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Soil: The Secret Weapon in the Fight Against Climate Change |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52477"><span class="small">Claire O'Connor, Natural Resources Defense Council</span></a>
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Sunday, 08 December 2019 09:18 |
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O'Connor writes: "Agriculture is on the front lines of climate change. Whether it's the a seven-year drought drying up fields in California, the devastating Midwest flooding in 2019, or hurricane after hurricane hitting the Eastern Shore, agriculture and rural communities are already feeling the effects of a changing climate."
Soil. (photo: Pexels)
Soil: The Secret Weapon in the Fight Against Climate Change
By Claire O'Connor, Natural Resources Defense Council
08 December 19
 griculture is on the front lines of climate change. Whether it's the a seven-year drought drying up fields in California, the devastating Midwest flooding in 2019, or hurricane after hurricane hitting the Eastern Shore, agriculture and rural communities are already feeling the effects of a changing climate. Scientists expect climate change to make these extreme weather events both more frequent and more intense in coming years.
Agriculture is also an important — in fact a necessary — partner in fighting climate change. The science is clear: We cannot stay beneath the most dangerous climate thresholds without sequestering a significant amount of carbon in our soils.
Agricultural soils have the potential to sequester, relatively inexpensively, 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gasses annually — equivalent to the annual emissions of 64 coal fired power plants, according to National Academy of Sciences.
But we can't get there without engaging farmers, turning a source of emissions into a carbon sink. Here are just a few of the ways the Natural Resources Defense Council works to encourage climate-friendly farming:
- Creating New Incentives for Cover Crops: Cover crops are planted in between growing seasons with the specific purpose of building soil health. Despite their multiple agronomic and environmental benefits, adoption is low — only about 7% of U.S. farmland uses cover crops. NRDC is working to scale up cover cropping through innovative incentives delivered through the largest federal farm subsidy: crop insurance. We've worked with partners in Iowa and Illinois to launch programs that give farmers who use cover crops $5/acre off of their crop insurance bill. And partners in Minnesota and Wisconsin are exploring similar options. While we're delighted at the benefit this program has for farmers in those individual states, we're even more excited about the potential to scale this program to the 350 million acres that utilize subsidized crop insurance nationwide. A recent study suggests that cover crops sequester an average of .79 tons of carbon per acre annually, making cover crops one of the pillars of climate-friendly farming systems.
- Supporting Carbon as a New "Agricultural Product": Championed by Senator Ron Wyden, the 2018 Farm Bill created a new program, the Soil Health Demonstration Trial, that encourages farmers to adopt practices that improve their soil health, and tracks and measures the outcomes. NRDC worked alongside our partners at E2 and a number of commodity groups, farmer organizations, and agribusinesses to secure passage of this provision. The Demonstration Trial will create a new, reliable income stream — farmers will get paid for the carbon they sequester regardless of how their crops turn out, and it builds the data needed for confidence in any future carbon markets. USDA recently announced the first round of awards under this new program, totaling over $13 million in investments to improve soil health. Senator Cory Booker has since drafted legislation that would increase funding for the program nearly 10-fold to $100 million annually; Representative Deb Haaland released a companion bill in the House.
- Scaling up Regenerative Agriculture: Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming that looks to work with nature to rebuild the overall health of the system. Regenerative farmers use a variety of tactics, including reduced chemical inputs, diverse crop and livestock rotations, incorporating compost into their systems, and agroforestry, among others. Our team is in the midst of interviewing regenerative farmers and ranchers to learn more about what's working for them and what challenges they've faced in their shift to a regenerative approach. We're planning to analyze our interview results and combine them with a literature review to identify what role NRDC could potentially play in helping to scale up regenerative farming and ranching systems. We'll also be sharing quotes and photos from our interviews on social media every Friday starting in January, so stay tuned for some inspiring farm footage!
- Supporting Organic Farmers: Organic agriculture by design reduces greenhouse gas emissions, sequesters carbon in the soil, does not rely on energy-intensive chemical inputs, and builds resiliency within our food system. Practices integrated into organic production will become increasingly more important in the face of a changing climate. NRDC supports organic farmers through policy initiatives like the Organic Farm-to-School program that was introduced in the California legislature last year. In the coming year, we'll continue to work to support organic farmers in California.
- Reducing Food Waste: Food waste generates nearly 3% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and NRDC is working hard to reduce that number, and improve soil health in the process. Some of our policy proposals include securing passage of date labelling legislation to eliminate confusion about whether food is still good to eat, working with cities to reduce waste and increase rescue of surplus food, and supporting efforts at all levels to increase composting of food scraps. Adding compost to soils improves their ability to sequester carbon, store nutrients, and retain water. Composting food scraps also helps to "close the loop" on organic matter and nutrients by returning them to the agricultural production cycle, rather than sending that organic material to landfills, where it generates methane (a powerful climate pollutant).
Climate-friendly farming also offers a host of important co-benefits. For example, when farmers use complex crop rotations to break weed, pest, and disease cycles, they can reduce the amount of synthetic chemicals they need to use. When they use practices like cover crops, no-till, and adding compost to protect and restore the soil, they reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers that emit greenhouse gasses. And when farmers can reinvest the oppressive amount of money they had been previously spending on expensive, synthetic inputs into the additional labor required to carbon farm, they bring new jobs to economically-depressed rural areas.
Farmers understand better than many of us the harsh realities of climate change, regardless of their opinions about what's causing those changes. And tight margins and trade wars make the potential of new value streams particularly attractive for farmers right now. By working alongside the farmers and farmworkers who tend the land, we can bring new allies into the fight against climate change, restore the health of our soil, and create a healthy, equitable, and resilient food system.
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Giuliani Returns to Ukraine, Signals Apparent Disregard for Inquiry |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52475"><span class="small">Paul Sonne, Greg Miller and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Saturday, 07 December 2019 14:28 |
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Excerpt: "Even as the House of Representatives began drafting charges against President Trump this week, his private attorney, who many believe is partly responsible for leading Trump on the path to his likely impeachment, made an audacious trip to the country at the center of the scandal."
Rudy Giuliani. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)
Giuliani Returns to Ukraine, Signals Apparent Disregard for Inquiry
By Paul Sonne, Greg Miller and Josh Dawsey, The Washington Post
07 December 19
 ven as the House of Representatives began drafting charges against President Trump this week, his private attorney, who many believe is partly responsible for leading Trump on the path to his likely impeachment, made an audacious trip to the country at the center of the scandal.
Rudolph W. Giuliani departed Kyiv after meeting with a range of Ukrainians who have been feeding him unproven allegations against former vice president Joe Biden and helping construct a counternarrative that is taking hold in the Republican Party. The latter story line asserts that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, including with the baseless theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, was behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
The purported purpose of the trip was to conduct interviews for a documentary on a right-wing media network. But Giuliani’s travel also appeared designed to send a broader and more brazen signal of the disregard that he and Trump have for the unfolding impeachment process.
As if to underscore that, Giuliani used his Twitter account while on the trip to describe the impeachment hearings as a “witch hunt,” attack the former U.S. ambassador whom he helped oust earlier this year, and assert that Trump’s demands for politically beneficial investigations by Ukraine’s government were appropriate.
The flurry of messages seemed designed to taunt Democrats in Washington.
Current and former officials in Washington expressed astonishment at how Giuliani — apparently on behalf of the president — seemed to be mocking impeachment investigators, if not the very idea that either he or his client should answer any articles of impeachment.
“It’s unbelievable to me the open way in which the administration and Giuliani are still pursuing this,” said Jeffrey Edmonds, who served as Russia director at the White House National Security Council under both Barack Obama and Trump. “It is a way of .?.?. asserting that everything that we’re doing is perfectly normal, perfectly fine and we’re going to keep doing it.”
Giuliani couldn’t be reached for comment on his trip.
The aftermath of Giuliani’s trip came as the White House signaled that it would not mount a formal defense of Trump in the House impeachment proceedings. White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone sent a letter to the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee on Friday, saying adopting articles of impeachment “would be a reckless abuse of power by House Democrats.”
Giuliani’s trip also represented an affront to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose government was welcoming a high-level State Department diplomat at the same time and hoping to return relations with the United States to normal after more than two months at the center of an American political maelstrom.
Zelensky, who didn’t meet with Giuliani, is preparing for a high-stakes summit on Monday in Paris, where he is scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin alongside the leaders of Germany and France in a renewed attempt to bring an end to the war between Russia-backed proxies and Ukrainian forces in the nation’s east. More than 13,000 people have died in the conflict.
The disruption in U.S.-Ukraine relations caused by Giuliani’s activities and the resulting impeachment inquiry have led some Ukrainians to fear that Zelensky, who promised an end to the conflict during his campaign, will cut a bad deal with Putin, owing partly to a growing sentiment in Kyiv that Ukraine can no longer count on support from the United States.
Such concerns appeared to be far from Giuliani’s mind.
During his trip, he sat down with a mustachioed Ukrainian lawmaker who has promoted Russian interests in Ukraine and once studied at a KGB academy in Moscow.
He was accompanied by a former Ukrainian diplomat who has won renown in U.S. right-wing circles by alleging Ukraine colluded with the DNC to undermine Trump in 2016.
He received a bon voyage message from a former Ukrainian parliamentarian, who once sent a peace proposal to the White House that would have lifted sanctions on Russia and recognized the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea.
The trip also served a practical purpose ahead of a likely Senate trial of his client. Giuliani brought a correspondent from the right-wing One America News to interview many of the Ukrainians he has interacted with in the past year — people who are willing to make allegations against Biden and the Democrats.
The footage will help inject the theories Giuliani has gathered over the past year even further into the American public discourse, as the Senate prepares to embark on a trial that some Republican lawmakers want to make as much about Biden as it is about the president.
Giuliani has alleged that Biden pushed for the 2016 firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor to help his son, Hunter Biden, who at the time was a board member of a Ukrainian gas company whose owner was under investigation in Ukraine. Apart from a claim by the top prosecutor in question that Biden had him fired for that reason, no evidence has surfaced to show that is why Biden sought his removal. European Union leaders also wanted the prosecutor removed.
During the trip, Giuliani said on Twitter that until the matter is resolved, the issue “will be a major obstacle to the U.S. assisting Ukraine with its anti-corruption efforts.”
In Kyiv, Giuliani met with two members of Ukraine’s parliament, Andriy Derkach and Oleksandr Dubinsky, who have called for a joint U.S.-Ukrainian parliamentary investigation into the gas company. The One America News correspondent traveling with Giuliani posted photos of them interviewing former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko in Budapest, where they stopped before traveling on to Ukraine.
On Capitol Hill, Democrats were shocked by Giuliani’s nerve.
“It’s a brazen move,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which led the impeachment inquiry. “This is emblematic of this White House: When they are in the wrong, they double down. And in this case, they are tripling down.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the trip an indication of “the arrogance of it all” in comments at a CNN Town Hall on Thursday night.
Some Republicans were left scratching their heads.
Asked about the trip, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) replied, “Rudy does what Rudy does.”
Others were surprised. “The fact that Giuliani is back in Ukraine is like a murder suspect returning to the crime scene to live-stream themselves moon dancing,” said Dan Eberhart, a prominent Republican donor and Trump supporter. “It’s brazen on a galactic level.”
At the White House, deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley sidestepped the matter.
“That’s a question between Rudy and the president,” Gidley said.
Privately, however, two officials involved in the White House’s impeachment response said Trump aides were not told Giuliani was traveling to Ukraine and do not view it as helpful.
Some House Republicans have sought to create distance between Trump and Giuliani, but the president has not yet signaled a willingness to support such a move, the two officials said. On Friday, Gidley said that as a far as he was aware, Giuliani remained Trump’s personal attorney.
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People Who Wear the Hijab Face Unique Discrimination During Pregnancy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=52474"><span class="small">Tasmiha Khan, VICE</span></a>
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Saturday, 07 December 2019 14:22 |
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Khan writes: "'It is intimidating [for patients] to ask a question to begin with. Even though I am a physician, people automatically assume that I don't speak English or I have to have a husband to be heard.'"
Mariam, when she was pregnant. (photo: Luthfan/Eyeem/Getty)
People Who Wear the Hijab Face Unique Discrimination During Pregnancy
By Tasmiha Khan, VICE
07 December 19
“It is intimidating [for patients] to ask a question to begin with. Even though I am a physician, people automatically assume that I don’t speak English or I have to have a husband to be heard."
 ariam, 34, was in labor with her first son when she started experiencing severe preeclampsia, a condition where blood pressure can get dangerously high. The Seattle resident observes hijab and was afraid of how she would be treated at the hospital after hearing horror stories of other Muslim women delivering. To her dismay, her experience was worse than she anticipated.
“I was not allowed to see my son after I gave birth until the next day,” Mariam said tearfully. “The staff thought I was inadequate and I remember crying I just want to hold him,” The nurses didn't explain why she couldn't see her son and treated her “like she was crazy,” she said. She believes her mistreatment is tied to her not only being Muslim but also Black—she was born in Somalia. She said her horrendous experience makes her think twice about having another child.
“I kept thinking that I was waking up from a bad dream,” she said.
In September, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a special report that looked at racial and ethnic disparities in pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. from 2007 to 2016. Indeed, racial disparities are a big part of this problem—Black women are three to four times more likely to die while pregnant or in the months after birth than are white women, and the CDC has also noted that more than half of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.
It is no surprise that, as another recent study shows, women of color can feel disempowered during pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care thanks to providers delivering health information in a leading way rather than allowing the patient's true informed consent in decision-making. While data from the new CDC report is critical to understanding why U.S. maternal mortality rates are at an all-time high and women of color are being affected most, there's a segment of the population that is not properly accounted for: Muslim women who live in the United States. In fact, CDC reports on maternal mortality are limited to five racial/ethnic groups with no indication of religion: white, Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian/Pacific Islander. In addition, there is no breakdown of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian women, racial groups where Muslim women are likely to be represented.
“She made me feel so bad about myself,” said Tonni N., 42, about her OB/GYN. “I wish I wasn’t pregnant; this is so difficult.” Tonni, who lives in Chicago, said her provider was difficult to reach and often dismissive of her concerns about feeling mentally unwell. She decided to not seek mental health care until her symptoms conditions worsened.
Tonni came to the U.S. from Bangladesh and said she's faced discrimination on multiple levels. In addition to having an accent, she also wears the hijab. “There were times when I thought I was going crazy,” she said. She had multiple panic attacks and painstakingly searched for another physician during her second trimester. After several rejections from other doctors, Tonni was able to identify another Muslim OB/GYN who also wore hijab. When she shared that she was feeling anxious and depressed, her OB/GYN was much more sympathetic and helped Tonni get counseling, where she was diagnosed with anxiety.
The lack of data on Muslim, Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian women is because the CDC uses race classifications set by the National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, said Emily Petersen, a medical officer and OB/GYN in the CDC's Division of Reproductive Health. Petersen said the CDC does this “to be consistent with the classification of race/ethnicity for pregnancy-related deaths and births for the time period covered. Consequently, Middle Eastern women would be classified as non-Hispanic white, and South Asian women would be classified as non-Hispanic Asian (which needed to be combined with non-Hispanic Pacific Islander in [the] report for stability of analysis).”
Furthermore, Petersen acknowledged that looking at data in more specific racial groups might have limitations. “We are limited in our ability to further analyze and report on more specific race/ethnicity categories due to the potential of unreliable pregnancy-related mortality ratios when analyzing smaller numbers of deaths." Plus, data on religion are not collected on vital records like death certificates and birth certificates so the CDC isn't able to analyze by religion, she said.
While it's true that minority populations receive lower-quality healthcare, there are many aspects of care that are not properly assessed. For example, there is often inadequate assessment of, and cultural adaptations to meet patients' needs. Seven million American Muslims, while ethnically and racially diverse, share religiously informed values that influence their expectations of healthcare. Research also shows that the political climate has an impact on the health of Muslims.
Aasim Padela, the Director of Initiative of Islam & Medicine and an emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago, lamented the lack of healthcare research on Muslim Americans.
“Although patient-centered care is a priority and the reduction of healthcare disparities an ethical mandate, the U.S. healthcare system overlooks how minority religious groups experience healthcare and thus inadequately meets their religious needs," Padela said. "A case in point is American Muslims where the absence of data on religious affiliation and religiosity within healthcare databases leads to a gap in knowledge regarding this group's aggregate health outcomes. Moreover, we do not know what their religious and spiritual needs in healthcare are, and if unmet, what disparities and inequities are produced.”
The little research that is available suggests patients are concerned about interacting with a medical system that might not respect their faith.
“As far as Muslim women and their values and needs, there are many community-based studies showing the import of modesty to their health decisions and our own work shows nearly 50 percent delay going to the doctor out of concern that their modesty needs won’t be accommodated." Padela said. "I have seen this myself as an ER doctor where some women minimize concerns, and even desire to leave the ER, when a female physician is not present."
Padela acknowledged that it may be impractical to base hospital staffing on always having female physicians available, but providers should make some accommodations in terms of more modest gowns and be better in respecting patients' concerns and communicating our understanding and attempts to accommodate them.
Kashfia, another woman who observes hijab, recounts being pregnant and mistreated when she was expecting her first son. “I just was not given the right information at the right time. When I asked, it felt like I was annoying [my doctor] even though I didn’t understand.” She said her doctor had seemed to retaliate against her. During her second pregnancy, Kashfia felt more confident in advocating for herself and she opted early for a midwife who used holistic treatment instead of the traditional care.
It’s critical to connect with patients on a deeper level, said Aalia Al-Barwani, a family medicine physician who also observes hijab and practices in Birmingham, Alabama.
“It is intimidating [for patients] to ask a question to begin with. Even though I am a physician, people automatically assume that I don’t speak English or I have to have a husband to be heard,” she added, noting how much harder it may be for Muslim patients to speak up. She goes on to say how African Americans are perceived to be native whereas Muslim Americans are perceived to be foreign, which can also impact how the prejudice is being played when it comes to not just pregnant women receiving care, but in all other domains of medicine.
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This Is the Hottest Job Market Since the 1990s. Why Aren't Wages Growing Faster? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46803"><span class="small">Heather Long, The Washington Post</span></a>
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Saturday, 07 December 2019 14:20 |
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Long writes: "By just about any metric this is the best job market since the late 1990s. The economy has been adding jobs for 110 straight months - a record streak. Jobs are plentiful. Unemployment is at a half-century low."
Walmart worker. (photo: AP)
This Is the Hottest Job Market Since the 1990s. Why Aren't Wages Growing Faster?
By Heather Long, The Washington Post
07 December 19
 y just about any metric this is the best job market since the late 1990s. The economy has been adding jobs for 110 straight months — a record streak. Jobs are plentiful. Unemployment is at a half-century low. And the unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Americans with less than a high school education are all at the lowest levels since the Labor Department began keeping track.
There’s a lot to cheer.
But one of the few head scratchers in this strong jobs picture is why wages aren’t growing as fast as they did in the late 1990s, when yearly wage growth routinely topped 4 percent.
The latest monthly report card on jobs came out Friday from the Labor Department and shows that the average worker’s pay — known as average hourly earnings — is up 3.1 percent in the past year. It’s a pretty good number. But it’s nowhere near where it was before.
Many hoped this would be the year wages really accelerated. After all, business leaders have been complaining for months they can’t find enough workers — both highly skilled and not — and the natural response to that is usually to bump up pay. But wage growth peaked in February at 3.4 percent and has pulled back since then, puzzling economists.
“From late 2017 through late 2018, it looked like wage growth was picking up. That ended. Wage growth has been backsliding this year,” tweeted economist Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
The White House likes to point out that the wage picture looks even better for working-class people. What they mean by that is workers in non-manager roles are experiencing faster wage growth than supervisors, a welcome trend to many. Top Trump Administration officials like to refer to this as a “working-class boom.”
“Skeptics continue to claim that the U.S. economy has run out of steam. Time and time again, they’re proven wrong,” said Tomas Philipson, acting head of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Wages for non-supervisors are growing at just shy of 3.7 percent, according to the latest data through November. That’s better than for workers overall, but even that figure lags behind the trend from the late 1990s. It’s about half a point less than much of 1997-98 (as well as 2006-07), and there’s concern that this metric is also starting to pull back.
Economists keep debating what the heck is going on. Some point to the decline of union membership and the lack of bargaining power for workers now vs. in the past. There’s also growing evidence that many towns have one big employer that’s able to control wages in the area and keep them lower. It’s a phenomenon in economics known as “monopsony,” which is when there is only one buyer (similar to a monopoly, which is when there is only one seller).
Others point out that workers today are interested in more than hourly pay. They want better benefits and more flexible work schedules, and some surveys indicate workers are willing to accept lower pay (or more modest pay increases) in exchange for more time off or the ability to work remotely.
Health-care costs are also rising rapidly, suggesting that some pay increases that would have gone to workers’ weekly paychecks are instead going to pay for health insurance. But Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, points out that total compensation (pay including health care) has been growing slower in the past year than hourly wages, so that doesn’t explain what America is seeing now.
Still others point to the overall cost of living. Inflation has been very low since the Great Recession, staying below 2 percent a year. While rent and health-care costs continue to rise for many, gas, groceries and other goods have risen more much modestly. Some say wages do not need to rise as much if inflation remains low (the latest annual inflation rate was 1.8 percent). But inflation was well below 2 percent in 1998, a year when wages were around 4 percent.
Another popular theory is that despite employers whining they can’t find any workers, there are still plenty of Americans available for employment. The share of Americans in their prime working years (ages 25 to 54) working in the late 1990s was over 81 percent. Today it’s just over 80 percent, suggesting there are at least a million more people who could be lured back to work under the right conditions. Employers might not feel the need to pay up until there truly is no one submitting a job application for an opening.
What’s clear is that the stock market is at record highs and many companies are having another very profitable year, yet the share of the economic “pie” going to workers remains at a 70-year low. And it does not show any signs of rebounding, even in a hot job market.
“One thing that really troubles me is the pace of wage growth. Workers are getting a smaller cut of what we produce than they used to,” tweeted Betsey Stevenson, associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan. “Everyone thought that a strong labor market would help change that, but worker’s share (compared to profits) of GDP remains stubbornly low.”
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