Category: california

June 24, 2021

State Lawmakers Are Using a Powerful Tool to Mandate Renewable Energy Use

As we work to combat the climate crisis, it’s clear that electricity providers must shift toward using more renewable energy to generate power. Clearly, more regulations are needed. But depending on where you are in the country, the word “regulation” is met with heavy resistance. So, why not try a reframe?

Some clever folks did just that. They came up with the label “Renewable Portfolio Standard,” also called “Renewable Energy Standards,” a policy approach that has spread rapidly with real impact.

The Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) is a public mandate, typically initiated by a state legislature with the purpose of increasing energy from renewable sources — wind, solar, and other alternatives to fossil fuel and nuclear power. Another purpose has been to drive renewable innovation by signaling a predictable, growing market. The law sets renewable energy production targets for utilities — either in the amount of energy they produce or as a share of their energy output — along with consequences for not meeting them, usually a fine.

Way back in 1983, Iowa became the first state to try this type of renewable energy mandate. The state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard mandated that Iowa’s two main utility companies own or secure by contract a total of 105 megawatts (MW) of renewables, or enough to power several hundred homes. Not a terribly impressive requirement … but a start. From this baby step came a big leap. By 2019, Iowa was the second largest wind power producer, after Texas. And by 2020, wind energy from more than 5,100 turbines powered 57 percent of Iowa’s net electricity generation — a bigger share than any other state.

As of early 2021 the state was generating around 11,500 megawatts of renewable-based energy, nearly 110 times the energy potential of Iowa’s original 105 megawatt renewables target.

Iowa’s success has played a pivotal role in moving others to use the Renewable Portfolio Standard. Now, 30 states, plus Washington, D.C., and three territories have adopted the policy or a similar approach to mandate a shift in electricity generation.

In 2004, as the most oil-dependent state in the nation, Hawaii changed its renewable portfolio “goal” to an enforceable standard. In a 2015 update to the standard, Hawaii became the first state to set a target of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. Gov. David Ige explained: “Hawaii spends roughly $5 billion a year on foreign oil to meet its energy needs. Making the transition to renewable, indigenous resources for power generation will allow us to keep more of that money at home, thereby improving our economy, environment, and energy security.”

Almost half the growth of U.S. renewable energy from 2000 to 2019 can be linked to state Renewable Portfolio Standards — with more expected over the next decade.

In 2018, California took the same step, setting a 100 percent renewable energy production goal by 2045. Understanding the urgency of this act, then-Gov. Jerry Brown declared to the press, “It will not be easy. It will not be immediate. But it must be done.”

The results are impressive: Clearly, lack of federal leadership did not stop significant state action.

If you thought Iowa’s use of renewable portfolio standards was unexpected, consider that even in Texas — where we know ideas like “big government” and “regulations” sound unpopular — lawmakers were willing to pass a renewable energy requirement when it was framed as a “Renewable Portfolio Standard.”

In 2002, after much give-and-take, the Texas legislature enacted Senate Bill 7, amending the state’s utility code and allowing for competition in the state’s retail electricity market. The Lone Star State put in place a Renewable Portfolio Standard. It required that by 2009 electricity providers collectively supply consumers with 2,000 megawatts of renewable power, enough to power about a third of a million homes.

When it became clear that this goal would be met three years early in Texas, the state legislature more than doubled the requirement to just over 5,000 megawatts by 2015. As before, wind development blew past forecasts. This achievement was possible because Texas had approved construction of transmission lines to route electricity from remote wind farms to large urban markets. As of May 2021, the state’s installed wind capacity had reached nearly 40,000 megawatts — more than six times the goal mandated just four years earlier. Now leading the nation in wind energy, Texas currently generates 20 percent of U.S. wind-powered electricity.

Rather than mandating that a particular share of energy be renewable, two national leaders, Iowa and Texas, require specific amounts of renewable energy capacity.

Meanwhile, in less than a decade, Virginia has become a renewable energy powerhouse. It’s on track to produce more than half of its electricity from renewables by 2035, and all of it a decade later.

In March, the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act went into effect. It’s got real teeth: mandated benchmarks over 15 years for solar and wind investment and a Renewable Portfolio Standard requiring the state’s utilities to provide fully renewable electricity by 2045.

If the entire U.S. were to adopt similar policies to these state-wide initiatives and enact a national goal of a 50 percent renewable energy standard by 2035, potentially we could cut CO2 emissions in the nation’s power sector by over 45 percent and reduce national natural gas generation by 38 percent over the next 15 years. These reductions—although falling slightly short of national efforts by President Biden to halve our current CO2 emissions within the next decade — would put us on track to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

Almost half the growth of U.S. renewable energy from 2000 to 2019 can be linked to state Renewable Portfolio Standards — with more expected over the next decade. But that’s about the only blanket statement one can make about them. This reminds us of Justice Brandeis’s observation nearly 90 years ago, perhaps no more important today: “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments …”

States have implemented differing approaches. Standards range from Washington, D.C.’s call for 100 percent renewable energy by 2032 to Iowa’s modest, but long-surpassed, 1983 renewables goal. Many states mandate that renewables comprise a minimum share of retail electric sales — generally between 10 and 45 percent, though 14 states require 50 percent or greater. Rather than mandating that a particular share of energy be renewable, two national leaders, Iowa and Texas, require specific amounts of renewable energy capacity.

In creating investment certainty, states’ “standards” mandates have been astonishingly successful in driving the growth of renewable energy and advancing renewable energy technology, all the while driving down our reliance and generation of fossil fuel source production, which has been steadily declining in the past several years. In fact, the U.S. now generates more than double the total renewable energy that was called for in the 29 states’ standards put together.

While this statistic is extremely impressive, we must also note that individual states can’t fight this national effort alone. These regional efforts constitute only a fraction, albeit a powerful one, of the necessary measures our nation must take in order to foster renewable energy systems that aren’t reliant on detrimental fossil fuels.

Let us all support the efforts of organizations and leaders rewriting our nation’s energy story. The youth-led Sunrise Movement as well as 350.org are leading the charge for renewable energy, fossil fuel emitter accountability, and just, equitable and sustainable energy grids — all the while upgrading the most crucial element of American infrastructure, democracy itself. They, among others, deserve praise and support for advancing the Green New Deal and President Biden’s Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice. Renewable Portfolio Standards are just one tool in what must become a broad, transformative strategy for how we power our society — a strategy that, I’m thrilled to say, is already significantly underway.

Note: If you want to discover where your state stands on renewable energy mandates, here is a handy interactive site from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The author would like to thank Nina Larbi, Olivia Smith and Rachel Madison for their assistance on earlier drafts.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 22, 2021

California Rent Forgiveness Shows It’s Possible to Shift Our National Priorities

Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people have found themselves out of work, clinging to credit cards or a savings account, making use of the local food bank, and worrying about making the rent each month as the cash dried up.

The relief packages passed by Congress were a lifeline for many, from the checks to the extended unemployment benefits and, perhaps most importantly, the eviction protections for those who simply couldn’t make rent because there was no work. The peril was ever-present, even with that help; if that firewall fell and landlords were allowed to evict for unpaid rent, the avalanche of immediate homelessness could have quite possibly been a country-killing event. Untold thousands put out on the street in the middle of a lethal pandemic? Unspeakable.

Every time the nation has come to the expiration deadline for the last set of eviction protections, landlord coalitions pushed to have them end and renter’s groups pleaded to have them extended. To this point, they have been extended each time, but protecting people from the collapse of the economy has become another conservative plaything; a number of Republican governors have moved to slash unemployment benefits under the long-running racist, classist lie that relief money makes people not want to work. How soon until they try to apply that argument to rent?

On Monday, however, the state of California, responding to sustained pressure from organizers and activists, showed the country a whole new way to go:

Gov. Gavin Newsom says California will pay off all the past-due rent that accumulated in the nation’s most populated state because of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, a promise to make landlords whole while giving renters a clean slate…. California has $5.2 billion to pay off people’s rent, money from multiple aid packages approved by Congress. That appears to be more than enough to cover all of the unpaid rent in the state, according to Jason Elliott, senior counselor to Newsom on housing and homelessness.

While employment among middle- and high-wage jobs has exceeded pre-pandemic levels, employment rates for people earning less than $27,000 a year are down more than 38% since January 2020, according to Opportunity Insights, an economic tracker based at Harvard University. “The stock market may be fine, we may be technically reopened, but people in low-wage jobs — which are disproportionately people of color — are not back yet,” said Madeline Howard, senior attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

How deeply embedded into the national psyche is the capitalist ethos? If an announcement like this came under the headline, “Spaceship From Planet XQ41 Appears Above Sacramento, Pays All Rent, Departs Through Hole in Sky,” my level of surprise would have been pretty much the same. How long was I asleep last night? What country is this?

Bless my heart, it’s the United States of America, where government — local, state and federal — can actually help people if we choose to make doing so a priority. The federal government did so with the relief bills, states like California took their own necessary steps like this, and local governments along with activists labored mightily to keep as many people afloat as possible. Cries of “socialism” were muted for much of the pandemic, because even a Republican knows a boat with no bottom is going to sink no matter what Ronald Reagan or Grover Norquist has to say about it.

To be sure, California’s historically robust economy is one of the main reasons why this action was possible. “The most trusted measure of economic strength says California is the world-beater among democracies,” reports Bloomberg News. “The state’s gross domestic product increased 21 percent during the past five years, dwarfing No. 2 New York (14 percent) and No. 3 Texas (12 percent), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The gains added $530 billion to the Golden State, 30 percent more than the increase for New York and Texas combined and equivalent to the entire economy of Sweden. Among the five largest economies, California outperforms the U.S., Japan and Germany with a growth rate exceeded only by China.”

If an announcement like this came under the headline, “Spaceship From Planet XQ41 Appears Above Sacramento, Pays All Rent, Departs Through Hole in Sky,” my level of surprise would have been pretty much the same.

Again, we return to the idea of priorities. President Bill Clinton amassed a huge budget surplus at the end of his second term, but it was all but gone by April 2001 because the Bush administration gave it away to its rich friends in the form of tax breaks. The rest of us — many of us, anyway — got $300 and a suddenly fragile national economy that was almost immediately knocked reeling by September 11. The rest of those funds, along with trillions more, were squandered on two failed wars that stole the economic future from a generation of Americans.

In 2001 and 2002, Congress passed Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) to lay the groundwork for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The economic damage done by the money wasted on these bloody endeavors is almost impossible to quantify, but real enough to make California’s statewide rent amnesty seem a laughable fantasy, until it happened.

Last week, almost 20 years after its inception, the repeal of the 2002 AUMF regarding Iraq was passed by the House. Its ultimate demise will be voted on by the Senate on June 22. The far more muscular 2001 AUMF remains intact, but there is a groundswell of support for ending it, as well. Congress has to deal with its little brother first, and then we shall see.

Among many other shabby things, the combined 39 years given to those two authorizations were the sign and signal of our national priorities. The money spent on those wars left us uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19, as all the social and medical infrastructure needed to combat it was revealed to be cash-starved and withered to the point of collapse. Only when we embraced some “socialist” policy priorities were we able to pull back from the brink. Note well: Rep. Barbara Lee was right.

Newsom could have argle-bargled about “job creators” and pulled a Bush, using his state’s budget surplus as an ATM for the wealthy and corporations. Instead, thanks to pressure from progressives, he paid the rent and delivered billions in tax relief to small businesses affected by the pandemic. The fact that this is remarkable tells us all we need to know about how far gone our priorities have become, but more importantly, it tells us what we can accomplish if we choose to change them.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 18, 2021

33 Wildfires Are Already Burning Across 10 States – and Summer Hasn’t Even Begun

Federal meteorologists and climate experts say the potential for another devastating wildfire season is higher than normal for much of the western United States, where a brutal heat wave shattered temperature records across multiple states this week.

Nearly 90 percent of the West is experiencing drought, increasing the amount of “fuel” for fires, such as dead trees and brush that is drying out up to a month ahead of schedule in many places, according to the latest climate update from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The past spring has been the warmest on record and the driest since 2006 in the lower 48 states.

Drought conditions have only intensified during the latest heat wave. More than 40 million people experienced triple-digit temperatures this week, straining power grids in Texas and California and prompting officials across the Southwest to warn the public against walking dogs on hot sidewalks and spending time outside during the day.

Wildfires are already burning across multiple states, including a massive 21,000-acre blaze in Montana, according to the U.S. Forest Service and news reports. With the start of summer right around the corner, the National Interagency Fire Center reported five new large fires on Thursday, bringing the current total to 33 fires burning across more than 400,000 acres in 10 western states.

Wildfires occur naturally and play an important role in certain ecosystems, especially in the West. However, climate change and the disruption of natural areas caused by human pollution and development have created conditions for widespread and devastatingly intense wildfires. A landmark 2016 study found that human-caused climate change is responsible for 55 percent of the increase in dryness that creates fuel for wildfires, more than doubling the amount of land burned across the western U.S. over the past three decades.

Last year, record-breaking summer temperatures, the fourth-highest level of drought on record and an unusual amount of dry lightning combined to create an “apocalyptic” fire season that saw 10.27 million acres of land burned, the most ever recorded, according to Yale Climate Connections. Millions of people in California, Oregon and Washington were forced to evacuate from cities large and small as huge wildfires raced across the landscape and sent enough smoke into the air to change atmospheric conditions across the nation.

Gina Palma, a fire meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said scientists are currently observing drought conditions that they would not normally see not in June, especially in the foothills of mountains and higher elevations across the West, increasing the likelihood of fires. Still, every fire needs a spark, and it remains to be seen whether lightening or fires started by people, for example, will spark the tinder available in brushy areas and dry forests and cause another intense wildfire season.

While there are a number of factors behind these tinderbox conditions, human-caused climate change is certainly one of them.

“We do expect in a warmer world to see more frequent and more intense wildfires, and also heat waves,” Palma told reporters on Thursday.

There is some good news: NOAA forecasters predict monsoon rains that were largely absent in recent years will return to New Mexico and Arizona later in the summer, relieving drought conditions and reducing the potential for significant wildfire outbreaks to normal levels. Palma said widespread drought has also prevented grass from growing that could dry out later in the summer and provide fuel for potential fires.

The potential for fire across most of Texas and the Midwest is expected to be normal or below normal this summer, although scientists warn that “normal” summer conditions could soon be a thing of the past as climate change threatens to become irreversible absent a widespread reduction in fossil fuel pollution.

According to NOAA, it’s still highly likely that many of the same areas across California, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Washington and western Montana that suffered destructive and even deadly wildfires last year will see significant wildfire activity this summer.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 16, 2021

Universal basic income for farmworkers in California? Some leaders are pushing for it

BY MELISSA MONTALVO

A Fresno-area politician wants California to prioritize struggling San Joaquin Valley farmworkers in a proposed pilot program that would put cash in the hands of some the state’s impoverished residents.

State Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat from Sanger, issued a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom last week urging the state to prioritize California’s “displaced, underemployed, or unemployed farmworkers” for the Universal Basic Income pilot program.

“The drought, extreme heat, the pandemic, and overtime pay rules are creating a dire situation for them. By expanding the proposed UBI program to farmworkers, it’s not only an investment in farmworkers — but in all of California,” wrote Hurtado.

In his revised budget proposed last month, Newsom allocated $35 million to fund UBI pilot programs administered by local city or county governments. Under Newsom’s latest proposal, the funding would require a local-match commitment and must target low-income Californians.

“By expanding the proposed UBI program to farmworkers, it’s not only an investment in farmworkers — but in all of California.” said State Senator, Melissa Hurtado (D-SANGER)

Hurtado’s letter, which was also signed by six colleagues in state Legislature, also urges the governor to provide supplemental guaranteed income for California’s farmworkers that face reduced hours, unemployment, and displacement due to the worsening drought.

The drought limits the amount of land that can be farmed, which leads to a reduced number of hours farmworkers can work, explained Hurtado.

On days that temperatures exceed 100 degrees or more, farmworkers can only work six-hour maximum workdays, which also means less wages.

A farmworker that works the maximum time allowed before overtime pay, at $14.25 an hour for 8.5 hours a day, will only bring home $2,500 a month. If there are only six days of 100-degree heat in a month, they will take home $2,200 for the month, Hurtado said in the letter.

Estimates of the number of agriculture workers in the state vary widely based on how data is gathered. UC Merced researcher Edward Flores estimates that in the central San Joaquin Valley, there are approximately 144,693 agricultural workers or 49.7% of California’s total of 290,959 agricultural workers aged 18-65.

Who would get the money under California’s UBI pilot program?

Universal basic income, also called universal guaranteed income, has gained attention in recent years as a strategy to alleviate poverty.

Under the leadership of former Mayor Michael Tubbs, Stockton ran the most notable universal basic income pilot program in the country, which awarded 125 people living in neighborhoods at or below Stockton’s median household income the unconditional monthly stipend of $500 for two years.

Critics of universal basic income say that such programs disincentivize people from working. Others cite the high costs of such a program. However, independent researchers found the Stockton program led to an increase in full-time employment, economic stability, and overall increased well-being in the Stockton participants.

Tubbs now serves as a special advisor to Newsom and has been instrumental in developing funding for the state’s proposed pilot program. Tubbs said they are waiting for the bill to move through the legislative process to finalize key details around its implementation, such as who would be eligible for the programs.

In response to Hurtado’s letter, Tubbs said he hopes to see state and local leaders focus on building a long-term policy that serves all Californians that need assistance.

“I would hate for it to be a shouting match over who deserves more,” said Tubbs in an interview with The Bee. “Everyone is slicing and dicing, like farmworkers, foster children, pregnant mothers,” he said. “With all this energy, let’s focus on getting a policy where everyone’s covered.”

Hurtado faced criticism earlier this year when she blocked the Senate Bill 65, also known as the California Momnibus Act, which would have provided guaranteed basic monthly income of $1,000 to primarily low-income, Black and Native American pregnant people in an effort to close the gap in racial health disparities.

Hurtado said she has reservations around a general universal basic income program, and thinks it should be a narrow program that exists “under certain circumstances for certain exceptions,” such as farmworkers.

It remains unclear whether undocumented residents in California would be allowed to qualify for the funding if the pilot program gets off the ground, but both Hurtado and Tubbs are hopeful.

“In an ideal world, yes, it should be expanded to all the undocumented farmworkers that are working,” Hurtado said.

Tubbs points to his universal basic income pilots in Stockton, and current pilots underway in Compton and Oakland, that select participants at random without asking for immigration status.

He also acknowledged that the state has increasingly included undocumented residents in other stimulus benefits, such as the Golden State Stimulus.

“So I definitely think that, in terms of the pilot, especially given our other investments in undocumented folks, undocumented Californians are included,” said Tubbs.

Local group says UBI could help Fresno-area residents, especially renters

Locally, the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission has confirmed it is leading a coalition of community groups to explore what a guaranteed income program could look like in Fresno, based on the promising results of the Stockton pilot program.

Fresno has some of the highest poverty and the highest concentrated poverty in the nation. Local supporters point out that a supplemental guaranteed income program in Fresno could turn housing from unaffordable to affordable for many Fresno renters, as outlined in the 2021 Fresno Affordable Housing Needs Report.

Hurtado, Tubbs, and local leaders say they are waiting confirmation of the final budget, which is expected some time this month.

___________________________________________________

About the Author: Melissa Montalvo is a reporter with The Fresno Bee and a Report for America corps member. This article is part of The California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in California.

The post Universal basic income for farmworkers in California? Some leaders are pushing for it appeared first on Basic Income Today.

This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.
June 15, 2021

University of California Workers Organize For Salaries That Keep Pace With Cost Of Living

In the months before the coronavirus pandemic abruptly halted the United States economy in March 2020, graduate student workers and faculty members in the University of California system aggressively pushed for cost-of-living salary adjustments through strikes, protests, and rallies on campuses.

Though COVID-19 shutdowns and transitions to remote learning disrupted these organizing efforts ahead of a potential vote for a system-wide strike, workers in the UC system adapted organizing efforts to be conducted remotely, recently securing enough union authorization cards to represent over 17,000 student researchers at all ten campuses in the UC system and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

They joined post-doctoral students, academic researchers, tutors, teaching assistants in the UC system, who are already represented by UAW affiliated unions.

Student researchers were initially classified as students rather than employees, exempting them from other bargaining units at UC campuses, until 2017 when the California State Legislature amended the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act of 1979 to classify student researchers as employees, paving the way for the formation of a union

On May 24, student researchers organizing with the United Auto Workers submitted 10,441 signed union authorization cards to the California Public Employees Relations Board in Oakland, California. They await the certification of the signatures and next steps forward.

The card campaign began in Fall 2020 after a statewide organizing committee planned out strategies to organize remotely and form campus-wide committees to lead organizing efforts at each UC campus.

“It’s kind of incredible how organized we were and how so many people are working toward this,” said Donghyung Lee (or K-Dan), a graduate student researcher studying neurobiology at University of California, San Diego.

Lee explained the widespread labor organizing efforts in the UCsystem are a microcosm of the socioeconomic inequities rampant in California, as workers in the UC system often work for low wages in cities with high costs of living, and these economic issues contribute to the lack of diversity in these programs, which exacerbates the risk of harassment, discrimination, and unfair dismissals.

According to Lee, the universities receive millions of dollars in funding from grants earned by student researchers, while administrators such as UC President Michael Drake receive an annual salary of $890,000.

“We have this publicly funded institution that should be doing research for the greater good that doesn’t treat its workers or pay its workers with the same kind of respect,” Lee added. “We deserve to be paid more than $20,000 to $30,000 a year to live in California.”

“At the very least, we have to establish a firm baseline for everyone working as a student researcher to be guaranteed things like sick days and vacation days. I think that’s the bare minimum that needs to be in an enforceable contract,” Lee contended.

Student researchers turn in union authorization signatures (Courtesy of SRU-UAW)

The high cost of living in California compared to wages for workers in the University of California system were a driving factor in a graduate workers’ strike at UC Santa Cruz that lasted from late 2019 to early 2020 and spread to other UC campuses before the pandemic.

Workers on strike said large portions of their low wages go toward high rents required to live near campus.

UC Santa Cruz fired dozens of graduate workers, who participated in the wildcat strikes before reinstating them after months of protests and disciplinary hearings. The campaign across the UC system took credit for several wage increases and summer and housing stipends that were enacted on nearly every UC campus following the strikes and protests.

The movement for a cost-of-living adjustment wage increase for workers in the University of California system has continued through the pandemic, the new union of student researchers intends to focus on the issue amidst a worsening housing crisis in California.

“The cost of living is a huge, huge issue we really want to tackle to make sure every graduate student can afford housing and live comfortably, because if we’re not happy in our living situation, if we’re not getting a good night’s sleep or able to take care of ourselves very well, that turns into mistakes in the lab and poor quality of work,” said Kate Augspurger, a graduate student researcher at UC San Francisco. “We as graduate students don’t have a whole lot of control over our employment right now. Bringing in a democratic voice in the workplace to make these changes so they are as helpful as possible to us is really important.”

A spokesperson for the University of California system said, “The University of California values its graduate student researchers and their many contributions to the University. UC neither encourages nor discourages unionization. UC supports employees’ right to make an informed decision and choose for themselves.”

Shortly after student researchers at the University of California turned in their union authorization cards, around 2,000 non-tenured lecturers represented by the University Council-American Federation of Teachers voted overwhelmingly in favor to authorize a strike amidst new union contract negotiations, which have drawn out since April 2019.

“UC continues to negotiate with UC-AFT on a new multi-year collective bargaining agreement on wages, benefits and other terms and conditions of employment for UC lecturers,” a UC system spokesperson claimed. “In the latest round of negotiations, UC made significant movement toward compromises with union leaders on key union priorities including compensation, appointments, and leave policy.”

Lecturers cited low-pay and job security as prevailing points of contention in contract negotiations. The median salary for lecturers at the University of California is $19,067 and the union claims UC has not introduced proposals on evaluating and rehiring processes or offered lecturers contract renewals.

Dr. Caroline Luce, a lecturer for six years at UCLA, explained lecturers currently are not compensated for duties that fall outside of their classroom time, such as mentoring and advising students or writing recommendation letters.

The low pay forces lecturers to cobble together gigs at different universities and colleges, find additional sources of employment, or rely on a spouse’s income in order to make ends meet, which contributes to the high attrition for lecturers (who also frequently do not receive contract renewals after a year or so with no explanation or review).

“We’ve become like gig workers,” said Luce. “These jobs are advertised and held out as a bridge to tenured employment or tenured track positions. But it’s effectively a bridge to nowhere these days, because the job market is so bad.”

“What we want to do is try to make these bad jobs into better, more stable careers for people so that they can plan their lives and establish roots in the communities near campus.”

The post University of California Workers Organize For Salaries That Keep Pace With Cost Of Living appeared first on Shadowproof.

This post was originally published on Shadowproof.
June 13, 2021

California reparations committee confronts harms of slavery, debates direct payments

“You are here today not just to seek an answer to say was there harm, but your task is to determine the depth of the harm and the ways in which we are to repair that harm,” Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a former state Assembly member who introduced the legislation last year, told the reparations committee at the start of the six-hour meeting.

The post California reparations committee confronts harms of slavery, debates direct payments appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
June 12, 2021

Reopening Isn’t Enough — Child Care System Must Be Transformed, Providers Say

When working parents across the U.S. were sheltering at home during the pandemic, Lucrece Lester had already been working from home — running a small daycare business out of her house in Contra Costa, California. At the same time, her job put her, the kids she cared for, and her own family, on the front lines of the pandemic.

Lester recounted the painful process of shutting down her program twice during the pandemic. First she had to close when she got infected with COVID-19 in September: “A child brought COVID in. I contracted it, of course, and my entire family got COVID, and we were closed for about a month. And I was extremely sick … and it was just an experience that was just horrible,” she told Truthout.

Even while her program was closed, the kids were still on her mind. “I [was] also checking on the families, because I realize that there are some children who live with their elderly grandparents,” she said, “and just [have] that worry.” She eventually reopened after undertaking extensive cleaning of her workspace, she added, but shut down again last February due to a positive COVID test for the family of the same child from whom she contracted the virus originally.

“We’re put in these situations every single day,” she said, “where we’re here, providing care, opening our doors through this entire pandemic with little appreciation.”

When the pandemic swept through California last year, shuttering workplaces and schools across the state, many child care providers like Lester stayed open in whatever way they could. Licensed family child care homes — small neighborhood-based daycare programs located within the provider’s home — care for about 30 percent of the nearly 1 million California children enrolled in formal child care. (The rest are served by full-scale daycare centers.) Although they provide the same kind of infant care, preschool lessons and recreational activities that larger daycare centers do, home-based daycares tend to be less financially stable than conventional centers, yet also tend to have a more intimate relationship with the communities they serve. M of the more than 26,000 licensed individual providers are low-income women of color running tiny businesses serving local families.

After more than a year of lockdowns and temporary and permanent closures, advocates for child care workers fear the network of family child care homes, already badly strained before the onset of the pandemic, is in deep crisis.

Although they provide the same kind of infant care, preschool lessons and recreational activities, home-based daycares tend to be less financially stable than conventional [daycare] centers.

The California Child Care Resource & Referral Network, which distributes payments and oversees licensed family child care providers, reports that an estimated 3,665 family child care home licenses have been lost between January 2020 and January 2021 in the state, a roughly 14 percent drop over the course of the year. (That does not include unlicensed family child care homes, which care for a smaller number of kids.) Meanwhile, though many licensed family child care homes that had closed early in the pandemic have been incrementally reopening in recent months, reopenings have lagged well behind closures: In the last half of 2020, the number of child care homes closing each month was well above 200, peaking at 1,330 last September, while the number of monthly reopenings hovered between 141 and 84.

The child care workforce as a whole — comprised of employees of child care programs — has also declined, from about 80,000 pre-pandemic to less than 64,500 as of April. Similarly, national data indicates between last February and October, the child care industry lost some 17 percent of its pre-pandemic workforce.

Many family child care providers are still devastated by the pandemic. Enrollments declined sharply as parents withdrew their kids. Some providers became sick themselves. Many providers faced challenges due to strict health protocols that required them to constantly sanitize their facilities. According to a survey conducted last July by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE), home-based providers across California saw a massive drop in enrollment and were often forced to lay off staff members.

Home-based child care providers, whose enrollment is typically limited to 12 or 14 kids, generally faced more severe financial damage from the pandemic, compared to daycare center operators: about half said they had been “unable to pay themselves at some point” — while only 28 percent of center-based providers did — and were more likely to report taking on personal credit card debt to stay open, or missing a mortgage payment. Of the providers who had shut down in California, 75 percent of family child care providers said they “felt their family’s health was at risk,” more than triple the rate of their center-based counterparts — not surprising, given that they live where they work.

Marcy Whitebook, director of the CSCCE, pointed out that family child care homes face “a double whammy,” because they are not only less financially resilient, but also face unprecedented logistical challenges in the COVID era, including keeping children safely separated in a space that is often just a cordoned-off area within a modest-sized house. “The job has really changed a lot because of the social distancing, because [of] the level of stress children are under,” especially when trying to keep rowdy toddlers separated from both teachers and each other.

In the long term, Child Care Providers United is demanding a system of publicly funded early childhood education from infancy through school age, in which no subsidized parent would need to pay a fee.

Noreen Jackson, who has been running a family child care home serving South Central Los Angeles for about two decades, said that the cost of maintaining her small staff became unsustainable during the pandemic, as she and her staff ran virtual classes while keeping them separated throughout the day. “The children have to be spaced out, and then you have the teacher, that’s [my] employee, going into each section to actually teach … I was only able to give each child 15 minutes of learning at a time.”

Sometimes earning just a few hundred dollars per month, she says the payment collected from her current enrollment is “not allowing me to climb out of the barrel.” She finds ways to eat the rest of the costs herself, like when she shares the group meals with the kids to save money on food. “When the kids eat, I eat,” she said. “And [for] the staff — I can’t financially afford to pay for their food, so when we all eat, we all eat together. So that’s helping us financially.”

Since home-based child care providers are technically considered self-employed, they do not earn regular wages, but rather derive their income from the fees and subsidies paid by parents or by the state. The child care reimbursement rates for a typical family child care home in Los Angeles for fiscal year 2017 ranged from less than $60 per day for an infant to just over $40 a day for a school-age child. After paying the overhead costs like utilities and supplies, child care providers are in many cases left with the equivalent of a poverty wage, which is compounded by a lack of paid sick leave and other benefits.

The child care workers employed by daycare providers are earning extremely low wages as well. Roughly 17 percent of early childhood education workers in California are living in poverty — nearly seven times higher than the rate for elementary and middle school teachers.

Although the state has subsidized supplies for cleaning and infection control during the pandemic, many home-based child care providers have struggled with staffing costs. “Many of us have employees that we have to pay minimum wage and all of these other things too, and yet we don’t make the minimum wage,” Lester said. Her union, the newly certified Child Care Providers United (CCPU), managed to push the state to offer additional paid leave time for home-based child care providers, which kept her from losing compensation for the days she lost when her program was closed temporarily (normally home-based child care providers lack paid sick days, but are allowed only 10 paid “non-operational days” in a year). But, she added, “We should not have to fight for something that should be given to us.”

Long-term economic security is imperative for CCPU members. Without a stable income, retirement savings or even health insurance in some cases, Lester said, “We are definitely on our own … you have a lot of women who are in this profession, minority women, sometimes single women … and they’re working in this profession until they’re beyond retirement age, and it’s because there isn’t another alternative.”

The same system that fails to pay child care workers fairly simultaneously prices out many poor parents. In California, according to Kidsdata.org, licensed family child care homes tend to be cheaper than daycare centers, at about $11,700 a year, but still prohibitively costly for typical working poor families. Even parents who are eligible for subsidies may not be able to find a spot — many programs have long waiting lists. Pre-pandemic, there we re no child care slots available for an estimated three-quarters of children aged 12 and under with working parents. According to CCPU’s research, prior to the pandemic, some 60 percent of Californians lived in a “child care desert” with no child care provider that they can afford within their zip codes. For families of color, the child care deficit is even worse at about 70 percent. The union warns that the crisis is likely to deepen now that many providers permanently shuttered during the pandemic.

Yet the early childhood education system in California may be due for a shake-up soon. One of the bright spots of the pandemic was the victory of the CCPU in a landmark statewide union election last year, providing about 43,000 licensed and unlicensed home-based child care providers with an official union. Organized jointly under AFSCME and SEIU — the two leading unions representing homecare workers and child care workers across the country — the CCPU is currently hammering out a first-ever union contract with the state government.

The union recently negotiated immediate relief for members, including extra payments of $600 per child and a $3,500 “stabilization stipend” for licensed providers who have suffered losses due to the pandemic.

In the long term, CCPU is demanding “child care for all” — a system of publicly funded early childhood education from infancy through school age, in which no subsidized parent would need to pay a fee. The union is advocating for a simultaneous dramatic expansion of the child care infrastructure, including programs that operate off-hours and serve kids who have special needs, while providers would in turn receive living wages along with health care, paid leave and retirement plans. Lastly, the union is calling for streamlining the state’s child care bureaucracy so families have a stable source of care, and payments to providers are not delayed.

Additional help may be coming from Washington soon. In addition to a funding infusion from the latest relief package passed by Congress earlier this year, the Biden administration’s American Families Plan promises to invest $425 billion in child care subsidies and early childhood education programs, with the aim of both expanding access and raising wages. Under the plan, most low- and middle-income families would pay no more than 7 percent of annual income for child care. In California, that would cover households earning up to $120,660 a year.

CCPU spokesperson Mila Myles said via email that the promise of a federal funding boost was a hopeful sign for a system “on the verge of collapse” — and that it would be a first step in a longer struggle.

“Family child care providers need transformational change with this funding,” Myles added, “not just bubblegum and scotch tape knitting together disparate programs and networks.”

Jackson thinks many child care providers like her will find a way to stay open despite the damage wrought by the pandemic, because the people who’ve relied on her the most — the hundreds of children she’s helped raise in her neighborhood — know the real value of her work. “Those kids are going to bring their kids back,” she said. “They’re going to seek the quality care provider, and they’ll understand the value that child care providers hold.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 10, 2021

Labor Unions Rally Behind California’s Zero-Emissions Climate Plan

Robert Pollin, distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been spearheading national and international efforts to tackle the climate crisis for more than a decade. Over the past few years, he and a group of his colleagues at PERI have produced green economy transition programs for numerous states. The latest such program is for California, and it is being released today.

The massive study — nearly 200 pages long — shows how California can become a zero emissions economy by 2045 while expanding good job opportunities throughout the state. Nineteen unions have already endorsed the green transition plan, making clear that they reject frameworks that falsely pit labor priorities and the environment against each other, and more are expected to do so in the days and weeks ahead.

In the exclusive interview for Truthout that follows, Pollin, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso 2020), talks about the climate stabilization project for California and the national implications of union support for a green economy transition.

C.J. Polychroniou: California has been at the forefront of the climate fight for years now, but the truth of the matter is that its efforts have fallen short. Now, you and some colleagues of yours at PERI have just completed a commissioned climate stabilization project for California. How does the project envision the clean energy transition to take place in a manner consistent with the emission targets set out by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2018, and how will it be financed?

Robert Pollin: This study presents a recovery program for California that will also build a durable foundation for an economically robust and ecologically sustainable longer-term growth trajectory. California has long been a national and global leader in implementing robust climate stabilization policies. This includes the 2018 Executive Order B-55-18 by then Gov. Jerry Brown. This measure committed the state to cut CO2 emissions by 50 percent as of 2030, to become carbon neutral no later than 2045, and to produce net negative emissions thereafter. These goals are somewhat more ambitious than those set out by the IPCC in 2018. Our study outlines a program through which the state can achieve its own established goals.

Our study shows how these 2030 and 2045 emissions reduction targets can be accomplished in California through phasing out the consumption of oil, coal and natural gas to generate energy in the state, since burning fossil fuels to produce energy is, by far, the primary source of CO2 emissions, and thereby, the single greatest factor causing climate change. The project we propose is to build a clean energy infrastructure to replace the existing fossil fuel-dominant infrastructure. The clean energy infrastructure will require large-scale investments to, first, dramatically raise energy efficiency standards in the state and, second, to equally dramatically expand the supply of clean renewable energy supplies, including solar and wind primarily, with supplemental supplies from low-emissions bioenergy, geothermal and small-scale hydro power. We show how this climate stabilization program for California can also serve as a major new engine of job creation and economic well-being throughout the state, both in the short- and longer run.

Nineteen unions have already endorsed the green transition plan, making clear that they reject frameworks that falsely pit labor priorities and the environment against each other.

We have scaled the clean energy investment project at about $76 billion per year on average between 2021 – 2030. This would equal roughly 2 percent of what we estimate will be the state’s average GDP between 2021 – 2030. In other words, California can hit its emissions reduction targets through maintaining clean energy investment spending levels at about 2 percent of overall economic activity in the state. That means that roughly 98 percent of the state’s annual economic activity can still be focused on anything other than clean energy investments. But the state must maintain this 2 percent of GDP investment level in clean energy for the program to work.

We estimate this level of investment will generate roughly 420,000 jobs throughout the state’s economy. New job opportunities will open for, among other occupations, carpenters, machinists, welders, electronic equipment assemblers, environmental scientists, administrative assistants, accountants, truck drivers, roofers and agricultural laborers. Investments in public transportation — a major component of the energy efficiency investment program — will produce public-sector jobs for drivers and managerial staff. The quality of these jobs — including wages, benefits and levels of unionization — vary by sector. In general, it will be critical to raise job quality standards as the number of jobs available expands. Raising unionization rates, as well as expanding job training programs will all be crucial for raising overall job quality levels. Local hire provisions and related measures will also need to be implemented to ensure equitable access by race and gender to the expanding job opportunities.

While focusing on the clean energy investment to reduce California’s CO2 emissions by 50 percent as of 2030, our study does also examine how the state can achieve its longer-term goal of becoming a zero-emissions economy by 2045. The basic features of the investment program between 2031 – 2045 can be extended from the 2021 – 2030 framework. But, in fact, the scale of the investment spending required to achieve the 2045 zero-emissions target can be somewhat more modest, averaging about 1.3 percent of the state’s GDP between 2031 – 2045.

Our study also examines a complementary investment project to upgrade California’s economy base through manufacturing, infrastructure, land restoration and agriculture investments. We budgeted this program at about $62 billion per year, or 1.7 percent of the state’s GDP — in these areas. This investment program is based on the proposed national THRIVE Agenda, a bill introduced into the U.S. Congress in February 2021 by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts)and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) to “Transform, Heal, and Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy.” To date, the THRIVE Agenda has been endorsed by more than 100 members of Congress and hundreds of major union, racial justice and climate organizations. We estimate that these investments will generate about 626,000 jobs throughout the state, in a wide range of occupations.

When we bring together the combined investment programs in the areas of energy efficiency and renewable energy, along with public infrastructure/manufacturing and land restoration/agriculture, total spending in California comes to an average of about $140 billion per year, equal to a bit less than 4 percent of California’s average annual GDP between 2021 – 2030. This level of job creation would generate about 1 million jobs within California. This higher level of job creation will then be sustained through the full decade, as long as the budgetary levels for the range of investment programs are maintained. The expansion in job opportunities will equal more than 5 percent of California’s 2019 labor force. This means that, if California’s unemployment rate was, say, 7 percent without this combined investment program, these investments could drive unemployment to something in the range of 2 percent — i.e. to reach something close to full employment in the state.

California can hit its emissions reduction targets through maintaining clean energy investment spending levels at about 2 percent of overall economic activity in the state.

An absolute front-and-center feature of our proposal is the just transition program for the state’s fossil fuel-dependent workers and communities. About 112,000 people are employed in California in fossil fuel-based industries, amounting to about 0.6 percent the state’s total workforce in 2019. Workers in the state’s fossil fuel-based industries will, of course, experience job losses as the state dramatically reduces consumption of these CO2-generating energy sources. We estimate that about 3,200 workers per year will be displaced in these industries in California between 2021 – 2030 while another roughly 2,500 will voluntarily retire each year. It is critical that all of these workers receive pension guarantees, health care coverage, re-employment guarantees along with wage subsidies to insure they will not experience income losses, along with retraining and relocation support, as needed. Enacting a generous just transition program for the displaced fossil fuel-based industry workers is especially important. We estimate that the costs of a generous just transition package for all fossil fuel industry-based workers experiencing layoffs would come to about $470 million per year. This is equal to about 0.02 percent (two one-hundredths of one percent) of the state’s average GDP between 2021 – 2030.

Three counties in California — Kern, Contra Costa and Los Angeles — account for roughly half of all employment in the state’s fossil fuel-based industries. Kern County, in particular, will face the most significant proportional impacts from the phase-down of the state’s fossil fuel industries. We therefore present a focused discussion on providing community transition support for Kern County. In fact, we found that some initial-stage activities are already underway in Kern to move the area away from its current level of fossil fuel-based industry dependency and to build there a clean energy production infrastructure.

How do you pay for the whole thing? It’s actually straightforward, especially as we keep in mind that, overall, we are talking about devoting less than 4 percent of the state’s overall economic activity to these investment projects, and the most critical purpose of these projects is, after all, is just to achieve the state’s own CO2 emissions reduction targets. Of the roughly $140 billion per year in combined investments and the just transition program, we assume that roughly half of total spending, about $70 billion per year, will be provided by private investors, while the other half is supplied by public spending. Private investments in the clean energy areas in particular will be incentivized by the federal and statewide regulatory environment. A significant share, if not the majority of the approximately $70 billion per year in public spending is likely to come from a version of the Biden administration’s proposed American Jobs Plan, which is focused on infrastructure and clean energy investments. The State of California could then provide the additional funding, as needed. The fact that the state can borrow at very low interest rates now is critical. As an example, we show that if the state government issues $30 billion in bonds in the current low-interest rate environment, the debt servicing burden will also be low, i.e.in the range of 0.3 percent of the state’s annual general revenues. It follows that even if the federal government’s funding through the final version of the Biden American Jobs Plan comes in at a relatively low figure, the State of California could still provide the additional financing through issuing bonds in the current low-interest rate environment without imposing a major burden on the state’s overall budget.

The project has already been endorsed by 19 unions across the State of California, and more are expected to join. This is undoubtedly a highly significant development, but, given that only around 16 percent of the total workforce is unionized, isn’t there a need to reach out to the rest of the population for support?

For decades now, wide majorities of people in California have been supporting strong measures to protect the environment and combat climate change. Increasingly also, the state is suffering disproportionately from the effects of climate change and, more generally, from burning fossil fuels to produce energy, including wildfires, droughts, floods, heat waves, and air pollution that are all becoming more severe over time. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that, just since 2012, California has experienced roughly 16 “billion-dollar disaster events,” generating economic losses of over $100 billion in total. Beyond these climate-specific considerations, it is also the case that the clean energy investment program will deliver lower energy costs to all consumers in California. This is, first, because raising energy efficiency standards will enable consumers to spend less money for a given amount of energy services — e.g. to heat, cool and light homes, or to drive from Riverside to L.A. In addition, the costs of wind, solar and geothermal power are all roughly equal to or lower than those for fossil fuels and nuclear energy, and are falling significantly. As such, the average California household should be able to save nearly 40 percent on their overall annual energy bill relative to what they spend now in the current fossil-fuel dominant system. In short, everyone in the state has a personal stake in solving the climate crisis, even those who aren’t particularly concerned with the most fundamental matter of saving the planet.

Can you also speak about the national implications set by the union support in California for the climate stabilization project you and your colleagues have designed?

The union movement has increasingly embraced a major leadership role in advancing green transition programs. I have worked with the leadership of the AFL-CIO on these issues in multiple states. The level at which California unions have supported our study is one major step forward, and I am, of course, extremely pleased by this support. But it is also part of a growing trend that has been advancing due to the work of outstanding, committed organizers throughout the country. When I first started working on these issues 14 years ago, the prevailing view in mainstream circles — not the labor movement, but in the circles of high-powered policymakers, academia and the mainstream press — was that there is a huge and unavoidable tradeoff between jobs and the environment. You could have one or the other — more jobs or a cleaner environment. But you can’t have both, so choose one. Over the last decade, lots of very effective labor movement activists — from the grassroots levels to many top officials — have pounded home the reality that this is a false trade-off. Due to their efforts, this message has now penetrated all the way up to the Biden administration. Note that Biden is calling his clean energy program an “American Jobs Plan.”

This is really highly encouraging news in the battle to tame global warming, so I must ask: What’s next in line in terms of your climate stabilization projects?

My co-workers and I at PERI are continuing to work with different groups to advance robust climate programs at the national, state as well as county and community levels. Separately, I am working on green transition studies for other countries, Greece being one of them. In the case of Greece, I am looking forward to working more on the issue of land-use requirements in building a green energy infrastructure, building from the outstanding work on this question by the Harvard physicist Mara Prentiss. The issues here is: Do we really have to locate wind turbines on top of the most beautiful pristine mountain cites in Greece in order to build a green economy? This is another one of the false trade-offs that lots of people in power want us to believe. I am also working on issues of financing the global Green New Deal in developing and middle-income countries, especially in Asia, in conjunction with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). That, in addition to trying to maintain the solar panels at my house and office reasonably well.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 9, 2021

Public Banking Can Improve the Lives of US Workers While Helping Save the Planet
The movement to create public banks is gaining ground in many parts of the U.S., particularly as part of an effort among activists and progressive lawmakers to extend banking access to low-income communities and communities of color in the post-COVID-19 economy. But how does public banking help protect the local community and assist with development? If public banks become part of the Federal Reserve — as a bill introduced by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aims to do — what would be the consequences? Leading progressive economist Gerald Epstein, professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has studied the issue of public banking extensively and sheds ample light on these questions in this exclusive interview for Truthout.

C.J. Polychroniou: After a series of ups and downs, the movement for public banking is gaining traction in states in the U.S. Why do we need public banks, and why are they a better alternative than private banks?

Gerald Epstein: First off, when I discuss a public bank or a public banking and finance institution, I generally mean a financial institution that has public support, has a social or public goal, and is not driven mainly by a profit motive.

Why do we need public banking institutions? Plenty of reasons. Private banks charge excessive fees for simple banking services. Asset management companies and financial advisers have major conflicts of interest. Banks engage in highly risky activities, expecting bailouts when they get into financial trouble. Private equity firms strip businesses and households of their assets by loading them up with debts, leaving them without the wherewithal to pay decent wages or compete with other companies.

The public provision of financial services is important not only because it can do what the current financial system does not do, but it can do better at many of the things that private finance purports to do. A public banking and financial institution could help restructure the financial system to better serve public needs, especially the short-term and long-term needs of the poor, the working class and the planet.

Here are some important functions that a public banking and financial institution could play in our economy:
1. Competition and regulation: Public options compete with existing financial institutions, thereby providing people with alternatives to private finance and possibly improving the products and services that private finance offers. The public option also provides a means of regulating private financial institutions through competition.
2. Public goods: Public goods, such as a highly educated population, efficient infrastructure, and long-term technological innovation with broad positive spillovers, can be supported by public finance institutions.
3. Collective goods and complementarities: Collective goods are those that require concerted and collective action to come to fruition and generate productive outcomes. For example, as Mehrsa Baradaran argues in developing her proposal for “A Homestead Act for the 21st Century,” providing affordable housing is not sustainable in and of itself because there are a number of complementary goods that must be available at the same time, such as jobs, financial institutions and grocery stores. Here, community development is a good that must involve collective planning and simultaneous financing in a number of different areas for any of the pieces to succeed. A public banking and financial institution can be a useful mechanism to coordinate and help finance these activities.
4. Financial inclusion — fighting poverty, exploitation and racial discrimination: Financial exclusion, exploitation and racial injustice are deeply ingrained social ills in the United States. Public banking and finance institutions can help finance affordable housing, cooperatives, small businesses, education initiatives and financial services, all in communities of color and for institutions owned or controlled by members of the community.
5. Financial resilience and stability: Public banking and finance institutions, by contributing to a diverse financial ecosystem, help to make the financial system more resilient and robust. For example, unlike for-profit banks, publicly oriented financial institutions tend to perform countercyclically, helping to stabilize the economy rather than exacerbating crises.
6. Economic transformation: For large-scale transformative issues, the social provision of finance must play a major role. These include projects that have long-term gestation periods, massive uncertainty, large economies of scale, and the need for complementary investments and planning. One example is the pressing need to make the transition to renewable and non-carbon-producing fuels, such as the Green New Deal. This requires investment in new technologies and infrastructure implementation. In such a multifaceted transformative endeavor, public provision of finance is crucial as a facilitating mechanism and a planning tool.
7. Promote full employment and good jobs: Credit allocation is key for job creation, including areas of structural unemployment, as well as patient capital for long-term gestation projects and infrastructure investments. Here, the quality of employment is as critical as the quantity (“high road” employment).
8. Instrument of public policy: In an economic transformation like the Green New Deal, public provision of credit is a powerful instrument of government policy. Countries that have made successful, rapid and transformative economic changes, including the United States, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Western European countries, such as France, Germany and Italy in the first few decades after World War II, all used public provision of finance as a carrot or stick to elicit desired corporate behavior and allocate credit to priority sectors.
9. Reducing the power of financial elites and countering capital strike: Among the most important effects of a public banking and financial institution — and a key reason that capitalists often oppose it — is that having a public option reduces the market power of private capital and the political power of finance. As private banks and other financial activities in the United States have become bigger and more concentrated, social provision of finance will confront these oligopolies with more competition. Politically, public options reduce the power of the threat of a capital strike and of being “too big to fail.” With a large public banking and financial institution footprint, we can say to Wall Street, “Go ahead and fail. Our public financial institutions will provide the needed services without you.” Moreover, public banking and financial institutions provide a counterweight if private finance threatens capital flight in response to progressive policies they don’t like.
Can public banking and finance institutions thrive and survive in a capitalist economy?

The origins of the resurgence of interest in public banking go back to the Occupy Movement.

Capitalist economies, especially those dominated by neoliberalism, would seem to be a uniquely inhospitable place for public banking and finance. Yet, as Thomas Marois has documented, there has been a dramatic increase in public banking and financial institutions’ prevalence around the world in recent decades. According to him, over 900 public banks currently exist. Altogether, they control more than 20 percent of all bank assets, public and private. While it is true that public control of banking assets has probably fallen from its 1970s height of around 40 percent, today’s economies are much bigger, and the total mass of public bank capital has grown substantially. The latest estimate by Marois shows that public banks have combined financial assets totaling near $49 trillion, which equals more than half of global GDP.

How can public banking and financial institutions continue to thrive in the apparently hyper-capitalist environment of most countries? Two factors are pivotal. The first one has to do with the recent decades of financial crises, which have led to the growth of these public institutions to rescue finance, if not the economy as a whole. The second may be a bit more surprising: in some ways, these institutions are actually more efficient and safer than private financial institutions.

Despite mainstream economics’ claim to the contrary, there are some competitive advantages of these public institutions that allow them a fighting chance, even in the capitalist marketplace. They are the following:
1. Public banking and finance institutions tend to emphasize “relationship” banking so that bankers and customers get to know each other well; this increases knowledge of credit risks and enhances trust, thereby reducing manipulative or fraudulent behavior on both sides.
2. Public mandates and lack of shareholder control typically lead public banking and finance institutions to adopt less risky behavior than their private counterparts. This can result in less instability.
3. Access to capital at lower cost: Many public banking and finance institutions have lower costs for capital because they are perceived as being safer than private banks that engage in high-risk activities. They tend to build capital through profit retention, since they are not under pressure to distribute dividends to shareholders, and they do not face the same shareholder demands for rapid expansion.
4. Public mandates lead to banks passing on advantages to customers: Public banking and finance institutions pass on lower expenses to customers rather than needing to pay extraordinarily high executive salaries and large amounts of dividends. This attracts more borrowers and more depositors and lenders.
5. Economies of scale: Even though relationship banking and tight monitoring of credit risks can be very costly, public banking and finance institutions can achieve economies of scale by joining networks that provide services like underwriting, technical assistance, and help identifying lenders and good borrowers. Such networks can at least partially erode some of the advantageous economies of scale that large private firms have.
The lack of alternatives to Wall Street banks gave rise to the Public Bank LA initiative, which began a campaign to establish a municipal bank that would be owned by the city of Los Angeles.

Still, this kind of banking seems stunted in the U.S. relative to some other places in the world, but I would argue that this is because private banking gets massive subsidies from the U.S. government (including the Federal Reserve) that mostly are not available to public banking and finance institutions. It will take political mobilization to change this, and, thankfully, that mobilization is beginning to happen.

What kind of grassroot initiatives are currently going on in the fight for public banking?

Public banking initiatives in the U.S. have gained unprecedented momentum in recent years. The origins of the resurgence of interest in public banking go back to the Occupy Movement, which emerged in 2011 as a response to the economic and social injustices heightened by the global financial crisis. The infrastructure crisis, the exclusion of millions of Americans from basic banking services and private banking’s longstanding history of financing environmentally harmful projects have further fueled interest in public banking across the U.S.

As a response to these problems, public banking advocates have started state and local initiatives to establish public banking institutions in a number of localities. Alongside these initiatives, networks of organizations and advocacy groups have been created. The Public Banking Institute, the California Public Banking Alliance and the National Public Banking Alliance are among the major think tanks and organizations advocating for public banking. These organizations have forged connections with a panoply of nongovernmental organizations and grassroots movements to help develop existing coalitions and mobilize support.

Advocates working toward establishing public banks follow two common approaches. The first approach is to establish public banks at the city, county or regional level. In most cases, the state governments need to pass legislation to authorize the creation of local-level public banks. The second approach involves establishing a state public bank, like the Bank of North Dakota, which would act as the public depository for state funds and partner with local lenders.

There are attempts in different states to establish public banks following both of these approaches. These efforts are spread throughout the country. Here is a brief rundown.

New York State and Pennsylvania host initiatives to establish public banks at local and state levels. Both states are working toward passing a bill that would provide the legal background for local governments to establish their own public banks. In Pennsylvania, this legislation will be used to establish a city public bank in Philadelphia. Besides, both states are pursuing legislation to establish state-level public banks. The advocates in Pennsylvania are working closely with the Public Banking Institute to establish a public bank following the Bank of North Dakota model. These efforts are supported by numerous grassroots groups in both states.

Washington State is another important hub for public banking advocacy. Over the past several years, advocates have been pushing to establish a state-level public bank that would function as a public depository for state money and would be authorized to manage and invest state funds in infrastructure development programs. Although these efforts have been facing fierce ideological opposition, particularly from the state treasurer, the organizers who participated in our survey expressed their commitment to continue pushing for public banking in the coming years. Besides these three states, there are efforts to establish state-level public banks in nine other states: Colorado, California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Virginia.

The Public Banking Act, a federal bill introduced to Congress in October 2020 aims to enable and encourage the creation of public banks at state and local levels.

The most significant victory for the public banking movement took place in California in 2019 as the legislation enabling the creation of local public banks, AB 857, passed. This is the first municipal banking legislation in the country authorizing the state to charter 10 municipal banks over seven years. There are also ongoing efforts to convert California’s Infrastructure and Development Bank (the IBank), currently an infrastructure loan fund, into a state-level public bank.

The lack of alternatives to Wall Street banks gave rise to the Public Bank LA initiative, which began a campaign to establish a municipal bank that would be owned by the city of Los Angeles and would manage city funds in the public interest.

One of the first major accomplishments of Public Bank LA was to facilitate a city referendum to form a public bank. Although the referendum fell short at 44.15 percent support, this momentum was translated into the formation of the California Public Banking Alliance, which is a coalition of 10 public banking grassroots groups across the state.

Besides local public banking, advocates in California have been campaigning for a state-level public bank. These efforts started in 2019 with the introduction of a bill, SB 528, by Democratic Sen. Ben Hueso. This bill aimed to transform the IBank into a depository institution that could take deposits from cities and countries, manage them and provide loan guarantees and conduit bonds to California projects. After the failure of this bill, a new task force started working on converting the IBank into a state-level public bank. In July 2020, a new bill, AB 310, was introduced for this purpose. AB 310 has two main components/targets: (1) expanding the IBank’s lending capacity; and (2) converting the IBank into a state public bank. The expansion in the lending capacity was introduced to support local governments and small businesses, targeting especially those owned by disadvantaged groups.

Overall, California can be considered as a center of public banking advocacy work in the U.S. There is a large and growing public support for public banking, and the advocates have been successful in building coalitions, forming organizations and introducing legislation. By following these developments and building dialogue, advocates in other parts of the country can take important lessons from the victories and challenges faced by public banking organizers from California.

Still, without broader federal support, such as what the government gives private banks, these public banks will always be at … somewhat of a disadvantage. Thankfully, a number of progressive legislators and activists are pursuing initiatives at the federal level to support public banking and finance institutions and activities.

Bill H.R. 8721 was introduced in October 2020 to provide for the federal charter of certain public banks. What would be the role of a public bank created by the federal government? Could it provide an effective pathway toward financing the green transition?

Some have proposed the creation of a federal infrastructure bank — this bank could be restricted to funding only climate-friendly investments.

The Public Banking Act, a federal bill introduced to Congress in October 2020 by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaks directly to some of the demands expressed by public banking advocates in our survey analysis. The Public Banking Act aims to enable and encourage the creation of public banks at state and local levels by establishing a comprehensive federal regulatory framework, grant programs and support [for] the financial infrastructure. In other words, this bill encourages the creation of public banks by providing “top-down” support for “bottom-up” local initiatives.

Under the Public Banking Act, public banks can become members of the Fed. In addition, this legislation presents a pathway for state-chartered banks to gain federal recognition and identifies a framework for public banks to interact with postal banking (where the USPS serves as a bank), or FedAccounts (where everyone gets an account with the Fed through which they could receive direct payments, such as stimulus checks, from the government). The bill also introduces lending rules and regulations regarding excluded and marginalized groups, ecological sustainability and data reporting. For instance, it prohibits public banks from engaging in or supporting fossil fuel investment. Besides, it directs the Fed to develop regulations and provide guidance to ensure that public banks’ activities remain consistent with climate goals and are universal and comprehensively include historically excluded and marginalized groups.

A key feature of the Public Banking Act is that it recognizes the need for more federal-level support for local- and state-level public banking initiatives. This legislation also shows that the Fed and the Treasury can be instrumental in supporting the financial infrastructure outside of their typical models of action.

There are other possible federal initiatives to help finance a Green New Deal. The Federal Reserve itself could buy green bonds, as suggested, for example, by Robert Pollin. Or the government could create a free-standing “Green Bank” at the federal level to mobilize private capital and combine it with public monies to help fund the green transition. Finally, some have proposed the creation of a federal infrastructure bank, and presumably, this bank could be restricted to funding only climate-friendly investments. All of this could greatly complement initiatives at the state and municipal levels to promote solutions to the climate emergency.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
June 6, 2021

Oakland dockworkers refuse to unload Israeli cargo ship

The ILWU stood firm for Palestinian rights and prevented ZIM ships from docking in 2010 and again in 2014, the last time that ZIM-owned shipping vessels were able to use the Oakland port.

Since then, ZIM ships have not tried to dock at the Oakland port – until this past month.

“Rank-and-file members of ILWU Local 10 stand against Israeli apartheid and with our brothers and sisters in Palestine,” union member Jimmy Salameh stated.

The post Oakland dockworkers refuse to unload Israeli cargo ship appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
June 5, 2021

Protesters At Port Of Oakland Declare Win In Israeli Cargo Boycott

Hundreds of picketers and protesters marched Friday morning in front of the Port of Oakland to keep cargo on an Israeli ship from being delivered.

Approximately 1,000 people from the Arab Resource & Organizing Center and the local union for longshoremen spread out across six gates at Berth 30 near the Middle Harbor Shoreline Park in the 2700 block of Middle Harbor Road.

“Our goal today is to show the city of Oakland that we do not want them to do business with and allow Israeli apartheid money to come into our city,” group spokesman Wassim Hage said by phone. “It’s part of an international picket movement at port cities around the world that will be going on over the next couple of weeks.”

The post Protesters At Port Of Oakland Declare Win In Israeli Cargo Boycott appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
May 31, 2021

Rural Communities Have Waited Nearly a Decade for Clean Drinking Water Systems

This article, produced jointly by the California Health Report and High Country News, is part of a collaboration that also includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism, Circle of Blue, Columbia Insight, Ensia, New Mexico In Depth and SJV Water. It was made possible by a grant from The Water Desk, with support from Ensia and INN’s Amplify News Project.

When Ramona Hernandez turns on her kitchen faucet in El Adobe, an unincorporated town just a few miles southeast of Bakersfield, the water that splashes out looks clean and inviting. But she doesn’t dare drink it.

“You worry about your health,” she said in Spanish as she sat in her tranquil front yard one morning early this spring, her elderly mother-in-law working in the garden behind her.

“I’m scared,” Hernandez said, “of getting sick from the water.” Drinking the tap water in this tiny community of dusty ranches and unpaved roads could expose Hernandez to arsenic. So, for years, she and her husband, Gerardo, have shuttled twice a week to the nearby town of Lamont to load up on bottled water. At a cost of about $80 a month, it’s enough for drinking and cooking. If they had the money, Hernandez, 55, would buy bottled water to shower with and use for her chickens. But given her husband’s salary as a farmworker, she says, that’s not a realistic option.

Like more than 300 communities across California, El Adobe lacks safe drinking water. Since 2008, the arsenic levels in one of its two wells have regularly exceeded the safety standards set by federal and state authorities, often by more than double. Long-term exposure to arsenic in drinking water is linked to diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer.

Contaminated drinking water affects an estimated 1 million people in California, many of whom rely on private wells or small community water systems like El Adobe’s. A majority of these residents live in the Central and Salinas valleys. These are largely low-income, rural and Latino communities, where lack of access to clean water exacerbates the health disparities that already exist due to structural inequities. Since 2012, California law has recognized that access to safe and affordable water is a human right, but action has lagged behind the language.

Arsenic levels in El Adobe’s other well are currently deemed safe, but the well can’t provide enough water to meet year-round demand. That means that many residents of the unincorporated town, including the Hernandezes, continue to pay for water they can’t drink. The El Adobe Property Owners Association charges households $125 a month for tap water, money that also covers streetlights and road maintenance (although only one road is paved). Most residents also buy bottled water at the store. Others take their chances and drink the tap water despite the risks. Many townspeople are low-income farmworkers and retirees, and buying bottled water is a significant expense.

“I can’t afford bottled water all the time,” said Kyle Wilkerson, 40, a father of three who lives on a fixed disability income. He’s also president of the El Adobe Property Owners Association, a small cadre of community members who manage the town’s water infrastructure almost entirely as volunteers.

Wilkerson said he worries about his own health as well as that of his family. “But what am I going to do?” he said. “You get to the point of, it is what it is.”

And indeed, residents in towns like El Adobe have few options. Arsenic can be removed from water, but it’s prohibitively expensive for most small towns. An arsenic treatment facility requires millions of dollars to build and another $100,000 or more per year to operate, said Chad Fischer, an engineer who works at the California Division of Drinking Water’s district office in Visalia, which regulates water in the region.

El Adobe is so small — just 83 homes — that if community residents split the cost of a treatment system, they’d spend tens of thousands of dollars each and face dramatically increased water rates. “The math is awful,” Fischer said. “It ends up being unaffordable.”

It’s possible for individual users to install an advanced filtration system, such as reverse osmosis, in their homes, usually under the sink, to remove arsenic. But these systems can cost hundreds of dollars to install and maintain. Some small water systems do install these in people’s homes, passing on the cost to consumers, but the state considers this a temporary fix. Inexpensive pitcher-type filters do not remove arsenic.

A permanent solution was supposed to be coming for El Adobe. In 2013, with funding from the California State Water Resources Control Board, El Adobe commissioned a report that concluded that the best option for the community was to connect with the larger water system in Lamont. According to Scott Taylor, general manager of the Lamont Public Utility District, the state promised to grant Lamont enough money to build the connecting pipeline, service lines and new wells needed to accommodate the increase in users and replace aging infrastructure.

“Eight years, it still hasn’t happened,” said Taylor. “I think it’s bureaucracy. For example, when we submit any kind of a document, a cost estimate, an engineering report … for whatever reason, it takes them two to three months to review it. If it took any of my staff a month to review a document, I don’t care if it’s 100 pages, I’d fire them.”

Blair Robertson, a spokesman for the California State Water Resources Control Board, said the state is still waiting for Lamont to purchase land for the new wells and drill test wells to see if water at the proposed sites is contaminated. There is currently no start date for the project, which is estimated to cost between $13 and 22 million and will likely be split into several construction phases. Formal state approval of the project will likely be in 2022, Robertson said, but there’s currently no timeframe for when El Adobe residents will have clean drinking water.

Planning and implementing a water system consolidation takes time, Fischer said, especially when the community, like El Adobe, is small and lacks a team of engineers and other professionals to manage the water supply. Lamont has its own water problems with contaminants and aging wells, which have added to the difficulties of the project, he said. Projects usually take five or more years to accomplish, he said, depending on their complexity. But it has already been eight years, and construction has yet to begin.

More Than 100 Others

Beyond those delays, dozens of other communities in California are also waiting on construction projects for clean water. Approximately 110 other out-of-compliance water systems in the state are planning or considering consolidation with another system. Sometimes, the larger communities resist appeals to absorb the smaller systems because they fear it will increase costs and strain their own water supply, particularly as droughts continue. The state often offers financial incentives to encourage consolidation, and can mandate it, if necessary. Other times consolidation isn’t even an option because a community is too remote.

In 2019, California passed a law that established a program called Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER), designed to help fund water improvements for communities that struggle to provide clean water to their residents. The state water board is working to complete a needs assessment to determine which water systems need help and to what extent, according to a recent report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. However, the state is still “in the very early stages of implementation,” and “much work remains to be accomplished” before all Californians have access to safe and affordable drinking water, the report stated.

Cheryl Blackhawk, 67, and her husband Edward, 69, are fed up with not having safe water in El Adobe. They moved to the town four years ago from nearby Greenfield, seeing it as a quiet and affordable place to retire. At the time, the seller assured them the water connection to Lamont would happen within a year. They’re still buying water bottles by the caseload from Walmart.

“You can’t go to the faucet to get water to drink,” said Edward Blackhawk. “You can’t cook.”

Contaminants aren’t the only problem. Like innumerable systems across California and the country, El Adobe’s wells, pipes, pumps and other water infrastructure are showing their age. El Adobe’s most critical well, the one without arsenic, was built in 1967, the same year Ronald Reagan became governor of California and labor activist Cesar Chavez initiated a nationwide boycott of the state’s table grapes. The community’s arsenic-laced well was built in 1985.

The life of a well depends on the chemicals in the local soil and water, and the quality of the well materials and construction, said Dave Warner, community development manager at Self-Help Enterprises in Visalia, which helps low-income communities access funding for water projects. But a well as old as 1967 “is really pushing it,” he said. Over time, the casing inside the well corrodes, and sand and other contaminants can get into the pump, causing it to fail. Still, drilling a new well costs more than $1 million, according to water officials. Securing state funding for it can take more than a decade, Warner said.

The precariousness of the situation is not lost on Edward Blackhawk. Without functioning wells and pumps, people’s faucets would run dry. Toilets wouldn’t flush.

“If these wells go down, we’re out of luck,” he said. “We’re out of water.”

Widespread Water Woes

Three miles down the road, Lamont has its own water struggles. Five of the town’s eight wells are contaminated with a highly toxic chemical called 1,2,3-trichloropropane, or 1,2,3-TCP. The chemical was added to soil fumigants used in agriculture during the 1940s through the 1980s. It persists in the environment indefinitely and is recognized as a carcinogen by the state of California. The state started regulating the chemical in drinking water in 2017, which meant communities like Lamont had to find a way to remove it.

Just like arsenic, 1,2,3-TCP is expensive to get rid of. A treatment system costs over $1 million per well, plus about $100,000 a year to change the filter, said Taylor. Lamont has installed treatment on four wells, using money from a settlement with Dow Chemical and Shell Oil, the companies allegedly responsible for the contamination. But two of the treatment systems are leased, and the utility district still doesn’t know how it will pay for them long-term. Two other wells still need 1,2,3-TCP and arsenic treatment systems, respectively.

Lamont’s population of 15,000 is almost entirely Latino, and many residents are farmworkers. The average per capita income is just over $13,000 a year. Plans to raise water rates last year to help cover some of the district’s expenses were delayed because of the pandemic. Even so, dozens of accounts fell into delinquency as people lost jobs and struggled to pay bills. The district is now short about $70,000 from delinquent accounts, Taylor said.

Lamont’s wells are also nearing the end of their lifespan. Last year, shortly after the district installed a $1 million filtration system for 1,2,3-TCP on a 60-year-old well, the well collapsed. Taylor said he “raised holy hell” with the state water board and obtained emergency funding to build a new well, which is now under construction. Another three wells need replacing, he said. Those new wells may also need treatment systems. Funding for that is supposed to be included in the consolidation project with El Adobe.

So far, Lamont has managed to provide clean water to residents, but that could change if another well breaks or demand increases enough to require making a contaminated well operational, said Taylor.

“It’s a little discouraging,” said district board member, Miguel Sanchez. “You’re trying to comply with all these regulations and the system is crumbling.”

A Reason for Hope?

But Californians now have a reason to be optimistic: A $2 trillion proposal by President Joe Biden to fund infrastructure improvements across the nation, including for clean water, could provide their state with more money for these types of projects. Biden’s plan — if approved by Congress — would include $111 billion dollars in clean water investments. The proposal seeks $10 billion to monitor and remediate new drinking-water contaminants and to invest in small rural water systems like El Adobe’s. The plan also requests $56 billion in grants and loans to upgrade and modernize America’s aging drinking water, wastewater and stormwater systems. Support for low-income communities and communities of color is a big focus of the proposal.

It’s not yet clear how much of the money would go to California. However, Gov. Gavin Newsom has called Biden’s plan “a game changer.”

And Warner, with Self-Help Enterprises, agreed. Right now, there’s not enough state and federal money available to efficiently tackle all of California’s water contamination and infrastructure problems, he said. Biden’s plan “gave me a lot of hope,” he said. “But it’s got to get approved.”

Meanwhile, Susana De Anda, co-founder of the Community Water Center, an environmental justice organization based in Visalia, applauded California’s SAFER program, but said communities need help faster. A short-term solution would be for the state to implement a rate-assistance program for low-income residents who are struggling to pay their water bills, including those who pay for water twice because their tap water is contaminated, she said.

“We want solutions now,” she said. “It’s a huge problem, and we have generations that have been condemned to this reality.”

In El Adobe, Hernandez worries that she may be inhaling contaminants or absorbing them through her skin when she showers. The concentration of arsenic in the water is still safe for bathing, according to state regulators, and arsenic does not evaporate into the air, but Hernandez remains distrustful, particularly since she and her husband both have lung problems.

If only officials in Sacramento could spend a day in her shoes, she said. “How would they like it?” she asked. “They don’t have to worry about having a shower, about drinking the water.”

At the edge of the community, Cheryl and Edward Blackhawk checked on El Adobe’s second well, the arsenic-laden one, and its water tank, which sits inside a small enclosure littered with tumbleweeds. Cheryl Blackhawk, who serves as financial secretary for the property owner’s association, said she fears that drought conditions this year will lead to falling water levels that result in higher arsenic concentrations in the well.

Her husband, standing quietly beside the aging pump, confessed he’s beginning to doubt the connection to Lamont will actually happen.

“There’s a lot of people out here who think it’s dead in the water,” he said softly. “And it’s not just us. There are hundreds (of communities) like us in the state.”

This story was supported by a grant from The Water Desk, with support from Ensia and the Institute for Nonprofit News’s Amplify News Project.

This article first appeared on California Health Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
May 29, 2021

Scheer Intelligence: Governor Orders Independent Investigation Into Kevin Cooper Case

Three hours and 42 minutes. That’s how close Kevin Cooper came in 2004 to being murdered by the state, strapped down to a gurney, and poisoned via lethal injection. He had been placed in what he calls a “death chamber waiting room” and stripped of all his clothes before he was granted a stay of execution. Five years later, in an unprecedented dissent, five federal judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion that began: “The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man.”

A rash of evidence would appear to substantiate their claim. In the opinion, Judge William A. Fletcher details multiple Brady disclosures—key information that had been ignored or actively suppressed that would compromise the case against Cooper.

The post Scheer Intelligence: Governor Orders Independent Investigation Into Kevin Cooper Case appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
May 18, 2021

Public Health Crisis Looms as California Identifies 600 Communities at Risk of Water-System Failures

A familiar scene has returned to California: drought. Two counties are currently under emergency declarations, and the rest of the state could follow.

The post Public Health Crisis Looms as California Identifies 600 Communities at Risk of Water-System Failures appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
May 14, 2021

Salvation Army faces lawsuit over labor violations

A group of five former rehab participants have filed a class-action lawsuit against The Salvation Army, alleging they were not paid for work they performed at the venerated charity.

The Salvation Army is one of the largest providers of drug and alcohol rehabilitation in the United States. Participants typically do not have to pay for a place in the residential program. But once there, the main mode of treatment is what The Salvation Army calls “work therapy” at the charity’s thrift stores, which generate more than $598 million in annual sales.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in San Francisco Superior Court, alleges that the charity violated California labor laws by not treating the workers as employees and failing to pay them minimum wage and overtime. According to the complaint, the participants worked more than 40 hours a week in “physically grueling and sometimes dangerous” jobs. Some picked up donations and worked in warehouses and stores, where they sorted, priced and displayed clothing, linens, shoes, accessories and housewares. Others performed maintenance jobs, repaired goods or operated heavy machinery. In exchange, they received gratuities of between $1 and $25 per week or “canteen cards” they could use to buy soda, chips or other snacks at The Salvation Army canteen.

The program provides room and board to the participants but requires them to sign up for and then relinquish their food stamps, according to the complaint. It also provides other services, such as spiritual counseling, Bible study and recreational outings.

But participants in the programs spent the vast majority of their time working. The charity admits only applicants who can work and routinely kicks participants out of the program if they get sick or injured and are no longer able to work, participants said. Most people do not complete the program, according to the complaint.

The Salvation Army did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the lawsuit. The organization has previously argued that rehab participants are not employees and are therefore not entitled to wages.

Jessica Riggin, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, alleges that the organization is violating labor law by not treating the workers as employees. Whether or not the program helps people is irrelevant, she said.

“There’s no nonprofit exemption to the labor code,” she said. “Even if they do good, that’s not a reason for them to not comply with the law like every other California employer.”

The suit, the attorneys said, was filed in response to an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, which found that The Salvation Army is among hundreds of rehab facilities across the country that put participants to work without pay. The federal Department of Labor previously found the charity in violation of labor law in 1990, but after The Salvation Army filed a lawsuit and lobbied federal lawmakers, the federal agency dropped the case. The Labor Department then added specific language to an internal handbook that effectively ended federal enforcement actions against The Salvation Army for wage violations.

The participants are seeking certification as a class and are demanding back wages for work performed by participants at 15 Salvation Army rehab facilities in California over the past four years.

Their attorneys filed the case under the Private Attorneys General Act, a California law that allows private attorneys representing employees to file lawsuits on behalf of the state to recover civil penalties for labor code violations.

This story was edited by Esther Kaplan and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Shoshana Walter can be reached at swalter@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @shoeshine.

Salvation Army faces lawsuit over labor violations is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

This post was originally published on Reveal.
May 11, 2021

Governor of California wants to provide two-thirds of residents a $600 stimulus check

The middle class and low-income Californians are expected to benefit from UBI

By: MAGGIE ANGST

Gov. Gavin Newsom today unveiled plans to deliver a second round of $600 stimulus checks — this time for middle-class residents in addition to low-income families — in an effort to speed up California’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The governor’s proposal to award two-thirds of Californians with stimulus checks is part of his $100-billion “California Comeback Plan,” which stems from an unprecedented $75.7 billion surplus in the state’s general fund projected for the upcoming fiscal year and an additional $26 billion from the federal coronavirus relief package.

As part of the plan, Newsom intends to give $600 payments to taxpayers earning up to $75,000 in adjusted gross income and an additional $500 to families with dependent children, including undocumented families.

He has also proposed spending $5.2 billion on rental assistance with the goal of getting 100% of back rent paid for Californians directly affected by COVID-19 and $2 billion in direct payments to help Californians pay off overdue water, gas and electricity bills.

“This is all on the basis of the recovery that California is already experiencing,” Newsom said during a news briefing Monday. “And that’s because we are defeating and we are successfully applying strategies to address this pandemic.

“…California is not just coming back, it’s roaring back.”

If approved by the state Legislature, the new stimulus package would triple the size of the Golden State Stimulus package that Newsom signed into law in February — bringing the total funding to $11.9 billion.

The first round of stimulus payments provided $600 checks for 5.7 million low-income Californians and grants to small businesses. Those who received the first payment will not be eligible for a second.

The Legislature has until June 15 to pass the state budget, so the proposed payments would likely be distributed sometime this summer.

The governor’s announcement comes just two weeks after a Republican-led campaign to recall him from office qualified for the ballot and just days before he is due to submit his revised proposal for a state budget bolstered by the significant funding surplus.

At least one candidate looking to oust Newsom from office quickly took the opportunity to throw jabs at the governor.

“Instead of making beastly, structural changes and slashing taxes permanently, pretty boy Gavin Newsom is making one-time payments to Californians to avoid being recalled,” John Cox said in a statement Monday. “But, Californians can’t be bought. Now is when we should be making big changes that will shake up Sacramento, lower taxes and make California permanently more affordable.”

Full details of the governor’s “California Comeback Plan” will be trickled out over the next few days.

In a Mother’s Day video on Sunday, Newsom debuted another major budget proposal to increase spending for families and caregivers, including funding for 100,000 new state-subsidized child care slots and $200 million for home health care workers.

“We’re going to be making some bold investments, and some big investments, in particular, to support parents,” he said in the video. “We have the backs of mothers and will be making investments to solve real problems and to acknowledge the extraordinary stress that so many moms, particularly working moms, have been under over this last year.”

The state’s projected surplus is so expansive that all California taxpayers are likely to benefit from a future rebate, thanks to a state law put in place to restrict government spending.

The law, approved by voters in 1979, was spearheaded by taxpayer watchdog Paul Gann. It requires the state to provide residents with a tax rebate when revenues outpace spending on taxpayer-funded programs — a provision that has not been triggered since 1986. Roughly half of the money must be spent on K-12 education and half must go back to taxpayers.

State finance officials predicted in January that California would exceed the spending limit by $102 million — a figure that is expected to grow even larger in the final budget. Newsom said the exact dollar amount to be given back to California taxpayers under the Gann limit will be determined over the course of the next year or so.

The realization marks a sharp pivot from last year’s budget process when Newsom and the Legislature took steps to close a projected $54 billion deficit stemming from the coronavirus outbreak.

It turns out that California’s finances were much stronger than projected. The pandemic-fueled recession did not go as deep as state finance officials had anticipated, primarily because wealthy households, which contribute most to state taxes, have prospered as the stock market soared in the midst of the pandemic.

Assemblymember Phil Ting, chair of the Assembly Budget Committee, said this realization has given the state a “historic opportunity” to help those who have suffered the most during the pandemic.

“At a time when people need government the most, often we’re in a situation where we can’t help them,” Ting said at the event in Oakland on Monday. “But because of our progressive tax policy … we have an unprecedented budget surplus and that budget surplus is going right back to the most vulnerable Californians — the ones who need the help the most.”

As of Monday, California had its lowest COVID-19 case rate since the start of the pandemic, and close to half the state has been fully vaccinated. But even though the state is poised to reopen most of its economy by June 15, tens of thousands of Californians are still unemployed and many residents are still struggling to cover their rent and keep up with additional expenses.

Under the governor’s new proposal, landlords could be reimbursed for 100% of an eligible renter’s unpaid rent.

Tom Bannon, chief executive officer of the California Apartment Association, called the announcement “welcome news.”

“We thank the governor for understanding the difficulties that both tenants and rental property owners have endured during the pandemic,” Bannon said in a statement.

The post Governor of California wants to provide two-thirds of residents a $600 stimulus check appeared first on Basic Income Today.

This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.
May 8, 2021

Over 600 Public Water Systems in California Communities Face Risk of Failure

A familiar scene has returned to California: drought. Two counties are currently under emergency declarations, and the rest of the state could follow.

It was only four years ago when a winter of torrential rain finally wrestled the state out of its last major drought, which had dragged on for five years and left thousands of domestic wells coughing up dust.

That drinking-water crisis made national headlines and helped shine a light on another long-simmering water crisis in California: More than 300 communities have chronically unsafe drinking water containing contaminants that can come with serious health consequences, including cancer. The areas hardest hit are mostly small, agricultural communities in the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys, which are predominantly Latino and are often also places classified by the state as “disadvantaged.” Unsafe water in these communities adds to a list of health and economic burdens made worse by the ongoing pandemic.

California took a step toward addressing the problem back in 2012 when it passed the country’s first state law declaring the human right to water. That was followed by a 2019 bill to help meet that mandate by establishing the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund.

But just how much cash is needed to address the problem?

The answer, we now know, is about $10 billion, according to a new “needs assessment” from state agencies and the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation that provides a detailed look at the scope of the problem and cost of solutions.

“The study is unique in that it’s the first — certainly for California, but I think also for any state — that looks across every source for drinking water purposes that can be quantified,” says Gregory Pierce, the study’s principal investigator and an adjunct assistant professor of urban planning at UCLA. This includes all public water systems regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, as well as domestic wells and “state smalls” with fewer than 15 connections.

“I think this takes us many steps forward to better understanding where we need additional funding and what areas we should be focusing on in terms of proactively addressing at-risk systems,” says Michael Clairborne, directing attorney at the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, which works on water-equity issues in the state. “It also demonstrates that there’s still a real need for additional infrastructure funding for drinking water.”

Understanding the Problem

So how bad is it?

The causes of the state’s drinking water woes are varied — and worrisome. Nitrate, mostly from farms and dairies, is the costliest water contaminant, the study found. Nitrates are especially dangerous for infants, and can cause lethargy, dizziness and even death. Other groundwater contaminants include bacteria from leaking septic systems and uranium, which can cause kidney damage. Several other contaminants have been linked to cancers, including the industrial pollutant chromium-6, the pesticide 1,2,3-trichloropropane, and human-made and naturally-occurring sources of arsenic.

Contamination is also widespread.

The study looked at 2,779 public water systems across the state and evaluated their water quality, affordability, accessibility, and technical and financial capacity. It found that 326 public water systems qualified as “human right to water communities” — the ones where water systems are consistently failing to provide affordable, safe drinking water.

For anyone tracking this issue (or living in these communities), that part wasn’t news.

But the report also found that another 617 public water systems are at risk of failing. Virtually every county in the state had at least one system on this list, but those with the highest numbers were in rural areas with large numbers of smaller water systems, including Tulare, Fresno, Monterey and Kern counties.

“What’s really novel is that it also tries to comprehensively assess where our water quality is likely to fail next if nothing is done to prevent it,” says Pierce.

And that should be a big wake-up call.

“This is the next logical step to try to get a handle on the drinking-water crisis in the state,” says Clairborne. “We really have to proactively address these high-risk systems before they fail, provide them the support they need, and potentially consolidate high-risk systems with nearby systems to improve sustainability.”

The research also found that almost one third of domestic wells (78,000) are at high risk of failure, as are half of California’s 1,236 state small systems.

And it highlighted another critical issue, too: money.

“The report reinforced what we unfortunately already know too well — that California is facing a major water affordability crisis,” says Jonathan Nelson, policy director of the Community Water Center. “Nearly 1 in 3 water systems were identified either as having water rates that were higher than what is deemed affordable for families or high levels of water shutoffs.”

Unsafe drinking water comes with an additional economic burden: Many families are also forced to spend more money on bottled water, with some spending as much as 10% of their monthly income on water, according to the Community Water Center.

Solutions

One of the main reasons for persistently unsafe water has to do with scale: Larger water systems have more resources to fund treatment technologies, while small systems often lack the resources to meet water-quality challenges.

Getting those struggling water systems more funding to upgrade their water-treatment systems can help. But those technologies need ongoing maintenance, and often the most cost-effective measure is consolidation. Small water systems or homes on domestic wells can be connected to larger systems that can better treat contaminated water sources.

Historically the state hasn’t been that good at consolidation because many larger water providers didn’t want to take on small, failing systems. But in 2015, Senate Bill 88 granted the California State Water Resources Control Board authority to mandate consolidation for failing water systems. Now another bill, Senate Bill 403, would expand that to include systems at risk of failure.

“That would help to address the needs of those nearly 620 at-risk water systems, as well as state small systems and domestic wells,” says Clairborne. “The state has made some progress in the last few years, with several hundred consolidations since 2015, compared to fewer than 200 for the 40 years prior.”

When it comes to addressing the affordability crisis, Nelson says the state legislature can take action to establish a water rate assistance fund, which is especially important now because “California families are carrying $1 billion in pandemic-caused water debt,” he says.

The report also found that a broader, more regional look at potential solutions could cut costs. In one example outlined in the study, if 85 small water systems in Monterey County are incorporated into a nearby larger system, the cost for each new connection falls from $39,000 to $7,000.

“If we can prioritize those [regional solutions], the cost could come down considerably, and our infrastructure would be much more integrated,” says Pierce.

Finding the Money

Bringing costs down will be key, as the price tag for implementing interim and long-term solutions for water systems and domestic wells that need assistance over the next five years is upwards of $10 billion. Some efforts are already underway to address paying for that, with allocations from the state and contributions from local governments, but that still leaves an estimated $4.6 billion shortfall, according to the report.

“Unless addressed, this funding gap will perpetuate the divide between those who have safe water in California and those who don’t,” says Nelson.

More money is needed from either the federal or state government, says Pierce. And even though the price tag seems steep, he says, the costs of not fixing the problems will be higher in the long run and bring a lot more suffering to communities.

“Unsafe water can not only cause physical health impacts, it can also cause a lot of direct affordability impacts and mental health stressors on people,” says Pierce. “One way or the other society pays for this and it’s better to invest up front — from a human right and equity standpoint, and also from an economic one.”

One recent bright spot is the potential for more spending at the national level, with the Biden administration’s current discussions around a major infrastructure bill in Congress.

That could represent a paradigm change. “The federal government’s role in funding drinking water infrastructure has dropped dramatically since the 1970s compared to other types of infrastructure,” says Pierce.

Even if such investments do come from Washington, though, they won’t solve all of California’s water problems.

“I hope it can be a substantial amount of what we need, but I would be very surprised to see it meet the whole need,” he says. “I think that much of what would be allotted to California would likely go to larger systems for broader infrastructure investments and drought-related resilience.”

Additionally, a lot of the bill’s equity focus is on lead. “Which I don’t disagree with, but California doesn’t have nearly as big of a lead problem in drinking water as many other states,” he adds.

The fact that California has already done the work to understand its drinking-water problems, identify solutions and tally the costs can make the process of getting federal dollars easier — and that could also help inspire other states to better quantify their water needs.

“I do think you’ll see more states do this, but it was a considerable effort: The water board basically created a new unit with multiple staff to do this work,” says Pierce. “But most of the data was the water board’s own, so I think a lot of this could be done by other states without too much effort, if they can learn from what was done here and maybe even enhance that.”

Money to shore up water systems, improve affordability and ensure clean water for all residents also comes with a ripple effect of benefits.

“Investments in water projects can help create drought and climate resiliency,” says Nelson. “And water investments can be an engine of equitable economic growth, creating good jobs in communities that need them. We have a tremendous opportunity to both address this public health crisis and help our economy recover at the same time.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
April 27, 2021

The More Biden Expands ACA, the Harder It Will Be for the Right to Cut It

Last year, on the campaign trail, President Joe Biden released a $750 billion, 10-year plan designed to massively expand the reach of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It would create a public option, allow undocumented immigrants to buy into that public option, lower the age at which Americans become eligible for Medicare, take Medicaid expansion into the 12 Republican heartland states that chose not to expand it themselves, and permit Americans to buy prescription drugs from overseas at a cheaper cost.

Since assuming office, such sweeping health care ambitions have taken a back-burner to getting COVID relief passed, to developing a large-scale infrastructure plan, and to initiating a reset on environmental policy. But that doesn’t mean there is less urgency to lock into place big-picture health insurance changes. After all, the Biden administration inherited a barn-on-fire situation from the previous president, and we are still in the middle of a pandemic.

There are, in 2021, more than 2 million low-income American adults who live in states that didn’t expand Medicaid, and who can’t access private insurance on the exchanges because their income is deemed too low to qualify for tax credits. Of these 2 million, more than a third live in Texas. All told, by the middle of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, about 30 million non-elderly Americans remained without insurance. That’s down from 48 million in 2010, but it’s up from 28 million at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. The increased numbers of uninsured in the years from 2017 to now are the clear result of former President Donald Trump’s effort to eviscerate his predecessor’s central legislative accomplishment and make it ever-harder for Americans to enroll in the subsidized insurance plans.

From 2017 through to January 20, 2021, health care advocates had to play defense pretty much all the time. From day one of his administration, Trump, with the full backing of most of the GOP, had the ACA, known more popularly as Obamacare, in his sights. In his first months in office, the Senate came within one vote of rolling back the legislation that had created the ACA. It was that one vote, cast by an ailing Sen. John McCain against dismantling the ACA, that fueled Trump’s loathing for, and mockery of, the dying Arizonan.

After Republicans failed in Congress to repeal the ACA, Trump sought to kill it by a thousand cuts: to make it harder for patients to enroll on health care exchanges, to limit Medicaid expansion, to cut funding for outreach campaigns to educate people on how to enroll. Finally, having failed to destroy the program this way, Trump’s administration decided to side with Texas and other GOP states in their Hail-Mary lawsuit attempting to have the entire thing declared unconstitutional.

That case was heard by the Supreme Court last year, and a decision on it should come down in the next few months. Given the extraordinarily conservative composition of today’s Supreme Court, it’s at least possible — though perhaps not likely, given previous rulings on the issue — that they’ll end up taking a judicial axe to the entire project.

Which is why it’s all the more vital that, in the interim, state and federal officials work to expand the ACA as rapidly as possible. After all, the more people are covered, and the more the ACA is seen to be an indispensable, life-saving pillar of the country’s health care delivery edifice, the harder it will be to pull the rug out from under it. Given that neither party seems likely to push for a more rational, more equitable universal health care system anytime soon, ironing out the kinks in the ACA and expanding its reach seem to represent the best short-term path toward near-universal coverage.

An ACA expansion would inevitably still fall short of a truly universal, single-payer system, and it would do little to address systemic problems such as over-billing and the profiteering of middle-men institutions, which go hand in hand with for-profit insurance systems as a primary delivery system for medical services. But it would, nevertheless, bring additional millions of uninsured Americans under health care umbrellas.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration extended the special enrollment period for the ACA insurance exchange through August 15 of this year, arguing that, because of the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, it was imperative to make it as easy as possible for Americans to find affordable health insurance coverage. California and other states with their own exchanges also followed suit in keeping enrollment open.

The result of this has been encouraging: In the first weeks of the special enrollment period, well over 200,000 people signed up for coverage, eclipsing, by orders of magnitude, the numbers from the first weeks of earlier special enrollments. Hundreds of thousands more have begun the application process to get insurance via these exchanges; and additional tens of thousands have been declared eligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Moreover, the latest COVID relief package in Congress freed up billions of dollars to increase subsidies to lower-income people buying coverage on the state exchanges. In many cases, premiums for people around the country will be cut in half. And in some states, funds will be used to essentially eliminate premiums for poorer residents. In California’s case, for example, this means an additional $3 billion for subsidies. As a result, come May, some low-income Californians will be paying only $1 per month for their health insurance. Hoping to get more Californians to take up insurance through the exchange, the state will spend $20 million on an outreach and advertising campaign promoting the new lower rates.

For a state that has already managed to cut its uninsured population from about 17 percent down to roughly 7 percent, all of this is a huge deal. Combine it with the ongoing efforts to expand Medi-Cal to cover all low-income undocumented adults, and one sees a road-map being drawn in California that would, over the coming years, get the state as close to having universal coverage as possible given the nature of the current U.S. health insurance system.

Where California goes on health care coverage, the nation might one day follow – especially with California’s former Attorney General Xavier Becerra now in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and pushing an emphasis on health equity and public health readiness. Already, California has self-funded Medicaid expansion to include young undocumented adults up to the age of 26. Quite possibly, later this year the state may expand the expansion to include a much larger proportion of the undocumented population. This jibes well with the proposals then-candidate Biden put out on the campaign trail. Hopefully, once California paves the way, Biden and the Democratically controlled Congress will follow through on their health care commitments at a federal level too.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
April 25, 2021

A Watershed Ruling On Homelessness

California -On Tuesday, April 20, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter of the Central District of California issued a ruling that is likely to become a watershed moment in the United States’ response to homelessness.

In March of last year, the LA Alliance for Human Rights and several individuals sued the City and County of Los Angeles, alleging that they had not only fundamentally failed to address the homeless emergency in Los Angeles but had in fact contributed to creating it over the course of several decades. The complaint they filed reads more like what we might imagine the authors of the “Seattle is Dying” video would have written about Los Angeles: public health hazards, accumulating trash, rising crime, blocked sidewalks, local government leaders unwilling or unable to rise to the challenge of dealing with it.

The post A Watershed Ruling On Homelessness appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
April 22, 2021

A Grim Season Looms — But Regenerative Agriculture Could Offer Hope

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

When Alexis Koefoed’s farm burned for the first time in 2008, she and her husband, who made a living raising pasture-grazing chickens at the time, lost 1,000 baby chicks and a brand-new barn. “I thought there could never be anything worse than this experience, until it happened three more times,” she said.

That first time, an arsonist was to blame. But parts of the farm, in Vacaville, California, ignited again in 2010 after an incident with power tools, and once more in 2013, though she doesn’t know what started that one. Then in August 2020, the “whole valley went up.”

At 1 am, Koefoed and her husband were given 10 minutes to evacuate. They grabbed their dogs, the deed to their house, and left. “We did not imagine we would ever come home,” Koefoed said.

The fire was part of the LNU Lightning Complex, started by the convergence of numerous lightning-sparked fires, which according to Solano County data, killed six people, scorched 192,000 acres and 1,491 structures, and burned for 46 days. In general, the 2020 fire season was the worst California has ever seen.

When Koefoed and her husband broke through the police barrier and made it back to their farm later that morning, the olive orchard was still ablaze. Embers the size of baseballs dropped from above. Pacific Gas and Electric had cut off their power, which meant water pumps weren’t working, so Koefoed and her husband and daughter spent six hours patting down the fire with shovels and small buckets of water they carried by hand from animal troughs. Miraculously, their house still stood, as did the lavender field. And they were able to save the olive trees.

How is it possible that any of Koefoed’s farm survived this fire? She wonders if her embrace of regenerative farming — a set of practices that restore soil health by mimicking natural processes — may have helped. In 2015, Koefoed shifted her philosophy on farming after coming across a lecture by Allan Savory, the Zimbabwean ecologist known for his systems-thinking approach to managing land. Before doing so, she had concentrated her efforts on taking care of the animals, trees and plants on her farm. But learning about Savory’s holistic farming practices caused her to flip her focus to the ground and work her way up. “First we’re building soil and everything else comes from that,” Koefoed said.

She stopped tilling the dirt. “No-till” practices help the soil sequester more carbon among other nutrients, and store water. She encouraged her animals to graze and added hedgerows (lines of native shrubs and trees which support pollinators).

Koefoed has not formally measured moisture levels since making these changes, but says she saw signs that things were shifting. Since she began employing more holistic practices six years ago, the grass stays greener later in the summer and there are more perennial grasses — signs of increased water-holding capacity.

“I think what the fire reinforced for me is that regenerative agriculture, managing the soil, using animals as grazers to build healthy soil is absolutely the direction to go in,” Koefoed said.

“As Soon as It Hit Our Grassland, It Slowed Down”

Other farmers and ranchers who have survived California wildfires have made similar observations.

Doniga Markegard is a cattle rancher in Half Moon Bay, where she leases 11,000 acres from regional parks, private land trusts, and other individual landowners. Markegard’s animals graze on grasses, instead of corn, as they’re often given on feedlots. Their grazing prevents the emergence of the most flammable kind of woody undergrowth that, when left unmanaged, contributes to fires growing hotter and getting out of hand. The animals eat and trim the grasses just enough to stimulate more root growth, which thereby improves water-holding capacity. Markegard moves them on to a new patch of land before they deplete the grasses, similar to how herds of wild animals used to migrate before humans built roads, cities and subdivisions.

Markegard says the benefits of the approach are visible, even to the untrained eye, during wildfire season.

In 2019, a brushfire began on a neighboring property, and spread quickly. “As soon as it hit our grassland, it slowed down,” Markegard described. Then, when CalFire arrived, they were able to cut a fuel break because unlike elsewhere, the fire had been tamed so much, they could walk over the land safely. If the land hadn’t been managed, Markegard speculates, the fire could have become devastating like so many others.

Markegard saw the same thing happen on other ranchers’ land last year. But she says there’s a marked absence of holistic practices on public lands, which contribute to the level of devastation of the 2020 wildfire season. Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California’s oldest, was devastated by the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, for instance. “The problem is that so many of these parks have removed agriculture. They’ve removed livestock and they haven’t put anything in its place to manage those lands. If you have no management, then a fire is going to come in and burn that vegetation,” Markegard said. The founding of many state and national parks also entailed the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples living there, many of whom practiced traditional ecological knowledge, which what we now call regenerative agriculture draws from.

According to an article published in January 2021 in the journal Global Environmental Change, the removal of livestock grazing, which in the study area in the Rocky Mountains declined 62 percent since 1940, can lead to decreases in biodiversity, increases in fuel loads for wildland fire and encroachment of trees and shrubs into meadows. Project Drawdown calls managed grazing number 16 of the top 100 solutions for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

Lightning Could Strike Anywhere

On account of ongoing megadrought conditions in the state, climate scientists say California could be on track for an even earlier and more grim fire season this year. Half of the U.S. is also experiencing drier than usual or drought conditions.

Amid the ongoing risk, farmers, ranchers, and other land stewards are making their usual preparations. Pie Ranch is a regenerative farm in Pescadero dedicated to food accessibility and youth education. Co-founder Jered Lawson told Truthout those working the land on their ranch are removing eucalyptus trees and replanting with a more diverse landscape in partnership with the Native Stewardship Corp of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which is bringing back cultural burns to the area, a practice that restores culturally significant plants and helps mitigate the risk of devastating fires. The Indigenous women-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which facilitates the return of Native land to Native people in San Francisco’s East Bay area, has built its first community resiliency center in anticipation of future fires and power outages. The center combines a ceremonial space, seed saving library, first-aid supplies, and food and medicine gardens.

But only so much is in the realm of control of a single farm or land trust, since lightning could strike anywhere.

Fire departments should more formally partner with farmers and ranchers on fire management, Lawson and Markegard say, because they know the land intimately. State governments might consider re-embracing grazing as a fire prevention strategy.

Reforms to fire insurance are also needed. A report quantifying the impacts of last year’s wildfires by the California Council on Science and Technology found that data on crop losses to wildfire is not systematically tracked across the state, and that high-value crops in California are not covered by federal crop insurance. Only 50 percent of agricultural producers have insurance, the report found. Of all that burned on Koefoed’s farm — decades worth of work — only a shipping container and a barn were covered by her policy. “Replacing 500 trees and waiting 22 years for them to grow is kind of an overwhelming idea,” Koefoed said.

Sherri Dugger, executive director of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, envisions farms and ranches like Koefoed’s, Lawson’s and Markegard’s dotting the landscape all over the country to feed communities fresh, healthy and locally raised foods and provide ecosystem services like fire management.

“The Farm System Reform Act, which will be reintroduced this year to Congress, and the Climate Stewardship Act, which was just reintroduced, are two really good first steps to supporting these regenerative-focused independent farmers, to halting environmental injustices, and to mitigating climate change,” Dugger told Truthout, noting that boosting regenerative agriculture programs might be funded by rerouting $25 billion in subsidies that industrial agriculture operations receive annually. A 2019 report by the Food and Land Use Coalition found that globally, just 1 percent of the $700 billion annually given to farmers is used to improve the environment and thereby, community well-being.

In 2023, the next U.S. Farm Bill is the Biden administration’s most significant opportunity to restructure, hold multinational corporate agribusinesses accountable for their pollution and reduce our agriculture system’s climate impact, Dugger said. It’s also an opportunity for the administration to call on farmers and agricultural workers to more formally collaborate on averting traumatic, high-carbon emitting wildfires on an economy-wide scale.

“We know the solution to managing the understory. We know that animal impact can make a huge difference in clearing out old debris and oxidized material,” Koefoed said. “But there’s just this disconnect between understanding this and moving it forward into the hands of decision makers.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
April 21, 2021

Texas and California Blackouts Show We Need Dramatic Infrastructure Upgrades

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Over a period of about six months, the United States suffered two extreme weather events that had the same outcome: widespread energy disruptions through rolling power outages that left people dangerously vulnerable to the elements.

Last August, a powerful heat wave knocked out electricity for millions of Californians in what was the first statewide set of power outages in some 20 years. This past February, a brutal and deadly cold snap in Texas caused rolling blackouts, leaving millions of Texans without the usual means to stay warm.

Efforts among allies of the fossil fuel industry to paint these blackouts as primarily a result of unreliable renewable energy sources have since been disproved. With climate change increasing the likelihood of extreme weather events across the U.S., and as broad efforts to green the nation’s energy grid move forward, we must take a deep look at the tragic events that unfolded in Texas and California and learn from the mistakes that were made.

To discuss, we spoke with Joshua Rhodes, a research fellow at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding partner of IdeaSmiths, an energy systems analytical firm.

Daniel Ross: What do you see as the most important lessons to be gleaned from the rolling blackouts that Texas experienced earlier this year?

Joshua Rhodes: One has to look at all of the systems. We rely heavily on our thermal fleet [predominantly powered through natural gas] to be available to meet that winter demand. I think it worked out that, at peak demand, we lost half of our thermal fleet when we relied on 90 percent of it to be there. Part of that comes from: We didn’t winterize the power plants; we had cooling water issues; we had cooling water sensor issues in the case of a nuclear facility. I think one of the big kickers is that the electricity sector was relying on the gas sector to be firm, and that turned out to be a bad assumption.

We need to take a broader look not only at the power plants that provide us with electricity but what fuels those power plants.

In particular with Texas, the natural gas we produce is a wet gas — there are lots of other liquids in water that come up with it, and that froze. We lost half of our natural gas production. And when half your gas plants rely on natural gas to make electricity, and you lose half of your fuel, you’re going to start off these events with one hand tied behind your back.

Renewables do get a knock for the fact you can’t turn them on any more than the sun’s shining and the wind’s blowing. But I think we learned lessons about fuel security. We need to take a broader look not only at the power plants that provide us with electricity but what fuels those power plants.

An official analysis blamed the rolling blackouts that we saw last year in California on three main things: extreme heat, antiquated grid reliability planning and an energy market that didn’t work as efficiently as it needed to. Do you see any similarities between what Texas and California experienced?

We [in Texas] don’t have the wind issues that California does with wildfires and things like that — or to that extent, anyway. But what they do share in common is if you take a system that was designed under a certain set of parameters — under a certain set of conditions — and you push it beyond the bounds it was designed for, then you’re going to have problems.

California has the target of reaching 100 percent clean energy production by 2045. Given the likelihood of extreme heat events along the West Coast becoming a more common occurrence, what does that state need to be mindful of in terms of energy resilience?

We really need to study the weather conditions that get us to these extreme events, which homes and businesses and people experience, because at the end of the day, it’s [about] buildings demanding electricity.

We need to figure out during those conditions what is happening. What is the sun doing? What is the wind doing? What are our neighbors doing? That’s especially the case for a place like California that relies a lot on [energy] imports, unlike Texas. If you become too comfortable thinking, “If we get into a bind, our neighbors will be able to help us,” but if everyone’s in a bind at the same time because you have a massive high-pressure system across the entire Western part of the United States, then that’s going to be an issue.

Broadly speaking, how have we planned in the past for extreme weather events?

That’s a great question. Historically, we’ve tended to look backwards in order to predict the future. We look at weather we’ve experienced in the past, and we use that as a marker with which to build our infrastructure to meet our future demands.

We look at weather we’ve experienced in the past as a marker with which to build our infrastructure to meet our future demands. Under a changing climate, looking backwards is not a good way of looking forward.

The problem is that under a changing climate, looking backwards is not a good way of looking forward. We’re going to have to come up with better ways of figuring out what future demands will be, given that a changing climate will impact those weather patterns that [historically] have given us our demands.

That’s hard. Looking backwards, you can actually look at data and you can actually see what happened. It’s something you can hold in your hand. It’s harder looking into the future because we haven’t seen that yet, so, in all likelihood, we’re probably going to get it wrong. But it would be better to err on that side of more extreme weather so that we’re ready for it, than get caught short without the infrastructure we need.

So, within our broader nationwide push toward greater clean energy reliance, what specifically do we need to be mindful of moving forward?

I think we need to keep the toolbox as big as possible.

There are folks out there who, when they think “clean energy future,” they think “renewable energy future” only. I think we can get really far with renewables — I’ve seen some studies showing 60, 70, 80 percent, depending where you are in the U.S., and depending on what your [energy] mix is like, and particularly whether or not you have something like hydro[electricity], which can be a good baseload. [Norway] can rely on very high [levels of] renewables because they’re [more than] 90 percent hydro. You can turn it off and on. It’s basically an emissions-free fossil fuel plant.

Getting that last 20 percent energy, I think that’s when it can become more expensive. It’s what most of the models show. And I think it’ll be harder for people to swallow going forward, and so, I think [we’ll need to be] keeping the toolbox open … paired with energy storage.

We’re pretty good now on short duration energy storage — the things that can modulate back and forth throughout the day. We don’t have good seasonal energy storage technology yet. And so, we need to be working on that. The more renewables we want to move from, say, a shoulder season to a summer or winter season, we need to focus on some of those kinds of [long-term] storage technologies.

How do you see Biden’s infrastructure plan — given available details — as a vehicle for needed change?

Nominally, there’s about $100 billion in the plan for grid upgrades. I think it’s a good start, but I think there’s some targeted investments that could be made, and I hope there’ll be a multiplier effect on that money that would allow more [of the] private sector to come into the system.

It would be better to err on [the] side of more extreme weather so that we’re ready for it, than get caught short without the infrastructure we need.

If you add up how much concrete and steel, how many wires and power plants and everything we have on the system — if we had to replace everything we have right now, it would cost about $5 trillion. There’s about $2 trillion worth of upgrades that need to be made on the system, and that’s just to keep things the way they are. If we want to transition to a different future than what we currently have, I imagine that’s going to cost trillions more dollars.

And so, we’ve got a long way to go in terms of building the energy infrastructure we frankly really need. If you look at the American Association of Civil Engineers, they grade our energy infrastructure as a C-, which, as a college professor, that’s barely a passing grade.

Most big studies that look over the entire U.S. show us how to get to high levels of clean energy, or high levels of renewable energy, and they build a lot of transmission [lines]. Sometimes, these weather events are large and they can take up an entire section of a country. And so, if we’re going to be able to import power to one part of the country from another part of the country that is not experiencing those conditions, that requires having really long extension cords.

Sometimes it’s not money that’s the problem — it’s getting all the people in the room to agree. One of the issues we have right now is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC; they have the ability to force everybody to get into the room to decide long-distance oil and gas pipelines, but they do not have the ability to do the same for electricity, for long-distance transmission lines. So, there’s a disconnect. There’s no one who can force everyone into the same room to even talk about the issue. It becomes a big logistics, red tape problem in order to build the infrastructure we need.

Honestly, if I could trade in the $100 billion, I would probably trade it in for the ability for FERC to help site those lines.

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
April 21, 2021

Despite Climate Commitments, Health Concerns, States Approve Fuel Tanks

Magali Sanchez-Hall, usually in motion, pauses for a moment on the sidewalk to gaze through a chain-link fence at the massive new construction project: tanks shaped like giant tuna fish cans that will store crude oil.

The Los Angeles refinery has been her troublesome neighbor for a quarter of a century, but she finds this latest turn particularly perplexing.

“Right now, we are supposed to be moving to clean energy,” she says.

Sanchez-Hall, 50, raised her children here before getting a master’s degree in public policy. When Tesoro, now Marathon Petroleum Corp., first proposed the new tanks in 2016, she opposed them, citing sickening fumes from the ones already there.

The post Despite Climate Commitments, Health Concerns, States Approve Fuel Tanks appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
April 14, 2021

Truck Drivers And Workers Strike At Southern California Ports

Truck drivers at Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, represented by the Teamsters union, started strike action against Universal Logistics Holdings (ULH) this week, adding further to extraordinary congestion woes at America’s principle west coast maritime gateways.

According to the Teamsters website, ULH-affiliated companies at the ports “illegally fired truck drivers, denied them back pay, and refused to recognize and bargain with the union [the drivers] legally won.” The drivers have formed a picket line outside the ULH Southern Counties Express trucking yard in Compton, California.

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April 14, 2021

Wildfire Researchers Forecast 2021 Fire Season That May Be More Severe Than 2020

Earlier this April, researchers at San José State University’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center in Northern California were gathering chamise at Blackberry Hill, a site in the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. In the past few years, it was a site that they had revisited to gather samples of the native shrub. While surveying the land at the site, the researchers made a disconcerting discovery: new, green growth was nowhere to be found.

“Wow, never seen April fuels look so… dry,” the research center tweeted.

In a separate tweet, the researchers stated that fire season in 2021 was looking “grim.” The reason? This year’s live fuel-moisture content (FMC), a metric which measures the ratio of moisture to natural combustible material, is historically low. Average fuel-moisture content in the wild is 137 percent; low is usually considered to be 115 percent. Right now, in 2021, the Northern California region is at 97 percent. Lower fuel-moisture content means higher flammability, and therefore higher chances of wildfires.

“Fire danger is a function of not only the weather, but the condition of the fuels — and the most important thing about the fuels is their moisture content,” said Craig Clements, a professor and director of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center at San José State University. Clements said he was “shocked” that they didn’t see new growth.

Every year, for two weeks during the spring, Clements and his colleagues go to the same three sites near the Santa Cruz mountains to take samples of scrub clippings to measure the FMC. Usually, April is a good month for new growth and moisture. It’s when Clements and the other researchers expect to measure their highest FMC ratios. Hence why the low ratio and lack of new growth was so shocking.

Clements checked in with other researchers who sampled various sites around the state of California and found that an astonishing number of sites are reportedly drier than normal.

“Some sites have new growth, but it’s still not what we expect in a normal year, and this is directly related to drought,” Clements said. “No rain, or low precipitation, equals drier-than-average fuel moistures.”

Indeed, the state of California has found itself in yet another drought this year. Meaning the likelihood of another severe wildfire season following a catastrophic 2020 wildfire season is high.

But it’s not just California. It’s the entire West Coast that is poised to have a wildfire season more catastrophic than the last. Indeed, the combination of low winter rainfall, fewer new shrubs and plant growth this spring, and a predicted dry summer are of great concern to climatologists and wildfire researchers.

The upcoming wildfire season could top even 2020, which, for the state of California, was its most severe in modern history. Over 10,000 wildfires tore through the state; nearly 4.2 million acres burned. Its northern neighbor Oregon also experienced one of its most destructive wildfire seasons in modern history, as did the state of Washington. In total, wildfires burned 10.2 million acres on the West Coast, killing at least 37 people and causing over $19.8 billion in damages.

“The long-term fire weather forecast doesn’t look good,” said Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington. Prichard agreed that one of the main reasons was that “in parts of all of California and a lot of the Southwest, fuels are already dry.”

Nicholas Bond, a climatologist for the state of Washington and principal research scientist at the University of Washington, said that the state of Washington had a higher-than-normal snowpack this winter, which was quite wet. That might seem like good news. Yet historically, there is a trend over the past decade of increasingly destructive wildfires each year.

“That trend is staring us in the face,” Bond said. He noted that an anticipated hot, dry summer will cause the snowpack to melt. “Even though we have right now an abundant snowpack right now, that’s not going to last forever,” he added.

As the snow melts in the later part of the summer, the landscape dries out and becomes prime fuel for wildfires, with the exception of the highest elevations in the mountains.

“It helps to have those great snowpacks for various reasons — for forest health, it’s a good thing,” Bond said. “But even if you have a good snow year like we have right now, you can have a bad fire season.”

In spring 2020, wildfire researchers began expressing their concerns about a severe wildfire season. But strange weather events, like lightning storms in California, made matters worse.

Bond said weather forecasters predict a hot and dry summer across the West Coast, but it can’t be predicted now if there will be strong winds or similar storms.

“We can’t anticipate whether we’re going to have one of those [weather events] or not — chances are there won’t be anything of that severity this year, but that’s kind of a wild card,” Bond said. “Climate change is a real thing, and this is one of the manifestations that we’re having in the West.”

As Prichard explained, the fire season is not entirely in the hands of Mother Nature — there’s a human factor, too.

“The dice are loaded, but we still get to roll the dice,” she said, paraphrasing a colleague. “I thought that that was a perfect way to describe the upcoming fire season because with these dry fuels and these longer, hotter, often windier summers that we’re getting. But the variable that we don’t know about is lightning and human fire starts.” And that last possibility, of course, is preventable.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
March 26, 2021

125 mothers in Marin County will begin receiving $1000 a month in basic income for two years

The Marin program will provide $1,000 monthly grants to 125 low wage-earning women of color who are raising at least one child in Marin County.

By Joshua Sabatini

Marin County will become the second Bay Area community experimenting with a guaranteed income program designed to improve the fortunes of lower-income residents.

The Marin program will provide $1,000 monthly grants to 125 low wage-earning women of color who are raising at least one child in Marin County.

It is being run not by the county but by the non-profit Marin Community Foundation. However, the Marin County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to contribute $400,000 to the program. The foundation will contribute $3 million as well as operating and evaluating the two-year program.

The Oakland and Marin County programs, which offer unrestricted monthly cash payments, follow on the success of a Stockton program that was one of the nation’s first. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced Tuesday that the city would launch one of the nation’s largest guaranteed income programs — giving $500 a month to 600 low-income families — this spring or summer. The Oakland program will last 18 months. The Stockton program, which provided $500 every month to 125 people for 24 months, was widely considered a success.

The Marin Community Foundation is a 30-year-old philanthropic group largely funded by the Buck Family Fund with a stated goal to “improve the human condition, embrace diversity, promote a humane and democratic society, and enhance the community’s quality of life, now and for future generations.”

Johnathan Logan, vice president of community engagement, said the foundation decided to try a guaranteed income program after spending two years talking to 93 low-income mothers struggling to get by and improve their lives in costly Marin County.

“We heard stories of resilience, we heard stories of hope and optimism, especially for their children but we also heard about the challenges they’re facing,” he said.

“We decided to do something about it. Unrestricted cash came up several times as a possible approach to supporting these moms.”

Those selected for the program will be mothers of at least one child younger than 17, and women of color, Logan said, and they’ll be chosen randomly from across the county. The foundation plans to start the program in May. While most of the previous universal guaranteed income programs made monthly payments of $500, the Marin program will pay twice as much.

The program will also offer supportive services like job training and counseling, which is what Marin County’s contribution will pay for. Other Marin organizations will also contribute, Logan said.

“Marin County is an expensive county to live in and to make ends meet,” he said. “We felt $1,000 would be an appropriate amount given the high cost of living and especially housing.”

_____

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan

To see original article please visit: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/1-000-a-month-guaranteed-income-program-coming-16051268.php

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This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.
March 23, 2021

Will the PRO Act Hurt Freelancers?

Labor lawyer Brandon Magner discusses what the PRO Act’s ABC test means for freelancers.

This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
March 16, 2021

Tribal Nations Fight Proposed Gold Mine Near Death Valley

Lone Pine, CA – Perched high in the craggy Inyo Mountains, between the dusty Owens Valley floor and Death Valley National Park, looms a rugged, nearly roadless chunk of desert terrain teeming with wildlife and scarred by mining operations.

Conglomerate Mesa’s charcoal smelters helped give birth 150 years ago to the nearby rip-roaring silver town of Cerro Gordo, where ingots were produced and shipped off to the small pueblo of Los Angeles by steamboat and a 20-mule team.

Now, the 22,500-acre tableau of Joshua trees, piñon pines and limestone boulders bristling with fossil shells is turning to mining again. Spurred by the rising price of gold, K2 Gold Corp., of Vancouver, Canada, is drilling and trenching in hopes of selling its findings or partnering with a bigger company that would, perhaps, transform the public lands into an open pit cyanide heap leach mine, just a few miles from Death Valley.

The post Tribal Nations Fight Proposed Gold Mine Near Death Valley appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
March 15, 2021

San Diego Protesters In Solidarity With Migrant Caravan

On March 13, the Party for Socialism and Liberation hosted a march and banner drop beginning at Larsen Field, in the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego, next to the Tijuana-San Diego border. Other organizations in attendance included Socialist Alternative, Immigrant Justice League, San Diego Sunrise Movement, ANSWER San Diego, and other supporters in the community.

The demonstration was held in solidarity with the migrant caravan making its way to the border through Mexico. Thousands of migrants are currently fleeing violence and persecution that are a direct result of U.S. intervention in Central America.

Just miles from San Ysidro is the Otay Mesa Detention Center. The OMDC is the site where the first Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee died from COVID-19.

The post San Diego Protesters In Solidarity With Migrant Caravan appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
March 9, 2021

Wildfires Will Keep Getting Worse — Even in “Best Case” Climate Scenarios

Massive wildfires have shattered records across the world in recent years, including in the western United States, where deadly blazes forced mass evacuations in 2020 and filled the sky across entire regions with smoke. Globally, wildfires are becoming more frequent, destructive and burning more land — and this trend is set to continue. Even under a “best case” scenario where greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly reduced in the coming decades and global warming is limited to 2 degrees Celsius, climate change will still drastically increase the size and likelihood of destructive wildfires globally, according to a new international study published in Environmental Research Letters.

It’s essential to reduce warming as much as possible to avert wildfire catastrophes, according to the study’s authors. Limiting warming further by even half a degree — to 1.5 degree Celsius, the rosiest of climate projections — would substantially reduce the danger of fire across the most populated continents, including in the African Sahara as well as the Amazon rainforest, which saw alarming outbreaks of forest fire in 2019 and 2020. Climate disruption contributes to heat waves, droughts and other factors that create prime conditions for wildfires and lengthen regional fire seasons — fueling a dangerous “feedback loop” as fires put more carbon dioxide into the air.

Under the Paris Climate Accord, countries around the world agreed to pursue efforts to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. These numbers are based on projections of what the world will look like over the course of a generation as temperatures rise. However, since the international goal posts were announced in 2015, scientists have warned that these “best case” targets are probably not achievable.

To achieve an increase of only 1.5 degrees by 2100, carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions must be rapidly reduced in the coming decades and brought to net-zero by 2050. Under the current climate policies in place in the U.S. and across the world, the Earth is projected to warm by about 2.9 degrees by 2100, according to the Climate Action Tracker, which compares climate action across governments to the goals set by the Paris agreement.

Even if governments across the world meet their most aggressive emissions reduction pledges and targets — including President Joe Biden’s hope for the U.S. to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 — global temperatures would increase between 2.1 to 2.6 degrees Celsius. Without any climate action, temperatures would warm by more than 4 degrees by the end of the century, causing up to two meters of seal level rise globally.

Most of the research on climate and wildfires focuses on more extreme emissions scenarios, and a team of scientists from South Korea, Japan and the U.S. wanted to know if wildfires would get worse even if humans achieve our most ambitious climate goals. Using 1.5 and 2 degree Celsius in warming as benchmarks, the team projected various fire weather conditions, such as temperature, humidity and windspeed, and concluded that fire-prone weather conditions will be more extreme in the future regardless of the degree of warming, although, of course, fires would likely be worse and more prevalent under the highest warming scenarios.

“If we were somehow able to suppress this extra half a degree of warming, we could reduce climate-driven extreme fire activities in many places, potentially saving many lives and billions of dollars.”

“Although it is reasonable to look at fire weather under more extreme circumstances, there is little sense in making goals without a good understanding of what might happen if you were to reach those goals,” said co-author Seung-Hee Kim of Chapman University, in a statement. “So, we asked ‘what would happen if we did reach these goals? Would the fire weather conditions not become as severe?’”

The answer to this question is complicated, but the connection between wildfires and climate change is clear. In the western U.S., for example, researchers have found human-caused climate change caused hotter, drier conditions that doubled the number of acres of land and forest burned since the mid-1980s. The number of dry, hot and windy autumn days that are perfect weather for fires has doubled in California, which saw its worst fire season on record last year. Climate change has extended the annual fire season in the U.S. by an average of 78 days since 1970, draining firefighting resources at both the state and federal levels.

Working with the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, Kim’s team did find a silver lining in their research. By comparing fire weather projections based on 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming, the scientists determined that limiting warming by even half a degree could substantially reduce fire risk, especially in high danger areas, such as the Amazon rainforest, African savannahs and much of the Mediterranean. The researchers concluded that warming temperatures remain a “principal factor” behind increased fire risk, although the impact of human land-use decisions requires further study.

The wildfire research is just the latest evidence that a world unchanged by the climate crisis has already disappeared in the rearview mirror.

“If we were somehow able to suppress this extra half a degree of warming, we could reduce climate-driven extreme fire activities in many places, potentially saving many lives and billions of dollars,” said co-author Simon Wang of Utah State University.

However, Wang said countries such as Australia and Indonesia will likely face “peak levels of fire susceptibility” before global average temperatures increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius, putting those areas at risk for more extreme fire seasons in years to come. Despite denialism among conservative politicians, warming temperatures in the U.S. have already contributed to record-breaking fire seasons as forests continue to die from a variety of climate-related stressors, with five of the six largest wildfires in California’s history erupting in 2020 alone.

The wildfire research is just the latest evidence that a world unchanged by the climate crisis has already disappeared in the rearview mirror. At this point, the actions governments and economies take over the next few decades can only determine how much worse it will get.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
March 5, 2021

Will 2021 Be Public Banking’s Watershed Moment?

Just over two months into the new year, 2021 has already seen a flurry of public banking activity. Sixteen new bills to form publicly-owned banks or facilitate their formation were introduced in eight U.S. states in January and February. Two bills for a state-owned bank were introduced in New Mexico, two in Massachusetts, two in New York, one each in Oregon and Hawaii, and Washington State’s Public Bank Bill was re-introduced as a “Substitution.” Bills for city-owned banks were introduced in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and bills facilitating the formation of public banks or for a feasibility study were introduced in New York, Oregon (three bills), and Hawaii.

In addition, California is expected to introduce a bill for a state-owned bank later this year, and New Jersey is moving forward with a strong commitment from its governor to implement one.

The post Will 2021 Be Public Banking’s Watershed Moment? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

Category: california

Who would get the money under California’s UBI pilot program?

Local group says UBI could help Fresno-area residents, especially renters

More Than 100 Others

Widespread Water Woes

A Reason for Hope?

Understanding the Problem

Solutions

Finding the Money

“As Soon as It Hit Our Grassland, It Slowed Down”

Lightning Could Strike Anywhere