California’s Raging Wildfires as You’ve Never Seen Them Before

Time

California’s Raging Wildfires as You’ve Never Seen Them Before

TIME Staff, October 9, 2017

Lake Fire | Big Bear June 2015

On the Front Lines of California’s Increasingly Devastating Fires

Video by Jeff Frost | Text by Josh Raab

Forest fires have long been a part of life in California, but not always like this. In recent years, artist Jeff Frost, based near Joshua Tree National Park, has watched as fires raged across the West Coast with increasing frequency and intensity. “Fire is a natural part of nature,” he says, “but what you’ll hear veteran firefighters say over and over, ‘I’ve never seen fire behavior like this.” Fire seasons are also starting earlier and ending later, on average 78 days longer than they were in 1970. On Monday, late in the fire season, Frost was chasing blazes in Sonoma and Napa counties, which have scorched tens of thousands of acres and led to widespread evacuations, including in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Four years ago, Frost, now 39, decided to begin documenting the fires. He put himself through the most intense fire-safety training courses he could find, enrolling in courses sanctioned by the U.S. Forest Service, then equipped his camper with a bed and a generator and headed to the front lines of California’s biggest fires.

Bluecut Fire | Cahone Pass Aug. 2016

Frost’s project, “California on Fire”, will be a feature-length art film combining his wildfire time lapses. The non-narrative film will look at forest fires loosely through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The stages will follow the life of wildfires, looking at their causes and effects from their ignition to the twisted metal and charred forests they leave behind. Frost is especially interested in exploring the role human involvement plays in these fires, both intentional and unintentional. “Human beings are stewards of the planet,” he says. “It’s just a question of whether we’re good stewards or bad stewards.”

On scene, Frost shoots sequences of hundreds of still photos, which he then combines into time-lapse videos. He previously used this approach at Joshua Tree National Park and at CERN, the research center renowned for building particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.

For the “California on Fire” project, Frost has shot more than 300,000 images at over 40 forest fires, resulting in over 500 time lapses ranging from 1 to 30 seconds. The blazes he has documented include the Erskine wildfire outside of Bakersfield in June 2016 that destroyed 386 structures and led to two deaths, and the King wildfire near Lake Tahoe in September 2014, which destroyed 80 structures and scorched almost 100,000 acres of land. While he is fascinated by fire, Frost’s obsession is to create an art piece that speaks to a larger reality: The role climate change plays in the fires.

Erskine Fire | Lake Isabella June 2016

“The intent is to show the effect of climate change right now, not just in the future,” he says. “Burning people’s houses down is not abstract.” Over the past three decades, climate change has doubled the area burned by forest fires in the western United States and the fire season has grown significantly longer. A number of climate-related issues are intensifying fires. Drier climates and more available fuel cause fires to start easier, burn longer and move faster. In addition, forest fires lower the number of trees that can absorb the carbon dioxide that causes climate change in the first place.

The federal cost of fighting forest fires has risen substantially. Fires cost the U.S. Forest Service more than $2 billion in 2015, over half of its annual budget, up from $240 million in 1985 (not adjusted for inflation).

LaTuna Fire | Los Angeles September 2017

While shooting the Rocky fire in Lake County in July 2015, Frost followed a firefighting team into a valley only to find himself completely surrounded by flames until a backup team arrived. “The wind was whipping across the hillside and catching grass on fire. I was sitting in the truck freaking out,” he says. “There were droves of insects running into the truck trying to get away from the fire. We had to wait for two hours before somebody could come in and retrieve us. That fire was a total of 70,000 acres but that day it burned 50,000.” Frost’s point-of-view video below documents his close call.

Rocky Fire | Clear Lake July 2015

After almost four years, Frost has shifted away from the front lines and turned his focus to covering the aftermath. He is shooting scorched landscapes and the remains of cars left behind. Recently, he started picking up pieces of charred aluminum, polishing them and displaying them in art exhibits to bring awareness to the power of forest fires. He expects to complete his time-lapse film in early 2018. A pre-public release will go out to his Patreon followers before he submits the film to Cannes and Sundance.

Jeff Frost is an artist based outside of Los Angeles. Follow him on instagram @frostjeff.

josh raab IS a multimedia editor at time. follow him on instagram @instagraabit.

Miles of Algae Covering Lake Erie

The New York Times

Miles of Algae Covering Lake Erie

By Jugal K. Patel and Yuliya Parshina-Kottas October 3, 2017

A potentially harmful algae bloom covered more than 700 square miles in the western basin of Lake Erie last week, turning the lake bright green and alarming residents and local officials.

Source: Landsat 8

Scientists say that algae blooms have been a growing problem for Lake Erie since the 2000s, mostly because of the extensive use of fertilizer on the region’s farmland.

The algae blooms contain cyanobacteria, which, under certain conditions, can produce toxins that contaminate drinking water and cause harm to the local ecosystem.

During last week’s bloom, the amount of toxins in the algae remained low at the intake points where towns draw water from the lake, according to officials.

Lake Erie’s algae blooms are driven by a landscape dominated by agriculture.

Rain causes nutrients from fertilizers on farmland to run off into rivers.

The nutrients travel along rivers, eventually reaching Lake Erie.

In the Maumee River, the largest tributary to any of the Great Lakes, green algae was visible last week in an aerial photograph.

According to experts, excess nutrients that are transported by the Maumee River can be a good indicator of how severe an algae bloom in the lake will be.

Source: Aerial Associates Photography, Inc., Zachary Haslick

Millions of people get drinking water from Lake Erie. Previous blooms have been toxic.

While not all algae blooms are toxic, they can produce a type of toxin called microcystin that can cause serious liver damage under certain conditions. Dangerous levels of the toxin caused Toledo, Ohio, to shut down the drinking water supply of a half million residents for three days in 2014.

In total, almost 3 million people get drinking water from the central basin of Lake Erie. Officials have been testing the intake pipes in the lake where towns draw water and report that the current toxin levels are low.

Source: NASA MODIS Note: Only intake points for towns and cities in Ohio are shown.

The blooms are hurting the region’s economy.

Lake Erie attracts millions of visitors for beaches and recreation like fishing, and many businesses stand to lose money during large algae blooms.

David Spangler, vice president of the Lake Erie Charter Boat Association, describes the algae as a musty-smelling, lime-green skin on the lake’s surface that’s so thick you could write your name in it.

“An awful lot of money may go someplace else other than Ohio if we continue having these issues in the lake,” Mr. Spangler said. He noted that in 2015, an algae bloom kept boats out of the lake for six to seven weeks.

The algae blooms are getting larger.

Since the 2000s, algae blooms in Lake Erie have become much more extensive.

According to one study by the Carnegie Institute for Science and Stanford University , most of the increase in the size of the blooms can be attributed to a rise in the amount of dissolved phosphorus flowing into the lake.

In the 1980s, researchers started tracking algae blooms in Lake Erie. They were mostly small, but changes in farming practices caused them to spike.

The blooms are expected to grow more harmful as global warming changes rainfall patterns.

According to local experts, storms have become more intense in the region, carrying more nutrients from the farmland into the lake.

Another study from the Carnegie Institution for Science shows that extensive algae blooms will continue to grow throughout the continental United States and around the globe, especially in Southeast Asia.

The mayor of Toledo, Paula Hicks-Hudson, wrote a letter to President Trump on Sept. 26, calling on the federal government to declare Lake Erie impaired, which would allow for the lake’s nutrient loads to be regulated under the Clean Water Act.

“There is something very wrong with our country when our rivers and lakes turn green,” Ms. Hicks-Hudson wrote in her letter. “As I look out my office at a green river, I can tell you one thing: The status quo is not working.”

Correction: Oct. 5, 2017

An article on Wednesday about an algae bloom in Lake Erie misidentified a toxin produced by algae blooms. It is microcystin, not microcystis.

Ohio mayor asks Trump for help combating Lake Erie algae

Washington Post

Ohio mayor asks Trump for help combating Lake Erie algae

In this Sept. 20, 2017 photo, a catfish appears on the shoreline in the algae-filled waters at the end of 113th Street in the Point Place section of North Toledo, Ohio. The 2017 algae bloom has stretched along the shores of Ohio, Michigan and Ontario, Canada, and will be among the largest in recent years. The 2015 bloom was the largest on record, covering an area the size of New York City. (Andy Morrison/The Blade via AP) (Associated Press)

By John Seewer | AP October 7, 2017

TOLEDO, Ohio — Three years after toxic algae in Lake Erie tainted the drinking water for more than 400,000 people, many are still leery about what’s coming out of their faucets.

Some have taken to stockpiling bottled water in the summer months when algae blooms blanket the western end in the shallowest of the Great Lakes.

Store shelves were emptied of bottled water a week ago when algae pushed into a river that flows through downtown Toledo into the lake, turning the river fluorescent green and sparking rumors that another “do not drink” advisory was looming.

It wasn’t the first time there’s been a run on bottled water even though there have been no water warnings since the first one in 2014.

Toledo’s mayor has asked President Donald Trump for help from the federal government in cleaning up the lake and wants the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to declare the western end impaired, which would allow for increased pollution regulations.

“There is something very wrong with our country when our rivers and lakes turn green,” Mayor Paula Hicks-Hudson wrote in a letter sent to Trump last week. “As I look out my office at a green river, I can tell you one thing: the status quo is not working.”

A message seeking comment on the letter was left with the White House.

Scientists largely blame farm fertilizer runoff and municipal sewage overflows for feeding the algae growth. While there are a number of efforts to tackle the problem, it won’t be solved for years.

This year’s algae bloom has stretched along the shores of Ohio, Michigan and Ontario, Canada, and will be among the largest in recent years. The 2015 bloom was the largest on record, covering an area the size of New York City.

The uncertainty some still have about the Toledo’s drinking water, the mayor said in an interview Wednesday, shows there’s a general mistrust about what some hear from government leaders and how easily rumors spread.

She pointed to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and how residents there were told the water was safe for months despite dangerous lead levels.

“We’re going to do what we can to regain their trust,” said Hicks-Hudson, a Democrat who’s up for re-election in November. “That’s all we can do.”

She said she has spent many hours talking with residents and reassuring them the water is safe. “Some will give me a suspicious look,” she said.

The tap water, she said, is tested daily and more often than the state requires. The city also has invested in upgrading its treatment plant and there’s an early warning system in the lake to notify the plant’s operators when toxic algae is increasing.

The city also has created a site that shows the daily tests on raw and treated water. But that’s not enough for some.

Tammie Nixon, of Toledo, said her family hasn’t drunk the city’s water since officials issued a “do not drink” for two days in September 2014. She was pregnant at the time and now also has a 3-month-old.

“Definitely not with the kids,” she said while loading jugs of milk and water into her car at the grocery. “It’s kind of scary. There’s only so much you can filter out.”

Chief justice: Pay no attention to the rigged election behind the curtain

Detroit Free Press-USA Today

Chief justice: Pay no attention to the rigged election behind the curtain

Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press Columnist October 8, 2017

SCOTUS is lined up to hear cases on topics like labor relations, gerrymandering and voters’ rights. Video available by Newsy Newslook

(Photo: Olivier Douliery, Getty Images)

For 12 years, Chief Justice John Roberts has worked overtime peddling the dubious conceit that he and his life-tenured colleagues on the U.S. Supreme Court are above politics and determined to remain so.

Yet Roberts himself is a consummate politician — a strategist who worries about appearances and harbors a ward heeler’s contempt for the intelligence of the average voter. And his cynicism was on full display last week when justices took up the politically fraught problem of gerrymandering.

Plaintiffs in a case known as Gill v. Whitford want the Supreme Court to rule that Wisconsin legislators violated the U.S. Constitution when they drew district boundaries that systematically diluted the electoral clout of their state’s Democratic voters.

Dickerson: Has Justice Kennedy finally had enough of partisan gerrymandering?
More: State panel approves petition aimed at ending gerrymandering

A lower court ordered Wisconsin to draw a fairer map after concluding that evidence and voting data submitted by the plaintiffs proved Republicans had configured districts designed to preserve their party’s legislative majority even when Democrats win a majority of the popular vote.

Roberts, who knows a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs will jeopardize Republican gerrymanders in more than a dozen other states, wants his colleagues to stay out of a partisan process even simpatico conservatives like Justice Samuel Alito concede is “distasteful.” The chief justice says the public will lose respect for the courts if he and his colleagues stick their noses into all that distastefulness.

Buy Photo

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says voters would think the high court was throwing elections for Democrats if tried to put a stop to gerrymandering. (Photo: Mike Thompson/Detroit Free Press)

But what if a majority party uses its mapmaking prowess to effectively disenfranchise the opposing party’s voters? And what if those aggrieved voters can use the same technological advances their opponents exploited to prove an election was rigged, and even to quantify the advantage its rivals gained by manipulating a state’s political boundaries?

That’s exactly what has happened in the Wisconsin case, as one of the country’s premier scientists explained in a remarkable friend-of-the-court brief filed on behalf of the plaintiffs.

Mapping chromosomes and rigged elections

It’s rare for disinterested third parties to play a decisive role in landmark Supreme Court cases. But the arguments filed by Eric Lander, a geneticist and mathematician who oversees the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, may prove an exception.

Lander was one of the principal leaders of the decade-long effort to map the human genome, and he has advised the White House and the Pentagon on innovative uses of technology for national defense. In a brief that several justices cited during Tuesday’s oral arguments, Lander says the sort of data-crunching the federal government uses to assess whether a nuclear weapon will detonate properly or whether Miami is safely outside the path of a hurricane can be used to prove when political boundaries have been manipulated to guarantee one party the largest possible electoral advantage.

Lander’s argument is a crucial one, because lawsuits challenging the fairness of gerrymandered political districts have foundered on the high court’s doubts that challengers could propose an objective standard for evaluating partisan bias.

Lander says technological advances that allow mapmakers to project likely electoral outcomes in thousands of different scenarios mean that a party that controls the redistricting process can pick the map that yields the most extreme partisan advantage. But he adds that the same analytical methods allow courts to discover when district lines have been manipulated to produce the maximum distortion of the electorate’s will, whether by amplifying the impact of one party’s voters or minimizing its opponents’ ability to muster an electoral majority in most districts.

By comparing the district lines a state has adopted with all the other possible configurations that comply with state and federal law, courts can determine not only whether a given map handicaps one party’s voters, but also how much. Using these reliable analytical tools, Lander says, deciding which of several possible maps yields electoral outcomes most consistent with the majority’s druthers becomes “a mathematical question to which there is a right answer” — exactly the sort of objective test judges worried about the corrosive effects of gerrymandering have been seeking.

Gobbledygook?

Chief Justice Roberts, of course, doesn’t see it that way. During oral arguments last week, he dismissed the evidence Lander and other mathematical analysts have submitted as proof Wisconsin’s legislative elections are rigged as “sociological gobbledygook.”

In another exchange with the plaintiffs’ attorneys, the chief justice appeared to concede that the evidence he disparaged might be persuasive after all, once you took the time to digest it, but hinted that few voters had the patience or smarts to do so.

“The intelligent man on the street is going to say that’s a bunch of baloney,” Roberts insisted. If justices blow the whistle on Republican cheating, he believes, the public will inevitably conclude that they’re simply shilling for Democrats — “And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and the integrity of the decisions of this Court in the eyes of the country.”

Roberts’ argument amounts to a rejection of rational inquiry itself: If the evidence that Wisconsin has violated its citizens’ constitutional rights is too sophisticated for laymen to grasp at first glance, he says, the court would be better off to ignore it.

This is the same cynically anti-intellectual rationale cheerleaders for the fossil fuel industry have marshaled to discredit the evidence of climate change. Until “the intelligent man on the street” has a keener understanding of the role greenhouse gases play in global warming, why should elected officials kowtow to experts who do?

Of course, the same logic could be marshaled to discount the warnings of hurricane forecasters or military strategists trying to anticipate the likely consequences of a military confrontation in the Middle East or on the Korean peninsula. If we don’t understand their calculations, why should we pay any attention to them?

The answer, of course, is that democratic government, like many other aspects of daily life, requires a reasonable deference to those with superior expertise: the surgeon who does hundreds of bypass operations a year, the repair technician who diagnoses malfunctioning furnaces for a living, or the pilot with 10,000 hours of in-flight service under her belt.

Roberts is right to be worried about the credibility of the judiciary, and its capacity to command the confidence of citizens across the political spectrum. But he should be at least as concerned about the credibility of representative democracy itself.

As Paul Smith, who represents the plaintiffs challenging Wisconsin’s legislative map argues, the stakes in Gill v. Whitford are larger than the public’s perception of Justice Roberts and his colleagues.

“If you let this go, if you say … we’re not going to have a judicial remedy for this problem, in 2020 you’re going to have a festival of copycat gerrymandering the likes of which this country has never seen,” Smith warned Roberts near the end of Tuesday’s oral arguments. “Voters everywhere are going to be like voters in Wisconsin, and (say): No, it really doesn’t matter whether I vote.”

Contact Brian Dickerson: bdickerson@freepress.com

Poll Shows Majority Of Americans Want Government To Act On Climate Change, But There’s A Catch

DeSmog

Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science

Poll Shows Majority Of Americans Want Government To Act On Climate Change, But There’s A Catch

By Farron Cousins October 4, 2017

Image: Texas Army National Guardsmen assist residents affected by flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Aug. 27, 2017. Army National Guard photo by Lt. Zachary West.

New polling data provides some inspiring news about the prospects for climate change action in the United States. According to public policy polling conducted by AP-NORC and the Energy Policy Institute at The University of Chicago, 61% of American citizens believe that climate change is a threat that the federal government should actively work to prevent. The poll also reveals that majorities in both major political parties – Democrats and Republicans – accept the fact that climate change is actually happening and that human activity is making it worse.

This data reinforces previous polling data indicating that a majority of American citizens, regardless of party affiliation, believe that climate change is a serious issue demanding urgent political action.

What sets the new set of data apart from the rest is also the part that makes it slightly less uplifting.

The poll found that 51% of Americans are willing to pay $1 per month to combat the growing threat of climate change, but when you start look at numbers higher than a dollar per month, the willingness of American citizens to foot the bill begins to decline sharply.

Additionally, the poll found a majority of citizens are against fracking, especially when they learn about the negative health effects from the oil and gas drilling process. However, support for fracking rises to nearly 41% when citizens are told that it could save them a few hundred dollars each year on their electric bills.

The new data helps to provide a clearer picture of how American citizens tend to view most non-social issues, and that is through the lens of finance.

When presented with data showing that dirty energy is harmful — but might save them money (in the short term) — they gravitate towards the “saving money” rather “saving lives” side of the climate equation.

But the fact that most people are willing to shell out even one dollar per month is actually a giant leap forward in terms of Americans’ willingness to address the growing threat of climate change, even if they may have to foot part of the bill.

Another interesting point about these polls is that the data was actually collected prior to the devastating string of hurricanes that hit the US — Harvey, Irma, and Maria — that captured the attention of the public and brought the issue of climate change to the forefront, albeit for a brief period of time.

There’s no doubt that the federal government could and should devote a lot more taxpayer money to fight climate change. Instead, Washington is currently choosing to subsidize an industry that is struggling to survive, and is significantly responsible for the climate change that’s hurting us now.

Why Not Fund Climate Action With Polluter Profits?

Ultimately, when it comes to paying for action to combat climate change, American citizens might consider asking their representatives in Washington to hold polluting industry responsible for funding the US response to climate change. After all, the fossil fuel industry bears significant responsibility for our current and future global warming predicament.

A recent report found that subsidies to the fossil fuel industry top $5 trillion a year – money that could instead be spent on infrastructure to protect low-lying cities from flooding in the event of rising waters, for instance. That money could also be used to provide more subsidies to the renewable energy sector which is already growing at a pace that far exceeds that of the fossil fuel sector.

Perhaps if we end the federal life support going to fossil fuel companies — a form of corporate welfare that is far from necessary — we could finally start addressing climate change without having to ask taxpayers to cough up a few extra dollars every month.

Republicans Are Kicking People Off Food Stamps

Newsweek

Under Trump’s New Budget, If You Don’t Work, You Don’t Eat: Republicans Are Kicking People Off Food Stamps

By Christianna Silva October 7, 2017

UPDATE: The budget resolution passed by the House on Thursday will push millions of already struggling people off food stamps, leaving the neediest Americans—children and the elderly among them—without food.

The $4.1-trillion budget will take over $150 billion away from several poverty programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps low-income people keep food on the table, by giving them small amounts of supplemental money to spend on groceries—anywhere from $100 a month to $700 a month for a family of five, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

This budget isn’t the newest problem SNAP has had to face. The number of people on SNAP ebbs and flows with the economy, but only 75 percent of people who are eligible for SNAP actually participate in the program, the website Snap to Health says. And it’s because applying can get really complicated.

Evan Teske, a 26-year-old medical student, needed assistance while he was working for Americorps. After graduating from college in 2014, Americorps assigned him to Focuspoint Family Research Center, which focuses on education from childhood to adulthood. His stipend just wasn’t enough.

“So I had to apply for food stamps,” Teske told Newsweek.

The application process was pretty confusing, he said, but Americorps helped him apply. Then, after about a year and a half, he was taken off.

“I got taken off by the government against my will because every six months I had to update my paperwork so they could see how much they were giving me,” Teske said. “And at one point, when food stamps and a stipend still wasn’t quite enough, I had help from my parents and family members to help me out in a pinch. When I put that down in the updated documents, they didn’t call it an income, but they said it was extra. So they cut me off.”

Teske worked for Americorps for the next six months and then moved to New Mexico for medical school. He said SNAP and food stamps made his life more livable.

Teske was taken off food stamps because his family helped him when he was needing a bit more. If Trump’s budget proposal passes the Senate, as it has already passed the House, many more people will be bumped off SNAP—and a lot of them won’t have the familial safety net that Teske did.

“SNAP is the first line of defense against hunger in the U.S.,” Ellen Vollinger, the legal director who directs SNAP work at the Food Research and Action Center, told Newsweek. “It’s the one program that’s available all over the country to serve people who need food. It’s the most accessible and available to people.”

But lately, for two big reasons, fewer people have been taking advantage of SNAP. First of all, the economy is doing better, which means fewer people are struggling with poverty and fewer people need the program.

In 2009, about 32 million people received SNAP benefits. The number increased during the great recession to an annual high of 47.6 million in 2013. Then, as the economy began to improve, it was down to 43 million in April 2010. And it’s continue to show. From April 2015 to April 2016, it was all the way down by 1.9 million participants.

“The unemployment rate has often been a pretty good indicator for the need for SNAP. As it comes down, there might be a bit of a lag, but we see SNAP come down,” Vollinger said.

The second reason, however, is that some states are cutting corners by making it more difficult to apply for SNAP so they make more room in their budget.

“A lot of people don’t know that they’re eligible,” Ginger Zielinskie, president and CEO of Benefits Data Trust, a company that connects people with the services they need, told Newsweek. “The first barrier is awareness. … It can be a really complicated application process.”

Moreover, some state laws don’t allow people to stay on SNAP for longer than a few months unless they have jobs, are training for jobs or are doing community service. But in times of economic stress, there aren’t always jobs available for them.

Take, for example, Devon Bracher, who graduated from Vanderbilt with an engineering degree and was living with her two sisters in Portland, Oregon, when she applied to get on SNAP after not being able to find a job.

“Technically, my residency was in Virginia, but all my work experience was in Tennessee,” Bracher told Newsweek. “I didn’t have a job, I was looking for jobs. This was my first year after graduating. That was part of what’s complicated. I wasn’t an Oregon resident, but I didn’t have an official job in Virginia. Virginia told me to apply to Tennessee.”

So Bracher went through the online application for SNAP. But the system had her call a SNAP representative because she wasn’t a Tennessee resident.

“I probably called maybe like five different times and the line was always busy,” Bracher said. Eventually, she just gave up.

“I benefitted a lot from being able to live with family,” Bracher said. “My sisters helped a lot.”

Not everyone has a family like Bracher’s, and if the proposed cuts to SNAP make its way through, the states will be responsible to keep families from starving.

In Alabama, for instance, the number of able-bodied people on SNAP has dropped from around 5,000 to 800. Most of it is because of the regulations states are forced to place on the benefits so that they can make their budget, a trend that’s seen all over the U.S.

Californians have concerns people who need programs like SNAP won’t be able to access them under Trump’s new budget, according to Jared Call from California Food Policy Advocates.

“We try to think of people first, but this particular [budget proposal] … would really seek to shift a substantial share to the states or propose penalties to put states on the hook and that’s just not something that state budgets are prepared to absorb,” he told Newsweek.

“California would go down $1.8 billion to just keep even. So you’re faced with cutting other important services or education or other programs or cutting benefit amounts or cutting eligibility,” Call said. “We want SNAP to go to the people who need it, but this proposal does not work that way. There is no way to cut SNAP without impacting benefit levels or eligibility. Ninety-four percent of these funds go directly to benefits, there’s no fat to cut.”

One in six people in America faces hunger, more than almost any other country in the developed world. If this budget goes through, and important programs like SNAP are axed, that number will be on the rise.

Story was updated to clarify the number of SNAP participants between 2015 and 2016 and the number of able-bodied people on SNAP in Alabama.

The U.S. Could Learn From Australia’s Gun Control

Fusion is with Splinter

Two decades ago, Australia took action on gun control after a mass shooting.

Now, gun violence has drastically declined in the wake of some of the strictest gun laws in the world:

The U.S. Could Learn From Australia's Gun Control

Two decades ago, Australia took action on gun control after a mass shooting.Now, gun violence has drastically declined in the wake of some of the strictest gun laws in the world:

Posted by Fusion on Friday, October 6, 2017

Game-Changing Lamp Powered by Gravity Could Provide Light to Billions

EcoWatch via ZINC

Gravitylight is changing lives in Africa

Game-Changing Lamp Powered by Gravity Could Provide Light to Billions

by Elaine Chow

Solar-powered electricity systems have often been touted as a solution for those living without reliable access to electricity, but another Earthly force is also readily available (and doesn’t surrender to inclement weather or nightfall): Gravity.

That’s the idea behind the GravityLight—a lamp that only requires the weight of a bag of sand or rocks to provide light. And for the 1.3 billion people in the world who live in “energy poverty,” this simple yet genius idea could be a game changer.

For the majority of people without reliable access to electricity, dangerous and polluting kerosene is the primary source for light. But as designers Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves said in their Indiegogo campaign, the GravityLight is “a low-cost [less than $10], safe and reliable alternative to the kerosene lamp, one that costs nothing to run, doesn’t need batteries and pays for itself within weeks switching from kerosene.”

It doesn’t take much to provide a lot of power. Photo Credit: GravityLight

It basically works like a hand-cranked lantern. To activate the GravityLight’s bright LED, the user attaches a weighted bag that’s at least a 12 kg (about 26 lbs) to a beaded chain. The user then lifts the bag up by pulling on the chain.

When user releases the bag, the bag’s slow descent to the floor (at about 1mm a second) helps power an internal DC generator that runs at thousands of rotations per minute. With these easy steps, the lamp can provide enough light for up to 30 minutes and can be repeated over and over as needed.

This simple pulley system allows the process to repeat indefinitely. Photo Credit: GravityLight

The project, which reached half of its $199,000 crowdsourcing goal in only 10 days and is nearing complete funding, is actually version 2.0 of the lamp. After the first version of the lamp, called GL01, was fully funded by a 2014 Indiegogo campaign, the makers tested it on more than 1,300 off-grid families around the globe. According to the designers, more than 90 percent of those who tried the lamp preferred it over a kerosene lamp.

This current version allegedly hammered out GL01’s kinks and is also brighter, simpler, lasts longer and stays lit even while it’s being charged, Gizmodo Australia reported.

Makers of the lamp are hoping to “empower those without electricity” and enable people to “break free from the economic, health and environmental hazards of kerosene lamps.”

Did you know 28% of Africa’s rural pop have electricity @UNDPAfrica @WorldResources #SE4ALL http://t.co/SQPR9Rdhdv pic.twitter.com/RIu3aO4p6b
— GravityLight (@GravityLight) May 22, 2015

The goal of the crowdsourcing campaign is to set up an assembly line in Kenya as well as provide local jobs and skills.

Now that’s a bright idea.

Tom Steyer: I’m a billionaire. Please raise my taxes

Los Angeles Times Op ED

Tom Steyer: I’m a billionaire. Please raise my taxes

Tom Steyer, the author of this article, speaks at the California Democratic Convention, in Los Angeles on March 8, 2014. (Los Angeles Times)

Tom Steyer October 5, 2017

As a billionaire, I would profit substantially from the tax cuts proposed last week by President Trump and the Republican Party. But I am strongly opposed to even one more penny in cuts for rich people and corporations.

My reason is simple: Tax cuts for the rich defund the critical public programs on which American families depend.

Three decades of data prove that tax cuts for the wealthy do not “trickle down” to working people or grow the overall economy. Since the Reagan era, Republicans have prescribed cuts for rich people and corporations as a cure-all. But every time they put their theory into practice, the rich just get richer and everyone else gets left behind. When such cuts drain the government of the revenue it needs to pay for essential services like public education, Medicare and Social Security, Republicans then seize the opportunity to shrink those programs.

Consider Kansas, where Republicans recently had the chance to pursue their tax-cut fantasy with an extreme anti-tax experiment. In 2012, they slashed taxes and promised fantastic growth. Instead, their scheme blew a hole in the state budget. The resulting shortfall in revenue forced severe cuts to public education and other essential programs, hurt working families and drove businesses out of the state.

Let’s raise taxes on the rich and use the money to invest directly in the American people.

Similar experiments at the national level have left the U.S. teetering on the edge of dangerous economic inequality. Today, the top 1% of the population takes more than 20% of the income generated here in a year. That’s more than double the share that rich people took in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the earnings of America’s working families have stagnated.

This degree of inequality is a major crisis, yet Republicans are proposing to exacerbate it by stripping trillions more in government revenue. Indeed, the GOP plan would put the country on a path to permanent economic inequality — and maybe that’s the point.

Some members of the ruling class are making a concerted effort to expand the wealth gap. A gang of powerful interests, led by the Koch brothers, launched a campaign to build support for the tax overhaul before it even existed. The coalition of wealthy conservatives spent tens of millions to mislead Americans about tax cuts. They had to: As the president of the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, Tim Phillips, recently said of the “average Americans” whose support would be needed: “If they think it’s just a group of wealthy corporations or powerful special interests battling it out to see who gets the best carve-outs, then it will fail.” If the coalition succeeded in obscuring the truth, in other words, its investments would pay off.

This campaign illustrates why economic inequality poses a grave threat to democracy. In our political system, money is power. The more we allow Republicans to concentrate the lion’s share of wealth in the hands of a few, the more power these wealthy few will have. And they will use this power to continue rewriting the rules of both our economy and our political system in their favor.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to “fix the rigged system.” By “fix,” he apparently meant rigging it to permanently benefit billionaires like himself.

Unrigging the system will require us to acknowledge that the American middle class enjoyed its strongest period of growth from 1950 to 1970 — a time when the effective tax rates for the wealthy were above 40% and the U.S. took unrivaled leadership in the global economy. It will require that we think of investment not as something done solely by the private sector, but as a category that encompasses public spending.

Bullish investment in the American people has arguably been the most important factor in our national success. But out of greed and selfishness, Republicans are intent on fighting such investment at every turn. After accumulating nearly all of the economy’s gains over the last 10 years, billionaires like Trump, and me, can more than afford to pay our fair share.

Let’s raise taxes on the rich and use the money to invest directly in the American people — by improving infrastructure, promoting clean energy, strengthening public education and expanding healthcare. Let’s boost wages to stimulate economic growth and job creation. It’s the only way we will create broad prosperity, rebuild the middle class and give working families a fair shake.

At a time like this, there’s only one reasonable position to take: I’m a billionaire. Please raise my taxes.

Tom Steyer is president of the progressive advocacy organization NextGen America.

Notes from closed meeting show how Interior aims to weaken environmental laws

Washington Post

Energy and Environment

Notes from closed meeting show how Interior aims to weaken environmental laws

By Darryl Fears October 5, 2017

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke talks with rancher Heidi Redd at the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah in May. (Scott G. Winterton/Salt Lake City Deseret News via AP)

Near the end of September, officials at the Interior Department bureau that oversees hundreds of millions of acres of public land hosted a conference with state, county and local government representatives to discuss ways to loosen environmental rules.

Bureau of Land Management hosts told attendees and those joining the invitation-only meeting remotely that they wanted to streamline a powerful law that protects wildlife and public land, the National Environmental Policy Act. They asked how its rules could be smoothed out to limit delays that slow public and corporate development so that the federal government, as President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have said, can be a better partner rather than a hindrance. The meeting covered ways to fulfill the president’s executive order to remove impediments to new infrastructure, mining and other development on federal land.

At least two groups not on the invitation list obtained the call-in information for the meeting and secretly sat in and took notes, which one group provided to The Washington Post.

Surrounded by miners from Rosebud Mining, President Trump signs his executive order on energy independence at the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in Washington in March. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

During the Sept. 21 webinar, the BLM and its guests discussed ways to water down NEPA and more. They talked about working around environmental analyses that determine whether infrastructure projects harm ecosystems, about stripping conservation groups of the power to sue the BLM if it wrongly approves a project and about limiting the number of federal Freedom of Information Act requests that allow the public to scrutinize how decisions were made.

“We’re seeking a better decision-making process that’s more productive and getting decisions faster,” Leah Baker, the BLM division chief for planning and NEPA, said in an interview Tuesday. “We heard through this process that we should try and streamline regulations … and that the agency leaves a little to be desired in how effectively we coordinate” with states and local governments.

When a participant in the meeting noticed that the event was being recorded, BLM officials assured the group that it would not be distributed. A second webinar attended by native tribes took place Sept. 25, BLM officials said in an interview this week.

A few days after the webinars, Zinke called employees who disagreed with Trump’s vision for change disloyal and vowed to move policymaking positions at Interior’s Washington headquarters to offices out West, possibly to Denver. Zinke has already reassigned dozens of senior Interior employees to positions they did not want. Interior’s inspector general is probing the legality of Zinke’s rapid reassignments.

NEPA is one of the oldest and most progressive environmental laws on the books. Established in 1970, it has been called an environmental Magna Carta that dozens of governments across the globe have used to craft their own environmental policies. But corporations and some state and local government officials have long criticized it as an impediment to development and revenue.

The webinar’s participants, which included the Western Governors’ Association and the National Association of Counties, also took aim at the Equal Access to Justice Act, which allows groups to seek reimbursement of attorneys’ fees when they win cases against the government. BLM officials and their guests said the reimbursements fuel more lawsuits from people who disagree with their land management practices.

The participants complained that the BLM is being overwhelmed with Freedom of Information Act requests from groups and individuals, more than 1,000 so far this year and growing. They discussed submitting recommendations to Zinke to limit those requests in addition to altering NEPA and EAJA.

Kelly Fuller, energy campaign coordinator for the Western Watersheds Project, said some state and local governments want to align the BLM’s environmental priorities with weaker or, in some cases, nonexistent rules of municipalities.

“They want BLM planning outcomes to match local and state plans … but there are different obligations,” Fuller said. “State and local plans are about development and extraction and making more money, creating more revenue.”

Since legislation is required to make those changes, they hoped Zinke would encourage Republicans in Congress, some of whom are working to weaken environmental rules such as the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Act, to include the September meeting’s recommendations as part of overall reform.

“They may say they want to streamline, but what they mean is cut the public out of the process, do less environmental review and have more secrecy so they can give oil, gas and coal companies unfettered access to our treasured public lands,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, a vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, who called the meeting an attempt to weaken NEPA.

“Let’s be perfectly clear,” said Bethany Cotton, a spokeswoman for WildEarth Guardians, based in Santa Fe, N.M. “The Trump administration’s efforts to roll back environmental protections are meant to strip the public of the opportunity to be informed and weigh in on proposals that will negatively impact our public lands, air, water, and most imperiled animals and plants. Each of these attacks is meant to cede power to resource extractive industries and anti-conservation localities.”

Cynthia Moses-Nedd, the BLM’s liaison to local and state governments who participated on the webinar with Baker and at least two other federal officials, said the issue isn’t so black and white. She recalled that a local government official suggested introducing legislation that would change the Equal Access to Justice Act.

“EAJA … is used to fund lawsuits against the BLM,” Nedd said, and can “paralyze the BLM when it’s doing its work. There needs to be something that deals with that … so BLM can do the work and not be hampered and paralyzed.”

Nedd said BLM isn’t necessarily trying to give its allies a greater role in environmental assessments. “I think our goal is to make sure we’re coordinating better … that’s where we saw the greatest input from our state and local partners.”

A gas flare burns as a driver monitors a water tank near Sidney, Mont., in February 2015. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News)

Baker called the NEPA statute “a cool law” but said complying with its rules is “a heavy lift. We’re trying to figure out how we do it quicker. … There are things routine in nature that can make [the process] speed up.” She said she recalled an experience where a single misstep caused a decision that could have been completed in months to take years. Officials worried that the misstep would trigger a lawsuit that would doom an entire project.

The National Association of Counties agrees with local officials who say they’re cut out of NEPA’s processes to determine environmental harm and want to help decide how its analysis should be done. Association spokesman David Jackson said counties suffer when a NEPA analysis drags on for months and sometimes years. “NACo supports the revision of NEPA to strengthen the involvement of local government in the federal decision-making process. We also support more public involvement.”

Jackson said the association’s position is that EAJA also should be reformed to ease lawsuits. “You can’t do effective forest management, for example, because you get sued at every turn.”

Fuller, of the Western Watersheds Project, said: “We’re waiting to see the BLM’s recommendations report to Secretary Zinke to give local governments and the states greater control. … How far is he going to go?”