Would you pay a toll to enter the Keys? Money needed to fight sea level rise, leaders say
Gwen Filosa August 19, 2020
It’s one of the most spectacular scenic drives in the nation: the Overseas Highway that leads down the Florida Keys to mile marker zero on U.S. 1.
Under blue skies, you can drift down the highway, along a collection of bridges, with the ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other.
So should it be a free ride?
No, Monroe County Commissioners said on Wednesday. Once again, they are considering a toll for visitors — not residents. Those who work in the Keys but live on the mainland are also not targeted, County Administrator Roman Gastesi said.
But don’t load up your SunPass account just yet.
Commissioners only told staff to explore ordering a feasibility study on installing a toll at the Monroe County end of the 18-mile stretch of U.S. 1 that connects the mainland to the Keys.
First, commissioners have to determine the state and federal laws and regulations they need to deal with to create a toll.
U.S. 1, which starts at mile marker 0 in Key West and runs to Maine, is part of a federal network of state-owned highways. It is a “federal-aid” highway, which could place it under U.S. rules requiring that any tolls collected be spent on new road construction or needed maintenance.
Commissioners also need to find out exactly what they can spend the toll revenue on, outside of highway maintenance and reconstruction.
One idea they have: using the money to battle the impacts of sea level rise in the Keys.
“The worst-case scenario is that any fees collected by a toll could be used by transportation and on transportation-related items,” said Monroe Mayor Heather Carruthers, of Key West.
Tolls were collected on U.S. 1 in 1927 and 1938 and have been collected on Card Sound Road since 1926.
The Lower Matecumbe toll booth on the Overseas Highway, circa 1940.
Also on Wednesday, the commission voted to raise the toll at Card Sound Road by one penny. The toll on a two-axle vehicle will be 78 cents. Three or more axles will go up to $1.03.
The Florida Department of Transportation strongly opposed efforts in 2010 to 2012 to consider a Florida Keys toll.
“Our usual response from our partners when we request this is deafening silence for extended periods of time,” said Commissioner David Rice. “I would support giving it another try and hope we can at least get a respectful response.”
On July 21, 2010, the commission unanimously directed staff to investigate and research installing a toll on the stretch to fund a wastewater mandate and address infrastructure needs related to sea level rise.
“What are you going to do about the fact we’ll probably be the only county in the United States you can only get to by toll,” said Commissioner Sylvia Murphy of Key Largo. “That question is going to come up. You need to be ready with an answer.”
County Attorney Bob Shillinger said in response that it’s hard to get to Hawaii without “paying something” to get there.
In the past, the toll idea was opposed by former U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, Shillinger said.
“He’s no longer there so that obstacle is gone,” Shillinger said.
Trump takes on 50 years of environmental regulations, one by one
Amanda Paulson, CSM January 16, 2020
It was 1970. Congress was wrestling with whether to give the right-of-way necessary to build a huge, 800-mile oil pipeline across Alaska, when a district judge blocked the project, using a brand new law requiring federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of projects.
“The Interior Department was stunned,” recalls William Reilly, a staff member in the Nixon administration at the time and later Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator. The law’s environmental impact statements, common today, were completely novel at the time. Even the authors of the statute, he says, “never anticipated it would have that effect.”
Exactly 50 years later, that law – the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) – is under attack. The Trump administration last week announced proposed reforms to the act that would significantly reduce its scope. It’s the latest move in an unprecedented effort to roll back not only recent Obama-era environmental regulations but also some of the bedrock laws that have shaped federal environment policy since the 1970’s.
“It’s not unique in being a pushback against regulation, or even in favoring the energy industry, but it’s unique in just how relentless it has been, and how many regulations they’ve tried to undo,” says Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California in Berkeley. There have been at least 50 significant environmental regulations President Trump has targeted, Professor Farber notes. “They’re leaving no stone unturned.”
For Mr. Trump, who as a developer has had his own battles with environmental reviews, it’s a pendulum swing that is long overdue.
“The United States will not be able to compete and prosper in the 21st century if we continue to allow a broken and outdated bureaucratic system hold us back from building what we need: the roads, the airports, the schools, everything,” he said last week in announcing proposed changes to NEPA.
Environmental consideration versus delay
Critics of the act, who often complain about lengthy environmental reviews and the impact statements required for major projects, welcomed his proposal, which would not only impose new deadlines on such studies but would also narrow the range of what could be considered.
“This is not about anti-regulation,” says Marty Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute. “It’s about having a smart process in place and a certain process in place, so that we can get decisions that will unlock the investment necessary to get these projects built as critical infrastructure.” If there’s no certainty about when a project will be approved, it’s harder to attract investors, he adds.
But others note that NEPA has played a critical role simply by ensuring that the environment gets consideration.
“It’s something that says: ‘Consider, reflect. Is this something you want to do? Is this the best way to do it? Are there any other ways you could do it?’” says Mr. Reilly, the former EPA administrator.
In the case of the trans-Alaska pipeline, it took more than four years of wrangling, an Arab oil embargo, and a special act of Congress before the permits were approved.
But Mr. Reilly recalls the chairman of the oil company in charge telling him that the final project was more robust and sound as a result of the environmental-review process. “In the eyes of the person most closely concerned about it, it was a very constructive intervention,” he says.
A 2016 Congressional Research Service report says critics overstate the permitting process’ effect on project delays. Insufficient data, lack of funds, and state and local issues are far more likely to increase project length than environmental reviews.
Some projects languish in permit purgatory for up to a decade, but the vast majority do not. The average length of time for a full environmental impact statement takes 4.5 years, according to the Council on Environmental Quality. Furthermore, only 1% of projects within the NEPA umbrella complete an EIS, according to a 2014 Governmental Accountability Office report.
Many people want a speedier process, acknowledge Mr. Reilly and others. And if that were the administration’s sole objective, the proposed changes would be less controversial. But by narrowing the range of projects that require environmental review and no longer requiring consideration of a project’s “cumulative” effects – which, under President Barack Obama, were expanded to include long-term climate change impacts – the administration is targeting the backbone of U.S. environmental policy for 50 years.
Beyond Obama-era regulations
Early deregulation efforts from the Trump Administration targeted Obama-era rules: the “Clean Water Rule” that defined what waters are subject to federal water protection; the Clean Power Plan, designed to regulate carbon dioxide pollution; and methane rules, regulating the release of a potent greenhouse gas. One of Trump’s most controversial actions, the legality of which is still being tested in the courts, has been an attempted reduction of two National Monument designations in Utah. And there is evidence of a significant shift toward less enforcement of regulations and policies that remain on the books.
Whittling away the government’s regulatory structures has always been part of Mr. Trump’s agenda, but his dismantling of the EPA is unique, says Caitlin McCoy, a fellow in the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard Law School who tracks such changes. Changing NEPA is the latest sign that the administration wants to undermine the statutory foundations of the EPA.
“They’re trying to take away the very things that the agency relies upon to do its job and to really severely damage its legal authority to function,” she says. “With other agencies, it’s similar, like, yes, we’re relaxing some of these tax rates, but it’s not like we’re trying to keep the IRS from doing audits.”
It’s not clear how successful the administration will be.
“For at least some of these regulations, the appeals will not hold up in court,” says Professor Farber. It’s not clear in the case of NEPA, for instance, whether Trump has the power to drastically reinterpret a major law enacted by Congress.
But for Trump, the payoff politically, showing his determination to undo environmental regulations that many view as overly burdensome, may be enough.
“Trump is doing overreach, and getting his comeuppance in the courts,” says Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University. “But it looks good [to his supporters] in 2020.”
Will the Public End up Paying to Clean up the Fracking Boom?
By Justin Mikulka October 18, 2019
Main image: Oil in the hills. Credit: Alonso E. Perez – Gonzalez, CC By 2.0
Increasingly, U.S. shale firms appear unable to pay back investors for the money borrowed to fuel the last decade of the fracking boom. In a similar vein, those companies also seem poised to stiff the public on cleanup costs for abandoned oil and gas wells once the producers have moved on.
“It’s starting to become out of control, and we want to rein this in,” Bruce Hicks, Assistant Director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, said in August about companies abandoning oil and gas wells. If North Dakota’s regulators, some of the most industry – friendly in the country, are sounding the alarm, then that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the nation.
In fact, officials in North Dakota are using Pennsylvania as an example of what they want to avoid when it comes to abandoned wells, and with good reason.
The first oil well drilled in America was in Pennsylvania in 1859, and the oil and gas industry has been drilling — and abandoning — wells there ever since. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) says that while it only has documentation of 8,000 orphaned and abandoned wells, it estimates the state actually has over a half million.
“We anticipate as many as 560,000 are in existence that we just don’t know of yet,” DEP spokesperson Laura Fraley told StateImpact Pennsylvania. “There’s no responsible party and so it’s on state government to pay to have those potential environmental and public health hazards remediated.”
According to StateImpact, “The state considers any well that doesn’t produce oil and gas for a calendar year to be an abandoned well.”
That first oil well drilled in Pennsylvania was 70 feet deep. Modern fracked wells, however, can be well over 10,000 feet in total length (most new fracked wells are drilled vertically to a depth where they turn horizontal to fracture the shale that contains the oil and gas). Because the longer the total length of the well, the more it costs to clean up, the funding required to properly clean up and cap wells has grown as drillers have continued to use new technologies to greatly extend well lengths. Evidence from the federal government points to the potential for these costs being shifted to the tax-paying public.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report this September about the risks from insufficient bonds to reclaim wells on public lands. It said, “the bonds operators provide as insurance are often not enough to cover the costs of this cleanup.” The report cited a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) official’s estimate of $10 a foot for well cleanup costs.
StateImpact Pennsylvania noted that costs to reclaim a well could add up to $20,000, and DEP spokesperson Fraley said they could be “much, much higher.” The GAO report noted that “low-cost wells typically cost about $20,000 to reclaim, and high-cost wells typically cost about $145,000 to reclaim.”
In North Dakota, where state regulators have raised concerns about this growing problem, one of the top industry regulators, State Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms, estimated that wells there cost $150,000 to plug and reclaim.
And this problem isn’t just in the U.S. Canada is facing a similar cleanup crisis.
Financial Bonding Requirements for well cleanup.
Legally, oil and gas companies are required to set aside money to pay for well cleanup costs, a process known as bonding. These requirements vary by state and for public lands, but in all cases, the amounts required are so small as to be practically irrelevant.
The GAO report reviewed the bonds held by the Bureau of Land Management for wells on public lands and found that the average bond per well in 2018 was worth $2,122.
The Western Organization of Resource Councils summarized bonding requirements by state, and none of them came even close to being adequate to cover estimated costs to deal with old wells. In North Dakota, a $50,000 bond is required for a well. But a $100,000 bond can cover up to 6 wells, which comes out to $16,667 per well — or approximately one tenth of the estimated cost to reclaim a well in that state.
North Dakota has a history of bending to oil and gas industry pressure when it comes to regulations. While North Dakota’s bonding rules fall far short of what’s needed to actually cover full cleanup costs, the reality on the ground is much worse. Regulators allow companies to “temporarily abandon” wells, which requires no action from companies for at least seven years. Wells can hold this “temporary status” for decades. And another practice in the state allows a company to sell old, under-performing wells to another company, passing along the liability but not the bonding funds.
By any measure, the amount of private money currently allocated in the U.S. to plug and reclaim oil and gas wells is a small fraction of the real costs. That means oil and gas wells — and the U.S. had one million active wells in 2017, and even more abandoned — will either be left to fail and potentially contaminate the surrounding water, air, and soil, or the public will have to pick up the tab. This represents just one of the many ways the public subsidizes the oil and gas industry.
A South Dakota Case Study.
South Dakota allows companies to post a $30,000 bond for as many wells as the company chooses to drill. Spyglass Cedar Creek is a Texas-based company that was operating in South Dakota and recently abandoned 40 wells, which the state has estimated will have a cleanup cost of $1.2 million.
However, there is a twist to this story. That $30,000 bond doesn’t really exist. The owners of the company had put $20,000 of it into a Certificate of Deposit. But when the state went looking for that money, the owners said they had cashed it in 2015 because, as reported by the Rapid City Journal, “company officials did not remember what the money was for.”
Spyglass Cedar Creek does not have the money set aside that was required to clean up these wells, the state does not have recourse to get that money, and some of the wells are reportedly leaking. So, what can be done?
According to Doyle Karpen, member of the South Dakota Board of Minerals and Environment, the answer is for the taxpayers of that state to cover the cost.
“I think the only way we can correct this is go to the Legislature and ask for money,” Karpen said earlier this year.
Following the Coal Industry Business Model.
What is starting to unfold with the oil and gas industry is very similar to what has already been playing out with the U.S. coal industry.
According to a Center for Public Integrity investigation, more than 150 coal mines (and dozens of uranium mines) have been allowed to idle indefinitely, enabling their owners to avoid paying for the costs of cleanup.
In April, the Stanford Law Review published the paper, “Bankruptcy as Bailout: Coal Company Insolvency and the Erosion of Federal Law,” which notes that almost half the coal mined in the U.S. is done so by companies that have recently declared bankruptcy.
The paper notes how the bankruptcy process is used by coal companies to rid themselves of environmental cleanup liabilities and pension costs “in a manner that has eviscerated the regulatory schemes that gave rise to those obligations.”
Yet coal company executives often receive healthy bonuses, even as they are driving companies into bankruptcy.
This summer, Blackjewel famously failed to pay its coal miners, and even pulled funds out of their bank accounts, after the company suddenly declared bankruptcy in July. That prompted workers to sit on train tracks in Kentucky, blocking a $1 million shipment of coal, in a two-month protest. And Blackjewel is poised to leave behind thousands of acres of mined land in Appalachia without adequate reclamation.
Privatize the Profits, Socialize the Losses.
The mineral extraction business model in the U.S. is set up to maximize profits for executives, even as they lose investor money and bankrupt their companies. That is true of the coal industry and that is true of the shale oil and gas industry.
At the same time, the regulatory capture by these industries at both state and federal levels allows private companies to pass on environmental cleanup costs to the public, and the inadequate bonding system for oil and gas well reclamation represents just one more example.
The so-called fracking revolution in America has resulted in many new records: record amounts of U.S. oil and gas exported (to the detriment of a livable climate), new levels of human health impacts on surrounding communities, record numbers of industry-induced earthquakes, record amounts of flaring natural gas in oil and gas fields, and record-breaking depths and lengths of wells.
And the cleanup costs for the fracking boom are also poised to be staggering.
Republicans Have No Leg to Stand On and They Know It
Trump has no real argument for why Gordon Sondland can’t testify before Congress, and neither do congressional Republicans.
By Charles P. Pierce October 8, 2019
MANDEL NGANGETTY IMAGES
“Well, Johnny Olson, it’s Tuesday. What’s our impeachable offense today?”
“For today’s winner, we have a lovely obstruction of Congress.” From The New York Times:
The decision to block Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, from speaking with investigators for three House committees is certain to provoke an immediate conflict with potentially profound consequences for the White House and President Trump. House Democrats have repeatedly warned that if the administration tries to interfere with their investigation, it will be construed as obstruction, a charge they see as potentially worthy of impeachment…
…But in making the decision, hours before he was scheduled to sit for a deposition in the basement of the Capitol, the Trump administration appears to be calculating that it is better off risking the House’s ire than letting Mr. Sondland show up and set a precedent for cooperation with an inquiry they have strenuously argued is illegitimate.
Reaction from the obstructed Congress in question was swift and predictable: the Democrats threatened to add another count to the indictment, and the Republicans pretended they were born last Saturday. From Rep. Adam Schiff via CNN:
“The failure to produce this witness, the failure to produce these documents we consider yet additional strong evidence of obstruction of the constitutional functions of Congress.
Here with a contrary view is Rep. Jim Jordan.
“You think about what the Democrats are trying to do: Impeach the President of the United States 13 months prior to an election, based on an anonymous whistleblower with no firsthand knowledge who has a bias against the President.”
The Republicans have no leg to stand on and they know it. There’s no privilege they can invoke. Sondland is obviously a key witness directly involved with the events that the House is tasked with investigating. The way you know that is that the president*’s account on the electric Twitter machine admits that’s the case.
I would love to send Ambassador Sondland, a really good man and great American, to testify, but unfortunately he would be testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s rights have been taken away, and true facts are not allowed out for the public to see. Importantly, Ambassador Sondland’s tweet, which few report, stated, “I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind.” That says it ALL!
Factory Farms Pollute the Environment and Poison Drinking Water
By Daniel Ross February 20, 2019
PeopleImages / E+ / Getty Images
Hurricane Florence, which battered the U.S. East Coast last September, left a trail of ruin and destruction estimated to cost between $17 billion and $22 billion. Some of the damage was all too visible—smashed homes and livelihoods. But other damage was less so, like the long-term environmental impacts in North Carolina from hog waste that spilled out over large open-air lagoons saturated in the rains.
Hog waste can contain potentially dangerous pathogens, pharmaceuticals and chemicals. According to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, as of early October nearly 100 such lagoons were damaged, breached or were very close to being so, the effluent from which can seep into waterways and drinking water supplies.
Rather than an isolated problem, however, the story of North Carolina’s failure to properly manage its hog waste opens a door to what critics say is a much wider national and global issue: the increasingly extensive and varied impacts on our water resources, air and soils from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).
“The big problem with this model is the waste management problem that it creates, generating so much waste in such high concentration,” said Will Hendrick, staff attorney with the Waterkeeper Alliance, a network of organizations monitoring U.S. waterways. “We haven’t really improved the technologies for managing this waste beyond what we were using centuries ago.”
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations
In recent decades, livestock numbers have soared in the U.S., while the number of actual farms has shrunk—a dynamic fueled in part by the government’s acquiescence to industrial farming mega-mergers. In 2015, for example, just four companies accounted for 85 percent of the nation’s beef packing industry. This has given rise to what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls CAFOs, livestock operations where animals—primarily cows, pigs and chickens—are kept and raised in confined spaces.
The amount of animal feces and urine produced in these facilities is staggering—more than 40 times the waste generated in wastewater treatment plants. Most CAFO waste is spread over farmland as fertilizer. But unlike strictly regulated human waste, the waste generated by CAFOs isn’t held to the same standard and is largely untreated. “The basic legal theory, which is basic legal fiction, is that the waste will be kept on site and applied to adjacent cropland and [will] never enter our water-bodies,” said Hendrick.
What actually happens is that potentially toxic chemicals, drugs and bacteria in untreated animal wastes drain off or leach through the soils, making their way into the nation’s rivers, streams, groundwater and drinking water at alarming rates, directly impacting communities. Iowa’s largest municipal water utility provider, for example, recently sued a number of upstream drainage districts for excessive drinking water nitrate levels caused by farmland runoff. The lawsuit, however, was subsequently dismissed, the judge ruling it a problem for the state legislatures to tackle.
CAFO wastes are regulated to some extent. Under the Clean Water Act, for example, operators must file a nutrient management plan with their state environmental agencies. “Whether spread next to the CAFO or on neighboring fields, that manure spreading is done only after a careful analysis of both the manure itself and the land it’s applied to. There are legal penalties attached to violating those plans,” said Will Rodger, a spokesperson for the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), in an email. The bureau is a powerful lobbying organization that has championed efforts to weaken the Clean Water Act.
Enforcement of these management plans, however, varies from state to state, said Tom Pelton, spokesperson for the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit environmental watchdog. “In reality, there’s not much enforcement, and they’re also difficult to enforce,” he added.
Soil Oversaturated With Animal Manure
The prevalence of veterinary drug use in industrial farming, and the associated health risks when humans are exposed to these drugs, is another factor that critics highlight. Antibiotics, for example, make their way through the waste-streams at these facilities and out into the environment, leading to fears of increased antibiotic resistance in humans, not to mention their damaging impacts on sensitive ecosystems.
There’s also the question of what to do with excess animal waste when the available agricultural land surrounding CAFOs is limited, leading to oversaturation of soils with animal manure. “There are still some states that have not banned applying this waste on frozen ground,” said Patty Lovera, assistant director at Food & Water Watch, a consumer advocacy organization that has called for an end to factory farms. “That’s not about growing crops. That’s about disposal.”
Animal waste doesn’t only impact valuable water resources. Industrial livestock production generates huge quantities of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas. According to the EPA, all national agricultural processes, including livestock production, accounted for 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2016. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization pins the percentage share from livestock production on overall anthropogenic global greenhouse emissions much higher—at 14.5 percent.
Despite the fact that the EPA has long known about high levels of CAFO-produced air pollution, the agency is seeking to exempt these facilities from having to report toxic air emissions like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide under a federal right-to-know law, though a group of environmental organizations filed a lawsuit last year to halt that proposed rule.
Air quality issues from industrial farming can also be more locally felt. In North Carolina, for example, neighbors of a hog farm operated by Murphy-Brown filed a lawsuit in 2014 against the owners complaining of nuisance noises and odors, worsening their quality of life. Theirs was one of a number of lawsuits against Smithfield Foods, Murphy-Brown’s parent company. The plaintiffs from that particular suit were recently awarded $473.5 million. But the state legislature also passed a law limiting the legal action that residents can now take against neighboring CAFOs.
Agricultural Chemicals
More animals, of course, means that more crops must be grown to feed them, which leads to broader industrial farming impacts, including runoff from agricultural chemicals like those found in fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides. What kinds of impacts do these chemicals have? A recent study out of New Zealand finds that certain bacteria develop antibiotic resistance up to 100,000 times faster when exposed to common herbicides like Roundup and Kamba. Agricultural runoff also helps feed harmful algae blooms.
According to an Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of data from 2014 and 2015, the drinking water in 1,700 individual systems (affecting approximately 7 million people) contained nitrogen at levels higher than 5 parts per million (ppm), an amount the National Cancer Institute says increases the risk of colon, kidney, ovarian and bladder cancers. The EWG also found that nearly 32,000 Americans received drinking water containing nitrogen at levels exceeding the EPA’s threshold of 10 ppm—a limit set more than 55 years ago.
Nor is it cheap for consumers to filter out chemicals like nitrates themselves, explained Anne Weir Schechinger, EWG’s senior economic analyst. As an example, the Iowan utility tackling elevated drinking water nitrate levels is reportedly spending $15 million to expand its filtration technology. “That’s why we want to make sure our audience has more [information] resources so they can protect themselves if the EPA isn’t going to,” Weir Schechinger said, pointing to EWG’s drinking water database.
The American Farm Bureau Federation disputes EWG’s findings, and points to what it regards as “inadequate evidence of carcinogenicity” in drinking water. “We are not impressed with this effort, nor the quality of EWG’s reports across the board,” said Will Rodger in an email. In response, Weir Schechinger explained how for decades, “peer-reviewed studies have shown a clear link between an increased risk of cancer and nitrate levels in tap water that are lower than EPA’s legal limit—and no amount of lobbying from special interest groups will change the science.”
Indeed, the health risks associated with living in close proximity to CAFOs are becoming increasingly clearer. A recent study out of Duke University found that North Carolinians who live near hog farms have higher death rates from a variety of health issues—including anemia, kidney disease, septicemia, tuberculosis and infant mortality—compared to those who live further away from such facilities. And who are the people most affected? CAFOs disproportionately impact low-income rural communities, African Americans, Latino Americans and Native Americans.
What Can Be Done?
The regulatory framework exists—in federal laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act—to force CAFO operators to properly dispose of their waste, said Sacoby Wilson, associate professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Health. The problem is, “They [CAFO operators] have a very strong hook in the legislature,” he said, pointing to the political clout that large agricultural organizations wield. That’s why CAFO operators have for so long circumvented more stringent waste disposal laws, according to Wilson.
But Wilson stressed that in the event CAFOs are held to tougher laws in the future, the costs associated with modernizing these facilities should be absorbed by the large conglomerates driving the CAFO industry, rather than the smaller farm operators, many of whom struggle financially. “In the process of compliance, there would have to be some modifications made to make sure the costs are internalized by the corporations,” said Wilson. “We’re not anti-farmers, we’re pro-farmers. We’re not anti-development, we are pro-sustainable development.”
Experts point to other things that CAFO operators can do to minimize their environmental footprint. Greater use of cover crops would promote healthier soils and reduce erosion. Buffer strips and terraces—natural devices that intercept pollutants—help reduce nitrogen and phosphorus runoff. But other proposed changes are more controversial. Methane digesters might sound like a good way of transforming methane emissions into renewable energy, but critics pick holes in such technologies, arguing that they do little to nothing to tackle the sheer volume of animal waste generated. More broadly, critics highlight ethical issues inherent in CAFOs, pointing to instances of animal abuse and cramped living conditions.
At the end of the day, though CAFOs are the “dominant model of agriculture,” said Lovera, “we didn’t vote” for this system. “If I could wave the magic wand, everybody would be using different agricultural techniques, but it’s going to take some steps to get us there.”
West Virginia poverty gets worse under Trump economy, not better
By Aimee Picchi, Orig. Pub. September 28, 2018
West Virginia has a growing poverty problem, and experts there who study the issue say Americans in every state should pay attention.
The Appalachian state is, along with Delaware, just one of two states where poverty rose last year, bucking the national trend of growing incomes and declining hardship, according to U.S. Census data released earlier this month. West Virginia’s poverty rate climbed to 19.1 percent last year from 17.9 percent, making it just one of four states with a poverty rate above 18 percent.
President Donald Trump plans to visit West Virginia on Saturday, when he’s expected to tout his economic accomplishments. The president has said he’s “very proud” of the state and claimed that he “turned West Virginia around.” His administration has focused on reviving jobs in the coal industry, which has added about 2,000 jobs across the U.S. since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
Mr. Trump has boasted about the state’s GDP growth, but its economy grew by 1.3 percent in the first quarter, or 37th in the nation and lagging the national rate of 1.8 percent, according to government data. It had fared better in 2017: up 2.6 percent for the year, tenth among the 50 states, compared with 2.1 percent for the nation.
Coal “is a potent message,” but it overlooks the reality of West Virginia’s economy, said Sean O’Leary, senior policy analyst of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, a nonpartisan think tank. “The growth we’ve had is in low-wage industries. Folks who find jobs haven’t found jobs that keep them out of poverty.”
President Trump acknowledges the crowd at a Make America Great Again rally in Charleston, West Virginia, on Aug. 21, 2018.REUTERS
Jobs in low-wage industries have grown 14.5 percent since 2001 in West Virginia, compared with a decline of 2.8 percent in jobs that pay higher wages during the same time, according to the WVCBP’s figures. The state has about 22,000 people employed in mining and logging, compared with 131,000 education and health care workers and 155,000 government workers, two of the biggest industries in the state, according to government data.
West Virginia’s dismal trends point to an economic issue that’s impacting states across the country: Workers at the bottom of the pay scale aren’t benefiting from the growing economy. Their issues range from low pay to unstable and scanty work hours, which makes it difficult to earn a living wage. Almost one in four West Virginians is employed in a low-wage job, the WVCBP found.
“It’s cashiers, retail sales people, service employees — those are our fastest growing jobs, but those jobs don’t pay very well,” O’Leary notes.
At the Manna Meals soup kitchen, more people are coming in for nourishment, said its executive director, Tara Martinez. The Charleston soup kitchen served almost 10,800 meals in August, compared with about 9,700 in January.
“There’s a direct correlation between the hopelessness and the lack of jobs,” she said. “The jobs that are available are minimum wage and part time — they don’t have benefits. When you have that, coupled with the hopelessness of, ‘How do I get out of this cycle?’ and having to go to a soup pantry, it’s like a hamster wheel.”
The opioid crisis is another issue facing West Virginia, which Martinez said she believes is tied to low-wage jobs and a lack of opportunity. Her observations echo academic findings from Princeton economists Anne Case and Nobel Prize-winner Angus Deaton, who found rising mortality rates for less educated white adults in the U.S., which they called “deaths of despair.”
And West Virginia plays directly into the issues highlighted by Deaton and Case. The state, whose population is 95 percent white, is frequently listed as one of the least educated states in the country.
About 21 percent of West Virginians between ages 25 to 64 has a college degree, according to the National Information Center for Higher Education Policymaking and Analysis. At the national level, about one-third of American workers have a college degree.
The post-recession economy has favored Americans with college degrees, providing them with both growing incomes and professional opportunities. But many who lack that credential have been left out of the recovery, as evidenced in West Virginia.
“People who don’t have jobs or don’t have any way out of this cycle, there’s a hopelessness that overtakes them,” Martinez said.
To be sure, West Virginia is coping with other hurdles in its battle against poverty, such as an aging population, higher rates of disability, and a small workforce compared with bigger states, such as New York or California. The state’s small size — just 1.8 million people last year, down 50,000 from 2010 — means it’s harder to lure employers to the state, O’Leary noted.
West Virginia had a net job loss of 26,000 from early 2012 to late 2016, according to a study from West Virginia University. And the state has the lowest labor force participation rate of all 50 states, at 53 percent.
Employment is growing slowly at a projected 0.7 percent per year through 2022, or below the national growth rate of 0.9 percent. At that rate, local employment isn’t expected to reach its 2012 peak until 2021, the study found.
West Virginia’s poor residents will face another burden beginning in October, when work requirements for food stamps go into effect across the state. Martinez said she believes the measure, which requires able-bodied adults without dependents to work, volunteer or receive job training for at least 20 hours a week to receive food stamps, will push more into poverty and ramp up demand for her soup kitchen’s services.
“It’s frightening and I’m worried and I’m doing everything I can to make sure our doors are still open,” she said, noting that she expects demand for meals to rise by 30 percent. “It’s going to be a lot of fundraising and pleading.”
She added, “You have huge companies, corporations that do really well and make a substantial profit and paying their employees as little as possible — and their employees are on food stamps or other benefits.”
Conservatives want you to believe that not having to choose between paying for rent or medicine is Soviet-style tyranny.
By Chuck Collins March 12, 2019
Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
A Stalinesque Dwight Eisenhower statue looms over Abilene, Kansas. (Shutterstock)
Beware of the specter of socialism!
Anytime a politician proposes a wildly popular idea that helps ordinary people, a few grumpy conservatives will call them “socialists.” Propose to reduce college debt, help sick families, or ensure the super-rich pay their fair share of taxes — suddenly you’re a walking red nightmare.
Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart is so alarmed he’s convened an “Anti Socialism Caucus” to ward off “the primitive appeal of socialism” that will “infect our institutions.” Democrats’ talk of restoring higher income tax rates on the wealthiest or helping families with childcare was enough to trigger Treasury Secretary Steve Munchin to quip, “We’re not going back to socialism.”
These same politicians consistently vote for tax cuts for the rich and to gut taxes and regulations on corporations so they can exercise their full freedom and liberty — to mistreat workers, pollute the environment, and rip off their customers.
The “shrink government” fear-mongers want you to believe there are only two flavors of economic ice cream. Choose strawberry and you get liberty-choking gulag communism. From this vantage, any proposal to rein in the unchecked power of global corporations and the rule-rigging rich is creeping socialism.
Choice number two, blueberry, is plutocracy, a society where the super-rich lord over the rest of us. It’s an economically polarized dystopia with stagnant wages and a declining standard of living for the majority.
Conservative demagogues aim to scare you into embracing their pro-plutocrat agenda as the only tolerable choice.
The good news is there many flavors to choose from. A number of presidential candidates have proposed or endorsed policies such as low cost or free college, a higher minimum wage, taxing the super-rich, and investing in infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions.
These ideas are tremendously popular with voters, winning majority support among Republicans, independents, and Democrats. As Fox News sheepishly reported from their own polling, over 70 percent of voters support tax hikes on households with over $10 million in income — including 54 percent of Republicans.
What would today’s hysterical Republicans say about the “socialist” presidency of Dwight Eisenhower? Most likely they would call him “Red Ike.” After all, during Eisenhower’s two terms between 1953 and 1960, the wealthy paid a top tax rate of 91 percent on incomes over the equivalent of $1.7 million for an individual and $3.4 million for a couple.
That crafty pinko Eisenhower also presided over government-subsidized mortgages that helped millions of Americans purchase their first home and attend college for free. He presided over the construction of public housing and state-owned infrastructure (like highways).
In the early 1960’s, the specter of socialism stalked the land again, this time in the form of a proposal to create a national health insurance program to cover senior citizens. Conservatives mounted a full-throated resistance movement to what George H.W. Bush at the time called “socialized medicine.”
The rest of us know it as Medicare.
Prior to the passage of Medicare in 1965, half of the country’s seniors didn’t have hospital insurance, and one in four went without medical care due to cost concerns. One in three seniors were in poverty. Half a century later, nearly all seniors have access to affordable health care, and the elderly poverty rate has fallen to 14 percent.
Now a majority of Americans support some form of “Medicare for All,” expanding universal coverage beyond seniors and disabled people to include children and adults.
Stay tuned for more fear mongering. Universal health care, the red baiters will say, will zap our national initiative and hurl us toward Soviet-style tyranny. Instead, maybe it will mean not having to choose between paying rent or for medicine.
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A Stalinesque Dwight Eisenhower statue looms over Abilene, Kansas. (Shutterstock)