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hurricane florence
The Scary New Math of Factory Farm Waste
Factory farms are exempt from reporting requirements under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Now a new tool can provide solid evidence of the environmental harm they can cause.
Jun 20, 2019
It has been almost a year since Hurricane Florence slammed the Carolinas, dumping a record 30 inches of rainfall in some parts of the states. At least 52 people died, and property and economic losses reached $24 billion, with nearly $17 billion in North Carolina alone. Flood waters also killed an estimated 3.5 million chickens and 5,500 hogs.
A lesser-known impact of the devastating hurricane was revealed through satellite photos released after the storm. Excessive rainfall flooded concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in low-lying areas, carrying riverbed sediment and animal waste previously stored in open-air lagoons into nearby waterways and then into the Atlantic. The difference between the photos, taken just five months apart before and after the storm, is striking.
Agriculture is the leading cause of pollution in the nation's rivers and lakes, according to the EPA, much of it emanating from large-scale factory farms.
Generally, CAFOs dispose of animal waste by spraying it as fertilizer and storing the excess in massive underground pits or open-air lagoons, where sulfur-eating bacteria often turn the mixture bright pink. Given that cropland can absorb only so much, a good deal of the waste ends up in groundwater, rivers, streams, and the ocean. In fact, agriculture is the leading cause of pollution in the nation's rivers and lakes, according to the EPA, much of it emanating from large-scale factory farms.
Floods can have even more devastating consequences for water quality. The risk is particularly pressing for North Carolina, a state regularly smacked by hurricanes, because it houses more than 2,200 hog CAFOs and 3,900 poultry CAFOs, and produces up to 10 billion gallons of animal waste a year. These estimates come from the Environmental Working Group.
One problem is that they are just that--estimates.
The truth is no one really knows how much factory farm waste is escaping into our environment because no federal agency collects consistent and reliable information on the number, size, and location of large-scale agricultural operations, nor the pollution they're emitting. This means there is considerable variation on how thoroughly states track and monitor CAFOs. Without this information, no one can monitor and hold CAFOS accountable for mismanaged waste and related health and environmental damage.
Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho and Ph.D. student Cassandra Handan-Nader are hoping to change that. In a paper published in Nature Sustainability in April, they show how a new algorithm can help put CAFOs on the map. Their research focused on hog and poultry operations. The latter can contribute as much nutrient runoff to watersheds as pig operations but are largely unpermitted in North Carolina and therefore much harder to detect.
The Clean Water Act requires permits for CAFOs that discharge pollutants directly into federally regulated waters. However, permits are not required for facilities that may discharge pollutants, say, if there was a break in the manure storage tank or a hurricane. An estimated 60 percent of CAFOs do not hold permits, reported the EPA in 2011, and so monitoring these facilities for unintentional pollution is nearly impossible.
Due to the lack of information about CAFOs and the failure of the government to provide oversight, several environmental and public interest groups have conducted their own studies of the issue. Several of these organizations have hired contractors to manually scan satellite images or physically identify facilities by plane or car. But this process is time- and resource-intensive. For North Carolina alone, contractors need about six weeks to manually scan satellite images on Google Maps, according to the Environmental Working Group.
Ho and Handan-Nader's automated approach could accomplish the same task in less than two days.
The development is a welcome one in an industry notoriously lacking in transparency. Around 25 states have pushed for "ag-gag" laws, which criminalize undercover filming or photography at factory farms without the consent of the owner. Nine states have passed these laws, and legislation is pending in two additional states, Kansas and North Carolina. In Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming, ag-gag laws were later struck down in higher courts as a violation of free speech and equal protection.
Proponents of ag-gag laws argue that they protect the animal agriculture industry, and farm owners' privacy. Critics say it gives factory farmers license to continue practices that are dirty, unsafe, and cruel. "This project helps mitigate a dangerous dearth of information about CAFOs," says Katie Cantrell, executive director of the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition. "Because CAFOs are exempt from reporting requirements under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, many communities across the United States are subjected to contaminated drinking water and dangerous levels of air pollutants, with little political recourse."
The Public Health Menace No One Knows About
The health and environmental impact of CAFOs is indeed enormous. "CAFOs are large-scale facilities that house thousands if not tens of thousands of animals in very small spaces," says Ho. "One CAFO can produce as much manure as a medium-size city in the United States"--with one critical difference: A medium-size city in the United States is required under the Clean Water Act to have a municipal wastewater treatment plant. CAFOs have no such treatment plant.
"Flint is everywhere here."
When animal manure escapes from CAFOs into nearby water sources, it can have devastating health consequences for people and ecosystems. Manure can contain nitrogen and phosphorus, pathogens such as E. coli, growth hormones, antibiotics, chemicals used as additives to the manure or to clean equipment, animal blood, and silage leachate from corn feed, reports the National Association of Local Boards of Health. Ammonia is also often found in surface waters surrounding CAFOs. When exposed to air, ammonium converts into nitrate, and elevated nitrate levels in drinking water have been connected to poor general health, birth defects, and miscarriages. For infants, it can mean blue baby syndrome and even death.
The New York Times recently exposed the devastating effects of nitrate contamination from animal manure in low-income farmworker communities in California's Central Valley. The widespread application of chemical fertilizers and dairy cow manure has made the water unsafe for drinking, cooking, and even showering. Camille Pannu, the director of the Aoki Water Justice Clinic at the University of California, Davis, likens the situation to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. "Flint is everywhere here."
Tying Data Patterns to Factory Farms
To put factory farms on the map, the Stanford team figured out how to teach a computer algorithm to analyze data patterns. They got help from Google's advances in image learning, the USDA's National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP), and the Environmental Working Group and Waterkeeper Alliance.
The environmental groups supplied locations of CAFOs they had collected manually. The researchers matched those locations to NAIP satellite images, hand-validating the presence of CAFOs using these same processes. Once CAFOs were confirmed, the team combined this information with open-source image-recognition tools released by Google, which were already trained to identify different types of objects, buildings, people and animals in photos.
In receiving this information, the algorithm was retrained to identify CAFOs by looking for certain visual cues. "Swine farms were identifiable by compact rectangular barns abutted by large liquid manure pits, and poultry by long rectangular barns and dry manure storage," note the researchers in their report. The algorithm could then be applied to unscanned locations to identify unseen CAFOs.
Handan-Nader explains this process as the retraining of an existing technology. "Instead of working with a baby, we got a toddler, who knows what an arm is, but maybe doesn't know what an entire person looks like," says Handan-Nader. In this case, the arm is a building, and an entire person is a CAFO.
To improve the tool's accuracy, the team also fed the algorithm photos of stadium bleachers, airplane hangars, and mobile home parks, which only appear to match the CAFO visual cues. "Just as humans learn from being tricked, so does a computer," says Handan-Nader.
There's another way to look at the research effort, she added. They were "very unglamorously looking at poop for months and months."
It paid off. Ho and Handan-Nader identified 15 percent more poultry farms than what was found through a manual census. The researchers estimated their algorithm could identify 95 percent of existing large-scale facilities using fewer than 10 percent of the resources required for a manual census.
"Dr. Ho's work makes my job much easier," says Soren Rundquist, the director of spatial analysis at the Environmental Working Group. "While humans will always need to validate and quality check computer-generated results, any innovation for locating CAFOs will make the process much more efficient. This is paramount when keeping up with an industry that can grow quickly, having an immediate impact on the environment and public health."
Replacing Guesswork With Evidence
The tool works with conventional satellite imagery, but future iterations could be trained to identify new spectral signatures, like building materials, lagoons, or actual discharges into waterways. The tool could also help detect other forms of environmental degradation, like oil spills. Stephen Luby, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, is already using a similar technology to track brick kilns, a huge source of air pollution.
Katie Cantrell envisions using the tool to provide solid evidence of the harm done by factory farming. "This mapping project provides an invaluable resource for advocates at the local, state, and national level," she says. "They can use it to document correlations between the location and density of CAFOs and socioeconomic data, health data such as asthma and mortality rates, and air and water pollution data, that can hopefully help drive better regulation and protection of front-line communities." Adds EWG's Rundquist, "The need for this utility is becoming more important as public information around these operations becomes more opaque and unavailable."
In the meantime, Missouri voted last month to prevent counties from passing more stringent laws regulating CAFOs. Now, local standards for health and environmental protection cannot be tougher than those of the state. In doing so, Missouri joins seven other states this year who have considered strengthening protections for CAFOs, which raises the question: Who is strengthening protections for our environment and local communities?
This article was produced as part of a partnership between Stone Pier Press and Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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#ExecutiveTime Takes Off on Twitter After 3 Months of Trump's Daily Schedules Leaked
"Wow and this whole time I thought he was diligently looking through policy proposals and carefully deciding a course for the country."
Feb 02, 2019
Somebody inside the Trump White House leaked three month's worth of the president's daily schedule, which Axios published on Sunday afternoon, and the internet quickly took up the cause by ridiculing the nation's chief executive for the amount of time he reportedly spends holed up in his private residence each day watching television, reading newspapers, sending bizarre tweets, and making phone calls.
Termed "Executive Time" by his former chief of staff John Kelley, the #ExecutiveTime hashtag was given new life on Sunday.
According to Axios:
What the schedules show: Trump, an early riser, usually spends the first 5 hours of the day in Executive Time. Each day's schedule places Trump in "Location: Oval Office" from 8 to 11 a.m.
*But Trump, who often wakes before 6 a.m., is never in the Oval during those hours, according to six sources with direct knowledge.
*Instead, he spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers.
Based on its analysis, the president spent roughly 60 percent of his total working day in "executive time" over the last ninety days. In order to protect the identity of their source, the news outlet published re-typed versions of the schedules they received. Read all three month's worth here.
"Safe to assume #ExecutiveTime is trending?" asked one member of the Twitter community. Yes, the internet responded, safe to assume.
Not that it's anything new:
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'Scary': Warming of Oceans Is Equivalent to 1.5 Atomic Bombs Every Second Over Past 150 Years
"And that's just the average. It's now equivalent to roughly three to six atomic bombs per second."
Jan 07, 2019
Carbon emissions are affecting life in all of Earth's ecosystems--contributing to drought, flooding, and the melting of ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. But a new study by researchers at Oxford University details how the planet's oceans are by far the climate crisis's biggest victim, with implications for the global population.
Researchers examined changes in ocean heat going all the way back to 1871, looking further into the past than many other studies of global and ocean warming. The research suggested that with carbon emissions accelerating dramatically since then, the average heating of the oceans over the nearly 150-year period was equivalent to the dropping of 1.5 atomic bombs per second since 1871.
The Guardian made that calculation after examining the report, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences--and alarmed the study's lead author, who confirmed it was accurate.
"I try not to make this type of calculation, simply because I find it worrisome," Professor Laure Zannat told the Guardian. "We usually try to compare the heating to [human] energy use, to make it less scary."
But Zannat's preferred calculation was hardly less troubling, with the study finding that the heating of the oceans from 1871 to the present day is also equivalent to 1,000 times the energy used by the entire global population every year.
With carbon emissions rising in recent decades, up 60 percent since 1990, the warming oceans can be compared to the effects of three atomic bombs, like the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, per second since that year.
As researchers have reported in recent years, the world's oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the carbon emissions caused by oil and gas drilling, agriculture, and other human activity.
Most of the heat the Oxford University researchers studied is being stored deep in the world's oceans, causing sea level rise and making hurricanes and tsunamis stronger and more destructive.
"Obviously, we are putting a lot of excess energy into the climate system and a lot of that ends up in the ocean. There is no doubt," Zanna told the Guardian.
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Feeling Blue About Climate Change? You're Not Alone
We need to hold fiercely to a vision of the future we want to see and work like hell to make it a reality
Dec 29, 2018
It's been a tough year for those of us in the climate change community. Each week has seemed to bring either a fresh report reminding us of how precious little time we have left to try to turn this ship around or a disaster that has climate change's fingerprints all over it. Friends, family, colleagues, and reporters have all asked whether I'm optimistic or hopeful about our ability to limit the severity of future climate change. And I'll be honest: I'm not. But that doesn't mean we should give up--in fact that would be among the worst things we could do. Rather, we need to hold fiercely to a vision of the future we want to see and work like hell to make it a reality.
Major climate events in 2018 made it a particularly grim year
During 2017--the year in which Trump announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, three Category 4 hurricanes made landfall in the US for the first time ever, and my home state of California witnessed its most destructive wildfire in recorded history--I found myself faced with the reality that we were witnessing the very events that climate scientists had long been saying we'd see as our climate warmed. And that was jarring. But 2018 marks the year that I truly started to grieve for what we have done and what we have failed to do.
There has been much to fuel that grief this year. So much, in fact, that words on a screen and cells in a spreadsheet didn't feel real enough. Instead, I had to write and draw about this in my notebook to make sense of it all, letting it pour out dot by dot into what I call my "Grief Graph."
For the first half of the year, the intensity of generating the data for our Underwater report mostly prevented the climate change arrows that were being slung from piercing my armor. Oh, blessed, messy data, thank you for distracting me from whatever was going on during those months. I trust that it was all unicorns and fairy dust.
But for the second half of the year the blinders were off. Shortly after taking my own turn at unleashing a new set of data showing just how profoundly changed our country will be if we continue along this path, and as wildfire smoke created a blanket of doom over the Bay Area, I had more time to ingest everyone else's dire reports. Oh, and there were two devastating hurricanes.
So what happened in 2018?
Readers, because I care about your well-being, if you are immersed in this stuff day in and day out, go ahead and skip to the next section. Yes, I'm issuing a trigger warning regarding the following list, which highlights a few of the lowlights shown in the graph above.
- "Losing Earth." On August 1, the New York Times devoted its entire weekly magazine to a piece by Nathaniel Rich called Losing Earth. In it, Rich provided a captivating history and timeline of the realization by scientists and politicians that climate change presented tremendous dangers to society and that we were responsible for it. The timeline covers my childhood from ages 1 through 11 (1979-1989).I realized as I read this how quickly climate change became entrenched in politics and how unable scientists were to get out of the trap of discussing levels of uncertainty so that policy headway could be made. The fact that so much was known so long ago means that we've wasted basically my entire lifetime debating whether climate change is real or not and whether or not we should do something about it.
- In early November, my colleagues here at UCS provided a briefing of the recently-released IPCC 1.5 Report for our Climate and Energy program. I had read portions of the report on my own and taken in the incredibly sobering messages of its Summary for Policymakers. But hearing my colleagues succinctly describe how little time we have left to drastically reduce our emissions if we want to stay below 1.5degC of warming was devastating.To stay below 1.5degC , we'll need to reduce coal use by about 60-75% by 2030.Every tenth of a degree above that gets us a little closer to the 2 degC mark, at which coral reefs are a thing of the past.All the potential pathways that limit warming to 1.5 degC without overshooting that mark at all will require us to be actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.I look at those timelines and feel like I'm having one of those anxiety dreams in which you realize you have a final exam in 5 minutes, but you didn't know you were registered for the class. The challenge before us is simply monumental.
- Then came the Camp Fire near Paradise, CA, and the horror of watching the death toll creep up to nearly 90 while we hunkered indoors for nearly two weeks because the air quality was so unhealthy. School was cancelled here in the Bay Area, and going outside felt like stepping into the pages of a dystopian novel.The sidewalks in my neighborhood, which usually host a steady stream of pedestrians? Empty. The hardware stores were out of N95 masks, and there were no air purifiers to be purchased within a 200-mile radius. Just the right time for the release of another sobering climate report! This time, the National Climate Assessment.
- My grief ebbed a teeny bit during the COP24 talks in Poland-despite the Trump administration's chummy behavior with the world's major fossil fuel producing countries--because some progress was made in defining the rules by which countries will report their progress on reducing carbon emissions. But that was bracketed by the news that carbon emissions rose substantially faster in 2018 than they had in the two previous years for both the globe as a whole as well for the US.
And that doesn't even begin to wade into the heartbreaking impacts of extreme weather all around the world.
The two solutions to climate grief: hard work and a positive vision for the future
The grief graph above demonstrates the grief-stemming power of two activities: being hard at work on activities that one hopes will make a difference and taking the time to think about the future you're working for. I'd like to focus on the latter here because the former is productive, for sure, but in terms of emotions, it is little more than a distraction from the grief.
"Let's hold that beautiful future in our hearts and minds so that it can give us the courage, the ambition, and the endurance to keep up the fight."
In late August, my colleagues and I had a free-form conversation about what we're really excited to work on as a group. What energized us most focused not on climate impacts--our bread and butter--but on climate opportunities.
For a few weeks, when I closed my eyes, I envisioned a world in which our coasts are transformed by wide swaths of beautiful wetlands that have the space they need to migrate inland. A world in which the people who used to live on the land the wetlands inhabit have found new opportunities on higher ground and are thriving because they had the support and resources they needed to relocate. A world in which we can turn on A/C that's powered without carbon-based fuels and we no longer have that nagging feeling that by making ourselves comfortable, we are ultimately making the heat worse.
This sort of thought exercise can be much more than that. Competitions like Resilient by Design challenge us to envision what our communities could be like, and present us with beautiful, sustainable options that are even more appealing than what we see around us today. Similarly, the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network and the Seeds of the Good Anthropocene initiative have developed frameworks for workshops in which participants develop positive visions for a future in which the climate is warmer and extremes are more frequent.
We may not be able to decrease our emissions fast enough to keep warming to below 1.5degC. My children will likely see the extinction of species, the deterioration of coral reefs, and ice-free summers in the Arctic. And with all of that, grief feels justified.
But I can also see a future in which we have done everything within our power to make our world as beautiful and healthy as it can be for our children and grandchildren. If hope and optimism aren't in your toolkit right now, I think that's OK. They're not in mine. But the last thing we're going to do is give up, right? So let's hold that beautiful future in our hearts and minds so that it can give us the courage, the ambition, and the endurance to keep up the fight.
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10 Costliest Climate-Driven Extreme Weather Events of 2018 Caused at Least $84.8B in Damage: Analysis
"The world's weather is becoming more extreme before our eyes—the only thing that can stop this destructive trend from escalating is a rapid fall in carbon emissions."
Dec 27, 2018
From heat waves and hurricanes to fires and floods, the 10 costliest extreme weather events of 2018--driven by the global climate crisis--killed thousands of people and caused at least $84.8 billion in damage, according to a new analysis from Christian Aid.
"The world's weather is becoming more extreme before our eyes--the only thing that can stop this destructive trend from escalating is a rapid fall in carbon emissions."
-- Michael Mann, climate scientist
Counting the Cost: A Year of Climate Breakdown (pdf), published Thursday by the London-based group, notes that "extreme weather hit every populated continent in 2018, killing, injuring, and displacing millions, and causing major economic damage."
"All of these disasters are linked with human-caused climate change," it points out. "This report highlights some of the disastrous consequences of this warming that are already striking."
Christian Aid's global climate lead, Kat Kramer, said in a statement that "climate change is something still often talked about as a future problem, not least because we know the consequences of the warming climate are so devastating and don't want to face up to what is already happening." But, he added, as the report clearly shows, "for many people, climate change is having devastating impacts on their lives and livelihoods right now."
Though some figures "are likely to be underestimates" due to data limitations, the report lists the following as the 10 costliest extreme weather events from 2018, the fourth-hottest year on record:
| Event | Estimated Cost (USD) |
| U.S. - Hurricanes Florence & Michael | $32 billion |
| California, U.S. - Camp & Woolsey fires | $9-13 billion |
| Europe - drought | $7.5 billion |
| Japan - floods | $9.3-12.5 billion |
| Argentina - drought | $6 billion |
| China - floods | $9.3 billion |
| Australia - drought | $5.8-9 billion |
| Kerala, India - floods | $3.7 billion |
| Cape Town, South Africa - drought | $1.2 billion |
| Philippines & China - Typhoon Mangkhut | $1-2 billion |
"The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. We are seeing them play out now, on our television screens, newspaper headlines, and social media feeds," responded renowned Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. "The world's weather is becoming more extreme before our eyes--the only thing that can stop this destructive trend from escalating is a rapid fall in carbon emissions."
Although the COP24 summit held earlier this month in Katowice, Poland led to the development of a rulebook for the Paris climate accord--an agreement backed by every nation on Earth except the United States under the Trump administration--as studies continue to show the consequences of anthropogenic global warming, including more frequent and powerful extreme weather events, experts emphasize that the international community must be even more ambitious to prevent climate catastrophe.
"We must respond to the warning these disasters are giving us and avert more and worse ones, by accelerating the transition to a zero carbon economy: one run on clean, renewable energy that will deliver a safer climate for everyone."
--Kat Kramer, Christian Aid
As the Christian Aid report warns, "Current plans for controlling emissions put the world on course for catastrophic warming by the end of the century, with the planet heating three to five times as much as it has already," meaning that "the fires, storms, heat waves, floods, and droughts of 2018 would seem insignificant in comparison, with the poorest and most vulnerable communities across the world at the forefront of these disasters."
"Unless governments worldwide increase their ambition and work to cut emissions, the world will fail to prevent this disaster," it continues, calling on every nation to "take their fair share of that global action with wealthier countries supporting the global shift to net-zero emissions through finance and technology, so that less developed countries come out of poverty in a low-carbon and sustainable way."
"History will judge us on how we act now, as there is still a window of opportunity to avert more suffering," Kramer concluded. "We must respond to the warning these disasters are giving us and avert more and worse ones, by accelerating the transition to a zero carbon economy: one run on clean, renewable energy that will deliver a safer climate for everyone."
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'Absolute Disgrace': When No One Looking, White House Plans to Dump Major Climate Report on Black Friday
The administration just announced Wednesday that the National Climate Assessment Volume II would be released Friday afternoon
Nov 21, 2018
Environmental groups, journalists, and climate scientists are reacting to the Trump administration's decision to release a major climate report the day after Thanksgiving--a move some are describing as an effort to bury an assessment packed with an "astonishing amount of science," and they are hoping to see that effort backfire "bigly."
"It's an absolute disgrace to bury the truth about climate impacts in a year that saw hundreds of Americans die during devastating climate-fueled megafires, hurricanes, floods, and algal blooms," said National Wildlife Federation president and CEO Collin O'Mara.
"Releasing the National Climate Assessment on Black Friday," he continued, "won't obscure the fact that authorities are still identifying bodies in California's unprecedented megafires, Florida is still dealing with toxic algae outbreaks fueled by warmer water, and Americans are still picking up the pieces from Hurricanes Florence and Michael and Typhoon Yutu that were worsened by climate change."
The report is the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment or NCA4, which NOAA says is designed to be "an authoritative assessment of the impacts of climate change on the U.S. and its territories, and was written to help decision-makers, utility and resource managers, public health officials, emergency planners, and other stakeholders better understand the effects of climate change on the United States." Volume one of the assessment was released last year.
As CNN reported, the assessment was expected to be released in December:
It's unclear why the date was moved up. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the Friday afternoon release on Wednesday--the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday.
Among journalists and public relations experts, releasing information on Friday afternoon--not to mention Black Friday--or around a holiday is widely seen as a way to cushion the impact of critical news. The idea is that fewer people pay attention to news releases on the weekend, and by Monday, the news is old.
Given that situation, observers pounced on the timing:
Some noted that the report wil come on the heels of Trump's tweet confusing weather and climate to ignore science:
Others took the timing of the release as a call to action, and suggested reporters fill the weekend with coverage of the report and social media users dump the hashtag #BlackFriday in favor of #ClimateFriday in an effort to #EndClimateSilence:
Attention everyone. We are celebrating (tweeting) the National Climate Assessment on Friday instead of buying stuff. Please join us and #EndClimateSilence. #ClimateFriday https://t.co/5FK95fITWb
-- Tessa Hill (@Tessa_M_Hill) November 21, 2018
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Occupying Office of Another Key Democrat, Climate Activists Say "Best Chance at Survival" for Humanity Is Green New Deal
The Sunrise Movement urges Rep. Frank Pallone (N.J.) to back proposal from Ocasio-Cortez, refuse fossil fuel money
Nov 15, 2018
Days after it targeted the Democratic leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi, the youth-led Sunrise Movement sustained its pressure on the party Friday morning as roughly three dozen climate activists with the group occupied the Washington, D.C. office of Rep. Frank Pallone (N.J.) to demand he back a "Green New Deal" as they called such a plan humanity's "best chance at survival."
"Our generation is done waiting," said one protester named Ben, a 21-year-old. "If not now, when?"
In addition to supporting Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's proposed Select Committee for a Green New Deal--an idea backed by other newly-elected Democrats including Ilhan Omar but deemed "not necessary" by Pallone, the group sporting t-shirts demanding their rights to "good jobs and a livable future" also urged the incoming chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to sign on to the "No Fossil Fuel Money Pledge."
"Our generation needs proof that you will fight with us," added Ben.
Pallone listened to the activists, and said that while he "largely agrees with" the agenda of the Green New Deal, he disagreed with the legislative process of the select committee.
"You've been in office for 25 years, longer than I've been alive, and you have not supported a #GreenNewDeal which addressed the scope of the crisis," said another activist identified as Beverly. She told Pallone to back the proposed committee, and added, "it's our best chance at survival."
Friday's action--which drew support from Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.)--comes the same week dozens of Sunrise Movement activists staged a sit-in at Pelosi's Washington, D.C. office to demand that party leadership get behind the Green New Deal.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself joined that protest and told the group, "I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future."
Her plan of action, however, is getting push-back from establishment Democrats. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), for example, warned about going "too extreme," while Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) declared it "technologically impossible" that "in five years or 10 years we're not going to consume any more fossil fuels."
But 19-year-old Sunrise Movement activist Olivia stressed the urgency of climate action. She said before departing Pallone's office: "We do not have time for committees to talk and research. We have the solutions and we need a Green New Deal now. Frank Pallone needs to stand with us or step aside."
Praising the direct action and echoing the fact that there's no time to spare, Anna Galland, executive director of civic action at MoveOn.org, tweeted that the Sunrise activists are "beautifully modeling the ferocious urgency we need."
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Want to Save the Climate? Break Up the Big Banks
Despite regularly claiming new commitments to ‘green finance,’ the big banks continue to lend billions to the fossil fuel industry every year
Nov 11, 2018
A stark new United Nations climate report warns that humans have about 12 years to slash global emissions by nearly half. Unfortunately, that's going to be extremely challenging without deep changes to the global financial system.
Despite regularly claiming new commitments to "green finance," the big banks continue to lend billions to the fossil fuel industry every year--including for the most extreme climate-damaging activities, like exploiting tar sands oils and burning coal.
Continuing to invest in fossil fuels goes against all of the evidence about what needs to be done to tackle climate change. An estimated 80 percent or more of the world's known fossil fuel reserves need to remain in the ground if we're to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic consequences, like rising sea levels and melting glaciers.
In place of fossil fuel finance, investments should be redirected toward renewable energy, cleaner industry, and more sustainable agriculture, among other priorities. That requires reforms to the Fed and the breakup of the biggest banks.
The scale of this change can seem daunting. But in a new report for the Institute for Policy Studies, I've identified several priorities for achieving a more climate-friendly financial system.
Reform the Fed
The financial crisis laid bare the shortcomings of a system that was obsessed with "price stability" above all other factors. Since then, many central banks have revised their mandate to include the stability of the financial system as a whole. Some central bank leaders already interpret this to include broader social and environmental objectives, and it's time for the Fed to step up and do the same.
Increase transparency
Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, has repeatedly emphasized greater transparency on the potential impacts of climate change on the economy.
More frequent extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Florence or the past summer's California wildfires, could have big impacts on property, trade and insurance premiums. Companies should be clear about how their business model would be affected by the transition to a cleaner economy. The international Financial Stability Board, established in response to the financial crisis, has suggested new global rules on climate transparency, which would be a good start.
Promote clear guidelines
In China, meanwhile, an interventionist central bank has played a key role in promoting green banking guidelines that prioritize loans for renewable energy and more efficient industry. The Fed should follow, while seeking to improve upon the patchy record of the People's Bank of China in implementing its own policies
More radically, banks should impose a "credit ceiling" on fossil fuel investment, with a clear timeline for reducing this limit to zero. If the oil needs to stay in the ground, the money to extract it needs to stay in the vault.
Take lessons from abroad
From Bangladesh to Costa Rica, there are many instances of state-owned banks and financial institutions leading the way in clean energy investments. In Bangladesh, for example, a government-backed lending program, supported by grants and soft loans from multilateral agencies, has helped to install more than 3 million solar home systems in rural areas in little more than a decade as part of a "rent-to-own" scheme.
Other changes will need to come from the ground up, including through the re-emergence of local savings banks and cooperatives. In Germany, for example, local savings banks have successfully targeted renewable energy and efficiency programs in their own communities, as well as partnered with the country's publicly owned development bank to ensure that its energy-lending is locally accountable. The rise of these smaller institutions, which are often non-profit and which sometimes have a social mission to serve disadvantaged communities, can also help turn the tide on the corrosive Wall Street culture that fed into the financial crisis.
Such changes are only likely to be achieved if there is a radical shake up in how banking works. Breaking up the "too big to fail" banks would be the most effective way to weaken the lobbying power of financial institutions with a vested interest in remaining the status quo. This would have not only climate benefits, but would also make for a more stable financial system.
Our economy--and our planet--depends on it.
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'They're Doing Us Like They Did New Orleans': Anger at Trump Inaction as Hurricane Michael Leaves Millions Without Power and Basic Needs
"We're not getting any help. We need food. It's just crazy."
Oct 15, 2018
Now that nearly a full week has passed since Hurricane Michael slammed into the Florida Panhandle and proceeded to tear through Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina--obliterating entire neighborhoods, businesses, and schools and killing at least 18 people--many of the millions of U.S. residents affected by the storm are beginning to voice outrage at the inadequate response of the Trump administration as hundreds of thousands are still without electricity as well as basic resources like food, water, medicine, and shelter.
"They're doing us like they did New Orleans. We know that people are coming, but where are they?"
--Tracey Simmons, Florida resident
"They're doing us like they did New Orleans," Florida resident Tracey Simmons told the New York Times, referring to the George W. Bush administration's appallingly slow, insufficient, and racist response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. "We know that people are coming, but where are they?"
Simmons was hardly the only Floridian expressing anger at the lack of federal response to the second devastating hurricane to strike the U.S. mainland in just two months.
"We're not getting any help," Barbara Sanders, a resident of Panama City--which "looks like a bomb has been dropped on it" following the Category 4 storm--told The Daily Beast. "We need food. It's just crazy."
"We're in need of food, water, anything," Chantelle Goolspy, who lives in Panama City public housing that was badly damaged by Michael, pleaded in a phone call with the Red Cross. "The whole street needs help. FEMA referred me to you. That person told me to call 211 [Florida United Way, a nonprofit relief organization]."
Hurricane Michael was described by meteorologists as one of the top four most powerful hurricanes to strike the U.S. in recorded history--and the most powerful to hit the Florida Panhandle in 100 years. Nearly five days after the destructive storm made landfall, the Washington Post reported on Sunday that an estimated "200,000 Floridians are still sleeping in the dark and unable to operate their well water pumps."
"Many are running out of fuel in their vehicles. While this number [of people without electricity] has dropped from its peak of about 400,000, much of the power restoration has happened in places like Tallahassee, where the storm was not as severe and where restaurants and stores began reopening this weekend," the Post continued. "The hardest-hit counties in the Panhandle remain in a primitive state."
"When we look away from climate change, we look away from people in harm's way, and now we are living with consequences that are tragic."
--Abigail Dillen, Earthjustice
Overall, nearly a million people across four states are still without power following the historic storm.
In the aftermath of last year's unprecedented Atlantic hurricane season--which inflicted catastrophic damage on Puerto Rico, Texas, Central America, and the Caribbean--the Trump White House came under fire for its slow and measly response.
Instead of addressing this criticism and heeding widespread calls for a comprehensive relief effort that leaves no one behind, President Donald Trump has praised himself for doing a "fantastic job" mobilizing federal resources following last year's hurricanes and downplayed the horrifying death toll in Puerto Rico, where an estimated 3,000 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria.
With Trump set to visit both Florida and Georgia this week, the president is coming under growing criticism from advocacy groups and lawmakers for spending time at his golf club and holding campaign-style rallies as dozens remain missing in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael and millions desperately struggle to recover in the storm's wake.
In addition to condemning the Trump administration's paltry and incompetent response to individual hurricanes over the past year, environmentalists have also called attention to the broader climate crisis, which is likely to produce more frequent and powerful storms in the near future as the White House dismisses the dire warnings of experts and continues to cater to the desires of the fossil fuel industry.
"In failing to take every action possible to arrest climate change, and in failing to invest in our communities to better prepare them for new climate realities, our government is failing us," Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen said in a statement last week. "When we look away from climate change, we look away from people in harm's way, and now we are living with consequences that are tragic."
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The Cheetah in Us All
A mother thinks about the inheritance of children
Oct 02, 2018
"I don't want to live in a world without cheetahs, Mom."
Seamus loves cheetahs and what's not to love -- unless you are a Thomson's gazelle? Cheetahs are the fastest mammals on the planet, formidable predators, sleek, saucy looking, and they even have spots.
My six-year-old boy can't imagine a future without his favorite animal, but we live in the small city of New London, Connecticut. Unlike coyotes, cheetahs are, to say the least, rare here. The nearest zoo is more than an hour away. I'm not sure where his love for cheetahs came from, since he doesn't watch much television, not even nature shows. Still, here we are, my six-year-old boy and me talking about those cheetahs and the end of nature on a Sunday morning.
His observation actually turned out to be remarkably on point when it comes to our current situation, globally and environmentally. He made it during a week in which nature was hitting back hard. If cheetahs are indeed endangered, so were surprising numbers of human beings that week as killer storms struck from the Philippines to North Carolina. With rage and rain, an increasingly overheated, climate-changed Mother Nature briefly reclaimed some of her territory, which we had defiled, dividing it up into endlessly buildable lots all the way to the high-tide line, pocking it with hog farms, studding it with nuclear power plants. Hurricane Florence and Super Typhoon Mangkhut flooded the works, making the whole sodden mess hers again, at least for a time, and sending a signal about what humans and cheetahs are up against in the decades to come.
Unlike Seamus, I haven't given cheetahs much thought. Still, after he expressed his worries about that cat and his life, I did a little research. Cheetahs, you won't be surprised to learn, live throughout Africa (northern, eastern, and southern), as well as -- and this was news to me -- in India and Iran. There are only seven or eight thousand cheetahs left on Earth. Once upon a time (and not so long ago) there must have been 100,000. They are speedy and range widely over their habitats. They want to move. They are also killed as pests by farmers, taken as trophies by big-game hunters, and regularly hit by cars careening down the growing number of roads crisscrossing their territories.
Headed Toward Oblivion
I've never seen a cheetah in real life. Neither has my son. And, if truth be told, I'm no cheetah champion either. I don't even particularly like tabby cats. Still, I found that, in the wake of our conversation, I didn't want to live in a world without them either.
In 2012, when Seamus was born, 196 species of mammals were already "critically endangered," the animals closest to extinction. Today 199 are in this most endangered category and 37 more species than when he was born are "endangered," the next level down, according to the "Red Lists" maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. We don't see this dramatic decline of species variety in our little corner of the world. It's all squirrels and raccoons here and they seem to be winning always, but what scientists are calling "the sixth extinction" is as real as the possum now going through my recycling bin.
From cheetahs and other endangered big mammals, it's only a short hop to what environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert says are "a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays,[...] a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds" that are "headed toward oblivion."
From cheetahs and other endangered big mammals, it's only a short hop to what environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert says are "a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays,[...] a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds" that are "headed toward oblivion." And it's but another short hop to other forms of obliteration and climate collapse, including the rapid decline of coral reefs, the growth of ocean dead zones, the retreat of sub-Arctic boreal forests, the "new-normal" of a raging fire season, the cracking and melting of what was once the strongest ice in the Arctic...
I could, of course, go on, but the mind shudders. Or thought of another way, the mind shutters. It forms a protective shell against what it can't truly take in -- or, at least, what it can't comprehend without radical change.
Seamus and I could head deeper into the world of the potentially vanishing cheetah. I could find a cheetah sanctuary in southern Africa and encourage him to use his piggy bank coins to "adopt" one of those cats. But I haven't gone there yet. I haven't told him why cheetahs are teetering on the edge of oblivion. We haven't started talking about why people kill such animals for sport or how increasingly few truly wild corners of this planet are left for "wild animals."
Still, I must admit that, after our conversation, I started to wonder why I hadn't taken his cheetah angst and turned it into the sort of teachable moment that parents are supposed to love when it comes to all that's wrong in the world. Could my mind have been shuddering and shuttering at the same time? Might I have feared sinking into an abiding helplessness in the face of catastrophic climate change and passing that on to my son?
I mean... what in the world can I -- or Seamus -- really do about the fate of the cheetah? About the fate of the whole miraculous wild world? What in the world could I really teach my child to do?
I don't want you to think that our family does nothing. My husband and I do what we can and frame it for our kids in the context of ecological responsibility. We live below the poverty line in intentional simplicity. We grow vegetables and conserve water. We eat a largely vegetarian diet, compost, and brew our own beer. We have solar panels and we shower only when necessary. We live in a dense urban area and can both walk to work. We don't fly a lot and drive only when necessary. None of these are exactly radical sacrifices, but they are not nothing either.
Still, they aren't faintly enough to save the cheetahs... or ourselves, for that matter.
Two Minutes to Midnight
Remembering my own fears as a six year-old, my son's seem decontextualized and vague. And thank God for that. As a child, I lived in concentrated, daily, physical dread of nuclear war.
When I was six years old, in 1980, the Cold War was still a hot worry and, for reasons I'll explain, I already lived in terror of becoming extinct.
In that very year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its famed Doomsday Clock from nine to seven minutes to nuclear midnight, chiding the Soviet Union and the United States for acting like "'nucleo-holics, drunks who continue to insist that the drink being consumed is positively 'the last one,' but who can always find a good excuse for 'just one more round.'"
In the spring of 1979, my family and I had driven from our home in Baltimore to the mountains of West Virginia to stay with friends after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania suffered a critical meltdown. We lived less than a two-hour drive from that ill-fated plant, which went critical on March 28th -- just days before my fifth birthday. We stayed with our friends for two weeks. I have a vague memory that their similarly aged daughter and I had the same flowered corduroy overalls and bonded over how painful wearing our hair in pigtails could be.
But mostly I was afraid. So afraid. Nuclear disaster seemed both real and imminent to me then -- and no wonder I felt that way. My parents, Phil Berrigan and Liz McAlister, were well-known antinuclear activists, as well as members of a radical Christian community of people committed to nonviolent resistance to war and nuclear culture. In those days, it seemed to me that all they did was focus on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, while experimenting with different ways to get other people to acknowledge the terrible danger we were all in. Their daily focus was on rising up against those who were making the bad decisions that left this planet prone to a nuclear Armageddon instead of ensuring a future for all of us.
At six, I already had a front row seat at their experiments. Or, more accurately, there were no seats. Like everyone else, I stood. Over and over and over again, I watched as my parents and their friends and fellow travelers in the peace movement of that time made dramatic, noisy, provocative messes all over Washington, D.C., and beyond. They dug graves on the parade ground at the Pentagon. They made giant cardboard warheads painted with the American and Soviet flags and set them afire in front of the building that housed the Pentagon's nuclear division.
Men dressed as specters screamed, moaned, and laughed maniacally, while other friends dusted themselves with ashes and writhed on the ground in front of the White House. Women cut off their hair and burned it in a bowl on the steps of the Pentagon's river entrance (from which I can still conjure up the cloying, sick smell of nuclear death that wafted over us that morning). I can remember my father -- more than once -- pulling a bottle of blood from his coat pocket and hurling it as high as he could at the pillars of the Pentagon, so that it would drip dramatically down the white marble.
My parents and their friends made such messes at least 100 times in attempting to remind a distracted public that nuclear war could be imminent and that it was both unwinnable and close to inevitable unless the two superpowers made the decision to disarm. I certainly wasn't their target audience, but I doubt anyone saw what they did more often than me. Most people -- even Pentagon employees -- caught such mini-spectacles just once or twice a year. I saw it repeatedly and nearly 40 years later, I'm still freaking out about it.
Just imagine that in a "limited" nuclear war between India and Pakistan up to 20 million people could die from the blasts, fire, and radiation, while a nuclear winter could be triggered in which, it is believed, up to a billion people might starve to death.
After all, today the danger isn't the mutual assured destruction tango of the massive superpowers. There are nine nuclear weapons states with an estimated 14,500 nuclear weapons and quarrels aplenty between some of them. Just imagine that in a "limited" nuclear war between India and Pakistan up to 20 million people could die from the blasts, fire, and radiation, while a nuclear winter could be triggered in which, it is believed, up to a billion people might starve to death. And keep in mind that the technology has been democratized to a point where some analysts fear that a "dirty bomb" detonated by some non-state actor might be more likely than an Israeli or Pakistani nuclear strike or, for that matter, a post-Cold War faceoff between the Russians or the Chinese and ourselves.
Keep in mind as well that we're no longer at seven minutes to nuclear midnight. We're now at two minutes, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the clock is still ticking. As the president and CEO of that publication put it at the beginning of this year: "In 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change, making the world security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago -- and as dangerous as it has been since World War II."
Hope, Not Fear
Some people find the prospect of Trump's small hands on the nuclear button particularly unsettling, but the capacity to destroy the world and the notion that a nuclear war might in any sense be winnable made Washington a "crazytown" long before he hit the Oval Office. The United States may not have detonated a nuclear warhead as an act of war since August 1945, but it's spent an incredible fortune endlessly developing its nuclear arsenal and continues to do so. The 30-year "modernization" of that arsenal alone (started under the president who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his urge to abolish them) is expected to cost some $1.7 trillion dollars. And the U.S. has already been spending about $20 billion a year to maintain the U.S. nuclear advantage and that is set to increase under President Trump.
The United States may not have detonated a nuclear warhead as an act of war since August 1945, but it's spent an incredible fortune endlessly developing its nuclear arsenal and continues to do so.
As the dangers and the dollars rise, nuclear weapons aren't even a concern or a preoccupation around here, much less a worry. They represent little but minor background noise in this country. Catastrophic climate change is so much more likely to claim front-page real estate these days with the epic storms, fires, and floods that occur ever more often. But the big question is: What do we do about it (especially in the age of Donald Trump)? How do we conquer our fears with action? And what kind of action will that be?
Those are hard questions to answer. My parents answered them one way and even though their answers terrified me, I appreciate that they tried -- and that, at 78, my mother is still trying. (She is in jail now, awaiting trial for trespass and property destruction at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia.)
Save the cheetahs almost seems simple by comparison!
The human polluting of the planet with the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels represents a slower-paced Armageddon than the red-button pushing "we begin bombing in five minutes" of thermonuclear warfare. But they are both too big for any one of us to hold alone: me or you or my six-year-old son. Today, at 44, facing a world in which there are now two forms of potential humanly induced global annihilation -- the fast and slow ones -- I don't simply want to dump them on Seamus.
It's true that the last decades have brought us closer to the nuclear brink even as the world slowly warms toward another kind of annihilation entirely, but for so many, fear doesn't activate. It doesn't lead to meaningful change. In fact, it's just as likely to shutter us all in.
So I don't want my son's fears to be my starting point -- or his. I want to start with his love, his hope. Save the cheetahs!
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