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There are also plenty of do-it-yourself instructions that involve little effort. But the easiest option of all is already sitting in one of your drawers.
In a video posted on Twitter Monday, Indian actor Ronit Roy demonstrated how to turn a T-shirt into a full face mask with no cutting:
No mask? Tension nahin Leneka! Simple hai! pic.twitter.com/NSNPMikDZ3
— Ronit Bose Roy (@RonitBoseRoy) April 20, 2020
By Brent Ranalli, orig. pub. by Feasta April 20, 2020
Agrarian Justice has a reputation as a “neglected” pamphlet of Paine’s, both because it made so little impact when first published, and because later students of Paine haven’t given it sufficient attention. A paper of mine that was recently published in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism investigates the history of Paine’s essay and its continuing relevance (the published paper is here and an author proof copy is here).
Paine’s proposal to tax land and distribute the proceeds widely rests on a basic insight from the natural law tradition: namely, the insight that there are two kinds of property, things that are created by human effort, and things that are not. Things that are not created by human effort — like land and other natural resources — are a common inheritance, and everyone has an equal right to enjoy them.
When a few monopolize the land, the normal remedy is redistribution. Writing in part for a French audience that had just experienced a bloody revolution, and in part for a English audience that feared revolution, Paine proposed a remedy that was much less disruptive. Let the landowners keep their land, he said. Let them simply pay a tax, and let that money be used to compensate the landless and give them some financial security. Paine proposed that money from the fund be distributed to the elderly and the disabled, plus a disbursement to every young man and woman on turning age 21 to help them start out in life.
Paine’s pamphlet had very little impact when it was published in 1797. It has usually been assumed that Paine had simply lost his reading public. After all, by 1797 his closest French colleagues had been scattered or killed in the Jacobin reign of terror. In Britain, his fellow radicals were being suppressed by the government. Many American readers had turned against him, scandalized by the supposed French atheism of his previous book, Age of Reason.
But this isn’t the whole story. In fact, the pamphlet was not only published in London and Paris, as well known, but in at least 10 cities and three languages (English, French, and German). It was serialized in newspapers and reviewed in widely read journals. English radicals staged a public debate about the merits of Paine’s plan in London, and many of them were enthusiastic about it.
No, Paine had not lost his reading public. The pamphlet’s “neglect” — its failure to make a difference — had other causes. The new paper attempts to tease these out.
Paine’s proposal did not fit neatly into existing radical discourses. It did not suit the temperament of revolutionary collectivists like Paine’s contemporaries Thomas Spence and “Gracchus” Babeuf, and later Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wanted villains to overthrow. Nor did it suit the so-called “utopian socialists” like Robert Owens and Charles Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon, who wanted to build a more just society immediately at the local level, not lobby for changes that might happen someday at the national level. Paine’s proposal was a curious mixture of conservative property rights and radical social reforms.
In the United States, there were two further factors that prevented even admirers of Paine’s plan from endorsing it. One factor has now been overcome, and the other remains with us today and hampers Basic Income advocacy.
The first factor was that — if one ignored the rights of Native Americans, as most did — the United States was “empty” territory. Before questions could be asked about what compensation landowners owed the landless, the more pressing question was who would settle the land in the first place. Admirers of Paine like the New York printer George H. Evans successfully lobbied for state and federal “homestead acts” that encouraged settlement by smallholders and fostered broad-based landownership.
The second factor was that America was — and still is — a heterogenous society with relatively open borders. To argue that British and French landed nobility owe some compensation to their landless tenants is one thing. To advocate for payment of universal dividends in the U.S. context is quite another. There will always be “out” groups — e.g., recently arrived immigrants, whether Irish domestics and Chinese railroad laborers, or Somali refugees and Mexican farmhands (to say nothing of racism toward African-Africans) — that some Americans will view as undeserving of a generous social safety net. Today many European nations too have significant immigrant populations and face a similar dynamic.
In the 1970’s, the State of Alaska decided that one of the things it would do with its newfound oil wealth was to issue annual dividends to residents. Some in Alaska feared that the state’s generosity might attract freeloaders. But those fears were misplaced. There was no massive influx of settlers from the lower 49 looking for “free stuff.” Today Alaskans are justifiably proud of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend, which is founded on a principle similar to Paine’s: regardless of who is given permission to drill and sell it, Alaska’s oil belongs to all Alaskans. Partly as a result of the dividend, provided to old and new residents alike, Alaska enjoys some of the lowest rates of wealth inequality in the nation.
With the Covid-19 crisis, calls for a Basic Income are gaining new momentum. The U.S., and other countries too, could enjoy the immense society-wide benefit of a Basic Income if they are willing to set aside the sour grapes argument — which has been in play since Paine’s own time—of not providing a social safety net to out-groups.
Featured image: Thomas Paine, 1972, by Auguste Millière
A private jet takes off from Jackson Hole Airport in June 2019. AFP via Getty Images
Nowhere is the increasingly global story line of wealth concentration and environmental impact seen more clearly than in a little corner of the rural West: Teton County, Wyo., and its Jackson Hole valley.
Middle-class families have vacationed here for generations to luxuriate in the grandeur of the Teton Mountains and the pure glory of Yellowstone Park. But now this once-backwater and relatively modest community has become the richest county in the U.S. as well as the county with the nation’s highest level of income inequality.
I interviewed hundreds of ultra-wealthy people and the working-poor who serve them to understand what it is like in what Bloomberg Wealth Manager Magazine ranks of “America’s wealth-friendliest states.”
The state’s personal and corporate tax benefits are attracting the rich from high-tax environments like Connecticut, New York and California. Like the gold rush of old, more and more are making the trek west, though in this case they have already struck it rich.
‘Gilded green philanthropy’: Land conservation has become a lucrative way to claim a tax break under the banner of altruism.
But why here? Isn’t wealth concentration and inequality an urban phenomenon, confined to the environs of Wall Street or Silicon Valley? Not any longer. Wyoming has become a lucrative tax haven because it can afford to. Sure, it, like many western states, has a strong cultural aversion to taxation, but its ultra-wealth-friendly tax policies also have been made possible by record windfalls from oil, gas, and coal.
At the same time, America’s financial industry boomed. In the 1980’s, the share of investment income began to climb, making up 30% of all income in the community. Billions continued to pour in. That number hit 40% of all income by the 1990’s, half in 2004 — and by 2015 nearly eight out of every 10 dollars of income made here was coming not from traditional wages or salary, but from interest and dividends checks.
Just how much money are we talking? Adjusting for inflation, in 1970, only $52 million in annual income in Teton County came from investments, but by 2015 this number ballooned to $3.4 billion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis and Headwaters Economics.
In other words, the rush of wealth to this community was not the result of broad-based economic growth or rising wages and salaries. Income from wages and salaries have remained shockingly stagnant. And today even a lowly multimillionaire may have a hard time affording some of the nicer $10 million to $15 million properties.
The ironic twist, as that I learned through hundreds of in-depth interviews with the ultra-wealthy, is that they move to places like Teton County because they fall in love with the small-town character and have become concerned about the environment. Yet that can also lead to some regrettable and unjust outcomes, such as romanticizing the ugly reality of rural hardship and justifying vast-natural resource consumption.
Even environmental philanthropy is not always what it seemed. Land conservation had become a lucrative way to accrue disproportionate economic benefits under the banner of altruism. Conservation easements, whereby landowners receive compensation — usually as a charitable deduction on their tax returns or a cash payment based on appraised value — in exchange for closing it from further development are a popular option.
Of course, easements and land trusts play a critical role in global conservation, and are successful because they involve win-win financial partnerships. Yet they also can become another highly profitable tool for those with great wealth to put it to work, reaping huge tax benefits, cash payments, while simultaneously constraining the housing supply and driving up prices even further.
This form of “gilded green philanthropy,” as I call it, widens even further the ugly socio-economic divide, hollowing out the community and making it harder for workers to live nearby. Unable to find affordable housing in town, they are pushed all the way into the neighboring state of Idaho, on the other side of the treacherous and steep 8,431-foot-high Teton Pass. These workers told many a harrowing story about just making up — and then down — to work in the dead of Wyoming winter.
We can blame the rich all we want, but we too often lose our way by fixating on simplistic questions about their moral merit as individuals. Especially these days, we humans have a hasty desire to brand them individually as either philanthropic saviors or monsters, good or evil, deserving or undeserving, environmental heroes or destroyers of nature.
But not only is this a fruitless exercise, it’s not what my data and findings suggest we do. A better way forward is to zoom out and reorient our attention to what rural places and policies like this offer the ultra-wealthy: a low-paid underclass that tirelessly serves them, mountains that awe them, a pace of life that slows them, an environmental philanthropy network that flatters them, and tax incentives that enrich them.
Justin Farrell is an associate professor of sociology at Yale University in the School of the Environment and the author of “Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West”.
Ellen Knickmeyer, A.P. April 19, 2020
‘They’re killing us,’ Texas residents say of Trump protections rollbacks.
HOUSTON (AP) — Danielle Nelson’s best monitor for the emissions billowing out of the oil refineries and chemical plants surrounding her home: The heaving chest of her 9-year-old asthmatic son.
On some nights, the boy’s chest shudders as he fights for breath in his sleep. Nelson suspects the towering plants and refineries are to blame, rising like a lit-up city at night around her squat brick apartment building in the rugged Texas Gulf Coast city of Port Arthur.
Ask Nelson what protection the federal government and plant operators provide her African American community, and her answer is blunt. “They’re basically killing us,” says the 37-year-old, who herself has been diagnosed with respiratory problems since moving to the community after Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
“We don’t even know what we’re breathing,” she says.
The Texas Gulf Coast is the United States’ petrochemical corridor, with four of the country’s 10 biggest oil and gas refineries and thousands of chemical facilities.
Residents of the mostly black and Latino communities closest to the refineries and chemical plants say that puts them on the front line of the Trump administration’s rollbacks of decades of public health and environmental protections.
Under President Donald Trump, federal regulatory changes are slashing requirements on industry to monitor, report and reduce toxic pollutants, heavy metals and climate-damaging fossil fuel emissions, and to work transparently with communities to prevent plant disasters — such as the half-dozen major chemical fires and explosions that have killed workers and disrupted life along the Texas Gulf Coast over the past year alone.
And that plunge in public health enforcement may be about to get even more dramatic. Last month, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist before Trump appointed him to the agency, announced enforcement waivers for industries on monitoring, reporting and quickly fixing hazardous releases, in cases the EPA deems staffing problems related to the coronavirus pandemic made compliance difficult.
Since then, air pollutants in Houston’s most heavily industrialized areas have surged as much as 62%, a Texas A & M analysis of state air monitor readings found.
EPA says it is balancing public and business interests in trimming what the Trump administration considers unnecessary regulations.
“Maintaining public health and enforcing existing environmental protections is of the upmost importance to EPA,” agency spokeswoman Andrea Woods said by email. “This administration’s deregulatory efforts are focused on rooting out inefficiencies, not paring back protections for any sector of society.”
But environmentalists call the EPA’s waiver during the coronavirus crisis the latest in a series of alarming moves.
“Traditionally less data and enforcement has never added up to cleaner air, water or land for communities of color and lower wealth communities,” said Mustafa Santiago Ali, head of the EPA environmental justice office under President Barack Obama.
On the Texas Gulf Coast, African Americans under segregation were shunted to low-lying coastal areas prone to high water — literally on the wrong side of the tracks, Port Arthur activist Hilton Kelley says. bumping over those rails on a tour of his industrial neighborhood. As Texas towns grew, refineries, interstates and other, dirtier industries moved to those areas.
Stopping at the site of a razed public housing project where he was born in a bedroom looking out on the refineries, Kelley recalls, “always hearing about someone dying of cancer, always smelling smells, watching little babies using nebulizers.”
During the Obama administration, Kelley traveled to Washington for signing ceremonies for rules tightening regulations on pollutants and other health threats, and requiring industries to do more to report hazardous emissions. These days, Kelley’s trips to Washington are to protest rollbacks relaxing those rules.
”That’s a death sentence for us,” Kelley says, driving past the the sickly yellow light of a refinery burning off methane gas. “Now we may not drop dead that day,” he says. “But when you’re inundated day after day…we’re dead. We’re dead.”
In Houston, one of the country’s largest cities without zoning rules, the exposure to toxins is compounded. In Hispanic Galena Park, a developer this year fracked an oil and gas well just hundreds of yards (meters) from a school. In another Hispanic community, Manchester, chemical storage tanks tower over single-story frame homes, encasing all but their porches and driveways.
Before dawn one day last month a headache-inducing chemical stench suffused the neighborhood as a child waited for a school bus. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle rolled by. Latino residents, afraid of attracting official attention, lay low and don’t often complain, resident and activist Juan Flores says.
Even before the Trump administration began the rollbacks, Houston’s urban freeways and industries were pumping enough poisonous refinery chemicals, heavy metals, and diesel and car exhaust to “almost certainly” be to blame for some respiratory problems and early deaths, as well as an “unacceptable increased risk” for cancers and chronic disease, concluded a landmark city task force, started in 2005 to study the health impacts.
Residents of some predominantly minority Houston neighborhoods face at least three times the cancer risks of Americans overall, according to a 2014 EPA assessment, the most recent available.
Last year, state health officials confirmed a cancer cluster in one African American Houston neighborhood where residents had for years complained that creosote from a former rail yard was killing multiple members of families. One woman drove around with a mock human skeleton in her passenger seat to try to draw attention to the deaths.
Among other health harms, Houston’s African American families, many of them in neighborhoods near one of the nation’s largest clusters of petrochemical plants, report twice as many asthma cases as the city’s white families, according to a federal government study.
One recent day, 50-year-old Felicia Lacy hummed a hymn in the early-morning darkness as she nuzzled her 4-year-old granddaughter, Kdynn, who lay in bed with a plastic oxygen mask on her face. Lacy wakes the girl at 5:30 a.m each morning for an hour of asthma treatment.
Lacy blames Houston’s polluted air for the asthma-related pneumonia that killed a son at 27, and for the little girl’s asthma and her own. She takes her own turn at the nebulizer after she gets the child off to preschool.
Lacy doesn’t often allow Kdynn and another grandchild play outside, no matter how much they plead.
“I can’t have it happen to them,” she says, referring to her son’s asthma death. “Not on my watch.”
In 2017, Hurricane Harvey released hundreds of millions of gallons of contaminated industrial products and hundreds of tons of air toxins. Low-lying black and Latino neighborhoods were devastated, including Galena Park, which for days became an island cut off by a half-billion gallons of toxic industrial wastewater.
Over the past year, additional chemical disasters have been similarly life-changing.
“Boom! Boom! Boom!” resident Cruz Hinojosa says, describing life in Galena Park.
Six major chemical plant and facility fires and explosions in the area since March 2019 have killed at least four people, destroyed hundreds of homes and sent tens of thousands of people fleeing or hunkering down under shelter-in-place orders. The disasters poured cancer-causing xylene, benzene and other petrochemicals into the air, nauseating residents.
Port Arthur and Houston residents say it’s difficult to find out from authorities what they’re breathing and how bad it is.
After Hurricane Harvey, EPA and state officials declined to have a NASA monitoring plane gauge the threat from chemical releases. An EPA internal watchdog faulted authorities’ failures in tracking toxic releases, which included turning off air monitors to protect them from damage.
A joint investigation by The Associated Press and Houston Chronicle a year later found the toxic contamination far more widespread and extensive than authorities reported.
Woods, the EPA spokeswoman, said the NASA offer came more than two weeks after Harvey made landfall, and at a time when EPA and Texas environmental regulators were going out day and night with hand-held monitors and other equipment to gauge hazardous emissions.
“Any assertion that EPA’s decision not to accept NASA’s flight offer obstructed information-gathering that would have helped Houstonians, particularly those in low-income communities near industrial facilities, is misleading and does not reflect the more effective monitoring efforts that were in place,” Woods wrote.
Three years after Harvey, community activists have taken monitoring into their own hands.
Last month, Bridgette Murray, a retired nurse and community leader in Houston’s African American community of Pleasantville, snapped cellphone pictures of neighborhood volunteers erecting the last of seven new air monitors, given to the community by an environmental group.
In Galena Park, Flores, the activist in that Latino community, is moving on a project to install air monitors at schools, after toying with the idea of giving each schoolchild a monitor to dangle off their backpacks.
The aim of the monitors, Flores says, is not to warn children when the air is unsafe for them to play outside, but to alert them when plant emissions are low enough to make outside activities safe.
“We have to defend ourselves,” Flores says. “Because the federal government isn’t going to do it.”
By Thom Hartmann, Independent Media Institute April 17, 2020
The coronovirus crisis is highlighting how dysfunctional states run by Republicans are. This is a feature of GOP rule, not a bug.
For the past 40-plus years, a group of “conservative” billionaires have been working as hard as they can to reshape our federal government from one that provides education, health care, housing, food and other necessities into one that does nothing more than run the military and fight wars.
In the process, “blue states” can continue to flower and prosper, while “red states” go back to their pre-Civil War poverty and local oligarchies. All it’ll take is a small tweak to our federal system, something that the billionaires have been pushing for since the 1970’s.
First, end the federal income tax, as David Koch called for when he ran for vice president in 1980. Most billionaires don’t pay much (if anything) into it anyway; as economists have documented and the New York Times (among others) reported, in 2019 billionaires paid a lower federal tax rate than anybody—including the working poor, the bottom 50 percent of American households.The federal income tax has become a massive annual transfer of wealth from blue states to red states. Just let it go, so the states can raise their own taxes to take care of their citizens without having to subsidize other states.
“Taker” Mississippi, for example, gets about 40 percent of its total budget in federal funds taken from “maker” blue states, with fully 24 percent of its residents being fed via the federal food stamp program (compared to 10 percent of Californians). If they’re so gung-ho about “states’ rights” when it comes to denying citizens the right to vote or to get a safe abortion, or putting limits on carrying assault weapons, why not give them the “right” to pay for their own social programs?
Education, housing, food stamps, health care, and pretty much every other program funded by the income tax (Social Security has its own separate tax and fund) can be picked up by the states. Ending the federal income tax (and leaving the federal government with tariffs and fees to pay for the military, as we did from the founding of the republic up until World War I) would give the states lots of elbow room.
Take away the 30 percent or 40 percent (for the top income brackets; or, before Reagan, even 91 percent to 70 percent on a progressive sliding scale) federal tax rate, and the states can then raise their state income taxes to those levels. Blue states, no longer having to subsidize red states via the federal government, can easily pick up all the social safety net costs and have enough money left over to build a multi-state world-class coronavirus-resistant nonprofit hospital system.
To make things easier, the blue states need to enter into a compact like several New England and Mid-Atlantic states did to control greenhouse gases, a move emulated by California, Oregon and Washington.
For a project this large, though (particularly if it includes a single-payer health care system), it’ll take all of the blue states: an interstate compact including the New England and Mid-Atlantic states, the West Coast states, and the few remaining blue states in the Midwest like Illinois and Minnesota. And with their “pact” to decide when and how to open their states after the coronavirus crisis ends, numerous blue states have already laid the foundation for exactly this.
America’s wealthiest billionaires, including Walmart’s Walton family, the Kochs, and Jeff Bezos, have famously worked to gut the right of workers to form unions; fine, let them have their federal “right to work for less” law. But don’t forbid the blue states from enforcing union rights; they’re the key to the prosperous middle class America had between the 1940’s and Reagan’s election in 1980, and blue states are all about prosperity.
When the red states start to collapse or see a mass exodus of their people to blue states, let them join the compact but, as with the European Union, only if they agree to the terms of the Blue State Compact: higher taxes and fully funded health, education and welfare programs, as well as high-functioning infrastructure to support modern business activity.
Pick your metric: Livability, family-friendliness, quality of health care, quality and availability of education, “personal freedom,” economic strength, job growth, business climate, worker rights… in nearly every case, blue states outrank red states, and often by a huge margin.
While the variation in GDP growth between the world’s top 20 economies averages around 1.75 percent, America’s blue states have grown 3.5 percent more than red states since the Great Recession. Blue states can definitely take care of themselves.
As part of their interstate compact, blue states could even define their own regulatory programs to keep their air and water clean and their food and drugs safe, as California has done for years with auto emissions. Without their taxes being sucked away to red states, the Compact can afford to create its own versions of the FDA, EPA, USDA and OSHA.
Ending the federal income tax (or dialing it back to functional meaninglessness) and creating an interstate compact like this would require a few steps, but they’ve been followed numerous times in American history.
The federal income tax, authorized in 1913 by the 16th Amendment, has been raised and lowered repeatedly in the more than 100 years since its inception. It’s been as low as a single-digit percent and as high as 91 percent. Given that the GOP has been begging for years to cut it as much as possible, if the Democrats in Congress were to offer to cut it to 1 percent or whatever minimum would, along with tariffs and fees, provide for the core functions of government (Army, Congress, SCOTUS, White House, etc.), it’s hard to imagine that the Republicans could say no.
Similarly, although Section 10 of Article I of the Constitution says, “No state shall, without the consent of Congress, … enter into any agreement or compact with another state,” that consent hasn’t been routinely withheld when interstate compacts were formed to do everything from controlling pollution to disposing of nuclear waste. This should be a viable idea.
Speaking to a group of 450 billionaires and multimillionaires, Charles Koch, in 2015, compared their struggle to that, according to the Washington Post, of “Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” Not to mention George Washington.
“Look at the American revolution,” Koch said, “the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement. All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome an injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”
A staple argument among America’s conservative uber-rich, going all the way back to their reaction to Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s, has been that the federal government needs to stop interfering with states, and that federal regulations and subsidies are distorting markets and holding back “the magic of the free market.”
They tried their experiments with Chile and Russia, “libertarianizing” those nations’ economies, and the results were less than spectacular. Perhaps they can do better with the states they already control (via Charles Koch’s ALEC, for example) once those states are unencumbered by federal taxes, regulations or the “stifling” effect of federal welfare and subsidy programs.
The right-wing billionaire definition of “freedom” includes the right to poverty, the right to die without health care, the right to be uneducated and illiterate, and the right to be hungry and homeless. Red states seem to like this, since they repeatedly vote for it; we should let them have it.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
And about half of this historic drought can be blamed on man-made global warming, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
Researchers focused on a nine-state area from Oregon and Wyoming down through California and New Mexico, plus a sliver of southwestern Montana and parts of northern Mexico. They used thousands of tree rings to compare a drought that started in 2000 and is still going (despite a wet 2019) to four previous megadroughts since the year 800.
Using soil moisture as the key measurement, they found only one other drought that was as big — and was probably slightly bigger. That one began in 1575, just 10 years after St. Augustine, the first European city in the United States, was founded, and it ended before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620.
What’s happening now is “a drought bigger than what modern society has seen,” said study lead author A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University.
Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who wasn’t involved in the research, called the work important because it provides evidence “that human-caused climate change transformed what might have otherwise been a moderate long-term drought into a severe event comparable to the ‘megadroughts’ of centuries past.”
What’s happening is that a natural but moderate drought is being worsened by temperatures that are 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit (or 1.6 degrees Celsius) hotter than in the past and that suck moisture out of the ground, Williams said.
“We’ve been increasingly drifting into a world that’s getting dryer,” Williams said.
To quantify the role of global warming, researchers used 31 computer models to compare what’s happening now to what would happen in a hypothetical world without the burning of fossil fuels that spews billions of tons of heat-trapping gases. They found that, on average, 47% of the drought could be blamed on human-caused climate change.
There’s debate among scientists over whether this current drought warrants the title “megadrought” because it has lasted only two decades — so far — while others are at least 28 years long.
Climate scientist Clara Deser at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who wasn’t part of the study, said that while the research is good, she thinks the deep drought has to last another decade or so to qualify as a “megadrought.”
Williams said he understands the concern and that’s why the study calls it “an emerging megadrought.”
“It’s still going on and it’s 21 years long,” Williams said. “This drought looks like one of the worst ones of the last millennium except for the fact that it hasn’t lasted as long.”
University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck, who studies the Southwestern climate and was not part of the study, calls it “the first observed multidecadal megadrought in recorded U.S. history.”
Although last year was wet, the recent rain and snow was not nearly enough to make up for the deep drought years before, said Williams, who added that past megadroughts have had wet years.
The U.S. drought monitor puts much of Oregon, California, Colorado, Utah and Nevada and good chunks of New Mexico, Arizona and Idaho in abnormally dry, moderate or severe drought conditions. Wyoming is the only state Williams studied that doesn’t have large areas of drought.
This week, water managers warned that the Rio Grande is forecast to have water flows less than half of normal, while New Mexico’s largest reservoir is expected to top out at about one-third of its 30-year average.
This is “what we can expect going forward in a world with continued global warming,” said Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who wasn’t part of the study.
Fueled in part by human-caused climate change, a “megadrought” appears to be emerging in the western U.S., a study published Thursday suggests.
In fact, the nearly-20-year drought is almost as bad or worse than any in the past 1,200 years, scientists say.
Megadroughts – defined as intense droughts that last for decades or longer – once plagued the Desert Southwest. Thanks to global warming, an especially fierce one appears to be coming back:
“We now have enough observations of current drought and tree-ring records of past drought to say that we’re on the same trajectory as the worst prehistoric droughts,” said study lead author A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University, in a statement. This is “a drought bigger than what modern society has seen.”
Scientists say that about half of this historic drought can be blamed on man-made global warming. Some of the impacts today include shrinking reservoirs and worsening wildfire seasons.
Since temperatures are projected to keep rising, it is likely the drought will continue for the near future – or fade briefly only to return, researchers say.
The study covers an area stretching across nine U.S. states from Oregon and Montana down through California, New Mexico and part of northern Mexico.
Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who wasn’t part of the study, called the research important because it provides evidence “that human-caused climate change transformed what might have otherwise been a moderate long-term drought into a severe event comparable to the ‘megadroughts’ of centuries past.”
Williams said that “because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts. We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while.
“But going forward, we’ll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to go back into drought,” he said.
Williams said the region could stay dry for centuries. “That’s not my prediction right now, but it’s possible.”
Naturally occurring western megadroughts have taken place many times before. In fact, most of the USA’s droughts of the past century, even the 1930’s Dust Bowl that forced migrations of Oklahomans and others from the Plains, “were exceeded in severity and duration multiple times by droughts during the preceding 2,000 years,” the National Climate Assessment said.
The difference now, of course, is the western USA is home to more than 70 million people who weren’t here for the previous medieval megadroughts. The implications are far more daunting.
University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck, who studies southwestern climate and was not part of the study, calls this drought “the first observed multidecadal megadrought in recorded U.S. history.”
To identify past droughts, scientists studied thousands of tree rings to find out how much – or little – rain fell hundreds of years ago. Scientists used historical data in combination with several computer model simulations to reach their conclusions.
One additional worrisome fact from the study was that the 20th century was the wettest century in the entire 1,200-year record. It was during that time that the population boomed in the western U.S., and that has continued.
“The 20th century gave us an overly optimistic view of how much water is potentially available,” said study co-author Benjamin Cook, a NASA climate scientist, in a statement.
“It goes to show that studies like this are not just about ancient history,” he said. “They’re about problems that are already here.”
The study was published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science.
Contributing: The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The pandemic sweeping the world will turn global economic growth “sharply negative” in 2020, triggering the worst fallout since the 1930’s Great Depression, with only a partial recovery seen in 2021, the head of the International Monetary Fund said.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva painted a far bleaker picture of the social and economic impact of the new coronavirus than even a few weeks ago, noting governments had already undertaken fiscal stimulus measures of $8 trillion, but more would likely be needed.
She said the crisis would hit emerging markets and developing countries hardest of all, which would then need hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid.
“Just three months ago, we expected positive per capita income growth in over 160 of our member countries in 2020,” she said on Thursday in remarks prepared for delivery ahead of next week’s IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings.
“Today, that number has been turned on its head: we now project that over 170 countries will experience negative per capita income growth this year.”
If the pandemic faded in the second half of the year, the IMF expected a partial recovery in 2021, Georgieva said, but she warned the situation could also get worse.
“I stress there is tremendous uncertainty about the outlook: it could get worse depending on many variable factors, including the duration of the pandemic,” she said.
The IMF, which has 189 member countries, will release its detailed World Economic Outlook forecasts on Tuesday.
The novel coronavirus that emerged in China in December has raced around the globe, infecting 1.41 million people and killing 83,400, according to a Reuters tally.
Georgieva said the pandemic was hitting both rich and poor countries, but many in Africa, Asia and Latin America were at higher risk because they had weaker health systems. They were also unable to implement social distancing in their densely populated cities and poverty-stricken slums.
She said investors had already removed some $100 billion in capital from those economies, more than three times the outflow seen during the same period of the global financial crisis.
With commodity prices down sharply, emerging market and developing countries would need trillions of dollars to fight the pandemic and rescue their economies, she said.
“They urgently need help,” she said, estimating hundreds of billions of dollars would have to be pumped in from outside sources since those governments could only cover a portion of the costs on their own, and many already had high debts.
Georgieva said it was encouraging that all governments had sprung into action, enacting some $8 trillion in fiscal measures and massive monetary measures.
To ensure a future recovery, Georgieva called for continued efforts to contain the virus and support health systems, while averting export controls that could slow the flow of vital medical equipment and food.
“The actions we take now will determine the speed and strength of our recovery,” she said.
It was critical to provide affected people and companies with “large, timely and targeted” measures such as wage subsidies, extended unemployment benefits and adjusted loan terms, while reducing stress to the financial system.
Coordinated fiscal stimulus was critical, and monetary policy should remain accommodative, where inflation remained low.
“Those with greater resources and policy space will need to do more; others, with limited resources will need more support,” she said.
The IMF was created for times like these, and stood ready to deploy its $1 trillion in lending capacity, Georgieva said.
The Fund’s executive board had approved doubling its emergency funding to $100 billion to meet the requests of over 90 countries, and staff were racing to process those requests.
The IMF was also looking at ways to provide additional liquidity support, including through creation of a new short-term liquidity line, and solutions that would allow lending even to countries whose debt was unsustainable, she said.
The IMF was also looking to increase its Catastrophe Relief and Containment Fund, which provides grants for the poorest countries to cover IMF debt service payments, to $1.4 billion from around $200 million, she said.
To further aid the poorest economies, the Fund and the World Bank were urging creditors such as China and other countries to temporarily stop collecting debt payments on their bilateral loans.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and David Lawder; Editing by Sam Holmes)
Stefanie Wal April 3, 2020
It’s been a few weeks since the COVID-19 pandemic halted the world, forcing us to retreat into our homes and forgo physical social contact—and it doesn’t look like we’ll be freed any time soon. Though grocery stores are open for business, authorities from governors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have asked that we minimize our outings into the public world, which got us thinking: what better time to plant your own vegetable garden? Not only could this help you skip the trip to the store once the produce comes in, but it also could provide some much-needed stress relief. We asked some gardening experts for tips and tricks to design a garden and grow produce in your backyard or patio.
Designing a Garden
Before you dive in with your trowel and seeds, you’ll want to spend some time designing your garden’s layout. Start by observing how much sunlight is in your yard or patio. “Consider where the vegetable garden is going. It should go in the sunniest spot, as most vegetables require lots of direct sun,” says landscape designer Kathryn Herman. But don’t fret if you have a little bit of shade. “Some vegetables, like salad greens, can take a small amount of shade,” says landscape designer Deborah Nevins.
When it comes to designing a layout, keep in mind that gardens take work. You’ll need to be out there watering, weeding, and harvesting, so you’ll want to leave areas between your beds where you can tread safely. “We like making the garden beds easy to access, so a three-foot-wide by eight-foot-long bed with space on either side allows circulation to get to both sides,” says Herman. “The space on either side of the bed can be lawn, or it can be gravel, or it can be a paved surface.”
And if you don’t have a full yard, don’t worry—there are plenty of ways to make do with a small space like a patio, a window box, or even a section of your driveway. “Plant in containers or a small raised bed,” says Tara Nolan, author of Gardening Your Front Yard and co-owner of Savvy Gardening. “You just need to make sure the space gets at least six to eight hours of sunlight a day. There are many compact plant varieties that are perfect for small spaces. Look for words like mini, dwarf, or patio on seed packets.”
Choosing What to Plant
There’s quite a variety of produce to choose from for your vegetable garden, and the good news for beginners is that it’s relatively easy to grow the vast majority of them. “Plants are really simple, especially vegetable plants,” says Shelby DeVore, founder of homesteading website Farminence. “There are two main types of vegetable plants that are suitable for first-time gardeners: fruit crops like tomatoes and cucumbers, and vegetative crops that are grown for their leaves, like spinach and lettuce.”
To help you narrow down your selection, consider the size of your garden—and the colors you want to see. “There is a large variety of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and lettuces that come in many forms and colors, which can add another level of interest to the garden,” says Herman. “These vegetables are suitable for a smaller bed, while vegetables like squash, cucumbers, and melons require more space to spread out.”
Something else to think about: Some plants grow better during different times of year. “Cool-weather crops like peas; root veggies like beets and carrots; and members of the Brassica genus, like cabbage, kale, and brussels sprouts, can be sown in early spring, while the heat-lovers like tomatoes, melons, and cucumbers are planted after all threat of frost has passed,” says Nolan. “Google your region and the area’s frost-free date, which will help you know when to plant.”
And, of course, grow what you want to eat! “Red Russian kale is one of my personal favorites,” says designer Christopher Spitzmiller. “It’s easy to grow and has nearly flat leaves that are easy to roll up and cut into small coleslaw-like pieces that make a great salad all summer and into the early winter.”
Gardening Tips
Follow these tips from our experts and you’ll be on your way to self-grown fresh produce in no time!
1. Consider starting your garden indoors if it’s still cold out
Although it’s just about the right time of year to get outdoors, you can start your garden inside if you’re in a colder climate. “We have lots of seeds started under grow lights in our garage,” says Spitzmiller. “We’ve started all sorts of lettuces, cabbages, and arugula.”
2. Make sure you’re using good soil
When it comes to gardening, it’s crucial to have healthy soil for robust growth. “You have to determine the quality of your soil regarding nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, and you need to see if the soil drains well,” says Nevins. And don’t forget fertilizer! “Composted manure can be worked in to help add organic matter into the soil,” says Herman.
3. Check on them daily
Pay attention to your plants, as their physical appearance can alert you to any issues they might have. “Plants that aren’t getting enough water will be droopy, but most people know that,” says DeVore. “They’ll also let you know if they have a disease or nutritional issue. Check the leaves for yellow or brown spots. Wilted, yellow, purple, or curled leaves can be a sign that something is wrong.”
4. Don’t get discouraged
“First-timers should know that even the most experienced gardeners can have issues, and not to be discouraged,” says Nolan. “Sometimes issues like pests, or even excessive rain, can affect crops. The key is to figure out what went wrong and how you can mitigate those circumstances next time.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Plant these sun lovers for long-lasting color that returns every year
By Arricca Sansone March 31, 2020
Got sun? Perennials that thrive in full sun, considered 6 or more hours per day, provide long-lasting color to gardens or containers on your deck, patio or balcony. Best of all, they come back every year so you’ll get more bang for your buck! For starters, read the plant tag or description to learn if a plant will survive in your USDA Hardiness zone (find yours here). Dig a hole about twice the size of the pot, then set it in the ground or pot at the same level it was in the container. Water thoroughly, and keep an eye on it during dry spells. Even drought-tolerant plants need TLC the first season, so don’t ignore them and let them dry out. Then be patient! Perennials may not look like they’re doing much for the first season or two. In fact, there’s a saying that perennials crawl the first year, walk the second, and take off running the third season in the ground.
Here are a few of our favorite hardy perennials for full sun:
