(Washington, DC) ­ The NAACP has released a new report that assesses energy policy in all 50 states from a civil rights lens. Titled Just Energy Policies: Reducing Pollution and Creating Jobs, the report provides analysis of each state¹s energy sector policies based on both the environmental and economic impacts.

“Our report is a call to action for our community and our leaders,” stated NAACP Interim President and CEO Lorraine C. Miller. “This is both a monumental moment and an opportunity for civic engagement.  The decision made about energy by public utility boards and local officials have a direct impact on our community. We must know who the decision makers are and spur them into action with our votes.”

The report assesses states on five different criteria: Renewable portfolio standards, Energy Efficiency Resource Standards, Net Metering Standards, Local Hire Provisions, and Minority Business Enterprise provisions.  Additionally, the report lays out the potential for each state to become a leader in clean energy.
“The Just Energy Policies report lays out a vision, supported by practical data, of the path to transitioning from energy production processes that are harmful to our communities, to energy efficiency and clean energy policy landscape that reduces pollution and creates new jobs,” stated Jacqueline Patterson, NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Director.  “Given double digit unemployment and staggeringly stark wealth differentials for African Americans, the report explicitly details mechanisms for ensuring economic gain for our communities and businesses.”
Based on the analysis of the data, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York rank as the states with the best energy policies, while Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee are ranked at the bottom.
“While Alabama does a good job assisting families with their utility bills and winterizing homes, our state must put more money into research and create renewable energy in our state and stop depending on coal to produce our electricity,” stated Bernard Simelton, President of the Alabama NAACP.  “The coal that we use to produce electricity causes pollution in our communities, river and streams and a vast majority of those facilities are located in or close to African American and poor communities. These plants causes health issues such as lung disease and the Governor has not extended Medicaid to those individuals that would have insurance coverage that live in these areas.  Therefore, many will die early from exposure to pollution if we do not change now.”
“The NAACP views clean energy as a civil rights and social justice issue. In Tennessee, we have to step away from spending billions of dollars on imported energy resources and embrace the renewable energy resource opportunities in our own backyard,” stated Gloria Sweet-Love, President of the Tennessee NAACP. “Tennessee has no renewable portfolio, no energy efficient resource standards, no net metering standard and no state or local hiring goals.”
“But Tennessee is on the cusp of change,” continued Sweet-Love.  “We already have a minority business enterprise certification provision, and just last year the state opened its largest solar plant.  We must admit that African Americans are underrepresented in the energy sector workplace, having only 1.1 percent of energy jobs. Our new report identifies clean energy potential state-by-state. I am concerned that an African American child is three times more likely to be admitted to the hospital and twice more likely to die of asthma attacks than a white American child,” she said.
“In Mississippi, the NAACP has long supported renewable energy,” stated Derrick Johnson, President of the Mississippi NAACP. “Over the last 7 years, we’ve been a part of a coalition supporting net metering. We believe that net metering is an appropriate approach for clean energy in a state like Mississippi where about half our power generating sources come from locally owned cooperatives.”
Johnson continued, “We want to see a state policy construct that allows African Americans and other communities to participate in the job market. The unemployment rate for African Americans in the state of Mississippi is in double digits, and the energy sector is one of the sectors that could provide gainful employment to communities around the state. Job creation in the state of Mississippi is something that we desperately need.”
“Since its founding in 1909, the NAACP has evolved in its programmatic agenda. We clearly view clean energy as a civil rights issue,” stated Kathy Egland, Chairman of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Board Committee. “A history of racial and economic inequalities has left many communities of color in the shadows of the energy conversation. We all have a responsibility to leave this world better than we found it, and I believe the NAACP¹s new report will give our communities the tools they need to help meet that responsibility,” she said.

Alternet, Dec. 29, 2013

By Joseph Torres, S. Derek Turner, New America Media

We just experienced a shameful milestone in the history of U.S. media — and barely anyone noticed.

There are now zero black-owned and operated full-power TV stations in our country.

This sorry state of affairs is the culmination of a trend that started in the late 1990s when Congress and the Federal Communications Commission allowed massive consolidation in the broadcasting industry. This policy shift crowded out existing owners of color and ensured that it would be nearly impossible for new owners to access the public airwaves. Recent FCC actions (and in some cases, inaction) have only hastened this decline in opportunities for diverse broadcasters.

From Little … to Nothing

When Free Press released its first report on the state of TV ownership in 2006, we found that there were only 18 African American-owned and operated full-power commercial TV stations — representing just 1.3 percent of all such stations.

By December 2012, those 18 had shrunk to just five. And now they’re all gone.

Roberts Broadcasting, a black-owned media company, just announced a deal to sell its three remaining full-power TV stations to ION Media Networks for nearly $8 million.

Once considered a phenomenal success story in an industry known for its stunning lack of diversity, Roberts Broadcasting was forced to declare bankruptcy in 2011.

This decline stemmed primarily from Viacom’s decision to shutter the UPN network, which Roberts had affiliated with due to UPN’s unique focus on programming featuring ordinary portrayals of African Americans.

Roberts Broadcasting’s exit from the market comes on the heels of the departures of two other prominent black owners.

In late October, the Sinclair Broadcast Group continued its buying spree by acquiring a Fox affiliate in Portland, Me., from a company helmed by Charles Glover, a funk musician turned broadcaster. That same month, Access.1 Communications agreed to sell its Atlantic City NBC station to Locus Point Networks.

New Jersey residents are up in arms about the deal: Locus Point is expected to close the station and give up its license as the FCC takes broadcast stations off the air and auctions those airwaves to cellphone companies.

Broken Promises

It’s hard to fathom the sorry state of broadcast ownership during the administration of our nation’s first black president. After all, during his first presidential campaign, President Obama pledged to “encourage diversity in the ownership of broadcast media.”

But that hasn’t happened.

Public interest and civil rights groups have warned the FCC that its policies allowing for greater media consolidation were going to push out the few remaining people of color who owned broadcast stations.

Media consolidation has made it harder for people of color to own broadcast stations because it raises entry barriers for small owners. Concentration makes it harder for any small owner to compete, and the few non-white broadcast licensees we have are far more likely to be small owners who control just a handful of stations or a single broadcast outlet.

Our nation’s history of discrimination created a lack of wealth in communities of color, and without access to capital, people of color find themselves permanently on the outside. And for those few owners of color who have been able to acquire stations, consolidation has made it harder for them to compete against larger and better-financed media conglomerates.

Can It Get Any Worse? Yes, It Can

If you think this situation can’t get worse, think again.

While owning a full-power TV station has been out of reach for most people of color, low-power TV has offered an opportunity to get into this otherwise closed industry.

Low-power TV commercial stations serve smaller areas than their full-power counterparts, and often lack legal protections, including guaranteed carriage by cable and satellite providers.

Consequently, they’re far cheaper to own.

At the end of 2011, the FCC reported that people of color owned 15 percent of all low-power TV stations, compared to just 3 percent of full-power TV outlets.

But this small ray of hope is expected to dim as the prospect of an auction to cellphone companies could drive out the owners of these low-power TV stations too.

The FCC is preparing to conduct that incentive auction in the next year or two. As a result, speculators have been buying up both low- and full-power TV stations in an effort to cash in.

This fervent speculation is creating a climate where many existing owners are forced to sell (as their creditors are more interested in pocketing a financial windfall than serving the community). We’re already seeing several full- and low-power owners of color exiting the market.

Will New FCC Leadership Bring Change We Can Believe In?

The FCC has a long and pitiful track record here, failing to promote or even preserve what little ownership diversity remains.

There’s hope this could change now that the agency has a new chairman.

But leaders have to lead.

In this case, that means the new FCC has to acknowledge that we’re well beyond a crisis point. Its own policies are responsible for the shameful state of minority ownership.

The elimination of black owners is a tragedy, but the FCC must take action to address its own failures.

========
Joseph Torres is senior external affairs director and S. Derek Turner is research director for the Free Press.

NJSpotlight, Dec. 24, 2013

As NJ Spotlight’s staff takes a holiday break until January, former Gov. Christie Whitman, who served from 1994 to 2001, provides the first in our collection of year-end essays from those who have sat in the governor’s chair. The invitation asked only that they write about any issue they think is important as New Jersey enters 2014.

As former U.S. EPA administrator and now a consultant on environmental issues, Whitman takes on a topic she knows well: the environment and our public health.

By Christine Todd Whitman

Recent studies linking various health and economic impacts of environmental contamination should cause policymakers to reevaluate their priorities when it comes to environmental legislation and regulation. Three key areas of research in this area stand out: the connection between certain pesticides and Parkinson’s, the correlation between elevated lead in gasoline with crime rates, and the link between air pollution and autism.

A study released last year by researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the Parkinson’s Institute and Clinical Center showed the connection between Parkinson’s disease and the use of two pesticides, rotenone and paraquat. People who had used either pesticide developed Parkinson’s disease approximately 2.5 times more often than those who did not use the chemicals. Mercifully, there are no residential uses for either paraquat or rotenone currently registered, but that restriction for rotenone was only put in place, voluntarily by its producers, in 2006. Paraquat use is restricted to certified applicators, and rotenone is now only permitted in the killing of invasive fish species.

A study released early this year revealed that the change in leaded gasoline usage has a high correlation with violent crime rates in America. Tulane University toxicologist Howard W. Mielke found that the exposure of children to high levels of lead in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a significant uptick in crime 20 years later. Every 1 percent increase in the number of tons of lead released into the atmosphere corresponded with a half a percent point increase in the aggravated assault rate 22 years later. Mielke found that once leaded gasoline was no longer available in the 1980s, the corresponding crime rates fell; further research confirmed this correlation in other countries and in six U.S. cities.

While there have been previous studies linking lead with birth defects, lower intellectual aptitude and hearing concerns, this latest study is groundbreaking in its connection between lead and high levels of aggression. Leaded gasoline use declined by the 1980s and was banned for use in vehicles in 1996; it is still in use in a few products, including racecars, certain piston-powered airplanes, and some off-road vehicles. There are still traces of lead in the soil in the U.S., and an estimated 16 million homes still have lead in paint or other areas.

Finally, this summer researchers from Harvard University’s School of Public Health found that pregnant women who were exposed to high levels of diesel particulates or mercury were twice as likely to have an autistic child when compared with women who were in areas of low pollution. Using data from the Nurse’s Health Study 2, a long-term study that began in 1980 and involves more than 116,000 nurses, the researchers examined 325 women who had a child with autism and 22,000 women who had a child that does not suffer from this disorder. They then used data from the Environmental Protection Agency to approximate the women’s exposure to toxins.

Pundits and politicians tend to present economic development and environmental regulation as opponents in a zero-sum game. Such a view is shortsighted and foolish; we need to take a longer-term view of the affects that our actions toward our surroundings have on our health and our safety –- two resources that once lost cannot simply be repurchased.

Thankfully, we now have research and measurement tools we did not have at our disposal decades ago, and it behooves us to utilize those tools to view environmental protection through the lens of our future and our children’s future. In our benevolent mission to grow the economy, we should not be in too great a rush to ignore environmental testing and results. The price we pay at the end is much greater than we can afford, both in terms of dollars and human lives.

The author was the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2001-2003 and governor of New Jersey from 1994-2001.

Newark Star-Ledger, Dec. 22, 2013

Solve Climate, Dec. 19, 2013

by Katherine Bagley

Separated by less than a mile, political leaders in New Jersey and New York diverge on the issue of climate change.

By Katherine Bagley

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a series of aggressive rebuilding initiatives to protect New Yorkers from future climate-related threats.

But less than a mile away in New Jersey, just across the Hudson River, political leaders reacted in a much different way.

To them, the October 2012 superstorm was just a rare event, not a preview of what scientists expect global warming to bring to the East Coast in the coming decades.

When asked in May about Sandy’s connection with climate change, Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, said the question was "a distraction" and that global warming was an "esoteric" theory.

That philosophy has permeated New Jersey’s post-Sandy recovery effort.

N.Y. Times, Dec. 23, 2013

By the Editorial Board

Civil rights groups in New Jersey filed a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in April charging that the state plan for distributing Hurricane Sandy recovery aid discriminated against blacks and Hispanics who lost their homes in the storm. In September, the Fair Share Housing Center, an advocacy group, sued the state, alleging that it was withholding public information that would show whether low-income and minority citizens were being discriminated against.

The center now says it has evidence showing that black and Hispanic citizens who seek assistance are being turned away in disproportionate numbers. Its data show that 38.1 percent of African-Americans and 20.4 percent of Hispanics who applied for resettlement grants were rejected, against only 14.5 percent of whites. The group says that it found a similar outcome among people who applied for reconstruction or rehabilitation grants: 35.1 percent of African-Americans and 18.1 percent of Latinos were rejected, compared with 13.6 percent of whites.

The center says that its data show low application rates by minority citizens, which might suggest problems with either the state’s outreach efforts or with the application process itself. Gov. Chris Christie has dismissed the center as a “hack group” that deserves no response. His Department of Community Affairs, which oversees the housing recovery effort, says the charge of discrimination is “outrageously false.”

The numbers by themselves do not prove discrimination. But the Christie administration has a poor record when it comes to supporting housing for the poor. Mr. Christie has tried to undermine the state’s affordable housing laws since he took office and would have dismantled the independent agency that promotes affordable housing had the New Jersey Supreme Court not barred him from doing so earlier this year.

Given that record, federal housing officials need to take a close look to see whether New Jersey is operating in a nondiscriminatory fashion.

© 2013 The New York Times

While NJ ranks as second-richest state in nation, gap in household incomes is wide and deep.

The vast differences in wealth in New Jersey become clear on a map showing household income:

MEMPHIS — After her doctor told her two months ago that she had breast cancer, Debrah Reid, a 58-year-old dance teacher, drove straight to a funeral home. She began planning a burial with the funeral director and his wife, even requesting a pink coffin.

Sensing something was amiss, the funeral director, Edmund Ford, paused. “Who is this for?” he asked. Ms. Reid replied quietly, “It’s for me.”

Aghast, Mr. Ford’s wife, Myrna, quickly put a stop to the purchase. “Get on out of here,” she said, urging Ms. Reid to return to her doctor and seek treatment. Despondent, Ms. Reid instead headed to her church to talk to her pastor.

“I was just going to sit down and die,” she says.

Like many other African-American women in Memphis and around the country, Ms. Reid learned about her breast cancer after it had already reached an advanced stage, making it difficult to treat and reducing her odds of survival. Her story reflects one of the most troubling disparities in American health care. Despite 20 years of pink ribbon awareness campaigns and numerous advances in medical treatment that have sharply improved survival rates for women with breast cancer in the United States, the vast majority of those gains have largely bypassed black women.

The cancer divide between black women and white women in the United States is as entrenched as it is startling. In the 1980s, breast cancer survival rates for the two were nearly identical. But since 1991, as improvements in screening and treatment came into use, the gap has widened, with no signs of abating. Although breast cancer is diagnosed in far more white women, black women are far more likely to die of the disease.

And Memphis is the deadliest major American city for African-American women with breast cancer. Black women with the disease here are more than twice as likely to die of it than white women.

“The big change in the 1990s was advances in care that were widely available in early detection and treatment,” said Steven Whitman, director of the Sinai Urban Health Institute in Chicago. “White women gained access to those advances, and black women didn’t.”

Over all, black women with a breast cancer diagnosis will die three years sooner than their white counterparts. While nearly 70 percent of white women live at least five years after diagnosis, only 56 percent of black women do. And some research suggests that institutions providing mammograms mainly to black patients miss as many as half of breast cancers compared with the expected detection rates at academic hospitals.

The gap in cancer survival cannot be explained away by biological differences in cancer between blacks and whites, researchers say. While African-American women are at greater risk of a more aggressive form of cancer known as triple negative, those cancers account for only about 10 percent of diagnoses.

Researchers from the Sinai Institute last year analyzed breast cancer cases in the country’s 25 largest cities and found that African-American women with breast cancer were, on average, 40 percent more likely to die of their disease than white women. In the United States, the disparity in breast cancer survival translates to about 1,700 additional deaths each year — or about five more black women dying every day.

News that Memphis has the widest survival gap between black and white hit the medical community here hard. When the breast cancer disparity study was published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology last year, Edward Rafalski was one of the first here to read it. He is senior vice president for strategic planning at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, which operates eight hospitals in the Memphis area.

As it happened, Dr. Rafalski had previously worked at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago and knew the study’s lead author, Dr. Whitman of the Sinai Institute. As local headlines declared the city’s troubling record, Dr. Rafalski invited Dr. Whitman to the city. Memphis, population 655,000, is more than two-thirds black, and more than a quarter of its residents are poor.

“When you look at any epidemiological study, Memphis is often the epicenter of virtually any disease, be it diabetes, heart failure — there are a lot of health issues here,” Dr. Rafalski said. “But for breast cancer to be as bad as it is — that’s why everyone came to the table and said, ‘We have to do something.’”

Dr. Whitman flew to Memphis for a strategy session. The study’s co-author, Marc Hurlbert of the Avon Breast Cancer Crusade, which funded the research, joined the conference by phone.

The solution, everyone agreed, would not be simple. Doctors and health care researchers say the reasons behind the black-white cancer divide are complex. Economic disparities that disproportionately affect African-Americans explain some of it. Years of racial discrimination and distrust of the medical establishment dating back to the Tuskegee, Ala., syphilis experiments on black men in the 1930s continue to influence health decisions made by African-American families in the South.

Lack of health insurance among low-income and self-employed women was also cited as an obstacle to timely care, a problem that may be eased if some of them gain insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Black women often arrive at the hospital with cancers so advanced, they rival the late-stage disease that doctors see among women in developing nations. A study based on Medicare records published in July in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 20 percent of African-American women with breast cancer did not learn of their disease until it had advanced to Stage 3 or 4. By comparison, only 11 percent of white women learn at late stages.

Doctors in Memphis and in cities around the country tell horrific stories of poor and uneducated patients, black and white, who arrive at the clinics with festering tumors or a breast that has been all but consumed by a growing cancer.

With a grant from the Avon Breast Cancer Foundation, researchers at the Methodist system analyzed their records of breast cancer patients and discovered that even in what is widely viewed as the top hospital system in the region, black patients took on average about a month longer to begin treatment after diagnosis compared with white patients.

“A large percentage of our African-American population is also poor, and poor people don’t have the luxury of being sick,” said Dr. Kurt Tauer, an oncologist with the West Cancer Clinic, which is affiliated with the Methodist system. “They have to take off work, find someone to give them a ride.”

But the larger issue, hospital officials say, is that many black women in Memphis do not seek health care at all. They do not undergo mammograms for screening or see a doctor when the earliest signs of breast cancer develop. Even among women with Medicare coverage, black women were significantly less likely than white women to have seen a primary care doctor in the six to 18 months before diagnosis, and also had far lower rates of breast cancer screening — 23.5 percent in that period, compared with 35.7 percent of white women, the JAMA study found.

The challenge is to get women screened and treated in good time. But how, the Methodist officials asked, do you reach African-American women who have felt excluded from the health care system for most of their lives?

Spreading the Word

It is often said that there is a church on every street corner in Memphis. In a half-mile stretch of Elvis Presley Boulevard, there are six: the Faith Temple Holiness Church, the Holmes Road Church of Christ, the CME Temple Christian Methodist Church, the Lily of the Valley Church of God in Christ, Our Savior Lutheran Church and the Holy Spring Baptist Church. Methodist hospital system officials estimate there are 3,000 to 4,000 churches in the area they serve.

“Our patients are in churches on Sunday,” said the Rev. Bobby Baker, director of faith and community partnerships at Methodist. “If we want to be in their lives when they’re not in our hospital, the church is where to find them.”

In 2005, the hospital system formed the Congregational Health Network. It began with 12 area churches and has grown to more than 500 congregations. Through the network, the hospitals have registered 18,000 people and given them messages promoting prevention, screening and health education. An analysis of hospital records shows that patients in the network fare better, staying out of the hospital four months longer than non-network patients with a similar diagnosis.

Dr. Rafalski and his Methodist colleagues realized that this network would be the best way to reach out to black women on breast cancer issues. With a grant from the Susan G. Komen Foundation, they hired Carole Dickens to work with pastors and congregants. During Sunday services, she spreads the word about early screening, gives women her cellphone number and follows up with those who share their contact information. She helps them gain access to public health programs and offers taxi vouchers so they can get to medical appointments.

Many of the women admit to never getting a mammogram and avoiding doctors. Sometimes, it is because they do not have health insurance, so Ms. Dickens refers them to free mammography programs in the area. Others admit they are stopped by fear.

“They have all kinds of reasons for not doing it,” Ms. Dickens said.

She said the women have told her: “I don’t want anybody cutting on me.”

“My mama died, and my aunt died and they suffered so much. I didn’t want to go through that.”

“If I’ve got it, I’ve got it. I’m going to die from something.”

A Daunting Task

Mary Singleton, 57, a Memphis print shop owner, noticed a lump in her breast in July. Because she did not have health insurance, she did not get the lump checked, telling herself that she did not need to worry because she did not have a family history of breast cancer.

One afternoon this fall, the Boulevard Church of Christ hosted a health fair, giving away pink bags that included pink pens, a key chain and a brochure from the American Cancer Society. It prompted Ms. Singleton to seek a free mammogram through the local health department. She learned she had Stage 4 cancer in October.

“It takes a while for the brain to process,” she said. “There’s a difference between what you heard about cancer, and now somebody is telling you that it’s your story.”

After years without health insurance, she was told that her cancer treatment would be covered by Tenncare, the state’s Medicaid program.

“I had to get cancer to get health insurance,” Ms. Singleton said, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I’ve been one of those people waiting for Obamacare, waiting for health insurance. And this is how I finally get it.”

After her diagnosis, her son George moved home from Iowa to help her run her printing business, which she had just opened about a month before learning of her illness. The business, named STBS, for Sisters Together Building Success, is in an office she leased from her church, just off Elvis Presley Boulevard.

On a recent day, she stepped out of her shop to watch a holiday parade move slowly past. She had printed some of the signs being carried in the parade, and she wanted to see them go by. A dance group called the Sassie Seniors strutted by in red Santa jackets. The leader, in a shiny red leotard and boots with faux leopard fur, was none other than Ms. Reid, the dance instructor who began planning her funeral after learning she had breast cancer.

After the funeral home refused her business, Ms. Reid sought counseling from the Rev. Robert J. Matthews of the New Hope Baptist Church of Memphis. He is a 12-year survivor of colon cancer, and their talk was transformative for her.

“I’m not a weak person,” she said. “I decided to be a messenger.”

Ms. Reid, a former member of the Grizzlies Grannies, a dance team for the Memphis Grizzlies, the city’s professional basketball team, said she had avoided a mammogram for eight years because she found them so unpleasant. Last month, she called a meeting of the Sassie Seniors in the dressing room before a performance.

“I revealed my breast so they could see it,” she said. “It was swollen. I made them touch it. It shocked them. Out of 21 people with me that night, 15 have already had mammograms, and others have them scheduled.”

While Ms. Reid, who has Stage 3 cancer, hopes her story will help other women, she knows that education is not enough. “A lot of us don’t have insurance,” she said. “And without insurance, a lot of stuff goes undetected.”

Ms. Reid, like Ms. Singleton, is undergoing treatment at the West Cancer Clinic.

Doctors say it will be months or even years before they know if their efforts to reach out to African-American women will lead to more early diagnoses and begin to narrow the black-and-white divide for breast cancer.

“It’s such a daunting task,” said Dr. Rafalski of Methodist. “It’s almost easier to throw up your hands, but we can’t. We have to fix it, one little step at a time.”

NJ Spotlight, Dec. 13, 2013

By Tracey Samuelson WHYY/NewsWorks

N.Y. Times, Dec. 11, 2013
By Corey Kilgannon
MAHWAH, N.J. — The past week has been unsettling for the Ramapough Mountain Indians, who live on this northern stretch of the Appalachian Mountains that overlooks the Manhattan skyline and wealthy parts of Bergen County. The new movie “Out of the Furnace,” featuring a star-studded cast that includes Christian Bale and Woody Harrelson, also features numerous negative references to the Ramapoughs. They include a fight-ring subplot.