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.
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.
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.
What are the state’s goals? The report aimed to develop strategies for achieving aggressive goals set forward in a 2007 law approved by the Legislature and signed by then Gov. Jon Corzine. It called for approximately a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to global warming, to 1990 levels by 2020, followed by a further reduction of 80 percent below 2006 levels by 2050. Where most greenhouse gas emissions are generated: The transportation sector is the biggest source of pollution that causes global warming, accounting for about 35 percent of gross emissions, according to the report. The next biggest source comes from power plants producing electricity (24 percent) followed by residential/commercial buildings (20 percent) and industrial sources (14 percent). In 1990, New Jersey’s statewide greenhouse gas emissions totaled approximately 123 million metric tons. How do we get there: The report suggests three main measures as the backbone of the state’s efforts to meet its 2020 target: the New Jersey Energy Master Plan; New Jersey Low Emission Vehicle program; and Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Those programs are targeted at reducing emissions from the two largest contributors to global warming pollution in New Jersey — transportation and energy — according to the report. Why some doubt the state will ever achieve its goals: Each of those programs has failed to live up to expectations, raising questions as to whether the expected reduction in emissions will ever be achieved. If these programs are not lowering emissions, then how will the state meet its targets? What’s happening with the New Jersey Energy Master plan? It calls for at least 20 percent of the state’s electricity to be produced by renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, by 2020. While the state’s solar sector seems to be recovering from a boom-and-bust cycle a few year ago, New Jersey’s efforts to develop a robust presence in offshore wind is not happening anytime soon. The Energy Master Plan calls for 1,100 megawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2020, a target few in the industry expect to hit. The plan originally called for a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption by 2020, a goal since reduced by the Christie administration. The state’s fund to promote clean energy programs also has lost $1 billion in the past few years to help plug gaps in state budgets. What’s happening with the Low Emission Vehicle program? One way the state hopes to curb greenhouse gas emissions from cars is through a decade-old law binding New Jersey to the California Low Emission Vehicle program, a measure that requires an increasing number of zero-emission vehicles to be sold here. In five years, up to 19,000 plug-in electric vehicles would have to be sold in New Jersey, even though the infrastructure for allowing motorists to recharge cars when they are running out of juice has yet to be largely developed. The number of public plug-in charging stations in New Jersey is fewer than 200, far too little to curb range anxiety among motorists seeking to buy the vehicles, according to some. What’s happening with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative? New Jersey was one of 10 states in the Northeast that enacted a program to reduce global warming emissions from power plants through a cap-and-trade program. But Gov. Chris Christie pulled out of the initiative in 2011, saying the program was not working and only amounted to a tax on ratepayers. The money collected from the program funds a variety of clean energy programs, which help reduce consumption of electricity and natural gas. What lies ahead: Uncertainty. The Legislature is moving once again to put New Jersey back into RGGI, but those efforts have failed in past legislative sessions. The report also outlined 22 recommendations to keep the state on track to attain the goals of the global-warming response law, but few have gotten any traction.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Illustration by Victor Juhasz Rolling Stone, April 23, 2014 The president came into office promising to make fighting climate change a priority. Now, he finally seems to be getting serious about it By Jeff Goodell EDITOR’S NOTE: On Friday April 18th, after the print version of this story had closed, the State Department announced that the decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline would be delayed due to legal challenges to the pipeline’s route, effectively putting off resolution of this controversial issue until after the election. The text has been updated to reflect these latest developments. President Obama is not even halfway through his second term yet, but you can almost feel the cement hardening around his feet. The glory days of hope and change have faded, his approval rating has flat-lined below 50 percent, and jockeying for 2016 has begun in earnest. But for Obama, the game ain’t over yet. In the next few months, he will take one of the biggest gambles of his presidency by testing the radical proposition that even SUV-loving Americans believe that global warming is real and are ready to do something about it. Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story It’s a gamble that could have a profound impact on energy politics, our economy and our ability to stabilize the climate. But if the president is wrong, it could not only cost his party control of the Senate this fall but also blow the last opportunity we have to save ourselves from life on a superheated planet. “It’s a transformative moment,” says Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in what may be the understatement of the century. The springboard of Obama’s big leap is to use his presidential powers to effectively hasten the phase-out of dirty coal from America’s energy system. Right now, coal-fired power plants generate about 40 percent of the electricity in the U.S. and are by far the largest single source of heat-trapping gases. Last year, he directed the Environmental Protection Agency to develop new rules to limit carbon pollution from power plants. These rules, which the EPA will make public in early June, are fraught with political peril, not least because they will stoke up talk of a War on Coal, which Republicans will argue is code for a War on the American Way of Life. At the same time, the president is likely to announce his decision on the northern leg of the Keystone XL, the hugely controversial 1,179-mile-long pipeline that would bring tar-sands oil down from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries. Although no final decision has been made, two high-level sources in the Obama administration told me recently that the president has all but decided to deny the permit for the pipeline – a dramatic move that would light up Democratic voters and donors while further provoking the wrath of Big Oil. Finally, Obama is positioning the U.S. to play a key role in negotiations on a new global-climate treaty that will begin next year, establishing American leadership on climate issues and giving him one last chance to lead the world to a cooler future before he leaves the Oval Office. Obama’s big leap is driven by two factors. The first is that the politics of climate and energy are changing fast. “Nature has a vote now,” says Chris Lehane, a political consultant who works with Tom Steyer, a hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-climate-activist. “People can look outside their window and see that the climate is changing.” The most recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are authored by the world’s top scientists, have erased any doubt that climate change is real and the risks – famine, drought, flooding – are increasing with each passing day. But at the same time, solutions are becoming more obvious: The price of clean energy has fallen dramatically in recent years, solar panels and wind turbines are popping up everywhere, and the path to a post-fossil-fuel world is suddenly opening before us. “The cost curve of clean-energy technology is bending down quickly, while the rate of deployment is going up,” says Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who points out that wind now generates four percent of the electricity in the U.S., and the price of solar panels has fallen 75 percent in the past five years. “Look at what’s happened with LED light bulbs, with photovoltaics. The clean-energy economy isn’t something that’s happening in the future. It’s here today.” Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math Obama’s other motivation is the judgment of history. When he took office in 2009, he had four major tasks on his to-do list: pump up the economy, get out of Iraq, fix health care and take action on climate change. He put a lot of political muscle into the first three, but on climate change, it was mostly poetic speeches, under-the-radar regulatory reform and billions of dollars in loan guarantees for clean-energy projects. The president’s supporters boast that he’s already done more to tackle climate change than any president before him, but that’s not saying much. He avoided risky political battles and too often treated the greatest challenge human civilization has ever faced as if it were no more urgent than reforming teachers’ unions. Now Obama has one last shot. “Taking action on climate is one of the most important goals in the president’s second term,” John Podesta, counselor to the president and his point man on climate policy, told me a few weeks ago. “He feels a profound and urgent obligation to get as much done as he can before he leaves office.” In his first term, Obama tried and failed to pass cap-and-trade legislation to limit carbon pollution from gas and coal-fired power plants. It was one of his biggest defeats and effectively killed any action on climate change for the rest of his term. This time around, he’s cutting Congress out of the process altogether, vowing to use the regulatory powers of the Clean Air Act to crack down on carbon-spewing power plants. He signaled his seriousness by appointing a first-rate Cabinet to advise him during his second term, one that is, in some ways, even more impressive than the team he had assembled for the first term: Moniz, a nuclear physicist and former MIT professor; Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry as secretary of state; and EPA veteran Gina McCarthy as the agency’s administrator. The choice of McCarthy to head the EPA was particularly important because it’s her job to guide the new rules on carbon pollution from power plants through the agency’s bureaucracy and to defend them in public. McCarthy, who grew up in a working-class mill town near Boston, has a kind of gruff charm that suggests she’s anything but a tree-hugging elitist. Within the environmental world, she was best known for her tireless and effective work as assistant administrator at the EPA to limit mercury pollution from coal plants. Now Obama is calling on her to do the same thing with carbon pollution. “The president made it clear to me when we talked about the job that passing carbon rules for power plants was his top priority in the second term,” McCarthy told me. Not surprisingly, her confirmation hearing in Congress was one of the most contentious in history, stretching out for 136 days. The 600 or so coal plants in the U.S. are responsible for nearly a third of all carbon pollution in this country. But they are the hardest to go after, in part because the plants that pollute the most are often the plants that are most profitable for the utilities that run them. Big Coal was a major factor in derailing cap-and-trade legislation; under the new regulatory approach, this becomes less of a problem because the rules aren’t voted on by congressmen who play golf with coal lobbyists on weekends. But setting these new rules will nonetheless require all the political finesse McCarthy can muster. One dilemma: How do you make sure coal states like Kentucky and West Virginia are not hit harder than clean-energy states like Arizona and California? One solution is to set overall carbon standards for each state, then let states decide for themselves how to meet those standards, either through efficiency or trading with other states or switching from coal to natural gas. In this way, you can get big reductions while still allowing states flexibility. How big the reductions turn out to be depends on how the rules are written. A plan proposed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which uses a framework that’s similar to the proposed new EPA rules, estimates that 470 million to 700 million tons of carbon pollution can be eliminated per year by 2020, equivalent to the emissions from 95 million to 130 million autos. NRDC calculates the plan would result in up to $63 billion in health and environmental benefits and up to $120 billion in investments in energy efficiency and renewables. Still, these new EPA regulations are a heavy lift. For one thing, the agency expects a flood of legal challenges from fossil-fuel-friendly states over what kind of technology standards can be applied under the Clean Air Act to existing (as opposed to new) power plants. For another, if there’s anything Big Coal hates more than solar panels, it’s government regulation. In order to get power-plant regulations in place before he leaves office, Obama had to get an aggressive timetable, with the proposed rules due by June: That means the rules will be rolled out just before the midterm elections, the moment of maximum peril for Democrats. The proposal won’t be made public until June, but Big Coal is blasting it as yet another attempt by liberal elites to shut down the industry. The playbook is simple and familiar: The EPA is trying to put the coal industry out of business; electricity rates will soar, forcing more American manufacturing to move to China; there will be more blackouts, causing economic chaos. It’s the same argument they made against regulations to cut smog 40 years ago, the same argument they made against regulations to cut acid-rain pollution 25 years ago, and the same argument they made against regulations to cut mercury pollution 10 years ago. Big Coal is indeed in a death spiral, but what’s killing them isn’t the EPA – it’s cheap wind, cheap solar and cheap natural gas. Of course, that hasn’t stopped coal-friendly politicians from throwing themselves on the tracks. Last fall, the attorney generals from 17 states wrote a letter to McCarthy, suggesting that the EPA was overstepping its authority in setting these rules. The House has already passed a bill to strip the EPA of authority to make these rules. And you can be sure that groups backed by the Koch brothers will get in on the action, too. Koch-related groups like Americans for Prosperity, American Future Fund and the American Energy Alliance, headed by former Koch Industries lobbyist Tom Pyle, spent some $400 million to influence the 2012 election, bombarding swing states like Ohio and Virginia with TV ads calling on voters to “stand with coal” and to “vote no on Obama’s failing energy policy.” These groups have already spent $30 million targeting vulnerable Democrats in 2014 midterms and will spend millions more in the coming months. But the old rhetoric is losing its power. In Kansas, Koch-backed groups recently funded an attack on the state’s renewable-energy laws, which require 10 percent of the state’s power to come from renewable energy, and 20 percent by 2020, claiming that renewable energy was expensive and would destroy local economies. In reality, Kansas added the second-most wind generation in the country in 2012, with 13,000 direct and indirect jobs, and $7 billion in economic activity for the state. Although a Koch-backed bill to kill the renewable-energy laws passed in the Kansas state Senate, it was defeated by the House. “This is nothing more than folks who want to exercise political power,” said Rep. Russell Jennings, a Republican and an advocate of clean energy, after the bill’s defeat. In fact, it’s Republicans, as much as Democrats, who feel the pressure from Koch money. “There used to be a whole range of Republicans who were willing to talk frankly about renewable energy and climate change, but that changed with Citizens United in 2010,” says Sen. Whitehouse, referring to the Supreme Court decision that unleashed a flood of corporate cash into American politics. “I’ve had Republicans who come up to me and say, ‘You think you have problems with the Koch brothers. You don’t know what problems are.'” McCarthy, who is no shrinking violet, has spent much of the last year traveling around the country, talking with governors, utility execs, public-utility commissioners and concerned citizens about the upcoming EPA proposals. “We’ve had over 300 meetings around the country,” McCarthy says. “We’ve had a great deal of support to take action. What states are looking for is flexibility to make these rules work – and that’s our goal, too. This is about how to address a public-health issue, while continuing to create jobs and grow our economy.” For Obama, success or failure of the EPA proposal will likely come down to whether utility execs and state leaders believe that the benefits of leaping to a clean-energy economy outweigh the political risks. “I expect a lot of people will run around with their hair on fire, claiming the rules are too tough, but will admit behind the scenes that they can work with them,” says Heather Zichal, who was Obama’s deputy assistant on energy and climate until last year. If too many states revolt, the lawsuits will multiply and the courts could drag out the rule-making process until after Obama leaves office, which means it could get killed by the next administration. If that happens, any hope of meaningful carbon reductions in the foreseeable future vanishes, and the next administration might as well encourage residents of Miami, Norfolk and even Washington, D.C., to start building boats. The trouble with EPA rule-making is that it isn’t sexy. It’s bureaucratic, complex and slow. In terms of actually making a difference on climate, the power-plant rules are by far the most important action Obama will take in the second term. But the decision that everyone will most be paying attention to, and which will inspire all kinds of entertaining idiocy on Fox News, is the decision on whether Obama approves the Keystone XL pipeline. “Five years ago, it would have gone through without comment,” says Zichal. But a few things happened that prevented that: Republicans tried to bully it through, which grabbed the attention of activists in Nebraska and elsewhere, who made the pipeline a litmus test of the president’s commitment to ending our dependence on fossil fuels. The protests paid off, at least initially. The president rejected the pipeline in 2012 based on local environmental concerns; TransCanada, the Canadian company that hopes to build the pipeline, then rerouted it and reapplied for a permit from the State Department, which is still pending (a final recommendation is due to be sent to the president at the end of May). In a speech last year, the president vowed to approve Keystone “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution” – a standard that would, by any common-sense measure, kill the dirty-oil pipeline right there. For the White House, the fight over the pipeline has become a kind of albatross, one that is getting in the way of more constructive progress. Sources close to the president say he is eager to get it off his plate. “I’m confident that the president is aware of every nuance of this debate,” says Zichal. Activists meet him everywhere he goes with handwritten signs urging him to kill the pipeline, and he gets letters from Democratic senators in tough re-election fights, including Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, arguing that if he delays approval of the pipeline any longer, it could cost them the election. What senators like Landrieu and Pryor fear, of course, is the Koch brothers’ attack machines. Koch Industries is indeed one of the largest landowners in northern Alberta, holding leases to more than a million acres in the tar-sands region, and they stand to profit hugely if the pipeline is approved. But as with the power-plant rules, the impact that rejecting Keystone will actually have with the electorate is far from clear. Tiernan Sittenfeld, an analyst with the League of Conservation Voters, points out that in the 2012 election, Keystone supporters spent $11 million to target anti-Keystone candidates in 18 races – and none of them lost. In the 2014 election, it doesn’t hurt that billionaire Tom Steyer has pledged that his political-action committee, NextGen Climate Action, will spend $100 million targeting climate deniers and Keystone supporters. “President Obama is obviously very committed to this issue,” Steyer told me in an e-mail. “My goal is to support him in this in any way I can.” Exactly how the president has weighed the decision on Keystone is a closely guarded secret in the White House, known only to a few senior advisors like Valerie Jarrett and Dan Pfeiffer. But it’s no surprise that I was told recently by members of the administration that the pipeline would, in fact, be rejected. “If the president is really serious about his legacy on climate change, he can’t have that and approve Keystone,” an Obama insider told me. “The only question now is the timing of the announcement.” Inside the beltway, there was speculation that the President could announce a decision on the pipeline early this summer. But late in the afternoon on Good Friday – the darkest depths of the news cycle – the State Department released a statement that a decision on the pipeline would be once again delayed: “Agencies need additional time based on the uncertainty created by the ongoing litigation in the Nebraska Supreme Court which could ultimately affect the pipeline route.” The White House denies the move was in any way political. “I know there’s a great urge and has always been to make this about politics,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said later. “The issue here has to do with a court decision in Nebraska and its impact on the ability for the State [Department] process to continue for agencies to be able to comment.” Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a pipeline supporter, called the delay “a stunning act of political cowardice.” But Jane Kleeb, founder of Bold Nebraska and one of the leaders of the anti-pipeline movement, described the move to me as “a pretty brilliant move” that will give red state Democrats like Mary Landrieu and Mark Begich an easy and highly theatrical way to distance themselves from the president in the mid-terms, as well a rallying point for oil and gas money to support them. “Obama just used oil and gas to get red state dems elected,” Kleeb wrote. “No way will gas and oil push against Landrieu and Begich.” “Sometimes the art of politics is the art of delay,” says Kalee Kreider, a D.C. consultant who works on climate issues. Climate change, of course, is a global problem, and ultimately what matters is the degree to which Obama’s actions in the U.S. inspire the world. Back in 2009, at the Copenhagen climate talks, he pledged to cut U.S. carbon pollution by 17 percent by 2020. If the EPA rules are successfully implemented, he will be on track to achieve that goal by the time he leaves the Oval Office. “This is a game-changer on the international front,” says Podesta. “It will re-establish U.S. leadership, and it will demonstrate that America is committed to taking significant action to reduce emissions.” Podesta points out that other progress has been made on the international front, including a deal with China and most developing nations to phase out so-called “superpollutants” like hydro fluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are used in refrigerators and other industrial applications. The big issue, however, is the next global-climate summit, in Paris in December 2015, when a new international treaty to reduce carbon pollution will be hammered out. “Are we going to be on track to come to an agreement that will limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, which is the threshold scientists have set for dangerous climate change?” Podesta wonders aloud. “Our goal is to give leadership and credibility to that effort.” Tim Wirth, vice chair of the U.N. Foundation and an outspoken advocate of action on climate change, argues the State Department – the agency that represents the U.S. in international climate negotiations – is “a tribal bureaucracy,” and that to put too much faith in these international agreements is unwise. He praises Obama for his recent moves on the domestic front, but thinks he could be more creative internationally: “How do we think differently about energy and climate? How are we going to deal with the Ukraine? How about a crash program to insulate buildings and cut their dependence on Russian natural gas? What about renewables? The Ukraine is not far from Germany, the solar capital of the world – why can’t we help the Ukraine go solar too?” But the sad truth is that even if Obama manages to pull off the climate trifecta – implementing EPA power-plant rules, killing Keystone and forging a global agreement to cut carbon pollution – he won’t have done enough. He won’t have pushed through a price on carbon. He won’t have stopped oil drilling in the Arctic. He won’t have cut subsidies to Big Oil and Coal that distort the energy market. But he will have changed the political calculation about what is possible. Already Hillary Clinton is talking about the need for a mass movement on climate; Podesta believes climate will emerge as a key issue in the 2016 presidential race. As for Republicans, “being hostile to science is not a good way to win elections,” says Steve Schmidt, a prominent GOP consultant. Sen. Whitehouse believes that energy politics are changing so quickly that Congress may well take up legislation again in the not-so-distant future that puts a price on carbon. As for how history will judge the president, Podesta has banned that kind of talk from the White House. “It’s not helpful in the day-to-day task of getting our work done,” he explains. “Besides, if we don’t take serious action on climate now, we may not have any history to look back on anyway.”
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.
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.”
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.
A few weeks ago I wrote skeptically of the jaunty uplifting narrative that sees white supremacy’s inevitable defeat. One reason I was so skeptical was because I’d been reading the reporting of Nikole Hannah-Jones. If you haven’t read her coverage on housing segregation you should. And then you should read her piece from this month’s magazine on the return of segregation in America’s schools:
Schools in the South, once the most segregated in the country, had by the 1970s become the most integrated, typically as a result of federal court orders. But since 2000, judges have released hundreds of school districts, from Mississippi to Virginia, from court-enforced integration, and many of these districts have followed the same path as Tuscaloosa’s—back toward segregation. Black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades. Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, widened as they became less so.
In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools—a figure likely to rise as court oversight continues to wane. In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools, according to an analysis by ProPublica.
Hannah-Jones profiles the schools in Tuscaloosa where business leaders are alarmed to see their school system becoming more and more black, as white parents choose to send their kids to private (nearly) all-white academies or heavily white schools outside the city. It’s worth noting that the school at the center of Hannah-Jones’ reporting—Central High School—was not a bad school. On the contrary, it was renowned for its football team as well its debate team.
But this did very little to slow the flight of white parents out of the district. (This is beyond the scope of Nikole’s story, but I’d be very interested to hear more about the history of housing policy in the town.) Faced with the prospect of losing all, or most of their white families, Tuscaloosa effectively resegregated its schools.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a political solution here. It’s fairly clear that integration simply isn’t much of a priority to white people, and sometimes not even to black people. And Tuscaloosa is not alone. I suspect if you polled most white people in these towns they would honestly say that racism is awful, and many (if not most) would be sincere. At the same time they would generally be lukewarm to the idea of having to "do something" in order to end white supremacy.
Ending white supremacy isn’t really in the American vocabulary. That is because ending white supremacy does not merely require a passive sense that racism is awful, but an active commitment to undoing its generational effects. Ending white supremacy requires the ability to do math—350 years of murderous plunder are not undone by 50 years of uneasy ceasefire.
A latent commitment to anti-racism just isn’t enough. But that’s what we have right now. With that in mind, there is no reason to believe that a total vanquishing of white supremacy is necessarily in the American future.
"History travels not only forwards, history can travel backwards," President Obama said recently. "Our rights, our freedoms — they are not given. They must be won. They must be nurtured through struggle and discipline and persistence and faith."
Indeed. But for right now, the struggle for integration is largely over.
