Vox, Apr. 22, 2014

By Brad Plumer

It was the early 1990s. Climate scientists had long known that humans were warming up the planet. But politicians were just beginning to grasp that it would take a huge coordinated effort to get nations to burn fewer fossil fuels and avoid sharp temperature increases in the decades ahead.

Those policymakers needed a common goal — a way to say, Here’s how bad things will get and This is what we need to do to stop it. And that posed a dilemma. No one could really agree on how much global warming was unacceptable. How high did the seas need to rise before we had a serious problem? How much heat was too much?

Around this time, an advisory council of scientists in Germany proposed a stunningly simple way to think about climate change. Look, they reasoned, human civilization hasn’t been around all that long. And for the last 13,000 years, Earth’s climate has fluctuated within a narrow band. So, to be on the safe side, we should prevent global average temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius (or 3.6° Fahrenheit) above what they were just before the dawn of industrialization.

Critics grumbled that the 2°C limit seemed arbitrary or overly simplistic. But scientists were already compiling evidence that the risks of global warming became especially daunting somewhere above the 2°C threshold: rapid sea-level rise, the risk of crop failure, the collapse of coral reefs. And policymakers loved the idea of a simple, easily digestible target. So it stuck.

The idea that the world can stay below 2°C looks increasingly delusional

By 2009, nearly every government in the world had endorsed the 2°C limit — global warming beyond that level was deemed “dangerous.” And so, every year, the world’s leaders meet at UN climate conferences to discuss policies and emissions cuts that they hope will keep us below 2°C. Climate experts churn out endless papers on how we can adapt to 2°C of warming (or less).

Two decades later, there’s just one major problem with this picture. The idea that the world can stay below 2°C looks increasingly delusional.

Consider: the Earth’s average temperature has already risen 0.8°C since the 19th century. And if you look at the current rapid rise in global greenhouse-gas emissions, we’re on pace to blow past the 2°C limit by mid-century — and hit 4°C or more by the end. That’s well above anything once deemed “dangerous.”Getting back on track for 2°C would, at this point, entail the sort of drastic emissions cuts usually associated with economic calamities, like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the 2008 financial crisis. And we’d have to repeat those cuts for decades.

The climate community has been slow to concede defeat. Back in 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a report noting that the world could stay below 2°C — but only if we started cutting emissions immediately. The years passed, countries did little, and emissions kept rising. So, just this month, the IPCC put out a new report saying, OK, not great, but we can still stay under 2°C. We just need to act more drastically and figure out some way to pull carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere. (Never mind that we still don’t have the technology to do the latter.)

We’re on track for 4°C of global warming — and 2°C is increasingly unlikely

Predicted temperature increases under various emissions scenarios:

On our current course, the world will put enough carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere by mid-century to breach the 2°C target.

Emissions would need to decline dramatically (and then go negative) for a good shot at staying below 2°C.

Source: Sanford et al. (2014)

• Historical emissions 
• High emissions
  Medium emissions
• Low emissions
  Extremely low emissions

“At some point, scientists will have to declare that it’s game over for the 2°C target,” says Oliver Geden, a climate policy analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “But they haven’t yet. Because nobody knows what will happen if they call this thing off.” The 2°C target was one of the few things that everyone at global climate talks could agree on. If the goal turns out to be impossible, people might just stop trying altogether.

Recently, then, some scientists and policymakers have been taking a fresh look at whether the 2°C limit is still the best way to think about climate change. Is this simple goal actually making it harder to prepare for the warming that lies ahead? Is it time to consider other approaches to climate policy? And if 2°C really is so dangerous, what do we do when it’s out of reach?

The murky origins of the 2°C limit

Back in the 1970s, climate scientists understood that the carbon dioxide that humans had been emitting since the Industrial Revolution — from cars, power plants, factories — was intensifying the greenhouse effect that warms the planet. They also knew that man-made emissions were increasing each year as the global economy grew.

So how hot would it get? Early calculations suggested that if we doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over pre-industrial levels, the Earth would warm somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C. In the decades since, scientists have amassed more evidence for this estimate of “climate sensitivity,” but they haven’t really narrowed the range.

The next step was to figure out how much warming humans could safely tolerate. There were a variety of ideas for defining “dangerous” interference with the Earth’s climate in the early 1990s. Maybe we should try to limit the rate of warming per decade, for instance.

Eventually, the 2°C limit won out — endorsed by, among others, a council of German scientists advising Angela Merkel, the nation’s environment minister at the time. Their thinking: human civilization had developed in a period when sea levels remained stable and agriculture could flourish. Staying within that bound — and preventing global average temperatures from rising more than 2°C — seemed like a reasonable rule of thumb.

“We said that, at the very least, it would be better not to depart from the conditions under which our species developed”

“We said that, at the very least, it would be better not to depart from the conditions under which our species developed,” recalls Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of the scientists on that German advisory panel who helped devise the 2°C limit. “Otherwise we’d be pushing the whole climate system outside the range we’ve adapted to.”

Over time, researchers gravitated toward this limit. An influential 2001 report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change detailed a number of reasons to worry about climate change: increased heat waves and storms, the threat of mass extinctions, severe economic losses. Many of these so-called “reasons of concern” were projected to get much worse as global warming climbed past 2°C.

Now, there are good arguments that the 2°C limit is arbitrary. Any limit would be. For instance, subsequent research has found that plenty of worrisome impacts actually happen well before we hit 2°C: Arctic sea ice could collapse, coral reefs could die off, tiny island nations like Tuvalu could get swallowed by the rising seas. Conversely, other worrisome changes, such as crop damage in the United States, might not happen until we go above the 2°C threshold. Deciding where to draw this line is a political judgment as much as a scientific one. (To put it another way, no climate scientist thinks we’ll be totally fine if we hit 1.9°C of warming but totally doomed if we hit 2.1°C.)

Economists, meanwhile, have often criticized the 2°C limit for not taking costs into account. After all, we don’t just burn oil, gas, and coal for fun. We use them to power our cars and homes and factories. And cutting back won’t be painless. William Nordhaus, an economist at Yale, has argued that we should aim for a temperature limit where the costs of reducing fossil fuels matches the climate benefits. In his book The Climate Casino, he pegs this limit at 2.5°C or possibly higher, depending on how easily we can switch to clean energy sources.

Still, despite the criticisms, the 2°C limit has maintained its dominant position for more than a decade — in part because it created an easy focal point for international negotiations. UN climate talks start by assuming the need to stay below 2°C and then work backward to hash out how each country should cut emissions. The European Union’s energy policies consistently reference this limit. The Obama administration’s upcoming rules to restrict carbon-dioxide emissions from US coal plants can be traced back to a pledge President Obama made in 2009 to help stay below 2°C.

That raises a question: what will happen if it becomes apparent that the 2°C limit is out of reach? Will we settle on a new limit? Or just give up altogether?

Why the 2°C limit looks increasingly impossible

Here’s how climate experts often think about the 2°C limit. Estimates of climate sensitivity tell us that the Earth will eventually warm somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C if we double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over pre-industrial levels. And we’re almost halfway to doubling.

So, if we want reasonable odds of staying below 2°C, there’s only so much more additional carbon dioxide we can put in the atmosphere. That’s our “carbon budget” — around 485 billion metric tons.

There’s not a lot of wiggle room left. Humans added the equivalent of 10 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere in 2012, and that amount is rising every year, as fast-growing countries like China and India build new factories, drive new cars, and burn lots of fossil fuels. At current rates, the world will exhaust its carbon budget in roughly three decades, setting the stage for 2°C of warming. (If climate sensitivity turns out to be low, that only buys us an extra decade or so.)

If we want to stay within the budget and avoid 2°C, then, our annual emissions need to start declining each year. Older, dirtier coal plants would need to get replaced with cleaner wind or solar or nuclear plants, say. Or gas-guzzling SUVs would need to get replaced with new low-carbon electric cars. But the longer we put this off, the harder it gets — the carbon budget gets smaller, and there are more coal plants and SUVs to replace.

The longer we wait on cutting emissions, the harder it gets

If we want a reasonable shot at staying below 2°C, there’s only so much more carbon-dioxide we can load into the atmosphere. If the world had started back in 2005, emissions could have decreased gently each year. If we wait until, say, 2020, the cuts have to be much sharper to catch up.

By now, countries have delayed action for so long that the necessary emissions cuts will have to be extremely sharp. In April 2014, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that if we want to stay below the 2°C limit, global greenhouse-gas emissions would have to decline between 1.3 percent and 3.1 percent each year, on average, between 2010 and 2050.

“If you’re serious about 2°C, the rates of change are so significant, it begs the way we see the world”

To put that in perspective, global emissions declined by just 1 percent for a single year after the 2008 financial crisis, during a brutal recession when factories and buildings around the world were idling. We’d potentially have to triple that pace of cuts, and sustain it year after year.

Some climate experts are skeptical that countries can do this while maintaining their historical rates of economic growth. The fastest that any country has ever managed to decarbonize its economy without suffering a crushing recession was France, when it spent billions to scale up its nuclear program between 1980 and 1985. That was a gargantuan feat — emissions fell 4.8 percent per year — but the country only sustained it for a five-year stretch.

To stay within the 2°C budget, every country would have to keep up that pace for decades, decarbonizing not just power plants, but factories, and homes, and cars, and airplanes. That goes far beyond even the most ambitious climate proposals currently being considered, including Obama’s big plan to curb emissions from US coal plants.

“If you’re serious about 2°C, the rates of change are so significant that it begs the way we see the world. That’s what people aren’t prepared to embrace,” says Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research. “Essentially you’d have to start asking questions about our current society and how we develop and grow.”

Anderson, for one, has argued that wealthy countries may need to sacrifice economic growth, at least temporarily, to stay below 2°C. In December, the Tyndall Centre hosted a conference on “radical emissions reductions” that offered some eye-popping suggestions: Perhaps every adult in wealthy countries could get a personal “carbon budget” tracked through an electronic credit card. Once they hit their limit, no more vacations or road trips. Other attendees suggested shaming campaigns against celebrities with outsized homes and yachts.

Not everyone is ready to go radical. The IPCC’s latest report suggested that an ambitious push on clean energy might only put a modest dent in global economic growth rates (a mere 0.06 percentage points per year). That’s partly because the cost of solar and wind power has been dropping far faster than anyone expected.

But even when you account for that, the IPCC figured that staying below 2°C would depend on a series of long-shot maneuvers: all nations would need to act right this second, ramp up wind and solar and nuclear power massively, and figure out still-nascent technologies to capture and bury emissions from coal plants. Crucially, we’d also have to invent some method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere — something that may never work on a large scale.

If any of those assumptions falter, the IPCC noted, costs start rising. And, as the years go by and the world’s nations put off cutting emissions, the odds of staying below 2°C look vanishingly unlikely.

“Ten years ago, it was possible to model a path to 2°C without all these heroic assumptions,” says Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But because we’ve dallied for so long, that’s no longer true.” In February, Frumhoff co-authored a paper in Nature Climate Change arguing that policymakers need to take the prospect of breaching the 2°C limit far more seriously than they’re currently doing. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves unprepared for what comes next.

What’s so bad about 3°C or 4°C?

If 2°C looks increasingly out of reach, then it’s worth looking at what happens if we blow past that and go to, say, 3°C or 4°C.

Four degrees (or 7.2° Fahrenheit) may not sound like much. But the world was only about 4°C to 7°C cooler, on average, during the last ice age, when large parts of Europe and the United States were covered by glaciers. The IPCC concluded that changing the world’s temperature in the opposite direction could bring similarly drastic changes, such as “substantial species extinctions,” or irreversibly destabilizing Greenland’s massive ice sheet.

In 2013, researchers with the World Bank took a look at the science on projected effects of 4°C warming and were appalled by what they found. A growing number of studies suggest that global food production could take a big hit under 3°C or 4°C of warming. Poorer countries like Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam, and parts of Africa could see large tracts of farmland made unusable by rising seas.

But what seemed to unnerve the authors of the World Bank report most was all of the stuff we don’t know. Most climate models currently make predictions in a linear fashion. That is, they basically assume that the impacts of 4°C of warming will be twice as bad as those of 2°C. But that might be wrong. Impacts may interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Current agriculture models, they noted, don’t have a good sense for what will happen to crops if heat waves, droughts, new pests and diseases all combine together.

“If we keep assuming we can stay below 2°C as a matter of course, then we aren’t being honest about the adaptation challenges”

Here’s an analogy that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who helped compile some of the research for the World Bank, likes to use. “Take the human body. If your temperature rises 2°C, you have a significant fever. If it rises 4°C or 6°C you can die. It’s not a linear change. You’re pushing a complex system outside the range it’s adapted to. And all our assessments indicate that once you do that, the system’s resilience gets stretched thin.”

Perhaps most significantly, the World Bank report wasn’t even sure if humanity could adapt to a 4°C world. At the moment, the large lender is helping poorer countries prepare for global warming by building seawalls, conducting crop research, and improving freshwater management. But, as an internal review found, most of these efforts are being done with relatively small temperature increases in mind. The bank wasn’t planning for 3°C or 4°C of global warming — because no one really knew what that might entail.

“[G]iven that uncertainty remains about the full nature and scale of impacts,” the report said, “there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.” And its conclusion was stark: “The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur.”

Only very recently have scientists even started trying to fill in those gaps in knowledge. Here’s a telling anecdote: back in 2011, the European Commission put out a call for papers exploring the impacts of a 2°C rise in temperature. Two years later, the call went out for impacts of warming greater than 2°C. What was once unthinkable is quickly becoming thinkable.

“If we keep assuming we can stay below 2°C as a matter of course, then we aren’t being honest about the adaptation challenges,” says Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists. For example, he notes, California might need to completely overhaul its water-planning efforts for the coming century if 3°C or 4°C becomes a serious possibility.

But so far, these sorts of planning efforts are scant — because few policymakers are prepared to admit that we’re going beyond 2°C.

The frantic search for alternatives to 2°C

The impossibility of staying below 2°C could also shake up the politics of climate change. After all, the UN climate talks are structured around this overarching goal. What will happen if everyone realizes it’s unreachable?

Last year, Geden, the German Institute researcher, broached this topic in a paper titled “Modifying the 2°C Target.” Then, in October, 11 researchers at the Tyndall Centre published a paper in Climate Policy exploring further alternatives to the 2°C limit. Here are a few options on offer:

Geoengineering: We could try to stay below 2°C through last-ditch “geoengineering” efforts. Some scientists have pointed out that we could, in theory, cool the Earth by putting sulfate particles into the atmosphere that reflect the sun. The downside? This could have all sorts of gruesome side effects, such as messing up global rainfall patterns. And it wouldn’t alleviate other dire impacts of our carbon-dioxide emissions, such as ocean acidification.

Accept (slightly) higher temperatures: Alternatively, policymakers could concede that 2°C is unworkable and instead work to stay below a slightly higher limit like 2.5°C or 3°C. This sounds easy: we simply accept that we’re going to face higher climate risks and try to adapt. And even if 3°C of warming is riskier than 2°C, it’s less risky than 4°C.

But there’s a hitch. As Geden points out, relaxing the limit might make global climate talks even less productive than they already are. The temperature limits themselves would suddenly be open to negotiation and endless squabbling. The Tyndall researchers worried that this could allow the world to drift into a situation where 4°C or 6°C is accepted as inevitable.

Abandoning the 2°C limit might make international climate talks even less productive

Reframe the problem: Alternatively, the world could rephrase its goals in more appealing terms. Some experts have argued that 2°C was never a particularly useful limit because it was so difficult to translate into action. The University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. has suggested that we could focus on easier-to-grasp goals like increasing the proportion of carbon-free energy that the world uses — say, going from 13 percent today to 90 percent. That would achieve similar ends, but it’s a vastly different way of framing the problem.

“It puts you in a different intellectual space, where your answers are focused on the deployment of vast amounts of clean energy,” Pielke told me earlier this year. “It’s a politics of possibility and opportunity where innovation is at the center. We may end up no better off than we are now. But the path we’re on now is going nowhere.”

Similarly, David Victor of the University of California, San Diego has long argued that starting with an agreed-upon temperature limit and then brow-beating countries into adopt the required cuts is doomed to failure. Instead, it might be more productive for countries to focus on taking individual steps on climate and slowly building up toward an agreed-upon target.

In their Climate Policy paper exploring these alternatives, the Tyndall Centre researchers noted that all of the approaches carry drawbacks — reframing the problem, for instance, could divert attention away from the dangers of higher temperatures. Ultimately, they couldn’t let go of the idea that recommitting to the 2°C limit might just be the “least unattractive course of action.” But, they noted, the world would have to take the problem much, much more seriously than it’s currently doing.

Whatever the right answer here is, the authors wrote, it’s at least something that needs to be discussed more fully. “There’s a real danger that the 2°C goal will become discredited,” says the Tyndall Centre’s Tim Rayner, one of the co-authors of the paper. “We think it’s important to begin the debate before that eventuality hits.”

[Thanks to Kim Gaddy for sending this article.]

NJ Spotlight, April 24, 2014
By Colleen O’Dea

The number of children living in poverty continues to rise in New Jersey, as measured by the newest edition of the Kids Count report for the state, which is being released today by Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ).

Almost one-third of all New Jersey children — 646,000 — were considered low-income, which is defined as living in a family with an income at twice the federal poverty limit, in 2012, the latest New Jersey Kids Count shows.

NJ Kids Count Pocket Guide

NJ Kids Count 2014

That’s a big increase from 2008, when some 310,000 children, or 15 percent of all New Jersey children, were living at the poverty level, with almost half of those considered very poor, in families with incomes of less than half the poverty limit. That year, the poverty level for a family of four was $23,050.

“While the rankings shift every year, we see certain trends across many counties, including increasing child poverty, fewer child care options for working parents and high housing costs,” said Cecilia Zalkind, ACNJ’s executive director. “These statistics should be used to inform local, county and state leaders, as well as community organizations, in their efforts to improve the well-being of all New Jersey children.”

The report shows that child poverty continued to rise from 2008 to 2012 in all but three counties — Morris, Salem and Warren. Warren and Salem saw substantial declines, at 46 and 22 percent, respectively, while Morris had a modest 1-percent decrease. In the other counties, increases in the number of children living in families earning too little to meet their children’s needs ranged from a low of 8 percent in Monmouth County to a high of 246 percent in Somerset County.

Statewide, the number of children living in poverty jumped 22 percent during this time.

The poverty data, because it dates to 2012, may show the lingering effects of the Great Recession, and next year’s report may have better news.

Every county but Cape May showed declines in unemployment, with many showing substantial drops in joblessness – as much as 30 percent — from 2009 to 2013. Still, it is not clear whether this will affect the child poverty rate. Some labor experts say the decline in unemployment is due, at least in part, to people leaving the labor force all together.

In addition to poverty and financial data, Kids Count provides statistics for the state and for each of the counties in 13 areas, including health, child care and education. It also combines all the data to rank each county.

This year, for the second year in a row, Hunterdon County took the top spot. Cumberland County ranked last. The rankings often closely mirror wealth, and that was the case for the top and bottom spots: Hunterdon had the highest 2012 median income for families with children, at $132,000, while Cumberland had the lowest — $51,113.

Some of the financial data for the state and counties is given above. Here’s a link to the full state report and all the county data.

NJ Spotlight, April 29, 2014
By Tom Johnson

Programs and plans are in place, but it seems ever more obvious that the state is going to miss its targets, typically by a wide margin

In late 2009, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection adopted a report detailing how the state would deal with the effects of global climate change, a problem that the agency then argued could have devastating ecological, economic, and public health effect on New Jersey. “Not only does climate change threaten New Jersey’s shoreline and ecology, but the socioeconomic impact of climate change stand to be profound and costly,’’ according to the report.

NY Times, Apr. 23, 2014

By Charles M. Blow

The time for complaining is at an end. Action must be taken. Accountability must be demanded. Muscle must be flexed. Power must be exercised.

Ballots must be cast.

It’s important to vote in presidential election years, to make sure that the leader of the free world is truly representative of the country. But presidential politics is only part of the political apparatus — the part furthest from most individuals. Much of the rest of the political power has a much lower center of gravity, playing itself out on the state and local level. In fact, the more local an election or ballot measure, the more powerful the individual votes, because the universe of all voters shrinks.

Charles M. Blow

This is what more voters must be made to understand: It’s negligent at best, and derelict at worst, to elect a president but stay home when the legislatures with which a president must work are being elected. Apathy insures enmity, as the president and the legislative branch both rightly proclaim that they have been sent to Washington at the behest of diametrically opposed voting populaces — the president by a broader, more diverse (in terms of race, age, income and ideology) demographic group, and many members of Congress by a more narrowly drawn one.

In far too many cases, our representatives simply aren’t representative. Midterm elections draw a much older and whiter group of voters than do presidential-year elections. And that is only counting the people who bother to show up.

As Pew put it in the lead up to the 2010 midterms:

“Turnout in midterm elections typically is less than 40 percent of the voting age population (in 2006 it was 37 percent), and there is no reason to expect that it will be dramatically higher in 2010.”

In fact, nearly 42 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in 2010.

Still, that means that most Americans who are eligible to vote don’t vote in midterm elections. And Democrats constituted 54 percent of the nonvoters. Thirty percent were Republican. That’s why “nonvoters generally express more liberal views than do likely voters,” according to Pew.

This is where the rubber meets the road. We know the kind of government we want. We know that we want to address economic inequality and tax-code reform. We know that we want to address gun violence. We know that we want to stop and reverse the raft of laws enacted in states across this country aimed at restricting women’s reproductive choices. We know that we want to expand the right to marry to all people in all states. We know that we want to pass comprehensive immigration reform. We know that we want to halt and reverse the corrosive effects of big money on our politics.

It’s all doable, but only when voters realize that if there is a surreptitious us-versus-them fight between the cloistered money classes and the Everyman and Everywoman, then there are more of us than there are of them.

And yet as Pew found, the nonvoters are those who most need to have their voices heard. Forty-three percent of all nonvoters make under $30,000. Another 30 percent of nonvoters made $30,000 to $74,999. Those who made more than that represented only 13 percent of nonvoters.

Single people made up nearly 6 out of every 10 nonvoters.

People 18 to 29 were a third of nonvoters, while people 20 to 49 were another third.

As the report explained:

“Reflecting their low incomes, many more nonvoters (31 percent) than likely voters (14 percent) describe their personal financial situation as poor, and fully 51 percent of nonvoters say that they or someone in their household was out of work and looking for a job at some point in the past 12 months. Among voters, 36 percent had this personal experience with unemployment.”

And Hispanics made up 21 percent of nonvoters but only 6 percent of voters. Part of this, of course, is related to citizenship status, but part is lack of participation. In fact, a Pew report issued this month found that both Hispanic and Asian voter turnout in midterm elections has fallen, somewhat consistently, since 1986.

This is particularly disheartening since the proportion of Hispanics in the population is expected to nearly double in the next 50 years and the portion of Asians is projected to increase by more than half.

The growing majority must decide that it will no longer be silent, that it will no longer acquiesce, that it will no longer settle. We are the majority, not interested in social Darwinism and a social paternalism, but rather in a fair shake in a truly free society, where government works for the people and not for the plutocrats.

That is a simple and noble yearning, but it requires more than dreaming: It requires action.

Those struggling, unconquerable in their dignity and holding fast to the idea of equality, will one day roar, but only when they shake loose the lie that these lions are weak and sickly and divested of their power.

© 2014 The New York Times

The Nation, Apr. 22, 2014

By Steven Hsieh

Midwest Generation’s Fisk Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

Sixty-eight percent of African-Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant, the zone of maximum exposure to pollutants that cause an array of ailments, from heart disease to birth defects. Communities of color breathe in nearly 40 percent more polluted air than whites. African-American children are three times as likely to suffer an asthma attack.

The NAACP launched its Climate Justice Initiative address the stark numbers head on. Working in conjunction with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization and Indigenous Environmental Network, the Initiative published “Coal-Blooded: Putting Profits Before People” in 2012, which evaluated the impact of 378 coal-fired power plants on communities along racial and economic lines. “Just Energy Policies: Reducing Pollution and Creating Jobs,” released in December, looked at the energy policies of all fifty states through a civil rights lens.

We spoke with Jacqueline Patterson, executive director of the NAACP’s Climate Justice Initiative, about her organization’s work. (This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Why did the NAACP launch the Climate Justice Initiative?

The NAACP launched the CJI because of a recognition of the impact both of climate change itself and how it disproportionately impacts marginalized communities, low-income communities and communities of color. We looked at how climate change violates the civil rights of those communities, whether it’s because of pre-existing vulnerabilities in the impact of disasters or whether its the redevelopment process and how lots of time and resource allocation is cut along political lines and folks are already disenfranchised. The actual drivers of climate change, whether its roadway pollution or traffic vehicles or if its polluted facilities like coal plants, are disproportionately affecting communities of color and low-income communities.

As your organization reports, 68 percent of African-Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant. That’s pretty stark. How did we get here?

There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here. In some cases, the facilities were already there before the communities. The communities are-low income or low-wealth, and they moved into an area where property values are on average 15 percent lower because that’s what they can afford. That’s one dynamic. You also have companies choosing to build facilities where property values are lower and property values are lower in low-income communities, so we’ll see disproportionate placement in those communities. They’ll also choose communities where they won’t get political push back. You’ll see that kind of pattern everywhere. It’s tied to voter disenfranchisement and the lack of political power that communities of color have.

Civil rights isn’t usually one of the first things that come up in discussions about climate change. Why is that?

Clearly, traditional environmental analysis and messaging around climate change has dominated the airwaves. There are more resources for the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, not to mention folks like Al Gore. With those groups, their focus is on glaciers, flora, fauna and wildlife. That has been the focus of climate change, historically.

When you’re marginalized in one way, you’re marginalized in many ways. The voices of frontline communities, the ones that are most impacted, usually don’t make it to the airwaves. That’s starting to change. Showtime is doing that series, Years of Living Dangerously. When I watch the news, all these different folks were talking about climate change and they were talking about it from a human impact angle. Whether it’s the polar vortex or these storms or wildfires or droughts or flooding or the landslide, all these events are impacting real people, so we’re seeing real dialogue around it.

What has been the significance of environmental disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, in elevating the climate justice angle?

What’s significant about disasters like Hurricane Katrina or even the flooding and tornadoes in Alabama and Mississippi a couple years ago is you start to see the differential impact and the differential response on communities of color. With Hurricane Katrina, it was more a story about the differential response, not as much of a story about climate change. It was before the wave of recognizing where we are in terms of the increase in extreme weather events. As these disasters become more frequent, we’ll see start to see more of an analysis around the differential impact through the lens of climate change.

Your research deals a lot with how climate policy impacts the health of communities of color. Want to talk a little about that?

I will say that the lack of climate policy is affecting health in communities of color. We are making some progress with the rules that are going to be introduced in June for existing coal-fired power plants and the carbon rules that were introduced last year for proposed coal-fired power plants. Just lessening the carbon in the atmosphere will save lives and prevent people from being harmed or sickened by the various impacts of climate change. There’s also the mercury and air toxics rule, which came out years ago, but is just now coming into enforcement. It’s a rule that addresses co-pollutants that come from these facilities, not just carbon dioxide. The same facilities that are driving climate change are also sickening communities with mercury, arsenic, lead and other things being emitted. So, policies that are comprehensive that look at all the ways these facilities are harming communities are important as well.

What we need to be looking at now is being much more aggressive around our emissions targets. We need to face the fact that climate change is here now and we need to pour public money into strengthening community resilience to the impact of climate change. There needs to be more funding for FEMA to do advanced forecasting and planning. Resources need to go to frontline communities so they’re in control of designing and implementing their own resilience plans. We need to think seriously, not just about disasters, which tend to get the most visibility, but also sea level rise and how we’re going to make sure communities are prepared for the waters that are going to overtaking land in parts of Louisiana, Alaska and places in between. But also, before that water overtakes the land and forces people to move, we need to deal with the fact that even right now, as we saw with Superstorm Sandy, storm surges resulting from sea-level rise is making any regular storm seem more intense. We need to be taking all of this into account in our local planning and our resources need to follow that.

We need to make sure that we are building a political system that is more inclusive. Currently, whether its Congress or the courts or the zoning board or the rural electric co-ops or the public utilities commissions, there is underrepresentation for communities that are most impacted by the decisions all of these decision-making bodies make. From litigation to adaptation, we need to make sure we have inclusive bodies that represent the voices of the people as these decisions are being made.

Your work explores the importance of making sure benefits from clean energy are equitable and reach communities of color. Could you talk a little bit about that?

We talked earlier about how 68 percent of African-Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant and other frontline communities, such as indigenous Native American communities and Latino communities, are also right in the smog zones of these facilities. Just transitioning to a more energy-efficient economy and clean energy economy would benefit those communities in terms of having clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and clean land to live on. In addition to that, we also want to make sure that those communities are in decision-making spaces as we develop this economy, as well as revenue-generating positions. African-Americans spent $41 million on energy in 2009, but only 1 percent of African-Americans were in energy jobs and less than 1 percent of revenue in the energy sector was earned by African-Americans. Whatever room there is for estimation on either side of those statistics, they’re still fairly stark in saying not only are we being negatively impacted by the current fossil-fuel dominated portfolio, we’re also not even benefiting from the revenue or jobs in that sector, nor are we in positions of being able to have input in how those sectors advance and roll out.

As we transition to a new-energy economy, we need frontline communities, not just communities of color but also low-income communities, to be working in decision-making and revenue-generating positions within the industry.

Obviously your organization is part of this, but how do we get people of color excited and engaged in discussions about climate change?

Communities across the country are already organizing themselves to talk about this — whether its the Eastern Michigan Environmental Action Council in Detroit or the Asia Pacific Environmental Network in the Bay Area — they’re really coming together to talk about, not just the direct impact of climate change but how we need a holistic approach to how we organize our communities and political and economic systems. So we are having, at a local level, conversations about what we want for our communities and how this connects to a bigger picture. We’re talking about how we can be agents of change for our communities and how to connect to the greater landscape.

For example, when we talk about climate change, solutions to climate change, we are talking about green schools, which are more energy efficient, but also make people feel valued through education, retrofitting their school and making it the type of environment they want to work and learn in. We talk about local food movements, which both mitigate climate change, because we’re growing our own food and aren’t relying on trucks for transport, and provide education about climate change. We’re looking at comprehensive, holistic ways of both mitigating climate change and adapting to climate change that helps provide economic, social and cultural benefits to our communities.

Copyright © 2012 The Nation

The Nation, Apr. 22, 2014

By Michelle Chen

Volunteers construct an environmentally friendly home for Central Valley Habitat for Humanity (AP Photo/The Daily News-Record, Nikki Fox)

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is in, reminding us once again that time is running out for governments and industry to decarbonize the economy: within a generation, policymakers must tighten emissions regulations, shift to clean energy sources, promote greener manufacturing and adapt technologies to reverse climate trends and mitigate the ecological impacts. Yet, while the assessment focuses on policy solutions, it leaves open questions about the labor element of climate policy: At the end of the day, the work of transforming how we produce and consume takes human hands. Where are the workers?

Five years ago, “green jobs” were all the rage in Washington. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was rolled out with a win-win agenda aimed at fixing the economy and healing the environment at once. Candidate Obama touted a “blueprint” for a green economy, with plans to create 5 million green jobs.

Then the stimulus sparked hopes of a Green New Deal — direct job creation to transition the workforce to a low-carbon economy, plus industrial policy to drive investment in green infrastructure and solar and wind sectors.

Today, the green has begun to wilt. Although the green technology and energy sectors are still expanding, the administration has offered little beyond the short-lived stimulus package and short-term tax breaks for renewable-energy development and corporate-friendly “public-private partnerships.” The drop in political enthusiasm for green jobs is in part the result of sustained conservative attacks coupled with continuing economic stagnation. Yet the fading of the green agenda’s populist buzz also reflects more profound social challenges in the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable economy.

Though federal green initiatives have provided vital seed money for wind farms and solar-generation projects nationwide, the blue-collar workers who have the most to gain from the projected clean-tech boom are still struggling to find any job, much less a green one.

Of course, green jobs are not the boondoggle portrayed by right-wingers. Solar panel companies and green building firms are hiring people, just not fast enough to dent the unemployment figures. In 2012 and 2013, several hundred projects related to renewables and green infrastructure were announced, potentially generating more than 180,000 green job openings, according to the green-tech advocacy group Environmental Entrepreneurs. But new investments have waned recently, in part due to lags in government supports. For example, many freshly announced new wind projects were halted abruptly in late 2012 when Congress delayed the renewal of a critical wind-production tax credit (goaded by aggressive lobbying from the dirty fuels industry). And the investment climate remains unstable, as another batch of credits remains in limbo for 2014.

Such setbacks demonstrate not only the crucial role of government investment but also the endemic unreliability of capital as the driver of an eco-conscious economic transition.

Capital has failed even more dramatically to match the hype around “green-collar jobs” as an employment program. Overall, even with the expansion of green-oriented businesses in the manufacturing, construction and technology sectors, workers involved in “green goods and services” made up under 3 percent of total employment in 2011. So while green sectors are growing through both public and private investment, green jobs are just one piece of a long-term fight against climate change, and they won’t solve the current unemployment crisis.

Indeed, some environmentalists say that green jobs might have been a more sustainable political venture if they had been more realistically billed as part of a broader climate change policy, not a big jobs booster in a slumped economy.

Jeremy Brecher, co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability, an alliance of environmental and labor organizations, tells The Nation that the stimulus did significantly boost new green energy projects and opened some opportunities for decently paying jobs in sectors like home weatherization.

But after the stimulus ended, those initiatives waned, and the evaporation of the administration’s political and fiscal support, he says, has “left a very bitter taste in the mouth of organized labor, who thought that by cooperating with Obama and environmental movements they would be able to really create substantial jobs for American workers. I think that they feel hung out to dry.”

Still, Brecher attributes the waning of the green jobs push to the same austerity mentality that has hampered other social programs: “It’s not that government can’t do anything, but that certain sectors of our political world have spent thirty years hamstringing and destroying the capacity of government to do anything.”

One political roadblock for green economic development is that the Obama administration oversold green jobs as a social project. Amid the Great Recession, the initiatives were originally framed as a labor-market intervention for communities hard hit by unemployment, with grassroots backing from environmental justice groups like Green For All. These good intentions did not translate into economic revitalization.

Five years on, the workforce programs aimed at low-income and disadvantaged communities have not yet been scaled up to a level that would have an impact on racial disparities in joblessness. As for generating skilled labor, a recent study by the Government Accountability Office found that of the 60 percent of Recovery Act training programs that had run their course by the end of 2012 — supported by some $500 million in stimulus funds — only about half of those trainees had been placed in jobs; many had received only limited skills training and had trouble breaking into recession-battered labor markets in construction and manufacturing.

More broadly, lawmakers have neglected the kinds of infrastructure investments the country needs to really ameliorate unemployment, including green development along with basic public works projects.

According to a 2012 industry analysis by Jobs for the Future, green jobs progress has also been impeded due to mismatching of labor capacity and employer needs. Training programs, researchers found, were sometimes ill-suited for skilled technical positions, and many job openings were concentrated in higher-level production and administrative positions, which were harder for entry-level workers to break into.

The disillusionment with the green jobs hype may have stoked political backlash from labor. The AFL-CIO building-trades department is now pressing for the government to move forward with plans to build the KeystoneXL oil and gas pipeline — directly antagonizing the climate change movement’s central campaign. And resentment has emerged from traditional mining communities against newly proposed environmental regulations on the coal industry, forging awkward common ground with pro-business conservatives.

But if you strip away the ideological polarization, you can start to see where social and environmental principles converge. People are profoundly worried about their futures, and across class and cultural lines, no one wants to see the health and safety of their communities pitted against their economic security. What if we started there: By changing social priorities, rather than twisting the concept of green transition around conventional frameworks of market-driven growth and profit?

The basic idea that the earlier green jobs rhetoric got right was environmental justice. This concept braids social and ecological values into a whole. As Brecher says, “We have a crisis of jobs and inequality… And we have a crisis of the climate, and fortunately, they can both be solved through the same policies.”

Some of those policies are already underway on the community level: Some cities and states have launched long-term municipal bond funding for clean energy, or developed funding programs for energy-efficient building and transit. But a holistic development agenda would incorporate all interests within the social ecosystem for long-term resilience: Curbing air and water pollution, promoting healthier forms of industrial and food production, and using democratic advocacy to advance economic and environmental values in tandem. Instead of letting corporations relentlessly exploit workers and natural resources, expanding public control over land-use, energy sources and industrial policy can help ensure that the sanctity of the commons is prioritized over the predation of capital.

Rather than bean-counting with job statistics and return-on-investment figures, activists can start rethinking green within the context of social protection, and focus on building policies around social equity — from subsidizing green power for low-income households, to shifting jobs from coal plants to the solar panels. Environmentalism can be a populist movement — if the political framing of climate policy centers not on just cutting carbon but cultivating justice.

Copyright © 2012 The Nation

NY Times, Apr. 22, 2014

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

A blinkered view of race in America won out in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, when six justices agreed, for various reasons, to allow Michigan voters to ban race-conscious admissions policies in higher education.

In 2003, the court upheld such a policy at the University of Michigan law school because it furthered a compelling governmental interest in educational diversity. Opponents of affirmative action moved to amend the state’s constitution to ban any consideration of race or sex in public education and employment. In 2006, voters passed the amendment by a wide margin.

Affirmative action supporters sued to strike down the amendment, arguing that by changing the rules of the game in a way that uniquely burdened racial minorities, the amendment violated the equal protection clause. A closely divided federal appeals court agreed.

In Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the Supreme Court reversed that ruling and allowed the amendment to stand. Among other things, the justices disagreed about whose rights were at issue: the minorities who would be affected by the ban or the majority of the state’s voters who passed it.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a three-member plurality, sided with the voters, who he said had undertaken “a basic exercise of their democratic power” in approving the amendment. He cautioned that the ruling took no position on the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies themselves. “This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it.”

Not so, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded in a stinging 58-page dissent. “Our Constitution places limits on what a majority of the people may do,” she wrote, such as when they pass laws that oppress minorities.

That’s what the affirmative action ban does, by altering the political process to single out race and sex as the only factors that may not be considered in university admissions.

While the Constitution “does not guarantee minority groups victory in the political process,” Justice Sotomayor wrote, “it does guarantee them meaningful and equal access to that process. It guarantees that the majority may not win by stacking the political process against minority groups permanently.”

The Michigan amendment has already resulted in a 25 percent drop in minority representation in Michigan’s public universities and colleges, even as the proportion of college-age African-Americans in the state has gone up.

In the most eloquent part of her dissent, Justice Sotomayor rightly took aim at the conservative members of the court, who speak high-mindedly of racial equality even as they write off decades-old precedent meant to address the lingering effects of “centuries of racial discrimination” — a view that is “out of touch with reality.” The reality, she wrote, is that “race matters.”

In response to her pointed rebuke, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote a terse concurrence chiding Justice Sotomayor for questioning her colleagues’ “openness and candor.” Yet the chief justice’s own words on race show no true understanding of what she called America’s “long and lamentable record” of rigging the political game against racial minorities. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he wrote glibly in a 2007 case striking down school integration efforts in Washington and Kentucky. “Things have changed dramatically” 50 years after the Voting Rights Act, he wrote last year in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key provision of that act.

These quotes represent a naïve vision of racial justice. As Justice Sotomayor put it, “we ought not sit back and wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society.”

© 2014 The New York Times

NY Times, Apr. 20, 2014

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Next year, in December, delegates from more than 190 nations will gather in Paris to take another shot at completing a new global treaty on climate change. This will be the 21st Conference of the Parties under United Nations auspices since the first summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

For the most part, these meetings have been exercises in futility, producing just one treaty — in Kyoto in 1997 — that asked little of the big developing countries and was never ratified by the United States Senate. But if the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report is to be taken seriously, as it should be, the Paris meeting may well be the world’s last, best chance to get a grip on a problem that, absent urgent action over the next decade, could spin out of control.

The I.P.C.C., composed of thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists, has issued three reports in the last seven months, each the product of up to six years of research. The first simply confirmed what has been known since Rio: global warming is caused largely by the burning of fossil fuels by humans and, to a lesser extent, by deforestation. The second, released in Japan three weeks ago, said that profound effects were already being felt around the world, including mounting damage to coral reefs, shrinking glaciers and more persistent droughts, and warned of worse to come — rising seas, species loss and dwindling agricultural yields.

The third report, released last week, may be the most ominous of the three. Despite investments in energy efficiency and cleaner energy sources in the United States, in Europe and in developing countries like China, annual emissions of greenhouse gases have risen almost twice as fast in the first decade of this century as they did in the last decades of the 20th century. This places in serious jeopardy the emissions target agreed upon in Rio to limit warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level. Beyond that increase, the world could face truly alarming consequences.

Avoiding that fate will require a reduction of between 40 percent and 70 percent in greenhouse gases by midcentury, which means embarking on a revolution in the way we produce and consume energy.

That’s daunting enough, but here’s the key finding: The world has only about 15 years left in which to begin to bend the emissions curve downward. Otherwise, the costs of last-minute fixes will be overwhelming. “We cannot afford to lose another decade,” says Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”

The report does not tell governments what to do — presumably, that’s for them to decide in Paris — but it lists approaches, mostly familiar, some technologically advanced. The most obvious, and probably the most difficult to negotiate, is to put a global price on carbon, either through a system of tradable permits like that adopted by Europe (and rejected by the United States Senate) or through a carbon tax of some sort, thus driving investments to cleaner fuels.

A more plausible pathway is to get each country to adopt binding emission reduction targets and then allow them to choose how to get there — ramping up nuclear energy, phasing out coal-fired plants in favor of cleaner natural gas (though natural gas itself would have to someday give way to low-carbon alternatives), and vastly increasing renewable sources like wind and solar, which still supply only a small fraction of the world’s energy (less than 5 percent for wind and solar combined in the United States). All this will require a huge shift in investment, both private and public, from fossil fuels.

Governments have an enormous amount of work to do in devising emission reduction strategies by next year. As always, American leadership will be required, meaning leadership from the top. Confronted with a hostile Congress, President Obama has commendably moved on his own to reduce emissions through regulations, first with cars and now with coal-fired power plants. And he has done so without a great deal of public support. However compelling the science, global warming has not generated the kind of public anxiety and bottom-up demand for change that helped win the big fights for cleaner air and water in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This makes his job harder but no less urgent.

© 2014 The New York Times