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Closing America's Climate Gap Between Rich and Poor
The gap between rich and poor as a result of mitigating climate change could become overwhelming if policymakers aren’t careful to evaluate the steps needed to ensure both effectiveness and social justice, a new report from the University of Southern California warns.
The analysis by USC’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equality (PERE) essentially tries to identify the impact that climate change — and its remedies — will have on people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale.
Think of it as seeing trees in an attempt to define a forest.
The Climate Gap report focuses on human rights, public health and social justice from a climate change and climate change amelioration perspective, defining those areas most likely to impact the poor, beginning with extreme heat and ending with biofuel production.
PERE Director Manuel Pastor, a professor in USC's Geography and American Studies and Ethnicity Department, defines it as a vital domestic component of climate legislation.
Urban Jungles Bake as Temperatures Rise
Pastor notes that heat waves in poorer, more urban California cities like Wilmington, West Oakland, east Palo Alto and central Los Angeles have been shown to seriously affect the health of the poor, who can’t always afford the costs of air-conditioning or the units themselves.
“In addition, lower income communities, or communities of color, tend to have more impervious surfaces (like concrete and asphalt) and less tree canopy, making them even more vulnerable to the risks of higher temperatures, which are expected to increase with climate change,” he said.
Pastor is speaking of the “asphalt jungles” that haunt major American cities; places where the poor find affordable housing but few amenities such as parks, tree-lined sidewalks or even fully funded social service agencies and safe schools.
In these urban jungles, the “heat island” effects double and sometimes triple, and deaths run three times higher than elsewhere, especially among the old, the very young and African Americans.
In Los Angeles, studies show that African Americans are nearly twice as likely to die during heat events as more exposed construction and agricultural workers — a phenomenal statistic that experts say is likely to rise as the globe warms. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that heat events also produce record levels of air pollution, and people are advised to stay indoors, which may be the worst thing to do when temperatures soar and homes have no air conditioning.
“There are already clear disparities with regard to pollution, and to the extent that climate change worsens impacts of pollution or the greenhouse gases associated with it, as regard to air quality, we can only expect these disparities to rise,” Pastor said.
Overwhelming evidence shows that air pollution in poorer areas is largely due to the siting of highways, power plants and industrial facilities within such communities rather than in more affluent ones — a NIMBY factor that throws social justice to the winds but preserves the view for the few who can afford to live in better neighborhoods.
The situation gets worse during heat waves, which speed up chemical interactions between nitrogen oxide (from coal-burning power plants and vehicles), volatile organic gases (from automobiles), and sunlight. These chemical “stews” cause an increase in ground-level ozone, which exacerbates everything from asthma and emphysema to heart disease and immune system function.
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Referendum For A New Democracy
Do we need a Referendum For A New Democracy?
Are you concerned about the future of democracy? Do you feel democracy is under attack by extreme greed in countries around the world? Are you sick and tired of: living in fear, corporate greed, growing police state, government for the rich, working more but having less?
Can we use both elections and random selection (in the way we select government officials) to rid democracy of undue influence by extreme wealth and wealth-dominated mass media campaigns?
The world's first democracy (Athenian democracy, 600 B.C.) used both elections and random selection. Even Aristotle (the cofounder of Western thought) promoted the use random selection as the best way to protect democracy. The idea of randomly selecting (after screening) juries remains from Athenian democracy, but not randomly selecting (after screening) government officials. Why is it used only for individual justice and not also for social justice? Who wins from that? ...the extremely wealthy?
What is the best way to combine elections and random selection to protect democracy in today's world? Can we use elections as the way to screen candidates, and random selection as the way to do the final selection? Who wins from that? ...the people?
Why complicate an already
Why complicate an already difficult problem by trying to use it as a platform for income redistribution and a tool for sorting other pollution problems? That can all be done separately through a progressive tax system and effective environmental legislation.
You do, however, illustrate the real problem of agreeing a fair and workable worldwide scheme, and nothing less will stop global warming, when the best interest of the nations who must agree is so divergent, far more so than the different neighbourhoods in the USA.
There is a problem at the heart of cap and trade. Who gets the initial allocation of the right to emit or the revenue from auctioning it? It is clear from the response of oil and coal price to minor excess demand just before the boom turned to crunch, that we are prepared to pay almost anything to sustain our energy consumption. The rights to emit will be worth trillions of dollars and sustainable worldwide agreement on who is entitled to sell them will therefore be virtually impossible.
There is a better way that all nations should find attractive and easy to agree to without protracted negotiation.
Energy saving, nuclear, renewables, electric cars etc. are only ways of filling the energy gap that cutting carbon dioxide emissions will create and mankind has been very effectively filling energy gaps for centuries without the aid of agreed national or global strategies, taxes or caps. Carbon capture is different. It is a way of stopping pollution and will always add cost. You can legislate to stop pollution (which is economically inefficient) or you can use market forces by giving credits in a cap and trade system, credits against a carbon tax or by paying directly in fuel prices as I propose. If we drive carbon capture in any of these ways all the other things will happen too.
We should oblige fossil fuel producers and importers to contract for the capture and sequestration of a quantity of carbon dioxide equal to a proportion of that produced from the fuel they supply. The proportion could start at a few percent and build up. This would provide full, immediate funding for carbon capture and storage and increase fuel price, encouraging energy saving, nuclear, renewables, electric cars etc.
The contract might permit capture to be delayed for a year if the quantity captured were increased by 10%, and for another year for another 10% etc. This would not only help with plant problems, but would also allow contracts to be placed today, providing a huge incentive to get carbon capture and storage up and running as soon as possible. It is not lack of know-how that is holding back carbon capture but the lack of an incentive to apply it.
We must soon stop carbon emissions from power generation, cement manufacture etc. and substitute electricity for fuel use in many domestic, industrial and transport applications. Taxing carbon, capping emissions or contracting for carbon capture when fuel is produced could all provide the economic incentive, but unless the rest of the world joins in they will not solve the problem.
Contracting for carbon capture is guaranteed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to whatever annual target is set and is easy for everyone to agree to because:
It will appeal to rapidly growing and mature countries alike. There are no national caps to restrict relative growth.
It will allow all industries in all countries to compete on a level playing field. There are no carbon tax or carbon credit differentials.
Because there is only one number to agree, the global annual target, extensive international negotiations will be unnecessary. There will be no national targets to haggle over and perhaps never meet. There will be no issue about who gets the revenue from a carbon tax or what the rate should be or who gets free allowances (or the revenue from an auction) with cap and trade.
While poor countries have at least as much to lose from global warming as rich ones, the cost they bear will be tiny because their fossil fuel use is tiny.
Enforcement is straightforward and does not rely on the co-operation of every country. The contracts would be traded and recorded centrally, mostly placed and paid for by the international energy companies. If countries were uncooperative and used their own fuel internally without contracting for carbon capture, a central monitoring organisation could impose an increased capture proportion on imports or exports of fuel for that country to compensate.
So what will it cost? The simple answer is that carbon capture and storage could cost 50 euros per tonne of carbon dioxide emission avoided. This is equivalent to $32/barrel of oil but the contract would only cost a proportion of that.
The complicated answer is that it is only practical to capture carbon dioxide from large point sources like power stations. Forcing 75% capture on the global market through my proposal would drive fuel price up and electricity price down until we switched from fuel to electricity for many industrial, domestic and transport applications. Once nearly all power stations etc. had captured their emissions there would be an incentive to build new power plants simply to create more carbon to capture and to dump the electricity they generated onto the market at any price. Fossil fuel power generation with carbon capture would collect payment for all the captured carbon but only pay back 75% in their fuel price, giving it an unfair advantage over nuclear and renewables. It would be perverse to tax carbon capture while we were trying to encourage it but as we approached the endgame national governments could tax away the 25% of the capture contract price that was not being paid in the fuel price. The revenue could then be paid out per kilowatt-hour to subsidise power from all clean generators.
The simple cost is modest compared to recent price changes so why are we waiting? Perhaps within as little as twenty-five years we could be defining the proportion of carbon to be captured, based on fossil fuel production at the time, such that global emissions were contained at the level that the oceans absorb annually. That is about 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon per year (25% of current emissions). Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would then stop rising.
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