Bay Area Air Sickening and Killing Kids

Richmond, CA (image from Flickr, by bionicteaching)

The wonderfully clear and sunny days the San Francisco Bay Area experienced during January and early February were also “spare the air” days because of the high levels of smog—also typical of Bay Area winters (at least lately). This is because the Bay Area is home to several oil refineries in Richmond and West Contra Costa County, as well as numerous other polluting chemical and industrial facilities along the waterfront throughout the area.

There were 11,000 hospital admissions in 2010 for asthma-related disease in California (according to a recent report by Inside Bay Area), but in Alameda Country (which includes Oakland and Berkeley) the rate was nearly twice the state average (20.3 hospitalizations for every 10,000 children)—higher than any other country except Fresno and Imperial Counties, which suffer from severe agricultural pollution. Particularly hard hit have been Oakland, Emeryville (Alameda Country), and Richmond and Pittsburg (Contra Costa County).

Severe asthma is potentially deadly (though this is rare). However, even for the majority of children who do not die from their attacks, there can be long-term or permanent health effects if not treated and controlled, as well as long-term social consequences, as the illness can cause them to fall behind at school due to their absences.

While there is ample evidence that indoor (e.g., tobacco smoke) and outdoor air pollution exacerbate asthma, what is less well understood is why asthma has been on the rise, now affecting nearly 10% of all U.S. children. Particularly hard hit have been African American children, who have seen a 39% increase in their rate of asthma. One hypothesis is that poverty in a contributing factor, since poor people are more likely to live in areas with high levels of air pollution and in substandard housing that is prone to mold—both of which are known to aggravate asthma.

80-90% of the childhood hospitalizations for asthma can be prevented with proper therapy and intervention, according to Dr. Ted Chaconas, who was quoted in the Inside Bay Area article. However, this often does not happen in poor communities, where children may lack health insurance or easy access to medical care, while also being exposed to higher levels of environmental pollutants.

Considering that many of the pollutants that contribute to asthma come from sources that are also spewing high levels of carbon into the atmosphere, the most rational approach to reducing the incidence and severity of asthma is to reduce or abolish as many of these factories as possible. This would not only reduce the number of missed school days, hospitalizations and costs of treatment, but it would help reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and, hopefully, help reverse global warming, which is already responsible for thousands of deaths worldwide due to extreme weather, crop failure, flooding and infiltration of fresh water supplies and the increased spread of infectious disease. Furthermore, particulate air pollution itself is deadly. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution is responsible for 1 million preventable deaths each year.

Generation Hot—Why Aren’t Parents Fighting Climate Change?

Mark Hertzgaard’s recent article, “Parents Need to Act Against Climate Change,” in the Daily Beast, is a moralistic diatribe against parents’ apathy in response to climate change. Since the worst effects of climate change are only just beginning, our kids will be inheriting a lifetime of catastrophic storms, heat waves, droughts, famines and economic hardships. Therefore, he argues, parents should be terrified, outraged and aggressively fighting to reverse the crisis. Yet for the most part they are not.

The current U.S. heat wave—the worst in 56 years—has now encompassed 1,000 counties and is affecting fully one-third of Americans. There have already been nearly 100 deaths (which is significant, but still miniscule compared with the 70,000 who died in Europe’s heat wave of 2003). Ranchers are considering selling off their herds for slaughter early because they cannot afford to feed them. Food prices are expected to rise dramatically. And scientists are claiming that the heat wave, drought, fires in the Southwest and other extreme weather events of the past few years are what climate change looks like.

Climate change is indeed the most significant issue of our day as it threatens life on the planet in the long-term and our living conditions and material wellbeing in the short-term. Hertzgaard is correct in his assessment that American’s are relatively apathetic on this issue. He is also correct that our children, whom he dubs “Generation Hot,” will inherit much more serious consequences than we are currently experiencing if the trend is not reversed.

However, people (parents, children and everyone else) cannot be beaten into action with moralizing and guilt tripping. They will not suddenly jump to the barricades because Hertzgaard, or his organization, have made them feel guilty about leaving a moribund planet to their children.

Nor will partial or inaccurate analyses lead them into action. For example, Hertzgaard suggests that parents “don’t know, or choose not to believe,” the science because the media covers climate change through “political rather than scientific lenses.” This overly simplistic analysis deemphasizes the role of the heavily funded PR machine that the coal and petroleum industries have used to deliberately mislead and confuse the public about the facts, much like the tobacco companies have done to try to convince the public that tobacco is safe.

There are other problems with this analysis, too, like the assumptions that if the media talked about climate change “through a scientific lens” the public would necessarily understand the science, its implications, be outraged and take action. None of these assumptions is necessarily true. The facts about tobacco’s health consequences encouraged some to quit. However, increased regulation (e.g., tobacco taxes, mandated warning labels, laws regulating where and how tobacco could be sold and advertised) together with public health outreach campaigns, have contributed to significantly more dramatic reductions in tobacco usage.

Hertzgaard also suggests that the facts are just too depressing for many parents to face, leading many to ignore them or pretend climate change is not happening. Of course the facts are depressing, while the only solutions likely to reverse the trend involve dramatic reductions (or elimination) of fossil fuel consumption and significant reductions in overall consumption seem hopelessly unlikely in our current economic and cultural climate.

However, I Hertzgaard’s analysis here is dismissive and disparaging. Parents are not the cause of climate change. They are its victims. And while we are all complicit in it by continuing to consume polluting products and services, we have little choice in the matter. We need to get to work and heat our homes and eat, and these are all heavily dependent on greenhouse gas emitting technologies. Changing this requires massive regulation, which depends on the goodwill of a political and economic system that benefits handsomely from the status quo, or dramatic socioeconomic changes that are unlikely to occur without considerable violence and suffering.

Furthermore, while climate change may be the most significant issue of our day, it is still largely a long term problem in most people’s eyes, particularly when juxtaposed with our day to day needs, like putting food on the table, which for most Americans has become much more difficult as a result of the economic crisis. It may be that Americans do indeed recognize the gravity of the climate problem and are not simply shoving their heads in the ground. Rather, they also recognize the socioeconomic challenges of fighting it and the urgency of their own material needs, and choose to go on with their lives with as little disruption and stress as they can.

In many respects, climate change is just another front in the class war the ruling elite has been imposing on the rest of us for generations. The primary beneficiaries of carbon pollution are the industries that are allowed to dump carbon into the atmosphere or sell polluting products without charge (e.g., petroleum, coal, shipping, automotive, construction, owners of large buildings, big agriculture, etc.) They increase their profits by externalizing these costs onto the public. Regulation has not been possible because these beneficiaries of carbon pollution have spent billions of dollars on PR, ads and lobbying to convince the public there is no problem and to convince politicians not to regulate them. Convincing parents to get angry and get into the streets is no more likely to change this than the Occupy movement was in getting Congress to regulate banking.

Of course regulation alone cannot solve the problem. We don’t simply need better rules governing how industries pollute. We need social changes that dramatically reduce or eliminate carbon pollution combined with heavy investment in carbon neutral technologies combined with dramatic reductions in overall consumption combined with stiffer penalties and better policing of industrial pollution. Most of these enormous long-term socioeconomic changes will require directly confronting the ruling elite and capitalism itself and therefore also require comprehensive community and workplace organizing. This is most effectively done by getting into the streets, communities and workplaces and talking to people one on one and listening to their concerns, not by getting on your high horse and talking down to them.

Climate Change Increasing Polar Bear Cannibalism?

Dinner for Dad? (Image from U.S. Fish and Wildlife, public domain)

A few years ago, a photographer observed a polar bear with a 2- to 3-year-old juvenile that it had killed and was preparing to devour. While this was not totally unheard of (Inuit hunters in Greenland and Canada had been documenting this on land), such occurrences were not known to occur on sea ice. Since then, there have been several more documentations of polar bears cannibalizing each other on sea ice, according to Sciencemag.org, which has some scientists worried that the practice has been accelerating due to diminishing sea ice and seal populations resulting from global warming.

Click here to see image.

California Failing to Provide K-5 Science Education

Only 10% of California’s K-5 students regularly experience hands-on science activities the Los Angeles Times reported this week. The data comes from a 2010-2011 survey of teachers, principals and district administrators at 300 California public schools and was conducted by the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd, the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, SRI International and others. 

The researchers found that 40% of teachers dedicated 60 minutes or less to science instruction, while 13% spent 30 minutes per week or less teaching science. Only one-third of elementary teachers said they felt prepared to teach science, while 85% said they have not received any recent science training. In addition to inadequate training, many felt there was insufficient class time available for science, as so much class time was now devoted to preparation for the state’s high stakes exams. They also complained of lack of funds for supplies.

The report can be found at www.cftl.org/science.

The study indicated that most science instruction in California begins in fifth grade, when the state starts measuring science knowledge on its standardized exams. The absurdity of this policy is that by then it is already too late for most students. Science is not simply a bunch of facts and vocabulary that can be memorized over the course of a single school year, but an entire manner of thinking that requires continuous practice and skill-building over many years. Students who are encouraged to explore and observe natural phenomena starting in kindergarten and who learn how to make hypotheses and collect and analyze data as they get older, are much more likely to enjoy science and take it seriously in school and they are more likely to understand it well enough by fifth grade to perform well on the exams.

The problems of low science literacy and science phobia can grow over time. Each year I have students in my high school biology classes who had little or no science in middle school. I have dozens more who have an irrational fear of or disdain for science, in many cases because of limited or negative experiences with past science classes. Most of these students struggle in a college preparatory high school science course because of their lack of prerequisite knowledge and skills.

The biggest tragedy, however, is not their low test scores or the potential F they could earn, but the lack of curiosity or interest in natural phenomena so many of them exhibit. Science ought to be fun and exciting, and it usually is when taught well. When students have had positive past experiences in science, they tend to be more fully engaged in future science classes, ask more intriguing questions, and desire to understand concepts more deeply. In contrast, students who are tuned out or who lack self-efficacy in science risk growing into adulthood harboring dangerous misconceptions about disease and immunity, human reproduction, nutrition, pollution and climate change.

Occupy Wall Street? For Democracy?

Ad Busters has called for 20,000 people to occupy lower Manhattan, with tents, kitchens and barricades, and to put their “asses on the line,” to convey their simple message “. . .that Barack Obama [must] ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.”

The problem is that we do have a democracy and it is functioning exactly as it was designed to function: as a system to ensure that the ruling elite maintains its wealth and power. The wealthy have always controlled the political system. The politicians have overwhelmingly come from the ruling class itself. Our laws are designed primarily to protect private property. The courts were created to enforce these laws, to the advantage of the ruling class. And we have been given the right to vote for the people who will make and enforce the decisions that help the wealthy to further enrich themselves at our expense.

Even if Adbuster’s goal were simplified to the liberal desire to set limits on the influence capital has over the political system, a presidential commission would be useless. Such change comes through litigation or legislation. However, neither is likely to achieve the desired goal. The Supreme Court is currently overloaded with seething capitalists, hence the Citizen’s United ruling. And Congress is incapable of passing any legislation that is the slightest bit controversial. Besides, they would be voting against their own interests.

Adbuster’s target, Wall Street, is also interesting. Sure, people are pissed at Wall Street, but what exactly are they pissed about, Wall Street going unpunished for causing the current economic crisis? Or maybe they’re angry about the bailout they funded? Or perhaps it’s the growing wealth gap, continued low taxes for the rich and austerity on the rest of us?

Yet Wall Street was only doing what was expected under capitalism as it has done over and over again throughout history. Should people really go out and construct barricades, risk getting gassed, tasered, clubbed and arrested simply to get stricter regulations or limits to executive compensation? If that is the goal, then expect the continuation of poverty, homelessness, hunger, greed, global warming, workplace deaths and privatization of the public sector.

Perhaps Adbusters is perfectly okay with 1% of the population possessing the vast majority of the wealth. Perhaps they don’t mind that a tiny minority is able to enrich itself by paying starvation wages for goods and services that bring them billions of dollars of profits. Maybe they’re fine with a system in which only the wealthy and their gophers are allowed to become elected officials, so long as they are not overly compensated for their services. Maybe Adbusters believes Obama’s delusion that America is just one big not so happy middle class that just needs a little stimulus to become happy again.

In that case, go on and occupy Wall Street. Maybe you'll get your commission, along with some more political hand wringing. But those of us who work for wages will continue to see our standards of living and working conditions decline, while the bosses continue to grow wealthier.