Farmer. “Now EPA will work with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to decide if additional changes need to be made to these insecticides’ labels or registrations to protect any of the affected species.”

ICYMI…

Depraved: Killing contest contestants bring their dead coyotes to be weighed and counted, Williamsport Fire Department, Williamsport, Indiana, on December 6, 2020. (Photo credit: The HSUS)

“You would really have to try hard to find anything more depraved than a wildlife killing contest, which targets coyotes, foxes, bobcats, squirrels, raccoons, crows and even wolves and cougars in some states, for the sake of a prize that could range from cash to hunting equipment. These contests are responsible for the mindless killing of an inconceivable number of animals, all under the guise of sport. Contests like these should be relegated to history books; instead, these events still take place in nearly all of the 42 states where wildlife killing contests are legal and result in the killing of thousands of animals every year.”

—EFL contributor Katie Stennes, “Undercover Investigations Expose Wildlife Killing Contest Brutality,” CounterPunch, July 21, 2021

Parting thought…

Monet’s muse: The European goldfinch is one of the many species of birds that the impressionist painter Claude Monet may have spotted in his garden in Giverny, France. (Photo credit: Bengt Nyman/Wikipedia)

“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.” —Claude Monet

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Climate Crisis Putting a Billion Children at ‘Extremely High Risk,’ Warns New UN Report | Take Action Tuesday @EarthFoodLife

Life at the extremes: Floods, like this one in Bangladesh in 2019, are becoming more common as extreme weather events linked to climate change increase in frequency and intensity. (Photo credit: Mohammad Rakibul Hasan/UN Women/Flickr)

Almost half of the world’s children are seriously threatened by the rapidly deteriorating global climate.

By Reynard Loki, Independent Media Institute

7 min read

“Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope,” said Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.” Now the famed young eco-warrior and Nobel Peace Prize nominee might get her wish as she, along with other youth activists, has collaborated with UNICEF—a United Nations agency working in more than 190 countries and territories to provide humanitarian and developmental aid to the world’s most disadvantaged children and adolescents—to launch an alarming new report that has found that a billion children across the world are at “extremely high risk” from the impacts of climate change.

Released ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in November in Glasgow, Scotland, and on the third anniversary of Fridays for Future (FFF), the youth-led global climate strike movement founded by Thunberg, “The Climate Crisis Is a Child Rights Crisis”​​ is the first climate report to combine high-resolution geographic maps detailing global environmental and climate impacts with maps that show regions where children are vulnerable due to an array of stressors, including poverty and lack of access to education, health care or clean water. The report introduces the new Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI), a composite index that ranks nations based on children’s exposure to climate shocks, providing the first comprehensive look at how exactly children are affected by the climate crisis, offering a road map for policymakers seeking to prioritize action based on those who are most at risk. Nick Rees, a policy specialist at UNICEF focusing on climate change and economic analysis and one of the report’s authors, told the Guardian that “[i]t essentially [shows] the likelihood of a child’s ability to survive climate change.”

“For the first time, we have a complete picture of where and how children are vulnerable to climate change, and that picture is almost unimaginably dire. Climate and environmental shocks are undermining the complete spectrum of children’s rights, from access to clean air, food and safe water; to education, housing, freedom from exploitation, and even their right to survive. Virtually no child’s life will be unaffected,” said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF’s executive director. “For three years, children have raised their voices around the world to demand action. UNICEF supports their calls for change with an unarguable message—the climate crisis is a child’s rights crisis.”

In addition to finding that approximately 1 billion children—nearly half the world’s child population—live in countries that are at an “extremely high risk” from climate impacts, the report found that almost every single child on the planet has been exposed to at least one climate or environmental stressor, such as air pollution, flooding, heat waves, tropical storms, flooding or drought. Moreover, the report found that 850 million children—approximately one-third of the world’s child population—are exposed to four or more stressors.Specifically, the CCRI found that 1 billion children are “highly exposed” to “exceedingly high levels of air pollution,” 920 million to water scarcity, 820 million to heat waves, 815 million to lead pollution, 600 million to vector-borne diseases, 400 million to tropical storms, 330 million to riverine flooding, and 240 million to coastal flooding.

Future leaders: Thousands of young activists rallied at the seventh annual “Youth for Climate” march in Brussels, Belgium, in February 2019. (Photo credit: The Left/Flickr)

“Children bear the greatest burden of climate change. Not only are they more vulnerable than adults to the extreme weather, toxic hazards and diseases it causes, but the planet is becoming a more dangerous place to live,” write Thunberg and three other youth climate activists with FFF: Adriana Calderón from Mexico, Farzana Faruk Jhumu from Bangladesh and Eric Njuguna from Kenya, in the report’s foreword. “In 1989, virtually every country in the world agreed children have rights to a clean environment to live in, clean air to breathe, water to drink and food to eat. Children also have rights to learn, relax and play. But with their lack of action on climate change, world leaders are failing this promise,” add the four youth activists, all part of the international youth-led Fridays for Future global climate strike movement. “Our futures are being destroyed, our rights violated, and our pleas ignored. Instead of going to school or living in a safe home, children are enduring famine, conflict and deadly diseases due to climate and environmental shocks. These shocks are propelling the world’s youngest, poorest and most vulnerable children further into poverty, making it harder for them to recover the next time a cyclone hits, or a wildfire sparks.”

“One of the reasons I’m a climate activist is because I was born into climate change like so many of us have been,” Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a youth campaigner from the Philippines who also helped launch the UNICEF report, told the Guardian. “I have such vivid memories of doing my homework by the candlelight as typhoons raged outside, wiping out the electricity, and growing up being afraid of drowning in my own bedroom because I would wake up to a flooded room.”

In addition to detailing the climate risks facing the world’s children, the CCRI reveals a worrisome inequity regarding who must ultimately deal with the consequences of climate change. The 33 extremely high-risk countries for children—including the Central African Republic, Chad, Nigeria, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau—collectively are responsible for a mere 9 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. This finding supports related research published in a 2020 report produced by Oxfam that found that the richest 1 percent of people are responsible for 15 percent of cumulative emissions—twice as much as the poorest half of the global population. “Climate change is deeply inequitable. While no child is responsible for rising global temperatures, they will pay the highest costs. The children from countries least responsible will suffer most of all,” said Fore.The UNICEF report’s authors connect this climate inequality to COVID-19, saying that the pandemic “has revealed the depth of what can go wrong if we do not listen to science and act rapidly in the face of a global crisis. It has laid bare the inequality that cuts across and within countries—the most vulnerable are often propelled further into poverty due to multiple risk factors, including poor access to vaccines, creating vicious cycles that are difficult to escape.”

Fighting for their future: Activists with the Taiwan Youth Climate Coalition rally on the Global Day of Action during the COP17 UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa, in December 2011. (Photo credit: Julian Koschorke/Speak Your Mind/theverb.org/Flickr)

In order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global net man-made emissions of carbon dioxide must be nearly halved by 2030, and reach “net zero” by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body for assessing the current state of the world’s climate science. The main problem is that the world’s nations are not meeting their targets to achieve these goals. In fact, a report released by the IPCC on August 9 found not only that climate change was “unequivocally” caused by human activity, but also that within two decades, rising temperatures will cause the planet to reach a significant turning point in global warming, with average global temperatures predicted to be warmer than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, causing more frequent and intense heat waves, droughts and extreme weather events. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the IPCC’s discouraging findings a “code red for humanity.”

“Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that,” Thunberg declared in an address to some 10,000 people gathered for a climate demonstration in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018. “There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground, so we can’t save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today.”

In their report, UNICEF calls on governments and businesses to protect children from the climate crisis not only by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also by increasing investments in health and hygiene services, education and clean water; providing children with climate education and green skills; including young people in climate negotiations and decision making; and ensuring a “green, low-carbon and inclusive” COVID-19 recovery “so that the capacity of future generations to address and respond to the climate crisis is not compromised.”

In December of 2011, during the COP17 UN climate talks held in Durban, South Africa, activists marched through the streets calling for action in the negotiations. Christiana Figueres, who was at the time the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (where she later oversaw the establishment of the Paris climate agreement in 2015), told the marchers that the children have a single message for climate negotiators: “Do more, do more, do more.” A decade later, with the Earth’s atmosphere heating up at a rate unprecedented in the last two millennia and economists suggesting that the Paris agreement may be doomed to fail, it’s becoming painfully clear that the UN—and the world’s political and business leaders—didn’t do nearly enough.

“There is still time for countries to commit to preventing the worst, including setting the appropriate carbon budgets to meet Paris targets, and ultimately taking the drastic action required to shift the economy away from fossil fuels,” write the UNICEF report youth activists Thunberg, Calderón, Jhumu and Njuguna, who committed to the climate fight, even if it means missing more days at school. “We will strike again and again until decision-makers change the course of humanity… We must acknowledge where we stand, treat climate change like the crisis it is and act with the urgency required to ensure today’s children inherit a liveable planet.”

Take action…

Burning problem: Air pollution can worsen asthma symptoms, and children are particularly at risk. More than 24 million Americans have asthma. Nearly 6 million of them are children. (Photo credit: Neal Wellons/Flickr)

“Nitrogen oxides (NOx) pollution from power plants contributes to harmful particle pollution and smog, and puts children and those with asthma at special risk,” writes Moms Clean Air Force, a coalition of parents working to fight air pollution. “Many power plants either do not have modern pollution controls for NOx installed or are not operating their controls optimally.”

Urge the EPA to ensure that U.S. power plants are not spewing massive pollution unchecked across state lines.

Cause for concern…

Pumping without permits: A pumpjack in the Permian Basin, a large oil and natural gas producing area located in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. (Photo credit: blake.thornberry/Flickr)

“A new analysis from Earthworks suggests that oil and gas producers in the Permian Basin in Texas, one of the largest oilfields in the world, are routinely emitting carbon dioxide and methane without the correct permits, with offenders including big names like Shell and Exxon,” reports Molly Taft for Earther.

Round of applause…

Poison spray: Approximately 1 billion pounds of conventional pesticides are used in the U.S. every single year. (Photo credit: Oregon Department of Agriculture/Flickr)

“A pesticide that’s been linked to neurological damage in children, including reduced IQ, loss of working memory, and attention deficit disorders, has been banned by the Biden administration following a years-long legal battle,” reports Vanessa Romo for NPR. “Health and labor organizations have been waging a campaign to revoke the use of chlorpyrifos for years. The EPA was considering a ban but under the Trump administration, the agency concluded there wasn’t enough evidence showing the harmful effects of the chemicals on humans and kept it on the market.”

ICYMI…

Trojan tree? An American chestnut hybrid bur. (Photo credit: Photolangelle.org)

“On August 18, 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a petition by researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) seeking federal approval to release their genetically engineered (GE) Darling 58 (D58) American chestnut tree into U.S. forests. Researchers claim the transgenic D58 tree will resist the fungal blight that, coupled with rampant overlogging, decimated the American chestnut population in the early 20th century. In fact, the GE American chestnut is a Trojan horse meant to open the doors to commercial GE trees designed for industrial plantations.”

—EFL contributor Anne Petermann, “USDA May Allow Genetically Modified Trees to Be Released Into the Wild,” Truthout, April 18, 2021

Parting thought…

Daily bread: People queuing to receive bread from Acme Bread in Berkeley, California, during the COVID-19 pandemic in August 2020. (Photo credit: Roger Jones/Flickr)

“My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share and that no one starves while I eat.” —Leo Tolstoy

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

How Do We Wake Up to the Living World Around Us and Respectfully Share It With Others?

Into the bush: An important habitat for several butterfly species, Bentley Wood, together with Blackmoor Copse, makes up one of the largest contiguous woodland areas in Wiltshire, England. (Photo credit: Snapdragon1959/Flickr) 

Finding our way back to nature starts with a single breath.

By Baptiste Morizot

5 min read

Editor’s Note: How do we wake up to the living world around us and respectfully share it with others? By following the trails of animals, says philosopher and environmentalist Baptise Morizot in On the Animal Trail (July 2021). Morizot wants us to develop a new relationship to the natural world: to become nature detectives and to follow the footprints of the many wonderful and extraordinary animals with which we share the earth—even wolves, bears, and snow leopards. It is through this kind of ‘philosophical tracking’ that we come to see the world from the animal’s point of view, and importantly, to learn to live in this world from the perspective of another species. Then can we begin to let go of our anthropocentric point of view, and recapture the kind of perspective that our ancestors had. Part philosophical treatise, part memoir, Morizot also recounts his own touching and, at times, heart-pounding encounters with the natural world in his own tracking expeditions across the globe.

The following excerpt is from On the Animal Trail, by Baptiste Morizot (Polity Books, 2021), and translated by Andrew Brown. This web adaptation was produced by Polity Books in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Tomorrow we’ll get a breath of fresh air. What fascinates me about this formulation is how the constraints of language poetically suggest something quite different from what you mean—how the phrase almost makes you hear the element most opposite to, and most complementary to, air, namely the ‘earth’ which the ear can almost hear hidden in the word ‘breath.’

To ‘get a breath of fresh air’ is also to be back on earth, earthly, or ‘terrestrial’ as Bruno Latour puts it. The fresh air that we breathe and that surrounds us, by the ancient miracle of photosynthesis, is the product of the breathing forces of the meadows and forests that we walk through, and which are themselves the gift of the living soils that we tread upon: the breath of fresh air is the metabolic activity of the earth. The atmospheric environment is living in the literal sense: it is the effect of living things and the environment that living beings maintain for themselves, and for us.

To get a breath of fresh air: the earth is disguised in the word ‘breath,’ but still perceptible—and once you are aware of it, you can’t ignore it. And the magic formula then invokes another world where there is no longer any separation between the celestial and the terrestrial, because the open air is the breath of the green earth. There’s no more opposition between the ethereal and the material, no more sky above us to ascend to, for we are already in the sky, which is none other than the earth inasmuch as it is alive—that is, built by the metabolic activity of living things, creating conditions that make our life possible. Getting a breath of fresh air is not about being in nature and far from civilization, because there is nature everywhere (apart from in shopping centers…). Nor does it mean being outside, but rather being everywhere at home on the living territories that are the basis of our subsistence and where each living thing inhabits the woven web of other living things.

Hello, fellow Earthling: A black bear footprint frozen in the snow near Echo Lake, California. (Photo credit: Mark Gunn/Flickr)

To get a breath of fresh air, however, is a bit demanding: urban life as such, disconnected from the circuits that convey biomass to us, disconnected from the elements and other forms of life, makes it very difficult to access fresh air. In the heart of cities, this means tracking migrating birds or practicing the geopolitics of permaculture vegetable gardens on a balcony. It means wondering where this tomato came from so that I can smell the sun and the portion of earth from which it was born, and see that earth with my own eyes. It means activating mutualist alliances with the worms of the worm composter to which we donate the leftovers from our kitchen and the shreds of our hair, so as to see and circulate solar energy in dynamic ecological processes rather than hiding them in lifeless rubbish bins. It’s more difficult, but even in the city you can get a breath of fresh air. With a little eco-sensitive vigilance, the living land reminds us of itself. It’s fascinating to feel how much we are connected to spring, how much it rises up in us, reaching into the very heart of the big cities, something we can see from a thousand little invigorating signs.

Being in the fresh air means simultaneously being enlarged by the living space around us when we take up room within it, and with our feet in the soil, lying on it as on a fantastic animal which bears us, a gigantic animal come back to life, rich in signs, in subtle relationships, a donor environment whose generosity is finally recognized, far removed from the myths that tell us we need to tyrannize the earth if it is to nourish us.

Being in the fresh air means being in the living atmosphere produced by the respiration of plants, since what they reject is what makes us. It means recognizing that the breath of fresh air and the earth are one and the same fabric, immersive, alive, made by living things in which we are caught up, mutually vulnerable—and thus forced into more diplomatic relations.

Being in the fresh air is, at one and the same time, an invigorating opening and a way of finding our way back to the earth.

###

Baptiste Morizot is a philosopher and lecturer at Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. He is the author of On the Animal Trail.

Take action…

Little wise ones: Threatened northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) fledglings stick close together on a branch. Earlier this year, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit to reinstate federal protections on the species’ essential habitat covering more than 3.4 million acres of federal old-growth forests. (Photo credit: Tom Kogut/USFS/USFWS Endangered Species/Flickr)

“There isn’t a moment to lose in the global extinction crisis. A species vanishes from the world every hour, and more than a million could be lost in the coming decades,” warns the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation organization headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

“It’s time for President Biden to declare the wildlife extinction crisis a national emergency. The declaration, under the National Emergencies Act, isn’t just symbolic. It will unlock key presidential powers to stem the loss of animals and plants in the United States and beyond.”

Urge President Biden to declare the wildlife extinction crisis a national emergency.

Letter to the editor…

​​​​Replying to “New UN Climate Report Is ‘Code Red for Humanity,’ but Joining Forces and Using Indigenous Knowledge Could Avert Disaster,” by EFL editor Reynard Loki:

“Good luck. Seems like pissing into the wind.” —Paul Whittaker, Ontario, Canada

Cause for concern…

Just infrastructure? President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. (Photo credit: Whitehouse.gov)

“The provisions [in President Biden’s infrastructure bill]… underscore a misplaced focus on limiting the environmental review and public input process, which threatens to undermine the principles of racial and climate equity that should guide an infrastructure package,” wrote a dozen conservation groups in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). The groups, report Dino Grandoni and Darryl Fears for the Washington Post, argue that the provisions would weaken the National Environmental Policy Act, a landmark environmental law.

Round of applause…

The plastic problem: Food packaging contributes about 5.4 percent of global food system emissions, according to UN data. (Photo credit: ricardo/Flickr)

“Two American manufacturers unveiled a new recipe on Thursday for PFAS and plastics-free packaging for everything from burgers to salads, in a bid to make takeout food more sustainable and safer for consumers,” reports Elizabeth Gribkoff for Environmental Health News. “While the companies—Zume and Solenis—are not the first to design a grease-resistant, PFAS-free food container, this is the first time that manufacturers have open-sourced such packaging technology.”

ICYMI…

The true cost of beef: Emissions from animal products are 10 to 50 times higher than those from plant-based foods. (Photo credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/We Animals)

“In order to meet the goals of the Paris agreement, global greenhouse gas emissions must be halved by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050. But current national commitments are insufficient, say scientists… To make matters worse, the ongoing expansion of the EU meat and dairy industries threatens to upend the bloc’s climate goals. Between 2007 and 2018, the EU’s meat and dairy production saw a 9.5 percent increase, which, according to Greenpeace, resulted in a 6 percent increase in annual emissions—the same impact as putting 8.4 million new cars on the road.”

—EFL editor Reynard Loki, “Meat and Dairy Industries Threaten to Derail Europe’s Commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement,” All-Creatures, February 16, 2021

Parting thought…

Tranquil tabby. (Photo credit: pelican/Flickr)

“The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.” —Jules Renard

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Counterpunch, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and nature/animal rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Remembering the Great Scientific Crusader Who Showed That No Biological Basis for Race Exists—Richard Lewontin

Lewontin fought a lifelong battle against racism, imperialism and capitalist oppression.

By Prabir Purkayastha

On July 4, Richard Lewontin, the dialectical biologist, Marxist and activist, died at the age of 92, just three days after the death of his wife of more than 70 years, Mary Jane. He was one of the founders of modern biology who brought together three different disciplines—statistics, molecular biology and evolutionary biology—that mark the discipline today. In doing so, he not only battled crude racism masquerading as science, but also helped shed light on what science really is. In this sense, he belongs to the rare group of scientists who are equally at home in the laboratory and while talking about science and ideology at a philosophical level. Lewontin is a popular exponent of what science is, and more pertinently, what it is not.

Lewontin always harked back to what being radical means: going back to fundamentals in deriving a viewpoint. This method is important, as it makes radical inquiry a powerful tool in science, compared to lazier ways of relating positions to certain class viewpoints. What is the relation between genes and race, class, or gender? Does social superiority spring from superior genes, or from biological differences between the sexes? As a Marxist and activist, Lewontin believed that we need to fight at both levels: to expose class, race and gender stereotypes as a reflection of power within society, and also at the level of radical science, meaning from the fundamentals of scientific theory and data.

Richard Lewontin and the population geneticist and mathematical ecologist Richard Levins shared a passion for biology, social activism and Marxism. It is not so well known that Lewontin’s close friend Stephen Jay Gould—the paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and popular science writer—was also a fellow Marxist. All three of them fought a lifelong battle against the racializing of biology and, later, sociobiology, which sought to ‘explain’ every social phenomenon as derived from our genes. Evolutionary biologists E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins—and many others—believed that humans are programmed so that society merely expresses what is already embedded in our genes. Through their eyes, white races are superior because of their genetic superiority; as are the rich. In India, there is also a genetic theory of caste to explain the supposed differences between caste groups. And as long as there are significant differences between groups of people—based on class, race, gender or caste—biological ‘explanations’ for these differences will be offered.

One of Lewontin’s pathbreaking works was to find out how much genetic diversity exists within species. This was at a time when we did not know how many genes humans had. Lewontin’s inspired guess was 20,000, far smaller than what most biologists thought then and remarkably close to what is known today. Most biologists then also believed that races had significant biological differences, which was one of the reasons why they thought that there was a much larger number of genes carrying different traits. Lewontin and geneticist John Hubby used a technique, protein gel electrophoresis, developed by Hubby, to quantify the genetic diversity in fruit flies. At that time, fruit flies were the favorite target for testing genetic theories in the laboratory. This pathbreaking exercise traced evolution at the species level to changes at the molecular level—a foundation for the field of molecular evolution—using statistical methods. The result was startling. Contrary to what most biologists believed, the exercise showed a surprising amount of genetic diversity within a given population and further revealed that evolution led to stable and diverse populations within a species. Later on, Lewontin used this method on human blood groups, to show that the result of stable genetic diversity held true for humans as well. The other result of the human blood group study was that it showed that 85.4 percent of the genetic diversity in humans was found within a population, and only 6.3 percent between ‘races.’ Race was not a biological construct but a social one.

Read the rest at Pressenza.

This article was produced in partnership with Newsclick.

Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.

Photo Credit: Gringer/Wikimedia Commons

Samuel Alito’s Assault on the Voting Rights Act Is Plunging the Supreme Court Back to the Segregation Era

The conservative majority’s opinion permits some racial discrimination in voting.

By Steven Rosenfeld

In recent decades, voting rights progress has consisted of expanding access to a ballot and the ways to cast it—such as online registration, voting from home with mailed-out ballots and other options to vote before Election Day. Those innovations have been widely embraced, especially during the 2020 election in response to health concerns during a pandemic. In the general election, 56 million people voted in a different manner than they had in 2016.

But the Supreme Court’s latest major decision on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has imposed new standards that election law scholars say are hostile to the more expansive and convenient voting options that have surfaced in recent years. Even more troubling, the court’s conservative majority has done so in a way that is reminiscent of the arguments put forth by last century’s opponents of equal voting opportunities for racial minorities.

In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court eviscerated the strongest remaining section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), Section 2, which held that election laws and voting rules that had a racially discriminatory impact could be blocked. (In 2013, the court, in Shelby v. Holder, neutered the VRA’s sections that allowed federal authorities to block regressive new election laws or voting rules in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination.) Perhaps most alarmingly in Brnovich, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion resurrected a legal strategy embraced by the opponents of last century’s major civil rights reforms.

Brnovich held that some discriminatory impacts of an election law do not alone invalidate that law. That standard, put forth in “guideposts” laid out by Alito, means that suits challenging laws and rules that make voting harder must go beyond showing a discriminatory result. Those challenging a law must prove that its authors intended to discriminate—making it much harder to sue and win. Shifting the burden of proof from the result or effect of a law to its authors’ intent was a tactic of 1970s anti-civil rights litigants.

Read the rest at National Memo.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

The Right Wing Is Pumping Out Critical Race Theory Attacks to Boost Its Propaganda War on Public Education

Right-wing groups are attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion work in public schools because they want to get rid of public education.

By Jeff Bryant

“No one deserves the school I went to,” says Celia Gottlieb.

Gottlieb is currently enrolled in Middlebury College and working as an intern with New York University’s Metro Center, but she is talking about the high school she attended in Highland, New York, a small community in the Lower Hudson River Valley region of the Empire State.

The Highland Central School District would raise few concerns to the casual observer. Its state data report card says the district graduates 89 percent of its students, above the national rate of 86 percent, with a college, career, and civic readiness level of four, the state’s highest rating. But Gottlieb’s negative recollections about her high school years have more to do with what went on inside the building.

“There was not a single day that I didn’t hear a student openly use the n-word,” she told me in a phone call. “Confederate flags were common. Students had Confederate flags on their cars and on their clothes. One kid wore a shirt with a Confederate flag on it nearly every day and was never told to take it off, even though a student who wore a shirt with an LGBTQ message on it was told to take it off.”

Read the rest at LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Climate Crises Can Lead to Improved Social Cooperation and Economy

A new study on the effects of climate crises in ancient Mesopotamia found increased cooperation and a more widespread distribution of power.

By April M. Short

The going assumption is that the impacts of climate disasters on institutions and economics will be negative. However, this is not always the case. Climate disasters can actually have the opposite effect, historically, as shown in a recent article about climate-related disasters in ancient Mesopotamia. The study found that climate-related tensions in effect forced greater cooperation and a more widespread distribution of power across social sectors.

The article, “Climate Change and State Evolution,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on April 6 and was authored by Carmine Guerriero from the University of Bologna in Italy and Giacomo Benati from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany. The authors note in the article’s abstract that prior literature on climate disasters in ancient societies focuses on “collapse archaeology,” and tends to correlate “severe droughts” with “institutional crises.” The article instead used a game theory approach to analyze a stream of papers that have been published in recent years on Bronze Age Mesopotamia that challenge this narrative.

Read the rest at Pressenza.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

Voting Booth: Reporting on the Ground From Arizona—Audit Controversies and Election Integrity

Voting Booth’s coverage of the Arizona state Senate’s examination of 2020 election ballots from Maricopa County, the state’s largest county, has noted many previously undisclosed and important developments. In mid-May, after visiting Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix where the audit was taking place and having backstage and floor access, Voting Booth noted why the hand count of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County was imprecise at key junctures, which could lead to discrepancies with the state-certified results where Joe Biden won.

The report’s prime takeaway was that the hand count was not compiling or comparing subtotals of the hand count with the building blocks of the official results, which is what an audit would do. By late May, Voting Booth reported how experienced auditors, including a respected Arizona Republican Party election observer, had obtained 2020 election data and issued their assessment of what happened in Arizona’s 2020 election. They found 60,000 ballots where most of the votes were cast for Republicans—but not for Donald Trump. In short, suburban Phoenix voters rejected him—an understandable explanation, in contrast to the many Trump-pedaled conspiracy theories.

As June began, those same independent auditors issued a challenge to the Arizona Senate’s pro-Trump lead contractors—underscoring that an independent team of experienced election auditors could do what the state Senate’s contractors had yet to do: trace the vote count from individual ballots through the process to the compiled election results. By mid-June, as the hand recount was nearing its completion, two camps were emerging backstage: one limiting the Senate’s investigations to those by fervent Trump supporters, and another seeking an actual audit of ballots and vote counts.

Voting Booth’s next report will focus on where the exercise in Phoenix’s Veterans Memorial Coliseum goes from here. It is not yet clear if pro-Trump partisans, who have minimal prior election auditing experience, will short-circuit a wider inquiry that not only evaluates the presidential election vote in Maricopa County, but also double-checks the hand recount.

One City’s Pioneering Project to Push Police Funding Into Housing the Homeless

Read the rest at Workplace Fairness.

The city of Austin has purchased four hotels and plans to purchase more, to house and provide supportive services to residents experiencing homelessness.

By April M. Short

Homelessness in the U.S., which was already on the rise prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, increased in 2020, exacerbated by the economic realities of the pandemic. Austin, Texas, is no exception, with an estimated 11 percent increase in homeless people counted in the city and Travis County between 2019 and 2020, according to the point-in-time (PIT) count reported in the Austin American-Statesman. Of Austin’s population of roughly 1 million, an estimated 2,500 people experience homelessness on any given night, according to the 2020 PIT count. Austin City Council member Gregorio Casar says this is a number “a community of [more than] a million folks should be able to care [for].”

In an effort to do so, the city of Austin has been purchasing underutilized hotels and transforming them into housing and services for people experiencing homelessness. In a February 4 meeting, the Austin City Council approved the purchase of a fourth hotel—which will provide 150 new homes to the homeless population in the city. Casar says the city plans to move forward on purchasing a fifth and a sixth hotel in the future.

“We have found sufficient resources in the city budget to acquire more hotels because we really believe that it’s a strategy for significantly reducing homelessness in the city,” he says.

In addition to providing long-term and transitional housing to people experiencing homelessness, the hotels purchased by the city will also provide supportive services, including mental health services, trauma services and job services.

“We are working with trusted community groups and nonprofit organizations to provide services at the hotels because we know that there are lots of folks who have experienced real trauma while living on the street and who need support so that their homelessness can permanently end,” Casar says. “And then there are lots of other folks who just need a connection to a job and a stable address for a while so that they can get back on their feet.”

According to Tara Pohlmeyer, communications director for Council Member Casar, Integral Care and Caritas of Austin have submitted letters of interest in operating the hotels and providing services, and the Homeless Services Division (HSD) anticipates negotiating a contract with a service provider/operator for each hotel in April.

He says while shelters provide an important service, oftentimes, they’re just temporarily addressing the issue. The plan for the converted hotels is for them to serve as a more permanent housing solution, to address the real needs of each person they house.

“That’s the way that we can reduce the amount of homelessness in the city, instead of just sort of hiding it, or moving [the homeless population] around while the numbers grow,” Casar says.

To pay for these supportive services, the city will reallocate dollars originally assigned to the police budget, as part of its project to reimagine safety, in response to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and public demand. Funding for operations and services of the hotels will come from Austin Public Health, using a portion of the additional $6.5 million added to the Fiscal Year 2021 budget to address homelessness during the city council’s efforts to reimagine public safety.

“We have never had so many people engage in local government before [the BLM movement],” he says. “There were tens of thousands of people that contacted my office alone. In the weeks of protest over the summer [in 2020], we had hundreds of people testifying at city council meetings, for hours, about the changes that they were calling on us to make. I think that was really important. It shifted all of our perspectives. The community here in Austin is calling on us to be real leaders for our community and for people across the state and across the country. Austin, I think, actually responded to the call to transform police budgets in a way that very few cities across the country did.”

Casar says while cities often have the dollars to make the capital investment in property to house the homeless, the long-term funding for operating those buildings and providing supportive services tends to be the challenge. He says prior to last summer’s BLM movement, which pressured cities across the nation to reallocate police funds into supportive services, one of Austin’s greatest challenges regarding homelessness was related to finding that long-term funding.

“The dollars from the police budget are going to provide the services and operate the hotels,” he says. “No matter how many changes I and some others have tried to make to the budget in years past, we’ve, oftentimes, struggled to make really transformative change because so many dollars get wrapped up in the police budget. This last year, there was finally an opportunity for us to rethink that budget and recognize that we were spending so many dollars on jailing folks experiencing homelessness and policing people experiencing homelessness—but that actually doesn’t reduce homelessness.”

Between the four hotels the city has purchased, there are about 300 rooms, some of which might be able to house a couple of people, and many of them just a single person. The plan is for the city to continue to purchase additional hotels and expand the programs offered, Casar says.

“We have to pull hundreds of people off the streets this year,” Casar says. “I think that would make a really significant difference.”

The extreme winter weather experienced in Texas through February and March makes the need to provide safe shelter and supportive services for people living on the streets all the more urgent.

“In a city as prosperous as Austin, no one should have to live on the streets, period. That became even more clear as we saw folks still sleeping out under bridges when we knew that zero-degree temperatures were coming—and sometimes there were hotels or lit-up buildings right across the streets where they could have safely stayed,” Casar says. “It’s clearly already so dangerous to live outdoors and without a home, and these extreme weather events make it even more clear why we can and should reorganize our resources and our priorities to make sure that everybody has a place to lay their head at night that is safe.”

Read the rest at Workplace Fairness.

April M. Short is an editor, journalist and documentary editor and producer. She is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Salon and many others.

Photo Credit: adactio/Flickr