One of my professional mantras echoes the sentiments of the commission: don't treat a symptom when you can cure the disease, because curing the disease will address even the symptoms you did not know. We must address the biases in our individual and collective priorities if we ever hope to move the nation forward.
Racism was a big factor in the Flint water crisis, a new report explains.
"Based on a year-long study, the report details how government failed Flint’s black residents for decades. Implicit bias and systemic racism ingrained in housing, education, infrastructure, and emergency management all perpetuated discrimination and eventually led to toxic lead levels in Flint’s water. The commission writes, “fixing the problems that originated in Flint’s latest chapter will address the tumor but not the cancer.”"
Regulations provide an easy target for those pushing back against government. However, regulations are simply laws...and for a nation that popularized "laws not men", it seems self-hating to rail against them. Old laws should go away when useless, but the existence of laws does not define government overreach, it defines our collective expression of what sets the floor of society. When repealing a law or interpreting it narrowly would cause death, we need to reconsider...
Clean Power Plan Repeal Would Cost America $600 Billion, Cause 120,000 Premature Deaths
"The Trump administration has prioritized repealing the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a set of rules by the U.S. EPA aimed at limiting pollution from power plants. New analysis shows that repealing the rule would cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars, add more than a billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and cause more than 100,000 premature deaths due to inhaled particulate pollution."
...otherwise we doom ourselves to relive an era when we did not enjoy the protections the laws provided. Taking things for granted challenges baseball and apple pie when defining the American experience, but enough people alive now lived back then that you would hope we would not have to relive to believe.
Why We Need the EPA
"Perhaps the EPA has been too successful for its own good. In the same way that vaccines have given parents the luxury of forgetting what measles and whooping cough were like, the EPA has nearly wiped out the national memory of the contaminated environment of the 1960s. But things were so bad then that support for creating the agency and our major environmental statutes was virtually unanimous—nearly everyone recognized the need for an environmental regulator."
I like hearing views that contradict my own. This article does that, but also highlights how challenging any prognostication can get. Can we assume innovation in one area but not another? Is countering a statement the same as addressing the core of an argument? My own writing improves as I read the words of others and learn from them.
California Is Considering a 100 Percent Renewable Energy Law. That’s a Bad Idea
"We don’t know that a 100 percent renewable approach is the fastest, cheapest or easiest way to decarbonize the grid. We do know that it will be expensive and hard enough that its own advocates compare it to the most gargantuan collective effort in the nation’s history."
The Department of Defense has led the way (along with NASA) in the development of some of the most impactful technology of the last 75 years. I find it most interesting that the approach of DoD to renewables focuses not on the climate impact (although the Navy specifically addresses energy issues because of the impact climate change has on its base locations), but on all the other impacts. Limiting the energy discussion to simply the point of transfer forgets all of the issues with transportation, storage, and handling that make renewables a more effective approach.
The Department of Defense Wants to Double Down on Renewables
"But military officials argue to Reuters that this shift to renewables isn’t really motivated by a desire to save the planet, but to make systems more efficient, safe, and robust. For instance, an Army facility running on renewables would be immune to grid attacks; a hybrid tank doesn’t need to stop to refuel as often; and in war zones a solar panel can’t explode like a tank of gas."
Clean energy and environmental justice work has greatest impacts on those communities already economically disadvantaged. Part of the struggle that social justice work has in improving the lives of the disadvantaged comes from the completely and utterly false impression that poverty results from immorality or a lack of work ethic. This. Has. To. Stop.
Laziness isn’t why people are poor. And iPhones aren’t why they lack health care.
"There’s one final problem with these kinds of arguments, and that is the implication that we should be worried by the possibility of poor people buying the occasional steak, lottery ticket or, yes, even an iPhone. Set aside the fact that a better cut of meat may be more nutritious than a meal Chaffetz would approve of, or the fact that a smartphone may be your only access to email, job notices, benefit applications, school work and so on. Why do we begrudge people struggling to get by the occasional indulgence? Why do we so little value pleasure and joy? Why do we insist that if you are poor, you should also be miserable? Why do we require penitence?"
For over a century, poor communities have suffered the effects of environmental issues to an extent much larger than that for the population as a whole. In fact, only when environmental issues come to roost on those of means do we see action on a large scale. America in the 1970s and China today highlight that observation.
Polluted environments kill 1.7 million children each year, WHO says
"The causes include unsafe water, lack of sanitation, poor hygiene practices and indoor and outdoor pollution, as well as injuries.
The new numbers equate to these pollutants being the cause of one in four deaths of children 1 month to 5 years old."
So for the party in power to take for granted forty-plus years of progress on environmental issues in an idealistic and utopian view that business will solve all ills smacks of arrogance. Government stalled regulation on asbestos for decades, and acted only after hundreds of thousands had died and lawsuits bankrupted the industry. Waiting for people to die in large numbers before acting does not reconcile with promoting "the general welfare".
What's at stake as the GOP moves to slash regulations? For starters, clean air
"By then, however, there was not much left for the EPA to do on asbestos, after legions of cancer victims took matters into their own hands with civil actions that bankrupted the industry. But the years of government inaction took their toll. A quarter-century later, nearly 15,000 Americans still die annually of diseases caused by asbestos exposure during their lifetime, according to the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization."
The disconcerting nature of the lack of attention to clean energy and environmental issues only grows when we consider that jobs of the present and the future will flow from these actions. Pandering to the past by sacrificing the health of the present and the future to create fewer jobs makes as much sense as trying to recreate the Ice Age.
Clean energy is now as big as pharmaceutical manufacturing in the US
"Globally, advanced energy brought in $1.4 trillion in revenue last year, which is, the report says, 'nearly twice the size of the airline industry, equal to apparel, and close to global spending on media, from newspapers to movies to video games...' What’s more, the advanced energy industry is growing much faster than the world economy overall (7 percent vs. 3.1 percent)."
Then again, maybe recreating the Ice Age will not prove such a bad idea after all.
Welcome to Pleistocene Park
"Nikita is trying to resurface Beringia with grasslands. He wants to summon the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem, complete with its extinct creatures, back from the underworld of geological layers. The park was founded in 1996, and already it has broken out of its original fences, eating its way into the surrounding tundra scrublands and small forests. If Nikita has his way, Pleistocene Park will spread across Arctic Siberia and into North America, helping to slow the thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Were that frozen underground layer to warm too quickly, it would release some of the world’s most dangerous climate-change accelerants into the atmosphere, visiting catastrophe on human beings and millions of other species."
