Urban oil wells linked to asthma and other health problems in Los Angeles

In some cases, the impact on residents’ lungs is worse than living beside a highway or being exposed to secondhand smoke every day.

By Jill Johnston and Bhavna Shamasunder
-June 2, 2021

SOURCE The Conversation

When California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a goal to phase out oil drilling statewide by 2045, he focused on its impact on climate change. But oil drilling is also a health problem, particularly in Los Angeles, where thousands of oil wells still dot the city.

These wells can emit toxic chemicals such as benzene and other irritants into the air, often just feet from homes, schools and parks.

As environmental health researchers, we study the impacts of oil drilling on surrounding communities. Our research shows that people living near these urban oil operations suffer higher rates of asthma than average, as well as wheezing, eye irritation and sore throats. In some cases, the impact on residents’ lungs is worse than living beside a highway or being exposed to secondhand smoke every day.
LA was once an oil town with forests of derricks

Over a century ago, before Hollywood, the first industry to boom in Los Angeles was oil.

Oil was abundant and flowed close to the surface. In early 20th-century California, sparse laws governed mineral extraction, and rights to oil accrued to those who could pull it out of the ground first. This ushered in a period of rampant drilling, with wells and associated machinery crisscrossing the landscape. By the mid-1920s, Los Angeles was one of the largest oil-exporting regions in the world.

A 1924 photo shows the oil derricks on Signal Hill. Water and Power Museum Archive

The view across The Pike amusement park and downtown Long Beach, California, in 1940 shows a forest of oil derricks in the background. Water and Power Museum Archive

Oil rigs were so pervasive across the region that the Los Angeles Times described them in 1930 as “trees in a forest.” Working-class communities were initially supportive of the industry because it promised jobs but later pushed back as their neighborhoods witnessed explosions and oil spills, along with longer-term damage to land, water and human health.

Tensions over land use, extraction rights and subsequent drops in oil prices due to overproduction eventually resulted in curbs on drilling and a long-standing practice of oil companies’ voluntary “self-regulation,” such as noise-reduction technologies. The industry began touting these voluntary approaches to deflect governmental regulation.

Increasingly, oil companies disguised their activities with approaches such as operating inside buildings, building tall walls and designing islands off Long Beach and other sites to blend in with the landscape. Oil drilling was hidden in plain sight.

Beverly Hills High School earned money from an oil well, hidden behind walls covered with flower drawings, that operated until 2017 but raised health concerns. 

Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Today there are over 20,000 active, idle or abandoned wells spread across a county of 10 million people. About one-third of residents live less than a mile from an active well site, some right next door.

Since the 2000s, the advance of extractive technologies to access harder-to-reach deposits has led to a resurgence of oil extraction activities. As extraction in some neighborhoods has ramped up, people living in South Los Angeles and other neighborhoods in oil fields have noticed frequent odors, nosebleeds and headaches.
Closer to urban oil drilling, poorer lung function

The City of Los Angeles currently requires no buffers or setbacks between oil extraction and homes. Approximately 75% of active oil or gas wells are located within 500 meters (1,640 feet) of “sensitive land uses,” such as homes, schools, child care facilities, parks or senior residential facilities.

Despite that proximity and over a century of oil drilling in Los Angeles, there have been few studies on how it affects residents’ health. We have been working with community health workers to gauge the impact oil wells are having on residents, particularly on its historically Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.Oil drilling in Los Angeles.

The first step was a door-to-door survey of 813 neighbors from 203 households near wells in Las Cienegas oilfield, just south and west of downtown. We found that asthma was significantly more common among people living near South Los Angeles oil wells than among residents of Los Angeles County as a whole. Nearly half the people we spoke with, 45%, didn’t know oil wells were operating nearby, and 63% didn’t know how to contact local regulatory authorities to report odors or environmental hazards.

Next, we measured lung function of 747 long-term residents, ages 10 to 85, living near two drilling sites. Poor lung capacity, measured as the amount of air a person can exhale after taking a deep breath, and lung strength, how strongly the person can exhale, and are both predictors of health problems including respiratory disease, death from cardiovascular problems and early death in general.

We found that the closer someone lived to an active or recently idle well site, the poorer that person’s lung function, even after adjusting for such other risk factors as smoking, asthma and living near a freeway. This research demonstrates a significant relationship between living near oil wells and worsened lung health.

People living up to 1,000 meters (0.6 miles) downwind of a well site showed lower lung function on average than those living farther away and upwind. The effect on their lungs’ capacity and strength was similar to impacts of living near a freeway or, for women, being exposed to secondhand smoke.

Using a community monitoring network in South Los Angeles, we were able to distinguish oil-related pollution in neighborhoods near wells. We found short-term spikes of air pollutants and methane, a potent greenhouse gas, at monitors less than 500 meters, about one-third of a mile, from oil sites.

When oil production at a site stopped, we observed significant reductions in such toxins as benzene, toluene and n-hexane in the air in adjacent neighborhoods. These chemicals are known irritants, carcinogens and reproductive toxins. They are also associated with dizziness, headaches, fatigue, tremors and respiratory system irritation, including difficulty breathing and, at higher levels, impaired lung function.
Vulnerable communities at risk

Many of the dozens of active oil wells in South Los Angeles are in historically Black and Hispanic communities that have been marginalized for decades. These neighborhoods are already considered among the most highly polluted, with the most vulnerable residents in the state.

A state app called well finder locates active oil wells, including in Los Angeles County. State of California

But while the governor declared that “California needs to move beyond oil,” his current timeline would allow oil wells to continue operating for the next two decades. A variety of policies, including buffers, phaseouts and emissions controls, will need to be considered to protect public health and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy sources.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Jill Johnston and Bhavna Shamasunder

Jill Johnston works to develop community-academic partnerships to advance environmental health and justice in disadvantaged urban and rural neighborhoods. Dr. Johnston's research combines community engagement with exposure assessment and epidemiology, to address environmental health concerns. In particular, she is interested in assessing exposure pathways to pollutants as a result of industrial activities. Dr. Johnston has collaborated with community organizations in San Antonio, TX to assess the migration of chlorinated solvents from groundwater into indoor air (vapor intrusion) near a former Air Force Base. Using community-driven approaches, she has worked to assess exposure to emerging contaminants due to land-applied sewage sludge as well as assess impacts of industrial animal operations. Her interest in environmental justice research emerged from years spent as a community organizer in South Texas working towards just remediation of legacy contamination, a healthy built environment and meaningful community participation in decision-making processes. She received her PhD in Environmental Sciences and Engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in environmental epidemiology. At USC, Dr. Johnston will continue to utilize participatory and community-based methods to understand the impacts of industrial processes and chemical use on the environment, characterize pathways of human exposure, and evaluate approaches to increase health, equity and justice. 

Bhavna Shamasunder teaches and conduct research on environmental health and justice at Occidental College in the Urban & Environmental Policy Department and Public Health Program. Much of my research is informed by community generated questions and collaborations, in partnership with those most affected by industrial or product driven exposures. My research examines impacts from oil extraction for nearby communities, and consumer product driven exposures in low income communities of color. I live and work in Los Angeles.

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How third-party auditors make oil industry fraud possible

The accounting companies hired by oil companies to evaluate their inflated financial claims are on the hook from investors frustrated by the lack of accountability.

By Justin Mikulka
-June 4, 2021
SOURCE Desmog Blog

BOILER BEING  DELIVERED TO LOUISIANA  OIL REFINERY ON GULF COAST

Major accounting firm KPMG is under fire from investors who filed a class action lawsuit against the firm for overstating the asset values of now-defunct oil exploration company Miller Energy Resources. And last month, a judge dismissed KPMG’s attempt to have the case thrown out.

At issue in the lawsuit, filed in 2016, is a $4.55 million purchase by Miller Energy in 2009 for land and offshore oil assets in Alaska which included existing oil production infrastructure. Miller Energy then claimed those same assets were worth approximately half a billion dollars, a claim which would require approval by third-party auditors.

But according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the property and old oil infrastructure in Alaska was worth only a fraction of those claims; inflating its value beyond its worth amounted to fraud, according to the SEC. The SEC stated that “Miller Energy overvalued the Alaska assets by more than $400 million.” But the oil company wasn’t the only one at fault, said the SEC. In January 2016, the SEC sent a cease and desist order for Miller Energy detailing the major fraud case and focusing in part on the role that third-party auditors such as KPMG played in making it possible.

The onshore and offshore Alaskan oil assets purchased by Miller Energy had been abandoned by the previous owner because the asset retirement obligations (AROs) — the amount of money required to properly decommission the existing assets — were likely greater than the value of the remaining oil in the ground. The property was essentially worthless once the cost of the AROs was considered. But Miller Energy then told the SEC in 2010 that property was worth half a billion dollars and KPMG signed off on that estimate for several years, starting in 2011.

In an August 2017 cease and desist order for KPMG, the SEC summarized the extent of KPMG’s failure to perform a valid audit of Miller Energy:

“[T]he KPMG engagement team performed an inadequate assessment of the risks associated with the Miller Energy engagement. Among other things, KPMG’s initial evaluation, which was completed by Riordan and approved by KPMG management, failed to adequately consider Miller Energy’s bargain purchase, its recent history as a penny-stock company, its lack of experienced executives and qualified accounting staff, its existing material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting, its long history of reported financial losses, and its pressing need to obtain financing to operate the newly acquired Alaska Assets.”

The Miller Energy executive who signed off on the overvaluation ultimately paid an SEC fine of $125,000, while KPMG was fined $1 million.

Oil reserves fraud — in which companies overestimate the amount of oil that can be produced from their assets — has been recognized as a growing problem in the oil and gas industry, as DeSmog has previously reported. But in order for companies to succeed in convincing investors of their incredible claims, it is critical to have independent third-party auditors — like KPMG — to support these claims.

A Seal of Approval on Fraud

Having third-party professionals sign off on corporate financial reporting is a standard part of doing business. The idea is to have independent parties verify that the reports are accurate. When companies are engaged in fraud, getting an apparently reputable third party to put its name on the financial reporting is one way to hide the fraudulent dealings, while also offering plausible deniability to those committing the fraud.

Much like the role of Enron’s auditor, the major accounting firm Arthur Andersen, whose “audits were meant to, and did, act as a seal of approval, a willingness to put a stamp of good practice on Enron transactions,” as Slate described in 2002, Miller Energy found a third party to sign off on its questionable financials: the small firm Sherb & Co.

And just like that seal of approval by a supposedly independent auditor ended up being the downfall of Arthur Andersen — then part of The Big Five accounting firms in the U.S. — and saw Enron’s top executives go to prison, so too are Miller Energy and its auditors’ activities now under scrutiny.

Sherb & Co. completed audits for Miller Energy in 2009 and 2010. Then, in 2013, the SEC found “that Sherb & Co. LLP and its auditors falsely represented in audit reports that they had conducted the audits in accordance with U.S. auditing standards when in fact they were riddled with failures and improper professional conduct.”

But by that time Miller Energy had switched, in 2011, to a new auditing firm to validate the claim that the land and oil infrastructure the company purchased in Alaska was worth one hundred times what it paid for it: Big Four accounting firm KPMG.
SEC and Miller Energy

In August 2017, the SEC charged KPMG with “audit failures” in its work with Miller Energy.

“Auditing firms must fully comprehend the industries of their clients. KPMG retained a new client and failed to grasp how it valued oil and gas properties, resulting in investors being misinformed that properties purchased for less than $5 million were worth a half-billion dollars,” Walter E. Jospin, Director of the SEC’s Atlanta Regional Office, said in a statement at the time.

The SEC’s 2016 order against Miller Energy recounted the details of a 2010 call in which the management discussed how to validate the oil company’s inflated asset valuations. On that call, the Miller Energy CFO reportedly told the other participants that “a professional had to sign off on it, not us, some third party…” Source: SEC Cease and Desist Order to Miller Energy, January 12, 2016

Financial reporting at the heart of the matter in 2010 showed an increase in asset value of over $490 million for Miller Energy, compared to 2009 when the company had assets of less than $10 million. Essentially, the company’s entire value in 2010 was attributable to the Alaskan assets. Miller Energy 2010 Financial Statement. Source: SEC filing

Both Sherb & Co, and later KPMG, audited and approved that valuation.

Then, in April 2011 the SEC sent a letter to Miller Energy with some questions about its annual 10-K filing from the previous year, first asking the oil company to explain its valuation of the Alaskan property.

Starting with its response to this question, Miller Energy went all-in on its fraudulent claims and shielded itself with the veneer of credibility from a Big Four accounting firm.
“The Management is Incompetent”

According to SEC documents, KPMG was retained as Miller Energy’s independent auditor on February 1, 2011. Two months later, on April 13, executives for the oil exploration firm rang the opening bell on the stock market floor as the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It was a big moment for a company with no history of profits and that had been trading as a penny stock before the Alaska purchase.

That day, Miller Energy CEO Scott Boruff gave an interview on the trading floor, mentioning his company’s “explosive growth” and its bright future prospects. Boruff was paid $7.6 million in 2011.

Boruff was joined that day by company founder Delroy Miller, who also happened to be his father-in-law. While this arrangement apparently didn’t raise any questions with auditors, in 2014 their relationship was flagged in more SEC correspondence from “Concerned Miller Shareholders (CMS)”:

“In the absence of proper qualifications, CMS has raised reasonable questions surrounding Mr. Boruff’s appointment as Miller’s CEO and specifically, whether it was motivated by his close familial ties to the Company’s founder.”

Boruff had no oil industry experience before being appointed in 2008 as CEO by his father-in-law. However, Boruff did have experience with companies involved in financial fraud, as lawyers for CMS noted.

According to CMS correspondence with the SEC, in a section titled “The Management is Incompetent,” Boruff had previously worked at the firm GunnAllen Financial, leaving in October 2006, and that “GunnAllen has since been closed by regulators [in 2010] and entered bankruptcy in the wake of investor lawsuits and allegations of a major Ponzi scheme involving Provident Asset Management.”

Provident was a good old-fashioned Ponzi scheme, promising investors eye-popping 18 percent returns from oil and gas royalties. In reality, however, the company paid those returns with money coming from new investors. The scam involved almost a half-billion dollars.

But Boruff, who worked as a broker at GunnAllen, was not charged in that Ponzi scheme. Instead of distancing himself from it, however, as the new head of Miller Energy, he hired Darren Gibson in 2009, who according to documents sent to the SEC, “was Provident’s former National Sales Director during the alleged Ponzi scheme.”

Announcing the new hire in a press release, Boruff said “[Gibson]’s proven track record in raising capital will allow Miller to aggressively pursue our acquisition and drilling program goals.”

But Boruff and Gibson’s proven track record should have raised red flags to auditors evaluating the company’s financial records, especially given the pair’s lack of oil and gas industry experience.

Despite all this, KPMG continued rubber-stamping Miller’s financial statements even after the concerned shareholders had been communicating with the SEC.
Reserves Fraud and Asset Retirement Obligations

As DeSmog has reported, oil and gas companies inflating the values or volumes of their reserves estimates lies at the heart of much of the fraud now surfacing in the industry. Miller Energy is just one example of many.

Another major factor is how oil companies get around financial obligations to clean up their old wells and surrounding lands after they are done extracting oil and gas — known in the industry as asset retirement obligations (AROs). These obligations are increasingly becoming an issue as oil and gas companies try to sell old assets because the cleanup liabilities are likely greater than the value of the oil and gas. This was the case with Miller Energy.

The asset retirement obligations for the Alaskan property Miller acquired were the reason why no one else wanted to buy it.

In July 2010, the SEC asked questions about Miller’s AROs and noted that in 2009, “a third party report had indicated that the AROs for these assets were $41 million.”

Miller Energy’s finances were rife with red flags. Enough even to get one engineering firm, with prior experience with the Alaskan property Miller purchased, to walk away. According to the SEC, this was because the firm “refused to assign any value to a property known as the Redoubt Shoal field [a major part of the Alaskan assets Miller acquired, which was then valued at $291 million by Miller], because it was uneconomical … and the prior firm had explained that it would not put its ‘name on a report that implies value exists where it likely does not.’”

After its Alaska deal, Miller Energy not only needed an auditor to give its seal of approval to claims that its property and oil infrastructure in Alaska had some value, it would require an auditor to agree it was worth half a billion dollars. KPMG was willing to do this.
Third-Party Auditors and KPMG

In 2017, the SEC laid out the many failures of KPMG in the Miller Energy case, including that the evidence that something was wrong should have been obvious to anyone who knew to look for it: “All of these facts were readily ascertainable from the publicly available bankruptcy records of the prior owner of the Alaska Assets. If they had reviewed those records, KPMG would have learned that their understanding of the facts leading to the acquisition was inaccurate.”

The SEC also noted that, like the CEO of Miller Energy, the partner whom KPMG put in charge of the audit, John Riordan, lacked relevant oil and gas industry experience, “resulting in departures from professional standards.”

But the issue was not just one partner at KPMG, according to the SEC, which noted that company management and national personnel “became aware of the unusual and highly material prior-year transaction,” yet “the firm did not take sufficient action.”

KPMG 2015 Audit Quality Report

As the SEC also noted in this case, due diligence requires an auditor to exercise professional skepticism — something the Miller valuation should have raised. Yet in 2011, when the financial website Street Sweeper published research challenging Miller Energy’s financial claims, KPMG chose to overlook those red flags as well, says the SEC. Now defunct, Street Sweeper was known for reporting on “over-valued, over-hyped stocks on Wall Street.”

The SEC noted that KPMG’s Department of Professional Practices (DPP), which was responsible for developing the firm’s internal auditing standards and guidance, failed to step in despite its knowledge of the Miller Energy case.

The SEC concluded that “DPP’s decision not to inquire further about the valuation of the Alaska Assets was unreasonable in light of the circumstances.” It also added that once KPMG learned of the 2011 Street Sweeper report, the department should have provided oversight of both Miller’s assessment and its own company procedures for the valuation.

In August 2017, the SEC found KPMG guilty of a long list of violations with regard to its audits of Miller Energy, including “lack of competence” and “highly unreasonable conduct.”

While not specifically implicated in the Miller Energy audit, David Middendorf, the former head of KPMG’s DPP where he was responsible for “audit quality and professional practice,” was sentenced to prison in 2019 for his part in trying to cover up KPMG’s dismal auditing results from 2013 and 2014.

After being misled about the oil company’s financial realities, many investors in Miller Energy lost their entire investments, which is why they are now suing KPMG.
Investors Lose, Fraudsters Walk Away

In the end, the SEC settled the charges against KPMG and John Riordan, its partner overseeing the case. KPMG agreed to give back the money it earned from working for Miller Energy, which was a little over $5 million when interest was included. Additionally, KPMG paid a civil penalty of $1 million while Riordan was fined $25,000. Riordan remained a partner at KPMG until he retired in 2020.

KPMG did not respond to a request for comment on whether anyone at KPMG was held accountable for their role in the Miller Energy audit.

Miller Energy was also fined $5 million, but due to its 2015 bankruptcy, it is not clear if that amount was ever paid in full during the three years it had to make the payments. In 2016, the company was reorganized into new entities controlled by Apollo Investment Corporation.

The SEC did not respond to a request for information on the status of that payment.

For their roles in the fraud, Miller’s CFO Paul Boyd and COO David Hall were both personally fined $125,000.

Scott Boruff, the CEO who oversaw all of the fraudulent activity, was not fined. After leaving Miller Energy in March 2016 when the bankruptcy was finalized, Boruff was sued by his father-in-law for failure to repay a $6 million personal loan.

Meanwhile, defrauded investors have turned to a lawsuit against KPMG to try to recoup their losses. That lawsuit is now expected to proceed next year.

Jeffrey Skilling, CEO of Enron, spent 14 years in jail for misleading investors. Arthur Andersen ceased to exist as one of the Big Five accounting firms due to its role in the Enron fraud. Meanwhile, Miller Energy executives and KPMG have essentially walked away with fines irrelevant to the scale of the fraud.

The oil company executives who oversaw the company during this fraud kept the money they were paid.

As this case and many others make clear, there is little incentive for oil industry executives to play by the rules when a company can engage in blatant fraud, get caught, and suffer almost no consequences. However, these frauds require the help of a third-party auditor willing to look the other way.

And while there are clearly auditors and engineering firms who will not put their “name on a report that implies value exists where it likely does not,” as the SEC wrote, there are plenty of others who will — including some of the biggest names in the business.

Justin Mikulka
Twitter URL 

https://twitter.com/JustinMikulka

 Profile Info Justin Mikulka is a freelance writer, audio and video producer living in Trumansburg, NY. Justin has a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University.

 

Humanity’s #1 environmental problem is consumption—climate change is just one of the byproducts

By focusing the climate fight on what we emit, not what we consume, we are destined to fail—net-zero emissions policies aren’t enough to prevent catastrophe.

By Reynard Loki
-June 3, 2021
SOURCE

Independent Media Institute

Carbon bomb: More than four-fifths of the global economy is powered by fossil fuels. (Photo credit: Damian Bakarcic/Flickr)  

Solving the global climate crisis is not going to be easy. So when the seemingly simple “net-zero” concept was proposed, it quickly became a popular rallying cry in the fight against climate change. “Net-zero” is based on the idea that human society can continue to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, provided that there is a way to “offset” the emissions. It makes sense that the main thrust of the climate fight is to drastically slash our carbon emissions: Global average temperatures are around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer today than before the Industrial Revolution caused Earth’s carbon cycle to speed up, building the carbon bomb that we are seeing explode today.

It has been widely accepted that net-zero is a major objective that is required to achieve the Paris climate agreement’s goal of keeping global temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In their special report on global warming released in October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that in order to prevent the worst impacts of climate change, nations must achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. This target has been embraced by nations, politicians, academics, activists, farmers, and even oil and gas companies.

The Lowy Institute’s annual survey of climate sentiment in Australia, published in May, found that eight out of ten Australians support “setting a net-zero emissions target for 2050.” Similarly, a separate poll, also published in May, conducted by Leger 360 in conjunction with the Association for Canadian Studies, found that the majority of Canadians and Americans support their respective nations meeting that target.

To realize the net-zero 2050 dream, society must hit a perfect combination of technological advances, climate-driven policies and lowered emissions. Ingredients in the recipe for success include the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the rapid increase in the use of electric vehicles, and the maturation of early-stage technologies like carbon capture and storage. “Addressing climate change will require investment in technologies that help to limit future emissions,” said Tom Crowther, a professor of global ecosystem ecology at ETH Zürich and the chief scientific adviser to the United Nation’s Trillion Tree Campaign. “[B]ut we will need thousands of solutions in combination.” Overall, we need nothing less than a fundamental change in how humanity operates. The Financial Times argues that “[m]eeting this goal… would require a total transformation of the global economy over the next three decades.” That is a tall order.

In May, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its 2050 roadmap for the global energy sector. “We are very happy to note that many governments now are making commitments to bring their emissions to net-zero by 2050,” said Fatih Birol, IEA’s executive director, in a press briefing on May 18. “Very encouraging, those commitments.” He also pointed out how the IEA has “already made special cases and analyses on this 1.5 degrees future to understand our modeling capabilities, data and how we can make an energy world which is compatible with [a] 1.5 [degrees future].”

“Efforts to reach net-zero must be complemented with adaptation and resilience measures, and the mobilization of climate financing for developing countries,” says the United Nations. This multilayered approach, while necessary, makes it even more difficult to track progress on a global scale, with each nation, state and local government working on separate methods, with different definitions, and with varying degrees of legal obligations. While more than 120 nations have made the “net-zero by 2050” pledge, only six countries—France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary and New Zealand—have made that target the law of the land. Canada, Chile, Spain, South Korea, Fiji and the European Union are considering doing the same. President Joe Biden made the 2050 pledge. China said it will hit the target before 2060.

By midcentury, perhaps we can finally live as harmoniously with the planetary ecosystem as we did before the Industrial Revolution. Well, that’s the hope, at least. The problem is that the net-zero plan is a fantasy. By letting governments and the polluting industries make vague commitments without any legal requirement to meet them, society is placing a lot of trust in a mirage. By relying on future technologies, we are shifting the ultimate solutions to the next generation. By making our emissions the culprit, and not our overconsumption, we are missing the chance to truly align an ethical, balanced and sustainable human lifestyle with the requirements to maintain healthy, functioning ecosystems—of which we are a primary beneficiary. And thinking that renewable energy will save the day is simply delusional when 84 percent of the global economy is currently powered by fossil fuels, while renewables account for a meager 5 percent share of the world’s overall energy consumption.

Beyond that obvious and massive hurdle, “[i]mportant questions are being overlooked,” write climate researchers Joeri Rogelj, Oliver Geden, Annette Cowie and Andy Reisinger, in a commentary published in March in the journal Nature. “Should some sectors, such as electricity generation, reach [net zero] earlier to counterbalance harder-to-abate sectors including heavy industry? Is it fair to expect emerging economies to reach [net zero] on the same schedule as long-industrialized ones? Without careful attention to such issues, individual achievements risk being too weak to deliver the collective climate goal of the Paris agreement.”

Another part of the net-zero fantasy is the illogical and irresponsible reliance on technologies that have not yet been tested or even developed. Writing in the Conversation, climate scientists James Dyke of the University of Exeter, Robert Watson of the University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr of Lund University admit that they were “deceived” by the “deceptively simple” premise of net-zero. They warn other scientists not to fall prey to this “dangerous trap” that “helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.”

Even slashing emissions now would not solve the problem. More than 90 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that have been created over the past 50 years are currently stored in the world’s oceans, and are eventually and slowly being released into the atmosphere as global warming heat. If society were to cut all emissions today, this drawn-out process of heating the air above locks the world into what the Economist calls “inevitable warming” in the years ahead.

There’s another deeper, philosophical problem. The concept that reducing emissions is the way out of the climate crisis is a convenient way to maintain society’s current levels of rampant overconsumption. By tagging emissions as the culprit, and not our personal behaviors, those of us who can afford to will continue to possess massive homes, multiple cars, and a myriad of electronic devices—as long as they use renewable energy. We can continue to traveling around the globe and taking cruise ships and buying food and goods that originate thousands of miles away—as long as those emissions are offset elsewhere.

The reality is that we don’t need more electric vehicles; we need fewer vehicles, period. Just think of all the materials that go into making an electric vehicle: steel, iron, aluminum, copper, cobalt, lithium, manganese, carbon fibers, polymers, graphite, glass, and a variety of rare-earth minerals like dysprosium, neodymium, niobium, terbium and praseodymium. The mining, processing and manufacturing industries required to extract and use these materials are highly destructive to ecosystems around the world—even deep-sea environments that are being ruined when waste rock and sediment from mining is dumped into the ocean—and emit tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In a report released in May, the IEA found that in order to meet global climate targets, the demand for minerals to supply the electric car industry may increase by at least 30 times by 2040. And that requires more mining and more manufacturing, which requires more fossil fuel combustion, and that means more emissions. A 2019 study published in the journal Energy by researchers in China found that manufacturing a single electric car emits about 2.5 more metric tons of carbon dioxide than manufacturing a car with an internal combustion (fossil fuel) engine. “The data shows a looming mismatch between the world’s strengthened climate ambitions and the availability of critical minerals that are essential to [realizing] those ambitions,” said IEA’s Birol after the release of his agency’s minerals report.

“The details behind ‘net-zero’ labels differ enormously,” write Rogelj, Geden, Cowie and Reisinger. “Some targets focus solely on carbon dioxide. Others cover all greenhouse gases. Companies might consider only emissions under their direct control, or include those from their supply chains and from the use or disposal of their products. Sometimes the targets do not aim to reduce emissions, but compensate for them with offsets.”

Another issue that net-zero and climate discussions rarely include is our broken, polluting and unethical animal-based food system. Together, the meat and dairy industries account for about 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. And these industries are not poised to reduce their emissions to the degree that is required to meet the Paris agreement goal. The IPCC report concedes that in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, negative emissions technologies (NETs)—technologies that remove carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere—will need to be deployed. “Even with rapid mitigation efforts, it is likely that NETs will be required to offset emissions from sectors that cannot easily reduce their emissions to zero, research shows,” according to Carbon Brief, a UK-based website covering climate science and energy policy. “These sectors include rice and meat production, which produce methane, and air travel.”

“We don’t want to tell people what to eat,” said ecologist Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of the IPCC’s working group on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. “But it would indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate incentives to that effect.”

There is no telling what humanity’s meat consumption will be like in 30 years, but the trendlines are not promising. While interest in veganism hit an all-time high last year (driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic) and there has been strong support for ending federal bailouts for factory farms, global meat consumption is expected to increase 1.4 percent per year through 2023. “Dietary shifts could contribute one-fifth of the mitigation needed to hold warming below 2°C, with one-quarter of low-cost options,” according to the IPCC report. “There, however, remains limited evidence of effective policy interventions to achieve such large-scale shifts in dietary choices, and prevailing trends are for increasing rather than decreasing demand for livestock products at the global scale.”

“Although the burning of fossil fuels for energy and transport garners the most attention, activities relating to land management, including agriculture and forestry, produce almost one-quarter of heat-trapping gases resulting from human activities,” writes Quirin Schiermeier for the journal Nature. “The race to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels… might be a lost cause unless land is used in a more sustainable and climate-friendly way.”

The oil and gas industry has been happy to support the net-zero myth, using it as a smokescreen to project abstract pledges while still increasing their production of fossil fuels. Last year, for example, BP announced what the New York Times described as “the most ambitious climate change goal of any major oil company.” Yet the London-based firm, which netted an income of more than $20 billion in 2020, “provided few details on how, exactly, it would achieve that difficult feat.” It helps to put into context the sheer magnitude of emissions that are generated from BP’s product. Including extraction, refinement and combustion, the annual emissions of the company’s fossil fuels amount to 415 million tons—a footprint nearly equivalent to that of the state of California. And the company has not made any firm commitments to stop extracting fossil fuel.

“BP is one of the companies most responsible for the climate emergency,” said 350.org campaigner Ellen Gibson, who works on fossil fuel divestment. “They say they want their business model to align with the Paris Agreement, but simply put: it is not possible to keep to a [2°C] warming limit—let alone [1.5°C]—while continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels. Unless BP commits clearly to stop searching for more oil and gas, and to keep their existing reserves in the ground, we shouldn’t take a word of their PR spin seriously.”

In February, Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, announced details of how it will achieve its net-zero emissions pledge by 2050. But, reports Inside Climate News, “[t]he day after Shell announced its net-zero ambition, the company also announced it would build a $6.4 billion gas project in Australia that is expected to operate for nearly 30 years, part of a joint venture with PetroChina. That project alone would draw more investment from Shell than all of its renewable energy ventures to date.”

“Getting to net-zero doesn’t require us to stop looking for, extracting and burning fossil fuels—a major driver of the climate crisis. It might require some reduction, but it would definitely not keep fossil fuels in the ground where they belong,” writes Earth | Food | Life contributor Patti Lynn, the executive director of Corporate Accountability, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Boston, on NationofChange. “In short, aiming for net-zero is a far cry from getting to the roots of the climate crisis. It certainly does nothing to shift an unjust economy that relies on unlimited extraction and burning of fossil fuels for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. Without getting to the root of the problem, we will never truly solve it.”

There’s still another sad reality that is tied to the net-zero fantasy. Tying its success to technologies that aren’t yet proven at scale (like carbon capture technologies, which today capture a paltry 0.1 percent of global emissions) or even here yet (like Bill Gates’ head-scratching scheme to dim the Sun—more an exercise in hubris than in logic) amounts to kicking the climate ball down the field, to be solved by the next generation. Many of those who will be in charge in 2050 have not yet been born. By trying to change our emissions, but not our behavior, we are doing those future leaders and their constituents a grave disservice. “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope,” said climate youth activist Greta Thunberg in 2019. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”

The IEA’s goal of making an “energy world” compatible with a 1.5 degrees Celsius future is a bit off the mark. Ultimately, the transformation of the global economy and the healing of the environment starts with making our consumption—that is, our impact—compatible with the future we want. And that begins with making the right personal decisions as consumers, homemakers, parents, travelers, drivers and eaters. “Every single day that we live, we make some impact on the planet,” said famed primatologist Jane Goodall. “We have a choice as to what kind of impact that is.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Reynard Loki is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent for Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s “Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow” in 2016. His work has been published by Truthout, Salon, BillMoyers.com, EcoWatch and Truthdig, among others.

The US has the power to meet all of its clean energy needs

The stage is set for a rapid transition to renewable energy. But time is of the essence.

By

 Amanda Mills

 -

June 4, 2021

SOURCENationofChange

A new report was released by the Environment America Research & Policy Center and the Frontier Group this week stating the U.S. has the power to move away from fossil fuels and focus on a clean energy system run on renewables. 

Coal, oil and gas are responsible for a rapidly warming planet, for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. each year from air pollution, and for untold environmental damage. A shift to emission-free energy from the wind, sun and other renewable sources can solve many of America’s most pressing environmental and public health challenges, writes the report. 

The U.S. already has enough wind and solar resources to meet the country’s energy needs and renewable technologies are also advancing and becoming more affordable. 

“This report shows that between the sunshine and the wind, we have the potential to run our society on clean energy, today and in the future,” says Susan Rakov, chair of Environment America Research & Policy Center’s (EARPC) Clean Energy program. 

The analysis’ plan to reach a 100 percent renewable future focuses on four key areas: 

1. Rapidly deploy clean energy.
2. Modernize the grid.
3. Reduce and manage energy demand.
4. Repower everything with renewables.

The stage is set for a rapid transition to renewable energy. But time is of the essence. Policymakers must do all they can to accelerate a shift away from fossil fuels to an energy system in which the vast majority of our energy comes from renewable sources like the wind and sun, writes the report.

Let's Go All Out for Universal Health Care in the US

We should continue to vigorously advocate for a universal publicly funded privately delivered health care system at every level throughout America—state as well as national.

by Philip Caper
Published on Thursday, June 03, 2021
by Common Dreams



Participants in the Medicare for All Rally in Los Angeles California on February 4, 2017. Organizers called for a single-payer system for Medicare. (Photo: Ronen Tivony/NurPhoto via Getty Images)


The article by Ana Manilow and Kay Tillow, published in Common Dreams on May 29, 2021 sounds a cautionary note about attempts to create state-based universal health care systems, because they will certainly increase the amount of fragmentation in the Medicare program. They are almost certainly right, and more fragmentation is the last thing we need in our already too fragmented "system." I know both Malinow and Tillow, and have utmost respect for their experience and judgment.

There is no doubt that a uniform national program of Improved Medicare for All would be the best way to go, on the grounds of simplicity, efficiency, effectiveness and political sustainability. But so far I see no evidence that the Congress, as it is now constituted, has any appetite to enact anything close to Improved Medicare for All on a national scale anytime soon.

We have to persuade not only the public, but also legislators, that enacting a huge tax increase to fund health care is a good idea.

There are ongoing efforts in over twenty states to enact universal health care. Only one state, Vermont, has made a serious attempt to implement a universal health care system.

That attempt failed. Its failure was not due to economic, technical or statutory barriers, but almost entirely due to politics. Peter Shumlin, the Governor of Vermont at the time of the attempts to enact universal healthcare system there, failed to adequately inoculate Vermont voters against the shock of transferring millions of dollars of private sector spending into taxes, as would have been required by full implementation of Green Mountain Care.

Shumlin, who barely won re-election for a second term, consequently throwing his re-election into the legislature, lost his nerve in the face of the prospects of the need to ask the legislature, that was poised to vote on his own election—for a substantial tax increase to fund Green Mountain Care despite the likely savings in overall health care spending that would have resulted if the program had been implemented.

The aversion to taxes and the resultant large government that is baked into American culture, (dating back to colonial times (Thomas Paine labeled government "a necessary evil") is a major impediment to enactment of a universal health care program in the United States. It is one that proponents of universal health care, whether in the form of a state-wide or a national program, to overcome.

We have to persuade not only the public, but also legislators, that enacting a huge tax increase to fund health care is a good idea. I believe that as our healthcare system becomes increasingly dysfunctional—and increasingly expensive, voters will become increasingly willing to accept that reality. We UHC advocates must become much more effective at making the case that taxes, not private premiums and out-of-pocket payments, are the only just, merciful, and fair way to fund health care. They are likely the only way to achieve universal coverage. The U.S.is the last of the wealthy Democracies to accept this reality.

We must also be more effective about explaining the virtues of everybody being in the same program (one size does fit all), and of a simpler, more transparent health care system with public accountability and the ability to control overall system-wide costs in a less intrusive way than the current system. As the current pandemic has demonstrated, we must also have a system that encourages policy-based investments in public health, whether in a national or state-based system—that only public funding can achieve. If there is any silver-lining in the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that has exposed the need for more investment in public health, which is undeniably a public good.

We must continue our intense focus on defending against the lies we know are coming from the opponents of major systemic changes even as we continue our campaign to win over the public for the idea of a publicly funded, universal health care system.

But at the same time, we must go on offense by focusing more on the benefits of such a systemic change for the vast majority of Americans. We all agree that a Universal federally funded and managed health care system is the best way to making health care as a right a reality in the US.

This is a classic example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. The paramount question is not whether we can achieve that perfect result, but how to get there from here, given the clash of interests in our current dysfunctional health care system


Unfortunately, the current power of the medical-industrial complex in Congress is such that federal legislators must pay "tribute" to the the large health care corporations (just like the Mafia) that increasingly control the American healthcare system. The ACA is the prime example of one of the outcomes of this reality.

As an advocate for the past ten years of a state-wide program of publicly funded privately delivered universal health care in Maine, I can attest to the power of that idea to the public, if they believe it is achievable.

In reaction to the suggestion of a national solution to the problem's of our healthcare system, people often roll their eyes. They don't believe it's achievable, because they don't believe they have the power to overcome the political barriers that prevent that outcome. But when they hear about the possibility of a state-level solution, they pay attention and become activists in trying to make it happen—because they believe they may make a difference at a state-level.

Just last month, over 70 Maine voters turned out to testify at a legislative hearing in support of universal healthcare bills that have been submitted to the legislature this session. The committee of jurisdiction of one of the bills (Maine LD 1045), not quite ready to vote to pass the bill due to concern that the state would lose some of its federal healthcare funds, carried the bill forward (didn't kill it), and agreed to support it in the future on the condition that Ro Khanna's State Based Universal Health Care bill (H.R. 5010), or something like it, was passed by Congress. They plan to introduce a joint-resolution to the full legislature later this year, asking Maine's Congressional Delegation to support Representative Khanna's bill.

That would likely would not have happened if Maine AllCare, the state-level universal health care advocacy group I helped establish in 2010, had not been conducting educational programs for the public explaining the benefits of universal health care and organizing for support of a state-based plan. In addition, we developed the language of and are advocating for the passage of a Resolve that we hope to put on the 2022 ballot expressing public support for a publicly funded, privately delivered universal health care plan in Maine.

We believe such a program would not only be a step towards towards Medicare for All, but may be the only way to achieve such a program in the foreseeable future.

I share the concerns of Manilow and Tillow. I wish it was not so difficult to do the right thing in the U.S. I wish our country did not suffer from the systemic racism that has contributed so much to the difficulties they point out in their essay, and wish the American public had not been so susceptible to the anti-government propaganda from the right wing we have endured for the past 45 years. I wish we had not experienced the massive takeover of our health care system by profit-driven multi-national corporations. I wish the political class and some members of The Supreme Court didn't think corporations are equivalent to people and money is equivalent to speech. But that is the reality we are living in, and we have to find a way around it.

The idea of state-level universal health care, despite its shortcomings, is a powerful and compelling tool for education and for organizing the power of the people that will be absolutely necessary to overcome the power of the medical-industrial complex.

People, at least here in Maine, respond differently to initiatives that are seen as local as opposed to national and near as opposed to distant, because they feel there's a better chance they, as individual voters, can have a positive impact on the outcome.

Mobilizing the power of the people is the best shot we have to halt the destruction of our patient-focused healthcare system, and to preserve Medicine as a self-regulating profession governed by the Hippocratic Oath, rather than the pursuit of maximum profitability,

We should continue to vigorously advocate for a universal publicly funded privately delivered health care system at every level throughout America—state as well as national. That may be the only way to effectively reach and motivate enough of the American public to finally achieve our common goals as a nation—health care as a right for every resident of the U.S.—a goal that is already a reality in most wealthy, industrialized democratic societies, but remains only an aspirational vision in our own. Let's use every tool at our disposal to turn that aspiration into a reality.

Philip Caper is a physician and founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and currently serves on the Board of Maine AllCare.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

CANCEL CULTURE, CRT, THE NEW RED SCARE IN AMERICA

More Than McCarthyism: The Attack on Activism Students Don't Learn About from Their Textbooks

Our students deserve to know that anti-communist repression has always been about a lot more than Russian spies, a blustering senator from Wisconsin, and a blacklist in Hollywood.

by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Published on Thursday, June 03, 2021
by Zinn Education Project




American politician Joseph McCarthy (1908 - 1957), the US Senator from Wisconsin, addresses the 1952 Republican National Convention at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago, Illinois, July 1952. (Photo: Pix/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

In legislatures across the country, Republican lawmakers are introducing bills to curtail what educators—in public schools and universities—can say and teach about racism and sexism. Idaho Representative Ron Nate explained his sponsorship of a bill that was recently signed into law:

House Bill 377 is a great win for Idaho because it prohibits the promotion of Social Justice programming and advocacy for Critical Race Theory (CRT) in our schools and universities. CRT, rooted in Marxist thought, is a pernicious way of viewing the world. It demands that everything in society be viewed through the lens of racism, sexism, and power. . .

Rep. Nate said that this initiative "is only the beginning of removing the cancer of CRT from universities and preventing it from spreading into our K–12 education."

This latest moral panic from the Right comes on the heels of recent legislation dangerously curtailing the rights of transgender people—especially young people—and enacting another round of voter suppression. It is paramount that we organize to defeat these threats to the health and safety of LGBTQ people, voting rights, and the freedom of educators to tell the truth. It is also worth reminding ourselves—and our students—of other times in U.S. history when powerful politicians manufactured threats and whipped up fear to neutralize progressive challenges to the status quo—the McCarthy Era being a well-known high-water mark of state repression.

"The long Red Scare of the 20th century was a scorched-earth policy against the country's most progressive forces."

Unfortunately, the version of this era that students get from mainstream textbooks obscures more than it instructs. Every high school textbook I consulted places the section on McCarthyism in its Cold War chapter and includes the following set pieces: Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten, and the Rosenbergs. It starts with a definition like "Anti-Communist attitudes and actions associated with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, including smear tactics and innuendo" (Pearson), closes with a heading like "McCarthy's Fall" (National Geographic), and a final sentence about the man himself: "Joseph McCarthy, suffering from alcoholism, died a broken man" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Contrary to this standard narrative, the "second Red Scare," launched immediately following World War II, was a time when the government and powerful elites conspired to stamp out the efforts of some of the United States' most dynamic activists and political organizations, like Sojourners for Truth and Justice, founded in 1951 by Louise Thompson Patterson and others. But repression of radical organizing in the United States was never confined to the so-called McCarthy era. Consider the attacks on radical activists like Emma Tenayuca, who led the 1938 San Antonio pecan shellers strike; and Hallie Flanagan, who headed the Federal Theater Project during the Great Depression. Whenever organizers challenged the status quo—racism, sexism, capitalism, militarism, and colonialism—its defenders screamed "communism." Our students deserve to know that anti-communist repression has always been about a lot more than Russian spies, a blustering senator from Wisconsin, and a blacklist in Hollywood.

Understating the Scope

The textbook periodization of anti-communist repression, which posits the Red Scare in the years following World War I, and the second Red Scare in the late 1940s and early 1950s, erases the continuity and pervasiveness of anti-communist politics and policies throughout the 20th century. It suggests to students that anti-communist political repression was exceptional, tightly bound into two discrete decades. But between the Palmer Raids and McCarthy, there were the Fish Committee and the Dies Committee (HUAC), and after McCarthy there was COINTELPRO. Indeed, anti-communist persecution targeted the same people in more than one era.

Another problem is the term "McCarthyism" itself, which makes it virtually impossible not to overstate the centrality of Joseph McCarthy, the man. Textbooks show us photos of McCarthy at a map depicting communist infiltration of the military (National Geographic) and acknowledging the cheers of a crowd of flag-waving supporters (Glencoe). Textbooks tell us that "He drank too much and could get offensive and even violent at times. He was not well-liked; but he learned how to be feared" (Glencoe). Students walk away with a sense of McCarthy as a kind of boorish joke, so extreme and incompetent he might easily be dismissed as an outlier. That may be true of the man, but not of his politics. As historian David K. Johnson has written: "To attribute the purges to McCarthy serves to marginalize them historically. It suggests they were the product of a uniquely unscrupulous demagogue, did not enjoy widespread support, and were not part of mainstream conservatism or the Republican Party."

Erasing the Victims

Not a single one of the McCarthyism sections in the five different middle and high school textbooks I consulted mentions anti-communist attacks on the civil rights movement or Black activists. Organizations like the Southern Negro Youth Congress and Sojourners for Truth and Justice were harassed out of existence by the government's attacks. Even Paul Robeson, arguably the most famous target of the Red Scare's attack on Black activists, shows up only in a chapter hundreds of pages removed from the one on McCarthyism, celebrating the "advances of African Americans on stage and screen" during the Harlem Renaissance (National Geographic). The textbooks give equal space—that is, virtually none—to other targets of anti-communist political persecution: radical labor unions, anti-war activists, feminists and LGBTQ people, Jews, and immigrants.


Dodging Politics

The words are repeated again and again in the textbook accounts of the Red Scare: communist and communism.

The Korean War reinforced the second Red Scare. . . . Legitimate concerns about espionage mixed with suspicions that Communist sympathizers in high places were helping Stalin and Mao. (Pearson)

The Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the Communist takeover of China shocked the American public. These events fueled a fear that communism would spread around the world. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Astonishingly, four of the five textbooks I reviewed provide no definition of communism in the entire McCarthyism chapter.

For the most part, "communism" in textbooks is used in precisely the same way it was used by the anti-communist hatchet men: a kind of catch-all boogeyman, always dangerous and foreign (Mao! Stalin! China! Korea!) but never examined in the context of actual political struggles. For Claudia Jones, being a communist meant finding a way to organize against a racist criminal justice system that had recently sentenced eight Black teenagers to death for a crime they didn't commit; for Louis Jaffe, a teacher in the radical New York City Teachers Union, communism meant working for the elimination of racist curricula and for well-resourced schools for even the city's poorest children; and for Lorraine Hansberry, communism was a way to analyze the connection between the violence against Black Americans at home and the violence perpetrated by the U.S. military abroad, and a means to organize against both. For these activists, communism was not something foreign, but rooted in struggles for justice, at home and abroad. Were they to rely on their textbooks, students would have no way of knowing this arena of U.S. communist politics, since "communism" is siloed in a Cold War chapter, emphasizing foreign threats, and devoid of a single story of activists like those mentioned above.

Teaching the Red Scare

As a high school U.S. history teacher for 20 years, I struggled to find a good way to teach McCarthyism. So most of the time—I am embarrassed to admit—I skipped it altogether. "Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare" is a lesson I wish I had written earlier in my career. In it, students meet 27 different targets of government harassment and repression. Some are communists (or Communists), some are not. Most are politically engaged in some form of organizing, but not all. They are men and women, immigrants and native-born, young and old, racially diverse, in government and outside it, affluent, middle class, and poor, Queer and straight. Students analyze why these disparate individuals might have become targets of the same campaign. What kind of threat did they pose in the view of the U.S. government? And why do most textbooks leave them out?

The long Red Scare of the 20th century was a scorched-earth policy against the country's most progressive forces—labor unions organizing across racial lines; civil rights organizations offering intersectional critiques of capitalism, racism, and gender oppression, generations before Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined that term; writers, artists, and journalists who advocated internationalism and peace. Red-baiting has not gone away, but it lacks the same destructive power it once had. When Sen. Ted Cruz slings the word "socialist" at one of his opponents, it may induce a little cortisol burst in his supporters. But in the minds of many younger people, "socialism" more likely evokes northern European nations with free college, universal health care, and paid family leave—not exactly the stuff of nightmares—than Stalinist Russia.

But it would be naive to conclude there is no cause for concern. When we look at the function McCarthyism served, it is not hard to find new discourses doing similar kinds of dirty work. Whereas "communist" became shorthand for any undesirable person or belief in the eyes of the elites, so today "voter fraud" is used by Republicans to disenfranchise "undesirable" voters who threaten to upset their traditional seats of power, and Critical Race Theory acts as a sweeping indictment of white supremacy's critics. This lesson aims to help students become alert to the way shiny new terminology can advance very old forms of oppression.

Perhaps more importantly, the version of McCarthyism we offer our students should restore the powerful and inspiring stories of the activists and organizations who were its victims. The transformational social change needed in the United States and across the globe will never come from above, from presidents, CEOs, or billionaires. It will come from people like us, like our students—and like the many everyday people targeted by anti-communist repression. The Jack O'Dells, Esther Cooper Jacksons, Sam Wallachs, and Elizabeth Catletts. Although activists who call for abolition of prisons and police, or a complete moratorium on fossil fuel extraction, or a jobs guarantee for every American, are often dismissed as impractical, imprudent, and utopian, our students deserve to know there have always been savvy dreamers, clear-eyed critics of the status quo, who believe—and act like—a better world is possible.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca has taught high school social studies since 2000. She is on the editorial board of Rethinking Schools and is a Zinn Education Project organizer and writer.

© 2021 Zinn Education Project