ICYMI HOORAY 
Decade of conservatism in Australia comes to an end with Labor set for victory

Labor's Anthony Albanese will be Australia's next prime minister. Photo: AP/Rick Rycroft.

Rod McGuirk
May 22 2022 02:30 AM

Australia’s centre-left Labour party has toppled the conservative government after almost a decade in power.

In his election victory speech, prime minister-elect Anthony Albanese promised sharper reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, while he also faces an early foreign policy test.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he had quickly conceded defeat despite millions of votes yet to be counted because an Australian leader must attended a Tokyo summit on Tuesday with US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Albanese, who has described himself as the only candidate with a “non-Anglo/Celtic name” to run for prime minister in the 121 years the office has existed, referred to his own humble upbringing in the Sydney suburb of Camperdown.

“It says a lot about our great country that a son of a single mom who was a disability pensioner, who grew up in public housing down the road in Camperdown, can stand before you tonight as Australia’s prime minister,” Albanese said.

“Every parent wants more for the next generation than they had. My mother dreamt of a better life for me.

“And I hope that my journey in life inspires Australians to reach for the stars.”

Albanese will be sworn in as prime minister after his party cli nched its first electoral win since 2007.

Labour has promised more financial assistance and a robust social safety net as Australia grapples with the highest inflation since 2001 and soaring housing prices.

The party also plans to increase minimum wages, while on the foreign policy front it has proposed to establish a Pacific defence school to train neighbouring armies in response to China’s potential military presence on the Solomon Islands, on Australia’s doorstep.

It also wants to tackle climate change with a more ambitious 43pc reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050.

Morrison’s Liberal party-led coalition was seeking a fourth three-year term. It held the narrowest of majorities — 76 seats in the 151-member House of Representatives, where parties need a majority to form a government.

In early counting , the coalition was on track to win 51 seats, with Labour on 72. Ten went to independents and 18 were too close to call.

The major parties bled votes to fringe parties and independents, which increases the likelihood of a hung parliament and a minority government.

Australia’s most recent hung parliaments were from 2010-13, and during the Second World War.

The Australian Greens appear to have increased their representation from a single seat to three.

The Greens supported a Labour minority government in 2010, and will likely support a Labour administration again if the party falls short of a 76-seat majority.

As well as campaigning against Labour, Morrison’s conservative Liberals fought off a new challenge from so-called teal independent candidates to key government legislators’ re-election in party strongholds.

At least four Liberals appeared to have lost their seats to teal independents, including Liberal Party deputy leader Josh Frydenberg, who had been considered Morrison’s most likely successor.

“What we have achieved here is extraordinary,” teal candidate and former foreign correspondent Zoe Daniels said in her victory speech.

“Safe Liberal seat. Two-term incumbent. Independent,” she added.

The teal independents are marketed as a greener shade than the Liberal Party’s traditional blue colour and want stronger government action on reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions than either the government or Labour are proposing.

The government’s senate leader Simon Birmingham was concerned by big swings toward several teal candidates.

“It is a clear problem that we are losing seats that are heartland seats, that have defined the Liberal Party for generations,” Birmingham said. “T here is clearly a big movement against us.”

Due to the pandemic, around half of Australia’s 17 million electors have voted early or applied for postal votes, which will likely slow the count.

Animal Welfare Campaigners Celebrate as Fate Is Sealed for UK’s Most Notorious Reptile Market

The Animal Protection Agency (APA) is today celebrating a historic breakthrough in ending illegal market trading of exotic animals.




May 21, 2022 
by Animal Protection Agency Foundation

The Animal Protection Agency (APA) is today celebrating a historic breakthrough in ending illegal market trading of exotic animals. This follows an announcement by Doncaster Council that Doncaster Racecourse – the venue for the largest UK reptile market – will no longer host the events after their contractual obligations end, with the final event taking place on 19 June 2022; although the Council is continuing investigations into “a number of instances” on compliance and enforcement.

The hard work and conscientious commitment of supportive Councillors has ensured that reptile markets no longer have a place in Doncaster.

Reptile market organisers planned four events for 2022, the first of which took place on 3rd April. At every event investigated by APA during a long-running campaign, evidence was recorded that it considered to show unlawful animal trading, as well as widespread animal suffering. Throughout the event’s history, many thousands of sensitive wild animals have been treated like inanimate commodities – displayed and sold in small, plastic takeaway tubs. APA has worked, over several years, with English and Welsh councils to clamp down on reptile markets and as a result, the Doncaster reptile market was the last of its kind in the UK.

APA greatly appreciates the time that Council Officers have taken to examine the evidence provided to them, and will continue to offer further assistance if needed. The hard work and conscientious commitment of supportive Councillors has ensured that reptile markets no longer have a place in Doncaster. APA also acknowledges the vital role played by World Animal Protection in bringing this issue to the public’s attention. Their campaign led to the Council being inundated with letters about the event, which ultimately helped to finish one of the largest reptile markets in Europe.

Says Cllr David Shaw, Chair of Doncaster Council’s Licensing Committee:
“I’m grateful for the work put in by the Animal Protection Agency over many years, which has brought us to this current position. APA has worked tirelessly and professionally to end potentially illegal trading. Whilst I accept that many exotic animal keepers care for their animals, I find this business abhorrent and something that should not take place in the UK – and certainly not in Doncaster.”



Says Dr Clifford Warwick, Reptile Biologist:
“In my view, the reptile markets at Doncaster have for years been a blight on the welfare of these wild animals, which are now well accepted to be highly sensitive to the kind of restrictive captive conditions and deprivations that are absurdly endemic to selling pets via makeshift stalls. The Animal Protection Agency, Doncaster Council, and the venue managers deserve high praise for their commitments to safeguarding animal welfare and mirroring the public conscience, which strongly rejects abusive treatment of wild animals for spurious reasons.”

Says, APA Director, Elaine Toland:
“We are delighted to see this event coming to an end. No animal deserves such maltreatment, and we are now closer than ever to completely eradicating wild animal markets in the UK.”

Trading in pet animals at market stalls was outlawed almost forty years ago on the grounds that animal welfare cannot be ensured in temporary and makeshift environments.For more information, images or footage, please contact Elaine Toland on 01273 674253 or out of hours on 07986 535024

Press release distributed by Pressat on behalf of Animal Protection Agency Foundation, on Thursday 7 April, 2022. For more information subscribe and follow https://pressat.co.uk/

The Age of Extinction Is Here — Some of Us Just Don’t Know It Yet

We’re Crossing the Threshold of Survivability — And There’s No Going Back

Image Credit: NASA

 

umair haque

May 21, 2022

“Why do you think people are a little freaked out by what I’m talking about these days?”

I was asking my kid sis. She laughed. “You’re basically telling them it’s the end of the world?”

It was the night of the eclipse. A red moon illuminated the sky. 300,000 years had gone by since our kind walked the earth. And now it would never be the same again.

Let me try and tell you how I’ve come to think of the Event, as I’ve begun to call it. The Cataclysm. Extinction. A different earth.

My friends in the Indian Subcontinent tell me stories, these days, that seem like science fiction. The heatwave there is pushing the boundaries of survivability. My other sister says that in the old, beautiful city of artists and poets, eagles are falling dead from the sky. They are just dropping dead and landing on houses, monuments, shops. They can’t fly anymore.

The streets, she says, are lined with dead things. Dogs. Cats. Cows. Animals of all kinds are just there, dead. They’ve perished in the killing heat. They can’t survive.

People, too, try to flee. They run indoors, spend all day in canals and rivers and lakes, and those who can’t, too, line the streets, passed out, pushed to the edge. They’re poor countries. We won’t know how many this heatwave has killed for some time to come. Many won’t even be counted.

Think about all that for a moment. Really stop and think about it. Stop the automatic motions of everyday life you go through and think about it.

You see, my Western friends read stories like this, and then they go back to obsessing over the Kardashians or Wonder Woman or Johnny Depp or Batman. They don’t understand yet. Because this is beyond the limits of what homo sapiens can really comprehend, the Event. That world is coming for them, too.

The analogy is often used to describe “climate change” of frogs in a boiling pot. It’s useful, but only to a certain degree. When the pot boils, they’re taken out and eaten. We were in a boiling pot, and now we’re at the stage where we’re about to get taken out and eaten. This is when things start to get really, really bad — really, really fast.

The way that I’ve come to think of the Event — a species that’s been around for 300,000 years now having altered the climate in ways that haven’t happened for millions of years, triggering an Extinction Event — is this.

Imagine a black hole. Humanity’s lined up before it. Everyone has to march through. Some are at the front of the line. They reach the other side first. Some are at the back of the line. They’re still laughing and joking and pretending, maybe. Nobody much hears from those who’ve gone through, because, well, it’s a black hole. But on the other side, nothing is ever to be the same again.

This is where we are now. We are at the threshold of the Cataclysm. Some of us are now crossing over to the other side, of a different planet, one that’s going to become unlivable. This isn’t “going to happen” or “might happen,” it is actually happening now.

Those are my friends, for example, in the Indian Subcontinent, where eagles are falling dead from the sky, where the streets are lined with dead things.

Extinction. The Event. You can literally see it happening there.

They are the first ones through the Event Horizon, if you like — the lip of the black hole. They are canaries in the coal mine, my Indian and Pakistani and Bengali friends. They are on the other side, and are experiencing the world in the Event. And that world is coming for us all.

I don’t use the words “climate change” to describe any of this, because, well, they’re inadequate. The way that we tell that story has led to a kind of shocking sense of apathy and ignorance about the reality of what we face. People read the science, and think that if the temperature rises by one degree, two, three, what’s the big deal? Ha ha! Who cares? That’s not even a hot day? Wrong. A better way to tell that story is something like this. On average, when the temperature rises one degree, the seasons change by a factor of ten at equatorial regions. One degree, one point five, which is where we are now — the summers are ten to fifteen degrees Celsius hotter. Two degrees? Twenty. Three degrees? Thirty.

We’re heading for three degrees.

It’s already 50 degrees Celsius in the Subcontinent. Spain is bracing for an extreme heatwave, of about 40 degrees plus as is Europe, as is much of America. That’s at one degree or so of global warming. At two degrees? The Subcontinent hits 60 degrees Celsius. Spain and Europe hit 50. At three degrees? Equatorial regions hit 70 degrees Celsius or more. Spain and Europe hit 60.

I’m sure that some will quibble with that interpretation, so go ahead and adjust however you like. It doesn’t really matter. At 50 degrees, which is where the Subcontinent is now, life dies off. The birds fall from the sky. The streets become mass graves. People flee and try to just survive. Energy grids begin to break. Economies grind to a halt.

Extinction happens.

This is the threshold. We are already hitting it. We can see it now in startling, grim, vivid detail. The Event is not some kind of abstraction or prediction. Extinction is now really happening in plain sight in places around the globe — and they are revealing to us the limits of what our civilization can survive. That limit is hit somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees. After that point, life as we know it comes to an end.

My Western friends still don’t really grasp this at all. They imagine that as the seasons get exponentially hotter, they can simply…turn up the air conditioning. LOL. Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. Why not? Not just because energy grids will fail, or even because at a certain point even air conditioning just fails. It’s because of life.

My Western friends don’t think these days. This fantasy of turning up the air conditioning and sitting in your apartment or house? They ignore the now obvious signs. Birds falling from the sky, Dead things lining the streets. What are you going to do, sit in your air conditioned home while everything else goes extinct?

It doesn’t work like that. Those things, those beings — birds, cows, sheep, chickens, whatever — they provide us with the basics, too. They perish, we perish. Insects nourish our soil, birds eat insects, and on and on. My Western friends don’t understand that we are part of systems. Ecosystems, in this case. And as their foundations are ripped out, we can scarcely survive. The idea that you can sit in your air conditioned home in comfort while everything else goes extinct is a fantasy, a delusion. What will you eat? Who will turn the soil? Who’ll keep the crops healthy? Where will the basics of life come from?

Our civilization collapses somewhere between fifty and sixty degrees Celsius. Bang, poof, gone. Nothing works after that point. Everything begins to die — not just animals and us in the case, but our systems which depend on them. Economics crater, inflation skyrockets, people grow poorer, fascism erupts as a consequence. You can already see that beginning to happen around the globe — but it’s just the beginning. Imagine how much worse inflation’s going to get when Extinction really begins to bite.

Everything fails at the threshold we are now reaching. Our civilization doesn’t survive it. Democracy has its throat slit by fascism and theocracy, as people, afraid, angry, desperate, turn to fundamentalist religion or authoritarian brutality to give them answers — or just a meal. Economies become mechanisms for basic survival, not opportunity or prosperity. Society and community are destroyed by the bitter every-man-for-himself quest for self-preservation. This is the world we’re heading into, and you can see it now spreading, from America to India to Europe and beyond.

What happens in such a world? Do people pull together to save it? Probably not. Inequality spirals even further — the rich finds ways to monopolize what few resources are left and profiteer. Covid gave us a vivid example of that. Governments, paralyzed, are captured by fanatical sects and factions, and nobody much arrives to help you when you need it. Covid, again. Culture becomes a war, between those who think of death, basically, as a good thing, a purification, and those who don’t. Think of America’s bitter “culture wars.” What happens in such a world? Society turns predatory, regressive, eats itself — which is what a civilization collapsing is.

We are crossing the threshold now. Of Extinction. Of the Event. So far, it’s been invisible to us, and we’ve been living in ignorant bliss. The insects are dying off — who cares! Hey, did you see what Kim Kardashian wore to the Met Gala? The fish are dying off — so what, LOL, bro, let’s go watch a Marvel Movie!! The earth’s great systems are all reaching tipping points — the Amazon, the boreal forests, the ocean currents, the poles — of reinforcing a hotter and hotter planet. Dude, what’s your problem? Tucker Carlson says we’re the master race!!

We are crossing the threshold now. Extinction is visible. The eagles fall from the sky, taking their last breaths on the way down to a burning planet. The streets are lined with death. We’re not frogs slowly boiling in a pot anymore. We’re being taken out of the pot, and we’re about to be eaten.

My Western friends are still in denial that any of this will happen to them. Ignorance is bliss. This world is coming for us all. There is going to be no escaping it. The ones in India and Pakistan and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are some of the first through the event horizon. But we must all cross it, because, well, we’re all on this planet. Extinction is something that happens to a planet.

That doesn’t mean — my usual caveats — that everything dies off. It means it the way biologists use the term — a mass extinction, in which many, many things do, and life resets itself, probably, in new ways. After us, comes a new earth. 300,000 years of us — barely the blink of an eye. Life will survive. But our civilization won’t. The Event — the time in between civilizations — will be a dark age. You can see that dark age falling now.

It’s in every bird falling from the sky, every animal dropping dead from the heat, every democracy being shredded by lunatics, in all the deaths we will never count. Our systems — all of them — economic, social, political — are beginning to fail.

Because, my friends, this is Extinction.

Some us just don’t know it yet.

Umair
May 2022

CASTEISM USA

Redlining’s Enduring Impact Shows up in WA Pollution Disparity

New research out of UW suggests historic, racist lending practices still affect inequitable exposure to hazardous pollution today.

By Hannah Weinberger

May 21, 2022

 From Crosscut 

It’s no secret that people of color often bear the brunt of environmental health hazards in the United States, often in ways tied to where they live. But new research out of the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley suggest for the first time at the national level just how much discriminatory mortgage lending practices of the 1930s persistently affect patterns of inequitable exposure to pollution even today, across more than 200 American cities.

Efforts to increase home ownership after the Great Depression included policies such as the Home Owners’ Loan Act, a discriminatory mortgage appraisal framework. The act made it difficult for people from Black, Hispanic, Asian and other marginalized communities to purchase homes, especially in areas deemed desirable. The federal government, through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) graded areas of cities from most to least “hazardous” to inform mortgage eligibility, often because of who already lived there. Areas with large populations of color were overwhelmingly graded “D,” the lowest grade, and given red outlines on maps.

Redlining may have been outlawed in Seattle in 1968 and Washington state in 1977, but the UW and Berkeley study, published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters on March 9, 2022, shows that residents of Seattle, Tacoma and Spokane who live in areas previously assigned worse HOLC grades are exposed to greater levels of significant air pollutants on average than people living in better-graded sections of the same city. In Seattle, these neighborhoods include parts of the Central District, Beacon Hill and South Park, among others.

People in these neighborhoods also bear the brunt of other environmental hazards, including higher temperatures and less access to green space.

“When we look city by city, specifically in Washington state, we see many of the same disparities that match the national trends,” says study co-author Dr. Julian Marshall, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Washington, and associate chair for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the university’s Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. “It affects us, and it affects every part of the U.S.”

“What the data tells us is that systemic racism still kills people in 2022, even though the people who laid the foundation of that racism … are already dead,” says Edwin Lindo, who is an associate teaching professor in the UW School of Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine and assistant dean for social & health justice. Lindo, whose work includes teaching Critical Race Theory to physicians, medical students and trainees, is not affiliated with the study.

This federal redline map shows Seattle districts rated by desirability for the purposes of mortgage security. Neighborhoods like D4 (Central District) and D5 (International District, Judkins and Beacon Hill) were given the lowest grade and considered “hazardous” due to high populations of people of color. (courtesy of Mapping Inequality)

Inspired by recently digitized national redlining maps out of the University of Richmond in Virginia, researchers at UC Berkeley and UW combined redlining and present pollution data to relate the enduring impacts of the former on the latter. While redlining wasn’t the only method of practicing housing discrimination and racial segregation, experts say it helped cement those patterns, informing where governments and businesses placed polluting infrastructure like highways and industrial facilities, as well as beneficial ones like parks. In Seattle, redlined areas are often closer to the industrial district and ports and rail lines, and today they are bisected by highways like Interstate 5; in Puget Sound, a dominant source of pollution is traffic exhaust.

Using the most recently available census data from 2010 and pollution data from that same year, the researchers overlaid HOLC grade maps to find a relationship between redlining and neighborhood exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5), two pollutants associated with negative health outcomes. Together, the two claim more than 100,000 American lives annually. Nitrogen dioxide largely contributes to breathing difficulties and asthma, and PM2.5 is associated with stroke, lung cancer, heart attacks and more.

The relationship between HOLC grade and NO2 levels was pronounced, with areas receiving D grades exposed to 56% higher pollution levels nationally than their A counterparts. Nitrogen dioxide concentrations tend to be highest closer to where they’re emitted — places like highways — while PM2.5 can form in the atmosphere and spread out over larger areas of space, reducing local differences. Moreover, the places where people produce wood smoke from heating in Washington state (associated with PM2.5) aren’t always the same places where people experience traffic pollution, says Jill Schulte with the state Department of Ecology, complicating that pattern of exposure.

Yesler Way, seen looking east from near Yesler Terrace Park towards Cherry Hill and the Central District, in Seattle, Washington on March 28, 2022. The Central District was an area redlined due to its diverse population. (David Ryder for Crosscut)

In all three Washington cities that were studied, there was a general upward trend in pollution levels for nitrogen dioxide: Blocks graded A were clearly better off, and D blocks were worse off. In Seattle, there was slightly less pollution in C graded areas than B graded ones, which Marshall says could possibly be explained by infrastructure developments made after redlining.

“Our understanding of NO2 and PM2.5 here in Washington really fits with the fact that they found a very strong association for NO2 and a weaker one for PM 2.5,” Schulte says.

Not only did lower property values literally pave the way for highways, but wealthier neighborhoods had the means and time to oppose polluting infrastructure in their neighborhoods.

Dr. LaDale Winling, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech who is not affiliated with the paper but helped digitize and curate the redlining map underlying it, says the HOLC grades institutionalized environmental hazards in areas rather than remediating them. “They basically said, ‘Don’t invest here’ … and then locked those patterns in place over the course of many generations,” Winling says.

In addition to showing that areas with lower grades have greater levels of nitrogen dioxide than average in their respective cities, the research shows that the pollution level differences between HOLC graded areas is bigger than pollution level differences amongst racial and ethnic groups, in part because grades are tied to specific locations. But race and ethnicity do matter, especially at the local level. The research shows that, nationally, within each category grade, white people breathe cleaner air than their Black and brown neighbors who live within the same grades.

“In fact, the within-category differences among racial and ethnic groups are larger than the between-category differences,” Marshall says, representing another kind of racism.

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Marshall and his colleagues found that in Washington cities, white people within a HOLC grade are generally exposed to lower levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution than are residents of color living in the same grade.

The paper doesn’t show why this is, but in addition to post-Home Owners’ Loan Act grade infrastructure changes, gentrification may also contribute: White people may live in redlined areas, but they might live in the least affected parts of them, or spend more of their time elsewhere.

Areas east and southeast of downtown Seattle were redlined by the federal government’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in the 1930s. The neighborhoods, which were mainly inhabited by people of color, were given D grades that reflected mortgage security and were considered “hazardous” and “undesirable.”

(David Ryder for Crosscut)

Researchers not affiliated with the work say it adds to our understanding of environmental racism. “This manuscript reaffirms what many communities of color already experienced for generations,” says fellow UW employee Dr. Esther Min, a clinical assistant professor in the department of environmental and occupational health sciences. The findings jibe with Min’s own work, which helped produce the Washington Environmental Health Disparities Map, a tool used by agencies from Ecology to the state Department of Health to target investments into those areas most affected by a number of environmental risk factors.

Dr. Vivek Shandas, a professor of climate adaptation at Portland State University who is not affiliated with the study, says the study adds to a growing body of research linking disinvestment and the siting of polluting infrastructure with inequitable health burdens. “The fact that these patterns exist is not new, though linking it to the redlining policy is helpful,” says Shandas, who has researched redlining’s relationship with other environmental hazards. “[It shows] few places are exempt from exposure to air pollutants.”

Shandas says it sounds correct that the study is, as the authors claim, the first full-scale examination of air pollution disparities relative to historical redlining in such a way that highlights its continuing effect on air pollution exposures in the United States. The study bridges disparate areas of research on a national level in a way that is compelling, he says, though it isn’t perfect. While weaknesses don’t invalidate that there is a relationship between redlining and present-day pollution, Shandas says the data being from 2010 dates the findings, and outdoor pollution does not account for what people are actually breathing, as people spend the majority of time indoors, among other things.

Kate Cole with Public Health — Seattle & King County says that because of the many things contributing to asthma, prevalence levels can be tough to use as proxies for air pollution. However, maps for the years 2015-2019 show that many of the Seattle neighborhoods with the greatest adult asthma prevalence were given lower HOLC grades.

Additionally, Winling says that while HOLC grades weren’t single-handedly responsible for rejected home loans or pollution, they reflect perspectives that influenced how cities developed over decades. “We cannot say that the maps are causative, but we can say that the maps are a lens on the way that city planners and civic leaders and bankers in the 1930s thought about and then planned for these neighborhoods throughout the rest of the 20th century,” he says.

On a practical level, the study adds fuel to the environmental justice movement.

“It’s important … to be aware that the inequalities in air pollution exposure that we see today have their roots in part in racist planning from 80 years ago. That decisions by people who are no longer alive are still affecting us,” Marshall says.

It also alludes to one of the most complicated parts of addressing environmental racism: that solutions often follow data, rather than simply the testaments of those affected. “Some of what we’re doing here is using an academic study and scholarship to show that this is systemic, and is consistent with the lived experience of many people. And, unfortunately, that’s needed sometimes for that information to enter into the political process,” Marshall says.

And this research takes time. “Proving things takes a tremendous amount of work, but the harm is caused,” Lindo says. “This work is sorely needed, and we need to start listening to the people who are saying it even before the research comes out.”

Lindo presents on ways that redlining contributes to pollution, which in turn has medical ramifications. A few years ago, he says, he made an argument that redlining led to higher rates of respiratory disease in South Seattle, but received pushback when he couldn’t provide a supporting study. For better or worse, he says, this study means he now has validation. “I’m glad this study exists,” he says. “I will be using it in my presentations.”

Now that this data is in hand, Lindo says, it can’t be ignored.

“We can’t allow our residents to live in polluted communities that were intentionally built to harm them. … We acknowledge redlining existed. We acknowledge the racist folks that implemented those policies. We acknowledge, now, the harm that it’s causing,” he says. “So now … there must be some form of reparation.”

Area professionals who work for regulatory, transportation and health-oriented agencies are alert to these and similar findings related to environmental racism.

“As this study shows, historic structural racism has led to disinvestment in many predominantly Black and brown communities, including in King County,” says Public Health’s Cole. “This correlation between structural racism — both historic and ongoing — and poor health outcomes is part of why King County and Public Health declared racism a public health crisis in 2020.”

“We certainly recognize the urgency” around environmental justice, says Alex Adams, senior manager of maritime environmental programs at the Port of Seattle. Studies like this, he says, are really helpful in not only showing how redlining manifests itself today, but also in guiding places like the Port as they “really strategically undo those policies into the future.”

Over the past two decades, says Graeme Carvlin of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, the Puget Sound overall has seen “pretty dramatic” pollution reduction. And programs focused on decarbonizing the region, such as switching to electric vehicles, could reduce traffic pollution near previously redlined neighborhoods. The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency has a program that funds efforts to scrap these pollution sources.

Carvlin and other air quality experts use tools like the agency’s Community Air Tool, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice screen and Washington state’s Health Disparities Map that Min helped create to identify who bears the brunt of pollution, and then build relationships with impacted communities to prioritize their concerns. By overlaying factors like race and income with pollution, “it’s pretty clear which areas have more air quality impacts, and it does overlap quite well with those redlined maps,” Carvlin said.

What pollution reduction measures don’t solve are harms already committed. The data hews to medical outcomes, especially asthma rates throughout King County.

“I had a constituent in 2020 die from asthma, a 12-year-old girl,” says state Rep. David Hackney, D-Tukwila. His 11th Legislative District includes redlined areas in Seattle, and communities adjacent to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Air quality is something people should be marching about, he says: “They’re breathing this polluted air every day … [and] the very people that are experiencing these health impacts have less access to quality health care.”

“The hidden cost of racism,” says UW educator Lindo, “is that it then doubles up as a burden of having to pay to cure ourselves for the harm that we didn’t cause.”

This post was previously published on CROSSCUT.COM.

Biden's visit to Japan clouds deep-seated grievances in Okinawa

People walk in front of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in the Okinawa Prefecture city of Ginowan, southern Japan, on May 14, 2022, during a peace march calling for the burden on Okinawa from hosting U.S. forces to be reduced, a day before the 50th anniversary of its reversion to Japan. /CF

Last week, the Japanese island chain of Okinawa marked the 50th anniversary of the end of U.S. occupation and its return to Japan.

Preceding a planned visit by U.S. President Joe Biden to Tokyo that aims to strengthen bilateral ties and enhance America's economic footprints in the Indo-Pacific region, the anniversary turned the spotlight on the longstanding issues that Okinawa residents have had with the U.S. military, something that is nevertheless bound to be overshadowed by closer partnership between the two nations.

Okinawa, a string of tropical islands off far southwest Japan, suffered massive devastation in World War Two. Two months of bloody battles between U.S. and Japanese forces left as many as a third of its people dead. Then, nearly 30 years of U.S. rule followed.

On May 15, 1972, the islands were finally returned to Japan in what was seen as a hopeful step forward from the war's painful legacy. But today, despite accounting for only 0.6 percent of the Japanese population, Okinawa stills hosts the majority of U.S. military bases in Japan, a devil's bargain that has provided jobs but also fed worries about crime and military accidents.

Over the decades, the U.S. has constructed 33 military installations in Okinawa. The high concentration of troops and military equipment have polluted the environment, stunted economic growth while being responsible for a series of deadly accidents and assaults, including the murder and rape of women and teenagers.

According to the local police, from 1972 to 2015, 741 serious crimes involving U.S. military personnel or civilian employees of the U.S. forces or their relatives were investigated. But since the U.S. military stationed in Japan is granted privileges like extraterritoriality, U.S. service members usually go unpunished even after committing a crime.

Demonstrations calling for the reduction of burdens from the U.S. military have been a constant scene on the islands. A nationwide poll by broadcaster NHK this month found 80 percent of Japanese consider the current disproportionate distribution of U.S. forces "wrong" or "somewhat wrong."

In the face of the various misdeeds of U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa, the Japanese government typically has no other choice but to verbally express regret, helplessly hoping that U.S. troops will "never do it again" and making limited efforts to relieve the burdens on Okinawans.

One of the issues exemplifying the sense of helplessness felt by Okinawans is the planned relocation of Okinawa's Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, sometimes dubbed the "world's most dangerous base" due to its proximity to residential areas.

It is scheduled to move to less-populated Henoko, but many Okinawans want it transferred elsewhere in the country, with 70 percent of local voters rejecting the relocation plan in a non-binding 2019 referendum.

Yet the attempt to shovel the plan has proven futile. Construction in Henoko has continued nonetheless, with the Japanese government defending it as the "only possible way" to mitigate Futenma's dangers and maintain the Japan-U.S. alliance's deterrence.

CGTN
(With input from agencies)

Trump isn’t out there with a gun, but he’s enabled this war against black people

CORNEL WEST

White supremacy is as American as apple pie, as the latest killings in Buffalo show. Biden needs to take a stand against neofascists

Mourners at the scene of a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, 19 May 2022. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP

Cornel West
Sat 21 May 2022 

Last weekend, just as I finished a live performance in California of Four Questions, the Grammy award-winning jazz collaboration for which I provided spoken words, word reached me about the racist killing of 10 people as they shopped in Buffalo, New York. I try never to be surprised by evil and never paralysed by despair. Instead, my immediate reaction was “here we go again”, with the horror, the suffering and then the now familiar routine of rhetorical gestures and superficial posturing.

On Tuesday, Joe Biden described white supremacy as a poison, and he is right, but – as ever – he fails to understand the gravity of his failure to make racial justice a priority; to see this cowardly white supremacy as a threat to American democracy

The simple truth is that you cannot see this latest neofascist attack in isolation. Think of the attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, when a white supremacist terrorist killed nine African Americans during their Bible study in 2015. Think of the attack on the American Asian community in Atlanta last year, when four people were murdered amid assertions from prosecutors that the attack was fuelled by race and gender hatred. Or the attack on Chicanos in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, when 22 people were killed in an allegedly hate-motived shooting; and the murder of 11 Jewish Americans at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh the same year by a man who said Jews “were committing a genocide to his people”.

White supremacy is as American as apple pie. It was constitutive of the founding of our nation, like a serpent wrapped around the legs of the table on which the Declaration of Independence and constitution were signed. What we saw in Buffalo at the weekend is another manifestation of it.

From what we know, the alleged shooter was a young and gullible man who got caught in the web of neofascist propaganda. But it is important to look beyond him – to look to those who have created this atmosphere of anger and hate.

After the death of George Floyd, there was a marvellous display of multiracial solidarity, not just here but around the world. But the US has been unable to fight against this neofascist challenge. The Trump forces have got stronger. They have become the public face of US neofascism, and their targets are black people and indigenous people and LGBTQ people.

Trump is not out there with a gun, but he is leading a campaign continuing what Malcolm X called a war against black and coloured people. He is doing it within the electoral political system. He is not killing folks. But he bears responsibility in terms of the context. Have no doubt, he is still the dominant figure.

The campaigning and reflection after the death of George Floyd should have made things better in the US. And, for a beautiful moment, it did. But that moment passed. The press is fickle, the pandemic started to kick in, and other issues such as Ukraine and inflation captured attention. Look at the polls and see how issues of race have fallen down the list of people’s priorities.

The impact of the George Floyd marches was blunted. Congress was unable to enact any meaningful legislation, including the George Floyd bill itself, which would have given us some mechanism with which to address police misconduct and brutality. The Democratic party was not even able to act decisively to uphold voting rights for black people. That is a colossal failure of the Biden administration, but then Biden bears a lot of responsibility when it comes to the position and arrogance of these white supremacists.

Last year Biden said America was not a racist country, and his vice-president, Kamala Harris, backed him on that. But these are lies, and those lies have their effect. If we operate on that level, how can we ever address the vicious legacy of racism and white supremacy?

To the president and Democrats in power, I say: “Shame on you, you dropped the ball.” They must be vigilant and stop acting as if these murders are something they can address in a couple of weeks and then move on. Race is the most explosive issue in the history of this country: from war to civic strife to Buffalo.

The president can’t stop a rightwing gangster killing black people, but he can send a message. He can say: I am being consistent because one of my major priorities is to ensure black people have their rights. If, after all the demonstrations and the campaigns, racists pick up the message that politicians don’t really care about black people, we end up exactly where we are today.

Neofascists and the far right have momentum with their narrative of the great replacement, but someone – and ideally it would be Biden – needs to explain to them what is really going on: that in some places there is replacement in the name of fairness. That sometimes they are seeing visible black folk where they did not previously see them. The racists need to know that they are living in a changing society and we are concerned about them being treated fairly, just as they should be concerned about others being treated fairly. There is a fascist story about replacement and a progressive story about replacement. The neoliberal story cannot counter the fascist story, and we on the left have been unable to get our story out.

So how should black America respond? Since the shootings, I have spoken to so many people and appeared on so many radio stations. People are devastated. The answer is to be a love warrior of the highest sort, a justice warrior, to never give in and never give up. The anger is there, and I don’t aim to calm it down, but I want to rechannel it. Our organisation must be perennial. But counter-terror in the face of terror and counter-violence in the face of violence are not the moral and spiritual options that we need.

It is for us to respond with the same grace and dignity as the people who were killed in that store last weekend: they were very dignified people. Think of Ruth Whitfield. She was 86, a strong member of her community, and had just been visiting her husband in his nursing home. We have to be continuous with the best of our history.

Above all, remember Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy abducted and lynched by Mississippi racists in 1955. She said: “I don’t have a minute to hate, I’ll pursue justice for the rest of my life.”

Cornel West is an American philosopher, author, critic, actor, civil rights activist and Dietrich Bonhoeffer professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary (NYC)

Local News Anchor Busts Lauren Boebert For Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud

“There are some conservative political figures that will hint about this theory or speak about it in code," said 9News' Kyle Clark. Boebert is not one of them.

Lee Moran

HUFFPOST
May. 21, 2022,

A local Colorado news anchor reminded viewers of Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-Colo.) past open embrace of the racist “replacement theory” that reportedly inspired the massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, last weekend.

“There are some conservative political figures that will hint about this theory or speak about it in code. And then there’s Colorado’s Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert,” Kyle Clark said on Denver’s 9News this week.

Clark cut to footage of Boebert talking just last year about the baseless conspiracy theory that claims Democrats are trying to replace white Americans with immigrants.

Boebert rants in the clip:

They want to grant amnesty and a path to citizenship to 8 million illegal aliens. Yes, there is definitely a replacement theory that’s going on right now. We are killing American jobs and bringing in illegal aliens from all over the world to replace them if Americans will not comply.

Clark lamented: “That was Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert openly espousing replacement theory by name in 2021.”

Opinion: I Helped Pen the UN Climate Report. Here’s Why It Gives Me Hope.

The nearly 3,000-page document details a stark, urgent threat — but it also shows a clear path forward.




By Sarah Burch

May 21, 2022 by Undark

On April 4, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the final installment of its Sixth Assessment Report, an epic synthesis of science exploring the causes and consequences of climate change. This latest document focused on the causes — chiefly, the rampant emission of greenhouse gases — and how to reduce them, fast.

As one of the lead authors of the new report, I and more than 230 scientists from around the world collectively reviewed over 18,000 scientific articles and responded to around 60,000 reviewer comments over the course of more than three years. Our goal was to compile the most accurate and nuanced picture of current climate science and social science, and to use this to inform international climate change treaty-making and policy design. The result was a nearly 3,000 page document that details a stark, urgent threat — but that also gives us reason for optimism.

First, the grim news: Average annual greenhouse gas emissions were the highest during the past decade than they have been in human history. This, despite escalating social movements, high profile declarations, and splashy vows from political and business leaders to integrate climate into investment and business decisions. Without immediate, deep, and accelerating emissions reductions in all sectors and in all regions of the world, the goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — the threshold for avoiding the worst, but not all, impacts of climate change — will be out of reach. The human and environmental toll of such a scenario is unfathomable.

But glimmers of hope also emerge from this report. For the first time, we’re seeing evidence of real, sustained decreases in greenhouse gas emissions from some countries. These reductions aren’t blips that can be attributed to the economic recession of 2008 and 2009 or to the hardships inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather, they are the result of effective and, in some cases, targeted efforts to scale up renewable energy, electrify transport, enhance building efficiency, foster compact, sustainable communities, and otherwise reduce society’s carbon footprint. In some countries, these reductions are deep and comprehensive enough to be consistent with limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, the overarching target set in the Paris Agreement of 2015.

These signs of progress also point to a path forward. The solutions to climate change now exist; we just have to adopt them.

In the energy supply sector, which is responsible for around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, a particularly major transition is required. Limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius will require us to prematurely shut down oil and gas infrastructure by mid-century. In other words, we will have to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and the new infrastructure that continues to be announced in countries like Canada may end up as stranded assets by 2050. Coal, of course, will have to go. Absent effective carbon capture and storage, neither of which is currently used widely or well enough to measurably impact our climate goals, coal use will need to decline by up to 92 percent by 2030.

There are promising indications, however, that a transition in the energy sector is already underway. As we watch the volatility of gas prices, we’ve also seen the price of renewable energy fall. The costs of photovoltaics used to harvest solar energy plummeted by around 85 percent over the last 10 years, surpassing even the most optimistic projections. Likewise, the price of wind has come down around 55 percent over the same time span, and the price of lithium-ion batteries — crucial for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow — has come down by 85 percent as well. Fuels like hydrogen and biofuels will fill in the gaps to support a transition in aviation and heavy shipping.

Our report also suggests vast potential to shift our cities toward low-carbon, resilient development. Cities are responsible for more than two thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is where the transport, building, and infrastructure sectors collide to shape individual decisions. Demand for transport can be reduced by locating homes near workplaces, recreation, and services. The remaining emissions can be dramatically reduced by encouraging a shift toward electric vehicles powered by clean energy sources and toward active transport, like walking and biking. Efficient buildings that use zero net energy or produce zero net carbon emissions will also be critical, and we find evidence that these buildings are springing up in every climate.

But it’s also important not to pin responsibility for mitigating climate change on the individual. We can only choose low carbon transport if the infrastructure is available and affordable; we can more easily make our homes energy efficient if incentives and building codes support these changes. The link between collective decision making, at all levels of governance, and individual behavior is a powerful one.

Ultimately, the new IPCC report lays bare the state of our efforts to mitigate the worst harms emerging from the rampant burning of fossil fuels. It shows that we cannot reach our broader sustainable development goals of a vibrant natural environment, clean water, peace, zero poverty, and healthy communities without addressing climate change. It just won’t work. Our report shows that addressing climate change is a matter of justice, and that a stable climate is the foundation upon which our societies thrive. We now have the solutions, and the path ahead is difficult, but clear.

Dr. Sarah Burch is a Canada Research Chair and executive director of the University of Waterloo’s Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change. She is a lead author of the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report.

Previously Published on undark.org

Georgia electrical vehicle factory becomes Kemp, Perdue campaign battle

Electric truck maker Rivian wants to bring thousands of jobs to rural Georgia — but some Republicans want the "woke corporation" to go back to California.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp stands next to a Rivian electric truck while announcing the company's plans to build a $5 billion plant east of Atlanta projected to employ 7,500 workers, in Atlanta on Dec. 16.

John Bazemore / AP file


May 21, 2022
By Alex Seitz-Wald


RUTLEDGE, Ga. — There are few things politicians love more than creating jobs and cutting ribbons.

But what if those jobs are on the wrong side of the culture war?

Plans to build a massive electric vehicle factory in rural Georgia have divided Republicans ahead of their primary next week, with Donald Trump-backed David Perdue criticizing rival Gov. Brian Kemp for offering taxpayer incentives to attract a “George Soros-owned woke corporation whose stated purpose is to combat climate change.”

Rivian, the well-capitalized electric pickup truck company that had one of the biggest IPOs in history six months ago, wants to spend $5 billion on a new assembly plant on farmland outside Atlanta. The mammoth factory will create 7,500 jobs and produce up to 400,000 cars a year in what officials say is the largest economic development project in Georgia’s history.

But the price tag for the deal was $1.5 billion in taxpayer incentives. And Perdue, a former U.S. senator, and other Republicans say Kemp cut a bad deal with a bad company.

“It’s a woke California company whose mission is to turn the world green,” Perdue said this month while stumping with local activists trying to stop the plant. “They aren’t interested in this part of the country. They just want to make money off of us.”

Vernon Jones, the Trump-backed candidate in a crowded Republican primary for the area’s open congressional seat, wrote on Facebook that Rivian is “a company whose corporate attitude is seemingly inconsistent with Georgia values.” He pointed to the company’s vaccine mandate for employees and its “large focus on diversity & inclusion; including transgender benefits.”

In another post, Jones wrote, “Rivian needs to pull out, and Kemp needs to be voted out.”

The controversy exposes a growing rift inside the GOP between its traditional pro-business wing, embodied by Kemp, and an ascendent populist wing, embodied by Perdue, that’s as quick to fight companies like Disney and Delta as it is Democrats for opposing conservative social policy.

It also underscores the challenge the entire country will face in transitioning to a greener economy. Even climate-friendly projects can negatively impact local environments, and communities and not-in-my-backyard opposition can be fierce and politicized.

“There are legitimate reasons to criticize this, but I don’t know what George Soros has to do with it,” said J.C. Bradbury, a professor of economics at Kennesaw State University who has studied Georgia economic development plans. “You’re just connecting it to him like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

Soros, the liberal Jewish billionaire who is often cast as a boogeyman in conservative circles, owns a small minority stake in Rivian, while larger investors include Amazon, BlackRock and T. Rowe Price, among others.

Opposition to the Rivian plant has become a key part of Perdue’s closing message, even if it is unlikely to be enough to save his sputtering campaign.

He’s visited the proposed site twice, hammered Kemp on the deal during their debate, spoken against it on national TV and ran a TV ad suggesting the plant was part of a corrupt deal between Kemp and Soros.

Republican gubernatorial candidate David Perdue speaks at a campaign event in Marietta, Ga., on March 29.

Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images file

Linking Kemp to Soros could resonate with conservative voters in farther-flung parts of the state and outside of it, since the issue has gotten some attention in conservative media.

During a tele-rally for Perdue this month, Trump said, “I’m not surprised about George Soros getting all of this money from Kemp."

The pivot comes as Perdue seeks to catch Kemp in the polls and differentiate himself from the governor, whose only major apostasy was refusing to help Trump try to overturn the 2020 election. That issue helped put Kemp on Trump’s target list, but it has not been enough for Perdue to eat into Kemp’s consistent lead in polls.

Opposition to the plant also allows Perdue to tap into the vocal and well-organized opposition to the plant locally.

Anti-Rivian yard signs have sprouted up like wildflowers around the rolling green fields where the automaker hopes to soon break ground on a project so massive that it will straddle two counties and be bigger than the Pentagon.

Amazon wants to switch its delivery fleet to clean electric vehicles, starting with an order for 100,000 zero-pollution Rivian tucks that could be made in Georgia. But many locals in the heavily Republican area see the project as devastating to their environment.

“Sherman and his troops destroyed our community. Now this supposedly green company is coming to destroy it again,” said JoEllen Artz, the president of the grassroots No2Rivian group, which says it has raised over $250,000 and hired Atlanta lawyers to help wage their battle. “We want to keep it just like it is.”

In Rutledge, a bucolic one-intersection town that has served as a backdrop for films like “Selma,” the old red caboose that now houses a lunch counter was abuzz with questions last week about what Rivian would mean for locals — their drinking water, their traffic, their schools, their dark skies prized by astronomers at Georgia State University's nearby observatory, their rural way of life.

Several residents said they moved here to escape the inexorable growth of Atlanta and now worry the Rivian plant will usher in more development that will eventually swallow their hayfields and antebellum mansions, thanks to the area’s combination of cheap land and proximity to an interstate and a rail line.

Keith Wilson, who is running for the Morgan County Board of Commissioners to try to stop the Rivian plant, said he found no supporters for it after knocking on more than 800 doors in his campaign. The county’s unemployment rate is just 2 percent, he said, so the company should take their jobs where they’re needed.

“Perdue is going to get a lot of votes here,” Wilson said. “I think it might be enough to put him over the top in the primary. I really do.”

Local opponents like Artz and Wilson say their opposition has nothing to do with the fact that Rivian is from California and makes electric vehicles and say the opposition movement includes people of all political stripes.

But they’re happy to have a champion in Perdue — especially since he could potentially halt the project if elected governor.

“People write to me and say, ‘You know Perdue is just using you for an issue?” Artz said. “And I say, ‘And?’”

Alex Seitz-Wald is senior digital politics reporter for NBC News.