Air pollution + Poverty = Lower IQ

Children born to mothers experiencing economic hardship, who were also exposed during pregnancy to high levels of PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), scored significantly lower on IQ tests at age 5 compared with children born to mothers with greater economic security and less exposure to the pollutants. The findings by researchers at the Columbia University Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) at the Mailman School of Public Health appear in the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.
PAH are found everywhere in the environment from emissions from motor vehicles, oil, and coal-burning for home heating and power generation, tobacco smoke, and other combustion sources.
The researchers followed 276 mother-child pairs, a subset of CCCEH’s ongoing urban birth cohort study in New York City, from pregnancy through early childhood. Mothers self-reported maternal material hardship during pregnancy and at multiple time points through early childhood. Material hardship is a measure used to assess an individual’s unmet basic needs with regard to food, clothing, and housing. The Columbia researchers, led by Frederica Perera, PhD, DrPH, director of CCCEH, previously reported that that prenatal exposure to airborne PAH during gestation was associated with development delay at age 3, reduced verbal and full scale IQ at age 5, and symptoms of anxiety and depression at age 7.
At child age 7 years, researchers used the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children to assess IQ. PAH-DNA adducts in cord blood provided an individual measure of prenatal exposure to the pollutants. The researchers observed that, among children whose mothers reported greater material hardship, the group with high levels of PAH-DNA cord adducts [new chemicals created by the mixture of existing chemicals] significantly scored lower on tests of full scale IQ, perceptual reasoning, and working memory compared to those children with lower levels of adducts. Statistically significant interactions were observed between both prenatal and recurrent material hardship and high levels of cord adducts on children’s working memory scores. The same significant relationships between adducts and IQ were not observed in the low material hardship group.
The findings add to other evidence that socioeconomic disadvantage can increase the adverse effects of toxic physical “stressors” like air pollutants. The present results suggest the need for a multifaceted approach to reduce PAH exposure and alleviate material hardship in order to protect the developing fetus and young child.
“The findings support policy interventions to reduce air pollution exposure in urban areas as well as programs to screen women early in pregnancy to identify those in need of psychological or material support,” says Perera, senior author of the paper.
More on PAH and ways to limit exposure can be found on the CCCEH website.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public HealthNote: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:

  1. Julia Vishnevetsky, Deliang Tang, Hsin-Wen Chang, Emily L. Roen, Ya Wang, Virginia Rauh, Shuang Wang, Rachel L. Miller, Julie Herbstman, Frederica P. Perera.Combined effects of prenatal polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and material hardship on child IQ.Neurotoxicology and Teratology, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.ntt.2015.04.002

Is the Lima Deal a Travesty of Global Climate Justice?

THE GUARDIAN – Dec. 15, 2014
Poorer countries likely to reject agreement in Paris next year if onus falls on them rather than those largely responsible for global warming
By John Vidal
At one point on Saturday night it looked quite likely that the Lima climate talks would collapse in disarray. Instead of the harmony expected between China and the US following their pre-talks pact, the world’s two largest economies were squaring off; workmen were dismantling the venue; old faultlines between rich and poor countries were opening up again and some countries’ delegations were rushing to catch their planes.
Countries may technically still be on track to negotiate a final agreement in Paris next year, but the gaps between them are growing rather than closing and the stakes are getting higher every month.
In the end, after a marathon 32-hour session where everyone stared into the abyss of total failure, a modicum of compromise prevailed. Some deft changes of emphasis in the revised text and the inclusion of key words such as “loss” and “damage” proved just enough for diplomats to bodge a last-minute compromise. There were cheers and tears as the most modest of agreements was reached. The Peruvian president of the UN climate change convention, or COP20, could say without irony: “With this text, we all win without exception.”
Not so. Countries may technically still be on track to negotiate a final agreement in Paris next year, but the gaps between them are growing rather than closing and the stakes are getting higher every month.
We have now reached the point where everyone can see clearly that whatever ambition there once was to respect science and try to hold temperatures to an overall 2C rise has been ditched. We also know that developing countries will not get anything like the money they need to adapt their economies and infrastructure to climate change and that those countries that have been historically responsible for getting the world into its current climate mess will be able to do much what they like.
As it stands, 21 years of tortuous negotiations may have actually taken developing countries backwards on tackling climate change. From an imperfect but legally binding UN treaty struck in 1992, in which industrialized countries accepted responsibility and agreed to make modest but specific cuts over a defined period, we now have the prospect of a less than legally binding global deal where everyone is obliged to do something but where the poor may have to do the most and the rich will be free to do little.
In 1992, rich countries were obliged to lead and to help the poor, but we now have a situation where those who had little or no historical responsibility for climate change are likely to cut emissions the most.
This travesty of global climate justice, say many developing countries, is largely the fault of the US, which, backed by Britain and others industrialized countries like Canada and Australia, has helped build up distrust in developing countries by continually trying to deregulate the international climate change regime by weakening the rules, shifting responsibility to the south and making derisory offers of financial help.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, made an impassioned speech in Lima warning that the world was “on a course leading to tragedy”, but inside the conference halls the US negotiators were not giving an inch during the negotiations, and the emissions cuts that the US proposed would put the world on a path for a global temperature increase well beyond the already dangerous 2C.
Countries now have little time to resolve fundamental issues, and success in Paris is not at all certain. All countries will be asked to submit their plans for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, known as intended nationally determined contributions, to the UN by 31 March. The UN will then crunch the figures and a few weeks before the talks open we will know just how far away countries are to limiting temperature increase to below 1.5C or 2C.
As it stands, we may be on track for 4C of warming. But with more than 100 countries supporting the ambitious goal of phasing out all man-made carbon emissions by 2050, Paris will see a massive showdown.
From now on, the stakes only get higher. Led by China, Africa and the least developed countries see weak and unjust climate targets from rich industrialized countries and, over the next year, they will exert as much pressure as they can to establish a fair and equitable way to share out what is left of the global carbon budget. But as Lima showed, they are now working together and are unlikely to sign up to what they think is a meaningless deal.
The other problem ducked in Lima was finance. Developing nations wanted rich countries to set a clear timetable to scale up the funds available to help them adapt. But the final text merely “requested” that rich countries “enhance the available quantitative and qualitative elements of a pathway” towards 2020.
Because the industrialized countries have already promised to secure $100bn a year after 2020, developing countries will want cast-iron assurances about how this will be achieved. Given that rich countries have so far pledged only about $10bn to run over the next five years, the gap may be too great and the likelihood of failure in Paris is high.
Unless the rich countries take care in the negotiations, at some point it will become clear to developing countries that no deal may prove better than any deal.
The Guardian
The Guardian UK, one of Britain’s top daily newspapers, provides coverage of international environmental issues. Earth Island Journal is a member of the Guardian’s Environment News Network.

People’s Summit in Lima Envisions Bottom-Up Movement for Global Climate Justice

Common Dreams, Dec. 9, 2014
Alternative gathering outside of UN talks brings together civil societies and social movements from across the globe
By Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Social movements and civil societies from around the world are gathered in Lima, Peru this week with an ambitiousgoal: to “develop an alternative form of development, one that respects the limits and regenerative capacities of Mother Earth and tackles the structural causes of climate change.”
The “People’s Summit on Climate Change” is hosted by grassroots organizations and networks — including the Workers General Confederation of Peru, Andean Coordinator of Indigenous organizations, and Workers Autonomous Central of Peru.
It constitutes an alternative to the ongoing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also in Lima, where government representatives and corporate leaders are holding the latest in a series of UN talks.
“We, the social movements and the progressive forces of civil society are beginning to seriously prepare ourselves for the protracted struggle to defend the people and the planet and create a just transition from the extractive and exploitative economy to a democratic economy that aligns us with the natural processes of the earth,” Kali Akuno, from the Mississippi-based organization Cooperation Jackson, told Common Dreams from Lima.
“A framework of global expropriation”
According to Akuno, who is attending the alternative summit as part of a Grassroots Global Justice Alliance delegation of U.S. communities on the front-lines of climate change, what is happening within the UN meeting is cynical: “At this moment the states and the transnational corporations are refining a framework of global expropriation that will complete the capitalist consumption of the earth. And they have become so bold as to remove any mention of human rights and protections from the framework.”
The UN conference in Lima, which takes place from December 1-12, is being publicly billed as a gathering to create a draft document that will “lay the foundation for an effective, new, universal climate change agreement in Paris in 2015.” The Paris meeting, known as COP21, “will mark a decisive stage in negotiations on the future international agreement on a post-2020 regime, and will, as agreed in Durban, adopt the major outlines of that regime,” according to a statement from the French government.
Akuno is not alone in being disillusioned with the UN process. Critics charge that the Lima meeting, in keeping with past UN talks, has been hijacked by corporations and the interests of wealthy people and nations, and as a result, will fail to deliver the urgent action needed.
Representatives from the fossil fuel industry have been holding private meetings with numerous national delegations, including a closed-door meeting between the Canadian delegation and Chevron and TransCanada, according to a report from Leehi Yona and Diego Arguedas Ortiz in Inter Press Service.
On Monday, activists, including indigenous communities in Colombia, Peru, Canada, and beyond, shut down a panel at the Conference. The panel — originally titled, “Why Divest from Fossil Fuels When a Future with Low Emission Fossil Energy Use is Already a Reality?”—which was organized by fossil fuel industry lobbyists and featured speakers from the World Coal Association and Shell.
However, People’s Summit organizers say the UN conference presents an opening to civil society and social movement groups to set their own vision for global change heading into the Paris meeting.
As world leaders draft a new climate agreement, those gathered at the alternative summit will “share initiatives, proposals and experiences, as well as define and coordinate our agendas, to bring pressure to bear on the decision makers at COP20, and demand that the official negotiators take account of the world’s citizens and peoples,” according to organizers.
Rally in Lima, Peru, in support of Maxima Acuña de Chaupe, an Indigenous woman from Peru being prosecuted for trying to keep her land. (Photo: Grassroots Global Justice Alliance)
“People from social movements around the world”
“It’s incredible to see so many people from social movements around the world coming together at this People’s Summit on Climate Change,” Cindy Wiesner, National Coordinator for Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, toldCommon Dreams.
“There are mass movement organizations like La Vía Campesina, broad labor unions like the CUT-Peru (Confederation of Workers of Peru), global feminist movements like the World March of Women, indigenous alliances like Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI) and Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), all putting our heads together in Lima to align our community-led solutions to this climate crisis,” Wiesner added.
The summit, which takes place from December 8 to 11, is “split into five tracks which all address a piece of climate change from food to rights of Mother Earth to alternative energy and economies,” Diana Lopez of the Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio, Texas told Common Dreams. “A large percent of the participants are indigenous people from the region. Many understand and speak Spanish but it is not their native language.”
Lopez shared reflections on the opening day of the gathering:
On one level you have global funders making spaces for their grantees to speak about their work. On another there are more academic, technology and policy spaces. And finally there are the organizer spaces which are self-organized and are concentrated on front-line experience, movement-building and alignment around solutions.
People seem tired and frustrated talking about policy and what the government should be doing. They don’t want to talk about those things anymore, and while it’s important to know them and keep track of those policies that will ultimately affect our communities the most, people are passionate about shifting towards a systemic change framework. The pueblos are interested in learning how to integrate new sustainable technology into traditional farming practices while still healing Mother Earth. We are talking about fighting against the extreme corporations that continue to destroy communities while developing an alternative space where our people can thrive and begin the healing of Pachamama.
The message is clear that in order to really create solutions to climate change we must also talk about the disparities among funding, patriarchy within our own movement and the role U.S. plays in the destruction of communities.
The Summit is building towards a December 10th “People’s Climate March” through Lima, timed to coincide with the International Day of Human Rights, which marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
An announcement for the march declares, “[W]e invite you to come and defend YOUR rights, OUR rights and those of LIFE on Earth.”

Massachusetts Governor Issues Executive Order on Environmental Justice

Executive Order requires each Secretariat to address environmental justice
Chelsea, Mass.– Nov. 25, 2014 – Governor Deval Patrick today signed an Executive Order requiring Secretariats to take action in promoting environmental justice.
“Today we reaffirm our commitment to providing the whole Commonwealth with better quality of life through parks, open space and sound environmental policy,” said Governor Patrick. “This Order will ensure these principles are integrated into decision making across state government.”
The Patrick Administration has made it a priority to direct robust park and open space investments toward environmental justice neighborhoods and to promote programs and policies that increase park equity.
“Governor Patrick’s dedication to ensuring open space in urban areas is unprecedented,” said Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Secretary Maeve Vallely Bartlett. “At EEA, we have worked to implement that vision with targeted investments in Gateway Cities and urban neighborhoods across Massachusetts.”
The Executive Order requires the following actions:
** The establishment of a Governor’s Advisory Council to advise the Governor and Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Secretary on Environmental Justice Issues.
** EEA is required to update its 2002 Environmental Justice Policy within 60 days
** Each Secretariat is required to appoint a Secretariat Environmental Justice Coordinator within 30 days. The Coordinator shall review Secretariat programs to determine which programs implicate Environmental Justice issues.
** Secretariats are required to post their Environmental Justice strategies online within 180 days.
** The Director of Environmental Justice is required to periodically convene the Secretariat Coordinators to meet as the Interagency Environmental Justice Coordinating Group.
EEA Secretary Bartlett appointed a Director of Environmental Justice, Michelle Reid, as part of Governor Patrick’s Women in the Workforce Initiative in September.
“What makes this Executive Order unique is that it focuses on both substantive requirements and procedural ones.  Environmental justice in many states is focused on improving the process or ability of residents and workers to participate in decision-making without guaranteeing that such input will result in practical changes on the ground,” said Staci Rubin, Senior Attorney at ACE.  “This executive order requires the state to focus enforcement and funding efforts for environmental benefits in environmental justice communities.”
“I’d like to thank Governor Patrick for moving forward with updates to our environmental justice policy and for ensuring environmental justice for the residents of Massachusetts,” said Senator Marc R. Pacheco.
“I’m pleased to see that Governor Patrick is once again taking specific action to make environmental justice a reality for those communities that most need it,” said Senator Sal DiDomenico. “The residents of my district, which is very urban, need more access to parks, playgrounds, open space, and other positive environmental benefits, and today is another step in the right direction.”
EEA has helped protect more than 125,000 acres of land and built or renovated more than 200 parks since 2007, including projects in 310 communities and 50 cities. The land conserved and parks created are within a 10 minute walk of 1.5 million residents – about 25 percent of the state’s residents. In the Commonwealth’s 26 Gateway Cities, new conservation land and parks are within a 10 minute walk of more than 500,000 residents – about 33 percent of all Gateway City residents.
“I am very pleased that Governor Patrick has used his executive powers to improve Massachusetts through an investment in urban parks and open spaces with a commitment to a targeted environmental policy,” said Representative Frank  A. Moran.
“The actions taken today by the Governor reinforce the Commonwealth’s promise of environmental equity for every community, and help to ensure that cities and towns can provide all citizens with ample open space to live and thrive,” said Representative Frank Smizik.
“The raw truth of the matter is that we human beings, have been terrible stewards of our unique and spectacular home; pleading ignorance or personal non culpability will not reverse the damage to the earth, clean up a single poisoned river or cure even one case of debilitating disease,” said Representative Chris Walsh. “Changing the sad trajectory of this legacy will only happen when each of us gladly seeks out and accepts the shared responsibility for change. All too often the ability to move away, truck away or pipe away contamination from our daily life has led to a stunning ability to deny the reality of our acquiescence in this vandalism. Many communities and populations however have not had that luxury; communities of uneducated , poor and politically dispossessed peoples have endured living in both obvious and subtle contaminated areas and have the illnesses and poor outcomes to prove it. The Governor’s executive order to integrate the principals of environmental justice throughout the decision making apparatus of state government is the first step in owning up to our shared problems and responsibilities and it is the only path that will lead us to a future that works for any of us.” 
“This Executive Order elevates the profile of environmental justice and increases transparency,” said Representative Jay Livingstone. “As the Commonwealth transitions to a new administration, we will be well-positioned to make progress on environmental justice.  Whether it’s reducing asthma rates or increasing access to open space, our Commonwealth has a number of opportunities to make sure certain communities aren’t disproportionately impacted by environmental harms or left behind when it comes to environmental benefits.”
“We are thrilled that Governor Patrick is signing an Executive Order on Environmental Justice. The Governor’s executive order recognizes that communities like Chelsea, East Boston and Roxbury bear the brunt of impacts for regional benefits; and the order will require far more comprehensive planning and community involvement in affected communities. This Thanksgiving, I am particularly grateful to Governor Patrick, who has long been a friend to Chelsea, for ensuring that our city will be protected for years to come,” said Roseann Bongiovanni, Associate Executive Director of the Chelsea Collaborative.
The Patrick Administration has invested $10.3 million in capital funding to construct a new playground or spray park, or renovate an existing one, in each of the Commonwealth’s 54 cities. Through the new Our Common Backyards program, each of these cities is receiving up to $200,000 in state funding to support these projects. 
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Ironbound residents win fight against another parking lot

NJ.com, Nov. 25, 2014
By Barry Carter
The division was clear at Newark’s Zoning Board of Adjustment meeting.
Fifty-three people, including residents, architects and planners, sat on one side of the municipal council chambers at Newark City Hall. They raised their hands, almost in unison, against plans for another surface parking lot in the city’s Ironbound section.
Across the aisle, 46 people didn’t agree with them. They supported the lot.
This was the fifth meeting about what should happen with a small piece of land between parking lots that saturate Newark streets behind Penn Station. When you add up the number of lots, including those facing the Prudential Center, there are 13.
Nino Pereira, of Hillside, was seeking permission to operate lot No. 14 on Bruen Street – with space for 73 cars. His problem was that residents have become fed up with parking lots, especially after they couldn’t stop a large one from opening two years ago on McWhorter Street, just across from where Pereira wanted to put his new lot.
Residents are appealing the approval of the McWhorter Street lot in court, but they dug in to fight this one, too.
Experts testified for and against the proposed lot at a hearing last summer. Earlier this month, more people on both sides of the issue had their say.
They traded shots, but residents’ arguments against the plan eventually were more compelling. Parking lots, they said, stifle development and drive away opportunities for retail and housing.
Lisa Scorsolini said she moved to Newark, particularly the Ironbound, so she could walk to the deli and hair dresser, the restaurant and train station.
“This area has a potential for growth,’’ she said. “Surface parking lots do none of that. Commuters come in and they leave, leaving behind their trash, none of their dollars, and only harm to our city.’’
When daytime travelers are gone, residents said, the lots become isolated empty spaces that invite crime. Cars are vandalized and people get mugged.
David Robinson, an architect, brought pictures of several parking lots, with very few cars in them, to illustrate his point. “This is proof that no one uses the lots on weekends and at night,’’ he said.
What proved most convincing to the zoning board, however, is that parking lots are not permitted uses under the city’s zoning ordinances and its master plan.
Previously, property owners with plans for parking lots had no trouble gaining permission to open them. The zoning board routinely approved variances allowing these lots to exist in the Ironbound and downtown Newark.
The justification given to Ironbound residents was that their area is zoned industrial, not residential, and businesses they don’t like, such as a night club or lumberyard, could be approved.
Pereira was hoping the zoning board would side with him on the Bruen Street lot. But his supporters, including Makram Demian of Dayton, who owns the land in the Ironbound did not sway the board. They contended that Newark is developing, and businesses need parking for customers. And they disagreed about the potential for crime, saying parking attendants could report suspicious activity.
Fausto Simoes, the lawyer who represented Pereira, argued that a parking lot may not be ideal for his client’s property, but that it was unfair for residents to tell him how the land could or could not be utilized.
Good try, but it didn’t work.
The zoning board voted 7-0 to deny the variance, a departure from past rulings that ushered parking lots into the area. Pereira was disappointed, saying he doesn’t know what to do.
“It’s very small land,’’ he said. “There’s no space for nothing else.’’
Rosemarie Ruivo, a board member who represents the Ironbound, said Newark thrives when its people use the local business. “Not a parking lot.”
Zoning Board president Charles Auffant made it plain: The city’s new master plan does not permit parking lots.
“I’ve heard nothing that would make me believe that this application is anything but a detriment to the master plan,’’ he said.
Now, residents and East Ward Councilman Augusto Amador want Newark to follow other cities, which have development plans that support “transit villages,” creating areas where people live, shop and do business.
Amador said the goal – in an effort he hopes the administration will take the lead on – is to persuade parking lot owners to develop the land into housing and parking garages, with possible incentives from the city and state.
“We’re slowly losing against towns like Harrison, Jersey City, Hoboken to develop the area around Penn Station, so we can create the conditions to attract new people,’’ he said.
Newark has to pay attention. If not, the city will struggle to capitalize on its assets for a very long time.
Barry Carter: (973) 392-1827 orbcarter@starledger.com of nj.com/carter of follow him on Twitter @BarryCarterSL
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To Attack Health Disparities, States Take a Broader View

Stateline [Pew Charitable Trusts], Nov. 21, 2014
By Michael Ollove
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn.— For years, proposals to raise the minimum wage in Minnesota bogged down over economic concerns: Would a raise impel businesses to leave the state? Would it decrease employment? Would it touch off inflation?
The supporters’ main argument, that raising the minimum wage would put more money into the pockets of low-wage workers and their families, fell short.
This year, proponents seized on a new strategy: They convinced the legislature to ask the Minnesota Department of Health to analyze the health impact of the state’s minimum wage of $6.15 an hour, which is among the lowest in the country.
The department’s subsequent analysis revealed that health and income levels were inextricably linked. Whether it was rates of adequate prenatal care, infant mortality, diabetes, suicide risk, or lack of insurance, the results for poorer Minnesotans were vastly inferior to residents with higher incomes. In fact, Minnesotans living in the highest income areas of the Twin Cities region lived eight years longer than those living in the poorest.
The report virtually ended the debate. The legislature voted to phase in an increase in the minimum wage to $9.50—one of the highest in the country—with automatic subsequent increases indexed to the rate of inflation.
For at least a decade, most states have been focusing on reducing health disparities—the difference in health outcomes among different population groups, such as minorities and the poor. But Minnesota has become a model for other states by making it an overarching state priority, not only for the state’s health agency but for all departments, from economic development to transportation to housing.
Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink, a national research and policy institute that tracks inequity in the United States, said, “It is truly extraordinary that a state would put a health in all policy areas front and center in this way.” As the size of minority populations in the U.S. becomes larger, she said it is essential that other states follow Minnesota’s lead.
The idea, which has gained traction among health policymakers across the nation, is that to improve population health, it is not enough to have a good health care delivery system. It’s also necessary to attack underlying social, economic and behavioral factors that contribute to poor health, such as deficient job opportunities, unsafe environmental conditions, crime, and lack of recreational outlets.
The minimum wage debate in Minnesota illustrated the power of that connection. Other states, including Kansas, Massachusetts and California, have employed similar analyses on such diverse matters as energy, domestic workers’ rights, and allowing more retailers to sell alcohol.
In the Minnesota minimum wage debate, the health argument proved decisive.
“That report created a powerful narrative for us, low-wage workers dying eight years before higher wage earners,” said Alexa Horwart of Isaiah, a faith-based organization in the forefront of the minimum wage fight.  “We thought we were going to win this year, but the question was how high would the new rate be and would it be indexed. The report had the most impact on those two things.”

‘Structural Racism’

By the time the Minnesota health department weighed in, no one could have been wholly surprised. Only weeks before, the agency had submitted to the legislature another sweeping report called “Advancing Health Equity in Minnesota.”
In it, the department said it was no longer enough for the state to attack health disparities on a disease by disease basis. The report argued that inequitable policies or practices in diverse areas such as transportation, housing, education and economic development also were damaging the health of disadvantaged groups and the population at large.
Some of those inequities, the report acknowledged, resulted from what it called “structural racism,” which it defined as “the normalization of historical cultural, institutional and interpersonal dynamics that routinely advantage white people while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes of people of color and American Indians.”
The inclusion of those two words surprised many. “There are terms in the report that we haven’t heard before from state government,” said Melanie Plucinski of the American Indian Foundation.
As an example of “structural racism,” Jeanne Ayers, an assistant state health commissioner and co-author of the health equity report, pointed to the department’s radon elimination program, which has always been targeted toward homeowners, not renters. But while three-quarters of the white population in Minnesota own their own homes, less than a quarter of blacks do.
“The (health equity) report illuminated that health is more than what happens in the doctor’s office. It incorporates everything,” said Kris Rhodes, executive director of the American Indian Cancer Foundation, which is headquartered in Minneapolis. “It turned everything on its head in terms of what we think about health.”
Rhodes made that remark last week during a break at a meeting at St. Mary’s University of the Minnesota Health Partnership. The group, composed of dozens of community groups in the state, meets regularly with health department officials to discuss ways of achieving health equity and to monitor the department’s progress on that issue.

Some Skeptics

Jim Abeler, the ranking Republican on the Minnesota House Health and Human Services Committee, is less impressed. He said he believes the elimination of health disparities is essential, but he called the health equities report an attempt by the health department to distract attention from its poor record to date in shrinking disparities. “It’s one thing to say you care,” he said. “It’s another to actually do something about it.”
Abeler said he was also disgusted that the department would evoke racism as an underlying reason for health disparities. “I don’t think it’s a cause at all. It’s a dodge.”
By all measures, residents of Minnesota are among the nation’s healthiest, with comparatively low levels of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The state also has a world-class health delivery system, anchored by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.
Yet, according to Ayers, the assistant state health commissioner and co-author of the health equity report, “We are also doing among the worst in terms of our disparities, and the disparities are in the part of the population that is growing the fastest. We are on a downward trajectory.”
Aside from health disparities based on income differences, blacks (who make up 5.7 percent of the overall Minnesota population) and American Indians (1.3 percent) experience far worse health outcomes than whites in Minnesota. Asians (4.6 percent) and Hispanics (5 percent) also frequently lag behind.
For example, the death rate for Indians between 45 and 65 in Minnesota from 2007 to 2011 was 1,063 per 100,000, compared to 772 for blacks and 434 for whites. Between 2006 and 2010, the infant mortality rate for blacks was 9.8 per 1,000 births, 9.1 for Indians and 4.4 for whites. The same was true for many other health outcomes, from rates of breast cancer mortality, to HIV/AIDS, chlamydia, stroke and COPD mortality, adolescent obesity and adolescent suicide tendencies.
Almost all states have programs designed to close such gaps. Minnesota, for example, has targeted grants toward particular diseases or conditions in particular populations. It has dispersed grants to combat teen pregnancy, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and cancer among certain selected populations. Like many other states, Minnesota also established an Office of Minority Health.
But Ayers and her boss, Health Commissioner Ed Ehlinger, recognized that clinical care plays only a small part in determining one’s health. Lifestyle behaviors, the physical environment and social and economic factors together are much more important predictors of people’s health than the health care they receive.
“Health outcomes are a physical manifestation of the inequities in the opportunities to be healthy,” Ayers said.

Extended Impact

In Minnesota, the health equity argument has proved decisive in several instances, beyond the minimum wage debate:

  • When the Twin Cities were planning a new light rail line between St. Paul and Minneapolis (eventually opened this year) the original plans called for widely spaced stops through predominately black, Somali and Hmong neighborhoods, which would have forced some residents to walk as much as a mile to get to a stop. With help from the Pew Charitable Trusts (which funds Stateline) and others, community organizers arranged for a health impact study of the entire project. It showed a number of troubling consequences for lower income residents, including less access to jobs and higher housing costs, all of which would result in worse health outcomes for those populations. The report helped forced changes in the plan to mitigate those ill effects.
  • After the minimum wage passed, poorly paid subcontracting cleaning crews of Target, which is headquartered in Minnesota, marshaled the same health impact report to win concessions from the company to crack down on the contractors whose practices were injurious to subcontractor cleaning crews.
  • Community groups, which successfully lobbied the legislature to pass a Ban the Box law in 2013, also incorporated health arguments in their presentations. The law prevents potential employers from asking job seekers on initial application forms if they had ever been arrested. Unemployment, the organizers pointed out, is closely tied to deteriorating health conditions.

The city of Minneapolis partnered with a nonprofit to begin a free bike-sharing program in 2010 with kiosks in downtown and affluent south Minneapolis. The city health department wanted poorer North Minneapolis to have access to the bikes as well to encourage exercise, but discovered a stumbling block. Although free, members had to register with a credit card, which poor people often don’t possess. City officials and the nonprofit are trying to figure out an alternative system.
 

RFP: Strategic Planning Consulting Services — Questions and Answers

NJEJA Request for Proposals
Strategic Planning Consulting Services
QUESTIONS and ANSWERS
1. Is this the first strategic plan of the N.J. Environmental
Justice Alliance, or is this an update to an existing plan?
This request for proposals will produce the first strategic plan of 
the Alliance. 
2. What promoted the Alliance to start a strategic planning 
process?
The Alliance conducted a retreat in September 2014 with the intent 
to develop a 3‐year strategic plan to guide the organization’s 
future.
3. While there are 33 members of the Alliance, how many of are 
considered to be “active” members?

There are 33 member organizations of the Alliance, of which the 
most active are the 8 members of the steering committee.
4. Why was the Alliance founded and does the Alliance consider 
the original founding principles of importance today?

The Alliance was founded to give the environmental justice 
community a greater voice in New Jersey. The founding principles 
are still important to the Alliance today.
5. What are the major sources of funding for the Alliance?
The major sources of funding for the Alliance are foundations and 
private entities.
6. What is estimated annual budget of the Alliance?
The estimated annual budget of the Alliance is $150,000.
7. What is the current legal structure of the Alliance?
The Alliance is a non‐profit organization that is seeking 501(c)3 
status. The League of Women Voters – New Jersey serves as the
fiscal agent for the Alliance.
8. How many full‐time staff members are there?
There are two full‐time staff members of the Alliance: a state 
director in Trenton, New Jersey and a community organizer in 
Newark, New Jersey.
9. What are the top two challenges facing the organization?
The top two challenges of the Alliance are attainment of 501(c)3 
status and growth in active membership.
10. What does the Alliance want to be known for?
The Alliance wants to be known as the ‘watchdog’ for 
environmental justice communities in New Jersey.
11. While the Alliance serves the whole state, are there 
jurisdictions in which the Alliance’s activities tend to be 
concentrated?
The Alliance is a statewide organization, however activities tend to 
be concentrated in Newark, New Jersey and Trenton, New Jersey.

Newark reaches deal with PSE&G over West Ward switching station

NJ.com, Nov. 15, 2014

By Naomi Nix
 
The agreement ends months-long wrangling between community residents in the Fairmount section of West Ward, city officials and PSEG over where to put a new switching station, which helps deliver power, in Newark.
“At the end, we were able to come up with an agreement that serves the needs of the community and the City while permitting PSE&G to build a new switching station to assure that existing and future businesses in Newark can be assured of reliable power,” Newark mayor Ras Baraka said in a statement.
Under the deal, PSE&G will be allowed to put a new switching station near the intersection of Central and Littleton Avenues, said PSE&G’s vice president of communications, Kathy Fitzgerald.
In exchange for the switching station, PSE&G will give Newark about $1 million in payments in lieu of taxes every year for 30 years— an amount that would increase by 3.75 percent each year, Fitzgerald said.
While PSE&G will give the city the money gradually, the city could monetize the funds through bonds and receive a lump sum payment, Fitzgerald said.
PSE&G also agreed to change the design of the switching station and decrease its size by about 2 and a half acres to about 3 acres. The excess land would be given to the city of Newark for redevelopment purposes, Fitzgerald said.
Under the agreement the Newark city council approved 7-0 this week, the Urban League of Essex County would use the land or another area to build a community center.
PSE&G would also preference newark residents for construction jobs under the agreement, Fitzgerald said.
“We’re glad that we could make this a win for the city and community and meet PSE&G’s need to build a new switching station to maintain reliable electric service to the city and the region,” PSE&G’s VP State Government Affairs Rick Thigpen said in statement.
West Ward councilman Joe McCallum, who has been negotiating with the utility company and the community groups over the station, said he is currently looking to identify minority contractors and potential employees for PSE&G and other companies to work with.
“We want to use this as a model” for future development projects, McCallum said. “The only way we can move forward is if our residents our getting jobs when people come into the city to do business.”
PSE&G, the Urban League of Essex County and the Fairmont Heights Neighborhood Association have been locked in a public debate over the switching station since last year.
The utility company argued that the city needed a new switching station in order to sustain the power grid. But the community groups questioned the size, location and aesthetics of the switching station.
The residents successfully lobbied Newark’s zoning board last year to deny PSE&G’s variance application to build the switching station.
But then PSE&G filed a petition with the board of public of utilities to overturn the zoning board decision, said Renee Steinhagen, the attorney who represents the League and neighborhood association.
The league, neighborhood association and city became interested parties in PSE&G’s petition, prompting negotiations between all the entities, Steinhagen said.
Steinhagen said the city and the neighborhood groups still have to finalize an agreement over how to handle the excess land PSE&G is giving the city for the community center.
But Urban League of Essex County president Vivian Cox Fraser said she hopes the agreement will help further revitalize the Fairmont Heights neighborhood.
“The residents of that community stood up. It’s important for community members begin able to decide on what happens in that community,” she said.
“When people stand up and communicate what’s important…we can really become effective partners for progress.”
Naomi Nix may be reached at nnix@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @nsnix87. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
© 2014 NJ.com. All rights reserved.

Frontline voices call for Climate Justice, shut out of process

Frontline communities gathered for the People’s Climate Justice Summit following the historic Peoples Climate March on September 21, 2014 in New York City. We held a People’s Tribunal as global corporate and government leaders gathered across the street, allowing only a very small number of civil society representatives to join. One of those delegates, Kandi Mossett of Indigenous Environmental Network, describes the challenge that frontline communities encounter when trying to insert our perspectives into the climate debate.
Watch the video here.
 

In Defense of Obama

Rolling Stone, Oct. 8, 2014
By Paul Krugman
When it comes to Barack Obama, I’ve always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue.
And I wasn’t wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP’s unwillingness to make even token concessions.
But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn’t deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history. His health reform is imperfect but still a huge step forward – and it’s working better than anyone expected. Financial reform fell far short of what should have happened, but it’s much more effective than you’d think. Economic management has been half-crippled by Republican obstruction, but has nonetheless been much better than in other advanced countries. And environmental policy is starting to look like it could be a major legacy.
I’ll go through those achievements shortly. First, however, let’s take a moment to talk about the current wave of Obama-bashing. All Obama-bashing can be divided into three types. One, a constant of his time in office, is the onslaught from the right, which has never stopped portraying him as an Islamic atheist Marxist Kenyan. Nothing has changed on that front, and nothing will.
There’s a different story on the left, where you now find a significant number of critics decrying Obama as, to quote Cornel West, someone who ”posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit.” They’re outraged that Wall Street hasn’t been punished, that income inequality remains so high, that ”neoliberal” economic policies are still in place. All of this seems to rest on the belief that if only Obama had put his eloquence behind a radical economic agenda, he could somehow have gotten that agenda past all the political barriers that have con- strained even his much more modest efforts. It’s hard to take such claims seriously.
Finally, there’s the constant belittling of Obama from mainstream pundits and talking heads. Turn on cable news (although I wouldn’t advise it) and you’ll hear endless talk about a rudderless, stalled administration, maybe even about a failed presidency. Such talk is often buttressed by polls showing that Obama does, indeed, have an approval rating that is very low by historical standards.
But this bashing is misguided even in its own terms – and in any case, it’s focused on the wrong thing.
Yes, Obama has a low approval rating compared with earlier presidents. But there are a number of reasons to believe that presidential approval doesn’t mean the same thing that it used to: There is much more party-sorting (in which Republicans never, ever have a good word for a Democratic president, and vice versa), the public is negative on politicians in general, and so on. Obviously the midterm election hasn’t happened yet, but in a year when Republicans have a huge structural advantage – Democrats are defending a disproportionate number of Senate seats in deep-red states – most analyses suggest that control of the Senate is in doubt, with Democrats doing considerably better than they were supposed to. This isn’t what you’d expect to see if a failing president were dragging his party down.
More important, however, polls – or even elections – are not the measure of a president. High office shouldn’t be about putting points on the electoral scoreboard, it should be about changing the country for the better. Has Obama done that? Do his achievements look likely to endure? The answer to both questions is yes.
HEALTH CARE
When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, an excited Joe Biden whispered audibly, ”This is a big fucking deal!” He was right.
The enactment and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, has been a perils-of-Pauline experience. When an upset in the special election to replace Ted Kennedy cost Democrats their 60-vote Senate majority, health reform had to be rescued with fancy legislative footwork. Then it survived a Supreme Court challenge only thanks to a surprise display of conscience by John Roberts, who nonetheless opened a loophole that has allowed Republican-controlled states to deny coverage to millions of Americans. Then technical difficulties with the HealthCare.gov website seemed to threaten disaster. But here we are, most of the way through the first full year of reform’s implementation, and it’s working better than even the optimists expected.
We won’t have the full data on 2014 until next year’s census report, but multiple independent surveys show a sharp drop in the number of Americans without health insurance, probably around 10 million, a number certain to grow greatly over the next two years as more people realize that the program is available and penalties for failure to sign up increase.
It’s true that the Affordable Care Act will still leave millions of people in America uninsured. For one thing, it was never intended to cover undocumented immigrants, who are counted in standard measures of the uninsured. Furthermore, millions of low-income Americans will slip into the loophole Roberts created: They were supposed to be covered by a federally funded expansion of Medicaid, but some states are blocking that expansion out of sheer spite. Finally, unlike Social Security and Medicare, for which almost everyone is automatically eligible, Obamacare requires beneficiaries to prove their eligibility for Medicaid or choose and then pay for a subsidized private plan. Inevitably, some people will fall through the cracks.
Still, Obamacare means a huge improvement in the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans – not just better care, but greater financial security. And even those who were already insured have gained both security and freedom, because they now have a guarantee of coverage if they lose or change jobs.
What about the costs? Here, too, the news is better than anyone expected. In 2014, premiums on the insurance policies offered through the Obamacare exchanges were well below those originally projected by the Congressional Budget Office, and the available data indicates a mix of modest increases and actual reductions for 2015 – which is very good in a sector where premiums normally increase five percent or more each year. More broadly, overall health spending has slowed substantially, with the cost-control features of the ACA probably deserving some of the credit.
In other words, health reform is looking like a major policy success story. It’s a program that is coming in ahead of schedule – and below budget – costing less, and doing more to reduce overall health costs than even its supporters predicted.
Of course, this success story makes nonsense of right-wing predictions of catastrophe. Beyond that, the good news on health costs refutes conservative orthodoxy. It’s a fixed idea on the right, sometimes echoed by ”centrist” commentators, that the only way to limit health costs is to dismantle guarantees of adequate care – for example, that the only way to control Medicare costs is to replace Medicare as we know it, a program that covers major medical expenditures, with vouchers that may or may not be enough to buy adequate insurance. But what we’re actually seeing is what looks like significant cost control via a laundry list of small changes to how we pay for care, with the basic guarantee of adequate coverage not only intact but widened to include Americans of all ages.
It’s worth pointing out that some criticisms of Obamacare from the left are also looking foolish. Obamacare is a system partly run through private insurance companies (although expansion of Medicaid is also a very important piece). And some on the left were outraged, arguing that the program would do more to raise profits in the medical-industrial complex than it would to protect American families.
You can still argue that single-payer would have covered more people at lower cost – in fact, I would. But that option wasn’t on the table; only a system that appeased insurers and reassured the public that not too much would change was politically feasible. And it’s working reasonably well: Competition among insurers who can no longer deny insurance to those who need it most is turning out to be pretty effective. This isn’t the health care system you would have designed from scratch, or if you could ignore special-interest politics, but it’s doing the job.
And this big improvement in American society is almost surely here to stay. The conservative health care nightmare – the one that led Republicans to go all-out against Bill Clinton’s health plans in 1993 and Obamacare more recently – is that once health care for everyone, or almost everyone, has been put in place, it will be very hard to undo, because too many voters would have a stake in the system. That’s exactly what is happening. Republicans are still going through the motions of attacking Obamacare, but the passion is gone. They’re even offering mealymouthed assurances that people won’t lose their new benefits. By the time Obama leaves office, there will be tens of millions of Americans who have benefited directly from health reform – and that will make it almost impossible to reverse. Health reform has made America a different, better place.
FINANCIAL REFORM
Let’s be clear: The financial crisis should have been followed by a drastic crackdown on Wall Street abuses, and it wasn’t. No important figures have gone to jail; bad banks and other financial institutions, from Citigroup to Goldman, were bailed out with few strings attached; and there has been nothing like the wholesale restructuring and reining in of finance that took place in the 1930s. Obama bears a considerable part of the blame for this disappointing response. It was his Treasury secretary and his attorney general who chose to treat finance with kid gloves.
It’s easy, however, to take this disappointment too far. You often hear Dodd- Frank, the financial-reform bill that Obama signed into law in 2010, dismissed as toothless and meaningless. It isn’t. It may not prevent the next financial crisis, but there’s a good chance that it will at least make future crises less severe and easier to deal with.
Dodd-Frank is a complicated piece of legislation, but let me single out three really important sections.
First, the law gives a special council the ability to designate ”systemically important financial institutions” (SIFIs) – that is, institutions that could create a crisis if they were to fail – and place such institutions under extra scrutiny and regulation of things like the amount of capital they are required to maintain to cover possible losses. This provision has been derided as ineffectual or worse – during the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney claimed that by announcing that some firms were SIFIs, the government was effectively guaranteeing that they would be bailed out, which he called ”the biggest kiss that’s been given to New York banks I’ve ever seen.”
But it’s easy to prove that this is nonsense: Just look at how institutions behave when they’re designated as SIFIs. Are they pleased, because they’re now guaranteed? Not a chance. Instead, they’re furious over the extra regulation, and in some cases fight bitterly to avoid being placed on the list. Right now, for example, MetLife is making an all-out effort to be kept off the SIFI list; this effort demonstrates that we’re talking about real regulation here, and that financial interests don’t like it.
Another key provision in Dodd-Frank is ”orderly liquidation authority,” which gives the government the legal right to seize complex financial institutions in a crisis. This is a bigger deal than you might think. We have a well-established procedure for seizing ordinary banks that get in trouble and putting them into receivership; in fact, it happens all the time. But what do you do when something like Citigroup is on the edge, and its failure might have devastating consequences? Back in 2009, Joseph Stiglitz and yours truly, among others, wanted to temporarily nationalize one or two major financial players, for the same reasons the FDIC takes over failing banks, to keep the institutions running but avoid bailing out stockholders and management. We got a chance to make that case directly to the president. But we lost the argument, and one key reason was Treasury’s claim that it lacked the necessary legal authority. I still think it could have found a way, but in any case that won’t be an issue next time.
A third piece of Dodd-Frank is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, an agency dedicated to protecting Americans against the predatory lending that has pushed so many into financial distress, and played an important role in the crisis. Warren’s idea was that such a stand-alone agency would more effectively protect the public than agencies that were supposed to protect consumers, but saw their main job as propping up banks. And by all accounts the new agency is in fact doing much more to crack down on predatory practices than anything we used to see.
There’s much more in the financial reform, including a number of pieces we don’t have enough information to evaluate yet. But there’s enough evidence even now to say that there’s a reason Wall Street – which used to give an approximately equal share of money to both parties but now overwhelmingly supports Republicans – tried so hard to kill financial reform, and is still trying to emasculate Dodd-Frank. This may not be the full overhaul of finance we should have had, and it’s not as major as health reform. But it’s a lot better than nothing.
THE ECONOMY
Barack Obama might not have been elected president without the 2008 financial crisis; he certainly wouldn’t have had the House majority and the brief filibuster-proof Senate majority that made health reform possible. So it’s very disappointing that six years into his presidency, the U.S. economy is still a long way from being fully recovered.
Before we ask why, however, we should note that things could have been worse. In fact, in other times and places they have been worse. Make no mistake about it – the devastation wrought by the financial crisis was terrible, with real income falling 5.5 percent. But that’s actually not as bad as the ”typical” experience after financial crises: Even in advanced countries, the median post-crisis decline in per- capita real GDP is seven percent. Recovery has been slow: It took almost six years for the United States to regain pre-crisis average income. But that was actually a bit faster than the historical average.
Or compare our performance with that of the European Union. Unemployment in America rose to a horrifying 10 percent in 2009, but it has come down sharply in the past few years. It’s true that some of the apparent improvement probably reflects discouraged workers dropping out, but there has been substantial real progress. Meanwhile, Europe has had barely any job recovery at all, and unemployment is still in double digits. Compared with our counterparts across the Atlantic, we haven’t done too badly.
Did Obama’s policies contribute to this less-awful performance? Yes, without question. You’d never know it listening to the talking heads, but there’s overwhelming consensus among economists that the Obama stimulus plan helped mitigate the worst of the slump. For example, when a panel of economic experts was asked whether the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus, 82 percent said yes, only two percent said no.
Still, couldn’t the U.S. economy have done a lot better? Of course. The original stimulus should have been both bigger and longer. And after Republicans won the House in 2010, U.S. policy took a sharp turn in the wrong direction. Not only did the stimulus fade out, but sequestration led to further steep cuts in federal spending, exactly the wrong thing to do in a still-depressed economy.
We can argue about how much Obama could have altered this literally depressing turn of events. He could have pushed for a larger, more extended stimulus, perhaps with provisions for extra aid that would have kicked in if unemployment stayed high. (This isn’t 20-20 hindsight, because a number of economists, myself included, pleaded for more aggressive measures from the beginning.) He arguably let Republicans blackmail him over the debt ceiling in 2011, leading to the sequester. But this is all kind of iffy.
The bottom line on Obama’s economic policy should be that what he did helped the economy, and that while enormous economic and human damage has taken place on his watch, the United States coped with the financial crisis better than most countries facing comparable crises have managed. He should have done more and better, but the narrative that portrays his policies as a simple failure is all wrong.
While America remains an incredibly unequal society, and we haven’t seen anything like the New Deal’s efforts to narrow income gaps, Obama has done more to limit inequality than he gets credit for. The rich are paying higher taxes, thanks to the partial expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the special taxes on high incomes that help pay for Obamacare; the Congressional Budget Office estimates the average tax rate of the top one percent at 33.6 percent in 2013, up from 28.1 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, the financial aid in Obamacare – expanded Medicaid, subsidies to help lower-income households pay insurance premiums – goes disproportionately to less-well-off Americans. When conservatives accuse Obama of redistributing income, they’re not completely wrong – and liberals should give him credit.
THE ENVIRONMENT
In 2009, it looked, briefly, as if we might be about to get real on the issue of climate change. A fairly comprehensive bill establishing a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse-gas emissions actually passed the House, and visions of global action danced like sugarplums in environmentalists’ heads. But the legislation stalled in the Senate, and Republican victory in the 2010 midterms put an end to that fantasy. Ever since, the only way forward has been through executive action based on existing legislation, which is a poor substitute for the new laws we need.
But as with financial reform, acknowledging the inadequacy of what has been done doesn’t mean that nothing has been achieved. Saying that Obama has been the best environmental president in a long time is actually faint praise, since George W. Bush was terrible and Bill Clinton didn’t get much done. Still, it’s true, and there’s reason to hope for a lot more over the next two years.
First of all, there has been much more progress on the use of renewable energy than most people realize. The share of U.S. energy provided by wind and solar has grown dramatically since Obama took office. True, it’s still only a small fraction of the total, and some of the growth in renewables reflects technological progress, especially in solar panels, that would have happened whoever was in office. But federal policies, including loan guarantees and tax credits, have played an important role.
Nor is it just about renewables; Obama has also taken big steps on energy conservation, especially via fuel-efficiency standards, that have flown, somewhat mysteriously, under the radar. And it’s not just cars. In 2011, the administration announced the first-ever fuel-efficiency standards for medium and heavy vehicles, and in February it announced that these standards would get even tougher for models sold after 2018. As a way to curb green house-gas emissions, these actions, taken together, are comparable in importance to proposed action on power plants.
Which brings us to the latest initiative. Because there’s no chance of getting climate-change legislation through Congress for the foreseeable future, Obama has turned to the EPA’s existing power to regulate pollution – power that the Supreme Court has affirmed extends to emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And this past summer, the EPA announced proposed rules that would require a large reduction over time in such emissions from power plants. You might say that such plants are only a piece of the problem, but they’re a large piece – CO2 from coal-burning power plants is in fact a big part of the problem, so if the EPA goes through with anything like the proposed rule, it will be a major step. Again, not nearly enough, and we’ll have to do a lot more soon, or face civilization-threatening disaster. But what Obama has done is far from trivial.
NATIONAL SECURITY
So far, i’ve been talking about Obama’s positive achievements, which have been much bigger than his critics understand. I do, however, need to address one area that has left some early Obama supporters bitterly disappointed: his record on national security policy. Let’s face it – many of his original enthusiasts favored him so strongly over Hillary Clinton because she supported the Iraq War and he didn’t. They hoped he would hold the people who took us to war on false pretenses accountable, that he would transform American foreign policy, and that he would drastically curb the reach of the national security state.
None of that happened. Obama’s team, as far as we can tell, never even considered going after the deceptions that took us to Baghdad, perhaps because they believed that this would play very badly at a time of financial crisis. On overall foreign policy, Obama has been essentially a normal post-Vietnam president, reluctant to commit U.S. ground troops and eager to extract them from ongoing commitments, but quite willing to bomb people considered threatening to U.S. interests. And he has defended the prerogatives of the NSA and the surveillance state in general.
Could and should he have been different? The truth is that I have no special expertise here; as an ordinary concerned citizen, I worry about the precedent of allowing what amount to war crimes to go not just unpunished but uninvestigated, even while appreciating that a modern version of the 1970s Church committee hearings on CIA abuses might well have been a political disaster, and undermined the policy achievements I’ve tried to highlight. What I would say is that even if Obama is just an ordinary president on national security issues, that’s a huge improvement over what came before and what we would have had if John McCain or Mitt Romney had won. It’s hard to get excited about a policy of not going to war gratuitously, but it’s a big deal compared with the alternative.
SOCIAL CHANGE
In 2004, social issues, along with national security, were cudgels the right used to bludgeon liberals – I like to say that Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists. Ten years later, and the scene is transformed: Democrats have turned these social issues – especially women’s rights – against Republicans; gay marriage has been widely legalized with approval or at least indifference from the wider public. We have, in a remarkably short stretch of time, become a notably more tolerant, open-minded nation.
Barack Obama has been more a follower than a leader on these issues. But at least he has been willing to follow the country’s new open-mindedness. We shouldn’t take this for granted. Before the Obama presidency, Democrats were in a kind of reflexive cringe on social issues, acting as if the religious right had far more power than it really does and ignoring the growing constituency on the other side. It’s easy to imagine that if someone else had been president these past six years, Democrats would still be cringing as if it were 2004. Thankfully, they aren’t. And the end of the cringe also, I’d argue, helped empower them to seek real change on substantive issues from health reform to the environment. Which brings me back to domestic issues.
As you can see, there’s a theme running through each of the areas of domestic policy I’ve covered. In each case, Obama delivered less than his supporters wanted, less than the country arguably deserved, but more than his current detractors acknowledge. The extent of his partial success ranges from the pretty good to the not-so-bad to the ugly. Health reform looks pretty good, especially in historical perspective – remember, even Social Security, in its original FDR version, only covered around half the workforce. Financial reform is, I’d argue, not so bad – it’s not the second coming of Glass-Steagall, but there’s a lot more protection against runaway finance than anyone except angry Wall Streeters seems to realize. Economic policy wasn’t enough to avoid a very ugly period of high unemployment, but Obama did at least mitigate the worst.
And as far as climate policy goes, there’s reason for hope, but we’ll have to see.
Am I damning with faint praise? Not at all. This is what a successful presidency looks like. No president gets to do everything his supporters expected him to. FDR left behind a reformed nation, but one in which the wealthy retained a lot of power and privilege. On the other side, for all his anti-government rhetoric, Reagan left the core institutions of the New Deal and the Great Society in place. I don’t care about the fact that Obama hasn’t lived up to the golden dreams of 2008, and I care even less about his approval rating. I do care that he has, when all is said and done, achieved a lot. That is, as Joe Biden didn’t quite say, a big deal.
© 2014 ROLLING STONE